End the War on Freedom

From drugsense:

Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties. -- Immanuel Kant

From samizdata:

Congress is now discussing ethics of business. This is the first time for many congressmen - not business, but ethics. -- Jay Leno

Mike Shelton - Campaign Finance Reform - cartoon commentary on the relationship between Enron and passage by the House of the Shays-Meehan bill. Hahahahaha.

I've started reading The State vs. The People by Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman. It's a wealth of historical information. Defines "police state" and gives a bunch of examples. Shows in gory detail the practices of the U.S. government that have police state traits. Of course, the war on freedom, er... some drugs, figures big in this picture, but it's not alone by a long shot.

I had forgotten that congress passed in 1996 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), H.R.3103, 104th congress, public law 104-191 (PDF). Part of this law creates another numbering scheme for us cattle: "The Secretary shall adopt standards providing for a standard unique health identifier for each individual, employer, health plan, and health care provider for use in the health care system." This identifier becomes the key in a federal database of all our medical information. The reasons I've forgotten it are that congress has so far denied it funding, and I rarely see doctors. I do see my dentist regularly, however. He'll lose my business the minute he asks for a medical identifier.

RKBAbang! is selling L. Neil Smith's Bill of Rights Enforcement button/card pairs. I got a hundred of them a couple of days ago, L. Neil's first shipment. Buy some today. Wear the button everywhere. Give out cards and buttons. Promote enforcement of the Bill of Rights.

Marijuana Policy Project - United States - MPP is asking folks to send letters to senators and representatives opposing the recent d.e.a. raids of medical marijuana facilities in California. I sent the following to senators Schumer and Rodham-Clinton:

The constitution does not mention anything about medicine or drugs. Hence, any federal legislation having anything to do with either is blatantly unconstitutional. This means that the DEA and FDA have no right to exist.

Furthermore, the ninth and tenth amendments, part of the Bill of Rights, guarantee that anything not explicitly mentioned in the constitution is the domain of the states or the people. Hence, the federal government must honor state laws allowing medical marijuana (or completely legalizing all drugs, for that matter).

Any federal agent who enforces these illegal laws is guilty of assault and kidnapping and should be jailed. Or worse: kidnapping is a capital offense. Any legislator who is part of making these laws is guilty of conspiracy to commit mass assault and kidnapping, a crime against humanity in my book. Again, jail or worse. That means you, Chucky.

And then there's the conspiracy by both of you to commit mass murder by disarming innocent victims in direct violation of the second amendment, but that's another topic.

And I sent this to John E. Sweeney:

Please support medical marijuana by co-sponsoring H.R. 2592, the congressional bill that would change federal policy so that states would have the right to enact their own medical marijuana laws without federal interference.

I've written to you before about this or a similar bill. I appreciate that you sent me a response in which you actually took a position. Unfortunately, your position is dead wrong. The U.S. Constitution does not mention medicine or drugs anywhere. Hence, you have no right to make any laws about them. And don't give me the commerce clause garbage. That won't wash with me. The very existence of the DEA and the FDA is blatantly unconstitutional. I urge you to eliminate them.

But I feel more strongly about this. What consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes is nobody's business. No government, federal, state, or local, has any right to make any law about this behavior. If somebody sells drugs to kids, fine, throw them in jail. If they inject heroin in their living room, however, it's not your business unless they commit an actual crime against an unwilling person or their property. The same goes for the businessman who sells them what they want. Private behavior between consenting adults is not a crime.

When a jack-booted thug breaks into someone's house and arrests him/her for ingesting vegetable extracts (aka drugs), that thug has committed assault and kidnapping. Those are real crimes. Serious crimes. When you pass a law authorizing such thuggery, you are guilty of conspiracy to commit mass assault and kidnapping. That is a crime against humanity. Nuremburg 2, anyone?

Now that you know where I'm coming from, maybe you can see that it is a very small step toward my point of view to cosponsor a simple bill that allows states, not the federal government, to decide whether to allow their citizens access to medical marijuana.

There. That feels better. I have no fantasy that these letters will even be seen by my "representatives" in Con-gress (opposite of Pro-gress). They'll likely be trashed quickly by the aides who take them out of the fax machines. But it felt good to get it off my chest.

Eric Hananoki at Democratic Underground - Exporting Weapons of Mass Destruction - Mr. Hananoki considers small arms to be weapons of mass destruction. Somewhere, he found a statistic claiming that "small arms and light weapons kill 500,000 people a year, 80% of whom are women and children." Get a clue, Mr. Hananoki. Human beings have a right to keep and bear arms. Abuse of that right is not the responsibility of the arms manufacturers. If you used a hammer to flatten your wife's head, would it be the responsibility of the tool manufacturer? Definitely not. Still, it's pretty stupid foreign policy to arm the people with whom you later find a need to go to war. Well, it's stupid if you assume that avoiding war is important to our government. It's likely the other way around. War is the health of the state. As for Kofi Annan's opinion, he wants to disarm everyone except his commU.N.ist police force so that he can establish a world socialist dictatorship. It's hard to give any credence to such a monster. I snarfed the Bush/Enron logo from this page. Well done. [anodyne]

Not only are small arms and light weapons highly profitable, they're also extremely destructive. Small arms and light weapons kill 500,000 people a year, 80% of whom are women and children.

The presence of these weapons in third world countries and conflicts zones cause a multitude of harms, including massive economic losses, nearly $140 to $170 billion per year in Latin America alone; facilitating the 3rd world problem of child soldiers; and most importantly, causing the destruction of villages and societies. One AK-47 into a primitive African village can destroy it permanently. It's no wonder that Kofi Annan called small arms and light weapons the "true weapons of mass destruction."

...

Even more ridiculous is the argument, spouted by Undersecretary of State John Bolton, that the regulation of small arms and light weapons hurts our ability to exercise the 2nd Amendment.

But restricting exports of small arms to citizens of foreign countries, people who have no right to bear arms, does not harm the 2nd Amendment. Further, no Supreme Court case has ever ruled that the transferring and selling of small arms, like assault rifles, is protected by the 2nd Amendment. If that was the case, 6-year olds and criminals could buy AK-47s with ease at K- Mart.

Jerry Pournelle - Saturday, February 16, 2002 - this was too funny. Will move here next week. [pournelle]

There was also an interesting note from someone who tells me how much he hates what I say -- and showed considerably familiarity with it all -- and how ghastly it is that I should ask him to pay when he'd pay not to read it. I didn't send him the obvious solution to this problem...

whitehouse.gov - The President's National Drug Control Strategy - this is real, not a whitehouse.org take-off (just in case the absurdity of it makes it hard to tell the difference). Let's see... $19.2 billion divided by 250 million people in the country times 4 people in my family = $307 of my stolen tax money funding something that I consider to be a crime against humanity. What a bummer man. Advice to GW: forced treatment doesn't work. Treatment can never be successful until the person with the problem recognizes the problem and decides on his/her own to ask for help (step 1 of the 12 steps, and no, I'm not an advocate, but this one is correct). If the feds fund anything, and I don't think they should, it should be getting honest information out there. Something like what DanceSafe does for ecstasy users. [unknown]

Healing America's Drug Users: The vast majority of the millions of people who need drug treatment are in denial about their addiction. Getting people into treatment--including programs that call upon the power of faith--will require us to create a new climate of "compassionate coercion," which begins with family, friends, employers, and the community. Compassionate coercion also uses the criminal justice system to get people into treatment. Americans must begin to confront drug use--and therefore drug users--honestly and directly. We must encourage those in need to enter and remain in drug treatment. The President's National Drug Control Strategy envisions making drug treatment available to many more Americans who need it.

...

Overall, the President's 2003 Budget includes $19.2 billion for drug control.

The Blue Button - Tom Tomorrow - liberals bitch a lot about Big Brother intrusions on their privacy, but they vote for big government every time. I finally added The Blue Button to my links page, returning the link that I noticed there quite a while back. [samizdata]

Or here's a compromise I proposed to one of my statist-liberal friends back in 2000: you liberals could vote Libertarian federally and Democrat (or Green or Socialist) locally. That way, you could bask in the knowledge that you advocated a smaller national government with less snooping powers while still having decided to force your neighbors to work for the common good.

Just stop bitching about big-government being Big Brother when you voted for an even bigger government.

bob lonsberry - Smile, You're On Candid Camera - Mr. Lonsberry doesn't like the idea of the hundreds of new surveillance cameras in D.C. Too much like George Orwell's 1984. I agree. In spades.

All of a sudden we'd live in a world where who we walk down the sidewalk with, or what we wear, or where we go and when we go there becomes a matter of public record stored for who knows how long in the archives and data bases of the government.

No more privacy, no more time alone, no place to go outside the prying eyes of government.

When I was in the seventh-grade it was fiction. Now it's becoming a reality.

And just as it was wrong then, it is wrong now.

vote.com - Should the senate pass the house's campaign finance "reform" bill? - no, obviously. 79% of the 28,000 current voters agree. [kaba]

Justin Davenport at thisislondon.co.uk - Just £200 for a gun in London - That's $286 according to xe.com's currency converter. In gun-free Great Britain, har har har. [kaba]

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