The Libertarian Party is not a fan of many of the drug war laws in the United States, believing that they create too many criminals out of otherwise consenting adults.  Not that we condone the use of drugs (or the abuse for that matter — any more than we’d condone the misuse or abuse of alcohol).  It’s the fact that prohibitions create black markets for otherwise worthless substances.  Rather than taking  away the incentive to push all sorts of things on your friends, family (children at school), the profits created by the War on Drugs give every person willing to take a shortcut to wealth the perfect incentive to get people hooked on the junk.

And then there is the ugliest side of the War on Drugs: further erosion of basic liberties, and the mainstreaming of authoritarian behavior in the culture to the points where many citizens watching the video above will think the actions of the police above are perfectly justified, or at worst, are a tolerable casualty  — tolerable collateral damage for a good cause.

Above is video from a February raid in Missouri.  The Balko site captions:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on. They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

And advocates:

I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime. But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

Problem with such efforts is what it implies: the government sees fit to know every little detail about you, tax scofflaw or not.

Perhaps if people actually felt the taxes they were paying were getting more of something they wanted, they’d more gladly pay.

Here’s a good interview with a defender of liberty — we don’t care what party — who explains the pros and cons of the Tea Party.

Stay tuned for more details!

(Wondering how different Bob Barr is from the same, old Democrats and Republicans?  Consider Bob’s comments on business as usual causing the economic crisis.)

Here’s some very sober thinking on the Drug War at a recent Libertarian presidential candidate debate. Sober thinking on a crucial subject while Congress is busy-bodying itself on steroid scandals.

The question of who owns your body — the government, voters, or you — is asked in a different way in this Reason TV Video. Libertarians believe you own you, and by inference you own the byproducts of you — that your property really is a representation of you in the past, with all that work it took to earn it. If you don’t own you, that implies slavery of some sort or another.

Los Angeles (April 10, 2008) – The Pennsylvania Turnpike is one of the country’s least cost-efficient toll roads, spending a whopping 62.4 percent of its toll revenues on operating and maintenance costs. Of 35 toll roads studied, only the Massachusetts and West Virginia turnpikes spend a higher percentage of their toll revenues on operating costs, according to a new report by the Reason Foundation, a free market think tank that has advised the last four presidential administration on transportation issues.

By comparison, the New York State Thruway has 51 percent more lane miles and handles 83 percent more vehicle miles traveled than the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but its annual costs are $39 million lower.

Over the last seven years the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s operating costs have more than doubled from $181 million in fiscal 2000 to $370 million in fiscal 2007. During that same time, the U.S. inflation rate was 23.4 percent, so the Turnpike’s costs grew at 4.5 times the rate of inflation.

“Anyone who doesn’t believe competition can make the Pennsylvania Turnpike a better, more efficient road is kidding themselves,” said Robert Poole, co-author of the report and director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation. “The data strongly suggest that a world-class toll road operator could generate substantial cost savings-which means they could afford to pay a premium to the state to lease the Turnpike.”

Read the Rest of the News Release here.

Let it suffice to say that Libertarians can’t help but question the real purpose of government-claimed monopolies on things like roads, education, and other services deemed too “vital” to be up against the free market for competition induced efficiencies.   In the end, these government monopolies are vast benefit systems for loyal voting unions and the clients of effective lobbying efforts. The taxpayer is sucker holding the bill, and that bill is increasingly coming due — just like all free lunches from politicians.

Yet Pennsylvanians choose to keep this system as it is by continuing to vote for democrats and republicans who simply toss the ball of power back and forth with little change from year to year.  It goes only to prove the warning that democracy is the theory that the people deserve to get what they want, and good and hard.

That’s why the U.S. is supposed to be a liberty protecting republic, and not a system that rewards those who can wrangle power and money for themselves at the parasitic trough.

Vote libertarian!

Every Republican I’ve spoken to is mystified that John McCain has sewn up the Republican nomination. For his entire career, he has been more statist on both domestic and foreign policy than even the typical Republican. He has been considered a “liberal,” and not in a good sense. He doesn’t share any of the values that are said to make up the Republican consensus on economics or culture or religion. His personal baggage is heavy and a mile long. He had no dedicated constituency within the party.Of course I’m not talking to the run-of-the-mill Republican. There are vast hordes of these people who have never read a book and vote only by the most sordid political instinct known to man. McCain is their candidate. It comes down to one thing only: the simple-minded, unthinking impression that he is a war hero and, more than anyone else, has what it takes to smash the evil foreign peoples who want to kill us. In short, he appeals to the militaristic, nationalistic impulses of the base Republican base.

The real question is why that one issue would trump every other concern alive among Republicans. How is it that imperialist nationalism has come to trump every other issue?

Many libertarians were formerly affiliated with the republican and democrat parties. Generally speaking, they found certain elements of one party or the other (and sometimes both) that they identified. But the also found a large and ever increasing element of both parties they didn’t like: the obsession to use government as the ultimate enforcer of solutions to the problems of humanity — at least as Congress and the President defined problems — and a willigness to sacrifice individual liberty as a mean to those ends.

Above is a passage from Llew Rockwell titled Triumph of the Red State Fascists. If you’re a believer in Ron Paul or just at a loss to explain why republicans can justify ending liberty while claiming to be for it, well — just give the piece a read. It explains a lot.   It explains why many republicans have finally given up on the Republican Party — the establishment pays short shrift to liberty, and believes you have no place to go. It explains how the R’s now use the fear you have of the “other party’ to get you to sacrifice your character, morals and ethics at the alter of “not wasting your vote.”

Welcome to the Libertarian Party. Even if you are not ready to join, please consider the importance of the libertarian ideology and its importance is keeping both Republicans and Democrats grounded in some way to the idealogy that founded this country. An ideology that said the individual answers to god, and that government is his servant and limited only to protecting the individual’s right to say no thanks to others meddling, be they robbers, foreign invaders, or mobs at the voting booth seeking to confiscate both dollars and freedoms for their own cause regardless of your consent. Our ideology is so strong and true, many of us would gladly vote for a libertarian minded person even if he or she was an R or D. Such is the case with Ron Paul. Its truly about your freedom and liberty.

Libertarianism is the key to freedom and a wealthy economy. Please support it one way or the other.

Here’s a nice video of tax dollars at work. A male driver with a pregnant wife and child in an SUV who is pulled over by the police attempts to clarify why he’s been pulled over and, absent a satisfactory answer, refuses to sign the ticket he’s given. The police officer immediately requests he exit the vehicle and turn his back and place his hands behind his head, during which the driver merely attempts to engage the officer in order to defuse the escalation and restate his concern. The officer draws his taser and begins threatening the man, who now is very concerned about being misunderstood. Then, in seconds, with zero threat to his own safety, the police officer proceeds to jolt the driver with 500 volts, to the terror of the man’s wife.

We believe that most police officers do a pretty good job. What we don’t like is the increased paranoia-state mentality in the country that is willing to tolerate more and more violations of basic freedoms in order to fight countless wars on this and that, from drugs and so on. What we absolutely fear are those entering law enforcement having zero attachment to defending liberty, instead defending laws that violate basic concepts of freedom, and create an environment that tolerates the “beat down” of those who question the legitimacy of what is happening to freedom, liberty, and — well, the right to question authority.

Watch the video and you decide. The time to question this environment, readers, is now — while you still can.