Pubdate: Wed, 29 May 2002
Source: Rock River Times (IL)
Copyright: (c) M. Simon - All rights reserved. Permission granted for one
time use in a single periodical publication. Permission also granted for
concurrent publication on the periodical's www site.
Contact:  http://www.rockrivertimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/539
Author: M. L. Simon
Note: The author is an industrial controls designer and Free Market Green. 

HOW TO TELL

How can you tell the right from the left in America? We do it like any good
pollster or reporter would. We ask questions.

So the first question is, "Do you believe that putting a gun to an honest
non-violent person's head is the way to get the world you want?" Who in
America would answer yes to such a question? So we have established a
principle. Just to make it clear, we can ask a second question. "Would you
be willing to hire gunmen to do the job for you?" No? "What if the gunmen
were government enforcers?" I will assume a more hesitant no.

The next question to ask is, "Would you put a gun to people's heads to get
social justice?" Right about now, about half my audience is going very
wobbly on me. They see pictures of poor people. They see the hungry, the out
of work, and they say to me, "Who wouldn't put a gun to people's heads to
eliminate suffering? My reply is this: We have programs galore and we
haven't done much to put an end to such suffering. In fact, we have held
back progress while trying to help. Suppose that in the 50 years since WWII
the government had been limited to it's constitutional functions. Milton
Friedman estimates that would give us a growth rate of 10 percent a year
versus the 3 percent we are actually getting. We would have an economy 26
times as large as we do today. There would be plenty to go around.

So even if it is morally acceptable to force people to pay for social
justice, it doesn't work too well. It actually retards the wealth needed to
pay for what is wanted. So much for the left.

The next question to ask is, "Would you put a gun to people's heads to get
morality?" Right about now, the other half of my audience is going very
wobbly on me. Because, "Your body is God's temple, it is not your own."
Which may very well be true, but here comes the tricky part for a free
country. "We who are closer to God, having studied in divinity school, are
pleased to tell you exactly how God wants you to behave. For your own
spiritual betterment, we are going to prohibit moral pollutants like drugs."

Why do they say this these days? Because they have no better argument left.
Whatever harm drugs do, prohibition increases the harm ten-fold. From an
overdose standpoint, marijuana is safer than aspirin or alcohol. Even heroin
is relatively safe if the antidote for heroin poisoning was at hand for an
addict (we have laws against making the antidote available so as to maximize
the number of deaths from heroin). So we have people from religious schools
telling us how to live, and this isn't even Saudi Arabia.

The spiritual question is so important that it can't be left to chance or
choice. Like those religious stalwarts of the Spanish Inquisition, they
intend to get the right answer from you if it kills you. And in fact,
occasionally it does. Usually we get a person killed every month or two in a
marijuana bust gone bad. The rest that are captured are tortured for varying
lengths of time by imprisonment until their attitude towards their evil
behavior changes, or someone can post bail. These religious conversions do
not come cheap. We are willing to spend $20,000 or more a year on these
practitioners of the false drug religion until they change their ways.

Because everyone knows that drugs cannot bring you happiness (unless it's
Prozac), only God can bring you happiness (unless it's Prozac).

The funny thing here, too, is that it doesn't work. Let us just take one
small part of the culture war. Recent studies show that government anti-drug
advertising at best is useless and at worst may actually encourage 12- and
13-year-olds to try drugs. As almost any government program, it accomplishes
the opposite of its stated intentions. So we have demolished from both an
intellectual and practical standpoint the arguments of the left and the
right in favor of using government enforcers for their own pet programs.
Given the sheer numbers involved in promoting the use of force to solve
religious and economic problems, I don't expect change anytime soon in the
prevailing morality. The best we can hope for is kinder jailers and gentler
enforcers. I'm not holding my breath on that one either.

If you would like to find out more about what a free country was really
supposed to be like, you can read copies of the Constitution, the Federalist
Papers, the Declaration of Independence, and other good stuff for free:

http://mywebpage.netscape.com/msimon669/index.html.
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MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk