My thoughts about the London bombings can be found here. I touched on some of the same points some of the rest of the bloggers here did, including David Beito's point about how the pro-war people want it both ways.
Friday, July 8, 2005 - 11:09
I have an article explaining why even a hardcore decentralist, anti-14th Amendment libertarian, who agrees with most of Kinsella's arguments against federal intervention, should be appalled by the Kelo ruling, and on federalist grounds, to boot.
An excerpt:
"Eminent domain is a crime. Even if the central state should not have the power to override this crime, neither should it give the criminals its official sanction. Let us ponder an analogy. Anarchists don’t believe that, in an ideal world, the state should ban common crimes, because, ideally, the state should not exist. Now, given that we have local governments, would anyone, even an anarchist, advocate that a local government sanction murder, theft, or battery? Would we want local government courts to rule in favor of arson? Of course not. And neither should we want the federal court system to specifically rule in favor of aggressive local policy. For the feds to side with our local rulers in stealing our liberty is akin to local governments siding with common criminals to burglarize our homes...."
An excerpt:
"Eminent domain is a crime. Even if the central state should not have the power to override this crime, neither should it give the criminals its official sanction. Let us ponder an analogy. Anarchists don’t believe that, in an ideal world, the state should ban common crimes, because, ideally, the state should not exist. Now, given that we have local governments, would anyone, even an anarchist, advocate that a local government sanction murder, theft, or battery? Would we want local government courts to rule in favor of arson? Of course not. And neither should we want the federal court system to specifically rule in favor of aggressive local policy. For the feds to side with our local rulers in stealing our liberty is akin to local governments siding with common criminals to burglarize our homes...."
Friday, July 1, 2005 - 11:27
William J. Watkins Jr. has a great piece on one particularly troubling aspect of the Kelo decision. He writes,"Property owners beware. If an owner does not make maximum productive use of his property, government is now empowered to transfer the property to another person. This is the essence of the Supreme Court’s ruling last week...."
N. Stephan Kinsella has a compelling article that discusses issues of the 14th Amendment and federalism, and argues that it would have been bad in the long run for liberty for the Supremes to overturn local eminent domain measures.
Very interesting stuff. I will comment on this soon.
N. Stephan Kinsella has a compelling article that discusses issues of the 14th Amendment and federalism, and argues that it would have been bad in the long run for liberty for the Supremes to overturn local eminent domain measures.
Very interesting stuff. I will comment on this soon.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005 - 17:00
Robert Higgs's masterpiece, Crisis and Leviathan, has a wonderful supplement in the recently published Against Leviathan. Both of these books, along with Higgs's numerous articles and scholarly studies over the years, constitute a tremendous body of anti-state scholarship. When I read Crisis in college, often between classes or sitting at a bar, I couldn't believe my eyes to see how in depth and comprehensive was his treatment of all the varying intricacies of political economy during times of crisis-induced nationalization and militarization of American resources, business and labor.
Against Leviathan is a little more polemic and impassioned—not to say less rigorous in its research—and has a slightly greater chance, in my experience, of inciting the reader to share the author’s anger and frustration. After reading it, I was frankly rather upset, especially by the sections on the war on drugs, both in its overt and well-recognized form (the war on illicit recreational substance users) and the less appreciated campaign (the war to deprive the ill from their needed and preferred but non-FDA-approved medicines). Both wars have assaulted individual liberty and have led to thousands of American deaths. And when Higgs writes about it, he discusses statistics and policy options, but the living resentful emotion of living under the tyranny of the therapeutic state resides in each of his virtuosically chosen words. I get the impression that Higgs has had it and he’s not going to take it any more.
But the book is filled with facts, data and information—more than one might believe without thinking about it while reading it, since the author’s prose goes does so easily and is not cluttered with extraneous and arrogant jargon. Here’s my review of the book from a while back on LewRockwell.com, in which I touch on other issues he examines, such as the oppression of conscription, economic egalitarianism as a supposed a priori good (he debunks this one well), and the nasty characters who have ruled this country (such as Richard Nixon, who, truth be told, was no more amiable and tactful in private discussion than he was honest and humble in his public “service”). I’d really like the comments of anyone who’s read the book, or anyone who hasn’t read it. This collection of essays truly is superb.
Against Leviathan is a little more polemic and impassioned—not to say less rigorous in its research—and has a slightly greater chance, in my experience, of inciting the reader to share the author’s anger and frustration. After reading it, I was frankly rather upset, especially by the sections on the war on drugs, both in its overt and well-recognized form (the war on illicit recreational substance users) and the less appreciated campaign (the war to deprive the ill from their needed and preferred but non-FDA-approved medicines). Both wars have assaulted individual liberty and have led to thousands of American deaths. And when Higgs writes about it, he discusses statistics and policy options, but the living resentful emotion of living under the tyranny of the therapeutic state resides in each of his virtuosically chosen words. I get the impression that Higgs has had it and he’s not going to take it any more.
But the book is filled with facts, data and information—more than one might believe without thinking about it while reading it, since the author’s prose goes does so easily and is not cluttered with extraneous and arrogant jargon. Here’s my review of the book from a while back on LewRockwell.com, in which I touch on other issues he examines, such as the oppression of conscription, economic egalitarianism as a supposed a priori good (he debunks this one well), and the nasty characters who have ruled this country (such as Richard Nixon, who, truth be told, was no more amiable and tactful in private discussion than he was honest and humble in his public “service”). I’d really like the comments of anyone who’s read the book, or anyone who hasn’t read it. This collection of essays truly is superb.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005 - 14:47
I have a new article on LRC about the regression of republics into empires, and how empires fall, relating Star Wars to the American experience. See also Scott Horton's piece on the subject at Antiwar.com.
Monday, May 23, 2005 - 21:32
In his new article, Ivan Eland argues that"The Bush administration spends so much time strutting and flexing before the world gallery that it fails to realize that such behavior accelerates nuclear proliferation." He continues:
Indeed, this isn't only a problem with the current administration, nor is it merely theoretical, since
Of course, the U.S. government—the only regime in the world ever to use nuclear weapons on people—could also help the situation by greatly disarming on its own. It does not take a radical anarchist to see the problem with the most powerful, well-armed State on earth, one that has intervened in dozens of countries throughout the planet—one whose current head of state seems ever willing to invade other countries"at the whim of a hat" (to borrow from his own fascinating lexicon)—trying to induce foreign States to disarm, even as it plans to enhance its own arsenal in spectacular ways.
In considering whether it is realistic for smaller States to doubt the U.S. government's dedication to peace, let us remember that it was Bush himself who also said,"See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."
Although Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are tyrannical regimes, they may have legitimate security concerns that drive their efforts to acquire so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD). They may want these weapons to deter neighbors or even a self-righteous superpower from attacking them. One does not have to be an apologist for the abysmal human rights records of those regimes to caution against feeding into their paranoia.
Indeed, this isn't only a problem with the current administration, nor is it merely theoretical, since
dictators in small, relatively poor third world countries don’t have to be paranoid to worry about attack from an interventionist superpower. President Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada; George H.W. Bush launched an assault against Panama and removed Manuel Noriega from power; Bill Clinton bombed Serbia over the Kosovo issue; and George W. Bush invaded and occupied Iraq. And the world saw that all of those non-nuclear states got a lot less respect than the likely nuclear-armed North Korea.
Of course, the U.S. government—the only regime in the world ever to use nuclear weapons on people—could also help the situation by greatly disarming on its own. It does not take a radical anarchist to see the problem with the most powerful, well-armed State on earth, one that has intervened in dozens of countries throughout the planet—one whose current head of state seems ever willing to invade other countries"at the whim of a hat" (to borrow from his own fascinating lexicon)—trying to induce foreign States to disarm, even as it plans to enhance its own arsenal in spectacular ways.
In considering whether it is realistic for smaller States to doubt the U.S. government's dedication to peace, let us remember that it was Bush himself who also said,"See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."
Monday, May 2, 2005 - 21:21
Reading Keith Halderman’s insightful post, I can’t seem to get over the fact that so many conservatives these days still believe so much in the drug war, and consider it to be the main weakness of libertarianism.
First of all, the concept of having a free society—without regulations on business, taxation of incomes or sales, protectionist tariffs, gun control laws, government education, government healthcare, subsidies, or violations of basic rights of due process—yet somehow maintaining a “war on drugs” that somehow prevents people from using, manufacturing or distributing certain chemicals to people who want them, is absurd and unimaginable. How can anything close to a libertarian philosophy allow for a State empowered enough to control what people put into their own bodies? It can’t. Conservatives who say libertarianism is fine except the drug issue do not, I believe, truly comprehend the implications of a free society, of individual liberty, of a laissez faire economy. Aside from the ethical and pragmatic problems with drug prohibition, the program is so incompatible with liberty and the free market that they simply could not exist together. There is no such thing as a conservative version of libertarianism that excludes the right to determine what to put in one’s own body. This is why, at the end of the day, most conservatives who say they are libertarians except on the drug issue will reveal all sorts of other qualifications and reservations concerning other areas of civil society, once prodded or questioned enough.
Indeed, as Halderman points out, the Progressives deserve much of the blame for the drug laws. Before the Progressive Era, there were few drug laws and drug problems. There were alcoholics, and the most widely abused drug was probably Laudanum, a beverage of alcohol and opium consumed by middle-class Americans. But even those who drank more than they should have—just like most today who drink more alcohol than they probably should—were still able to function in society and posed no threat to their neighbors, much less"national security."
The first drug laws were on the state level, and pertained mainly to alcohol. In California, Opium became illegal in the late 19th century—mainly as a way to harass Chinese-Americans. It was during the Progressive Era that the federal government passed the first major national drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which forbade heroin and required prescriptions for cocaine and morphine. The culmination of the Progressive Era in domestic policy—the biggest achievement of the Progressives—was probably alcohol prohibition, with the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment. When alcohol prohibition ended, federal bureaucrats like Harry Anslinger were peeved they didn’t have anything to do in the prohibition department, so it wasn’t long before Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act of 1938—which outlawed the drug by making it a tax issue (to have the drug without a tax stamp was illegal, but the tax stamps weren’t printed)—and Franklin Roosevelt signed it. So the first federal marijuana laws were part of the New Deal. The next major federal interventions on the drug issues, such as the creation of drug scheduling and the ban of LSD and other drugs, came during the Great Society.
It is no coincidence that back when America had a much freer market, no Federal Reserve or persistent income tax, no Departments of Education or Health and Human Services, no national price controls, federal gun laws, and all the other things conservatives often claim they do not like, America also had no drug laws of significance. The freedom to control one’s own body was not seen as a federal issue, just as education and welfare weren’t. For the State to expropriate the means of consumption is socialistic, and burdened with all the same moral and practical problems as the worst socialist economic programs.
Furthermore, the Szasz quote Halderman cites relates to an important point about the use of scare language and its impact on discourse and social thinking on drugs. The word “narcotic” has an actual meaning. Narcotics are analgesics and depressants that bring about a state of narcosis—sleep. Marijuana is not a narcotic. Cocaine is not a narcotic. Just like the liberals who talk about “assault weapons,” usually with little understanding of firearms, distinctions between them and the subtleties of language, conservatives talk about “designer drugs” and “narcotics” without having a clue, most the time, what they’re yapping about.
Yes, drugs can be very harmful. So can automobiles, cigarettes and high-fat diets—all of which kill more Americans every year than all illegal drugs combined. Back in the early 20th century—before the Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, or the regulatory-welfare state—anyone could walk into a drug store and buy cocaine or heroin. “Heroin” itself was a brand name trademarked by the company that produced it, Bayer. If heroin were legal now, it would probably be used in hospitals in many cases instead of morphine, since it has the same analgesic effects but is more potent, and thus has fewer side effects. Indeed, if we had a true free market in drugs, do conservatives really worry that everyone would start doing heroin all the time? Do they worry about crack—a version of cocaine that became popularized because the drug war made it a less risky and expensive method to distribute higher potency cocaine? Do they worry about powder cocaine—which really took off when the feds were somewhat successful in preventing the proliferation of marijuana and banned coca leaves? In a free market in drugs, people will seek drugs as they do now, but such considerations as safety and fewer side effects will become increasingly important. People will be more selective. If they legalized all the drugs, perhaps marijuana use would go up for a short time, but, just like alcohol use after alcohol prohibition, it would probably go back down. The “harder” drugs would probably not become that much more popular, and I would bet that fewer people would huff paint.
And even if drug use went up somewhat, the drug war is still not worth it. The war on politically incorrect molecules and plants must end, and soon, for its costs are far too high and its benefits dubious.
To believe in the drug war is simply to believe that freedom and the free market are dysfunctional, that consumption is an appropriate thing to nationalize, that it is morally permissible to lock people in cages for personal choices. It’s very hard for me to understand how people can be wrong on this issue but right on most others. And, as I said before, most people who are wrong on the drug issue are wrong on many other issues.
Finally, how can conservatives still think the drug war is working, or that it is doing more good than bad? Hundreds of thousands of non-violent people behind bars at the cost of fifty-or-so-thousand dollars each per year, the systematic destruction of the Bill of Rights, the acceleration of violent crime, a perverse foreign policy of spraying Latin Americans’ crops with poison and propping up their “anti-drug” dictators —are these things still considered worth it, just so “we” don’t “send the wrong message” by re-legalizing drugs? And, I know it has been said over and over, but do these people want to outlaw alcohol again? I know some of them actually do.
First of all, the concept of having a free society—without regulations on business, taxation of incomes or sales, protectionist tariffs, gun control laws, government education, government healthcare, subsidies, or violations of basic rights of due process—yet somehow maintaining a “war on drugs” that somehow prevents people from using, manufacturing or distributing certain chemicals to people who want them, is absurd and unimaginable. How can anything close to a libertarian philosophy allow for a State empowered enough to control what people put into their own bodies? It can’t. Conservatives who say libertarianism is fine except the drug issue do not, I believe, truly comprehend the implications of a free society, of individual liberty, of a laissez faire economy. Aside from the ethical and pragmatic problems with drug prohibition, the program is so incompatible with liberty and the free market that they simply could not exist together. There is no such thing as a conservative version of libertarianism that excludes the right to determine what to put in one’s own body. This is why, at the end of the day, most conservatives who say they are libertarians except on the drug issue will reveal all sorts of other qualifications and reservations concerning other areas of civil society, once prodded or questioned enough.
Indeed, as Halderman points out, the Progressives deserve much of the blame for the drug laws. Before the Progressive Era, there were few drug laws and drug problems. There were alcoholics, and the most widely abused drug was probably Laudanum, a beverage of alcohol and opium consumed by middle-class Americans. But even those who drank more than they should have—just like most today who drink more alcohol than they probably should—were still able to function in society and posed no threat to their neighbors, much less"national security."
The first drug laws were on the state level, and pertained mainly to alcohol. In California, Opium became illegal in the late 19th century—mainly as a way to harass Chinese-Americans. It was during the Progressive Era that the federal government passed the first major national drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which forbade heroin and required prescriptions for cocaine and morphine. The culmination of the Progressive Era in domestic policy—the biggest achievement of the Progressives—was probably alcohol prohibition, with the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment. When alcohol prohibition ended, federal bureaucrats like Harry Anslinger were peeved they didn’t have anything to do in the prohibition department, so it wasn’t long before Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act of 1938—which outlawed the drug by making it a tax issue (to have the drug without a tax stamp was illegal, but the tax stamps weren’t printed)—and Franklin Roosevelt signed it. So the first federal marijuana laws were part of the New Deal. The next major federal interventions on the drug issues, such as the creation of drug scheduling and the ban of LSD and other drugs, came during the Great Society.
It is no coincidence that back when America had a much freer market, no Federal Reserve or persistent income tax, no Departments of Education or Health and Human Services, no national price controls, federal gun laws, and all the other things conservatives often claim they do not like, America also had no drug laws of significance. The freedom to control one’s own body was not seen as a federal issue, just as education and welfare weren’t. For the State to expropriate the means of consumption is socialistic, and burdened with all the same moral and practical problems as the worst socialist economic programs.
Furthermore, the Szasz quote Halderman cites relates to an important point about the use of scare language and its impact on discourse and social thinking on drugs. The word “narcotic” has an actual meaning. Narcotics are analgesics and depressants that bring about a state of narcosis—sleep. Marijuana is not a narcotic. Cocaine is not a narcotic. Just like the liberals who talk about “assault weapons,” usually with little understanding of firearms, distinctions between them and the subtleties of language, conservatives talk about “designer drugs” and “narcotics” without having a clue, most the time, what they’re yapping about.
Yes, drugs can be very harmful. So can automobiles, cigarettes and high-fat diets—all of which kill more Americans every year than all illegal drugs combined. Back in the early 20th century—before the Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, or the regulatory-welfare state—anyone could walk into a drug store and buy cocaine or heroin. “Heroin” itself was a brand name trademarked by the company that produced it, Bayer. If heroin were legal now, it would probably be used in hospitals in many cases instead of morphine, since it has the same analgesic effects but is more potent, and thus has fewer side effects. Indeed, if we had a true free market in drugs, do conservatives really worry that everyone would start doing heroin all the time? Do they worry about crack—a version of cocaine that became popularized because the drug war made it a less risky and expensive method to distribute higher potency cocaine? Do they worry about powder cocaine—which really took off when the feds were somewhat successful in preventing the proliferation of marijuana and banned coca leaves? In a free market in drugs, people will seek drugs as they do now, but such considerations as safety and fewer side effects will become increasingly important. People will be more selective. If they legalized all the drugs, perhaps marijuana use would go up for a short time, but, just like alcohol use after alcohol prohibition, it would probably go back down. The “harder” drugs would probably not become that much more popular, and I would bet that fewer people would huff paint.
And even if drug use went up somewhat, the drug war is still not worth it. The war on politically incorrect molecules and plants must end, and soon, for its costs are far too high and its benefits dubious.
To believe in the drug war is simply to believe that freedom and the free market are dysfunctional, that consumption is an appropriate thing to nationalize, that it is morally permissible to lock people in cages for personal choices. It’s very hard for me to understand how people can be wrong on this issue but right on most others. And, as I said before, most people who are wrong on the drug issue are wrong on many other issues.
Finally, how can conservatives still think the drug war is working, or that it is doing more good than bad? Hundreds of thousands of non-violent people behind bars at the cost of fifty-or-so-thousand dollars each per year, the systematic destruction of the Bill of Rights, the acceleration of violent crime, a perverse foreign policy of spraying Latin Americans’ crops with poison and propping up their “anti-drug” dictators —are these things still considered worth it, just so “we” don’t “send the wrong message” by re-legalizing drugs? And, I know it has been said over and over, but do these people want to outlaw alcohol again? I know some of them actually do.
Friday, April 29, 2005 - 21:05
In his new article, "Evidence that the U.S. May Be Losing the Global War on Terror", Ivan Eland discusses how the administration might be hiding evidence of its own failures in the war.
Dr. Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute:
According to Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who still has many sources within the intelligence community, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s office is suppressing data showing that the number of major terrorist attacks worldwide exploded from 175 in 2003 to 625 in 2004, the highest number since the Cold War began to wane in 1985. U.S. officials said that when analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center declined the office of the secretary’s invitation to use a methodology that would reduce the number of terrorist attacks, her office terminated publication of the State Department’s annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report.
Dr. Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute:
Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - 13:36
For the ten-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, and the twelve-year anniversary of the Waco massace, I have an article here about the events and their parallels with foreign policy and 9/11, all in the context of left-right domestic politics. I also have here a short addendum expounding upon one point a bit more.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - 12:59
Greetings. As a new member of the Liberty and Power group blog, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anthony Gregory, and I am a Research Assistant at The Independent Institute, primarily working at its Center on Peace and Liberty as an assistant to Ivan Eland.
I also write regularly for LewRockwell.com (where I am also a frequent blogger), the Future of Freedom Foundation (where I am a Policy Advisor), and Strike-the-Root (where I am a Guest Editor); and have written for such publications as Antiwar.com, The Libertarian Enterprise, Rational Review, Liberty Magazine. I graduated from U.C. Berkeley in May, 2003, with a bachelors degree in history, specifically American history and the history of science. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Waco massacre of 1993 and government-media relations surrounding that atrocity. While I was at Berkeley I was active for four years and president for two in the campus student group, the Cal Libertarians. I’ve been a self-described libertarian since I was about fourteen years old, although I only became a full-blown market anarchist in college. I also love movies, fiction, and music (I’m in a rock band, for which I compose music, play bass and sing; and I play keyboards and guitar—however, aside from rock, I also much appreciate classical, romantic, Baroque and jazz music).
I must say I am quite eager and happy to be invited to this wonderful forum, where many modern intellectual heroes of mine share their insights, commentaries and views with the world. I've been a fan of this site for a couple years, and am thrilled to be a part of it.
For my first substantive contribution, I would like to draw attention to Ivan Eland’s last column, ”Three Strikes for Empire,” especially Eland’s mention of one unsettling and recurrent theme in the “War on Terror”:
[A] seemingly unrelated development to the Bush administration's brand of modern day imperialism may have the most consequence: the indefinite detention of a German man, Murat Kurnaz, by a kangaroo U.S. military tribunal on the basis of flimsy secret evidence that he is a member of al Qaeda. Yet that evidence shows that U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement agencies had concluded that Kurnaz had no connections to al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. So the U.S. government has known for two years that it was incarcerating an innocent man. The Kurnaz case reinforces a U.S. district judge's opinion that the military tribunals are illegal, unconstitutional, and unfairly prejudicial against those being held in prison.
Detaining people indefinitely without a jury trial, and instead using a military tribunal that allows secret evidence and no legal representation for the defendant, may be normal practice in authoritarian regimes (such as Pakistan) but should not be used in the “home of the free and the brave.”
Now, I agree with this, and I wonder: what has become of our country concerning these “enemy combatant” indefinite detentions? There is precedent in American history for this, and nearly every instance I can recollect of such blatant disregard for procedural and habeas corpus rights and civil liberties—from Lincoln’s arrest of war dissenters without trial to Wilson’s incarceration of those who violated the ridiculous Espionage Act—has since been widely discredited and frowned upon. They often teach undergrads about these nightmares as historical aberrations from which we’ve since learned lessons about the frailty of liberty at wartime. In the years since 9/11, however, I’ve noticed an entire new re-revisionism emerge, where pundits and even scholars attempt to look at these past attacks on liberty as positive precedents for today’s war, as opposed to atrocities to be condemned and avoided.
In particular, I have seen many conservatives and “libertarians,” relatively reliable allies against police-state abuses only five years ago, turn into today’s greatest defenders of such grotesque legislation as the PATRIOT Act. I wonder, are there really that many people who believe that the government can’t be trusted to protect the environment and set wage rates, but can—indeed, must—be trusted with the power to detain people indefinitely without trial or due process? It seems to me that a government that has such power is only distinct from totalitarianism in how much its potential abuses fail to manifest themselves into real ones—a difference in degree, not in kind, meaning we are only spared the liberties the state cannot get away with assaulting. And, it also seems to me, the only way to prevent it from getting away with true totalitarian-level violations of our freedom is an outraged public, jealous of its freedom. Ironically, given this, the more people are willing to agree that it “can’t happen here,” the greater the possibility that it will.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 - 21:01
