The Cocaine Price Support Program

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 19 Feb 2005 13:00:00 GMT
# Vin Suprynowicz' novel, The Black Arrow, paperback version, is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com. $16.47 + shipping, expected to ship on April 30. [militant]

# A long time ago, before I had a Gmail account, I filled out a form at the Gmail web site asking them to notify me when I could get an account. I found an invitation elsewhere not too long after that and forgot about my request. Yesterday, I received an invitation direct from the Gmail team. Methinks they're getting closer to opening it up. I also couldn't find that form today. And I've still got 50 invitations. if you want one, just ask.

# Bill Walker at LewRockwell.com - The Cocaine Price Support Program - I call the war on (some) drugs the war on freedom. Mr. Walker calls it the title of this piece. Why you should oppose all gummint price support programs, especially the drug war. [lew]

More widely felt at first than the Harrison Act was the Ethanol Price Support Program ("Prohibition"), Amendment XVIII, passed in 1919. While the EPSP had some of the same effects as the Drug War (more murders, more deaths from adulterated products, etc.), it fell short of its potential for several reasons. The most prominent of these reasons was that Alcohol Prohibition operated within the US legal system, and thus died ignominiously in 1933 when it was repealed.

The Drug War did not repeat this mistake. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and the other informal traditions of the Drug War simply asserted their own legitimacy, with no appeal to Constitutional authority. In fact, many government agencies draw the authority for their actions from their alleged usefulness to the Drug War, rather than from any obsolete Constitutional precedents. The invasion of Panama, foreign aid to the Taliban regime and other dictatorships, etc., derived their moral authority from the Drug War itself.

The Inversion of Authority

This new inverted authority supersedes all other civil authority, in the same way that the witch manias of medieval Europe did. At this point in history the entire US population, drug-using or not, lives in a state of perpetual Double Secret Probation. At any time of day or night, black-masked hoodlums waving German submachine guns and cursing wildly may kick in your doors, shoot you and/or your Labrador retriever and throw your family on the floor. Your property may be forfeited without trial. And just as in the witch manias, all sorts of false testimony can be used against you without recourse. If the ritually masked hoodlums bring their own drugs with them, and "find" them on your property, you are guilty. (In Dallas, they only have to "find" some billiard chalk... but that is another long story).

...

So.... Why Drug Price Supports?

Drug Prohibition's costs are obviously much greater than any possible benefit to the general public. So why does every drug-using political hack from Rush Limbaugh to the most leftist pot-smoking Democrat advocate Drug Prohibition? For the same reason that politicians support price supports for milk or sugar: they increase the power of politicians. All price supports confer arbitrary power on those who administer them. Every "cost" I've listed above is a "profit" for the parasitic class.

# bob lonsberry - When Is Enough Enough? - some common sense on the gummint's plan to ban matches and lighters on airplanes. [trt-ny]

# In response to this Claire Files thread, I got GnuPG working on my PC. Not nearly as polished as PGP, but the whole thing, command line and task bar GUI (WinPT), takes only 1.5 megs of disk space. WinPT also has a Sourceforge page, but the bundled installer there has an older GnuPG version (at least they say it does; I didn't try it).

I discovered today that PGP's hot keys to encrypt and decrypt the current window work pretty well on Gmail messages, at least in Firefox (didn't try any other browsers). Makes it easy to encrypt a message in place, and allows me to decrypt a message or verify a signature. Yay.

# I tried my Knoppix 3.4 CD on my new Dell Inspiron 600m laptop. It booted fine, but didn't recognize the 802.11g interface, so I had no network connectivity. I didn't try the wired network. I'll try version 3.7 as soon as I can get some time with the CD burner on my wife's computer. XP boots faster on this machine than Knoppix.

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