Define Irony: Applauding the arrest of protesters...

... and then championing free speech in the next sentence.

This amusing tidbit of counter-intuitive thinking from someone calling themselves 'Confederate Yankee' challenges even the inane reasoning of Robert Stacy McCain:

"6 people, presumably students, have been arrested protesting Virgil Goode's speech against illegal immigration at UNC-Chapel Hill. They seem to be every bit as tolerant as the Carolina blue fascists that violently ended Tom Tancredo's attempted speech last week.

The Daily Tarheel covered the speech via Twitter, and described juvenile protesters that simply don't understand that the freedom of speech hinges on the free exchange of ideas, not drowning out those that oppose your own.

It's a sad commentary on the state of education and intellectual discourse at Chapel Hill, but sadly a kind of intellectual bullying that has become a favored tactic on the political left.

A protestor at the Tancredo event sums up the thuggish behavior with daring honesty when she admitted, "I don't believe a lot of change in this country have come through debating and being happy and talking to people."

Presumably one day in the future this protestor or another one like her will brag about having the university with the cleanest-burning ovens."

See, the opposition to free speech is expressed by the protesters exercising their right to dispute the views with which they disagree and not by the arrest of said protesters. The writer comes to the dubious conclusion that exercising free speech is anathema to free speech, while arresting protesters practicing their constitutional rights to free speech and free assembly is defending free speech. Think about that for a long moment. The best way to defend our constitutional rights, according to Confederate Yankee, is to lock up people who exercise their constitutional rights. He then goes so far as to compare the exercise of one's rights of free expression to the Holocaust.

We should all have a serious problem with this kind of Orwellian thinking regardless of our political views about illegal immigration. True free speech means that the speaker has the right to speak his mind and those who disagree with him have the right to express their disagreement. All views have the equal right to be heard, protesters and speakers alike. To pretend that anything less than this is free speech is either genuine ignorance or egregious intellectual dishonesty. In this specific case I will not speculate which of the two it may be.

I will say that it is a core conservative trait to defend the rights of protesters they like (the Minutemen, pro-life groups, and gay bashers) even when those protesters explicitly break the law, while condemning law abiding protesters exercising their natural rights as 'fascists' when they disagree with said protesters. The double standard is hardly subtle.

Personally, I believe that free expression is something to be enjoyed on the left and the right. That even means Confederate Yankee is entirely free to blog as he chooses.

The problem is, this time, it kind of makes him look silly. At best.

The Political Problem of Prosecution: Why President Obama is Thinking About Whitewater and Paula Jones

The Bush administration memos detailing the dirty secrets of the GWOT continue to make an impact on the blogosphere. On Liberal Values, Ron Chusid has written several posts on the topic of torture over the past week, and over on The Anonymous Liberal, the eponymous author has made it his chief topic. Ron has made note of the fact that President Obama did leave the door open for prosecution of those officials responsible for setting policy on torture, despite his rather broad promise of immunity to the interrogators who actually committed the human rights abuses. He has also made strong posts about the moral failure and specific motives involved in torture. It is the latter that I find particularly cogent: torture's true effectiveness is not in eliciting unknown information from unwilling informants, but rather coercing specific, desired responses from unwilling victims. The classic purpose of torture throughout history has been to force a confession, real or spurious. The actual value of torture as an interrogation tool is marginal at best.

The Anonymous Liberal, as befits a lawyer, spends more time on the legal ramifications of the torture disclosures. Indeed, the discussion of whether or not President Obama was 'right' to promise broad immunity to the torturers under the idea that they acted in 'good faith' was the point of his original post (he claims that it was) and has dominated the discussion of both the original post and subsequent posts. Before going on to my real point, I feel I have to stop and share my views on the 'good faith' question.

The argument, as the AL advances it, is that if the statements of the OLC that the techniques being used in interrogations were not torture and therefore legal than it follows that the interrogators did not break the law because they believed, in good faith, that they were not breaking the law. Naturally, this is a somewhat controversial argument among liberals. Some accept it while others disagree and some of them have done so quite aggressively. The precedent advanced most often is the Nuremburg tribunals, where subordinate Nazis who were 'just following orders' were convicted and executed... sometimes while the higher ranking Nazis who gave the orders being followed went free. Because of the political aspects of Nuremburg, I do not agree with its use in this scenario. We are not talking about a defeated enemy being prosecuted for war crimes for the purpose of a political point. We are talking about policing our own ranks and making sure that our own people live up to our own values.

I reject the 'good faith' argument all the same. The OLC is a branch of the DOJ, certainly, and its job is to provide legal counsel to the agencies of the executive branch of the government. However, expert opinion that a specific action is legal is not a shield from criminal prosecution. If the opinion is incorrect or if the counsel is guilty of malpractice, the suspect is still vulnerable to prosecution and is still guilty if the evidence prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The fact that government lawyers may be guilty of a slough of criminal charges for politicizing their legal opinions, authorizing torture, and covering the backs of agencies engaged in criminal activities or that they may be liable for malpractice as a result of said counsel does not and should not provide the torturers immunity from prosecution. The only thing that can provide such immunity is sworn testimony against the superiors who ordered the torture. Anything less than that is an unacceptable reason for such immunity.

As he is an intelligent man and, as far as I can tell, a moral man, I am inclined to think that President Barack Obama knows this. I do not believe 'good faith' is the genuine reason for the current administration's reluctance to pursue a slough of criminal charges against government agents and Bush administration officials. Rather, I believe that President Obama is thinking about the Clinton Presidency.

During the Clinton administration, the GOP pursued a bevy of politically motivated investigations and charges into the conduct of President Bill Clinton. These ranged from a real estate scam of which the Clintons were victims (Whitewater), to the kind of foolish but genuine mistakes any new administration unfamiliar with Washington bureaucracy might make (the so called 'Travelgate' scandal), to the more genuinely questionable record of President Clinton's personal life before and during his presidency. The Republicans threw everything they had up against the wall to see what would stick, leading up to a legally questionable political waiver of sovereign immunity to allow a sitting president to be forced to give sworn testimony in a civil suit filed against him. Amusingly, this entirely uncomfortable precedent is being completely ignored by Republicans now touting the power of executive privelege to protect Bush administration officials.

The Republicans suffered a political cost for politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of Clinton administration officials. As the momentum to impeachment gained ground, it completely sucked the life out of the remainder of the Republican agenda. After the impeachment failed so completely, President Clinton was the clear winner and enjoyed a clear advantage over the GOP for the remainder of his administration.

Investigations and prosecutions of Bush officials would have the same effect on the Obama administration, and President Obama has too heavy a policy agenda on the table to want to see anything derail it. To his pragmatic mind it is clear that economic recovery, health care, and education must all take priority over justice that would be perceived by many on the right as political payback by liberal Democrats against an administration they despised. Regardless of the reality of the corruption, cronyism, and civil rights violations of the Bush administration, the fact remains that many Republicans still believe the civil rights violations to be justified and the corruption and cronyism to be fair politics. Prosecution would be viewed as persecution by these Republicans and their voting base. Considering President Obama's efforts to undermine the GOP base with appeals to both social and fiscal conservatives on several levels, he cannot want to risk alienating them on such a massive scale.

We can approve or disapprove of this political judgement. I, for one, very much wish it were possible to pursue aggressive justice without compromising the agenda I believe to be the most liberal since LBJ, for all its flaws and basic fiscal conservatism. The best chance, in my opinion, was when the Democratic Congress first took office after the 2006 mid-terms. Most of the new Democrats were elected on promises of impeachment, and their decision to 'work with the White House' once taking office was a terrible betrayal of their campaign promises on par with Bush's 2000 statement that he had no faith at all in the concept of nation-building.

Approve or disapprove of the pragmatism inherent in the decision, we must recognize that it is pragmatic and it is valid. If we support the agenda being advanced by the White House, we must understand that we must pay the price of not being able to prosecute Bush officials unless a broad bipartisan demand to do so exists. Otherwise it will be the latest volley in a political war that has always hijacked governance when indulged. If we believe that justice must be done at all costs, we must be willing to pay that cost in the loss of a policy agenda that is desperately needed even if it is not as radical as it should perhaps be.

It should also be kept in mind, by all of us as liberals, that we chose President Obama. Liberals voted for Senators Obama and Clinton, the most conservative presidential aspirants in the Democratic Party, to the detriment of genuinely liberal candidates. The candidates who actually promised what most of the people now berating President Obama for not delivering really want, Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, were given ridiculously small portions of the vote. I do not say this to undercut the presidency of President Obama, whom I believe to have the potential to be a great president, but rather to illustrate the inherent flaws in many of the expectations placed on President Obama by the left.

I share the desire to see justice done, but it is just not pragmatic. We elected a pragmatist, this is what comes of it. Pragmatists are rarely radical.

Tearing Up the Social Contract: if a contract binds one party and not the other, is it still a contract?

Anyone who has been reading this blog knows how I feel about the 'at will' employment agreement and, even more fundamentally, about the huge imbalance in rights and responsibilities in any dealings between individuals and corporations. So many of the agreements we enter into today are effectively one sided contracts: the individual signing is bound by a tight web of regulation, while the corporation or institution with whom the individual is entering into an agreement is provided with enough loopholes that they can safely match the rate of fire of the Prussian Army through their side of the agreement. This is entirely anti-capitalist, as capitalism is based on the market freedoms of all parties to enter into fair bargains, and also entirely anti-democratic, as democracy is based on equal rights under the law for all citizens.

A week ago now, on his blog Boztopia, Martin Bosworth wrote on just this topic, though he did so in reference to leases, credit cards, mortgages, etc rather than employment agreements. Still, it was very cheering to see someone else thinking the way I do on this issue. Bosworth writes:

"The problem here is this. We go into any deal expecting that the person (or people) on the other side will operate fairly, or at least not try to screw us. We provide whatever we’re providing–a good, a service, a usage of time–and the other person provides something in kind. Everyone gets what they want, so everyone adheres to the deal.

But when one side has all the power and the other does not, the deal is inherently unfair. As I’ve written before, we’ve eroded the social contract between us that presumes both sides play fair. Now, every agreement you sign, from your credit card to a Web site service to a home loan, contains terms in it that are specifically designed to favor one side over the other–and that side isn’t yours.

When you can see your credit card interest rate jump from 8 percent to 29 percent for no fault of your own, when a social networking service can take your content and make money off it without your permission, and when a landlord can raise your rent by 100 percent or more, who can honestly say that there is fairness in the transaction?

Business doesn’t have to be about screwing the other guy. You can make a profit without legally mauling the person you’re contracted to, for, or with. A moral person has the obligation to uphold their end of a bargain, but when the other agent in the transaction goes out of their way to fuck said person, I have a hard time justifying why they should not do the same in return."

Mr. Bosworth is precisely correct. Business agreements (whether they are leases/rental agreements, loans, contracts, or employment agreements) are fundamentally based on the theory that both sides will clearly communicate their expectations of the other and agree to uphold their own responsibilities. The modern interaction between corporate institution and individual employee, debtor, or customer is no longer based on this concept at all. Instead, corporate lawyers include a slough of exceptions by which the institution with which me make our agreement is bound to nothing and we, as individuals, are bound by tight legal chains. Corporations have rights and freedoms far beyond those allotted to individual American citizens, and citizens often have very little resource against corporate power. Even when legal resources exist, economic realities very frequently prevent us, as individuals, from seeing redress. How many of us, in this day and age, can afford to sit out a lawsuit for years while a corporation's legal department runs us in circles?

Contracts are one of the oldest legal mechanisms in history. The ancient Sumerians had contracts before they had real 'government' in the modern sense. The ancient Babylonian government was, for all intents and purposes, created with the express purpose of backing the contracts made by Babylonian merchants with military force if necessary. Ditto the Carthaginian and Roman governments. Yet we have allowed our contract law to devolve to the point where agreements with corporate institutions bear much more resemblance to feudal serfdom than to equitable agreements between equal parties.

The irony is that many of these 'loose agreements' were made deliberately looser under the guise of benefitting the individual signatory. Flexible rate mortgage agreements were designed to allegedly benefit less affluent home-buyers, while the 'at will' employment agreement allegedly exists to benefit the supposed desire for easy mobility among today's younger workforce. In both cases the benefit to the individual that allegedly justified the creation of the looser agreement is almost non-existent when weighed against the increased freedom of a corporate entity to do as it pleases.

American corporations have the power to enforce agreements by which they themselves are bound to nothing. What does this say about American government and American society?

Keep in mind that both political parties are equally guilty in these matters. Neoconservative Republicans and 'pro-business' New Democrats have both strengthened the feudal prerogatives of the American corporation at the expense of the American worker, borrower, and consumer. At the same time, they have removed legal restriction on the behavior of corporations in an irresponsible manner that makes Wall Street today the equivalent of Tombstone, Arizona in the days of Doc Holiday and Ike Clanton. Corporations stalk the streets like gunfighters, doing as they please, while honest townsfolk huddle behind closed doors.

I close with a quote by John Maynard Keynes:

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

While I believe free-enterprise and free markets are necessary, that is certainly the definition of capitalism advanced by today's fiscal conservatives. Can we really afford that any longer?

The Conservative Coalition vs. the Liberal Coalition: Is the Former REALLY Falling Apart and How Cohesive is the Latter?

Yesterday in the Huffington Post, Drew Westen wrote a well-reasoned analysis of what he identified as five key elements in the conservative coalition that has controlled the Republican Party to a growing degree since the Barry Goldwater presidential candidacy in 1964. Rather than recap his long description of each, I will summarize them briefly.

1.) Libertarian conservatives - Those opposed to strong central government in defense of personal freedom and personal responsibility.

2.) Social conservatives - Traditionalists opposed to social change, primarily composed of Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Dominionists.

3.) Fiscal conservatives - Good old-fashioned Herbert Hoover progressives in the Robert Taft/Bob Dole tradition who acknowledge government's legitimate role in public life but who advocate 'fiscal discipline' and 'pro-business' policies.

4.) Defense hawks - The empire builders who support a strong military, interventionist foreign policy, American triumphalism, and exporting American values.

5.) 'Know-nothings' - American exclusivists who share attitudes frequently defined as racist code words and phrases and who advocate a definition of equality that protects the status quo and promotes bringing the right kinds of minorities into the established order rather than allowing minority groups to strongly influence the cultural, economic, or political status quo in a different direction. These people advance a generally white, European cultural ideal and are accepting of minorities who meet its standards and dismissive of those who do not, though they frequently do not consider themselves racist. They frequently curry to genuinely racist voting blocs, however.

Dr. Westen lists them as exclusive groups, though he notes overlap between some of these groups in some areas. He claims there is a large degree of incompatibility in this coalition, particularly between the first three categories, and that the alliance is fundamentally unstable and is falling apart. This is a popular view in liberal circles, but I am not certain it is an accurate view at all.

I would argue that the last two categories of 'conservative' do not truly exist as intrinsically 'conservative', nor are they separate categories within the conservative coalition that defines movement conservatism within the Republican Party. Instead, they are a set of tendencies shared by conservatives, moderates, and liberals which tend to be particularly prevalent within the conservative coalition because of the natural cultural chauvinism of social conservatives and the natural economic elitism of fiscal conservatives and some libertarian conservatives. There are plenty of Defense Hawks and Know Nothings in the Democratic Party as well, just look at Hillary Clinton's message and demographic in the 2008 election and John Edwards' message and demographic in 2004.

So then, let's reduce that number of categories to:

1.) Libertarian conservatives

2.) Social conservatives

3.) Fiscal conservatives

We can also assume that most of the members of the conservative coalition, allowing for exceptions, have tendencies toward being Defense Hawks, Know Nothings, or both. Libertarian and Fiscal conservatives are often, but not always, Defense Hawks. Fiscal conservatives are often, but not always, Know Nothings. Social conservatives are very frequently both Defense Hawks and Know Nothings. Libertarian conservatives are usually not Know Nothings, but there are exceptions.

If one breaks things down this way, one discovers there is a much smaller division within the conservative coalition than originally appeared to exist. What is more, some of the assumptions that Dr. Westen makes in his article are too driven by subjective thought to correctly describe conservative thinking processes. For instance,

"The fundamentalist politics practiced by the likes of Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson over the last 30 years should have been anathema to genuine libertarians, because they run against everything libertarian conservatives believe in vis-à-vis intrusive government. However, the two groups lived happily together as long as libertarians got to keep their taxes low and their rifles loaded and fundamentalists got to keep their kids from learning anything about birth control (leading the Bible Belt to have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and abortion anywhere in the country, although Sarah Palin seems to be leading a one-family crusade to recapture for Alaska the title of Miss Teen Pregnancy)."

The problem is that this is not merely an ability to live happily together, but a general (if mistaken) belief many Social conservatives hold: they think they are Libertarian conservatives! They believe themselves to be apostles of freedom, much better than those self-proclaimed libertarians who are stupid enough to believe in silly things like personal liberty! This is really important to understand, it really defines a mode of thought that sounds silly to those who do not share it... one can be absolutely opposed to full civil rights for all citizens and still call one's self a libertarian if one accepts that liberty and Christianity are the same thing! Social conservatives of this stripe share the same economic ideas as Libertarian and Fiscal conservatives, and tend to accept the 'government is evil' mantra of Libertarian conservatives in all aspects of their lives except for their right to persecute those who believe differently from themeselves. Frequently, they believe themselves to be the persecuted minority, the evil secular world is punishing them for their righteousness!

There are Libertarian and Fiscal conservatives who are put off by this behavior, notably Barry Goldwater in the former category and (for a very long time) George H.W. Bush in the latter. The problem is that they are in the minority. Most conservatives in the Republican party are unwilling or unable to buck the political power of fundamentalist Christian voters in the party organization. Conservative tv and radio pundits like Bill O'Riley, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity are primarily Social conservatives masked in Libertarian or Fiscal sheep's clothing. So the unity of the right wing is much sturdier than Dr. Westen and many of our fellow liberals would like to believe. Thinking otherwise is dangerous. Yes, Libertarian conservatives like Christopher Hitchens and Fiscal conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and Gov. Charlie Crist (R FL) are hitching to the moderate-to-liberal bandwagon in these difficult times, but they are in the extreme minority. Even moderates like Senator Arlen Spector (R PA) are being intimidated to fall into the conservative line.

The real danger, however, that this overconfident belief in the destruction of movement conservatism poses to liberals, is successfully captured by Dr. Westen despite his failure to understand what he is really saying:

"They're short on ideas, but they're long on selling ideas, however vapid. Second, Democrats are exactly the opposite: They're long on ideas but short on the ability to bundle them into coherent, emotionally compelling narratives that make people want to buy them..."

This is the most dangerous flaw in predictions of the destruction of movement conservatism and the triumph of 'progressivism.' Particularly when one notes that the Democratic Party has to face Fiscal conservatives, Defense Hawks, and Know Nothings within its own ranks. Senator Blanche Lincoln (D - Wal-Mart) defected from the EFCA, after having been one of its original Senate supporters, due to political pressure from Fiscal conservatives within the Democratic Party. Senator Ben Nelson (D - NE) was the leader of the Senate slashing of the White House stimulus bill.

Fiscal conservatives in both parties may be the future of the Republican Party, or even of the Democratic Party, if self-proclaimed 'progressives' do not work hard to support liberal Democratic candidates instead of rushing to support the most neoconservative candidates available.

The division between liberal Democrats, Fiscal conservatives, Blue Dog Fiscal/Social/Defense Hawks, and moderates may be far more dangerous to the Democratic Party than any of the internal divisions in movement conservatism. Liberals, if they wish to hold their own and expand their influence, must find a way to bring the most pragmatic members of the Green, Peace and Freedom, and Natural Law parties back into the Democratic ranks. Liberal pragmatists more invested in radical reform than the success of the Democratic Party must strive to do the same if they wish to save liberalism.

The liberal coalition of ethnocentric civil rights groups, feminist groups, and GLBT rights groups (all of which desperately need to pool their forces into cohesive human rights groups) with labor, civil libertarians, peace activists, and environmentalists might be far more unstable than the other side. Environmentalist liberals and Labor liberals have much deeper divides than Social and Libertarian conservatives. Ignoring those divides is asking for trouble... it's one of the reasons we have a surfeit of liberal third parties with no cohesion amongst themselves, let alone with liberal Democrats.

I believe that Fiscal conservatism will self-destruct if aggressive radical reforms are adopted to help those most harmed by the bad economy and get the economy back on track. Even if President Obama's rather conservative agenda succeeds, it will at least prove that conservatism must be pragmatic rather than dogmatic. Social conservatism will continue to shrink as the younger generation continues to challenge the older... but there will always be backsliding as well. How many of today's conservative Republicans were counterculture liberals in the 1960s?

Before liberals can gloat about the destruction of movement conservatism, we have to actually sort out just what movement liberalism is and get it back on track.

Disgusting Gutter Politics is Disgusting Gutter Politics: Excuse me a Sister Souljah speech

Oscar nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick is making a new documentary, "Outrage," on the subject of closeted gay conservative Republican politicians who have joined with the kind of religious right wingers I have taken long moments to mock and berate in my posts here. The movie is still in post-production, but it has already been the subject of pieces by GayPatriot and Jenn Q Public. I don't plan to get into the habit of quoting Republicans approvingly, but it's hard to argue with some of the points made here. First and foremost, as Jenn Q Public writes,

"The pretense is that outing is the great equalizer. It is held up as a bold and noble act in defense of gays and lesbians. In reality, it is petty, vindictive, and yes, often catty."

This is, of course, one hundred percent true. Of course it leaves out another word... 'repugnant.' To deliberately hold the personal lives of your enemies up to ridicule and abuse, and to invite bigotry against them (particularly when you yourself face that bigotry) is repugnant. I understand the anger of gay Americans against gay-bashers who are really closeted homosexuals. Who would not? I can't help but disagree with both the bloggers quoted and say that a gay man supporting gay bashing likely is possessed of a heaping helping of self-loathing whether conservatives want to admit it or not.

The problem is that their self-loathing doesn't justify this kind of deliberately hurtful sleaze. It is one thing to expose scandal, corruption, or crime in office. It is something else to deliberately hold someone up for abuse, bigotry, and contempt for no other reason but to hurt them. It is the natural reaction of anger, but it is just not right. I don't have any regard for Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, or Mark Foley or for anyone else of that ilk... but sinking to their level and getting the same crud on us will not prove that we are any better, and in order to achieve a just society weon the left must prove that we can be just and moral. I understand the pragmatic need for partisan politics and tough fighting, but there is a big difference between being tough and being cheap, and ladies and gentlemen this is cheap.

I don't agree with everything in either piece. Most importantly this not about the 'liberal agenda', even if we assumed there were on all consuming liberal agenda. This is about equal rights under the law for all American citizens. I don't believe any gay rights activist or liberal Democrat truly hates someone for disagreeing with them on taxes, the economy, or defense policy. Everyone understands that there will be differing views on a wide range of policy issues and the point of politics is for those views to compete until they are ironed out into a coherent policy addressing all the possible concerns of any question.

This is about some Americans believing that other Americans should be denied full participation in American civil society as equal citizens. When some of the people joining this chorus are some of the very people their allies wish to exclude from the system, and they join with their allies in advocating this bigoted policy, that is every bit as repugnant as outing them for it. Two wrongs do not make a right, but allying one's self with bigots is still wrong. If the issue were truly only that not all gays were fully part of the progressive movement, that would be one thing... but the real issue here is collaboration with bigotry in the name of either self-preservation, self-advancement, or (and I will say it) a certain lack of self-respect. There is no excuse for bigotry, and less excuse for becoming an apologist for bigotry when you are one of the objects of that bigotry.

Yet, I have to say it again: outing gay Republicans, no matter how closely in bed they are with the religious right, just to embarass and humiliate them and their allies and to cause people pain is not any kind of social justice. It is petty, repugnant personal vengeance. It's every bit as hypocritical as what they are doing. There's just no excuse for that kind of viciousness.

Crime, Corruption, and Fascism: The War on Some Drugs

While it is old news now, most people are aware that President Obama laughed off a question about marijuana legalization with a joke and a dismissal. At the time, Norm Stamper (a retired Seattle police chief and an advocate of drug policy reform, particularly medical marijuana) wrote a firm and direct article on Huffington Post, chiding the president for the joke. Mr. Stamper is a firm advocate of legalization, having seen the failure of the drug war from the front lines during his career in urban law enforcement. It is worth commenting that he has some street cred on the topic. He is motivated not merely by his views on the pragmatic failures of drug policy, but also by ideological advocacy of legalization through his involvement with the medical marijuana lobby.

I read his article at the time and strongly agreed with his position, though I thought he waved the bloody shirt a little bit. The anecdotal story about John or Jane Q. Public and their tragedy has never been my favorite political tactic, even before Joe the Plumber made it a sick joke. On the issue, however, Stamper is dead on.

Stamper's reaction was not the only reaction on HuffPo, nor was reaction limited to HuffPo. That same week, Ron Chusid wrote (quoting the SanFrancisco chronicle) about the DEA raiding a medical marijuana dispensary in San Francisco and on the topic (quoting Daniel Larison and Andrew Sullivan) of whether it is helpful or counter-productive for advocates of legalization to preface their comments with 'I don't smoke pot, but...', both pieces sparking their share of discussion. The second, particularly, sparked reaction from Jeremy Pober about the issue of pragmatic support for legalization vs philosophical support for legalization and whether or not the debate between the two points of view was counter-productive for the legalization campaign. Norm Stamper wrote about the reaction to his original piece and laid out the debtate between those who felt it was wrong for the president to shrug off the question of legalization and those who felt it was politically wise. The most recent piece by Stamper rekindled my thoughts about the previous pieces mentioned above.

Before I go any further, I will note that both sides of the debate Stamper mentions have factual grounding. It is true that the legalization of marijuana (and the larger issue of the Sitzkrieg that is the 'War on Drugs') is a very important issue that deserves serious consideration and not jokes. Dismissal of the pro-legalization side of the argument as a bunch of pot-heads not worthy of serious consideration is a big part of the strategy of the drug warriors. Even if this was not President Obama's intent, his joke mirrors those used by the drug warriors.

President Obama won several red states where voters take a hard law and order line, and he may believe it is politically inexpedient to advocate drug reform too aggressively because of the risk it may pose to those gains. He may very well be right.

Nevertheless, drug reform is too important an issue not to push, regardless of its political expedience. I will say that again, so that my clarity of meaning cannot be mistaken: drug reform is too important an issue not to push.

The so-called 'Drug War' is better characterized as 'The War on Drugs We Don't Like on Behalf of Corporations We Do Like.' That's awfully long to type, so I will just call it the 'War on Some Drugs', though I can't take credit for that phrase. Drug reform, real drug reform, is about a lot more than legalizing medical marijuana at the federal level or even entirely repealing federal marijuana laws. Real drug reform is about improved regulation of prescription drugs, improved enforcement of that regulation, ending the 'War on Some Drugs' entirely (by legalizing presently illegal drugs and legally regulating those in need of such regulation on a case by case basis), and applying a tax and duty policy to drugs (both those presently legal and those presently illegal) across the board. Medical marijuana is a tiny tip of a huge iceberg, and the entire iceberg must be successfully circumnavigated.

The 'War on Some Drugs' was sold to the public as an agressive campaign of law and order against gangsters and thugs who sold drugs to innocents. It has become, instead, a selective war against the poor and minorities justifying massive violations of civil liberties. The people in the actual business of selling drugs are doing better than ever, while their 'victims' (whom the policy was allegedly enacted to defend) are treated as the enemy.

At the turn of the century, it should be noted, cocaine, opiates, and marijuana were all legal. Marijuana was grown throughout rural America, particularly the South. Cocaine was in soft drinks. Morphine and codeine were sold over the counter, and heroin was in toothache pills, throat lozenges, and cough drops. Drug related violence was impossibly low, by today's standards. These drugs were outlawed roughly at the same time as Prohibition was imposed on alcoholic beverages, as part of the same Progressive Era moral reform movement. Prohibition ended, but the restrictions on illegal drugs were not lifted. Initially, as the big business in organized crime was still gambling and prostitution (which had naturally accompanied bootlegging), things went on as normal... until organized crime realized the money that could be tapped in the market for illegal drugs. Then the drug business bloomed as never before.

The public health argument for prohibition of drugs is laughable. Nicotine and alcohol, both legal, are extremely dangerous drugs when used irresponsibly and nicotine may be impossible to use responsibly. Yet neither are illegal. By comparison to nicotine, marijuana and LSD are as safe as aspirin and both are far less addictive. Even addictive and dangerous drugs like heroin and cocaine cannot compete with nicotine for addiction rates and death rates, and the overdose rates for both drugs may be artificially high because prohibition completely removes any possibility of regulation or quality control. Methadone, the preferred method of treatment for opiate addiction, is far MORE addictive than any of the opiates it replaces and far more dangerous to the health of the user. Yet it is used to treat addiction to heroin without a second thought. Most chemical treatment patients end up addicted to methadone for life and risk deadly withdrawal if they try to quit. Legal prescription drugs frequently have addiction potential and harmful side effects on par with heroin and cocaine as well. The 'public health' rationale for the 'War on Some Drugs' is completely incoherent.

The 'law enforcement' argument is worse. If drugs were not illegal, drug related crime would drop. Drug related crime is so high because drug prohibition relegates otherwise law abiding drug users to criminal status and puts the business entirely in the hands of criminals. Pragmatically speaking, the 'War on Some Drugs' creates far more crime than it stops and the majority of the 'criminals' persecuted under the policy are the victims of the drug cartels rather than their leaders.

On a purely philosophical level, the moral hypocrisy of the WoSD is simply impossible to completely communicate. Recreational users of dangerous drugs are persecuted as criminals... unless they are recreational users of alcohol or nicotine. Mandatory minimums for drug offenders frequently carry heavy racial undertones, such as differences in sentencing for possession of powder cocaine and possession of free-base cocaine. Laws against other drugs, such as heroin and methamphetamine, primarily target the poor. Well-to-do abusers of illegal drugs or prescription drugs frequently end up in treatment programs without facing criminal charges.

The pragmatic benefits of taxation and regulation have been argued by others, and I am not going to repeat them here. My fundamental objection to the WoSD is philosophical, though I agree entirely with all the pragmatic arguments.

One of the greatest flaws in the WsOD, however, is the treatment of prescription drugs. Just as recreational drugs, medical drugs are big business. Dangerous, experimental drugs are marketed before they have been fully verified as safe and effective. Multiple drugs are frequently marketed for the same conditions with no other purpose than to sell another product. Corporate advertisements tell us to solve our problems with drugs every day, and some medical conditions (ADD and ADHD come to mind, but are not the end of the story) have arguably been invented in order to justify selling dangerous drugs to 'treat' them. Once upon a time the purpose of drugs was to cure disease and treat pain, but now the purpose of drugs is frequently to manage chronic symptoms without affecting the underyling condition responsible. This is simply corporate drug dealing, no different than selling heroin on the street. Scores of hugely dangerous products are sold legally to people who may or may not benefit from their use every day.

This situation is too insane to be allowed to continue, the only reason it continues is money. People make money off drugs, legal and illegal, and that money would be threatened by the major overhaul our drug policy needs. Thus political expediency crushes real reform at every turn.

It is easy to understand why the president feels it politically inexpedient to challenge the current drug policy, even in as small a step as to respond to a question about the legalization of marijuana, but it is important that agitation on the issue continue. Our current drug policy, medical and criminal, divides America into two: a nation of addicts and a nationed of criminals.

Clearly, rectifying a crisis on that scale justified radical action.

Business, the Individual, and Society: A Radical Ideology of Government

The issues of the economy and the culture wars have occupied a great deal of my writing lately, as I have been busier with political polemic and anti-corporate invective than either meaningful philosophy or practical policy. I am going to attempt to essay the former tonight, so bear with me if my thoughts tend to wander a little bit more than is usual even for me.

'Big government' versus 'small government' is a popular theme of the moderate and the conservative in today's political arena. 'Effective government' is the popular mantra of today's self-proclaimed 'progressives.' The coercive power of the government has always been a great concern of libertarians, whether they are left-leaning or right-leaning in their thinking. Yet none of them really address the issue of just what government is and what government should be. This is a question that is frequently danced around, taken for granted, or dismissed entirely depending on the political leanings of the people having the discussion. Liberals believe that government should be in the business of defining and solving problems, while conservatives believe that government's only real role is maintaining order in a chaos of 'capitalist' 'freedom'. I've written about 'freedom' before, and addressed the conflicting notions of volia and svoboda as they apply to the debate over the free market and capitalism. To recap, very briefly, 'volia' is the concept of absolute license to do as one pleases without any obligation to outside authority, while 'svoboda' is analogous to what the classical liberal thinkers called 'the Social Contract', the idea of individual freedom intermingled with one's responsibility to society and society's responsiblility to itself and its members.

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary defines government thusly:

1. The act of governing; the exercise of authority; the administration of laws; control; direction; regulation; as, civil, church, or family government.

2. The mode of governing; the system of polity in a state; the established form of law.

3. The right or power of governing; authority.

4. The person or persons authorized to administer the laws; the ruling power; the administration.

5. The body politic governed by one authority; a state; as, the governments of Europe.

6. Management of the limbs or body.

7. (Gram.) The influence of a word in regard to construction, requiring that another word should be in a particular case.

Obviously, we can dismiss the anatomical and grammatical definitions of the word for the purposes of this discussion. We can safely assume no one in politics means either of them. My personal thought is that when conservatives, moderates, and libertarians talk about 'government' they usually mean definition three, four, or five or some combination of the two. Liberals frequently mean the first or second definition, or a combination of them both, and think of government less as an established authority than as a means by which society excercises authority over itself. The classic word for this advanced by the Founding Fathers and many other since is 'self-government.' As Abraham Lincoln said it, government 'of the people, by the people, for the people.' This is a significant gap of thought, even if it appears relatively minor.

Let me put this more simply. When a conservative says, 'government doesn't solve problems,' what he means is 'solutions cannot be forced from a position of authority.' Conversely, when a liberal says, 'the government must become involved,' what he really means to say is, 'we, as a people, must take concerted action to solve this problem through our political and social institutions.' This is a much more significant difference in philosophy than it appeared in the first place. It's not merely about differing philosophies of government, it is about totally different ideas about what government even is. To a conservative, government is an outside authority to maintain order. To a liberal, government is consensus action by the people themselves.

Either of these philosophies can be dangerous. The former is how the kings of France got their heads cut off, what laid the foundations for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and got the tsar shot. The latter is the source of the historical abbatoirs of the French and Bolshevik revolutions.

In my view, 'good government' is a complex interaction between the members of a society to define and regulate themselves as a society. If the complex interaction of 'good government' does not exist, then there is a vacuum left that will be filled by someone or something else. In the absence of viable democracy, for instance, someone will take over and establish despotism. Many of use the word 'government' to describe those most heavily involved in this interaction, but anyone who votes, protests, or speaks their mind is part of it. This interaction, or some poor subsititute for it, will always exist. Anarchy is not a sustainable state of being. Either society will order itself, or someone will order society. My apologies to all the hard-core libertarians out there, but these are the simple facts of human nature.

For a broad sweep of reasons, economics is one of the chief social occupations of mankind. We have physical, emotional, and spiritual needs and we must meet those needs. This leads to another complex interaction between the members of society, to meet those needs, that can be varying called 'the economy' or 'the market.' This interaction will, like government, always exist in some form. It is a necessity of human existence. The problem is that it, like government, is a venue of human interaction. There is no way of doing way with the interaction of the market, people will always have needs and they will never meet those needs 'for free', so Marxism is as unsustainable a fantasy as anarchy. Socialist utopia and libertarian utopia are equally unviable, because society will always seek to somehow order itself and the market cannot provide that order. The market is merely part of the social interaction. So rather than use the term 'the market', which is heavy with false images of concrete meaning, I will use the term 'business.'

At the core of society is the individual. It is the individual's interactions with his fellow individuals (including government and business) which make society happen. Society cannot exist without individuals to interact, but no two individuals are identical. Everyone wants something different from that interaction. Because utopia is not possible, there will always be individuals who do not get what they want or need from society. Because society is made up of individuals, however, it is reponsible to its members... even when they are not having their needs met... coupled with a duty to meet those needs as best as it can. When it cannot, society suffers as a whole because of the lost contribution of those individuals. More importantly, the individuals who are having their needs met by society have a greater responsibility to that society in return. This is simple capitalism, no one gets anything for free.

If this sounds socialist in conception, it certainly is. However, all due apologies to John Galt, there really isn't an alternative. If society does not function in a healthy fashion, then it will function in an unhealthy fashion and everyone will suffer. If everyone were to become non-participatory, society would break down, anarchy would follow, and totalitarian order would be imposed by someone to end the anarchy. That is simply the inevitable reaction of nature, to fill a vaccuum.

So we have three choices: the healthiest society possible, a willfully unhealthy society, or social disintegration followed by a society in which none of us wish to live.

People will never stop being individuals, as history has shown. Even in purported collectivist utopias, individual needs cause some to seek greater individualism. Even in absolutist utopias, individuals desire independence of mind and feeling.

I believe in natural rights, free will, empirical thought, and an ordered universe. Though my spiritual awareness flickers between Christianity and quasi-Deism as I attempt to apply an empirical standard to existence, I believe in the divine ordination of both natural rights and free will. We are individuals because we are meant to be individuals with independent thoughts, desires, ambitions, and fears. We are meant to make our own choices based on those individual drives. I also believe in central moral principles: our freedom to act stops when another is deprived of their freedom to act by our action.

How does all this apply to business, government, and society?

Society exists because one of the needs we all share is the need for human contact and because people can help one another meet their individual needs more effectively than people can meet their needs alone. If mankind truly desired absolute self-reliance, there would be no community or society. Individuals are independent beings sharing an interdependent world. This is simply the way it is. We can preach self-reliance and responsibility all we want, and true responsibility is certainly a virtue and irresponsibility certainly a dangerous vice, but we need each other. The community needs its members to exist and its members need the community to satisfy their needs. If this were not so, they would not have created the community in the first place.

Societies exist because of individuals and have a responsbility to protect their members and cooperatively administer to societal needs while allowing/empowering individuals to do their best to administer to individual desires. This is where business and government come into play.

Business is the mechanism by which society meets its needs and enables its members to meet their individual desires. Because the essential nature of this activity is selfish, self-interest will drive business more often than altruism. Because self-interest can be dangerous when not enlightened, and human nature does not always live up to its own better angels, business cannot be left in a vaccuum.

Government is the mechanism by which society defines its values, establishes and maintains social order, and acts to defend the rights of its members. These rights are best defined as defined in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government can also be a threat to the very rights it is intended to establish, however, and the rights it defends are not granted by the government. They are natural to individuals, part and parcel with free will. The government cannot give rights to anyone, it can only take them away. This is the fundamental reason for the massive concern for human rights around the world and in the US, the fact that society has been all too lax in its responsibility to guarantee the rights of all its members. Because humans are imperfect and not always enlightened, government requires mechanisms of control to guarantee individual freedoms.

Society, made up of its individuals, must have full control of government. As long as government is serving society, it is serving its purpose: 'big' or 'small' government is not an issue. As soon as government fails to serve society, it is not serving its purpose and must be adjusted: once again whether it is 'big' or 'small' is irrevelevent.

Business must be subject to society, through the mechanism of government, because it is too important not to be. This is not a rejection of the capitalist economic system, but it is a rejection of the religion of capitalism in which business is granted absolute power. We know from history that we cannot give government absolute power, that society must regulate its own excesses through democracy, revolutions, etc. Why, then, do we insist we can give business absolute power? We say 'the market' and pretend we are speaking of something concrete, but we are really just talking about the human mechanism of business. As the government must be subject to society and society must be responsible to the individual, so business must be responsible to government.

The individual reponsibility to society, the societal responsibility to the individual, and the responsibility of business to both are all interlinked. Fascism, Communism, anarchy, or any other utopian system is impossible because of this linkage. We can all only do the best we can, there is no perfect system to maintain it all for us and there will always be human failings for which we must compensate when we can, as best we can. Government is the mechanism through which society fulfills that web of interlinked responsibilities.

If that's socialism, then socialism beats any alternative anyone has offered so far.