Replies

"Only robbers and muggers, with their lack of respect for liberty and private property, are responsible for their actions and beliefs."

Yes.. obviously.

"Only terrorists, with their lack of respect for liberty and private property, are responsible for their actions."

Hard to argue with that statement.

Question for conservatives: With respect to welfare programs, do you still feel that good intentions don't matter and that advocates of the decades-long war on poverty should take responsibility for its destructive consequences, or do you now feel that only the food-stamp mother in the grocery-store line is responsible for her actions and beliefs?

False analogy. Food Stamp mothers are not perpetrators of a crime. Muggers and terrorists are. Food Stamp mothers, and the rest of society, are the victims. The advocates of the failed and foolishly contrived decades-long war on poverty are the perpetrators of "a counter productive policy, which became an entrenched institution." Now, if there were no "war on poverty" would there be more Food Stamp Mothers? Already proven that this assumption is false. There is a powerful, effective, constructive, positive alternative to the political use of the welfare system to create dependency and thereby ensure the re-election of the benif of the goodies. It is called "personal responsibility." It works, try it.

If there were no war on drugs, i.e. prohibition, would there be less damage to society from drug use? The answer is MORE damage, as we see with the case of the "legal" drug- alcohol. We as a society are so unconsciously accepting of the titanic cost in social decline, damage to physical and mental health, crime, property damage, and lost productivity, that we hardly notice the hundreds of billions lost to this scourge of American life. The "legalization" of alcohol has led to no reduction, and in many ways increased the damage that drug does to our nation. Libertarians seem to be willing to accept long term, pervasive and corrosively damaging societal effects of "legalized" and therefore widespread and unchecked, hard, addicting drug use, in order to attempt to remove the incentive for street and organized crime involving the traffic in drugs. Unless Libertarians are willing to simply stop enforcing any relevant law of any kind, including tax and licensing laws, this crime will simply mutate and evolve, as organized crime did after the end of alcohol prohibition. After prohibition is ended, it can never be restored, a fact that even Libertarians should agree with. So...

Question for Libertarians: With respect to drug legalization, do you still feel that good intentions don't matter and that advocates of the legalization of all drugs should take responsibility for its destructive consequences, or do you now feel that only the drug addict's mother, wife, husband, children, neighbors, and society at large are responsible for the drug addict's self destruction, wasted life, and burden upon the nation?

Interesting. In your question, you let me choose anyone but the drug user to bare the responsibility. Why is that?

You are right to equate the War on Drugs with LBJ's War on Poverty. My disagreement w/ the drug war does not mean I want people on drugs any more than a conservative's disagreement w/ the War on Poverty means he wants people to be poor. Liberals call conservatives selfish because of their not supporting social programs. Conservatives call libertarians selfish because of their not supporting the WOD. Its BS in both cases.

It is simply, in both cases, a refusal to let govt stomp on people's rights because "their motives are pure" and they have a Big Problem to tackle. It is a realization that some things are "problems" that may or not be solved, and others are just chronic conditions that never will be. "The poor you will always have with you" someone popular on FR said once, about 2000 years ago, and there never has been a society where nobody is trying to mess up their brain chemistry.

If there were no war on drugs, i.e. prohibition, would there be less damage to society from drug use?
The answer is MORE damage, as we see with the case of the "legal" drug- alcohol.
We as a society are so unconsciously accepting of the titanic cost in social decline, damage to physical and mental health, crime, property damage, and lost productivity, that we hardly notice the hundreds of billions lost to this scourge of American life.

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You deny the historical lessons of alcohol prohibition.
The criminalizing effect of prohibitory law, in itself, is what leads to the 'damage to society'. In effect, the prohibition of mind altering substances, makes every user an outlaw.
The very fabric of society, a respect for the rule of law, is openly scorned.

Wisely, our constitutional form of government has provided a solution to the problem, which now works [to an extent, but not well enough], in the way we control alcohol.

Prohibitory law violates due process. -- No state may deprive a citizen of life, liberty or property, without due process, as per the 14th amendment.

Thus, - states are empowered by their citizens to 'regulate' public use & sale of property, not to outlaw or ban it.
--- This method works, in a fashion, for booze. -- Why not drugs?

Look to the irrationality of fanatical 'drug warriors' for your answer.

Question for Libertarians: With respect to drug legalization, do you still feel that good intentions don't matter and that advocates of the legalization of all drugs should take responsibility for its destructive consequences, or do you now feel that only the drug addict's mother, wife, husband, children, neighbors, and society at large are responsible for the drug addict's self destruction, wasted life, and burden upon the nation?

An answer, if I may: This libertarian believes an individual is solely responsible for his or her actions and the consequences thereof, and that society is under no obligation to facilitate or mitigate any consequences. (And don't even think about expecting the taxpayers to pick up the tab for your rehab, either, if it gets that far.) This libertarian believes there is a distinction between vice (what you do with or to yourself only) and crime (what you do with or to another sovereign individual, regardless of what you have or have not consumed prior to committing that act).

This libertarian believes you can do whatever the hell you want whenever the hell you want to in the privacy of your own home and on your own property, so long as a) no one but you is affected by what you do, b) you do not force someone else to join in with you, and c) you commit no crime against someone else in order to facilitate whatever vice it is that animates you, for whatever reason. I don't have to like or approve of whatever it is in order to respect your absolute right to indulge it in your own home. A fellow citizen's vices are no legitimate business of mine unless or until he or she tries to force me to join in the fun; a fellow citizen's vices are no legitimate business of society until or unless he or she a) insists, by the relevant actions, that society must contend with said indulgence in the public square, or b) commits a crime or crimes to facilitate said indulgence.

Society, in other words, has no damned business poking its nose into your home, or onto your property, unless there is legitimate, not politically trumped up, evidence that you are harming another sovereign person explicitly, and without the proper exercise of the law based upon the prescriptions of the still-intact, still-unrepealed Fourth*, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments - and none of this jazz about snatching every damn last thing you own before you have been found properly guilty of a properly-defined crime, either. (For that matter, away with this crap about pouncing on sovereign citizens who are "fool" enough to be carrying more than a certain limited amount of cash on their persons and proclaiming that they "must" be involved in some criminal activity if they're carrying that much cash.)

This libertarian believes that if you do commit a crime on behalf of whatever vice it is that animates you, then does society have every last right to prosecute and punish you, swiftly and surely, for the actual crime you committed - and when you commit a crime, it doesn't matter a damn whether you had consumed pot, cocaine, Hostess Twinkies or McDonald's hamburgers or whatever the hell it was you consumed before you committed that crime.

And, in closing and with apologies for consuming too much space, this libertarian would like to remind you and anyone else who cares to understand that though it may be so that many if not most actual druggies support an end to the War on Drugs, it does not follow that many if not most of those who support an end to the War on Drugs are actually druggies. (for those who are interested in purple cows, it might be useful enough to recall that the actual seed of the War on Drugs was planted by a liberal government - the Harrison Act of 1914 was signed off by Woodrow [Make The World Safe For World War II] Wilson; and, more to the point, that its first and most draconian escalation was prompted by liberal Republican President named Richard Nixon. And anyone who thinks Nixon wasn't a liberal should read the record once again. Thoroughly.)

(* - May we remember, please, that "probable cause" does not equal some assoholic Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy deciding someone living on a rich and sumptuously-grounded estate simply must be growing marijuana somewhere on those grounds or otherwise involved in drug activity, thus giving himself "probable cause" to stage a rather nasty and unannounced SWAT raid in which the homeowner was killed because the homeowner, thinking his home was being burglarised, cocked and fired his own weapon to defend his home and his wife against the would-be burglars. And what was the actual motive behind this disgrace? This man's estate, with its sumptuous grounds, sat surrounded by some federal parkland the official stewards of which had coveted that estate's grounds for the home, and previous inquiries as to whether the man might consider selling his home had been met with refusals, it being so that the man, understandably enough, loved his home and those grounds on which it sat. You can look it up: it really did happen, in the 1990s. The man's name was Donald Scott and he was wealthy in his own right in addition to being the heir to a European cosmetics fortune the name of which escapes me. Oh, yes, I almost forgot: No marijuana plant was ever found on his grounds or in his home. His story is told chillingly enough in Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, a book which should be required reading for anyone still deluding themselves about the innate goodness of the State and the innate evil of the individual.)