Ich bin ein Looneytarianer
Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate for President spoiler, has an interesting explanation of the LP’s support for drug legalization. Get a load of this:
War on Drugs
The government’s war on drugs violates the rights of Americans so egregiously that it is a bigger threat than the drugs themselves. Libertarians do not want our children taking drugs either, but we recognize that the several decades of drug interdiction haven’t slowed the flow of narcotics into this country. Children take drugs because criminals actively sell them. Criminals sell drugs because they are astronomically profitable. Drugs are highly profitable only because they are illegal. The Libertarian solution is to decriminalize drugs, which will make drugs extremely cheap, which will remove the profit motivation for selling drugs, which will result in fewer children taking drugs.
I can picture it: some 12-year old kid on a school yard saying “dang it, now that a day’s worth of blow doesn’t ‘blow’ through my monthly allowance, it’s just not much fun anymore.”
Has the LP jumped the shark, or have they really been this daft all along? Uncle has more.
UPDATE: Another recovering Libertarian candidate turned blogger, Kevin Murphy, has some additional thoughts on the LP’s unfortunate trend toward confusing rigid dogmatism with “principle.”
June 1st, 2004 at 9:07 am
Heh, and you’re the one who ran as a Libertarian once right? Drugs are an interesting thing and I, despite the collective weight of most of the blogosphere, hew to the traditional conservative line. Heck, we treat tobacco like it’s a mortal sin, but marijuana like it is all that is good and holy, what an odd world we live in.
June 1st, 2004 at 10:05 am
I did, in 1992. I didn’t exactly run from the drug legalization issue, either; I brought it up in multiple candidate forums, and also debated the issue the local head of the DEA on Channel 8.
My position has mellowed a bit over the past 12 years, although I do still lean toward the view that prohibition, like most other government efforts to save idiots from themselves, causes more problems than it solves. Even at the height of my libertarian streak, I never would have argued that legalization would cause fewer children to use drugs than do so now. I think my opponents may have raised that position once or twice as a strawman, but it never occurred to me that this strawman might one day come to life and even run for President.
June 1st, 2004 at 12:17 pm
Libertarian Party and Reality
Having run for the State Assembly as a Libertarian (CA 47th, 1994), I’m fairly much in agreement with Libertarian ideals. But in the last decade, I’ve seen the LP move further and further towards impossibly “pure” positions — to the…
June 1st, 2004 at 9:24 pm
Many of the online Randheads are, well, nuts. Especially the ones who support Open Borders. Slightly saner members of that class include Hit & Run and theagitator.com. Having libertarian ideals is OK, as long as you have at least a tenuous grip on reality. Unfortunately, many of them have greasy palms. See, for instance, the Libertarian Purity Test. Holy moses malone!