Truth To Power wrote:We may only be saying that criminalization/prohibition is unwise and counter-productive. Which it clearly is. Government clearly does have business with people's private vices, to the extent that they harm the polity;
Joe Liberty wrote:Again with the nebulous "harm" to abstract concepts...
There is a difference between a concept, which is an abstraction, and the real thing the concept designates. The polity is a real thing with certain characteristics and interests, and can indeed suffer harm, such as economic decline, military invasion, an epidemic of contagious disease, etc.
The fact that prohibition has been a massive, catastrophic failure does not in any way imply that government should do nothing to mitigate harms caused by drug use, or that it has no business doing anything.
That's true, as far as it goes, the massive failure of the drug war is not the reason government has no business prohibiting drugs. It's an unintended consequence (an utterly predictable one at that) of government's attempts to do something it has no business doing. The reason it has no business doing it is because it was granted no powers to do so by the constitution.
That's just the legalistic fallacy, and is refuted by the general welfare clause in any case.
They needed a constutional amendment to ban alchohol, there is no such amendment to ban anything else. Thus, it simply does not have the power.
Nope. Wrong. Flat, outright wrong as a matter of objective fact.
The SC disagrees, and as they have the final word UNDER THE CONSTITUTION, you are out of luck, sorry.
Adultery is legal -- but you can still be sued successfully for it. So government is not taking a hands-off approach, just a wiser approach than in the case of drugs.
The fact that a government-run court system will entertain divorce requests does not invalidate my analogy.
Ignoratio elenchi. You can be sued by the spouse of someone you had an adulterous affair with.
Adultery is indeed perfectly legal, there are no laws against it at all, and by your logic that means the government is saying that it's okay.
Wrong. As already explained, there are no laws prohibiting many torts, but government still takes an interest in suppressing such behavior, just through the civil courts.
Me wrote:I'll add a different perspective: in a self-governing society, the power of the government is derived from the consent of the governed. Now, since you can't give power you don't have in the first place, this technically means the government can't do anything that you couldn't do on your own, if you had the resources.
Truth to Power wrote: Wrong.
No, that's exactly right,
Nope.
the US government gets its power by the consent of the governed, and you can't give away something you don't have.
But consent to be governed is something people DO have.
There are many things people can't rightly do on their own which government CAN rightly do because its JOB is to secure and reconcile people's individual rights, and an individual can't do that.
An individual most certainly can defend his own rights.
No, he cannot. Rights ARE societal undertakings to constrain its members' actions wrt each other.
That's why he can grant government the power to do it on his behalf, when the threats to one's rights are on a grander scale (such as an invasion).
Nope. The governed can consent to government using powers and authority they themselves do not have.
Most particularly, government arises in the first place because of the need, in a settled society, to administer possession and use of land to secure rightful property in fixed improvements. No individual can rightly do that.
Sure they can, and did, before government came along.
Nope. Flat false. No one ever had a right to exclude others from natural opportunities without making just compensation. They only did it because they had the
power to do it. But by that "logic," slavery, rape, murder, etc. are also things people can rightly consent to their government doing.
You can stake a claim to a property and defend it,
But as land can never rightly become property, that's nothing but forcible, uncompensated abrogation of others' rights to liberty.
so that power can be granted to government to do on a large scale.
Nope. Having a
power to steal from others is not evidence of a
right to steal from others.
Rights only have meaning in society, and interfering with people's drug use is not to protect them from themselves, but to protect society from the effects of their irresponsible drug use.
If by "society" you mean other individuals (because it means nothing else),
It
definitely means something else. Your refusal to know the meanings of ordinary English words is not an argument, sorry.
you've now granted government the power to pre-emptively take action before any harm has been done to anybody.
As with drunk driving. Correct.
That's a dangerous precedent, and one of the reasons prohibition is so corrupting.
True, that kind of law
is dangerous, but in certain cases justified.
Yes, it does, because rights COME FROM our condition as social animals of a specific sort in the first place.
No, privileges and "civil" rights are granted by government.
Ignoratio elenchi.
You have inherent rights as an adult human being that government does not grant, that was the whole point of the Constitution, to prohibit the federal government from interfering with those rights.
Still ignoratio elenchi. You are not addressing the fact that rights COME FROM an evolutionary process where
individual survival and success were very much a function of
societal survival and success.
Even if I were to accept the flawed premise of your statement, that doesn't mean government can treat you like an idiot child.
There is no flawed premise of my statement. It's biological fact.
No, the radical libertarian view is not based on a sound analysis of the source and nature of individual rights.
Don't tell me how I've arrived at my political philosophy, and I won't tell you how you arrived at yours.
You don't know how I arrived at mine, but as a former libertarian, I know how you arrived at yours.
We're on board with the practical argument. We're agreed prohibition is an atrocity. But we differ on why.
But from what I can tell, your "why" doesn't actually prohibit the government from doing it,
Correct. It depends on the drug. None of the commonly used ones should be prohibited, because they aren't as harmful as prohibition -- obviously: if they were that bad, people wouldn't be using them. But there are more dangerous ones that need to be banned.
in fact you defend the power of the government to treat citizens like retarded children.
Strawman.
I don't see how that would correct this problem at all.
I'm advocating a reasoned approach. That's always going to correct the problem, if it can be corrected at all.