Well good for Auspm then I say as I completely agree with him! Whilst this was written with a view to the United States - it is equally as applicable here in Australia... Some Random Thoughts About the War on Drugs It is not my purpose in this essay to explore the merits or demerits of drug use, a question that should properly be left to the individual. It is irrelevantand often a matter of sheer conjecture and unsupported opinionwhether drugs in general, or any drug in particular, may be good or bad for the individual or for society. In an era in which most of the worldespecially government and the mediawas hoaxed into believing in global warming, it would be wise to be suspicious of any "science" offered in support of government policies. Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrongand demonstrably more destructivefor government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are generally inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed; it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost. Those who argue that an individual's drug use affects others the drug user's family, for example, or his friends, his employers, his co-workers, his lodge brothers, or little children starving in India or Chinaare merely attempting to deprive those people of personal choices that they should be free to make, concerning their association with the drug user. Even children should have the right to disassociate themselves from a parent whose drug use threatens their wellbeing. Moreover, while we may love certain people in our lives, and they may love us, that doesn't make us their property any more than it makes them ours. Each and every individual is the owner and sole proprietor of his own life, and nobody who understands history and human nature wants to live in a society where that principle is not upheld. While employers have an understandable interest in forbidding drug use on the job, they have no right to dictate what an employee does on his own time as long as it doesn't affect his or her performance at work. Current testing policies enforce company preferences off the job as well as on, and they must either be modified or discontinued altogether. Exactly the same restrictions should apply to schools. Importantly, there is nothing in the Constitutionby which, under Article 6, Section 2, officials at every level of government are obligated to abidethat authorizes the banning of any substance or enforcing that ban with the threat of injury, incarceration, or death. The lawful powers of the federal government are enumerated in Article 1, Section 8, and they do not include prohibiting drugs or any other substance or establishing paramilitary police agencies to enforce such a prohibition. Politicians early in the 20th century understood this, and passed a Constitutional amendment allowing them to outlaw alcohol. No such amendment was ever passed, or even proposed, with regard to drugs. Given the number of turf wars, drive-by shootings, compromised police and other officials, and invasions by uniformed thugs of the wrong address that are closely associated with the War on Drugsand with special attention directed to the bloody open warfare between competing drug cartels and a putrescently corrupt Mexican government presently spilling over our southern borderit should be clear by now that drug laws and the attempt to enforce them cause vastly more destruction to individuals and society, and consume much more time, energy, and money, than the drugs in question ever did. We owe the existence and character of the police state which has sprung up all around us largely to government excesses in the name of the War on Drugs. A new correspondent of mine recently asserted that the real reason that America never won the 'war on drugs' is that "we never really made it a war. Terror and violence," he insisted, "can only be subdued through greater terror and greater violence. Systematically target the boss narcos with cruise missiles," he suggested, "and continue with their replacements, and the flow of drugs [will die] in less than a year." I seriously doubt that, but I didn't debate it. Instead, I asked him what, precisely, gives anybody a right to do something like that? Show me that portion of the Constitution that specifically authorizes it. I added, "Mention 'the children' once, and you'll be sent back to Start and lose all of your points. The only ones who should stop kids from using drugs are their parentsand the kids themselves, of course. "It worked for mine." "Terror and violence" against drug producers and dealers is no more permissible than terror and violence against grocery store owners or bicycle dealers. There are murderous morons in government who ache to do this same sort of thing to gun dealers and their customers. Know that, and you'll have a begininng at understanding how to handle the problemto the extent that it really is onein a sane, ethical way. Remember, there was no drug problem until there were drug laws. I confess I get heated on this issue, even if I have less than no interest in the drugs themselves. (I'm an alcohol and caffeine man.) But it is the worst kind of usurpation against individual sovereignty and self-ownership to point a gun and tell people what they can and cannot do with their own lives"for their own good". I would far rather live with gangsters running things than with do-gooders who think they have a right to organize my life for me. The truth, now, wouldn't you really rather Chicago was run by Al Capone than Baby Dick Daley? On top of that, government has wasted countless billions of our dollars since about 1900, and it's squandered millions of lives, worldwide, in a futile attempt to keep people from doing whatever politicians disapprove of. How stupid do you have to be to see that drug cartels are not empowered by drugs, they are empowered by drug laws? How many diseases might have been cured with that money? How many trips to the Moon and other planets have we thrown away? If you want to know where your Picturephone, your flying car, and maybe even your interstellar drive went, they were devoured by the War on Drugs, a war whose "victories" are worse disasters than those of the drugs themselves? And along the way, we have empowered and enriched, not just the drug lords, but countless scumbag politicians, bureaucrats, and cops, and given them permission to stick their fingers up our asses, demand blood and urine samples, and generally violate our privacy, dignity, and liberty. Ironically, the honest ones are worse than the corrupted ones. The men who fought the American Revolution would have answered these foul usurpers with iron, fire, and lead. So forgive me for falling far short of that and getting a little exercised. Drug laws (and the myriad other usurpation that inevitably followed) have destroyed the America I once believed in and the future I expected to arrive. No one has a right to interfere with "acts of capitalism between consenting adults", no matter how high their moral dudgeon or how many useful idiots they drag along with them. It is that very interference, by two coercive states, that is at the heart of the violence on the border. It's the drug laws that have made this mess. The real enemies of life, liberty, and property are in Congress and our state legislatures. In the first third or the 20th century, the Volstead Act and alcohol Prohibition brought unprecedented oppression and violenceboth from criminals and "law enforcement"into the lives of ordinary Americans, and nobody seems to have learned a damned thing from it. Drug Prohibition allows criminal scum to make obscene amounts of money because cheap agricultural products have been made illegaland therefore massively profitablefor no logical or Constitutional reason. Equally loathesome politicians, bureaucrats, and jackbooted thugs scheme psychopathologically to accumulate power for its own sake by frightening the population and keeping them at one another's throats. How many more incarcerations for possession of politically incorrect vegetable byproducts, how many more violent raids at the wrong addresses, how many more unjustifable killings by militarily equipped policemen with too many guns and too much power, does this culture have to tolerate before somebody cries, "Enough!"? When will somebody with a tall enough soapbox point out that the cultivation, manufacture, distribution, sale, possession, and consumption of drugs are all normal human activities guaranteed protection under the Constitution? The production, processing, transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of drugs is, in fact, a Ninth Amendment right, differing in no respect from the production, processing, transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of bread. All laws contravening the Ninth Amendment are unconstitutional and therefore illegal. Every government agency responsible for enforcing these laws is therefore a criminal conspiracy, and every individual who works for them is an unappehended criminal. America didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. While drugs were consumed by large numbers of peoplethe number of women habituated to the opium found is laudanum is, no pun intended, staggeringthey were, for the most part, easily able to live their lives, do their jobs, and raise their families pretty much the way we do today. None of that changed until legislation was passed generously handing the drug trade over to criminals and criminal organizations, removing commercial safeguards of uniformity and sanitation, cruelly endangering the lives and freedom of drug users, and generating all kinds of associated crimes of violence and and the risk of disease and death. Interestingly, the first turf wars, drive-by shootings, corrupt police and other officials, and invasions of the wrong address occurred, not in connection with drugs but with alcohol prohibition, an historic period that doesn't appear to have taught anybody anything. Advocates for one drug or another often claim that their drug is less dangerous to individuals and less damaging to society than tobacco or alcohol. This "Do it to Julia" tacticwhich George Orwell warned us about in 1984is less than productive. What each of us must demand consistently is freedom for all to make important choices in our lives, rather than have them made for us by the government and the kind of sick, twisted, broken individuals who use it to control others because their own lives are so repulsive and unbearable. Especially in this era where we can no longer trust science to be truthful, there is no reason tobacco and alcoholor other drugs should be regulated or taxed differently from any other product. The motivation to do so is punitive, essentially religious in character, and therefore forbidden under the First Amendment which states, in effect, that public policy is not to be made on the basis of religious beliefs. Advocates for drugs like marijuana often point out that if it were legal, it could be taxed, as a sort of bribe offered to the government to leave it users alone. This is the submissive behavior of a slave mind-set, and it has no place in the struggle for individual liberty. Taxationof any kindis theft, a far greater wrong than using dugs. As an issue, I am less than enchanted with the concept of "medical marijuana" because I can't shake the impression that it was thought up by it advocates as a "clever" way to inch, sneakily, toward full "legalization". On the other hand, what are we to believe about the character of any politician who would willingly watch innocent cancer victims starve and wither away under the ravages of chemotherapy, suffering prolonged deaths, writhing in indescribable agony, rather than allow Prohibition to slip backward a single political inch? Such a creature is a monster, a collectivist, willing to sacrifice any number of individuals to his dark, evil fantasy of control over the lives of others. I oppose "legalization" with its implications of regulation and special taxation; I simply want to see all the drug laws repealed. There's no more reason to "legalize" marijuanaor anything else, for that matterthan there is to "legalize" bananas. Alcohol was "legalized"meaning that Prohibition never really ended, it only changed in shapeand it staggers along today under a burden of discriminatory taxes and microscopic scrutiny inappropriate in a free country. Criminals should be tried and punished on the basis of what they did, rather than how they were when they did it, or what they used to get that way. If we can outlaw drugs because they sometimes cause some people to injure or kill others, then, given the history of the last thousand years, between the violent and ugly excesses of Christianity and Islam alone, we should be able to outlaw religion for the same reason. Many individuals in government don't seem to understand the laws of economics. Most of themaside from those in Congressseem to be concentrated in the area of "drug enforcement". They often brag at news conferences that their interception of drugs between producer and consumer has raised the "street value" of the drugs, meaning that the drugs are now scarcer than they were. What these statists stubbornly refuse to acknowledge is that this only increases the market incentive to cash in on those higher prices by making up for the artificial scarcity. Can they really be that stupid? Or do they understand cynically that the livelihoods of thousands of police officers, administrators, bureaucrats, and politicians depend heavily on never actually ending the illegal traffic in drugs? The drug war, in fact, is a kind of corrupt, evil game played endlessly by so-called "law enforcement" and traffickers, in which both profit obscenely at the irreparable expense of the Productive Class in particular and Western Civilization in general. Simply repealing drug laws at every level of government would save tens of billions of dollars every year, money that is badly needed now for America's economic recovery, money that shouldn't be wasted on an effort that has not only gone on for decades without positive results, but which has made the situation vastly worse than it was to begin with. Repealing drug laws would remove the risks involved with producing and distributing drugs, bringing "street prices" crashing down (it's estimated that a "spoon" of heroin would cost about a quarter in the free market), thereby eradicating any incentive that criminals might have to compete with legitimate businesses, and greatly reducingif not eliminating altogetherany economic reason to "push" drugs on children. Choices about drugs and drug use must be left to the character of the individual, or, all choices having been made for them, we will inevitably end up with individuals who have no character at all. And concern for "the children", which is often an excuse for the most atrocious of authoritarian policies must be left in the hands of their parents. The alternative is chaos, insanity, and ruin. How do you like it so far? I don't use drugs myself, but it annoys me whenever I hear conservatives getting shirty about others using drugs because "it's against the law". The fact is, drug laws are against the law. Nothing in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution permits their existence. The Ninth Amendment clearly protects the production, sale, purchase, and use of drugs. Article 6, Section 2 passes that protection on to lower juridictions. Those who pass and enforce drug laws are criminals themselves. If you're concerned about obeying the law, people involved with drugs must be left to direct their own lives, whether you approve or not. http://down-with-power.com/drugwar.html If you're not a little bit uncomfortable with your position, it isn't radical enough. How can you be too principled? Take the most extreme position you canyou're claiming territory you won't have to fight for later, mostly against your "allies". L. Neil Smith
That's cos all the dipsh1ts who buy on credit have driven prices sky high! If credit was abolished tomorrow, property prices would drop to their true value - which would be linked to a realistic amount which can be saved by the average wage earner in a reasonable amount of time.
You will never own "your" property. The gubmint owns it mate! So is interest ... and there's a lot more of it!
why - so the gubmint's got you by the balls when it's time to milk the populace? (see Greece and other European countries for a tip on who the gubmint will be stealing from in future once we reach their debit levels.)
really. well, what are YOU going to do about it? l'll tell you what, nothing. What rights do you actually have? The right to keep what you have if you can stop someone else from taking it. that's about it.
There are a lot more people abusing fast food and television (and credit) than drugs in the west. The Gov just hates drugs because they encourage lateral thinking which is of course outside of the box provided.
Ahh yes, rights. You are correct. They don't exist. No-one has the right to take my money by force nor ban me from putting whatever I want in my body because those rights don't exist. Agree? Disagree?
Offtopic but, there are lots of functional drug addicts in our society, taking caffeine, sugar, alcohol, tobacco and anti-depressants, but they are "ok drugs" because they are legal. But why are they legal? Hint, it's not because you can't abuse them! Abuse/overuse of anything is unhealthy but as the article Yippe attatched states things if left alone have a natural way of balancing out. It is often the regulation that makes things sick.
Rights exist to the extent that you can enforce them. If you can't, then what difference does it make if they exist or not? none. Someone breaks into your house and takes your money, never to be seen again. You may have a "right to keep what belongs to you, but so what? it's gone, and your right to keep it is worthless.
Back on topic (we're really trying here!) I am debt free and have been for a very long time (had a CC many years ago) I don't buy what I cannot afford and live within my means. I use a debit card for CC transactions, else I just EFTPOS my own money for purchases. If I want something I save for it and buy it outright. I have a small amount of savings in the bank for emergencies and day to day living expenses, cash on hand for outages and gold/silver for storing my wealth. Because I don't use leveraged debt, I don't have the trappings of society many assume are necessities, nor is my stack as large as many people here. But that said, I beholden to no one and what I own - I own outright. I don't have the need to own as much shit as the guy next door to be happy I guess.
Debt is a dangerous mistress, you just need to make sure who is on top and pay for your own vaseline if things get too tight. I don't personally indulge and never have done. I think I was sort of lucky growing up without the need/belief that if you want something you can just go and get it and pretend that you own it now, and then pay 10-15-20 % more for it while you do so. Is the latest this or that material object or a trendy holiday really worth the angst and worry of knowing you have to stay in a crappy job for X number of months or years to repay more than what it is actually worth in real value to have ? Do you pay more out on credit than you save ? The whole of western society is geared towards consumerism, every waking moment of our lives. Not spending, not having the latest, not providing the best for your family as deemed by those selling (and buying) it all, is seen as falling behind or being a failure. Obsolescence is the new norm now, where shit is built to fail so there is a constant turnover in product instead of the old norm of stuff you bought with your labour actually lasting (see many vintage commodores around?). The same is happening with peoples values and what it is to have a "happy" life, it has become a consumer oriented market place where one is deemed a failure in the eye of society unless it can be demonstrated with a dollar cost associated with it. An instant Peacock/Hen display on Facebook or update on some other must have social media to the point that even a so called BBQ these days is seen as uncouth and outdated unless some state of the art cuisine is on display and the humble sausage/sauce and a slice of bread is replaced with some unpronounceable and grotesque $10 a serve artsy interpretation of it. Now don't get me wrong, I can and do understand credit being used for reasons of substance, such as the expansion of enterprise where a business person takes on the risk of debt in order to either take on more business or upgrade machinery or in the case of a person wanting to purchase a "home" to live and raise a family etc in. But pretending that you are living while doing so on credit is really a nightmare within a dream, you're not living. You are a milk cow , you are building somebody else's dream at your own cost and more than likely that person is someone most find to be an overpaid prick at the top of a foodchain that 98% of society buy into . They have a new Plasma, car, laptop, ipad, dining setting, clothes, couch, dress, jewellery, holiday, shoes, hairstyle, blah blah blah, why cant I ? Most people here can understand the adage of "if you don't hold it you don't own it" when it relates to precious metals. Look around your life and do the same thing.... Do you really own it ?
We needed a new car and started saving in 2010, we dont use credit. Saving cash was hard, getting flittered away on bits a pieces, started buying silver instead of trying to hold cash. It worked was able to sell off a few items to help with the purchase. We also use lay - by, people have nearly forgotten lay-by when you can have it now interest free for 12months. If we cant afford it, we go without.
I saved for about 2 years, to be able to afford my car outright. At 14k, its wasn't much, but at least I dont have to worry about loans and things like that.
How can you abolish credit yippe? Credit is a natural part of a market, so to use that as an example in your argument about the inflated price of houses is ridiculous. You should have said if credit was tightened then property prices would find their true value.
I don't use X Therefore I don't have Y This would only be valid if X was the only way to get Y. X is not the only way to get Y Being based on a false premise ( that is X is the only way to get Y) this argument is invalid.
