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RE: Prop 64 passes Colorado election
A love of individual freedom doesn't mean we've got to legalize drugs. There is still the right for a group to judge what they must do to protect their families and have that reflected in laws so that they do not need to take the law into their own hands to protect their families. When someone is selling something potentially harmful to others we're going to rightfully decide as a society where to draw the lines and a cost benefit analysis is going to be in the hopper along with the risks.
I support that the right to own guns (even though I don't own one) for some very important reasons far beyond hunting etc but I do not support the right to own guns to extend to really big guns like bazooka's and artillery that can bring down airplanes.
As far as what I eat, yeah I hate the idea of the majority of people (and that's what government is - the hand of the majority as we do have some control over it as votes) telling me what I can eat. Drugs are just one of millions of things that I can eat.
I don't want to decide what is good for others etc
BUT .. the issue transcends the individual user. We don't live in a vacuum , nor is it rational not to anticipate llikely mistakes people will make, or assume that all people will be the self-reliant , self aware , knowledgeable people that a full libertarian ideal would work best at. The world is more complicated..even for the very best.
I could go into an enormous essay on government etc but i'll try to cut to the chase (hard for me)
To have a Rule of Law underwhich our liberties and property are protected, we need things like courts to arbitrate disputes etc - even ardent libretarians agree with that level of government. There must be a punitive system for things like rape and murder etc. .
To have a rule of law, means that we've delegated an monopoly power to the goverment(majority) to the use of physical force to arbitrate disputes between citizens.
Things like Rape or Murder might be self evident, but there are all sorts of other types of law that must exist but are going to be a grayer area where one person's desires to live a certain way overlap with anothers and the majority must decide where the line must be drawn.
Think of something like noise. If there were no law one person might decide that they wanted to listen to their stereo at the loudest level and play along with it on electric guitar with large amplifiers at 3:00 AM . Without a law , the only way to stop the guy might be for the neighbors to go over and punch him in the nose if he kept doing it against their wishs until he stopped the practice.
Exactly how loud someone could play at which times of day does fall to a majority opinion, which should be clearly written and uniformly enforced (essay on importance of uniform enforcment ommitted). There does come a point though where from a freedom loving attitude that others must bear with noise of others and I'd agree that can't just be a matter of taste. At 2 in the afternoon, if the neighbor is playing music at a level someone across the street can hear , but someone 2 blocks away can't I'd error on the side of liberty.
Still, even at the same volume, while I think it would be vastly intrusive for the majority (via their exclusive use of physical force through government) to have a law that permitted Bach from being played at a louder level than the Beastie boys... but content in terms of profanity might be more reasonable to make rules about in terms of how far away it was heard.
Ok .. better make this shorter.
If a guy was playing rap music talking about all the girls they were going to rape and vulagity about blow jobs etc while washing his car and I had some 7 year old girls playing in my driveway.... well, some-how a law against music with profanity in it being played easily audibly off the person's property isn't about choosing what music the guy wants to listen to but about law choosing whether a neighbor has no recourse.
I think it would be a pretty reasonable thing for a group of dads in the neighborhood to get together and walk over to the guy and tell him that it wasn't ok for him to play that profanity at a level the kids could hear.
If the guy said no.. i'm going to play what I wanted, I think it is within a "moral law" reasoning that the neighbors might threaten violence when reason didn't prevail.
To have the rule of law, we must delegate the monopoly use of force to the government, but that cannot mean that the rule of law removes the ability for the larger group to self police. The rule of law doesn't mean that an individual can aggressively thumb their noses and impact others and say "haha you can't do anything about it". A bigger issue though is where to draw the line about how loud. Hearing lyrics through an open window from a sidewalk close to the house might be differnt but its up to society to draw that line between individual freedom and impact.
I agree that the fellow has the right to listen to whatever he wants where I can't hear it for sure .
Is that all a slippery slope? Yeah for sure...but the reality is that the world requires walking on slippery slopes or just staying home. Just as individuals are expected to be responsible there is the notion too that groups can also be responsible.
So (boy this is getting long) .. onto drugs.
If a guy sold my Daughter heroine , damn concepts of individual freedom, I know very damn well that I have a responsibility to protect my family and so do others. Sure it might be my hypothetical daughter's fault for buying drugs but it wasn't ONLY her resoponiblity... the person selling it played a very crucial role.
Anytime the majority of people think that a person had every right to beat the shit out of someone for doing something, that pretty much suggests that laws must extend to that area to preserve the rule of law. The majorities are going to have to navigate that slippery slope.
We must preserver the ideal of individual freedom being a major influence in our line drawing but we also can't get too removed from believing we as a group can set limitations where one group members actions impact another.
Now, just because we have things like corportations and stores.. that does not change the equation between right and wrong. If a guy sold my daughter drugs (even if she was an addict) me and my friends would have every right to threaten the guy physically if there weren't a government to do it for us in an uniform way.
If a 7-11 sold the drugs, the business isn't free from peronal responsibility because they're not a person - businesses must be held to the same responsibility we would hold an individual to... the concept of law is the same ...especially if we're talking of a grand philosophy of what government is.
I know I would feel justified in a group using force against a member that sold dangerous and destructive substances to people making the wrong decisions.
The crime isn't the person using the substance. If the person manufactured the drug themselves and consumed it (grow your own pot) it is all their own doing.
There are all sorts of gray areas that we as group (which ultimately means our government) must decide. Somethings will be dangerous if used incorrectly but useful if used correctly. We're not going to hold a guy selling hammers responsible if a hammer is used to murder someone. We will hopefully continue to allow the sale of guns even though the uses of some of those are quite tilted to the danger side.
But, as a group, we're not going to allow someone to sell air to air missiles and say that it was only a individual who had all responsibility about whether to use it as a terrorist or not.
Ok.. I'm rambling..
..but the libertarian arguments that are so good in theory are just not so clean a way to have a moral rule of law.
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