No to Legalizing Drugs, Gambling, Prostitution, and Pornography

The thesis I wish to discuss and refute in this paper is the notion that in order to restore liberty to our country, we must legalize vices. This is a widely held libertarian notion, which has done immeasurable harm to the cause of liberty.

I start with the idea that libertarianism is based on what you might call moral absolutes. Violence is evil. Enslaving people is evil. Defrauding them is evil. In this essay, I seek to show that legalizing vices contradicts libertarian fundamental principles. A vice is that which is inherently evil but which gives pleasure anyway. Libertarians are arguing that we have to permit evil in order to protect the right to do good. This is nonsense on its face.

What is a vice? My working definition is any behavior that is harmful to the individual who does it, and impairs his ability to function or be responsible (and consequently also harms those to whom he has a duty), but which is indulged in because of apparent pleasure.

In other words, the person engaging in the behavior thinks the pleasure outweighs the harm he is doing to himself and others, or the behavior has resulted in his inability to refrain once he learns otherwise, or else the behavior has sufficiently impaired the person's judgment that the person cannot see that the harm outweighs the pleasure, or that his personal behavior threatens or harms others.

Implicit in my thought is that a vice is something that causes harm to the individual and as a direct consequence of that harm, others are also harmed. It is, indeed, a two-step process. The person first harms himself with his vice, and as a consequence and inevitable result, he ends up harming others. He destroys his capacity for protecting others from the harm he will inflict on them. Also implicit in my thought is that a vice can be something that is widely believed not to be harmful, or that is thought to have a pleasure-giving quality that outweighs the harm, when in fact this is not the case. That is the fraud element.

It is also a requirement to label something a vice that a person who is vulnerable will not learn of his vulnerability until after it is too late to prevent the harm, even if there are other people in the population who are not vulnerable and can get away with indulging in the vice without harming themselves, at least for a time.

Finally, a vice is something that a person doesn't ever have to do to survive. So if it is something a person must do, such as eating, and the vice consists only in doing it to excess, then it's not a true vice.

Here is the definition in Black's Law Dictionary, seventh edition: "vice...n. 1. A moral failing, an ethical fault. 2. Wickedness; corruption. 3. Broadly, any defect or failing."

My definition is narrower than that, for the purpose of law. In my definition, it's not a vice unless it also causes significant harm. It can be said that all wickedness causes harm, and indeed that is true. But in the narrower sense, it must cause specific kinds of harm.

In the following paragraphs, I will consider several of the immediately following briefly stated ideas. This essay is based on the libertarian idea that liberty is a seminal value.

Every culture has one legal vice, which is needed as an escape valve. The mere fact that one vice has been legalized to provide this does not mean that all other vices must be legalized.

Libertarins frequently argue that vices must be legal because the individual must be allowed to decide for himself what is personally beneficial or harmful. They somehow consider this to be a characteristic of freedom. However, I would argue that libertarianism works best, if it works at all, when it is supported by a framework of objective thought. It should be possible to look objectively at the benefit (pleasure, sometimes as little as five minutes' worth of pleasure) and the harm (long-term regret, disability, or dysfunction). Objectively speaking, for a behavior to fall into the category of liberty, the benefit must outweigh harm in an objective sense. Furthermore, it can be argued that pleasure is simply not weighty enough to be a major factor in the determination. Yes, we are guaranteed the right to pursuit of happness. We are not guaranteed the right to the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is not necessarily synonymous with happiness. Happiness includes well-being. If something harms your well-being, then it does not produce happiness. Philosophers are usually familiar with the hedonists. Hedonism is said to be the lifestyle of seeking pleasure. However, I would define it slightly differently. I would define hedonism as enlightened self-interest. (Ayn Rand calls it "rational self-interest".) Why? Simply put, if your activities do not lead to long-term happiness or pleasure, then it can be said that it is not a hedonistic act! You may think you are experiencing short-term pleasure, but in the aggregate, is five minutes of pleasure that results in a lifetime of disability or regret really and truly pleasure? I would say that only the most irrational person would call that pleasure.

Libertarians often argue that the government should not outlaw private action. However, if a private action causes harm, it's no longer private. If you smoke around me, your action is not private. If as a result of using a drug, you cannot care for your child, your action is not private. If as a result of the practice of a vice, someone else is enslaved, your action is not private. The harm doesn't have to be done to the general public. It is sufficient if it harms one unwilling person.

Is there such a thing as a situation where you can safely practice a vice and it remains a private action? Are you a hermit? Maybe if you are a hermit, then you can do this. But what is a hermit? It is a person who was raised by somebody who took the time and effort to teach him how to survive on his own, supplying all of his own needs. He still must live somewhere, which either means he has been given permission to be there, or he owns the land on which he lives. If he owns the land, then he either bought it or it was given to him. If he bought it, then either someone gave him the money, or he had a job. If he had a job, someone gave him that job. Someone provided the facilities. Someone taught him how to do that job. There are no examples, in the entire world, of any human being who is truly and completely self-sufficient, and has been all his life. And if you are not truly and completely self-sufficient, then whatever you do has an impact on others. It's that simple.

Libertarianism is based on value judgments. In particular, libertarianism is based on the value judgment that personal freedom is a good value. To show that this is not a fundamental value judgment, all I need to say is that not all societies look at it this way. In particular Asian societies think that honor is more important. A person is expected to sacrifice personal freedom to honor and right behavior, and nobody thinks twice about this. It is just the way things are. Ironically, the one philosophical idea that makes the difference here is Christianity (and by inference, therefore, Judaism). Christianity is what taught us that personal freedom is important, that the individual is of paramount importance, and that we have an obligation to protect people's freedoms. Yet, many libertarians want to pick and choose. To balance this idea, Christianity also introduces another idea, namely, that of personal responsibility. You are personally responsible to control your behavior for the good of your family, the people around you, and society at large. You do not have the right to turn around and act however you please, no matter whom it hurts. Our system of government, based on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are based on Christian thought, that rights exist because they are endowed by God! In developing the philosophy behind our government and society, which made the development of libertarian thought possible, the Founders relied squarely on Christian philosophy, whether they personally were Christians or not. Implicit in their thought was that the Bible is true, and they incorporated the seminal ideas of the Bible into the system of government they developed. The Founders recognized vices are bad. They used society to control them. They failed to make most vices illegal because they did not understand the depth of harm they caused, and because it was unthinkable for anybody to advocate practicing a vice as an exercise of freedom. People in those days recognized that vices are enslaving, and they were no more interested in being enslaved by their own lack of self-control than they were in being enslaved by government.

If you are a person who advocates the legalization of vices, and thinks that we should control them through social condemnation, you are contradicting yourself. Society no longer controls vices, and in the process of seeking to legalize them, you are not in a position to bring about social condemnation as a substitute for the laws you wish to repeal. More importantly, cult mind control exercised by society at large to control the practice of vices is a poor substitute for a clear and consistently enforced law. The law is by far less disruptive of individual freedom.

If you do not legally punish the practice of vices, eventually society will pass laws, and the laws that are passed will be statist and tyrannical in nature.

Why the Declaration of Independence? It is by far the most seminal legal document that explains the true nature of liberty. It is part of our organic law. Libertarians rely on it, whether they realize it or not.

Returning to the core principles of the Declaration of Independence for me means returning to the sense of responsibility of the Founders. This is because it is self-evident, to me at least, that one cannot implement the Declaration if the population is licentious. I spend a lot of time talking to libertarians, and there are several things that they seem to have in common that bother me considerably. One is the idea that a person has a right to cause self-harm. The Founders recognized that our rights are a gift from God. Well, guess what, folks! God told us what our rights are, and the right to self-harm isn't one of them! Yes, if the government starts to conclude that people who go against the establishment are causing self-harm and tries to intervene, it can start doing things like forbidding people to use healthful herbs, for example. The way to avoid this predicament is to learn once more to discern. Libertarians seem to suffer from a problem of lump-ism. They lump together things that are not comparable. They maintain that if we are going to preserve freedom, we must allow people to engage in self-harm. The government doesn't have a right to intervene, they say. The problem is that they have established pleasure as a paramount value, for starters, and many of them are atheists. This means that, among other things, they have no foundation for their political philosophy. They think that rights just exist. They don't see that rights come from God. Therefore, they hold that we own ourselves, and do not acknowledge that God owns us. Thus, they recognize no duty to God. The result of that is, of course, the idea that the individual has the right of self-harm. They do not recognize that self-harm also harms others. They say if self-harm does not directly harm someone else, it should not be made illegal. Thus, if a person uses drugs, for example, but harms no one but himself, government is wrong to get involved. The problem is that in practical terms, you cannot harm yourself without harming those who depend on you, or to whom you owe an obligation. These people do not recognize obligations not voluntarily agreed upon. They get into trouble, then, when they realize that, for example, if two people conceive a child, against their will, then they do owe the child care, and not to aggress against the child with abortion, but they seem to be unable to explain how this obligation taken on involuntarily is a valid one. I have pointed out that when people try to avoid conception, then the obligation is involuntary, even though the act that brought about the conception was voluntary. They are not willing to accept this. In other words, by insisting that a person only owes an obligation voluntarily assumed, they run into contradictions and difficulties.

What is happening is that the libertarians are failing to recognize that you cannot have rights without responsibilities. I picked up the phrase "responsible autonomy" someplace, and consider it apt. If we do not engage in responsible autonomy, we will be unable to live as a free people. I have pointed out that if people do not act responsibly, and they do cause harm, either directly or indirectly, then other people will insist on passing laws to mitigate the damage. The ultimate result, then, is statism. This is exactly the opposite from what many libertarians argue, for they say that in order to restore true freedom, we must also give people the freedom to harm themselves. In reality, the ultimate result is statism. People won't willingly allow other people to harm themselves, and then let those people die unhelped in the street. It is part of our common humanity to have compassion, and many people respond to the helpless by collecting tax money to help them. This is especially true where a person is incapable of helping through his own resources. It is imperative that we do not do anything to destroy a person's natural tendencies toward compassion.

We should also keep in mind that taking responsibility for one's actions doesn't just include the willingness to take the consequences of imprudent behavior. Rather, it means being responsible enough not to engage in imprudent behavior to begin with! Libertarians never talk about this for some strange reason.

I have also pointed out that the best place to prevent the harm is wherever it can be stopped. When a vice forms a link in a causal chain, even if the vice is not the link adjacent to the harm, and there is one link in between, if it turns out that the best place to prevent the harm is by stopping the vice, then this is what you have to do. I would maintain that it is not merely the best place, but the only place. Once you pass that link in the chain, the harm cannot be prevented. If a person drives under the influence of a drug and then kills a stranger, it is a little late for the stranger to punish the person for having driven under the influence. The only way to preserve the life of the stranger is to make sure the driver never used drugs in the first place. Thus, a law that makes it illegal to drive under the influence is reasonable, and if insufficient, may be supplemented with a law directed at the use of the drugs themselves. It has been said that a person who is using a drug should refrain from driving. People forget that folks under the influence of drugs are not only incompetent to drive, they are also incompetent to decide whether or not they are incompetent to drive!

Some people argue that for the right to life and liberty to have any meaning, a person must have the right to give up either of them. They make this argument in the same vein as the argument that having the right to property lawfully acquired includes the right to give it away or sell it. However, what they are really arguing here is not that a person must have a right to give away one's life or liberty in a good cause, but in the service of evil. What rational person would hold that there is a right to give away one's unalienable rights in the service of evil? Was a soldier in Saddam's army who chose fanatical obedience to Saddam right to throw away his life in service of Saddam's evil? If we say that a soldier has the right to do this, then we are arguing that a person has a right to use his God-given rights in the service of evil. It is irrational to say that the fanatic in Saddam's army has a right to kill those who try to liberate the people. This is so fundamental that it is almost impossible to explain why. Everyone knows why. Even if the fanatic doesn't harm anyone but himself, what right does he have to throw away his life in the service of evil? Going back to the question of property, does the right to property lawfully acquired give a person a right to destroy that property? We could say that if the quantity of property is sufficiently small, then it won't have any serious effect, so we should not act to prevent it. But what if the property in question is 700 oil wells? Even though the Iraqi people own the oil, do they have a right to destroy it so that the world cannot make use of it? Who gave them those resources in the first place? Does a person have a right to act destructively? No!

Since a person who fries his brain on drugs becomes incapable of acting responsibly, the only way to prevent damage to those to whom he owes an obligation is to prevent him from frying his brain in the first place. A lot of people are going to see it this way. Thus, a libertarianism founded on sand which does not recognize that God is the source of rights, that God owns us, and that we have an obligation to live responsibly is not going to win converts from people who have any sense.

The bottom line is that libertarian notions that licentiousness should be fully legal are appealing to a lot of irresponsible people. These people then flood the libertarian movement and turn it aside from the fundamental issues such as the principles in the Declaration. I want freedom-lovers back with us, not pulling votes away. Because freedom-lovers have abandoned the Republican Party, the Party has drifted badly leftwards. These people are cutting their own throats.

We must to figure out how to persuade Americans that responsible autonomy comes first, and freedom is the consequence, not the other way around. God does own us, and we do have obligations to Him. Absent our fulfilling those obligations, we are in no position to take advantage of unalienable rights.

Is it the responsibility of government to enforce God's rights? No, but it is the responsibility of government to make sure that it does nothing to interfere with God's rights. God's rights are consonant with human rights, and vice versa. God is the Author of rights, which means that for rights to exist, God must exist. One may argue in favor of rights from a secular viewpoint, but this fails to address the origin of rights.

Finally, there are those libertarians who support anarchy. Not much needs to be said about the fallacies here, since we had a graphic demonstration of why anarchy will not work. All one needs to do is to observe what happened in Iraq after Baghdad was liberated. Without some kind of governmental control, people chose wholesale to engage in destructive acts. The fact they did so almost defies belief. They had just been given something good and wonderful, and what they chose to do with it caused irreparable harm. This is the natural state of the human race. Nature abhors a vacuum. When there is no government, then there will be chaos, and as rapidly as possible, the biggest bully will take control, and anarchy will yield to tyranny. The Iraqis were lucky because the Americans and the British were still there, and both militaries have discipline. Were it not for that, the situation there would have become a complete failure. Effectively what libertarians are asking for when they ask that vices be legalized is that we should have anarchy on self-destructive and other-destructive acts. It won't work. Morality is absolute, but morality is also what it is because it is the only system that will permit life, liberty, happiness, and the preservation of property lawfully acquired. Morality was defined by God, the Creator, Who designed us in a particular way, and Who gave us laws for our own happiness. I am not suggesting that our laws must be identical to the ones God gave Israel. I am saying that God established a pattern that government is responsible for enacting laws that protect the people from harm. All of them, not just the responsible ones, but especially the irresponsible ones. The best way to do that is to protect the people's rights, but the right to self-destruct is not among them. Self-destruction is the antithesis of rights, because a person who destroys himself cannot exercise rights.

Some people have argued to me that one does not have an obligation which is not voluntarily undertaken. This is in part in support of their arguments for legalizing drugs, and in support of other issues as well. The argument goes that we don't have any obligations if we have not assumed them voluntarily. I have argued that one has an obligation to any person who has given you something of value. Eric Frank Russell wrote articulately of this idea in at least one science fiction novel. In the novel, the obligation incurred because someone did something for you or gave you something of value is called an "ob". In real life, some examples of such obligations would be the obligation to one's parents because they raised you, provided food, shelter, clothing, and an education. You now have two obligations to your parents. Your first obligation is not to squander what you have been given. Your second obligation is to provide for them if they ever need it. Social security (which is anti-libertarian) has allowed people to forget about this obligation. But the obligation is real, and it is involuntary. Of course, theoretically a child could refuse the help of his parents. But he still received help to survive until he is old enough to have the capacity to make the decision. Nor is it the case that because parents have an obligation to care for their children, their children have no reciprocal obligations. Children do not have an obligation to parents who do not care for them, and abandon them. And the mere fact that a parent has the obligation to care for his children does not mean there are no reciprocal obligations. It is well understood that people can take on voluntary obligations, and that some obligations are indirectly voluntary. For example, a parent owes it to his child to care for her, even if the child was conceived by accident. A parent doesn't have a right to assault the child (i.e. abortion) because the obligation of a child was not taken on willingly and deliberately. Except in the case of rape (beyond the scope of this article), both parents voluntarily undertood the act that resulted in the existence of the child. The mere fact the child was unintended does not remove the obligation. Thus, involuntary obligations are legitimate and can be enforced by the government. It follows, then, that a person has an obligation to whomever raised and educated him, not to squander his life, and not to harm himself. This is in order that this person will be available to discharge the obligation to care for those people in the future, should they need it. Government has every right to enforce that obligation. If a person who is sound of mind and body refuses to care for his parents, then the government has as much right and obligation to compel him to as it does to compel a father to support his child. The alternative is social security, which is anti-libertarian. Here, you really do have only two viable choices: either the individual has the obligation to provide for elderly and disabled family members, or people will insist on passing laws to provide for these individuals. People also do have an obligation to have and raise children if possible, though the discussion of that is also beyond the scope of this article. Thus, the obligation not to harm oneself is an obligation to others, and it is by its nature legitimately enforced by the government.

Another example of an obligation taken on involuntarily is if you are the driver of a car which you are driving prudently, but an accident happens, your car is at fault, and the other person is maimed or crippled. You now have an obligation to do everything you can to restore that person, and that obligation is taken on without your express consent.

It has been said that a few people can use drugs "responsibly." For this reason, drugs must not be made illegal, since there are some people who are committing no harm. I cannot accept this argument. A law must be objective and must apply to all. To try to single out a small minority would make the law intrusive. In fact, a person who is using drugs "responsibly" is encouraging, by example, those who cannot do so, and in that way alone, he is committing harm. This is, in fact, a major reason why legalizing drugs is even a question. If no responsible person ever used drugs (and I would argue that no responsible person does), or a person using drugs, made no claim to be responsible, and if responsible people condemned drug use unequivocally, then the idea that we ought to legalize drugs would be unacceptable to the population as a whole. Furthermore, if no person who does not use drugs and claims to be responsible ever said that he knew drug users who acted responsibly, legalizing drugs would have no legitimacy as an idea. Ideas have consequences, and just promoting an idea, even if never pursued, can cause harm. A person who suggests that abortion should be legal or recommends it to someone who then has one has become an accomplice to killing that baby. It does no good to claim you yourself do not use drugs, if you advocate that it should be legal to do so. The attempt to look like a responsible person is belied by the stance you take. You know that some people will use drugs to their detriment. If you have any powers of observation, you also know that it cannot be predicted in advance who will be harmed, and by the time someone is harmed by using drugs, it is too late.

As far as drug laws are concerned, I am mindful of one thing: very, very few people can use drugs without posing a threat to the people near them. We have to share the roads with them, the air we breathe if they are smoking the drugs, and people usually have obligations of one kind or another they neglect if they impair their ability to function. So I am not in favor of legalizing the use of dangerous drugs for recreational purposes. I agree that the War on Drugs is both a dismal failure and a violation of the Constitution. But I don't believe in false dilemmas, so I look for a decent law, and I don't really care who enacts and enforces it.

If I have to go out in public and breathe marijuana smoke, which makes me deathly ill, I am hardly in a position to sue someone each and every time I have that problem. But that person doesn't have the right to pollute the air I must breathe. If I have to drive, it is small comfort to me that someone can be punished once I am dead because someone driving DUI struck my car.

The fundamental concept here is that of responsible autonomy. Responsible autonomy is when a person is self-sufficient, even though no laws compel him to be. Libertarianism absolutely depends on the vast majority of the population to be responsibly autonomous. Libertarianism simply will not work if the vast majority are not practicing responsible autonomy.

People must be willing to engage in responsible autonomy if a libertarian society is going to work. The fact is, if people do not act responsibly, laws will be passed to deal with the consequences. The founders made it quite clear that the Constitution was designed for an ethical people and was wholly inadequate for any other. We tend to forget that, and we tend to be way too easygoing about activity where the victims are not so obvious. This is a major reason why so many libertarians overlook the unborn. This same mentality leaks over into other issues, and quite frankly, we won't ever develop a lasting libertarian society unless people act responsibly. And I submit that drug use for recreational purposes is irresponsible.

A libertarian society is not possible if people are not willing to engage in responsible autonomy. This includes the possibility that people will encourage or protect irresponsible behavior in others. The law is never neutral. Either it prohibits or it protects. Acquiescence is a position. As Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

There was a time when a public library took it upon itself to provide only decent books. Librarians had a sense of the idea that they were engaged in an activity involving the public trust. They considered it their responsibility to promote only that which was worthwhile.

That was then, and this is now.

We now have an unprincipled population who believe that liberty means the right to do whatever they please, consequences be hanged. It is this very attitude that results in people passing laws that infringe on everyone's liberty. If people policed themselves, this would never happen. There is a difference between having the freedom to promote unpopular political and religious ideas, and allowing children to wallow in filth. Nowadays, many librarians are insisting that they have a duty to make available every possible expression of speech or art (so-called) and that they do not have the right to "censor" anything, nor do they have a duty to protect children from gaining access to filth.

For the information of such a librarian, children do not have constitutional rights on the same basis as adults. The courts have said so. And parents have the right to safeguard their children's well-being and not to have that undermined. The librarian has a fiduciary responsibility. She is using public funds to purchase books for the library, and her duty extends to using the money wisely. Buying filth for the library is not a wise use of public money. At the very least, it is an infringement of the religions of the taxpayers who has to foot the bill. It seems to me that as a public official (which is probably the case) she can be held accountable.

Once a person becomes addicted to gambling, he will willingly plunder himself to run the government. Taxation is no longer an issue. As soon as the government discovers this, it will officially offer gambling opportunities to the public. The people most likely to take advantage of this opportunity to destroy themselves and their families are the poor, and people with children they are having difficulty caring for. The people most likely to engage in gambling are people who are uneducated, especially those who are poor in math. They cannot calculate the odds of winning. If they were able to compare the odds of winning to the amount of money they are likely to lose, most would not gamble. Gambling is based on the deceit of false mathematics and false probability. It induces people to believe that they are likely to become rich by taking the money of others, if they will only choose to gamble. Gambling is wrong simply because all payouts are with other people's money. Yes, the people paid the money in without someone holding a gun to their heads. Did they do so voluntarily? Is it not part of a voluntary action to understand the consequences of the act and to assent to it? If a person does not understand the consequences, how can he agree to undertake the risk? If he cannot agree to take the risk, how can it be said that he did the act voluntarily? If he did not do the act voluntarily, then should the government not enforce laws against those who took advantage of him? It is a form of fraud, is it not?

Pornography, it is said, does not have any victims other than the users. Unfortunately, this is just as false as the other claims we are considering here. A person who becomes addicted to porn is much more likely to rape a woman, or commit assault on a woman, or to harm his children. He becomes incapable or unwilling to refrain from such harm. He does a positive act. Pornography also victimizes people in other ways. It exploits the people involved in making it. People claim that a woman doesn't have to pose for porn images. If the only way she can earn money to feed her children is through making porn, she is not doing so voluntarily. She may have been given a very different picture of what it is like to be a porn model. She may have been told that the opportunity to model for porn is a legitimate business opportunity. She may be searching for an acting job in Hollywood, not a porn modeling job. By the time she discovers her error, she may have become enslaved by the porn makers. She may even have been given a drug so she will develop an addiction and have no choice but to come back. Some women who are desperate to come to the United States to get away from persecution by a repressive regime may be lured here by the promise of a legitimate job (waitressing, for example) only to arrive and discover that the person who paid her passage expects her to model for porn because she owes him money for her passage. There is much fraud in the production of porn, because very few of the women discover the fact that they are enslaved by it until after the enslavement already occurs. A woman who wants out will often be kept by threat of blackmail: if she leaves, the images already made of her in pornographic poses will be revealed to the public, in order to destroy her reputation. Porn also readily gets into the hands of minors. This is particularly a problem on the internet. People who want a real life example of what would happen if we legalized porn only need to observe that children are being exposed to disgusting, sick images behind their parents' back on the internet. This is "libertarianism" in action. The movement to legalize porn seeks to legalize what is happening on the internet. Another feature of the internet is that porn users are luring young children to meet with them in person, whereupon they will be assaulted, perhaps even killed. Young children are also being subjected to sick language in chat rooms and elsewhere. People who email porn spam make no attempt to determine who the recipients will be. I get sick, disgusting images in my email box constantly. One person who wanted revenge on me because I stood up to him and didn't allow him to tear down abortion-experienced women went around signing me up for porn spam. I have no recourse. I cannot get the porn spam to stop. I report it regularly, but it hasn't helped, and the images get sicker and sicker. Another scam porn sites use is to email spam that says their site is free. If a person goes there, then ostensibly to protect minors, the porn site will ask for a credit card number (of course, this ignores the fact that minors do have access to credit card numbers), and upon receiving it, will take the available funds on the credit card without the permission of the holder. The number of different ways people can be defrauded through porn is practically incalculable. It is also not uncommon for a person to be just as vulnerable to porn as alcohol. The person may have a porn addiction and may need to stay away from images. One image may throw such a person "off the wagon". It is just as unconscionable to throw a porn addict off the wagon as it is to serve an alcoholic drink to an alcoholic. Finally, it is extremely common for porn users to leave their magazines accessible to young children. I personally know several people who were victimized by this, and who have suffered greatly. Nobody has the right to warp the mind of a child.

Many of the remarks I have made about porn apply to prostitution. In addition, the following also apply. A person who uses a prostitute may be married. If so, and if he visits the prostitute without the knowledge of his wife, he has broken his marriage covenant and defrauded his wife. If he then contracts a sexually transmitted disease as a result of his liaison with the prostitute, he may take this home and give it to his wife without her knowledge. Prostitutes are frequently sex slaves, and if they have children (which is a possibility given the activity), these children may be born with a sexually transmitted disease, or addicted to whatever drug the pimp is using to keep the prostitute enslaved.

Before considering the last examples, some other remarks are in order.

Some people are not harmed by the activity, and therefore we should not make it illegal, or so they say. If someone can escape harm, then we should not make a law against it. First of all, escaping harm temporarily is not the same thing as escaping harm permanently. Secondly, laws have to be made for the general public. If an activity will harm a sufficient number of people, it is reasonable to outlaw it even if there is a handful of people who can escape harm. Most commonly, people can escape harm temporarily, but usually in the end have been harmed in some way. It is a principle that hard cases make bad law. So do a handful of exceptions. If a handful of people can get away with something for the rest of their lives (until they are killed accidentally, for example), that doesn't justify legalizing that thing for everyone.

Suppose that just about any person can engage in the activity one time and escape harm. But a percentage who do will become addicted, or return to the activity for another reason. Such a person may return because he escaped harm the first time. Eventually, everyone or nearly everyone will become addicted. To say that a person has escaped harm and used the vice responsibly simply because the harm has yet to occur does not mean the activity is harmless for that individual. Some people will argue, for example, that a person should use a condom as protection from STD's and pregnancy because it reduces the risk to one third of what it would have been otherwise. Yet, few people use a condom just once. If a condom is used often enough, then harm is ultimately guaranteed. I call such condom use "sexual roulette". Furthermore, a person has no control over whether the condom is defective (a surprising number are), or whether the failure occurs on the first use or the fiftieth. Finally, what we are really talking about here is an example of the fallacy of the false dilemma anyway. According to this fallacy, there are only two choices, both bad. You must choose one of them, so you must make a bad choice. Who said that a person needs to have sex in dangerous circumstances with or without a condom? Oh, but if the public and the individual both believe the pleasure of an activity trumps everything, then it will be argued that we don't have a right to deprive a person of pleasure. Folks, since when is years of suffering because of an STD or an abortion a kind of pleasure? Why do five minutes of pleasure outweigh a lifetime of suffering? People who understand cost-accounting would never make such a stupid mistake. Why don't people understand? Partly it is because of our government indoctrination centers (public "schools") and partly it is because people don't want to think about the consequences; they just decide pleasure is paramount, and they don't care if it is five minutes worth with a lifetime of sickness and regret. These same considerations can be applied to any vice.

And what about freedom of choice? Vices have the characteristic that they tend to be addicting. What is addiction? Some people have told me that a person who is addicted can decide at any time to stop using the vice. Oh really! In other words, a person who will suffer horrible withdrawal symptoms can just walk away from the substance that will relieve them? Well, I have this bridge I'd like to sell you! People are also ignoring the fact that one of the characteristics of addiction is the loss of the ability to make sound decisions, to act prudently. Drugs work because they alter the mind. They destroy the capacity for rational thought. That's why people like them. Many people become incapable of even considering the decision to stop. I know of one woman who had fetal alcohol syndrome. She is incapable of living a controlled life on her own. She requires an environment that forces external control. For this reason, she spends most of her time in prison. Unfortunately, she can get drugs in prison. While she was in prison, she had a baby. I know the woman who adopted that baby. The baby was born addicted. For months, this child experienced withdrawal. He would cry unconsolably. The tiniest annoyance could set off a round of suffering for him. It was horrible. Eventually, because of the unconditional love he received from everyone, he made a full recovery. He was lucky. He could have been permanently impaired. Many children are. What gives a woman a right to force her child to become addicted to some horrible drug?

Some people have suggested that we should somehow prevent women who are pregnant from using drugs, because they are harming someone else. Oh really! How do you plan to make sure that the woman isn't using during the time she is most likely to do grave damage: the first few weeks before she knows she is pregnant? And on what grounds will you forbid her to use drugs when everyone else is allowed to do so? To do this would be a violation of equal protection. Besides, it is also a violation of equal protection not to protect born children from parents who are addicted to drugs. So unless you are prepared for the government to look the other way while a pregnant mother addicts her unborn child to drugs, you need to be prepared to make those drugs illegal for everyone.

How should we decide which substances to outlaw? If a substance is said to have healing qualities, but people who use it do not use standard medical care, and this costs doctors money, then the substance should not be outlawed. But if a substance is a low grade poison, impairs a person's ability to think rationally or to act responsibly, or even to judge his own fitness to engage in dangerous activities such as driving, if the substance "works" because it is a low grade poison, if it causes measurable harm to the user (and in the case of smoke, to bystanders), and no rational person would use it because of the harm it causes (and here I define a rational person as someone capable of weighing five minutes of pleasure against a lifetime of illness), if the substance will result in the user becoming dependent on others, whether those others help voluntarily or not, then it should be outlawed.

There is no inherent right to harm oneself. Let me repeat that.

There is no inherent right to harm oneself.

It is anti-rational to assert the "right" to harm oneself. Why? Simply put, we must have some sort of objective idea upon which to base our philosophy. Libertarians have chosen to base their philosophy on the idea that life and liberty are good, which is to say objectively good. Vices negate both life and liberty. They shorten life and diminish the quality of life. Vices negate liberty because people become enslaved to them. As such, vices are destructive of the very good which libertarianism has identified. A person has a right to life and liberty. A person does not have the right to the negation of them, and does not have the right to destroy them for anyone.

It is also anti-rational to be unable to distinguish between something that is potentially helpful (such as an herb, or even a normally harmful substance such as marijuana used medicinally) and something that is inherently harmful.

One argument I hear a lot is that because drugs are illegal, all kinds of harm to society results. Usually, several examples are given. For one thing, the person argues, if drugs are illegal, they will be very expensive, so people will rob others to get the money to buy drugs. This ignores the fact that drugs impair a person such that he won't be able to earn the money legitimately to buy them at any price, and further will impair his judgment such that he will have no desire to acquire them only through moral means. Another argument offered is that because drugs are illegal, only organized crime (or criminals) are selling it, so we are encouraging organized crime. Folks, this is the antithesis of a libertarian argument! Libertarianism is about taking responsibility for one's own actions. Since when is the government responsible for the freely chosen actions of criminals? Shall we use the same argument to legalize rape, assault, robbery, murder? Since government made it illegal, only criminals engage in these activities, so we should make them legal! This argument is not only anti-libertarian, it is totally irrational. It is also totally irrational to argue, as I have heard, that our government is responsible for terrorism because it has made drugs illegal, and therefore terrorists have produced drugs for sale and been able to finance their operations in this way. This argument is also irrational for the simple reason that money made from selling oil (about which there is not even a quarrel that it is beneficial) is used to fund terrorist activities. We could just as easily argue that legalizing oil production funds terrorists, and therefore, the government must make oil production or importation illegal! Folks, the people who produce and sell drugs are to blame. The people who try to mitigate the damage to society from drugs are not to blame.

Or how about this argument: since Prohibition didn't work, trying to outlaw drugs is foolishness. Folks, Prohibition didn't work because you can't put toothpaste back into a tube. It would appear that every society requires that one vice be legal. That point is debatable, but let us assume it for the sake of argument. Alcohol was our legal vice. Some people need a form of escape. Alcohol provides this. It has been legal in our society for centuries for this purpose, and the consequences are well understood, and though they are severe, the people using alcohol in this way would harm themselves some other way if alcohol were not available. Since alcohol has been legal for centuries, outlawing would require the consent of all of the people, because people have to consent to obey the law. The law is a teacher. It teaches people in the middle how to behave. Keeping something illegal will cut down on the number of people who will pursue that activity. There are always people in the middle who will refrain because a thing is illegal and for no other reason, but will not refrain if the activity becomes legal. Those are the people who are targeted by the law. The law won't stop those who will do a thing simply because it is illegal, and it won't stop a person who ignores the law. The law has no impact on people who would not do the thing under any circumstances (thus, a law against smoking has no impact on me or my freedom, and to argue otherwise is anti-rational; yet libertarians do argue this way). So what we tried to do was take a substance that had been legal for centuries, and make it illegal without the consent of the people at large. It didn't work. That was a huge surprise! (It shouldn't have been.) Now at this point, there were one of two choices: either make the penalties extremely harsh and apply them consistently and universally, or repeal the constitutional amendment. We chose to do the latter. But we could just as easily have chosen the former. That is what Malaysia did. They don't have a drug problem. Dealing drugs is a capital offense, and justice is swift. A healing practitioner is exempt, but the law applies to everyone else. Not only does Malaysia not have a drug problem, but people aren't clamering for change, either.

Some people have argued that when we keep drugs illegal, this makes it attractive for organized crime, so laws against drugs are responsible for the existence of organized crime. That's nonsense. Organized crime is responsible for the existence of organized crime. Under libertarianism, people are supposed to take responsibility for their own actions. Therefore, the law is not responsible for those who choose to break it. The same thing applies to gangs. People argued that the existence of gangs is due to drugs being illegal. No. Gangs are responsible for their own existence. If these arguments held any water, then laws against rape are responsible for the existence of rape, and laws against murder are responsible for the existence of murder, etc. That's obviously irrational and silly. Likewise this argument: we should make things safe for people who use drugs. Since when are we obligated to make indulgence in self-destructive behavior "safe"? Or how about this argument: if drugs were made legal, people could afford to buy them, and wouldn't resort to stealing to support their habits. Since when are we obligated to make it cheap for people to destroy themselves? People who rob and steal are responsible for doing so. The stealing isn't the fault of the law. It's the fault of the people who do it. And what makes you think that if we made drugs cheap, people could afford them? If people fry their brains on drugs, they won't be able to make a living, and they won't be able to afford drugs at any price.

The fact that Prohibition didn't work is an argument against legalizing vices, simply because if we are wrong, and evil results, we will be unable to fix it.

How, as a libertarian society, can we best curb vices through law? My proposal is that we outlaw dealing the vice. This means that people who sell drugs are disobeying the law. People who buy and use are not. People who maintain prostitutes are disobeying the law. Prostitutes may or may not be disobeying. They are selling sex. If they are slaves, they are not disobeying the law. If they are doing it freely of their own choice, they are disobeying. People who make and distribute porn are disobeying the law. People who buy and use it are not, unless they harm children with it. And so forth. Making an exception for someone who is enslaved is treated as a mitigating circumstance, but does not necessarily prevent conviction. On what grounds should we pass such a law? Such a law is proper on the grounds that dealers are defrauding the buyers. The dealers may not directly misrepresent the vice; the dealers may simply rely on societal propaganda that the vice is acceptable or harmless. Anybody who relies on someone's state of mind to deceive that person, rather than direct deception, can be said to have engaged in fraud, and can be held accountable. Any person who sells to an addict can be held accountable. Any person, for that matter, who sells to a minor, can be held accountable. Since most of them do, sooner or later, we should be able to prosecute most of them eventually. That's fine with me. Are you prepared to make selling vices to a minor legal? If not, then the argument that we should not punish dealers, that the government should leave dealers alone, holds no water.

The current War on Drugs is a bad law for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is the forfeiture law, that allows the government to seize what are considered to be the "fruits of a crime" and then initiate a civil suit against the seized property to get a court's permission to keep it. If the owner tries to intervene, because this is a civil suit, the government can go on a fishing expedition of the intervenor and find enough evidence to charge and convict him criminally, thus circumventing his fifth amendment rights. This is unquestionably a bad law. The law is also bad because it rewards law enforcement officers if they plant evidence at the border. First of all, no law enforcement agency should ever be given the legal right to keep what they have taken. The proceeds should always go elsewhere, and there should never be any tit for tat. I could elaborate on more things wrong with this law, but I want to wrap up by pointing out that just because we have a bad law doesn't mean we should have no law at all. Remember the fallacy of the false dilemma?

Finally, we should refrain from legalizing drugs simply because if we do, more people will drive under the influence. You and I have to share the roads with these people, and we will be forced to submit to the risks they pose by driving on the roads with us. I have been told that people who use drugs will be wise enough to refrain from driving. Not bloody likely! If they're foolish enough to impair their ability to think, what makes you think they will be wise enough to recognize they are impaired?

The best argument for keeping smoking legal is that a lot of people will lose their jobs, their farms, or the value of their companies if we outlaw smoking. There are no other arguments in favor of keeping it legal.

I believe the government has the duty to protect us from force. Forcing me to breathe polluted air that makes me ill just because I happen to be in the same room as you is force. The government has a right to intervene. I shouldn't have to be a prisoner in my own home just because people feel like polluting the air in all public places. As I have argued many times with libertarians, if people do not engage in responsible autonomy, then people will make laws. People refused to recognize my right to breathe clean air (I have no choice about breathing, so this is an attack on my right to life), and businesses refused to recognize my right to breathe clean air, and for that reason, people demanded laws. That's always the way it works. It is irresponsible to force other people to breathe polluted air just because they happen to be next to you in a public place. It is really and truly assault. It is the willingness to assault unconsenting people with polluted, disease-producing air that smokers displayed for so many years that led people to demand laws. If people don't want laws against assault, they shouldn't assault.

Let me give you an illustration to show why smoking in my vicinity is assault. You may be familiar with the so-called rape drug, Rohypnol. This drug causes a woman to become unable to resist rape, and to forget what happened to her so she cannot identify the rapist. Most commonly, a person will slip Rohypnol into a woman's drink while she is not looking. She then becomes pliant, and the aggressor can then take her to a place where she will be raped. Just about anybody who is capable of reason would say that putting Rohypnol in her drink is a form of assault, in and of itself. She has not consented to have her mind altered. It was done against her will, and in this case, without her knowledge. There is both assault and fraud involved. Now in what way is smoking in my vicinity different from putting Rohypnol in my drink? It is different in only one respect: I am usually aware when people are smoking in my vicinity. So there is no element of fraud. But is there an element of violence, which is to say, assault? Most definitely! A person who smokes in my vicinity forces me to breathe the smoke, because as long as that person is smoking next to me, that smoke will be in the air I must breathe to stay alive. It really doesn't matter whether the smoke is personally harmful to me or not. If I am forced to breathe it against my will, then placing that smoke there is aggression. Must I be forced to leave the vicinity? Compelling me to leave a place I desire to be is a form of aggression. The difference between placing Rohypnol in my drink and placing smoke in the air I am breathing has one other difference: I don't have to drink constantly to stay alive. I can remain in a place and simply refuse to drink there in order to avoid the possibility of drinking a liquid that has Rohypnol in it. But I must breathe. I cannot simply refrain from breathing for a half hour so I can stay where I want to be. Therefore, smoking in my vicinity is, in that sense, more aggressive than putting Rohypnol in my drink.

Suppose you argue that a person owns a business, and because of his ownership, he has a right to permit smoking on the premises, and the government doesn't have a right to interfere because the business is privately owned. This is fine as long as the only people who go there are specific private individuals who come by invitation only. But when a person opens a business to the public, then the public has a right to rely on the notion that it can go there and not be assaulted. What if the person knows he will be assaulted and goes anyway? It depends on whether he consents to being assaulted, and whether the nature of the business makes that particular form of assault an integral part of the business. Let me give you an example or two. If I go to a smoke shop, then I really don't have a complaint if they allow smoking within. If I go to a sex club, I probably don't have a right to complain if someone rapes me. But if I go to a restaurant which is open to the public, then the restaurant has an obligation to serve me wholesome food, and does not have the right to give someone permission to assault me with tobacco (or marijuana) smoke while I am there. The bottom line is that in general, no person who owns a business has a right to give some of his customers permission to commit assault on other customers. For that reason, a person who goes to a business that is open to the public has a right to expect that he will not be assaulted on the premises, and if he is assaulted, it is proper for the government to deal with whomever committed the assault.

I am appalled that smokers so often think they have a right to pollute the air that I breathe, which belongs to me by virtue of the fact I take it into my lungs.

The same principles can be applied to the issue of air pollution from industry. No industry has a right to pollute the air that other people must breathe. Because industry refused to keep the air clean, the government enacted many laws and regulations. Laws are always the result of irresponsible behavior. If you believe that no industry has a right to pollute your land by allowing its toxic chemicals to soak into the soil, such that eventually some of it crosses the border and soaks into your soil, then the only logical thing you can believe is that likewise, no person has a right to pollute the air I must breathe.

I have been assailed by numerous examples of things other people find objectionable, saying essentially that because it would be irrational to ban these things, it is likewise irrational to ban smoking. This commits a fallacy known as "equivocation", which means to make two things that are inherently unequal, "equal" for the sake of proving a debating point. Among the other examples I have been given are people who plant bermuda grass in their lawns next door to someone who is allergic to bermuda grass, serving fish (the person offering this example is allergic to fish), or wearing perfume. These examples are not equivalent simply because the degree of harm and the prevalence of the possibility of harm are small. An occasional person (one in a million, perhaps?) who is allergic to fish must simply stay out of restaurants that serve fish (assuming the smell of fish is harmful to that person, which I rather doubt), or must refrain from ordering fish. In the same manner, I must stay out of smoke shops. More people are allergic to perfume. I think there may be a case for outlawing the use of perfume in public. The health club where I work out urges women not to use perfumes and sprays in the locker room. A person who installs bermuda grass in a lawn next door to a person who is allergic probably should be prohibited from growing bermuda grass. It is not easy for a person to move out of her home, nor should she be required to uproot herself for the dubious pleasure of being able to choose bermuda grass over another kind of grass. The harm significantly outweighs the value of having the right to plant that particular species of grass as opposed to any other.

Here is a discussion with someone who was using the perfume equivocation when discussing the topic of smoking:

* People who hate perfume are uncomfortable around people with tons of the cheap stuff on them, and we might be rude to tell them not to wear it in our houses but there is no right to have the state punish them.

Unless the perfume causes an asthmatic attack (which happens sometimes), they don't have a right to be offended by the smell of perfume, I grant you that. But we're not talking about obnoxious perfume here. We are talking about a substance that causes disease, that causes real harm, and I am one of the persons who is significantly harmed by it. For your information, some tobaccos contain monosodium glutimate, which is a deadly neurotoxin. It appears that it is those tobaccos that cause me to go into coughing fits; I am very, very sensitive to MSG (it almost killed me at one time).

If the perfume causes harm, then the government has a duty to step in and deal with that harm. Any person who wears perfume that is likely to cause asthmatic attacks is opening herself to legal liability for using that in public, and it is reasonable for the government to assist the victim to achieve redress of grievance.

* Down with the lifestyle police. Basically, people should find there [sic] "air" where they like it. We get a fresh supply with every breeze anyway.

You don't get breezes in a building.

This isn't about lifestyle. It's about people forcing me to breathe a deadly substance against my will simply because they refuse to control their behavior in my presence. I cannot find my air where I like it. If there were no laws against smoking in public, I would be trapped in my home. I cannot live like that. I have to be able to buy groceries and vitamins, and clothing, etc. And when I am away from home, I have to eat someplace. It's not something I choose to do; it is something I have to do.

* Smoking is not assault. It's an annoyance in your case, obviously. But it's a lifestyle choice.

No. It is harmful to my health. It is an assault. Discounting an assault because you want to engage in assault turns people against libertarianism. It trivializes fundamental rights and weakens the movement toward liberty. This position actually interferes with the restoration of freedom because people will refuse to support the group that advocates this. The result is a delay in developing the political clout needed to restore freedom. Insisting on legalizing vices does not restore freedom; it inhibits it.

* We should outlaw monosodium glutimate, too?

I would prefer it, but since the industry is voluntarily removing it from food, it may not be necessary. Unfortunately, they are replacing it with onions, which are rich in MSG. They are also cheap. And now it is almost impossible for me to find decent prepared food that doesn't have onions in it. If the food industry fails either to label food clearly when it contains MSG (fraud) or refuses to remove it from food, then it would be appropriate for the government to act. MSG is a deadly neurotoxin. The mere fact that some people get away with eating it for a time does not change its basic character. It is difficult to know for certain whether food contains MSG. Given how serious the harm is that it can cause, it is reasonable for the government to do something to protect the general public.

* You are over-reacting. We all have to accommodate things we don't like, despise, even. But that is the price of freedom.

This isn't a question of freedom. As they say, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. You don't have the right, in the name of freedom, to hurt someone else. So it is not a question of freedom. It's a question of my survival and people's refusal to respect my rights. Remember, for a libertarian society to work, people have to practice responsible autonomy. It is failure to do this that got us in the mess we're in. You don't even recognize my rights; how can I expect you to respect them? You are setting us up for more statism by refusing voluntarily to control your behavior in public so that people like me have to accept harm to our health. The response to this is inevitable: laws. That's how we got the laws against smoking in public places in the first place! We tried for decades to get people to respect our rights before government was ever resorted to. It didn't work.

If you insist on this being a question of freedom, then why is my freedom to live in a healthful environment inferior to your freedom to commit a harmful act? Failure to discern the difference between that which is good or neutral on the one hand and that which is harmful on the other is a major problem with much modern libertarian thought.

Here is the most mind-boggling argument I have heard so far. The argument runs that we need to make drugs legal to restore freedom, and it should not be illegal to smoke in a public place. In other words, this person thinks that we should make marijuana legal and then I should be forced to breathe it every time I leave my home. Do I even need to explain why this is a stupid argument? Marijuana smoke gives me a splitting headache. I have gotten such headaches when I have been in a closed apartment in the dead of winter, an apartment that has its own heating and cooling system so it is not shared with any other apartment, and someone lit a marijuana cigarette in another closed apartment next door. And no, it wasn't a psychological reaction. I didn't even know what I was smelling at first! I just knew that it smelled strange, and the next thing I knew, I had a splitting headache. How does someone who argues that we should make harmful substances legal and then we should make it legal to smoke them anywhere expect to be taken seriously by anybody else at all?

Why didn't the Founders outlaw drugs? Simple. They didn't have the medical knowledge of how drugs harm people. They didn't have the strength of drugs we have today. They didn't have the evidence of how destructive they are, or how they destroy the person's ability to think rationally, to be competent to determine whether or not he is being harmed. And they didn't have a population hell-bent on destroying themselves. Virtue was still valued.

Why should we keep vices illegal? Consider that there are not two but four choices. Either something is good and should be commanded, or something is good, and it should be encouraged but not commanded, or something is bad, and you should discourage but not forbid it, or something is bad and you should forbid it. Vices are clearly bad. Shall we merely discourage them or shall we outlaw them? Why? Simply put, vices are sufficiently evil that they cause a major disruption of society if widely practiced, and cause a great deal of harm. They are not on a level with wasting an hour watching television. It has been shown through history that when vices become sufficiently prevalent, the society collapses, and along with it, any libertarian features of government (which are usually part of the society), leaving in its place a tyrannical system. Vices are so damaging to everyone concerned partly because they destroy the capacity of a person to live free. They are damaging because they destroy a person's capacity to act rationally and to fulfill his obligations. This is why vices need to be made illegal. You cannot derive good from evil.

Some people have suggested that we should "relegalize" drugs. But the fact is, this argument can also be used, and is being used, to support abortion. People just want to relegalize abortion. Claiming that something is not harmful just because it was once legal is irrational to begin with. Perhaps it should never have been legal in the first place. By using the argument that we should relegalize something, we are trying to imply that whatever it was is good simply because it was legal. And this is precisely the argument that many people use to justify abortion, or any other horrendous practice. If it is legal, it must be good, or at least acceptable. The two have no bearing on each other.

The bottom line is that equivocating the pursuit of a vice (licentiousness) with freedom, real freedom, is a fallacy. It is irrational, and has no place in a libertarian philosophy supposedly based on rational political thought. Equating good (liberty) with evil (licentiousness) is so fallacious that it boggles my mind that anybody at all would confuse the two. Certainly anybody who does should never be given the honor of being called rational! Vices are wrong because they are evil. They are wrong because they are destructive. And being wrong, they properly fall under the control of government simply because of the egregious harm they do to everyone concerned. No man is an island. And that is the long and short of it, folks!

Phyllis Parun says, "As a drug user, you are not free. You are not in charge of your destiny."

If you are not free as a drug user, then legalizing drugs is not an element of restoring freedom. If you are enslaved to your own vices, then you are not free, no matter what the law says. Q.E.D. The bottom line is that if you want to restore freedom, then your philosophy must clearly and unequivocally reflect the ability to distinguish between freedom and licentiousness. If it does not, there are just too many people who know better, who will have nothing to do with your movement. Your efforts become a detriment to freedom. I cannot allow this, so I will continue to speak of this matter wherever I have the opportunity. And if you want to be foolish enough to ignore my advice, then I will personally be affected by the failure to gather enough support to restore freedom. I am not hopeful. I do not expect to see freedom restored in my lifetime. There are just too many stupid people out there who have resisted my efforts to persuade them into a little sense. If you are one of the people who can understand and appreciate my arguments, please spread them around. Thank you.

I have lots of company, people who won't have anything to do with the Libertarian Party because of these issues. The LP NEEDS those people to win elections. By driving those people away, the LP is working against the cause of freedom because it is siphoning off a lot of good people who could help reform the Republican Party. It is dividing and conquering freedom-loving people. That's sheer stupidity.

The Founders always pointed out that the government they designed required a virtuous people. We are no longer a virtuous people, and the major reason why is because we allow ourselves to wallow in filth and then we excuse it. And it's primarily the Christians who need to do something about it. Remember God promised that if WE repent and turn from sin, He will heal our land. If the CHRISTIANS who are called by His name aren't willing to stand up for righteousness, we forfeit God's blessing of our country. And we need God's blessing to preserve liberty. It's that simple.

I always told my kids that only a fool insists on making his own mistakes. That's one reason we have the Bible. Unfortunately, many mistakes are too costly for us to advocate that people learn from them. Take abortion for example. A woman who has an abortion is going to suffer emotionally and spiritually, sometimes agonizingly, and sometimes at that level for decades. Some are severely harmed medically, sometimes even killed. Some must go childless. A person who becomes addicted to drugs is going to suffer emotionally, physically, and spiritually in agonizing ways. For all of these things, the cost is too high. This is why God gave children parents: to teach them not to learn from these kinds of mistakes. If people grow up and continue to act like two year olds (pleasure is the most important value to me, gimme what I want and don't punish me for doing it), then the government WILL have laws against the behavior. There is really only one way to legalize vices: make sure nobody wants to do them. You don't do that by supporting the people who argue that people should be allowed to do it with impunity.

Some people argue that if we make a thing illegal, people will want to do it just because it is illegal. They call this the "forbidden fruit" syndrome.

The drug Czar can say anything he wants. That doesn't make it true. People tend to be curious about evil by nature. The law really has no bearing on it. The argument you are proposing says basically that when we pass a law, people will seek to disobey it, therefore we should not pass a law. How about we just apply it to all the laws, and then the incidence of murder, rape, pillage, arson, assault, robbery, etc. will all decrease because we all know that people are naturally good, and all we have to do is give them freedom and everything will be hunkey dorey. As a Christian, you should know better than that! Laws are intended by God to constrain evil. Governments are appointed by God to constrain evil. If you want to have a government of laws and not of men, this necessitates laws, which are necessary for objectivity in judging the actions of people. The laws are necessary to inform people. The Bible says "without the law there can be no sin." It is unbiblical to punish people when there is no law prohibiting the behavior.

People have basically been brainwashed by the public schools, which have taught that there are no absolute standards for behavior, and that each person should do what is right in his own eyes. The last time things got this out of hand, the world got very, very wet. This teaching that each person judges morality for himself is anti-God, and it is being promoted by the same public schools that teach collectivism. These schools teach us to acquiesce while the government plunders us, and teaches us further that people should feel free to indulge in vices. What people who have been brainwashed in this way don't realize is that this is a recipe for communism, not liberty. The communists were very open about how they could take over a country without war. Weaken the morals of the people, it said. Many people who succumb to abortion and vices no longer believe they deserve freedom. They lose heart. They acquiesce. That's exactly why the communists felt it was an effective way to conquer a free nation.

Links

The Merchants of Cannabis
Is Right Just a Matter of Opinion?
Moral Objectivism
Blessed Tolerance: The Virtue of a Republic in Decline