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I recently suggested that the War on Drugs just wasn't working. I said, in a place where I couldn't take it back, that the $4,000 toilet seats the Navy occasionally buys are stupid, but the War on Drugs has that topped. I heard from folks all over the country.
I wrote him this letter:
Mr. Taylor,Drug use is not a crime. Drug sales are not crimes. Drug manufacture is not a crime. No peaceful behavior between consenting adults in the privacy of their own property is a crime. Never was. Never will be. Independent of legislation. Independent of how many jack-booted thugs the state contracts. Fraud and the initiation of force are the only crimes. Always were. Always will be.
Want to know how to tell the real criminals? Anyone who initiates force or delegates its initiation is a criminal. When legislators vote to imprison drug users, they are guilty of conspiracy to commit mass assault and kidnapping. When jack-booted thugs break into someone's house, shackle them, and drag them off to jail for a non-crime, those thugs are guilty of assault and kidnapping. Those are the real criminals. Lock them up. Throw away the key.
-Bill St. Clair
bill@billstclair.com
From DrugSense Weekly:
"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest [nation] of people on earth." -- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
The UK Guardian via MAPINC - It's Divine Justice, Gore Is Told: had the Clinton administration been less eager to convict black men of felony drug crimes, thus relieving them of their right to vote, Al Gore might have handily won the election in Florida. Serves him right.
Al Gore may have lost America's presidential election not because of a badly designed ballot, dubious counting practices in Florida or the defection of independents to Ralph Nader, but because of the criminal justice policy he and Bill Clinton have pursued for the past eight years.That policy appears to have robbed the Democrats of victory by disenfranchising nearly one in three black men in Florida, most of whose votes he would have received.
Raymond Bonner and Josh Barbanel at the New York Times -
Democrats Rue Ballot Foul-Up in a 2nd County 
: why were 26,000
ballots thrown out in Duval County, Florida? Because democratic party
workers instructed first-time voters to "be sure to punch a hole on
every page." So rather than read the ballot and realize that both
pages 1 and 2 contained presidential candidates, they voted twice for
president. Hehe. [lew]
Two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:
- Truck seizure goes too far - After crashing his truck into a
mobile home while drunk, Karl Dir lost his driver's license for a year
and paid $500. But they also stole his truck. Neither Vin nor I
condone his behavior, but this is still no reason for the state to
steal his truck.
Property rights are too vital an underpinning of our heritage of freedom to allow them to be eroded any further. I have no sympathy for drunks who crash into people's homes. Karl Dir's behavior was potentially deadly; a repetition might result in consequences far more serious.
But in a day and age when the number of "laws" is multiplying so quickly that it's hard to get to work in the morning without breaking some, it's all the more important to set limits on such a potentially devastating government power.
- A purely cosmetic measure - Prostitution is legal in some parts of Nevada. In the parts of Las Vegas where it isn't legal, there are "order-out" zones. People aren't arrested there for practicing the oldest profession, just asked to vacate and not come back. Why can't they just realize that these activities are here to stay and legalize them? Same with drugs, IMNSHO.
Lew Rockwell at LewRockwell.com - Another Presidency Survey!? a "conservative" group has published its list of the best presidents. Their list is no better than the one made by the liberals. Statists and war-mongers are at the top of the list. [lew]
The most evil consequence of these lists is that they convey to current presidents that they had better start a war or preside over some domestic mayhem to earn their place in the scheme of things.Beware, all presidents and would-be presidents: You get no points for keeping the peace and enforcing the Constitution, much less for letting the American people go about their business unimpeded.
Notice that none of these lists explains what precisely a president is supposed to do to become great. If, for example, a list said, "a great president is one who brings about the most deaths of innocents, annexes the most territory, dramatically increases debt and spending, inflates 'till the cows come home, and otherwise ignores the Constitution because of a crisis he might have prevented or even brought on deliberately," at least that list would have the virtue of honesty.
Lew Rockwell at the Ludwig von Mises Institute - In Praise of Failure: business failures are a natural part of the market economy. In the long run, they are beneficial. [lew]
Perhaps the best example of industries that have failed is in the public sector. The second half of the life of the Soviet economy can be seen as an elaborate effort to keep failing industries alive. And in the US, the quality and efficiency of public schools have dropped every year for many decades, and yet they are not permitted to go out of business. The same is true for all government "services," which survive only because they aren't subject to market judgement.
Richard Koman at the O'Reilly Network - Ian Clarke Has Big Plans for the Internet: An interview with the creator of Freenet. [mumble]
