Light ‘em Up for Liberty

I’m told that the best thing about beating your head against the wall is how good it feels when you stop.  Our national bi-partisan War On Drugs is a lot like that.

The war on drugs has reduced respect for the rule of law.  As Montesquieu wrote two hundred years ago, Useless laws weaken the necessary laws. More than 100 million Americans have smoked marijuana. Each of those citizens is now a criminal.  Becoming a criminal changes the way that a citizen thinks about his country, about the legal system, and about himself.  It causes him to love his country less, to respect the legal system less, and to hold himself to a less strict standard of behavior.

Economically, the War on Drugs is a disaster.  Approximately 100,000 Americans are currently imprisoned for marijuana offenses.  Taking each of these citizens freedom costs the taxpayers approximately $40k/yr.  For $40k/yr, you could send your kid to a very good university.  Instead, the government is spending your kids tuition money to imprison people for smoking.

Our current president is an admitted marijuana and cocaine user, and yet he is afraid to publicly back marijuana legalization efforts.  Obama’s financial backer, George Soros, isn’t so timid.  He has funded legalization initiatives in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

Notable conservative scholars such as William F. Buckley and George Schulz have written in favor of marijuana legalization, but such views remain in the minority of the Republican Party.  Marijuana legalization should be a Repubican issue.  If we are serious about small government, free markets, and liberty — we should not be giving government the power to tell people what they can and can’t smoke.

The Democratic Party currently runs the Executive and Legislative branches of government, and has a strong presence in the Judicial branch.  I would hope that they would use this power for at least one good thing.  Instead, they seem focused only on creating legislation, executive orders, and bureaucratic rules which expand government power and reduce American freedom.  The Democratic voters should demand more of their officials.

The Republican Party currently runs nothing.  The voters threw them out of office.  The Republican Party is now in the process of soul-searching to determine who they are and what they stand for — and scheming how to get back in the good graces of the American public.  It seems to me that throwing party support behind marijuana legalization would endear the party to pro-liberty and small government activists, as well as the 100 million Americans who have smoked marijuana.  This would be an opportunity to make a good economic decision that would prove that the Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility.  It would also be a huge step towards the building the “big tent” that many Republicans believe is necessary to beat the Democrats in 2012.

But mostly, it’s the morally right thing to do.  As Thomas Jefferson wrote, Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. It’s time that both parties recognized how far we have strayed from the wisdom of our founding fathers.  The American government has no right to violate the rights of Americans — unless it is absolutely necessary to do so in order to protect the equal rights of others.  This is a fundamental part of what America stands for and we the people should refuse to vote for any candidate who denies this great American heritage.