House of Eratosthenes

You know, it says something about us that is not good when — well, if someone immigrated to our country and asked for an explanation about conservatives, liberals and libertarians, and the task fell to me to explain it to them, and someone put me on a strict limit as far as the number of words to use for my answer (and come to think of it, not a one among those three things is implausible)…I would have to say…

Alright, looking at it from a distant birds-eye view so I can put it in a single paragraph, let’s start with the conservatives and liberals, both of which believe in the sanctity of individual rights and that the government should not be able to interfere with those rights no matter how badly it wants to. But both sides have picked what kind of individual rights enjoy that durability, that level of protection, that the individual rights triumph over the calling for law and order. Conservatives, generally speaking, favor the individual rights that, by being exercised, help to make a society stronger and liberals generally favor the individual rights that make a society weaker. (A list optionally follows, which includes starting a business, employing people, home-schooling your kids, packing heat to protect your family in case someone attacks you…versus…getting acquitted during a criminal trial when you’re guilty as hell because the evidence is inadmissible.) Now, the libertarians generally side with the conservatives in all this, except they labor under the notion that using contraband recreational drugs falls into the “make society stronger” side…or, at least, their use does not make society any weaker.

There. That skips over a lot, like for example the liberals’ fondness for selective enforceability…you’ll notice there aren’t too many liberals campaigning, for example, for illegal things to be made legal, lately they offer a whole bunch of excuses about why some law should not be enforced. Don’t make it alright to break into a family’s house and steal their stuff, just ban guns because, aw gee, someone might get hurt. Don’t make a law requiring everyone to have the same share of assets or the same level of income…just reform the tax code SoThatMillionairesAndBillionairesPayTheirFairShare. Don’t legalize illegal immigration, just have a whole bunch of oopsies, darn we couldn’t keep ’em out…oh well, now that they’re here, don’t legalize voting by illegal aliens, just…oopsie…we can’t ask for identification at the polling place because that would be racist. Oh my look at that, we have a whole bunch of brand-new votes for democrat politicians, how nice. So the conservatives and libertarians are arguing, by & large, about what laws we should and should not have. The liberals, on the other hand, expend their political energy toward reforming our culture, as opposed to our statutes…since they stand alone in doing this, they generally prevail here…and their arguments go toward what laws we should and should not bother to enforce. You’ll notice just about every time they argue for a new law to be placed on the books, that law has the effect of making some other law, already on the books, much harder to enforce. But, obviously, that gets into a second paragraph and thus would not be under discussion at that first dinner-table meeting. Which is a pity. But, priorities. The first paragraph gives us plenty enough to discuss before the cheesecake.

Well. Let us turn to the legalization of drugs, because with all the other stuff that’s going on, nobody says too much about it except the people who are all fired up about it, and the people who are all fired up about it are these libertarians who want them legalized. By and large, they don’t have opinions about too many other things, or at least they don’t have opinions that are equally passionate about too many other things. If I want a blog post to really catch fire, all I have to do is make it about 1) Sarah Palin, 2) Abortion or 3) legalizing drugs, and that’s not in order…it’s somewhat backwards…the legalize-drug crowd always has to have the last word, and the first one as well. So by now, we’ve all heard their arguments.

Time to hear the other side. Take it away Zo:

I live in a state where “assault weapons” are selected for illegalization by politicians who have no idea whatsoever what an assault weapon really is. I heard through the grapevine our senior Senator worked with the Clinton administration to ban selected firearms, at the federal level, by going through some gun catalogues and picking out what was most scary-looking. This, in spite of the fact that we have a constitutional amendment clearly spelling out that this should not be happening…

If someone has the time and passion to put together a response to Zo, and I consider this an inevitability, I expect them to spare an equal share of time and passion in defense of gun rights, if they want to keep a shred of conservative credibility with me. A gun, after all, is the ultimate device to be implemented in this always-unfinished task of ensuring good prevails over evil, and law and order prevail over chaos.

A bag of grass doesn’t do that.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

I am Batman!

(BIG-ass sigh)
- bpenni | 02/27/2012 @ 13:41
Hah! Well played, sir.
- mkfreeberg | 02/27/2012 @ 14:02
I think you’ve forgotten a critical point:

Human rights are not determined by utility. The right to control what does and does not go into your body is not determined by how useful your exercise of that right is to society at large. It is innate, and you do not have to prove you deserve to exercise it.

Libertarians oppose prohibition because it is immoral, UNCONSTITUTTIONAL, and by nature grants government unjust power over individuals, which is just as invariably expanded to further and further enroach upon people’s freedoms.

First, booze. then “hard” drugs. Then marijuana. then tobacco. Now they’re coming for fat and sugar. Hell, they’ve got health nazis rifling through children’s lunches now. Every day a new infringement, a new enroachment, a new Nanny State law. And every last bit of it made possible by the War on (some politically incorrect) drugs.

THAT’S what a legal bag of weed prevents.
- rhjunior | 02/28/2012 @ 01:51
Human rights are not determined by utility. The right to control what does and does not go into your body is not determined by how useful your exercise of that right is to society at large. It is innate, and you do not have to prove you deserve to exercise it.

Wouldn’t it be more correct to say, I’m starting off with a premise that is not fundamental to the situation…the conservatives may agree “human rights are determined by utility” whereas the libertarians would not, so my argument, to coin a phrase from myself, ends rather close to where it begins. Okay, it’s a fair point. It’s a mistake easily made when one tries to keep things short.

But you’re overstating it a little bit, aren’t you? If human-rights-determined-by-utility is the point I’m really trying to make…and by “human right” we mean, no matter what kind of legitimate argument government could make that it must proscribe against these efforts & activities of yours as a matter of necessity to preserve law & order, no matter how much your community deplores it, you should be able to do it anyway…that would then be an argument that all that is industrious must be legal. Clearly that’s going well beyond the points presented here. In fact, I don’t see anyone anywhere claiming that about industrious things. For the better part of a year now we’ve seen the Occupy Wall Street types destroying public parks, and throughout all of it we’ve seen agreement across the ideological spectrum…at least, until later, when things started to get destructive in some areas, later on in many more areas…that this right to assemble peaceably was a right that should have remained intact. In fact, we can see now that’s why OWS chose the tactic; they could claim with a patina of legitimacy that their enemies were obliged to tolerate the message along with the presentation of it, even when there was no coherent message and therefore no discernible purpose, the entire exercise was part of “constitutional rights.”

Since when does business, or utility, of any kind, enjoy such protection?

In fact, the way I see it it’s somewhat reversed. The libertarian who desires to make drugs legal, is essentially presenting the argument “this exercise is non-productive and recreational, therefore there is a level of protection it should enjoy (that productive exercises do not and cannot enjoy).” If your point is — just because it’s unproductive, doesn’t mean it has to be outlawed — then you’re preaching to the choir, since my position has always been that legalizing drug use vs. keeping it illegal, is a community decision and the feds need to stay out of it.
- mkfreeberg | 02/28/2012 @ 06:25
If your point is — just because it’s unproductive, doesn’t mean it has to be outlawed — then you’re preaching to the choir, since my position has always been that legalizing drug use vs. keeping it illegal, is a community decision and the feds need to stay out of it.”

I do like you usually come down on the “local control” position, rather than simply asserting something ought to be legal or illegal at the federal level.

However, this does immediately raise a question – if something is legal in one state (or county) and illegal in the next one over, doesn’t that present a problem for the community where it’s illegal? You mentioned assault weapons above; being that gun rights are my favorite political issue, I lament often that I have to install a stupid “bullet button” on my semi-automatic rifle AND keep the magazines to ten rounds or less, when over forty other states have no such restrictions. It is not even possible to buy hi-cap magazines in this state unless you’re a cop (i.e. a member of a trusted class).

Nevada and other neighboring states have gun stores that do sell such magazines, however. It is not difficult to drive across the border, buy hi cap mags, and return to California. Being caught is unlikely. The only real incentive not to do so is the knowledge that a person can’t use such mags at a public shooting range here, but he could probably keep them in his home in the event of a SHTF scenario, and/or target shoot out in the wilderness with relative confidence.

Do you see where I’m going with this? It is likely you’ll point out that this is a distraction from the discussion of whether or not local control is best – and you’d be right. I do wonder if it should be factored-in.
- cylarz | 02/28/2012 @ 12:48

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Zo’s Argument Against Legalizing DrugsMonday, February 27th, 2012

Zo’s Argument Against Legalizing Drugs
Monday, February 27th, 2012