No Coercion

Mexico just legalized possession of small amounts of drugs.

Much more needs to be done, especially considering the corruption stemming from illegal drug activity in that country, but it’s a step in the right direction. The United States should follow suit, and take it a step further by fully legalizing all drugs in all amounts. Only a complete end to drug prohibition will decimate law enforcement corruption and gang violence, help business and peaceful activity thrive in the currently ruinous parts of our cities, and remove a major obstacle to addicts seeking treatment. And from a strictly moral standpoint, when government uses force or threat of force to prevent people from doing something that does not involve initiating force against others (i.e. nonviolent drug use or trafficking), the government then becomes the initiator of force and acts wholly immorally.

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More evidence that government attempts to prevent voluntary exchange in the market have unfortunate consequences:

Police crackdowns may encourage drug use

From the article:

TOUGH policing of the illegal drugs market may have the perverse effect of making drugs more affordable and thereby encouraging people to use them, according to a new model of the dynamics of this market.

No net good can come from using force to interfere with natural human interactions that aren’t harming anyone other than those who choose to harm themselves.

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The mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, had a nice moment of libertarianism Friday when he said he would not be approving the police department’s request to arm patrol officers with M-16 rifles given to them by the U.S. military. It’s a basic libertarian tenet that giving the government’s enforcement arm additional firepower is bad for the prospects of individual liberty. Militarization of the police is a hallmark of oppressive regimes and something we should oppose at every turn. Of course, he didn’t rule out arming “specialized units” with such weapons, and he most certainly did not do a truly pro-liberty thing like pushing for the rifles to be sold on the free market to private buyers and sending the proceeds back to Uncle Sam with a demand for the money to be applied to the debt or somehow returned to the American tax payers. But it’s a start.

Of course, the argument in favor of such enhanced armaments (an argument often put forth by well-meaning law-and-order conservatives) is undoubtedly that the police need those weapons to combat the well-armed gangs who thrive on illegal drug trafficking. Unfortunately for their position, that’s like liberals who are arguing that the current government-regulation-induced financial crisis should be cured with more government regulation.

Rather than engage in an arms race with better-funded and more highly motivated drug gangs, resulting in innocent casualties and an ever more powerful and dangerous government, we should (thinking to ourselves, what would Sun Tzu do?) remove the traffickers’ very raison d’etre by legalizing all currently illegal drugs. Then we’d be simultaneously ending an un-American policy of keeping people from putting certain things in their bodies and ending the violent drug black market over which the gangs are fighting (and bribing cops, lawyers, and judges). After all, since the end of the disastrous prohibition of alcohol, you don’t see people battling in the streets over liquor turf, do you?

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It’s official. As reported by the government itself, gangs are responsible for as much as 80% of crime in the United States. The article reports that “criminal gangs in the USA have swelled to an estimated 1 million members” and notes that gangs thrive on illegal drug trafficking and other activities prohibited by the government. This is exactly right. Gangs gain most of their power and wealth by taking advantage of the U.S. government’s (and state governments’) wars on drugs, guns, prostitution, and gambling, just like alcohol was organized crime’s primary source of power during Prohibition. Government-created black markets are always dominated by violent thugs.

So we have a double injustice here. In the first place, the government comes along and prohibits items, substances, and activities that are not inherently bad (though perhaps frowned upon by a certain vocal portion of the population). By doing this, the government is agressing against innocent people. On top of that, the demand for such things cannot be eliminated, so enterprising individuals seeking to profit (again, something that’s not inherently wrong) act to provide consumers with what they want. Of course, since they’re forced to conduct business in secret and settle disputes outside the normal institutions, violent elements come to dominate. The move toward violence is compounded by the necessity for these individuals to defend themselves from the force initiated on them by the government because of the ‘illegal’ nature of their business.

Government prohibition of drugs, prostitution, gambling, and guns — and even disproportionate taxation of such things — has led inevitably to a flourishing of criminal gangs. These gangs, funded by a combination of artificially high prices and (often) protection payments, do battle with each other for control of lucrative territory, as well as with the government itself. The territories, usually inner cities, are devastated by the warfare. Even non-violent offenders, whose only crime is to use a substance that someone else decided was bad for them, are often thrown in jail or prison. The resulting broken families and deteriorating schools increase the attractiveness of gang life to children, and the trend continues. Increasing resources are expended by both the gangs and the government to beef up personnel and firepower until you virtually have military forces laying waste to American cities, all over our government’s decision to declare certain things illegal to appease a bunch of moralistic busy-bodies.

And even beyond all that you have the economic destruction caused by taxes the government collects to wage its war and imprison hundreds of thousands of people caught up in it (people, who might otherwise be creating vast amounts of wealth in the economy). The resulting government-induced poverty yet again enhances the power of criminal gangs and leads to calls for even more government programs to “do something.”

It’s truly difficult to contemplate how much richer and safer and more peaceful we’d be as a country if not for the actions of our government.

And if you think it’s bad now, just wait until they ban caffeine.

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So as I sit here sipping my Bicardi and cola, I have to wonder at the absurdity and–not to put too fine a point on it–wholesale injustice of the fact that the “great” state of North Carolina controls my natural human right to purchase liquor and does so with an iron fist one would expect to be reserved for the most heinous of inhuman acts. How, in the 21st century, do we stand idly by and allow ourselves to be strong-armed by the state in our enjoyment of our spirituous refreshments?

Under the regime of the state of North Carolina, I could be thrown in jail (or killed, if I resist) just for distilling my own special brand of whiskey and attempting to sell it to my neighbors, who are willing buyers. Why do we permit a group of people lacking natural authority over our actions (but claiming for themselves some arbitrary authority granted by nonsensical democracy and social contract theory) to tell us what beverages we can or cannot buy and sell? And why do we (now speaking for the polity as represented by the organized crime cartel known as the government) insist on initiating force against our neighbors for their choice of livelihood? What right have we to assault and kill our fellow man for creating and selling a particular kind of drink that is in demand by others?

I say enough is enough. It’s time we learned to grow up and behave in a civilized fashion. All state alcohol control authorities, including my own state’s despicable Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, must be fought and ultimately abolished without delay. Write letters to the editor of your local paper, call and write your state elected officials, be creative! Above all, don’t ever–ever–accept the notion that the state has legitimate authority over you. Your only authority is you. Now, in the spirit of my Irish heritage, let’s drink and fight!

[Update: I have submitted concatenated versions of this post as letters to the editor of both the Herald Sun of Durham and the News & Observer of Raleigh. Both papers are already familiar with my work. He he he. ]

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…of alcohol. Don over at Cafe Hayek reminds us that today is the 74th anniversary of the repeal of the 18th Amendment, which banned alcohol. As we all know, the end of alcohol prohibition increased the safety of booze, stopped the trend of sending otherwise law-abiding citizens to prison (and destroying their families), ended mob warfare over control of the alcohol black market, and generally left us more free from an overbearing police state than we would have been had prohibition continued.

But wait. Something’s wrong. We now have even more dangerous substances on the streets, inner cities wrecked by gang violence and families broken by prison, overcrowed prisons, nonviolent young people being sent to prison where they are converted into violent offenders, and a rapidly expanding police state that routinely beefs up its weaponry and violates our most basic rights in its fanatical crusade to fight prohibited goods. Of course I’m referring to the inane War on Drugs.

Why is it that we learned our lesson when it came to alcohol prohibition, but not when it comes to drug prohibition? What is it about the American psyche that results in a large majority of the public and virtually all elected officials at the state and federal levels favoring the continued prohibition of highly demanded chemical substances? Is it (as an old Army buddy told me) that we feel we’d be encouraging our kids to do drugs if we supported legalizing them? Are we really willing to continue to accept all the society-destroying consequences of drug prohibition in order to make ourselves feel better about the messages we’re sending our kids? I for one am more than willing to have a few more man-to-man conversations with my kids about how to take care of their bodies in exchange for the vast reduction of crime (which is a danger to my family), poverty, and government oppression that would come about from the legalization of drugs. Who’s with me?

(By the way, check out Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), and see how the guys in the trenches feel about the Drug War).

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Veterans Day was a few days ago, and as usual, I kept hearing that perennial mindless refrain (uttered as if by Pavlovian response), that we should “honor veterans because they’re over there fighting for our freedom and keeping us safe.”

Excuse me, but no, they’re not.

Our troops are in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting for Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s freedom (regardless of whether they want it) and trying to keep the Afghan and Iraqi people safe (even if it’s actually having the opposite effect). There is NOTHING our troops are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq (or in any other country) that is even remotely promoting American freedom and safety (I served in Afghanistan, and I assure you, we were not protecting your right to free speech or making sure you slept safe at night). On the contrary, our actions in both theaters have made us demonstrably LESS safe since we continue to breed resentment and create more terrorist recruits determined to do us harm. And last I checked, our freedoms were being rapidly eroded by a Bush administration consumed by the darkness of totalitarianism and using a nonsensical and Orwellian “War on Terror” to justify the emerging police state.

Don’t get me wrong–I don’t blame the troops for any of this. I blame the political leadership. The troops are simply doing what they agreed to do when they signed up. They’re fulfilling legally binding employment contracts, a noble and honorable thing. They should be honored because, deep down, they really did join because they thought they would get a chance to defend our freedom and keep us safe. It’s not their fault they ended up being used as tools to accomplish some fanatical neoconservative reordering of the Middle East in a grand scheme that Bush believes was hand delivered to him by some omnipotent being. I mean, they really couldn’t have seen that one coming, especially when most of them sign on the dotted line right out of high school (or even during their senior year like I did).

I find it particularly abhorrent that our government continues to send troops into Afghanistan to fight al Qaida and the Taliban while simultaneously empowering those enemies by trying to shut down opium farming in the country. Our failed war on drugs apparently hasn’t caused enough ruin in our own country, so we felt the need to export that ruin to a country that could actually emerge as a prosperous and peaceful place if it wasn’t for the fact that Western politicians with a poor grasp of human nature and an even worse grasp of economics have decided that certain substances, including heroin, must be banned by the coercive state.

So yes, honor veterans if you like, but do it for the right reasons. And let’s get some folks elected (like, say, Ron Paul) who will stop putting the people that signed up to defend America and the Constitution in the position of having to carry out self-defeating (and very un-American) foreign policy around the world.

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