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: 5979
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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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 27.
#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.
You have a factual problem. EU: 4.3 million square kilometers (1.7M square miles). US: 9.1 million square kilometers (3.7M square miles). Your argument impeaches itself.
Not really. Habitable area and population density matter. A third of the US is a desert, either of the sand kind or the Alaskan wilderness kind, with very few people in it. This should have been obvious when I said that France was bigger than any American state. Alaska is geographically larger in surface area than France, but that's irrelevant when speaking of social welfare. France is bigger by the measures that count: population and economy. That went without saying, so I didn't say it directly. I did say it implicitly, however, by stating correctly that France is bigger than any state. There are more people in the EU than the US, and when it comes to governance and social safety nets, what matters is not empty desert but population and economy size. Europe is bigger: more people, more money. That Europe has less land actually bolsters my argument, as it means that Europe has a bigger economy and more people living in crowded space (problems tend to be in urban areas, not the countryside), and a lot less land for natural resources. Which is to say, Europe's greater economic power is based much more heavily on productive human activity, and much less on raw resource extraction than America's economy is. America has far greater natural bounty, far more room to stretch its arms, and a much crappier social services net…which means that in spite of having more land, more resources, better natural bounty, and fewer people to have to manage, Americans STILL have a more poorly educated population, higher crime, lower life expectancies, more grinding poverty and drug use and despair than less-well-endowed but more compassionately operated Europe. My argument doesn't impeach itself at all. Europe is bigger than the United STates in every way that matters: bigger population, bigger economy. Empty acres of desert and tundra? (Full of oil and minerals that are exploited and add to America's wealth?) Sure. Oh, and your figure doesn't count Greenland in the land total. Greenland is part of Denmark. If you're going to include Alaska in your figure, you have to include Greenland as well, because it's an integral part of Denmark, like Alaska and the US, or Northern Ireland and England.
This is mostly a BS statement, certainly about life expectancy. But it is a popular myth for the undiscerning and socialists to perpetuate. When you really compare apples with apples by normalizing the population for things like gender, ethnicity, accidental deaths, etc. the U.S. fares better than virtually all of western Europe. For example, blacks in virtually every country have a lower life expectancy than the respective population as a whole. The U.S. compared to Europe has a higher proportion of blacks in its population. In fact each ethnic group has it own characteristics which may be higher or lower than the country's average. When you nomalize each country to an equal proportion of ethnic groups and gender you get a truer picture of the life expectancy for comparison purposes.
Blacks in America are poor. Therefore, they are treated like shit and get poorer medical care. Therefore, they average shorter live spans. You've drunk the Kool-Aid. No point continuing to discuss. Your mind will never change (even as you use Medicare and Social Security throughout your long retirement). So the country will just have to defeat you guys again at the polls, and continue to build out the social infrastructure, without your input, because your ilk never have been able to address these things honestly. It's terrible that we end up having to rely on BABYKILLERS as the only rational beings when it comes to the social safety net, but given Republican attitudes, and the incapacity to be honest about basic things when it comes to economics, that's the way it always turns out. Republicans won't be constructive in helping to establish a good universal health insurance coverage, so instead we have Obamacare. What will NEVER happen is that the people are NEVER going to give up and let go of universal health insurance now that we've won it. It will be expanded, crappily, by stops and starts. Republicans won't cooperate, just like they never did on Social Security, so they will be the minority and it'll be done without them. They'll bitch about it…and use the system…and we'll continue to move forward. It's too bad. But we're done here. Nothing more to discuss, really. It always comes down to a test of force, and your side always loses, because it's wrong and people are smart enough to know that. It's a shame we have to put up with the likes of Hillary and Reid and Pelosi because Republicans are stuck on stupid. But they are, so we do.
FYI, I and my employers have paid more into SS since 1965 than I will ever get out of it. I would gladly take what was paid into my SS account over the years with interste accumulated at any reasonable rate in a lump sum today than what I will receive in SS benefits before I die. I would have to live to close to 100 for this not to be the case. Do the math, it's not that hard.
It's harder than you think. First of all, during all of those years you have not simply had a retirement plan. You have had all of the following: (1) Disability insurance, with no precondition screening and no change of rates. (2) A lifetime death annuity for your apouse and also for your minor children until they reach adulthood. (3) The retirement benefit. And all three of these things are inflation adjusted with no change of premium. No, you cannot go buy an INFLATION ADJUSTED retirement annuity - with lifetime payments, AND an INFLATION ADJUSTED surviving spouse annuity - without added premium - AND a no-precondition disability insurance policy that lasts for life and is inflation adjusted, with no increase of premium - and no premium at all, actually, if you're disabled. Those products DO NOT EXIST, because insurance companies cannot make money on them. The terms are too favorable to the insured. You've had all three of those insurance policies since 1965. That you did not NEED them, and would like to ignore the benefits you didn't use (and didn't pay more for) and pretend that all of your payments JUST went to the retirement benefit - well - you really don't do the math very well at all. You just think you do. Blind and blinkered, and focusing on one little tree, and missing the whole forest. The American people as a whole have been a lot smarter than your type, which is why you are always defeated when you try to destroy Social Security with stupid arguments like that, and always will be. It's like refighting the civil war over and over again. The bad guys lose, because they're wrong. And you're the bad guy. You never gain political traction because, actually, you can't do the math, you just think you can, and your policy idea, that you can just blow off disability and spousal benefit, and INFLATION ADJUSTMENT and do better, somehow, in a private market that doesn't even produce products like that because they can never be profitable - well that's bad policy. It's dumb. And it's why privatization never gets anywhere, and never will. You lose the forest for the trees.
(1) Disability insurance, with no precondition screening and no change of rates. (2) A lifetime death annuity for your apouse and also for your minor children until they reach adulthood. (3) The retirement benefit. And all three of these things are inflation adjusted with no change of premium. I don't know what world you live but not so. Further, whatever benefits employers pay for, in whole or part, is otherwise in lieu of wages, i.e. - they are all part of an employee's compensation package. If my employer didn't provide these benefits my, like all other such employees, salary would have been higher all those years as well. Which means I likley would have paid more into both SS and Medicare and UNEMPLOYMENT insurance to the government AS WELL as higher Federal, State and City income taxes. But I guess, Comrade, you are like Obama and believe that people working for these employers have won the lottery. Also, for those people who are receiving SS benefits and still need (or choose) to work, the SS benefits are taxed AGAIN - FYI SS payments to the government are based on pre-tax dollars so I paid taxes on the money I earned that went to SS and I am paying taxes on that money AGAIN as I am still working. Yes, this lottery winner is being taxed twice for on the same money. Open you eyes. More importantly open you mind. Facts are pesky things. BTW, who are and have been the staunchest supporters of SS since FDR implemented it (especially the double taxation aspect of the program)? Republicans or Democrats? Remember, Comrade, I and my employers had no choice but to pay SS taxes.
There are no replies to Comment # 27. End Trace Mode for Comment # 27.
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#8. To: Vicomte13 (#7)
#9. To: redleghunter (#8)
#11. To: Vicomte13 (#9)
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.
#12. To: TooConservative (#11)
(Edited)
#14. To: Vicomte13, TooConservative (#12)
which means that in spite of having more land, more resources, better natural bounty, and fewer people to have to manage, Americans STILL have a more poorly educated population, higher crime, lower life expectancies, more grinding poverty and drug use and despair than less-well-endowed but more compassionately operated Europe.
#15. To: SOSO (#14)
(Edited)
#17. To: Vicomte13 (#15)
(even as you use Medicare and Social Security throughout your long retirement).
#23. To: SOSO (#17)
FYI, I and my employers have paid more into SS since 1965 than I will ever get out of it. I would gladly take what was paid into my SS account over the years with interste accumulated at any reasonable rate in a lump sum today than what I will receive in SS benefits before I die. I would have to live to close to 100 for this not to be the case. Do the math, it's not that hard.
#27. To: Vicomte13, TooConservative (#23)
You have had all of the following:
Replies to Comment # 27.
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