The Progress And Prohibition Foundation

by Tim Lee on May 2, 2006 · View Comments

Anyone who could describe America’s drug laws as “lax and unenforced,” in a nation where hundreds of thousands of people are arrested every year for minor drug offenses, either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or isn’t a libertarian. And if the drug war is like copyright, doesn’t that mean the libertarian position on copyright is to repeal it?

View Comments Posted in: DMCA, DRM & Piracy

  • J
    I second the call for comments on IPCentral.

    Patrick:

    Tell the drug laws are lax to the over 700,000 people arrested for marijuana use last year. Tell it to Cory Maye. Tell it to Dr. Paul Heberle (whom I interview in my documentary on the drug war, along with his patients), who tried to help people in severe pain by providing them with needed pain medication, and is now on trial for his freedom because of it. Yes, the drug laws are very lax.




    As for antipathy, I rarely feel anything but neutral towards people on the web. When I walk away from the computer, I tend to forget most everyone that isn't a friend or colleague. There are passions involved, of course. For me, particularly on the issue of the drug war, to call the laws and enforcement "lax" demonstrates not a position, but a complete dissociation from the reality of the situation.

  • Yorthrup
    MikeT:

    I guess I'm just going to have to disagree with you on both fronts. I'd include a lot more people under the umbrella of "Christian" than you would, and I'd include a lot more people under the umbrella of "Libertarian" than you would.

    Your special definitions, created by some elite group, are exactly that: special and elitist.

  • Yorthrup,


    I am not going to get into here about religion because this is not my blog. My purpose with that comparison was to point out that there is in fact a standard core belief structure common to all libertarians that defines basics. For "orthodox Christians," (ie Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and all Protestants) the issue of the core beliefs is settled by that creed and the core Bible doesn't really have any significant variance between the different branches' canons save for the Apocrypha and that doesn't change the meaning of the New Testament. I stand by my point that a belief that no real libertarian can look at the War on Drugs and agree with what it has done anymore than a Christian can look at the Nicene Creed and disagree with fundamental parts of it and be considered a Christian.


    And one last thing. Libertarianism is a political ideology, not an outlook on life. There is no trademark involved with being a Christian, but we do have a core belief system that has been prayerfully settled for a very, very long time and that is directly based off of the scripture that both Trinitarians and Arians believed in. We never claimed to be open-minded and "tolerant" toward those who come in calling themselves Christians and who have radically divergent beliefs. Again, libertarianism is a political system, nothing more. If you doubt that one can be a libertarian while being an unabashedly orthodox, "narrow-minded Christian," I'd be more than happy to introduce you to one of my blog's readers who will set you straight if you won't believe me. He's so generally anti-state that he'd damn near make most people at PFF look pinko.

  • Yorthrup
    MikeT: So what do you say to Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.? That they aren't Christians?

    I just spoke with a Mormon friend of mine who said something to the effect of: "They can't accept us as Christians even though we believe in that guy who was born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, believe that he was the son of God born of Mary, believe that he performed miracles, believe in his perfect teachings and sinless example, believe that he died on the cross for us, and believe that he resurrected 3 days later?"

    I'd have to agree. It sounds like this Nicene business consists of a pretty "special" set of beliefs. [Stick with me on this -- you'll see how it relates to Libertarianism in a moment]. My friend also pointed out that one of the key components of the Creed, the belief in 'the Trinity' as a single entity (?) was hotly argued over by many Christians in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries after Christ's death, and that minor wars or skirmishes were even fought over the issue. And yet you would say that there is only one side to the issue, and that if you don't agree with it, you can't use the name "Christian?" Sounds like some sort of absurd patent/trademark claim that goes back to 1 A.D. and extends into infinity to me. Who are these "Christians" to tell another person what they may call themselves, and to tell them if they do or do not believe in Jesus?

    And of course I'm not just talking about Christianity here. This same narrowmindedness that we see among the "Christians," arguing about who can and cannot be in the special "Christian Jesus club is immature and, frankly, discredits their message -- and it also discredits "Libertarians" if those who profess to be such use the same types of exclusivity and intolerance. Only accepting a narrow definition of "Libertarian" paints you into the same type of pigheaded corner, if you asked me. Do you have a trademark on the word "Libertarian," and only you can license its use and dictate who gets to be one and what they must believe in order to have the honor?

  • Patrick: One other thing for you to consider is that not all of us who have criticized you feel antipathy toward you. I for one, don't. Sorry if you feel that way, but many of us are geeks and are prone to be passionate. It would actually benefit IPCentral tremendously to engage your readers via comment sections. Trolls are part of life, but part of what makes TLF a great blog is that its readers can communicate more easily with the bloggers behind it. Hell, one time I tried to politely email DeLong to tell him that one of his citations of a comment blasting him personally was from a blog reader, not the blogger as he originally thought, but none of your readers could see that.


    Just remember, Pat, HTML doesn't convey emotions. You shouldn't assume the worst that we're sitting there flaming the hell out of you. I was actually laughing my ass off when I saw that post of yours and chuckling to myself, "now THAT's a libertarian..." ;) Perhaps we need to start using Hyper-Text Snarkup Language :)

  • Patrick,


    The two are such night and day issues that it's like comparing gun control to child porn controls. There are major differences between the way that the French have been enforcing IP law and the way that the US government enforces its drug laws. People routinely get life-destroying convictions from possession of more than trivial amounts of hard drugs in the US. The French would actually be watering down protection of IP, whereas the federal government has every few years ramped up its war on drugs in some increasingly draconian way.


    I don't think anyone here is calling you an idiot, but surely you can see how someone would question your "libertarian credentials" because of that post of yours. I for one will take you at your word that it just didn't go over as planned with your readers. For the love of God, man, don't take simple "huh, what the?" comments about your politics as personal attacks.


    Again, I think your analogy, well... blows. The French law was clearly an attack on IP, which is a legitimate institution, and the War on Drugs is an assault on civil liberties. The former is bad for property rights, the latter being ended would naturally be good for property rights if for no other reason than all of those anti-property statutes would be kicked off the books.


    Yorthrup,


    Yes. The Nicene Creed is basically a summary of the core concepts of the New Testament. If you need a reference, a good translation is here. All of the concepts in there can be backed up by scripture verses, some of the most important ones coming directly from Christ. Rejecting a chunk of it for a Christian, would be like a secular libertarian rejecting say... the rights of self-defense and firearm ownership because it's a fundamental set of definitions of what constitutes basic Christian or another case, libertarian, ideas. How seriously would you take a Marxist who rejected the idea of abolishing private property?

  • Yorthrup
    "It's like someone calling themselves a Christian and then rejecting swaths of the Nicene Creed."

    ???

    I may not be intimately familiar with Christianity, but are you saying that in order for a person to call themselves a follower of Christ ( a "Christian"), they have to agree with a bunch of arbitrary decisions made by old men in tunics at the Council of Nice 300 years after Christ died?

    Isn't that almost as bad as saying that in order to call youself a libertarian, you have to agree with an arbitrary set of criteria made up by only one faction of the many groups that claim to have libertarian leanings?
  • Tim
    Patrick,

    I don't have any antipathy for you, and I didn't call you an idiot. However, I'm still confused about your claim that US drug laws are "lax and unenforced." We arrest hundreds of thousands of people and spend billions of dollars every year on domestic drug-fighting activities. How many more people would be have to lock up before our policy would qualify as non-lax in your book?
  • First, let me extend my thanks to Tim for trying to pull back the rhetoric a bit here.

    On the whole libertarian kick -- I must have missed the meeting when the libertarian movement launched a credentials process. If they have done so, I'd rather not get a credential; one thing that's always attracted me to libertarianism is no one tells me what to think.

    I have called myself a libertarian (I'm an AZ native and I idolized Goldwater as a youth) but I generally call myself a "practical" libertarian. I live in DC and am involved in public policy; a true libertarian would divorce himself from that process before becoming infected.

    For example, the libertarian in me believes drug use should be legal, because after all it's ones own body, and who is the state to say what I put in it? But having lived in a not-so-good part of DC at the height of the crack craze, I also know that illegal drug use impacts not just the user, but the community. Families are destroyed, children are scarred, family savings are eviscerated, break-ins and muggings increase, fear pervades society, etc. There are no easy answers, but claiming "I'm a libertarian so the answer is just to ignore drug use" doesn't cut it from a public policy perspective.

    Of course, the point of my post, as should be clear by the title "Supply and Demand," was not to advocate more enforcement of drug possession laws. It was rather to point out the absurdity of spending billions for our military to go after drug fields in S. America (and alienating residents there in the process) when the demand stays high at home. One way, of course, to reduce demand is to support drug treatment programs and get these unfortunate people who have had bad breaks in life off of these drugs so they can raise their children and participate in the economy.

    The analogy came to me because the other night, my wife and I were watching a news report on drug eradication efforts in some South American country and we both marveled at the foolishness of it when demand remains high in the US. That can be said of other problems, such as sex tourism, where we berate third-world countries for the atrocity of allowing their children to partake in this when Justice Department and DHS figures show it's mostly US men hiring these children.

    So for those of you who want to call me an idiot, please continue to do so, particularly those individuals who don't really know me but have developed great antipathy for me (which actually includes anyone who has ever criticized me on TLF, actually). Next time, however, please keep in mind that you may be insulting not just me but my wife as well. If you have no qualms about that, fire away.

  • OK, I will admit that the criticisms against the PFF are probably undeserved at this point. However, you really do have to question how libertarian someone is when they have such a nonchalant attitude toward the War on Drugs because of how poisonous its effects have been on personal liberty. I can even appreciate Epstein's disagreement on copyright issues with the rest of us, but Ross' "Republicanesque" attitude toward the War on Drugs, especially his not so subtle suggestion that it's insane that we haven't tried harder to get drug use under control, is... well.... "problematic" in a similar sense that a libertarian who thinks that there is mostly truth in Marx's version of class warfare theory. It's that "elephant in the room" of one's beliefs that casts very solid doubt on what one really believes.


    Again, I respect the right of dissent, and don't even begrudge him the right to support the War on Drugs, but he should explain himself on that point. It's like someone calling themselves a Christian and then rejecting swaths of the Nicene Creed.

  • Tim
    If he thinks that our drug laws are lax and unenforced, I'm certainly willing to say he's not much of a libertarian. But I don't think that proves that PFF as a whole isn't a libertarian organization. And I don't think that "anyone who comes down so heavily on supporting any expansion of copyright holder rights is not a libertarian." Richard Epstein agrees with PFF on copyright issues. I think he's wrong, but I don't think that makes him unlibertarian.

  • Tim,


    Other political factions get it right on other issues too. Conservatives often get it right, even though they can be terribly wrong on other issues to the extent that they almost negate their pro-liberty stances. I hope you do realize that there are legitimate reasons to question how Ross can call himself a libertarian and make such statements about the War on Drugs.

  • Tim
    Guys, PFF does a lot of good work on issues like telecom and free speech. And there are lots of libertarians I respect who disagree with me about the DMCA. The title of this post was poorly chosen, and I didn't mean it as an attack on PFF. I was just trying to give Patrick a hard time for what was probably a careless statement. Let's try to avoid name-calling, please.
  • Btw, Tim. I just wrote up another good example of why software patents are bad here if you're interested. This time, I provided some actual working code that most people should be able to grok at least a little bit.
  • Dammit Tim, I could have told you a long time ago that the PFF is NOT a libertarian organization and that Ross' "libertarianism" is a crock. Anyone who comes down so heavily on supporting any expansion of copyright holder rights is not a libertarian. I think this just seals the deal.
  • PLN
    Oh god my eyes are bleeding.
  • Joel
    And if the drug war is like copyright, doesn't that mean the libertarian position on copyright is to repeal it?

    You tell it, brother!
  • ArthurQ
    The PFF is, somewhat ironically, smoking a lot of crack.


    I 'take a trip' everytime I read DeLong.

  • PFF is not exactly a libertarian organization, particularly given their support for antitrust (and their recent hiring of a former FTC commissioner who endorsed price controls in health care.)
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