U.S. Constitution
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Title: The Prohibitionist Song Remains the Same
Source:
LRC
URL Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blo ... tionist-song-remains-the-same/
Published: May 15, 2015
Author: William Norman Grigg
Post Date: 2015-05-15 15:55:06 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 6550
Comments: 27
Proponents of drug decriminalization, “with their cry of personal liberty … have about wrecked the true concept of government control of evils,” complained John A. Lapp, President of the National Conference of Social Workers. From Lapp’s perspective, opposition to the federal War on Drugs is itself a gateway drug to outright anarchism, which is the ultimate goal of “destructionists” who conceal their true intentions behind cynical appeals to personal liberty. “To be consistent those same destructionists go so far as to condemn any and all control of conduct,” Lapp insisted. “What may the government regulate, control, or prohibit if not such human destroyers as [drugs]?… No previous time in our history has seen such a concerted movement to break the confidence of the people in their government as an instrument for human betterment.” The drug against which Lapp inveighed was alcohol, the indispensable federal crusade for “human betterment” was enforcement of the Volstead Act, and his condemnation of liberty-obsessed “destructionists” was delivered in the May 11, 1927 keynote address for the national convention of his organization. Public non-compliance with Prohibition was commonplace, and entirely predictable. In fact, five years before Lapp’s despairing address, The New Republic — the flagship publication of the Progressive movement — published a surprisingly lucid critique of Prohibition, which could be considered the defining Progressive social program. Government “must expect to have its authority flouted” when “it forbids its citizens to perform innocent and inoffensive acts of conduct,” observed TNR contributor Fabian Franklin, a notable academic. Dr. Franklin was a prominent critic of Soviet-inspired revolutionary socialism, and he saw Prohibition as the product of the same desire to regiment and “reform” human behavior through state-inflicted violence. Creation of a “dry” national society, Dr. Franklin wrote, would require “the suppression of individuality, the exaltation of the collective will and the collective interest, [and] the submergence of the individual will and the individual interest.” Although the end could never be realized, the means employed by Prohibitionists would never be fully repudiated, Dr. Franklin predicted: “The eighteenth amendment has profoundly altered our federal system of government. In comparison, the commerce clause is a frail instrument of potential centralization. If Congress ever casts off hypocrisy and sets up the necessary machinery for adequate federal enforcement, we shall enjoy a national bureaucracy worthy of our boasted `bigness’ in other respects.” Writing in the William & Mary Law Review roughly a decade ago, Dean Robert C. Post of Yale Law School described how Prohibition was the result of an alliance between pietistic conservatives and paternalistic progressives. Post focused on the key role played by the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Howard Taft, which “regularly sustained the administrative and law enforcement techniques deployed by the federal government” and its state and local allies in the war against liquor. In many respects, the Taft Court was reliably conservative, zealously guarding against federal intrusions into the reserved powers of the states. This skepticism about federal power dissipated quickly, however, when it came to “law and order” issues and matters of moral uplift — such as that era’s war on drugs. The result was a series of decisions reflecting purely results-oriented jurisprudence that upheld “the constitutional legitimacy of national police regulations that widely suppressed the prerogatives of local state authority to regulate intimate details of personal conduct….In the end the Taft Court would repudiate [state] prerogatives in ways that strikingly anticipate the nationalism of the New Deal.” It was under Prohibition that the “local” police were federalized and overtly militarized, and the federal “administrative state” took form. A little less than forty years after the 18th Amendment was repealed, the Nixon administration declared “war on drugs” without the benefit of a constitutional amendment, or even the pretense of constitutional legitimacy. Prohibitionists simply transposed their authoritarian rhetoric into a slightly different key, and they continue chanting the same refrains today.
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#7. To: TooConservative (#0)
Why drugs (including alcohol)? Pain. Why pain? Poverty, weakness, cruelty, subordination, stress...all things that could be substantially eliminated by obeying Christ, and in the case of poverty, subordination and stress, by those who have accumulated wealth using that wealth to free the slaves of poverty, subordination and stress. Give people greater security, and they will be less stressed and cruelly treated, and less cruel in return. And the NEED for pharmakeia - which is itself a deadly sin - will be dramatically reduced. To solve the drug problem, the problem of the human heart must be addressed. That can never be completely addressed. But the excessive pain of our society can be. There is a lot less drug-everything in Western countries that have stronger social safety nets. The Netherlands, where marijuana is essentially legal, and Iceland, Belgium, France and the Scandinavian countries - countries with the strongest safety nets, have the lowest death rates from drugs. By contrast, the WORST of the major Western European countries in terms of drug addiction and death rate, is...you guessed it...the much more "free" market, "competitive" United Kingdom. The US, of course, is up there in the "worst" category as well. Needless to say, African countries have low drug death rates: they're too poor to get the stuff. But Latin American countries, also, have lower rates. Comparing poor countries to rich doesn't tell us much. But comparing Scandinavia and France - "socialist" places (none of them are REALLY socialist, they all have better social safety nets, that's all) - are much better off in this regard than the USA and the UK - the places with the cheapest, worst, most threadbare and brutal social safety nets. You either give people security, or you pay for it in drug addiction, crime and death. Pissing, moaning and bellyaching about how people should...do something impossible and not human that human populations are incapable of ever doing - well, that's precisely the sort of stubborn stupidity that gave us Prohibition, bad laws, and STILL gives us a very crappy safety net, horrible crime and death rates, and no escape from the fouling of our own nest. Simply put, the very wealthy MUST be compelled to give up considerably more of their income, and the wealth concentration MUST be redistributed, through taxation and social welfare, in order to have social peace, low levels of drug addiction, low levels of crime, longer and better lives, and greater general happiness. People who dream of being barons and lords of the manor will have a worse time. They are few in number, and it is better that they should be brought to heel, as they have been in MOST of the western world, than that we continue to have the ragin' contagion of drugs, crime, death, and disorder and illiteracy, and every other goddamn thing we do, because we insist on calling social welfare and needful wealth redistribution "socialism". It isn't. But if it is, fine: let's have more socialism. Having written that, I fully expect to see the mouth breathers quoting that at me for the next forever. Don't care. The future does not lie in maintaining this system as structured. It's dying. The only question is whether we end up living in Scandinavia or Mexico. My bet is Mexico. It's too bad.
Or they can get a job. The majority of people on drugs are unemployed because they are drug users. The majority of people unemployed are already on welfare and spend their money on drugs. With no desire to find work. The more we increase a secular government socialist safety net the more people in this very populous country will stay home and do nothing. France and Sweden are much smaller populations with much smaller economies. The difference here is there are plenty of jobs, but Americans just don't want to do those jobs. They can take welfare at about the same income. So we either pull the safety net in a bit and people go back to work or the jobs need to be better paying than staying on welfare. The truly poor in our country is microscopic compared to those receiving transfer payments. And the truly poor are usually working and too proud to take a government hand out.
#9. To: redleghunter (#8)
France is bigger than any American state, with over twice the population of California. Take the populations of California, New York together and stick them in Texas, with the population of Texas to boot - THAT is France. It's the fifth largest economy in the world. Add Germany to it, which is very similar to France, and you've got nearly half the population of the United States. Take just Western Europe, those countries that are together in the EU, and you've got the US. And you've got a broader social safety net, and less-of-everything-bad. Because the stronger social safety net gives people security, and when people are secure, they behave better. The US is physically large and has a large population, but the EU is physically larger, and has a larger population, and a larger economy too. And it's got a better social safety net, and less overall problems. What it doesn't have, is an empire. That empire costs us very dearly.
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#8. To: Vicomte13 (#7)
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