Last week, the Libertarian Party announced that Michael Badnarik, a computer programmer from Texas, will be their 2004 Presidential candidate. "If I can win the nomination, there's no reason I can't win this election," said Badnarkik, obviously unaware of the LP’s track record in Presidential races.
While I personally admire Badnarik's clueless optimism, other bloggers aren’t as impressed. Jon Henke from QandO is particularly disappointed with the choice (“Badnarik is exactly the sort of person that gives Libertarians a reputation as fringe-dwelling nuts.") and Captain Ed argues that the LP has proven that it won’t be posing a threat to the two-party system anytime soon.
While I respect their opinions, I think they’re being too harsh. The LP has some well argued policy positions that are worthy of a closer look. Take, for example, Badnarik position on the “War on Drugs":
Children take drugs because criminals actively sell them. Criminals sell drugs because they are astronomically profitable. Drugs are highly profitable only because they are illegal. The Libertarian solution is to decriminalize drugs, which will make drugs extremely cheap, which will remove the profit motivation for selling drugs, which will result in fewer children taking drugs.
If this solution will work for street drugs then it should work for prescription drugs as well. In fact, we can just replace the words “children", "criminals", and “drugs" with “sick people", "pharmacists", and “prescription drugs" to get a Libertarian solution for the prescription drug problem:
Sick people take prescription drugs because pharmacists actively sell them. Pharmacists sell drugs because they are astronomically profitable. Prescription drugs are highly profitable only because they are illegal. The Libertarian solution is to decriminalize prescription drugs, which will make prescription drugs extremely cheap, which will remove the profit motivation for selling prescription drugs, which will result in fewer sick people taking prescription drugs.
I think the Libertarian Party is on to something here. If we would just make prescription drugs legal they would soon become so cheap that no one would want them anymore. No one want cheap drugs, especially sick people and children. We could just give them to all those sick people in Africa. (If the South Americans send their drugs to us then we should be able to ship ours to another continent too.)
With brilliant policy solutions like this, it makes you wonder why the Libertarian Party has never won the Presidency.
1
There are two industries that I know of that consistently create a greater demand when the supply is increased: drugs and the sex trade. One word for both of them: addiction. The LP's solution is great in solving the supply-side problem, but leaves the keep gaping hole of demand wide-open. An increase in supply in an industry where demand is created by such increases results in a bigge problem.
Sweden's policy of legalization has created red light districts and HAS increased crime. I'd rather support a "loosing" war on drugs any day. Are we messing up? Yes. But giving up means death, versus stemming "bleeding at the throat."
posted on 05.31.2004 11:14 PM2
Joe,
Do you simply not comprehend how a system without a nanny-state would work? I'm at a loss as to how you could ever claim to be a conservative, meaning you believe in genuine personal responsibility, then act like you have no idea how this system could work.
The prescription drug system creates a system of exclusivity on the sale. If the system were not in place, a doctor could tell them to simply go buy the drug at market value rather than with the added overhead of buying it from just a licensed pharmacist.
If people buy Percoset for a common headache that is their fault, not society's. That we should step in and help them out of some elitist "we know what's best for you" attitude is socialistic and I don't think that's how you want to be viewed. Being your brother's keeper is all fine and good, but never should you extend that to imposing your standard of what is good for them on their medical habits.
People with children will do one of two things. They'll either grow up and act responsibly or continue to act irresponsibly. The only thing that you can do is punish those who do the former. If you regulate the drug you take away the moral legitimacy when you go after them since you're attacking their habit not the underlying problem. Someone could take codeine for years for a migraine problem and be fine, another could become an addict.
People do this with alcohol all the time and no one demands "personal responsibility" from them. Having grown up around an alcoholic I think that the impact on children of growing up around a pothead is probably a lot healthier. Potheads are too damn mellow to get violent. Alcoholics vary too wildly to be trusted, and yet alcohol is perfectly legal.
Either ban it all or recognize te underlying problem is human behavior and regulate accordingly. For God's sake man, if you think that people won't find bizarre ways to get high, dig up a list of ingredients that go into a typical batch of Crank.
//end rant on WoD and prescription drugs.
posted on 06.01.2004 7:51 AM3
LOL!! Brilliant!
Can you e-mail this post to Tim Pawlenty, please? :-)
posted on 06.01.2004 9:40 AM4
The point I made on my blog Joe was that Jesus accepted the impossibility of humanity to find anyway to legislate away the corruption in the world. The best we can do is march in place until we are fixed, because if we try to launch legislative campaigns to stop vice-sins they will be steps backward, not forward.
The drug war hasn't put a dent in the drug use. About 25% of the seniors I knew in HS had used or experimented with drugs. If our society would just accept the fact that human nature is sinful and try to control the impact of the sin then we could have a free AND safe society. You cannot stop drug use, people will grow their own poppy plants to make Heroin if they really want to. People do it all the time with pot.
What you can do is provide a safe, regulated environment which allows society full control over far more of the behavior than it currently has. Legislating away drug use is a pipe dream and the zeal of the drug warriors, more than anything else, has given us an out of control government. A large part of the reason that we cannot get good anti-terrorism laws passed is that the law enforcement agencies that get involved in drug and drug-related crime (what isn't anymore?) want access to those laws.
The more I go to a local conservative presbyterian church the more I realize how powerless we really are to even slow down sin when people want it really badly. I have become more of a realist and thus more of a libertarian (not Libertarian). Pretty soon the idealism of social conservatives and drug warriors will crash into a brick wall at 90mph and when it does your freedom will be a memory.
posted on 06.01.2004 1:38 PM5
Mike:
I've been saying for some time that Libertarianism is very much like Communism: it kinda looks good on paper, but if you've spent even five minutes in the presence of other human beings, you immediately understand why it could never work.
Your "logic" reaffirms this decision. Thank you.
If some unscrupulous vendor sells sugar pills and calls them Cipro, that's the consumer's problem for not being more careful, not society's. :)
As a side note, I love how Libertarians automatically assume that all regulations exist because lawmakers had nothing to do one day. They couldn't possibly have been trying to solve a legitimate problem, could they? Nah! The zero-hindsight Libertarians forget what things were like before regulation. Obviously they never read The Jungle or any such thing.
Is over-regulation a problem? Sometimes, sure. But doing away with all regulation, and calling regulation "nannyism" is neither intelligent nor conservative. It's childish and silly.
posted on 06.01.2004 11:22 PM6
STRAW MAN STRAW MAN STRAW MAN
youve beat up a straw man, shame on you.
you have in no way "deafeated" the policy of legalizing illegal drugs through this EXTREMELY weak argument. Honestly this is the worst one ive heard yet.
These drugs that are now illegal, are so simply because people in the last 80 years decided at the drop of a hat that they were "bad".
If you Re-lagalise (they used to be used by many people for hundreds/thousands of years before they were deemed "bad") we would put the drug dealers out of biz, thus removing the criminal element from these drugs.
People should be allowed to do whatever they want to their own bodies as long as it doesnt harm others.
dont even get me stared on the economics of this issue.
7
Tgirsch,
You are a very ignorant SOB on the subject of libertarianism. First your sugar pill "argument" and then your claim that libertarians want the end of all regulation. You are so far out in left field that you have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the difference between libertarians and anarchists. Go do your homework, you have reduced yourself on this subject to just parroting social conservative lies about libertarianism.
posted on 06.02.2004 7:53 AM9
Mike:
You are so far out in left field that you have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the difference between libertarians and anarchists.
That's because Libertarians haven't sufficiently demonstrated the difference. Have you read the LP platform? Their "solution" to environmental problems (as an example) is to repeal all environmental regulations, sell all government land to private owners, and shut down the nation's biggest polluter, which they say is the federal government.
The reason I say they want to get rid of regulation is because, when you boil it down, they do. Show me three regulations that the LP officially supports.
As for the "litte-L" libertarians, who don't conform to the LP platform, they're even worse, in my estimation. Their personal politics boils down to "the government shouldn't do things that I don't think the government should do." And when you try to nail them down on what the government should do, finding even two who agree on anything specific is nigh unto impossible.
You may think I'm wrong, but I'm certainly not ignorant about libertarianism. (SOB I'll give you.) I find it especially amusing that you would think I was parroting any "social conservative lies." As Joe will attest, I'm the antithesis of the social conservative.
Back to my sugar pill example, the standard libertarian remedy to this situation is to sue the guy who sold the sugar pill as an antibiotic, assuming you live long enough to do so. Because the threat of a lawsuit will scare him into good behavior. Just like the threat of lawsuits stops companies from behaving badly today.
posted on 06.02.2004 1:49 PM