Meetings will take place in Charleston, South Carolina on January 24th, Newark, New Jersey on February 27th, Honolulu, Hawaii on March 27th, and Las Vegas, Nevada on April 24th. The DPA provides an online toolkit for those who plan to attend.

An important point to remember, made by Richard Lawrence Miller in his book Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State, about drug testing is that it highlights the fact that drug use is a status crime not a behavioral one. The only reason you would need to test people for drug use is that you cannot tell whether or not they take drugs from the way they act. This explains why the ONDCP is so interested in spreading the use of testing because without it the drug problem might not be large enough for them.

Cross Posted on The Trebach Report

This is an old blog but still worth repeating. The following is from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s book in 1957, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story Unfortunately, King later shed much of his earlier skepticism of Marx and statism, especially during his"Poor People's Campaign" phase:

During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretative works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day. First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter. Second, I strongly disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the 'millennial' end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the means.

Third, I opposed communism's political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an 'interim' reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man's so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.

This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself."

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Three items of interest:

• It looks like Ron Paul is considering running for the Republican nomination. (Conical hat tip to Lew Rockwell.)
  
  His chances of getting it are, of course, svelter than a nanotube. (It would be hilarious if the Republicans did nominate Paul and then the LP nominated someone like Barr!) But it strikes me as a good publicity move; antiwar liberals of the Jon Stewart variety might relish the chance to draw attention to an antiwar, anti-Bush candidate for the GOP top spot.



• Robert Anton Wilson has died; see the notices from my two favouritepeople at Reason. His gleeful conspiracy novels anticipated both Foucault’s Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code, but were a lot more fun. For Wilson’s brief left-libertarian glossary-as-manifesto, see here.



• And finally, this great quote from Theodore Roszak’s Voice of the Earth (conical hat tip to David Edwards):
  
  

  Our complex global economy is built upon millions of small, private acts of psychological surrender, the willingness of people to acquiesce in playing their assigned parts as cogs in the great social machine that encompasses all other machines. They must shape themselves to the prefabricated identities that make efficient coordination possible. ... [T]hat capacity for self-enslavement must be broken.

  And before you write in, gentle libertarian comrade: no, my quoting that does not mean that I agree with everything that Theodore Roszak ever said, nor does it mean that I’m getting a tattoo of Stalin on my forehead.

In chapter 15, Mises writes,

Credit transactions fall into two groups, the separation of which must form the starting point for every theory of credit and especially for every investigation into the connection between money and credit and into the influence of credit on the money prices of goods. On the one hand are those credit transactions which are characterized by the fact that they impose a sacrifice on that party who performs his part of the bargain before the other does—the forgoing of immediate power of disposal over the exchanged good, or, if this version is preferred, the forgoing of power of disposal over the surrendered good until the receipt of that for which it is exchanged. This sacrifice is balanced by a corresponding gain on the part of the other party to the contract—the advantage of obtaining earlier disposal over the good acquired in exchange, or, what is the same thing, of not having to fulfill his part of the bargain immediately. In their respective valuations both parties take account of the advantages and disadvantages that arise from the difference between the times at which they have to fulfill the bargain. The exchange ratio embodied in the contract contains an expression of the value of time in the opinions of the individuals concerned.

The second group of credit transactions is characterized by the fact that in them the gain of the party who receives before he pays is balanced by no sacrifice on the part of the other party. Thus the difference in time between fulfillment and counterfulfillment, which is just as much the essence of this kind of transaction as of the other, has an influence merely on the valuations of the one party, while the other is able to treat it as insignificant. This fact at first seems puzzling, even inexplicable; it constitutes a rock on which many economic theories have come to grief. Nevertheless, the explanation is not very difficult if we take into account the peculiarity of the goods involved in the transaction. In the first kind of credit transactions, what is surrendered consists of money or goods, disposal over which is a source of satisfaction and renunciation of which a source of dissatisfaction. In the credit transactions of the second group, the granter of the credit renounces for the time being the ownership of a sum of money, but this renunciation (given certain assumptions that in this case are justifiable) results for him in no reduction of satisfaction. If a creditor is able to confer a loan by issuing claims which are payable on demand, then the granting of the credit is bound up with no economic sacrifice for him. He could confer credit in this form free of charge, if we disregard the technical costs that may be involved in the issue of notes and the like. Whether he is paid immediately in money or only receives claims at first, which do not fall due until later, remains a matter of indifference to him.

The peculiar attitude of individuals toward transactions involving circulation credit is explained by the circumstance that the claims in which it is expressed can be used in every connection instead of money. He who requires money, in order to lend it, or to buy something, or to liquidate debts, or to pay taxes, is not first obliged to convert the claims to money (notes or bank balances) into money; he can also use the claims themselves directly as means of payment. For everybody they therefore are really money substitutes; they perform the monetary function in the same way as money; they are"ready money" to him, that is, present, not future, money.