No Coercion

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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