Making drugs illegal causes the price to increase, which motivates suppliers to enter the black market to make money. The state gets angry over this economic phenomenon, imposing harsher penalties and more brutally enforcing the laws. That causes prices to go up even more, which motivates more people to enter into the market as suppliers. Ultimately, the black market price gets so high that ordinary citizens are lured into the market in the hopes of scoring big financially.

All the bad consequences of the drug war, however, are not the primary reason for why we should legalize drugs. Freedom is the primary reason to legalize drugs. When the state has the power to put people into jail for ingesting a non-approved substance, there is no way that people in that society can be considered free.

A person is sitting in the privacy of his own living room. He decides to smoke marijuana, snort cocaine, or inject himself with heroin. The state — e.g., the members of Congress, the president, the DEA, the Justice Department — claim the authority to punish the person for doing that.

But it’s that person’s mouth, it’s his body, it’s his health.

Alas, not under terms of the drug war. The state says: We own you, we control you, we regulate you. You do as we say with respect to what you put into your mouth, or else.

How can that possibly be reconciled with fundamental principles of freedom? A society in which freedom is genuine is one in which people are free to engage in any activity, so long as it is peaceful and non-fraudulent. That includes, at a minimum, conduct that could be considered self-destructive.

You want to smoke? That’s your decision. You want to drink? That’s your decision. You want to ingest other drugs, no matter how harmful? That’s your decision. That’s what freedom is all about — the right to live your life the way you want, so long as you don’t initiate force or fraud against others.

Unfortunately, statists take an opposite approach. They say that every person ultimately belongs to society and, therefore, can be controlled and regulated by the state for the benefit of society. Since a person taking drugs is harming society, the collectivist argument goes, the state can send him to his room when he is caught violating drug laws, as much as a parent can do so to a child who violates rules on what he should and shouldn’t put into his mouth.

Most everyone now realizes that government officials benefit tremendously from the drug war, just as drug lords and drug gangs do. There is the ever-burgeoning business of asset forfeiture, including against innocent people, which is a way that the state helps fills its coffers without going through the legislative process of raising taxes. There are the bribes of public officials. And there are simply the jobs that the drug war produces — drug war agents, prosecutors, judges, clerks, and so forth. Thus, it isn’t surprising that among the people who still favor the drug war, government officials and drug lords are at the top of the list. Both groups would be put out of work immediately with drug legalization.

We live in a universe in which bad means beget bad ends. It is not surprising that the drug war produces nothing but bad consequences. Violating a fundamental principle of freedom — what a person chooses to ingest — brings about death, destruction, crisis, chaos, violence, corruption, and other bad consequences. Legalizing drugs would be a major step toward restoring the freedoms of the American people, while also bringing an immediate end to the bad consequences that the drug war produces.

Regards,
Jacob G. Hornberger
Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 21, 2011

The Evils of the Drug War was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The world is experiencing what some commentators call “the rise of the rest.” Growth in China, India, Brazil and smaller actors is creating a world where many other countries are moving up to America’s level of economic clout and self-assertion. No other one nation can challenge the U.S. at every level. But many nations can, and do, challenge the U.S. at one level or another.

A key development is that the very role of nation-states is becoming less defined. Non-state actors are wielding more and more clout. Examples include Al Qaeda in terms of a military and terrorist challenge, displaying the sharp edge of militant Islam. Or there are the Mexican narco-gangs that are engaged in a quiet civil war within Mexico.

On the more benign side, there are non-government organizations (NGOs) such as those that are driving much of the world environmental movement. Indeed, near 25,000 NGO representatives were registered at the recent Copenhagen climate summit talks.

In a recent book entitled Superclass, author David Rothkopf argues that the influence of nation-states is waning on many of the most critical issues of our time. Rothkopf argues that the traditional systems for addressing global issues among nation-states are more ineffective than ever. Thus there’s an emerging power void.

This power void is being filled by a small group of players, which Rothkopf refers to as “the superclass” — a new global elite who are much better suited to operating on the global stage and influencing global outcomes than the vast majority of national political leaders.

It makes for a two edged sword. Some of these new elite are from business and finance, and are subject to traditional forms of influence and suasion, not to mention the rule of law. “Some,” writes Rothkopf, “are masters of new or traditional media, some are religious leaders, and a few are top officials of those governments that do have the ability to project their influence globally.”

Others of the superclass, according to Rothkopf, are members of “a kind of shadow elite — criminals and terrorists.”

In both leadership and accountability, there’s quite a difference between what we’re dealing with in the developed world versus the developing world.

Nation-states in the developing world are having an increasingly hard time fulfilling the expectations of their citizens. Thus more and more, and the international system is undergoing an almost lawless evolution.

We see examples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where small fiefdoms and powerful warlords rule much of the day. Or we see it in the broken system of governance in Nigeria, where armed rebels are wreaking havoc on oil production. Or close to home, we have to wonder how things will play out down in Mexico.

This crisis of instability and lack of control is compounded by the absence of a global strategy to combat the asymmetric threats that the U.S. and other major players face. It’s going to make for many more interesting developments — and investment opportunities — as we turn the page on the calendar and enter the new year.

Until we meet again,
Byron W. King

January 8, 2010

The Changing Role of the Nation-State was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

No government has the right to exist.

First, I must specify what I mean by a right. We can define a right in many different ways, but the one thing that all conceptions have in common is that they are, ultimately, a justification for the use of force, or more simply, “I’ll kick your ass if you try to take this away.” If I have, for instance, a right to action or property, this means ultimately that I am ethically justified in using force to oppose you if you try to take my freedom or property away.

So far so good but, as for all other ethical principles, the trouble comes with the implementation. The government, for instance, claims the right to extort taxation money for all sorts of actions and trades, including simply working or owning a piece of land. Does it have such a right?

Groups cannot have rights above and beyond those of their component individuals, as only individuals can use violence and determine its validity. Any group is nothing more than the addition of individuals and the property and principles they produce or acquire for the purposes of the group’s activities. Therefore, if the government has the right to tax, meaning that it is justified in using force to take people’s money for its purposes, it must be the case that the individuals composing the government also have that right as individuals.

But it should be clear that no one has such a right. If any random person came to your door and demanded five thousand dollars so he could use it for his own purposes (say, giving it to poor people), you’d probably consider him to be a lunatic. If he drew a gun and threatened you, you’d consider him a dangerous lunatic thief. The only difference between this person and an IRS agent is that we don’t scream “thief!” when an IRS agent does the exact same thing, because, through indoctrination, takeover of many parts of society and sheer threats of force, government is given more legitimacy than a common thief. One cannot fight against the government or the system as a whole, therefore one must submit and forget about the unpleasant truth that one is being exploited.

Statists use many arguments to try to hide this obvious fact. Generally, they claim that government is necessary and that its purposes are essential. But it’s important to remember that all that a government does is control and corrupt production through tax spending and law, getting all sorts of benefits from this control. Government does not stop criminals: it controls and corrupts the production of policing services. Government does not build roads: it controls and corrupts the production of roads. The issue therefore is not how we can produce things, because individuals already do this, but rather how we want production to be controlled. Whose interests do we wish our institutions to pursue, those of the power elite or those of society as a whole? Republicans and Democrats are in the former camp (although they would generally not admit it), while most people who oppose the system would answer the latter. There is a lot more to say on this topic, obviously, but this is the problem as simply expressed as possible.

Another argument used by statists is that the government is justified by the consent of its subjects. This is a strange argument on the face of it, since no one is asked to consent to government before being its subject. The United States Constitution was not verbally or formally consented to by anyone alive, except government employees. But even if it was, we’d have to conclude that it was done under duress, since failure to accept the rules would deprive one of a living. How would anyone possibly say no?

This, by the way, is the basis of a recent argument, made by Charles Johnson and drawing from work by political theorist Crispin Sartwell, which seeks to demonstrate that there can be no such thing as consent to the State. To simplify, the argument says that, the fact that one has no alternative but to submit to the State means that there can be no such thing as consenting to the State, because consent (as opposed to desire or acceptance, which are purely private) can only exist in the presence of alternatives. The obvious statist reply is to claim that one is free to leave, but, notwithstanding the fact that this is not always true and that it also costs a great deal of money, this does not prove that one is consenting to government, since there are governments everywhere one might want to live.

But it’s important for me to point out that, even if either argument was true, they would not solve the problem of rights. Even if every single person in a given society could consent, and consented, to the existence of a government, it would not make the government any less coercive. Even if government was absolutely necessary for some essential function (something which sociological and historical studies disprove conclusively), it would not make government any less exploitative.

The obvious question arises: what does it matter if government is unjustified? They have the guns and “might makes right.” Certainly there is merit to this line of reasoning, not in the sense that might actually does make right (a position so repulsive that few non-insane people would accept its logical consequences), but in the sense that, as the ability to use force is a prerequisite for the expression of rights, might dictates the degree to which one can use one’s inherent rights. In our current society, you have the right to complain, sure, but that right is useless without the power to actually change anything. All it does is make people feel like they’re achieving something of significance, when all they’re doing is talking to a wall.

Now, as for why it matters: because we are all to a certain extent responsible for what happens in our society. The only manner in which a society can change for the better is by an awakening of all those people who know “something” is wrong, with their lives, with the system they live under, but can’t identify what. It is because they keep obeying this system of exploitation that it continues to flourish. As Anselme Bellegarrigue beautifully put it: “You believed until now that tyrants exist? Well! You were wrong, there are only slaves: where no one obeys, no one can command.”

For this to happen, there needs to be a global realization that the emperor has no clothes, both from a moral and from a practical standpoint. We need to get people off the mindset that we have to “save” our capital-democratic system, that if we can just get the right people or the right approach we can mend a process that was broken from the get-go. If you looked for a new car in the classifieds and found one that is advertised as not working, you just wouldn’t buy it. Buying it and then desperately trying to put it back together when you need to go to work would be a fool’s errand.

The belief that “good people” would make government itself become an apparatus dedicated to the well-being of its subjects is contradictory, because people who are so altruistic and dedicated would not need government to begin with. Even the framers of the Constitution, a document which is held as a paragon of freedom and yet gave birth to one of the most dangerous centralized governments in the world, understood this fact:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the  great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

– James Madison

In the statist mindset, there can be only one sort of relation between people, and that is control. Any other mode of relating to others is excluded as being insecure, “not good enough” to keep society running. And if control is the only way we can run society, therefore the only debate left is how this control is to be implemented, whether it is to be implemented in one or three distinct organizations (which is really all that the so-called “checks and balances” of the Constitution are about), whether it is to be run on liberal or conservative principles, whether the supreme ruler should be named by a popularity contest or by the privilege of birth, and so on.

To this view of society we must contrast that of freedom: that each individual should be free to act in accordance with his own values, without being controlled by any exterior determinism. This view should be distinguished from ethical nihilism, which is in fact nothing but the flip side of statism. When might becomes the primary standard, there can be no fixed principles, only the whims of rulers. Any realistic conception of freedom must entail that our institutions, whether political, economic or social, must be constructed and maintained, not on the basis of might, but on the basis of moral principles.

Regards,
Francois Tremblay

January 30, 2009

The Social Non-Contract: Governments Have No Right was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Americans of obvious African descent really got a raw deal. Their ancestors were slaves in Africa and sold to Europeans by their African masters. That’s some introduction to American society…and you never really get over the first impression you make. And then there was the fact that Africans just looked so alien; surely, if you weren’t one of them, it must have been hard to think of them as human in quite the same way; the same genus perhaps, but not the same species. The swarthy Greek and Italian, epicanthic fold-bedecked Pole and Swede and even the unwashed Irish all eventually melded into the existing Anglo-Germanic society of North America…but at least they were honest-to-God white people. And the Asians! As exotic as they must have seemed to a European, they at least weren’t so brown (well, maybe the South Asians were…), nor at all nappy-headed.

It must have been easy for people of pure European stock to view Africans as chattel with only vaguely humanoid shapes: sort of like bipedal goats and cows. That, of course, didn’t stop white slave owners from doing what slave owners have done with their female slaves from time immemorial: add them to the harem. The result: there is hardly a person of African descent in the New World today who doesn’t have anywhere from 10 to 60% European ancestry (the median is about 20%; those with more than 60% or so were able “to pass” and sometimes they integrated into white society). In Latin American countries some of them wouldn’t even have to check “black” on the census box! On the other hand if you’re white in America and your ancestors’ arrival predates one of the waves of European immigration in the 19th and 20th Centuries, then you may be surprised at what’s in your family tree; it’s probably not just “a little bit of Indian.”

There are tons of blacks in North America with no immediate pure white ancestry who nevertheless carry about as much European DNA as someone like Obama whose own father was about as pure black African as one can get. Obama, despite having a white mamma, looks like any random sampling of blacks in the U.S. who on average have almost as much white ancestry, though very rarely as immediate as a full-blooded parent or grandparent. Someone like Obama has geographical/racial genetic markers occurring in clumps as opposed to the more sifted occurrences in the chromosomes born of generations of mixing. Whatever the case, it doesn’t take much African blood to make one black. A drop will do…particularly if the evidence is written on one’s features.

Let’s be frank: a lot of the resentment folks rightfully feel about government handouts and entitlements are focused very squarely on a particular group of recipients: the descendants of the African slaves in the U.S. To the average white taxpayer, they amount to shiftless negroes, crack-dealers and bastard-producing welfare queens…even more simply put: just about every single black person on these shores who isn’t a professional athlete, entertainer, Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China or the price of gold in a Comex squeeze?

I dunno.

I’m just pointing out that there is a very real and seemingly irreconcilable resentment among a small handful of different groups in this country. The two largest players are the American white and black races, but making a growing claim are the Spanish-speaking folk of largely indigenous descent (the majority of those reading this will know them simply as “Mexicans” or “illegals,” whatever their actual nationality). Their arrival to our black/white tussle is like that of fashionably late Kurds to an all-nighter being thrown by the Sunni and Shia.

I can only guess at the role these post-1492 mestizos will play as our nation wends its way toward currency destruction and resource shortages. Maybe a lot of them will just go back home. Maybe the ones who’ve been in the Southwest of this country for generations will conspire with the government of their ancestors and help reconquistar California, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, and a hearty chunk of Arizona. I do know that just about every one of the hundreds of Mexican or South American immigrants I’ve ever met usually works at least 10 hours per day and is willing to live in a small, neatly kept room for years at a time, often in a houseful of strangers. In other words, like the white immigrants who preceded them, they are willing to risk, sacrifice, and work hard in hopes of a better a future for their descendants. I also know that they feel about as much solidarity with blacks as do the Irish or Italian immigrants who came before.

Though the ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences certainly don’t help the situation, the hatred toward Hispanic immigrants (remember: the ones we see tend not to be primarily of European descent who tend to stay in their home countries…unless a communist dictator kicks them out…) is largely a byproduct of our welfare state. Those of us paying into it can’t help but resent those who benefit from it without paying a dime. Few probably hate the old, the sick or even the illegal immigrant so much as they hate being forced to give strangers money…though giving money to strangers from another tribe is probably more painful. Alas national socialism is a perfectly natural end result of the state…and it tends to breed the longing for genocidal purging.

But as I pointed out a little earlier, at least the Hispanic immigrant will be looking to earn his keep, even if he benefits from the taxes we pay and which he does not…and even if his descendants in this country are tripped up on their way to integration because of multicultural political frippery like bilingual education. On the other hand, black folks in this country have come to rely on politics to address grievances, instead of simply getting to work. Yet they mistrust and hate the state from which they demand resources. The result is an entire race stumbling through life like an indolent teenager who when asked to pitch in falls back on the line, “I never asked to be born.” Fair treatment before the law is about as far as anyone should want to take things. Government subsidy just begs for resentment.

Race is a troublesome and unscientific way to group things, but like Newtonian physics, it’s tremendously useful for where the rubber meets the road. Race is both real and ephemeral, a concrete phantom, a mirage that you can smell and taste just enough to think it has considerable substance. As with the aforementioned Newtonian mechanics, it breaks down when you look really close, but it’s real enough for the gross world in which people must live. Angels and molecular biologists can ignore it; most of us can’t.

The trouble really comes not from folks making personal decisions based on race, but on the state doing so. And here we come to the meat of this argument. The ideal American attitude toward people-who-aren’t-exactly-like-me ought to be “I’ll tolerate you…but don’t expect me to pay for you. I ask that you do the same.” Perhaps it would be so if we hadn’t been accelerating toward outright national socialism for the past hundred years. Socialism, despite its attempts at kindergarten inclusiveness, naturally lends itself to genocide. It’s what happens when you mix the basic human tendency to favor those clearly of one’s own tribe with forced resource-sharing a la the state.

Forced integration is as pernicious as forced segregation. Leave people alone and they’ll sort themselves out. I can’t fault anyone for wanting to live among people who look like they do and speak the same language. But that’s really a matter of property rights and personal freedom. When it becomes a matter the state feels obliged to address, the results are the enhanced division we see manifest in the decay and color-based blight in our cities. It was the state that initially passed laws forbidding people to intermarry and that racially codified who would be property, thus retarding integration of people of obvious African descent into mainstream society. It is the state that now uses money stolen from one set of citizens to pay off and simultaneously cripple another along glaringly racial lines.

It doesn’t matter whose ancestors did what or had what done to them. Things are as they are now, and compounding past errors with the excuse of past grievances is just not a good idea. Of course, the state doesn’t agree with me on this. Hence the past hundred years of forced integration and legislation, whose end result has been to strip one segment of the people of initiative, morals, and hope…and which continues to foster resentment and mutual distrust…and often hatred.

Working whites don’t’ mind the relatively small portion of their own race on the dole so much, but they see the black race as (innately) parasitical and perhaps intellectually challenged. And this goes for those whites who voted along party lines for the black messiah. Whether they think this calls for coddling, deportation or extermination is an individual matter, but the perception is probably fairly uniform. They may view Hispanics the same way to varying degrees, while Hispanics may have similar intimations towards blacks. Whites see non-whites as taking food from their own children’s mouths at the point of the government gun and offering only criminal violence in return. Whatever the accuracy of this perception—and it’s very accurate to quite a few—whites may not stand for it as the going continues to get unbelievably rough for them financially. Meanwhile, the black race seems to be itching for a chance to enact wholesale violence against the white race…and probably won’t be in any better shape materially as scarcity increases.

A black face will be superimposed on the head of the monster from D.C. I suspect that it doesn’t mean a blessed thing in terms of healing the damage done to race relations by state intervention in the first place. And then there’s what we expect will happen to the currency. Hmm…hyperinflation and three large and distinct racial groups who really don’t care for each other? How do you think this is going to turn out? Personally I think no amount of wishful thinking and singing “Kumbaya” together is going to help. When resources get scarce, people tend to eat the horses…and then each other…and they tend to do their killing along ethnic and racial lines.

Regards,
Gary Gibson

January 16, 2009

A Few Nations Under God: Race and National Socialism in America was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.