,,, Has been run, and as everyone who has kids warned for years, making a false idol of freedom has been a disaster.
There are fewer people in the court system for possession charges now, but no reasonable person doubted that claim. If we stopped arresting people for murder, the courts would see a drop in murder cases. The argument for or against legalizing drugs was never about courts of prisons. It is about the overall quality of life. If a big robust criminal justice system is what we need in order to have a high quality of life, only crazy people will complain about that trade-off. Life is nothing but trade-offs.
When you look at what has been happening in the country in total since states began to experiment with drug legalization, a pattern emerges. We have seen a sharp rise in taxes at the state level, some owing to taxes on drug sales, but also a sharp decline in the rule of law. The Western states, where marijuana legalization first started, has seen a collapse in civil order. You have massive homeless camps in Los Angeles, anarchy in Seattle and Portland. Anarcho-tyranny is the rule out west now.
Another point worth mentioning is that the states rushing to legalize drugs have also been some of the worst offenders of Covid lockdowns. California is operating under a bizarre form of martial law. Criminals and bums can run wild in the streets, but normal businesses are being shuttered over Covid. Maine has wrecked their tourist industry over Covid, despite few cases. Massachusetts is operating under a curfew. Maybe these states did not legalize weed for libertarian reasons.
The numbers don’t lie. In the past year, the number of murders in Portland rose by 51.5%. Minneapolis saw a 72% rise in the murder rate, and Seattle had a 74% explosion in murders.
It is important to underscore that the collapse of civil order in drug legalizing states is not caused by drug fiends running the streets. The bums, drug fiends, petty criminals and bourgeois revolutionaries are symptoms of a larger decline in civil order. The image that is beginning to emerge is that drug legalization efforts correspond with a collapse in the willingness of state government to maintain order. The Covid hysteria is probably just another indicator of this collapse in civil order.
The decadent, incestuous ruling class that closed down the churches didn’t legalize weed because they love liberty. First and foremost, they’ve renounced any duty to protect us and now seek to actively harm us. Just look at how they let the opioid crisis run rampant.
Second, our rulers see the cracks forming in the current order and need bread and circuses to keep the masses distracted.
Third, the elites want anyone who might object to their tyranny kept dull-witted and weak.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
And take this sad state of affairs as another lesson in the hierarchy of cultural warfare. For decades now, Libertarian and Conservative opposition to Leftist totalitarianism has relied on appeals to freedom. The result: They lost their liberty and conserved nothing. It was a foregone conclusion that anti-lockdown protests based on the same appeals would be utter failures.
Freedom is moral currency. Its worth wholly depends on the intrinsic value of the goods you can get with it.
To win, it will be absolutely necessary to abandon transactive relativism, stop pushing negatives, and champion the common good.
And Disney, Netflix, and AAA gaming are the circuses half of the equation, so it’s also necessary to stop giving money to people who hate you.
It took the Trump era to cure me of libertarianism. I saw Reason flip on a dime from railing against Obama's health care awfulness to railing against all efforts by Trump to give the country actual borders. I saw the libertarian right cheer on pot legalization and oppose restrictions on porn. The real breaking point, though, was when I just about spouted the 'not real communism' canard only with libertarianism in place of communism.
The reluctance of the right to reign in Big Tech, meaningfully address the usurious fraud racket that is student loans, and pay out cash to people the government put out of work just further reinforced what I already knew at that point.
For the curious, the biggest hole in libertarian utopianism is the idea that all people will ultimately act in their *financial* best interest, a falsity that Mr. Neimeier has already covered extensively. Every libertarian ideal requires a society that uses nonviolent, extralegal means to enforce virtue, which is just a government that lacks the power to actually exact justice.
Libertarianism is big gay.
I praise God for calling me out of that pit, never again will I have to pretend that it is normal to ask 'what if the child consents'.
Thank you for teaching me that one. It really is a silver bullet.
I was thinking about the lockdowns today. It's been just shy of a year since I first heard about the virus on Metokur's stream. Back then, folks on the dissident right were calling for travel restrictions and short but strict lockdowns while urging reprisals against China. It was hoped that Trump would use Corona-chan to discredit globalism and become the next FDR.
Everybody forgets that initial time window, as well as the Left's knee-jerk reaction. You had subcontinental blue checks with MD in their bio dismissing Covid as the flue while calling Trump racist for restricting travel with China.
Then BoomerCons like Bill Mitchell started issuing hysterical warnings about lockdowns tanking the stock market. That became the official Conservative position, and the Left pulled a 180 in response. They whipsawed from denouncing any talk of a pandemic as racist to clamoring for total lockdowns overnight.
As always, once the Left formed a consensus contra the Conservative position, the Lefty consensus won the day.
What struck me today is that Conservatives really do always lose–not because they refuse to play the game by the Left's rules, but because "Conservatives always lose" *is* a rule of the game.
More so even than drowning out actual potential right-thinking leaders and misleading the non/less-brainwashed into supporting unchecked materialism and unfeasible “principled” government strategy, the Uniparty’s main purpose for Republican figureheads is to have them stake ideological ground so that leftist voters (all of whom are Dunning-Krueger retarded contrarians whose only guiding principle is “defy and impede old successful white men even, if not especially, when doing so demonstrably makes things worse”) will see them and then rally around the exact opposite position, which is always the one that damages society the most regardless of if the Conservative thesis was actually correct or not. They are like scarecrows in that way, or perhaps reverse Judas goats.
The killer for Libertarianism and even for classical liberalism, possibly even pure democracy: they all measurably fail to conserve the most liberty (natural rights, see Feser) for the most number. A tool that cannot drive a nail in is not a hammer; or if you like, salt that isn’t salty is just dirt.
They all fail to secure the Good.