Southern Avenger

It's time for us all to stop being ignorant hypocrites and start being TRUE conservatives!

Pragmatic libertarians (minimal-statists) and "true" Conservatives agree that many, if not most, of society's problems are caused by government usurping choices that could better be made by individuals and that government is just about the worst way of doing almost anything. Where libertarianism normally parts company with "fake" conservatism is over moral issues. But a true conservative would have no problem with agreeing, that what people do with their own bodies, and especially in the privacy of their own home, should be supremely their business, and that anything else would entail ignoring the basic tenet of limited government.

Fake-Conservatism on the other hand has much in common with socialism; Both Leftists and Fake-Conservatives appear to harbor the belief that nature does not exist and that any human can be anything he wants to be, or can for the "greater good", be "re-educated" into being. Leftists therefore think little boys can be conditioned into preferring dolls over toy soldiers, and similarly Fake-conservatives believe that adults can be coerced into choosing alcohol over marijuana. A true conservative, just like a pragmatic libertarian, would immediately reject both ideas as nonsense.

If you support prohibition then you are NOT a conservative.
Conservative principles, quite clearly, ARE:

1) Limited, locally controlled government.
2) Individual liberty coupled with personal responsibility.
3) Free enterprise.
4) A strong national defense.
5) Fiscal responsibility.

Prohibition is actually an authoritarian War on the economy, the Constitution and all civic institutions of our great nation.

It's all about the market and cost/benefit analysis. Whether any particular drug is good, bad, or otherwise is irrelevant! As long as there is demand for any mind altering substance, there will be supply; the end! The only affect prohibiting it has is to drive the price up, increase the costs and profits, and where there is illegal profit to be made criminals and terrorists thrive.

The cost of criminalizing citizens who are using substances no more harmful than similar things that are perfectly legal like alcohol and tobacco, is not only hypocritical and futile, but also simply not worth the incredible damage it does.

Afghani farmers produce approx. 93% of the world's opium which is then, mostly, refined into street heroin then smuggled throughout Eastern and Western Europe.

Both the Taliban and the terrorists of al Qaeda derive their main income from the prohibition-inflated value of this very easily grown crop, which means that Prohibition is the "Goose that laid the golden egg" and the lifeblood of terrorists as well as drug cartels. Only those opposed, or willing to ignore this fact, want things the way they are.

See: How opium profits the Taliban: http://tinyurl.com/37mr86k

or: A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF NARCOTICS-FUNDED TERRORIST GROUPS
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/pdf-files/NarcsF…

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The Taliban was actually very harsh on opium and heroin production and the production of heroin in Afghanistan has increased dramatically ever since we took over almost ten years ago. Get your facts straight. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2814861.stm

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A lot of Blah,Blah,Blah from both the author and folks commenting. The truth is that drugs are a MORAL issue and. Government creates a criminal issue when it tries to dictate morality through laws. That's plain talk. Not a bunch of politico mumbo jumbo (of which there is far too much theses days).
As for Malcom Kyle's assertion that alcohol and tobacco aren't very harmful, well that's just bullshit. They both are ways that people KILL themselves and each other. Comparing them to marijuana is apples and oranges. They are as dangerous as the "heavy" drugs like heroin and cocaine. But it isn't governments place to stop us from being idiots. Natural selection dictates that some animals will do stupid or inadvertent things that will cause their death. Humans are no different.

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Jack trots out a couple rhetorical fallacies today, with a nice cocktail of appeal to emotion and authority. His argument against the War on Drugs comes with several sources; nicely done. The big-money, macroeconomic picture of the drug industry and the military/law enforcement expenditures against it are described broadly. This gets our dander up, knowing that most readers of this paper in one way or another disagree with heavy spending and/or drug criminalization.

Of course, he pairs it with an non-citationed, tautological argument against the minimum wage. "Much like the minimum wage, virtually all data available on drug prohibition points to the utter ineffectiveness of our policies." What data on the minimum wage? He has provided none, trotting out what appears to be your opinion as a well-known fact. Basically what this leaves us is a set-up having to do with drugs to a opinion hit piece on minimum wage.

To be fair to the Southern Avenger, this is merely a copy of a blog on a conservative blogger's site. He's just preaching to the choir there.

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factoryconnection continues to try to impress people today with a smorgasbord of condescension and professorialism. He leads his comment with a compliment to the author; nicely done. Then he proceeds to validate the factual basis for one of the author's positions. This regurgitation tells us that most of the readers of this paper are not quite as smart as he.

Of course, he marries a high-minded logic term with conversational English and incorrect grammar. "Jack trots out a couple rhetorical fallacies today," trotted away from a necessary preposition that leaves us wondering if he would say or write, "there are a few of ridiculous sentences in his comment?"

To be fair to Mr. Connection, this is merely a fulfilled promise to use his Word of the Day Calendar once a day. Sneaky "Tautological."

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How dare anybody write at above a sixth grade level on here!!

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False equivalences to show how he's above the fray of everyday liberals and conservatives is Jack Hunter's stock in trade. But with his bizarre comparison of the minimum wage to the war on drugs he finally gone far enough for people to call him on his bullshit.

Other than that Factory Connection covered his arguments pretty well.

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The minimum wage and the War on Drugs should both be eliminated. Rather than serve their respective intended purposes they undermine them. Anyone who defends either, especially the minimum wage has not honestly done their research into the harm that both of these policies do and lack of true benefit that they bring.

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I'll trade you the minimum wage for a maximum wage.

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@BourbonandBranch, Good eye on the missed "of." Shame on me. Thank you also for providing another favorite of the ill-prepared debater: attack the messenger. Fortunately, we're not in high school anymore so calling me a brainiac doesn't hurt my feelings. I also wear glasses, so if you'd like to make yourself feel any better you can call me "four-eyes" as well. I figured that the Southern Avenger would be quite familiar with everything I discussed at the level I discussed it, even if you aren't.

In the interest of fairness, my previous comment in knuckle-dragger-ese:

"Irregardless of the fact I ain't about to argue his point on the drug thing, Jack is bullshitting us about the minimum wage. It ain't got nothin' to do with this here Obammy's war on drugs. He's just blowin sunshine up our ass about the marajawanna and sneakin' in all that about minimum wage ruining the country."

Is that better? I can't bring myself to put any more misspellings or moron-speak to page. I'm already burning with embarrassment over yesterday's mistake.

@Nofaith: present an argument instead of just assuming that "the minimum wage is bad" is correct because you say so. You've just put down a very serious charge that the minimum wage is doing greater harm to the US than the war on drugs. Now convince us with facts and citations... no blogs please.

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@factory - you misread my comment. Both do a tremendous amount of harm in different ways and someone who does not understand why a minumum wage is not good, especially entry level employees, has no understanding of basic economics. If you set the minimum wage at a rate that is higher than the intersection of supply and demand for labor (which it sometimes is depending on the task) then you will have people unemployed that would normally not be. Forcing employers to pay more than the market forces require them to makes them to employ less people and in turn be less productive. That also keeps entry level people out of the job market and prevents them from gaining skills so that they will not be entry level very long and making entry pay forever.

@mat - why don't you just move to China or some other communist country? I am sure you would be much happier there. Maximum wage is a really good way to stop innovation and growth of an economy in it's tracks and shows even less understanding of economics than supporting a minimum wage. It's like telling all the kids in the class you get a C even if you do A level work. Feels good for the masses, takes away the incentive for the people who will exceed expectations and create rather than just be.

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No faith: you're an idiot if you think China's an example of a left-wing paradise. Either that, of you've been living under a rock since the 80's. Just because someone calls themselves 'communist' doesn't mean they are.

This stifling innovation thing baffles me. Let's say we set a maximum wage at, say $750,000/year. Do you really think the CEO and capitalist class would say, "ah well, I can only make three quarters of a million. Why bother with all that work? I'll just work doubles at the IHOP for the rest of my life."

Never mind the fact that not everyone is motivated by greed. See Jonas Salk.

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@sark - when you are forced to give what you earn to others it stifles ambition which in turn will stifle innovation. Maybe not for everyone but for many it would and does. China is obvioulsy not a paradise because it is a communist country and communism, which by the way does things like limit peoples income, does not work no matter how much the liberals in this country want it to. Not everyone is going to be a CEO or a wildly successful creator but limiting (or eliminating) the reward for taking those risks certainly does not provide incentive for ever pursuing it.

As to your insipid analogy, no, the earner and producer will not go work at IHOP (there probably would only be one IHOP to work anyhow because no one would have worked hard to build it into a chain like it is now.) But if they do work valued at $2 million and only get to keep $750K I guarantee they will not be too worried about producing $2 million again. If you say you would do differently I would have to throw Christo sized bullshit flag. They don't produce, others don't get to sell them other companies and fancy cars and big houses and land and TVs and golf trips and whatever else that they want to buy with their wealth. That means people that could have had jobs and income and maybe even learned how to be as or more successful as the person that started them will never get to do so because it isn't fair to the people who can't be as successful. Maybe in the next Olympics we should weigh down the fastest runners to slow them down so that everyone can cross the finish line at the same time. Sounds pretty dumb, doesn't it? So does limiting income.

And if you think Jonas Salk was not rewarded handsomely for his efforts it is you that is hiding under the rock. Yes, he gave away the patent, but he lived a pretty fruitful life and I am sure he wasn't worried about his wife learning how to do extreme couponing.

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@Nofaith: that was more like it. However, minimum wage laws are in place to counteract employment hegemony. Poor people have the least mobility, and so the jobs in their area are all the ones that they can exercise their control of labor supply over. Example: When Wal-Mart becomes (inevitably) the only game in a town, what then prevents Wal-Mart from depressing the wage rate indefinitely? Certainly not a sense of corporate citizenship! The workers cannot move, and they cannot change jobs, so the supply/demand relationship is completely skewed. Before long you've got the old "company store" trap of the industrial revolution mining towns.

Also, minimum wage laws drive up paygrades well above entry level. If minimum wage laws were such a giant punishment to business, why would the businesses do this instead of just diminishing the interval between pay levels to offset the cost of entry-level folks? At the lower end of the employment spectrum, a much higher portion of wages is expended on retail purchases... this leads to rewards for local businesses when such employees are paid better.

People at the bottom of the earning scale are affected more than just the 8 hours per day worked. The cost of healthcare, child care, and other services have risen consistently in real dollars (especially healthcare, greatly outpacing inflation). Reducing the worker's wages increases the number of job seekers, because now that one job doesn't fill the need. That same worker is also seeking other employment, thus driving up unemployment as part-time labor is cheaper than full-time. The cycle then repeats.

And what results from parents being away 12, 14, 16 hours out of the day working two or three jobs? The answer is not "better-performing students that later bolster the local economy." Short-term, it sucks and long-term it sucks.

Some links:
http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/brie…
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/12/01/…
http://www.uvm.edu/~vlrs/doc/min_wage.htm

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nofaith is the second person in two days to tell me I should move out of the country.

I am doing something right, then.

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"I am doing something right, then."


@mat - best of luck in your move!

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I think that the question we should ask ourselves is; "How much can the government regulate or attempt to control vice, or sin if you will?" I am a Christian, I'm very traditional and conservative, but I am libertarian on the issue of drugs. Like Ron Paul, I think the federal "war on drugs" is like socialism, it doesn't work and it never will. I think the drug issue should be up to the individual states, if some states want to legalize marijuana or other drugs, then so be it. I also believe their is a big difference between a pot smoker and a "druggie." I have friends who smoke pot, some of whom own businesses, and they function just as normally as people who don't. On the other hand, I've had friends who started using hard drugs like crack and meth, and it was an awful sight to behold, very scary. I definitely think reefer should be legal, as far as hard drugs go, I'm not sure where I stand on that. Like liberals, many so-called "conservatives" do not understand human nature. As a Christian, I believe that man is sinful, it is in the fallen nature of human beings to seek pleasure, even if it's in doing things that are bad for us, whether it's smoking, drinking, eating junkfood, etc. Man has been abusing substances since the beginning of time. The Bible tells of this in Genesis 9:20-21; "And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken, and uncovered (naked) in his tent." In other words, Noah got really buzzed by consuming something he grew! So what else is new? I believe the true role of government should be to prevent and punish crime. The government should only intervene if one citizen commits a crime against another. In order for there to be a crime, there has to be (1) a perpetrator, and (2) a victim. So if somebody decides to smoke a joint in the privacy of their own home on their own time, how can that be a crime? They're not bothering or doing harm to anyone else, they should be left alone! Is smoking weed a sin? I don't believe it is if it's used for medicinal purposes, but it is if it's recreational use. (That's my personal belief anyway.) That being said, let the church deal with that, let the preachers preach against it, just like they do against drunkenness. Let each person be governed by their own conscience; if you don't see anything wrong with smoking weed, then by all means light up, but if you think it's wrong, then don't do it. It's that simple. God is the author of our liberties, He gave each of us a free will, to choose between right and wrong, and good and evil. No amount of legislation can change the human heart, only the Holy Spirit of God can do that. People who like to smoke weed are going to do it anyway, and no amount of laws, no drug testing (which I completely oppose for anybody) and no punitive measures of any sort will ever stop it. The original prohibition in this country, for alcohol, ran from 1919 to 1933. It did not work! So in 1937, (the year they made marijuana illegal) they bascially replace one form of prohibition with another. And guess what? That doesn't work either! The phony "war on drugs" is a waste of time and a plundering of the taxpayer. It is a fraud. They only thing it does is to make certain people richer (like drug testing labs, drug cartels, and rehab centers) to keep useless government bureaucrats employed (like the DEA, etc.) and oppress the people. It's time to end this foolish madness once and for all.

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The way political opposition forces for thousands of years operated by prohibiting only CERTAIN drugs and criminalizing them in attempts to rise or stay in power, is the same way Conservatives, Republicans and others are doing today: criminalize otherwise law-abiding citizens so that many of their political enemies are neutralized and/or silenced.

The War on Drugs started (really its been about 80 years) with a corrupt Republican politician named Richard Nixon, who spied on his enemies and focused on eliminating them by locking them up over simple drug violations. I, supposedly a “good” Conservative Republican (only vote that way because Democrats are worse) supported the War on Drugs. I changed over the years to only wanting to decriminalize Cannabis, but keeping other already illegal drugs illicit, then to legalizing Cannabis but still keeping other illicit drugs illegal, to now knowing I was WRONG about the entire subject and believe ALL drugs now criminalized should be legal so that government regulates them, instead of the ruthless Drug Cartels.

What all of us need to do is ask the two simple, basic questions that should determine whether or not we should support a law or not. The first basic question is whether the law we support is Constitutional – especially from the standpoint of looking at the law from the viewpoint of Freedom of Religion, Speech and Assembly. The War on Drugs FAILS at protecting all three of these precious rights. Secondly, does the law fulfill the basic premise of Government that it does NOT deprive someone of their pursuit of happiness that all are guaranteed, as long as what they are pursuing doesn’t harm someone else? The War on Drugs FAILS at this very basic question of the very foundation of why Government exists in the first place.

From the start, U.S. Drug Policy was determined along racial lines, with the first law banning opium smoking in the late 1800s because it was the favorite of Chinese laborers who were brought here to build the railroads, even though White folks used opium too, but they sipped it in their drinks, which was considered perfectly acceptable.

Cocaine was also a popular drug in the late 19th Century, with cigarettes treated with it, medicines derived from it and even the Sears catalogue offering it for sale. But when the Journal of the American Medical Association published an editorial on cocaine use among blacks in the South, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a racist named Dr. Hamilton Wright to head up his version of the War on Drugs. Wright stirred up anti-black and anti-Latino sentiments.

Nelson Rockefeller, longtime New York governor is widely remembered as the architect of New York’s draconian drug laws enacted in 1973 mandating that possession of even small amounts of cocaine or heroin be punished with minimum sentences of 15 years to life in prison—even for those with no prior record.

As a result of these laws, some 200,000 men, women and children were condemned to spend decades in prison. Today, nearly 90% of those incarcerated in New York on drug charges are black or Latino, and the Rockefeller laws became the model for drug laws all across the country that eventually imprisoned hundreds of thousands more in the racist War on drugs. The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. has grown eightfold since 1970, with 2.3 million behind bars today — 70% of them Black or Latino.

A 2009 report by the New York Civil Liberties Union said that the Rockefeller laws are “New York’s Jim Crow Laws.” In the 1950s, when Jim Crow segregation was still legal in the South, Black Americans made up 30% of the national prison population. But today, as a result of the War on Drugs, Blacks, which account for only 13% of the U.S. population, make up over 50% of prison inmates, eight times the rate of imprisonment for Whites. And according to a 2007 Justice Policy Institute report, Black men are sent to prison on drug charges at ten times the rate of white men, even though their drug use is about the same.

Thanks for listening, 777denny

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@no faith- You ever work for minimum wage? You ever try to pay bills and feed a family off of less than $10 an hour? Would you even get out of bed for that?
You conservative types seem to think that some middle man on wall street who shuffles other folks money around sucking a percentage off the top are more worthy of prosperity than people who actually work for a living. Why is it that you have such disdain for the working class? Next time cut your own grass, take your own garbage to the dump, move your own furniture, flip your own burgers, fix the pot holes on your street. Why don't you carry some lumber? Not once, but everyday. And listen and read the opinion of self important ass wipes like yourself who think that very minimum wage protection is wrong. Most people who work for TWICE minimum wage struggle to get by or work more than one job. I would know, I'm one of them.

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