Recently, the ATF decided that medical marijuana patients cannot own guns. It is assumed that people on drugs are criminals, and thus any guns they own are used for the commission of criminal acts to further their drug habits. In other words, everyone on drugs is a Very Dangerous Person according to the US government, and anyone involved in the drug trade is a Very Bad Person.
Let’s contrast this story with the ongoing coverup of the sale of “assault rifles” and other military-grade small arms to Mexican drug cartels. This program, known as “Fast and Furious” (possibly named after the films which feature outlaws driving fast cars), led to the death of an American ATF agent and the deaths of many Mexican nationals. The ATF has been clandestinely working to arm Mexican drug cartels, which has had the effect of destabilizing the country to our south. The people involved have been promoted out of their positions because of their criminal ineptitude, and the Obama Administration and Department of Justice have denied wrongdoing. The guns going over the border causing so much carnage have given the Obama Administration cause to make selling guns to those legally able to own guns harder.
When Obama was elected, he made a promise to stop raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. This hasn’t happened. Instead, federal enforcement of drug laws against people seeking a safe alternative to prescription drugs has increased. Keep in mind, prescription drugs are responsible for pushing the death toll from drugs in America higher than traffic fatalities, yet it is marijuana which is illegal (challenge to the reader: find a single death attributed to marijuana overdose).
The drug war has been an abysmal failure for America. We all learn in our public schools that Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s was very bad because it gave rise to gangsters, but the correlation is not made with respect to the ongoing drug war, which siphons away tens of billions of dollars per year from the productive economy and has put hundreds of thousands of people in prison for trafficking in weeds. The violence found in the drug war is a problem caused by prohibition, and the government continues to shift blame from itself to users in order to justify further interventions in the economy.
So I caught this video of Alfonzo Rachel at Pajamas Media trying to smear libertarians on a few issues including war and drugs as well as point out why he isn’t a neoconservative. His arguments are full of lies and strawmen, which is a fairly common tactic among conservatives when talking about libertarianism.
Rachel falls into the lie that “Islamofascists” are trying to attack us for no reason, and that war overseas is justified to keep them away from the US, and keep Russia and China from occupying the Middle East. I don’t understand this last notion about Russia or China, but he’s completely wrong on the rest of the counts. As I’ve alreadydemolished his main man Rick Santorum and the rest of the clowns on the issue of foreign intervention leading to blowback, I don’t think I’ll go too far into it. All one really has to do is just pay attention to what they say. It’s the occupation, stupid. Ron Paul isn’t trying to justify attacks against the US, he’s merely pointing out why others do them. If we were to follow the warmongers logic, then we’d necessarily have to conclude that the US government hates the Afghan people for their religion and that’s why they invaded their country after 9/11, not the fact that it was rumored the terrorists attacked the US on 9/11 from there. There’s a difference between understanding motivations and justifying actions, and the warmongers just do not understand this.
Rachel also misrepresents neoconservatism. This is probably purposeful because the neoconservative philosophy advocates Machiavellian pragmatism (read: doing anything and having no principles) to achieve a Platonic ideal (read: total state with a lack of individualism). In other words, neoconservatives are snakes in the grass scheming for power over all. Their Straussian philosophy combined with their Trotskyist past leads them toward being “big government conservatives,” but there is nothing conservative about their policies. For more on the topic of neoconservatives, I have an interview airing with Bradley Thompson on his book Neoconservatism: An Obituary of an Idea at Radio Free Market soon, but for now have a look at David Gordon’s review of the fantastic book. Neoconservatives aren’t necessarily socially liberal as Rachel claims, nor are they necessarily fiscally conservative; in fact, it’s usually libertarians who are described as being “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” (although this isn’t necessarily true).
When Rachel starts discussing libertarian philosophy, he really doesn’t even do the idea of libertarianism justice. A really easy way to demonstrate this is the ongoing hostility between libertarians of various think tanks continuing to have fights. What I’m getting at is that there are many ways to discuss libertarians, and to simply put them into one big group and to say what they all believe is yet another means of strawmanning.
But let’s look at some of the policies that Rachel discusses with regard to libertarians. For one, legalizing the vices which society has banned will probably have a net benefit to the nation. Decriminalization worked for Portugal (hint: decriminalization decreases, not increases government intervention).
Prohibition has a very real economic effect. Prices are increased as a result of prohibition, which gives incentive for people to sell these banned goods, whether it is crack, smack, or sex. These markets become violent because the people who are selling the goods are not concerned with upholding the rule of law. Legalizing drugs would have the effect of stopping more than 1.5 million people from getting arrested per year (a disproportionate amount of whom are minorities, which is ripping apart those communities). Nothing says police state like having the highest absolute prison population and percentage of the population imprisoned on the planet.
Oh, and the irony is that the drug war has made us less free without having the promised benefits. The PATRIOT Act, meant to keep us safe from the “Islamofascists,” is being used overwhelmingly for the drug war not terrorism. Bank secrecy laws are enacted to stop people from “trafficking drugs” by allowing the government to snoop in on all your bank accounts. Drugs are more prevalent and powerful today than ever. Under-deliver and over-promise: that’s what conservatives like Rachel enjoy.
I don’t know about this whole “Judeo-Christian Constitution” thing the guy is talking about, either. The US common law has its roots through 800 years of tradition from England. This tradition, along with the works of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, were the basis of the Constitution. Plus, the words “god” and “Jesus” do not appear in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. In fact, the US signed a treaty with the “Islamofascists” in 1797 that said the US was not founded on the Christian religion.
Not to mention Rachel goes ahead and blatantly misrepresents libertarians on other social issues. Dr. Paul is a Christian who does not believe in abortion, yet somehow all libertarians are in favor of abortion. Many libertarians I know are religious and/or abstain from substances; Dr. Paul said during a previous debate that most of us don’t need the government to tell us not to do heroin, so why does it need to be illegal? These sorts of nuanced points cannot be understood by regular conservatives, so they resort to nonsensical attacks like the video above.
Alonzo Rachel’s statements would be easier understood if sung:
Your Truth-o-meter writeup on Rick Perry’s statement that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme needs to be corrected.
You quoted a professor of journalism, Mitchell Zuckoff, and the Social Security Administration for your information. If you look through the SSA website, you’ll also find they admit that money coming in goes right back out, regardless if it is for Social Security transfer payments or for the war.
Let’s not forget that three Nobel winning economists (Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Paul Krugman) all agreed that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme.
The fact is that Social Security does require increasing numbers of people and/or money so that it can meet its obligations with changing demographics. That is a classic example of a Ponzi scheme.
The quotations you give from Professor Zuckoff only tell half the story. People are told that they are paying into their retirement, when Social Security plainly and openly operates as a transfer payment scheme from the working to the retired. Social Security can only be “tweaked” to avoid failure by increasing taxes on the working population, meaning the payment system does require more resources to be sustainable (a la Ponzi scheme).
Finally, the third quote, that Social Security is morally different therefore it cannot be a Ponzi scheme, is equivocation. If a starving person steals bread from someone who has more than his fill, while some may justify this as being a “legitimate” wealth transfer, this doesn’t change the fact that it is stealing.
If something walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, what would you call it?
PS: I’m no Rick Perry fan. In fact, I recently had a heated exchange with him on his record as governor, using numbers from your website.
As a Veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan reflecting on my time in service, I’m not sure why the United States continues to fight the War on Terror.
The horrible terrorist acts on 9/11 were not because of religion as many continue to claim, but the fact that violent occupations lead to violent responses. In 1998 and 2002, Osama bin Laden declared that the US policy of supporting corrupt regimes in the Middle East and killing scores of civilians in Iraq through sanctions was the reason he would attack America.
Americans would not tolerate foreigners creating pain and suffering on our people, so why should we expect others to tolerate American foreign policy which has caused so many problems abroad? Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, showed that 95% of all suicide bombings are not motivated by religion or ethnicity but to repel a foreign occupation.
American foreign intervention has historically led to numerous negative unintended consequences around the world. In 1953, the CIA overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran and installed a pro-US dictator for the benefit of Western oil countries. By 1979, the people of Iran had enough and overthrew the Shah but another government was installed which repressed the people even more. Christopher Coyne, professor of Economics at George Mason University, found an overwhelming majority of countries where the US intervened in the past century haven’t even become as “free” as Iran is now.
Iran isn’t the only failure of note. The prime minister of “free” Iraq routinely arrests political opponents. Afghanistan is more unsafe than ever, where drug lords (supported by the US government) run the country, the government itself is incompetent and lacking legitimacy among the people, and the US-backed government has been a major point of contention between longtime nuclear weapon armed rivals India and Pakistan. The drone bombing campaign in Pakistan indiscriminately kills civilians. The US government worked closely with the Gadaffi regime to rendition terror suspects in Libya among other types of aid, before working with the rebels (many of whom fought and killed Americans in Iraq).
These interventions have been far too costly in blood and treasure. 3,000 Americans died on 9/11, and another 5,500 have died “fighting for freedom” overseas. Thousands of Americans suffer from mental trauma or have become amputees because of these wars without end. More than 100,000 Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans have died. There is no way to know how much these wars will cost in the long run, but economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks it will be far beyond $3 trillion.
Ultimately, we have become less free because of the War on Terror. The PATRIOT Act has allowed the US government to spy on citizens. Americans sacrifice privacy at the airport, despite the TSA is mostly incapable of securing airports or detecting threats. The FBI created a massive network of agents provocateur to justify draconian anti-terrorist laws. Veterans are murdered during no-knock SWAT raids absent any evidence of wrongdoing. Food cooperatives are being raided by government agents for the Very Serious Crime of selling raw milk.
The motivations for the War on Terror are nebulous at best. Many say this War on Terror is a war for oil and other natural resources. Others claim the War on Terror is simply to perpetuate the defense industry. Some contend it “spreads democracy” and keeps America safe. Whatever the purpose, the War on Terror has clearly been negative for millions here and abroad, and now is simply time to end it. The freedom Americans believe is being defended by troops overseas is being destroyed at home by their own government.
Update: this post was re-published in the University of Iowa student newspaper, The Daily Iowan.
Recent Comments