U.S. Constitution
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Title: The Prohibitionist Song Remains the Same
Source:
LRC
URL Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blo ... tionist-song-remains-the-same/
Published: May 15, 2015
Author: William Norman Grigg
Post Date: 2015-05-15 15:55:06 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 6002
Comments: 27
Proponents of drug decriminalization, “with their cry of personal liberty … have about wrecked the true concept of government control of evils,” complained John A. Lapp, President of the National Conference of Social Workers. From Lapp’s perspective, opposition to the federal War on Drugs is itself a gateway drug to outright anarchism, which is the ultimate goal of “destructionists” who conceal their true intentions behind cynical appeals to personal liberty. “To be consistent those same destructionists go so far as to condemn any and all control of conduct,” Lapp insisted. “What may the government regulate, control, or prohibit if not such human destroyers as [drugs]?… No previous time in our history has seen such a concerted movement to break the confidence of the people in their government as an instrument for human betterment.” The drug against which Lapp inveighed was alcohol, the indispensable federal crusade for “human betterment” was enforcement of the Volstead Act, and his condemnation of liberty-obsessed “destructionists” was delivered in the May 11, 1927 keynote address for the national convention of his organization. Public non-compliance with Prohibition was commonplace, and entirely predictable. In fact, five years before Lapp’s despairing address, The New Republic — the flagship publication of the Progressive movement — published a surprisingly lucid critique of Prohibition, which could be considered the defining Progressive social program. Government “must expect to have its authority flouted” when “it forbids its citizens to perform innocent and inoffensive acts of conduct,” observed TNR contributor Fabian Franklin, a notable academic. Dr. Franklin was a prominent critic of Soviet-inspired revolutionary socialism, and he saw Prohibition as the product of the same desire to regiment and “reform” human behavior through state-inflicted violence. Creation of a “dry” national society, Dr. Franklin wrote, would require “the suppression of individuality, the exaltation of the collective will and the collective interest, [and] the submergence of the individual will and the individual interest.” Although the end could never be realized, the means employed by Prohibitionists would never be fully repudiated, Dr. Franklin predicted: “The eighteenth amendment has profoundly altered our federal system of government. In comparison, the commerce clause is a frail instrument of potential centralization. If Congress ever casts off hypocrisy and sets up the necessary machinery for adequate federal enforcement, we shall enjoy a national bureaucracy worthy of our boasted `bigness’ in other respects.” Writing in the William & Mary Law Review roughly a decade ago, Dean Robert C. Post of Yale Law School described how Prohibition was the result of an alliance between pietistic conservatives and paternalistic progressives. Post focused on the key role played by the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Howard Taft, which “regularly sustained the administrative and law enforcement techniques deployed by the federal government” and its state and local allies in the war against liquor. In many respects, the Taft Court was reliably conservative, zealously guarding against federal intrusions into the reserved powers of the states. This skepticism about federal power dissipated quickly, however, when it came to “law and order” issues and matters of moral uplift — such as that era’s war on drugs. The result was a series of decisions reflecting purely results-oriented jurisprudence that upheld “the constitutional legitimacy of national police regulations that widely suppressed the prerogatives of local state authority to regulate intimate details of personal conduct….In the end the Taft Court would repudiate [state] prerogatives in ways that strikingly anticipate the nationalism of the New Deal.” It was under Prohibition that the “local” police were federalized and overtly militarized, and the federal “administrative state” took form. A little less than forty years after the 18th Amendment was repealed, the Nixon administration declared “war on drugs” without the benefit of a constitutional amendment, or even the pretense of constitutional legitimacy. Prohibitionists simply transposed their authoritarian rhetoric into a slightly different key, and they continue chanting the same refrains today.
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#7. To: TooConservative (#0)
Why drugs (including alcohol)? Pain. Why pain? Poverty, weakness, cruelty, subordination, stress...all things that could be substantially eliminated by obeying Christ, and in the case of poverty, subordination and stress, by those who have accumulated wealth using that wealth to free the slaves of poverty, subordination and stress. Give people greater security, and they will be less stressed and cruelly treated, and less cruel in return. And the NEED for pharmakeia - which is itself a deadly sin - will be dramatically reduced. To solve the drug problem, the problem of the human heart must be addressed. That can never be completely addressed. But the excessive pain of our society can be. There is a lot less drug-everything in Western countries that have stronger social safety nets. The Netherlands, where marijuana is essentially legal, and Iceland, Belgium, France and the Scandinavian countries - countries with the strongest safety nets, have the lowest death rates from drugs. By contrast, the WORST of the major Western European countries in terms of drug addiction and death rate, is...you guessed it...the much more "free" market, "competitive" United Kingdom. The US, of course, is up there in the "worst" category as well. Needless to say, African countries have low drug death rates: they're too poor to get the stuff. But Latin American countries, also, have lower rates. Comparing poor countries to rich doesn't tell us much. But comparing Scandinavia and France - "socialist" places (none of them are REALLY socialist, they all have better social safety nets, that's all) - are much better off in this regard than the USA and the UK - the places with the cheapest, worst, most threadbare and brutal social safety nets. You either give people security, or you pay for it in drug addiction, crime and death. Pissing, moaning and bellyaching about how people should...do something impossible and not human that human populations are incapable of ever doing - well, that's precisely the sort of stubborn stupidity that gave us Prohibition, bad laws, and STILL gives us a very crappy safety net, horrible crime and death rates, and no escape from the fouling of our own nest. Simply put, the very wealthy MUST be compelled to give up considerably more of their income, and the wealth concentration MUST be redistributed, through taxation and social welfare, in order to have social peace, low levels of drug addiction, low levels of crime, longer and better lives, and greater general happiness. People who dream of being barons and lords of the manor will have a worse time. They are few in number, and it is better that they should be brought to heel, as they have been in MOST of the western world, than that we continue to have the ragin' contagion of drugs, crime, death, and disorder and illiteracy, and every other goddamn thing we do, because we insist on calling social welfare and needful wealth redistribution "socialism". It isn't. But if it is, fine: let's have more socialism. Having written that, I fully expect to see the mouth breathers quoting that at me for the next forever. Don't care. The future does not lie in maintaining this system as structured. It's dying. The only question is whether we end up living in Scandinavia or Mexico. My bet is Mexico. It's too bad.
Or they can get a job. The majority of people on drugs are unemployed because they are drug users. The majority of people unemployed are already on welfare and spend their money on drugs. With no desire to find work. The more we increase a secular government socialist safety net the more people in this very populous country will stay home and do nothing. France and Sweden are much smaller populations with much smaller economies. The difference here is there are plenty of jobs, but Americans just don't want to do those jobs. They can take welfare at about the same income. So we either pull the safety net in a bit and people go back to work or the jobs need to be better paying than staying on welfare. The truly poor in our country is microscopic compared to those receiving transfer payments. And the truly poor are usually working and too proud to take a government hand out.
France is bigger than any American state, with over twice the population of California. Take the populations of California, New York together and stick them in Texas, with the population of Texas to boot - THAT is France. It's the fifth largest economy in the world. Add Germany to it, which is very similar to France, and you've got nearly half the population of the United States. Take just Western Europe, those countries that are together in the EU, and you've got the US. And you've got a broader social safety net, and less-of-everything-bad. Because the stronger social safety net gives people security, and when people are secure, they behave better. The US is physically large and has a large population, but the EU is physically larger, and has a larger population, and a larger economy too. And it's got a better social safety net, and less overall problems. What it doesn't have, is an empire. That empire costs us very dearly.
No France just has an out of control Muslim population which thrived on the social safety net. Beggars to their own demise.
#25. To: redleghunter (#24)
France's Muslim population is smaller, as a percentage of the population, than America's Mexican population OR America's black population. And the French have better education, longer lives and less crime. They're doing something right. The US Constitution, like the French, does not discriminate based on religion. Meaning that Muslims exist and proliferate in the US as well. Go to Dearborn sometime and listen to the call of the muezzin. In France, they have decided to ban the burka in public, and the hijab in schools and public jobs. In America, of course, these things are fully legal - indeed, it would be a violation of our Constitution to outlaw them. Now then, if you want to take the blow you're trying to aim at France and aim it, instead, directly at the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, and call that portion, at least, of our Constitution a horrible error that should be correct (because it is allowing the proliferation if Islam, unchecked, throughout America, and doesn't allow government at any level to take steps to legally curb it, as French law does), well, then, be my guest. But if the idea is "I'm mad at you. I'm going to take a swat at France. USA! USA! USA!" (which is really what motivates it), well ok. The truths remain: the US Constitution was devised by landed gentry in a rural society that had slaves, and that got the land for "free" by taking it with blood. So, the basic title to the land was gained through violence, something that isn't repeatable, and the structure of the society and labor force was radically different from today. Slavery was abolished through blood, and gradually the disenfranchised: especially women, also Blacks and Indians, gained the vote. And society radically transformed in the industrial revolution. Jefferson wrote of an agricultural empire, but that didn't happen. Instead, we clustered into cities, built factories and gave up the farms. Economic ideas, of the elderly in families being cared for by the younger - meaning room, board, clothing, medical care - everything - is something that became IMPOSSIBLE when 97% of the people moved the farm, left behind the ability to grow their own food and live in big houses at subsistence levels, and moved into little apartments in cities. In cities, people don't own the land, they can't grow their own food, and children can barely pay for themselves and their own children. 95% of the population does not have the means to be able to support their own children AND themselves AND their parents, including food and medical care. It is not doable. It isn't doable anywhere in the world. Everywhere in the world that is industrialized either gets that through LOGIC, like the Germans did (and, actually, we did), OR their elites and their allies are TOO headstrong, stubborn, and greedy and REFUSE to have a publicly-funded social support system. THOSE countries, then, all have violent "red" revolutions in which the stubborn elites are murdered and the social safety net is put into place by brute force. Either way you get there. France got there the violent way. America got their the more intelligent way, through men like FDR. But we've come past industrialization now to a global economy where the urban workers have become even POORER relative to what they need. It is IMPOSSIBLE for 95% of the population to provide their own health care in old age. Medicine is too sophisticated and expensive, and most people are living on old-age stipends. Children have children of their own, with brutal living expenses and college costs. Therefore, just as there MUST be unemployment insurance, AND social security, and universal public education, everywhere, paid for by taxpayers, with money primarily extracted from the rich top through taxes, there will ALSO eventually be universal publicly funded health insurance. We already have it for the old, called Medicare, because we have to. With Obamacare we've got a bad plan for all. It will fail, and eventually the government will have to squeeze out the private insurers, because basic human needs are expensive and can't be adequately delivered at a profit. So we're going to use democratic government to do it, and to impose the taxes to do it. The elites barely fight it. It's the class below the elites, who dream of being elites but who see the social insurance taxes making it such that they can't accumulate the necessary nut to live off their own interest - those are the people who fight it the worst. Until they get cancer or something and realize that upper middle class income and savings cannot cover the costs, and no, the answer is NOT "tough luck, die". The answer is "You want to accumulate more MONEY. Tough luck, taxes have to be higher than any of us want, to pay what all of us need, FIRST. Then we can look at gaining margins of luxury." That's reality. Republicans refuse to face it. Some of them hijack Christ to try to find an ally, but the Catholics and Orthodox and other sensible Christians put the kebosh on that. The better answer is to admit that you're wrong about social insurance, back down off the position, admit that it is no more optional than national defense, and accept that it takes about 50% of the economy, administered by the government, to pay for defense AND police AND universal education AND universal pensions AND universal health care, and that the universality requirement of all of these things means that they cannot be done by the private sector, ever, because there's no profit in most of it. Therefore, it MUST be done by government, and will be. If Republicans bring their considerable managerial skills to the table to make it work BETTER, cleanly, more efficiently, then they could really move the ball. But instead they've take up the role of enemies of REALITY, and fight what is necessary. And are marginalize in their stupidity on the subject as the world moves on. Everybody remembers the last Republican administration: Bush. Lost wars and a blown up economy. And the Republicans just stay wrong on everything. The Democrats, meanwhile, are SO into the social insurance state that they press for all sorts of excesses and evils. Republicans need to make peace with the necessity of the social insurance state, just like Democrats made peace with the fact that they don't get to have slaves or segregate blacks anymore, because they were wrong. Now they're part of the solution on racial issues. Republicans need to stop being economic morons, stop pretending that the sky is going to fall if their foolish economic schemes aren't adopted (we DID adopt their schemes, three times, under Herbert Hoover, Reagan and W Bush, and we got the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the crash of 1987 and the collapse of the S&Ls'. Republic economics DO NO WORK. It's been proven over and over again. Republicans don't learn. So they keep losing. And that's too bad, because the religious are tied up with the Republicans, and the religious are RIGHT to oppose abortion and gay marriage. But people vote their pocketbooks, and the Republicans have been toxic waste for most people's pocketbooks for a century. And they never come off it. They keep writing foolishness about Social Security. It's just dumb. It's Italian Army dumb. Completely incompetent and unworkable. It pains me to see so many otherwise sincere, middle class men who cannot possibly provide for themselves and their children and their old parents, if anything really bad happens - men who otherwise love GOd and want to see liberty preserved - on an idiotic jihad against the social infrastructure that taught them to READ and that has always been there to sustain their parents, them and their children in the event of real calamity. "The Churches will do it!" No, they won't. The Churches never DID do it, effectively, at all, during the 1900 preceding years when we DIDN'T have social insurance. Churches HELPED, but that was back in the day that people lived on farms and could GROW food and HOUSE themselves and elders, and start over. Once we moved to cities and lived in apartments and gave up apartments for urban living, that old model became as obsolete as buggies. The physical infrastructure for 19th Century poverty relief is GONE. Today, it must come from the government. "Or nowhere" is no option. That just leads to revolution, everywhere, and the infrastructure then is imposed by bloody revolutionaries. It is better that democratic, free people do it intelligently and methodically. But that requires people to be REALISTIC. And Republicans are not. Republicans live in a world where we're going to go bankrupt, tomorrow, if we have public health insurance, but where we have to spend a trillion a year on empire and Israel. It's incredible. It's dishonest. And it's bankrupt. It's why Republicans always lose on these issues. They refuse to bring their brain to the table, and nobody but themselves is ever persuaded by any of it. Reagan won because of the Iranian hostage taking. He used his win to try to implement Republican economics for the first time since Hoover. He did. It seemed to work great, like the 1920s Roared. But then came 1987, like 1929. Bush repeated it, and then came 2008 and another crash. Three generations of imbeciles is enough. LEARN FROM IT. Republican Economics DOES NOT WORK. The social welfare state is expensive, and NECESSARY. So become part of the solution by working on making it more efficient, rather than trying to pull apart the safety net. There. France has nothing to do with it. They've done a better job with their safety net, and are more stable on account of it than we are. That's a model worth emulating. We have Muslims too, and they wear burkas on the street and have prayer calls over loudspeakers in Dearborn. The French have put the kebosh on that. We CAN'T, because our sclerotic Constitution leaves us hamstrung. Physician, heal thyself.
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#8. To: Vicomte13 (#7)
#9. To: redleghunter (#8)
#24. To: Vicomte13 (#9)
Replies to Comment # 24.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 24.
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