Posted on 02/25/2013 3:04:49 PM PST by Shout Bits
Last week, conservative Ann Coulter took a swipe at libertarians, calling them "pussies" for their stance on marijuana. Coulter's best qualities are her bluntness (get it?) and her willingness to fight. In her "pussies" comments, she argued that, since the US is a socialist welfare state, people's choices regarding their lifestyles are her business – hence MJ should be illegal. Coulter has a point; socialism turns strangers into family. However, her conclusion that statism and central control are warranted is an abandonment of principle.
Libertarians come in several flavors, and nearly equally from left and right backgrounds. The actual Libertarian Party is dominated by barely reformed hippies and ideologues, who put drug policy front and center. Most libertarians, however, do not belong to the LP. While libertarians like GOP Sen. Rand Paul do not support the war on drugs, that issue is just an example in the spectrum of Constitutional abuses and overreaches by today's government. Perhaps coincidentally, the Tea Party has embraced much of the constitutional libertarian platform of confining government to its enumerated powers.
When conservatives complain about the cost of providing services to immigrants and their children, libertarians blame welfare, not immigration. When conservatives like Coulter complain about the harm drugs do (never mind tobacco and booze), libertarians blame socialized medicine, not drugs. Perhaps Coulter is being pragmatic by acknowledging the US socialist family, but she is conceding this generation's key battle and even the soul of the US by doing so.
Socialists refer to their subjects as family much as dictators refer to their subjects as their children. Under collectivism, the consequences of an individual's bad choices (e.g. smoking, or drinking, or irresponsible debt) are borne by everyone. This creates what economists call a moral hazard. By mitigating the negative consequences of bad behavior, the deterrent is minimized. Why not borrow too much when the government will always bail me out? Why not smoke crack when food, shelter, and health care are available no matter how worthless drugs make me? Of course the government might outlaw crack, but the criminal deterrent has proven to be less effective than the personal ruin deterrent. The best policy regarding vices is for people to live with their decisions' consequences, but socialism is a family where consequences are limited.
Coulter is a big sister who thinks MJ should be illegal so she does not have to pay for whatever negative consequences its users might incur. However, the socialist family is not one which libertarians wish to join. Banning drugs is ineffective at best, and the consequence of proscription might actually be more drug use based on decades' long trends. Libertarians are not in favor of MJ, they are opposed to substituting personal responsibility for the socialist family. Liberals just like MJ for policy reasons. While MJ is a popular example and a clear policy argument, the issue is only an example of why the government should not be the master of a socialist family.
Still, Coulter has a point. The US is a socialist welfare state, and she is forced to be responsible for the bad choices of others. She is not wrong to expect good behavior from her wards. Perhaps Coulter has illuminated the key difference between conservatives and libertarians – Coulter is willing to be a member of today's deeply flawed US socialist family, while libertarians are still willing to fight. As such a famous fighter, Ms. Coulter should try harder and expect a little more.
Shout Bits can be found on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ShoutBits
Well said. So long as libertarians stay off drugs (so to speak) and avoid talking about pedophilia and public safety issues, they can be quite reasonable. Libertarians should stick to economic issues — anti-minimum wage, anti-insider trading laws, cutting entitlements, cutting defense department waste, getting rid of farm subsidies, ending anti-monopoly laws, fighting pork, and promoting the flat tax.
The list of small-government economic policies is almost endless. Yet libertarians care most about smoking dope.
The issues are freedom, personal responsibility and limited government. That’s three strikes for RINO Annie
Those are conservative positions, if libertarians weren't lefties, then they would merely be conservatives, but they are lefties.
I never said I agreed with Ann, I said social libertarians are nuts
Your ‘point’ that the 3rd parties foisted O on us? False premise. The GOP didn’t run a candidate that one could still stand by their principles.
How that pertains to the topic at hand, I know not.
Interesting. It’s the (L) party itself that would abolish forced ‘tithing’ to gov’t in the name of ‘charity’
Has it not been the GOP and the pointy talking heads that are not espousing ‘restructuring’ and ‘saving’ SS/Medicare/etc.? How many more weeks of unemployment will they all bump it up? Wait for the min. wage battle to begin!
It is not the (L) party that says controlled borders and no welfare state = open, free flow of people who WANT to come. Let alone terminate all foreign aide.
Again, has it not been the GOP, in behind the scenes (so they don’t have to explain to their own constituents/base) pushing for ANOTHER amnesty? Haven’t they blown enough smoke about ‘securing’ the same? Did they stop the visas from the Middle East after 9/11? Stopped funding those that actively try to kill us??
Well stated. I like your premise.
IMHO, you have some flaws
1) Morality, as everyone should know, cannot be legislated.
2) Freedom and Liberty do not ‘cost’ anyone. Cost is only associated with a Socialist State (community over the individual).
3) You CAN build a Free country containing those unwilling/unable to govern themselves. We have had it and will always have them. They are the ones who burn out early in Life, and sometimes in very terrible ways.
Libertarians want open borders and the elimination of the INS and Border Patrol, in other words, no borders.
Libertarianism creates liberal voters, who vote for more government and more welfare, and more programs.
Ghetto social liberalism creates democrats, not right wing Evangelicals.
My point is that you struggle with context, not to mention electoral reality, and while I’m at it, how candidates are chosen.
It’s real easy to make grand pronouncements without a chance in hell you’ll ever have to live with the consequences of your pronouncements. You bore me, so just go luxuriate in the purity of your own irrelevance.
It just seems like the Libertarians lead with purposely provocative issues like drug legalization instead of speaking more generally about things most on this site would agree with like keeping government out of our lives. Too often on FR, many aren't about live and let live type of freedom. They're the law and order types that don't mind government telling people what to do so long as it is from a more conservative perspective.
Abortion, gay marriage, homosexualizing the military, homosexual adoption, ending restraints on world immigration, drugs, hookers, pimps and porn, polygamy and pedophilia.
Your agenda is a curse on the American soul.
I am the world’s only Libertarian Fascist - Live Free or We’ll Kill You.
That I did not know.
Thanks to everyone for the comments. I got on a plane and when I landed, comments.
Just for the record, no I would not support drugs for children or pedophilia, or porn for children. The point is that adults are better at deciding for themselves and should not be treated as children. That implies that children do not yet know what is best and should be guided.
Anyway, society was less drug riddled before the war on drugs. People were more responsible before financial regulation and bailouts (to a point, there were bubbles going back hundreds of years. Regulation certainly did not help).
If people want a sober and responsible society, they should not ask the government for much help. It doesn’t work, and eventually some socialist pig comes for your guns or your soda cups.
F-me once, shame on me, Coulter.
The cost is not incurred by the criminalizing. It is incurred by people’s soft attitude toward drugs—their own and other people’s. If people weren’t so durned wishy-washy on this subject, the demand would lessen. Make it uncool by public opinion.
I don’t support any danger fraught behavior that isn’t an inalienable right that also makes my culture more dangerous.
Bungee jump all you want, but it doesn’t make my culture more dangerous.
Exercise your freedom with pot, and you increase my peril of being hit by a dangerously intoxicated driver.
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