Does High-Fructose Corn Syrup Have to Be in Everything?

Does High-Fructose Corn Syrup Have to Be in Everything?
by Wilton D. Alston

In her recent article on cholesterol, Karen De Coster provided information that should be beneficial to anyone interested in staying healthy. In this piece I want to address a similar issue. The title says it all. Why, in the name of health, do so many foods marketed to the U.S. public include high fructose corn syrup? Even the most cursory search of the many health sites on the Internet yield a veritable cornucopia of negative information about this stuff.

The Usual Suspect – Again

Of course the culprit for the presence of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in all sweetened foods in the U.S. is the state. The mechanism is the incredibly high tariff on sugar produced in other countries. The U.S. government would rather force manufacturers to use inferior and hazardous high fructose corn syrup, which can be created from corn – a crop grown in the U.S. – than allow them to use more natural sugar from places that seem rather obvious. I don’t know about you, but when I think of sugar, I think of sugar cane in South America, but when the USDA thinks of sugar, apparently they think of cornfields in Nebraska!

But Really, Who Cares?

What if corn sweetener is just as good as sugar from cane in South America? Wouldn’t it make sense to support our "local" producers? Well, no, not with legislation. If corn sweetener were really better than cane sugar, legislation artificially inflating our price for cane sugar would not be needed. Read that sentence again, because that is about the size of it. Whenever the state gets involved to force the market to take a particular path it is only because the path chosen by the state would not otherwise be taken by anyone intelligent enough to decide on his own. Period.

On the other hand, what if corn sweetener is not just as good as sugar from cane? Well, Houston, then we have a problem! According to experts such as Mehmet Oz and Michael Roisen, high-fructose corn syrup is a horrible sweetener. In their landmark book, "You: The Owner’s Manual…," they state:

"One of the biggest evil influences on our diet is the presence of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a sugar substitute that itself is a sugar found in soft drinks and many other sweet, processed foods. The problem is that HCFS inhibits leptin secretion, so you never get the message that you’re full. And it never shuts off gherin, so, even though you have food in your stomach, you constantly get the message that you’re hungry." (See page 192.)

With apologies to the Church Lady, "Well, isn’t that special?" So the state forces us to consume a sweetener that’s obviously not as good for us, just so their constituents can sell more, make more money, and vote en bloc for the legislator who visits this evil on the rest of us. Sounds like yet another example of misplaced incentives.

Other Sweeteners – Same Problem

Those of us who are "into" health know all about stevia. This is a very powerful natural sweetener, extracted from South American plants much as sugar is extracted from cane. One can find stevia in health food stores, but it is not allowed as an ingredient in processed foods. Why not? The typical statist would say "because it is not shown to be proven safe and effective" which is FDA-speak for "because we didn’t say you could use it." Call me a conspiracy realist, but I doubt that "safe and effective" had much to do with the FDA deciding to ban stevia. Nothing drives this point home better than this little tidbit: the FDA initially labeled stevia as an "unsafe food additive" after an anonymous complaint. (Yes, an anonymous complaint!) You simply cannot make this stuff up.

But stevia has been used by other cultures for thousands of years with no ill effects. Yes, thousands of years. If it’s so dangerous, why are we in the U.S. alone on Earth in recognizing the danger? In Japan the government will not allow artificial sweeteners in soft drinks, so they use stevia instead. In fact, it accounts for 40% of the Japanese sweetener market. In the U.S. the government won’t allow stevia, but we get a heaping helping of Aspartame, Sucralose, and all manner of other chemical junk. Where is the logic? (Maybe I should just follow the money.) Interestingly, many of the sweetening chemicals we're allowed to have as additives come with warning labels, by the way, so the government considers it established that there are health problems with those.

Conclusion

The decisions we each make about what we eat are some of the most basic ones we'll ever encounter. But in the case of HFCS – just as one example – we in the U.S. aren’t given that choice. The FDA claims to "protect" us from snake-oil salesmen of every stripe, yet when it comes to being able to choose an item of food that is among the most basic and prevalent in any diet, economic considerations trump safety. From my standpoint, while this about par for the course, it is still darned unsettling.

What will it take to reverse the tide?

Population And Immigration: A Contradiction

There is a blatant contradiction that can be found on both sides of the debate over immigration and population size. On one hand, we have many right-wingers who are pro-life and anti-immigration. On the other hand, we have many left-wingers who are not pro-life and are pro-immigration. To many of the rightists, there can never be too much people; reproduction is encouraged in this sense. To many of the leftists, we face a major problem of overpopulation; people are reproducing too much.

Here's the contradiction: If the rightists truly don't think there can ever be enough people, they must welcome open immigration to be consistant, for surely this is more people. Surely, if reproduction is to be encouraged, allowing more people into the country will be pro-life. On the other hand, if the leftists truly are concerned about population size, thinking we face a major population problem, they must oppose immigration to be consistant, for surely immigration brings in more people to reproduce. Surely, if there is overpopulation, immigration will overpopulate us.

In short, in order to be consistant, the opponent of immigration must support population control of some sort, and the supporter of immigration must oppose it. To complain about too many immigrants coming while similtanously claiming to encourage a growing and reproductive population is simply hypocrisy, as is to nonchalantly support mass-immigration while simultaneously claiming that we have a problem of overpopulation. If one thinks there are too many people, it is nonsensical to then encourage more people to immigrate to your country. If one thinks that the population should continue to grow, it is nonsensical to then discourage people to immigrate to your country.

It is unavoidable that we conclude that both sides (as in the two main positions accepted as the political status quo) of the debate are nonsensical and hypocritical. These positions consist of opposing ideas in themselves; oxymorons. This applies on a larger scale to the entire political atmosphere in general. We find many right-wingers passionately railing on and on about the importance of life and the virtue of consequently preserving and encouraging it, who then turn around and support policies that are blatantly against this principle (such as perpetual war and protectionist blockades to immigration). We also find many left-wingers passionately railing on and on about overpopulation who then balk at the right-winger's support for policies that reduce the population, and then go on to support policies that are blatantly contradictary to their concern for overpopulation (such as government subsidies for immigration and extensive government welfare).

The public debate on immigration and population misses the point entirely in that it pretty much solely concentrates on a question of numerics, of the amount of people, rather then the condition of the individual people and the actual means by which they immigrate and populate. For the true question here is not a quantative one of how many people, but a qualative question of wether or not, in an individual case, someone's immigration occured in a fashion that is respectful of property rights. Did the immigrant violate anyone's rights in the process of immigrating? Did others violate the immigrant's rights in the process of immigrating?

The question is, when someone does desire to immigrate, what is the proper and unproper means by which this can be done? And on a larger scale, what is the proper way to create a reasonable quality of life for any given population, regaurdless of numbers? Forget about the number of people: what economic, social or political system(s) will create that which makes staying alive enhanced and "social utility" possible to begin with? The question isn't "how many people should we allow to immigrate or reproduce", but of the very process of immigration and the very quality of life of the individuals that have been produced already. Yet instead of asking tough questions about the means to immigration and the quality of life, we waste our time on an endless statistical numbers game where all that matters is quantative percentages and an assumption that either the glass is half empty or half full.

Why Is Marijuana Illegal?

http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html

Many people assume that marijuana was made illegal through some kind of process involving scientific, medical, and government hearings; that it was to protect the citizens from what was determined to be a dangerous drug.

The actual story shows a much different picture. Those who voted on the legal fate of this plant never had the facts, but were dependent on information supplied by those who had a specific agenda to deceive lawmakers. You'll see below that the very first federal vote to prohibit marijuana was based entirely on a documented lie on the floor of the Senate.

You'll also see that the history of marijuana's criminalization is filled with:
Racism
Fear
Protection of Corporate Profits
Yellow Journalism
Ignorant, Incompetent, and/or Corrupt Legislators
Personal Career Advancement and Greed These are the actual reasons marijuana is illegal.
Background

For most of human history, marijuana has been completely legal. It's not a recently discovered plant, nor is it a long-standing law. Marijuana has been illegal for less than 1% of the time that it's been in use. Its known uses go back further than 7,000 B.C. and it was legal as recently as when Ronald Reagan was a boy.

The marijuana (hemp) plant, of course, has an incredible number of uses. The earliest known woven fabric was apparently of hemp, and over the centuries the plant was used for food, incense, cloth, rope, and much more. This adds to some of the confusion over its introduction in the United States, as the plant was well known from the early 1600's, but did not reach public awareness as a recreational drug until the early 1900's.

America's first marijuana law was enacted at Jamestown Colony, Virginia in 1619. It was a law "ordering" all farmers to grow Indian hempseed. There were several other "must grow" laws over the next 200 years (you could be jailed for not growing hemp during times of shortage in Virginia between 1763 and 1767), and during most of that time, hemp was legal tender (you could even pay your taxes with hemp -- try that today!) Hemp was such a critical crop for a number of purposes (including essential war requirements - rope, etc.) that the government went out of its way to encourage growth.

The United States Census of 1850 counted 8,327 hemp "plantations" (minimum 2,000-acre farm) growing cannabis hemp for cloth, canvas and even the cordage used for baling cotton.

The Mexican Connection

In the early 1900s, the western states developed significant tensions regarding the influx of Mexican-Americans. The revolution in Mexico in 1910 spilled over the border, with General Pershing's army clashing with bandit Pancho Villa. Later in that decade, bad feelings developed between the small farmer and the large farms that used cheaper Mexican labor. Then, the depression came and increased tensions, as jobs and welfare resources became scarce.

One of the "differences" seized upon during this time was the fact that many Mexicans smoked marijuana and had brought the plant with them.

However, the first state law outlawing marijuana did so not because of Mexicans using the drug. Oddly enough, it was because of Mormons using it. Mormons who traveled to Mexico in 1910 came back to Salt Lake City with marijuana. The church was not pleased and ruled against use of the drug. Since the state of Utah automatically enshrined church doctrine into law, the first state marijuana prohibition was established in 1915. (Today, Senator Orrin Hatch serves as the prohibition arm of this heavily church-influenced state.)

Other states quickly followed suit with marijuana prohibition laws, including Wyoming (1915), Texas (1919), Iowa (1923), Nevada (1923), Oregon (1923), Washington (1923), Arkansas (1923), and Nebraska (1927). These laws tended to be specifically targeted against the Mexican-American population.

When Montana outlawed marijuana in 1927, the Butte Montana Standard reported a legislator's comment: "When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff... he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies." In Texas, a senator said on the floor of the Senate: "All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff [marijuana] is what makes them crazy."

Jazz and Assassins

In the eastern states, the "problem" was attributed to a combination of Latin Americans and black jazz musicians. Marijuana and jazz traveled from New Orleans to Chicago, and then to Harlem, where marijuana became an indispensable part of the music scene, even entering the language of the black hits of the time (Louis Armstrong's "Muggles", Cab Calloway's "That Funny Reefer Man", Fats Waller's "Viper's Drag").

Again, racism was part of the charge against marijuana, as newspapers in 1934 editorialized: "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."

Two other fear-tactic rumors started to spread: one, that Mexicans, Blacks and other foreigners were snaring white children with marijuana; and two, the story of the "assassins." Early stories of Marco Polo had told of "hasheesh-eaters" or hashashin, from which derived the term "assassin." In the original stories, these professional killers were given large doses of hashish and brought to the ruler's garden (to give them a glimpse of the paradise that awaited them upon successful completion of their mission). Then, after the effects of the drug disappeared, the assassin would fulfill his ruler's wishes with cool, calculating loyalty.

By the 1930s, the story had changed. Dr. A. E. Fossier wrote in the 1931 New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal: "Under the influence of hashish those fanatics would madly rush at their enemies, and ruthlessly massacre every one within their grasp." Within a very short time, marijuana started being linked to violent behavior.

Alcohol Prohibition and Federal Approaches to Drug Prohibition

During this time, the United States was also dealing with alcohol prohibition, which lasted from 1919 to 1933. Alcohol prohibition was extremely visible and debated at all levels, while drug laws were passed without the general public's knowledge. National alcohol prohibition happened through the mechanism of an amendment to the constitution.

Earlier (1914), the Harrison Act was passed, which provided federal tax penalties for opiates and cocaine.

The federal approach is important. It was considered at the time that the federal government did not have the constitutional power to outlaw alcohol or drugs. It is because of this that alcohol prohibition required a constitutional amendment.

At that time in our country's history, the judiciary regularly placed the tenth amendment in the path of congressional regulation of "local" affairs, and direct regulation of medical practice was considered beyond congressional power under the commerce clause (since then, both provisions have been weakened so far as to have almost no meaning).

Since drugs could not be outlawed at the federal level, the decision was made to use federal taxes as a way around the restriction. In the Harrison Act, legal uses of opiates and cocaine were taxed (supposedly as a revenue need by the federal government, which is the only way it would hold up in the courts), and those who didn't follow the law found themselves in trouble with the treasury department.

In 1930, a new division in the Treasury Department was established -- the Federal Bureau of Narcotics -- and Harry J. Anslinger was named director. This, if anything, marked the beginning of the all-out war against marijuana.

Harry J. Anslinger

Anslinger was an extremely ambitious man, and he recognized the Bureau of Narcotics as an amazing career opportunity -- a new government agency with the opportunity to define both the problem and the solution. He immediately realized that opiates and cocaine wouldn't be enough to help build his agency, so he latched on to marijuana and started to work on making it illegal at the federal level.

Anslinger immediately drew upon the themes of racism and violence to draw national attention to the problem he wanted to create. Some of his quotes regarding marijuana...

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others." "...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races." "Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death." "Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men." "Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing" "You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother." "Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."

And he loved to pull out his own version of the "assassin" definition:

"In the year 1090, there was founded in Persia the religious and military order of the Assassins, whose history is one of cruelty, barbarity, and murder, and for good reason: the members were confirmed users of hashish, or marihuana, and it is from the Arabs' 'hashashin' that we have the English word 'assassin.'"

Yellow Journalism

Harry Anslinger got some additional help from William Randolf Hearst, owner of a huge chain of newspapers. Hearst had lots of reasons to help. First, he hated Mexicans. Second, he had invested heavily in the timber industry to support his newspaper chain and didn't want to see the development of hemp paper in competition. Third, he had lost 800,000 acres of timberland to Pancho Villa, so he hated Mexicans. Fourth, telling lurid lies about Mexicans (and the devil marijuana weed causing violence) sold newspapers, making him rich.

Some samples from the San Francisco Examiner:

"Marihuana makes fiends of boys in thirty days -- Hashish goads users to bloodlust." "By the tons it is coming into this country -- the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.... Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him...."

And other nationwide columns...

"Users of marijuana become STIMULATED as they inhale the drug and are LIKELY TO DO ANYTHING. Most crimes of violence in this section, especially in country districts are laid to users of that drug." "Was it marijuana, the new Mexican drug, that nerved the murderous arm of Clara Phillips when she hammered out her victim's life in Los Angeles?... THREE-FOURTHS OF THE CRIMES of violence in this country today are committed by DOPE SLAVES -- that is a matter of cold record."

Hearst and Anslinger were then supported by Dupont chemical company and various pharmaceutical companies in the effort to outlaw cannabis. Dupont had patented nylon, and wanted hemp removed as competition. The pharmaceutical companies could neither identify nor standardize cannabis dosages, and besides, with cannabis, folks could grow their own medicine and not have to purchase it from large companies.

This all set the stage for...

The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.

After two years of secret planning, Anslinger brought his plan to Congress -- complete with a scrapbook full of sensational Hearst editorials, stories of ax murderers who had supposedly smoked marijuana, and racial slurs.

It was a remarkably short set of hearings.

The one fly in Anslinger's ointment was the appearance by Dr. William C. Woodward, Legislative Council of the American Medical Association.

Woodward started by slamming Harry Anslinger and the Bureau of Narcotics for distorting earlier AMA statements that had nothing to do with marijuana and making them appear to be AMA endorsement for Anslinger's view.

He also reproached the legislature and the Bureau for using the term marijuana in the legislation and not publicizing it as a bill about cannabis or hemp. At this point, marijuana (or marihuana) was a sensationalist word used to refer to Mexicans smoking a drug and had not been connected in most people's minds to the existing cannabis/hemp plant. Thus, many who had legitimate reasons to oppose the bill weren't even aware of it.

Woodward went on to state that the AMA was opposed to the legislation and further questioned the approach of the hearings, coming close to outright accusation of misconduct by Anslinger and the committee:

"That there is a certain amount of narcotic addiction of an objectionable character no one will deny. The newspapers have called attention to it so prominently that there must be some grounds for [their] statements [even Woodward was partially taken in by Hearst's propaganda]. It has surprised me, however, that the facts on which these statements have been based have not been brought before this committee by competent primary evidence. We are referred to newspaper publications concerning the prevalence of marihuana addiction. We are told that the use of marihuana causes crime. But yet no one has been produced from the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of prisoners who have been found addicted to the marihuana habit. An informed inquiry shows that the Bureau of Prisons has no evidence on that point. You have been told that school children are great users of marihuana cigarettes. No one has been summoned from the Children's Bureau to show the nature and extent of the habit, among children. Inquiry of the Children's Bureau shows that they have had no occasion to investigate it and know nothing particularly of it. Inquiry of the Office of Education--- and they certainly should know something of the prevalence of the habit among the school children of the country, if there is a prevalent habit--- indicates that they have had no occasion to investigate and know nothing of it.

Moreover, there is in the Treasury Department itself, the Public Health Service, with its Division of Mental Hygiene. The Division of Mental Hygiene was, in the first place, the Division of Narcotics. It was converted into the Division of Mental Hygiene, I think, about 1930. That particular Bureau has control at the present time of the narcotics farms that were created about 1929 or 1930 and came into operation a few years later. No one has been summoned from that Bureau to give evidence on that point. Informal inquiry by me indicates that they have had no record of any marihuana of Cannabis addicts who have ever been committed to those farms. The bureau of Public Health Service has also a division of pharmacology. If you desire evidence as to the pharmacology of Cannabis, that obviously is the place where you can get direct and primary evidence, rather than the indirect hearsay evidence."

Committee members then proceeded to attack Dr. Woodward, questioning his motives in opposing the legislation. Even the Chairman joined in:

The Chairman: If you want to advise us on legislation, you ought to come here with some constructive proposals, rather than criticism, rather than trying to throw obstacles in the way of something that the Federal Government is trying to do. It has not only an unselfish motive in this, but they have a serious responsibility. Dr. Woodward: We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chairman, why this bill should have been prepared in secret for 2 years without any intimation, even, to the profession, that it was being prepared.

After some further bantering...

The Chairman: I would like to read a quotation from a recent editorial in the Washington Times:
The marihuana cigarette is one of the most insidious of all forms of dope, largely because of the failure of the public to understand its fatal qualities. The Nation is almost defenseless against it, having no Federal laws to cope with it and virtually no organized campaign for combating it. The result is tragic. School children are the prey of peddlers who infest school neighborhoods. High school boys and girls buy the destructive weed without knowledge of its capacity of harm, and conscienceless dealers sell it with impunity. This is a national problem, and it must have national attention. The fatal marihuana cigarette must be recognized as a deadly drug, and American children must be protected against it.That is a pretty severe indictment. They say it is a national question and that it requires effective legislation. Of course, in a general way, you have responded to all of these statements; but that indicates very clearly that it is an evil of such magnitude that it is recognized by the press of the country as such.

And that was basically it. Yellow journalism won over medical science.

The committee passed the legislation on. And on the floor of the house, the entire discussion was:

Member from upstate New York: "Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?" Speaker Rayburn: "I don't know. It has something to do with a thing called marihuana. I think it's a narcotic of some kind." "Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support this bill?" Member on the committee jumps up and says: "Their Doctor Wentworth[sic] came down here. They support this bill 100 percent."

And on the basis of that lie, on August 2, 1937, marijuana became illegal at the federal level.
The entire coverage in the New York Times: "President Roosevelt signed today a bill to curb traffic in the narcotic, marihuana, through heavy taxes on transactions."

Anslinger as precursor to the Drug Czars

Anslinger was essentially the first Drug Czar. Even though the term didn't exist until William Bennett's position as director of the White House Office of National Drug Policy, Anslinger acted in a similar fashion. In fact, there are some amazing parallels between Anslinger and the current Drug Czar John Walters. Both had kind of a carte blanche to go around demonizing drugs and drug users. Both had resources and a large public podium for their voice to be heard and to promote their personal agenda. Both lied constantly, often when it was unnecessary. Both were racists. Both had the ear of lawmakers, and both realized that they could persuade legislators and others based on lies, particularly if they could co-opt the media into squelching or downplaying any opposition views.

Anslinger even had the ability to circumvent the First Amendment. He banned the Canadian movie "Drug Addict," a 1946 documentary that realistically depicted the drug addicts and law enforcement efforts. He even tried to get Canada to ban the movie in their own country, or failing that, to prevent U.S. citizens from seeing the movie in Canada. Canada refused. (Today, Drug Czar John Walters is trying to bully Canada into keeping harsh marijuana laws.)

Anslinger had 37 years to solidify the propaganda and stifle opposition. The lies continued the entire time (although the stories would adjust -- the 21 year old Florida boy who killed his family of five got younger each time he told it). In 1961, he looked back at his efforts:

"Much of the most irrational juvenile violence and that has written a new chapter of shame and tragedy is traceable directly to this hemp intoxication. A gang of boys tear the clothes from two school girls and rape the screaming girls, one boy after the other. A sixteen-year-old kills his entire family of five in Florida, a man in Minnesota puts a bullet through the head of a stranger on the road; in Colorado husband tries to shoot his wife, kills her grandmother instead and then kills himself. Every one of these crimes had been proceeded [sic] by the smoking of one or more marijuana "reefers." As the marijuana situation grew worse, I knew action had to be taken to get the proper legislation passed. By 1937 under my direction, the Bureau launched two important steps First, a legislative plan to seek from Congress a new law that would place marijuana and its distribution directly under federal control. Second, on radio and at major forums, such that presented annually by the New York Herald Tribune, I told the story of this evil weed of the fields and river beds and roadsides. I wrote articles for magazines; our agents gave hundreds of lectures to parents, educators, social and civic leaders. In network broadcasts I reported on the growing list of crimes, including murder and rape. I described the nature of marijuana and its close kinship to hashish. I continued to hammer at the facts. I believe we did a thorough job, for the public was alerted and the laws to protect them were passed, both nationally and at the state level. We also brought under control the wild growing marijuana in this country. Working with local authorities, we cleaned up hundreds of acres of marijuana and we uprooted plants sprouting along the roadsides."

After Anslinger

On a break from college in the 70s, I was visiting a church in rural Illinois. There in the literature racks in the back of the church was a lurid pamphlet about the evils of marijuana -- all the old reefer madness propaganda about how it caused insanity and murder. I approached the minister and said "You can't have this in your church. It's all lies, and the church shouldn't be about promoting lies." Fortunately, my dad believed me, and he had the material removed. He didn't even know how it got there. But without me speaking up, neither he nor the other members of the church had any reason NOT to believe what the pamphlet said. The propaganda machine had been that effective.

The story since then has been a continual litany of:
Politicians wanting to appear tough on crime and passing tougher penalties
Constant increases in spending on law enforcement and prisons
Racist application of drug laws
Taxpayer funded propaganda
Stifling of opposition speech
Political contributions from corporations that profit from marijuana being illegal (pharmaceuticals, alcohol, etc.)
This account only scratches the surface of the story. If you want to know more about the history of marijuana, Harry Anslinger, and the saga of criminalization in the United States and elsewhere, visit some of the excellent links below. (All data and quotes for this piece came from these sources as well).

The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States by Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law, USC Law School. A Speech to the California Judges Association 1995 annual conference.
THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT AND THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: AN INQUIRY INTO THE LEGAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN MARIJUANA PROHIBITION by Richard J. Bonnie & Charles H. Whitebread, II. VIRGINIA LAW REVIEW. VOLUME 56 OCTOBER 1970 NUMBER 6
The Consumers Union Report - Licit and Illicit Drugs by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine
The History of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 By David F. Musto, M.D., New Haven, Conn. Originally published in Arch. Gen. Psychiat. Volume 26, February, 1972
The Report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse I. Control of Marihuana, Alcohol and Tobacco. History of Marihuana Legislation
The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. The history of how the Marihuana Tax Act came to be the law of the land.
Marijuana - The First Twelve Thousand Years by Ernest L. Abel, 1980

Guess Who Wants Transparency

by Jack Kenny

Every once in a while the common platitudes of political discourse sound a jarring note, leaving the listener scratching his head and wondering: "What’s wrong with this picture?"

Take "transparency," for example, that benign justification for the many regulations of freedom of speech and other First Amendment rights for the sake of lofty goals like campaign finance reform. As long as your right to speak isn’t violated and only the reporting of your expenditures and other activities is required, then the law serves the interest of "transparency" and all is well, right? Wrong!

The problem with "transparency" is that it puts the ill-fitting transparent shoes on precisely the wrong feet. We have somehow been conned into believing that government may keep all manner of secrets from us, secrets regarding how they spend our money and soil our nation’s name to starve, torture, bomb or otherwise kill people, based on highly secret (and frequently suspect) "intelligence." Yet we are led to believe that transparency is required of us in the private sector – where you make decisions about how to spend your money, whether on a political cause or candidate or on books about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The latter might bring your book purchases or library records to the attention of the government under the USA PATRIOT Act. But your political donations or activities come under government scrutiny in the name of campaign finance or "ethics" reform.

Legislation proposed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would define people and organizations at the grass roots level as lobbyists, who must, therefore, report quarterly expenditures of more than $50,000. Okay, so you don’t spend $50,000 in a quarter on grassroots political activity, so you can go back to sleep, right? Sure, if you prefer. As the bumper sticker says, "It’s okay, I wasn’t using my civil liberties anyway."

The Bill of Rights is truly impartial. It does not guarantee freedom of speech up to the level of $50,000 per quarter or $200,000 a year. It does not deny freedom to the rich any more than to the poor. If you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on a political ad saying your congressman doesn’t give a rat’s behind about the First Amendment, as witness his vote on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, neither your congressman nor Senators McCain or Feingold nor any combination of their colleagues in the Incumbents’ Rackets Club should be able to prevent you from doing so, right up to and including the day of an election. But, of course, McCain, Feingold and a majority of their colleagues in each house have done just that.

Now the Pelosi bill would define grassroots activity, such as organizing telephone or letter writing campaigns to your representatives in Congress, as lobbying. You may never go near Capitol Hill, not even know the name of your congressman. But if you lead a petition drive, take out issue advocacy ads in your local newspaper, organize a demonstration or buy air time on TV or radio to support a cause, be it the environment, the end of war or an end to the killing of babies in abortuaries, you may be a lobbyist under the Pelosi bill. Because if your activities and those of other like-minded citizens in your organization cost more than $50,000 in a quarter, you would be required to report those activities to the government.

Now this is an amazing thing! We the People have to report our political activities to the government. You might have thought the government would have to report its activities to us. Oh, no! The same Congress that puts reporting requirements on you can go into secret session whenever it likes. The executive branch that collects data on you and takes the nation to war in far off places based on frequently faulty "intelligence" it can’t disclose, demands to know what political action groups you are supporting with some of the dollars it lets you keep after taxation. And the Supreme Court, which won’t even tell us what part of the "make no law" phrase in the First Amendment it cannot understand, says (in its ruling on McCain-Feingold) that this sort of thing is Constitutionally permissible.

So what we have now is not a government accountable to the people, but the very opposite – a people accountable to the government. And most of the people don’t even see the contradiction. We are like the poor, manipulated creatures in George Orwell’s "Animal Farm" who awake each morning to find the rules have been rewritten during the night.

Oh, yes, we still have a Constitution – in writing. But so did the people of the Soviet Union. As Judge Learned Hand long ago observed,

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it." Or as the bumper sticker says:

"It’s okay, I wasn’t using my civil liberties, anyway."

The Ethics of Liberty: Part I Natural Law

by Murray Rothbard
http://www.mises.org/story/2426
1. Natural Law and Reason (Listen to MP3)

Among intellectuals who consider themselves "scientific," the phrase "the nature of man" is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull. "Man has no nature!" is the modern rallying cry and typical of the sentiment of political philosophers today was the assertion of a distinguished political theorist some years ago before a meeting of the American Political Science Association that "man's nature" is a purely theological concept that must be dismissed from any scientific discussion.

In the controversy over man's nature, and over the broader and more controversial concept of "natural law," both sides have repeatedly proclaimed that natural law and theology are inextricably intertwined. As a result, many champions of natural law, in scientific or philosophic circles, have gravely weakened their case by implying that rational, philosophical methods alone cannot establish such law: that theological faith is necessary to maintain the concept. On the other hand, the opponents of natural law have gleefully agreed; since faith in the supernatural is deemed necessary to belief in natural law, the latter concept must be tossed out of scientific, secular discourse, and be consigned to the arcane sphere of the divine studies. In consequence, the idea of a natural law founded on reason and rational inquiry has been virtually lost.

The believer in a rationally established natural law must, then, face the hostility of both camps: the one group sensing in this position an antagonism toward religion; and the other group suspecting that God and mysticism are being slipped in by the back door. To the first group, it must be said that they are reflecting an extreme Augustinian position which held that faith rather than reason was the only legitimate tool for investigating man's nature and man's proper ends. In short, in this fideist tradition, theology had completely displaced philosophy. The Thomist tradition, on the contrary, was precisely the opposite: vindicating the independence of philosophy from theology, and proclaiming the ability of man's reason to understand and arrive at the laws, physical and ethical, of the natural order, if belief in a systematic order of natural laws open to discovery by man's reason is per se anti-religious, then anti-religious also were St. Thomas and the later Scholastics, as well as the devout Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius. The statement that there is an order of natural law, in short, leaves open the problem of whether or not God has created that order; and the assertion of the viability of man's reason to discover the natural order leaves open the question of whether or not that reason was given to man by God. The assertion of an order of natural laws discoverable by reason is, by itself, neither pro- nor anti-religious.

Because this position is startling to most people today, let us investigate this Thomistic position a little further. The statement of absolute independence of natural law from the question of the existence of God was implicit rather than flatly asserted in St. Thomas himself; but like so many implications of Thomism, it was brought forth by Suarez and the other brilliant Spanish Scholastics of the late sixteenth century. The Jesuit Suarez pointed out that many Scholastics had taken the position that the natural law of ethics, the law of what is good and bad for man, does not depend upon God's will. Indeed, some of the Scholastics had gone so far as to say that:
even though God did not exist, or did not make use of His reason, or did not judge rightly of things, if there is in man such a dictate of right reason to guide him, it would have had the same nature of law as it now has.

Or, as a modern Thomist philosopher declares:

If the word "natural' means anything at all, it refers to the nature of a man, and when used with "law," "natural" must refer to an ordering that is manifested in the inclinations of a man's nature and to nothing else. Hence, taken in itself, there is nothing religious or theological in the "Natural Law" of Aquinas.

Dutch Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius declared, in his De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1625):

What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God.

And again:

Measureless as is the power of God, nevertheless it can be said that there are certain things over which that power does not extend … Just as even God cannot cause that two times two should not make four, so He cannot cause that which is intrinsically evil be not evil.

D'Entrèves concludes that:

[Grotius's] definition of natural law has nothing revolutionary. When he maintains that natural law is that body of rules which Man is able to discover by the use of his reason, he does nothing but restate the Scholastic notion of a rational foundation of ethics. Indeed, his aim is rather to restore that notion which had been shaken by the extreme Augustinianism of certain Protestant currents of thought. When he declares that these rules are valid in themselves, independently of the fact that God willed them, he repeats an assertion which had already been made by some of the schoolmen.

Grotius's aim, d'Entrèves adds, "was to construct a system of laws which would carry conviction in an age in which theological controversy was gradually losing the power to do so." Grotius and his juristic successors — Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, and Vattel — proceeded to elaborate this independent body of natural laws in a purely secular context, in accordance with their own particular interests, which were not, in contrast to the Schoolmen, primarily theological. Indeed, even the eighteenth-century rationalists, in many ways dedicated enemies of the Scholastics, were profoundly influenced in their very rationalism by the Scholastic tradition.

Thus, let there be no mistake: in the Thomistic tradition, natural law is ethical as well as physical law; and the instrument by which man apprehends such law is his reason — not faith, or intuition, or grace, revelation, or anything else. In the contemporary atmosphere of sharp dichotomy between natural law and reason — and especially amid the irrationalist sentiments of "conservative" thought — this cannot be underscored too often. Hence, St. Thomas Aquinas, in the words of the eminent historian of philosophy Father Copleston, "emphasized the place and function of reason in moral conduct. He [Aquinas] shared with Aristotle the view that it is the possession of reason which distinguished man from the animals" and which "enables him to act deliberately in view of the consciously apprehended end and raises him above the level of purely instinctive behavior."

Aquinas, then, realized that men always act purposively, but also went beyond this to argue that ends can also be apprehended by reason as either objectively good or bad for man. For Aquinas, then, in the words of Copleston, "there is therefore room for the concept of 'right reason,' reason directing man's acts to the attainment of the objective good for man." Moral conduct is therefore conduct in accord with right reason: "If it is said that moral conduct is rational conduct, what is meant is that it is conduct in accordance with right reason, reason apprehending the objective good for man and dictating the means to its attainment."

Reason is not bound to be a mere slave to the passions, confined to cranking out the discovery of the means to arbitrarily chosen ends.

In natural-law philosophy, then, reason is not bound, as it is in modern post-Humean philosophy, to be a mere slave to the passions, confined to cranking out the discovery of the means to arbitrarily chosen ends. For the ends themselves are selected by the use of reason; and "right reason" dictates to man his proper ends as well as the means for their attainment. For the Thomist or natural-law theorist, the general law of morality for man is a special case of the system of natural law governing all entities of the world, each with its own nature and its own ends. "For him the moral law … is a special case of the general principles that all finite things move toward their ends by the development of their potentialities." And here we come to a vital difference between inanimate or even non-human living creatures, and man himself; for the former are compelled to proceed in accordance with the ends dictated by their natures, whereas man, "the rational animal," possesses reason to discover such ends and the free will to choose.

Which doctrine, natural law or those of its critics, is to be considered truly rational was answered incisively by the late Leo Strauss, in the course of a penetrating critique of the value-relativism in political theory of Professor Arnold Brecht. For, in contrast to natural law,
positivistic social science … is characterized by the abandonment of reason or the flight from reason….

According to the positivistic interpretation of relativism which prevails in present-day social science … reason can tell us which means are conducive to which ends; it cannot tell us which attainable ends are to be preferred to other attainable ends. Reason cannot tell us that we ought to choose attainable ends; if someone 'loves him who desires the impossible' reason may tell him that he acts irrationally, but it cannot tell him that he ought to act rationally, or that acting irrationally is acting badly or basely. If rational conduct consists in choosing the right means for the right end, relativism teaches in effect that rational conduct is impossible.

Finally, the unique place of reason in natural-law philosophy has been affirmed by the modern Thomistic philosopher, the late Father John Toohey. Toohey defined sound philosophy as follows: "Philosophy, in the sense in which the word is used when scholasticism is contrasted with other philosophies, is an attempt on the part of man's unaided reason to give a fundamental explanation of the nature of things."

2. Natural Law as "Science" (Listen to MP3)

It is indeed puzzling that so many modern philosophers should sniff at the very term "nature" as an injection of mysticism and the supernatural. An apple, let fall, will drop to the ground; this we all observe and acknowledge to be in the nature of the apple (as well as the world in general).

Two atoms of hydrogen combined with one of oxygen will yield one molecule of water — behavior that is uniquely in the nature of hydrogen, oxygen, and water. There is nothing arcane or mystical about such observations. Why then cavil at the concept of "nature"? The world, in fact, consists of a myriad number of observable things, or entities. This is surely an observable fact. Since the world does not consist of one homogenous thing or entity alone, it follows that each one of these different things possesses differing attributes, otherwise they would all be the same thing. But if A, B, C, etc., have different attributes, it follows immediately that they have different natures. It also follows that when these various things meet and interact, a specifically delimitable and definable result will occur. In short, specific, delimitable causes will have specific delimitable effects.

The observable behavior of each of these entities is the law of their natures, and this law includes what happens as a result of the interactions. The complex that we may build up of these laws may be termed the structure of natural law. What is "mystical" about that? In the field of purely physical laws, this concept will usually differ from modern positivistic terminology only on high philosophical levels; applied to man, however, the concept is far more controversial. And yet, if apples and stones and roses each have their specific natures, is man the only entity, the only being, that cannot have one? And if man does have a nature, why cannot it too be open to rational observation and reflection? If all things have natures, then surely man's nature is open to inspection; the current brusque rejection of the concept of the nature of man is therefore arbitrary and a priori.

One common, flip criticism by opponents of natural law is: who is to establish the alleged truths about man? The answer is not who but what: man's reason. Man's reason is objective, i.e., it can be employed by all men to yield truths about the world. To ask what is man's nature is to invite the answer. Go thou and study and find out! It is as if one man were to assert that the nature of copper were open to rational investigation and a critic were to challenge him to "prove" this immediately by setting forth on the spot all the laws that have been discovered about copper.
Another common charge is that natural-law theorists differ among themselves, and that therefore all natural-law theories must be discarded. This charge comes with peculiar ill grace when it comes, as it often does, from utilitarian economists. For economics has been a notoriously contentious science — and yet few people advocate tossing all economics therefore into the discard. Furthermore, difference of opinion is no excuse for discarding all sides to a dispute; the responsible person is the one who uses his reason to examine the various contentions and make up his own mind. He does not simply say a priori, "a plague on all your houses!" The fact of man's reason does not mean that error is impossible. Even such "hard" sciences as physics and chemistry have had their errors and their fervent disputes. No man is omniscient or infallible — a law, by the way, of man's nature.

The natural law ethic decrees that for all living things, "goodness" is the fulfillment of what is best for that type of creature; "goodness" is therefore relative to the nature of the creature concerned. Thus, Professor Cropsey writes:

The classical [natural law] doctrine is that each thing is excellent in the degree to which it can do the things for which its species is naturally equipped … Why is the natural good? … [Because] there is neither a way nor a reason to prevent ourselves from distinguishing between useless and serviceable beasts, for example; and … the most empirical and … rational standard of the serviceable, or the limit of the thing's activity is set by its nature. We do not judge elephants to be good because they are natural; or because nature is morally good — whatever that would mean. We judge a particular elephant to be good by the light of what elephant nature makes it possible for elephants to do and to be.

In the case of man, the natural-law ethic states that goodness or badness can be determined by what fulfills or thwarts what is best for man's nature.

The brusque rejection of the concept of the nature of man is arbitrary….

The natural law, then, elucidates what is best for man — what ends man should pursue that are most harmonious with, and best tend to fulfill, his nature. In a significant sense, then, natural law provides man with a "science of happiness," with the paths which will lead to his real happiness. In contrast praxeology or economics as well as the utilitarian philosophy with which this science has been closely allied, treat "happiness" in the purely formal sense as the fulfillment of those ends which people happen — for whatever reason — to place high on their scales of value.

Satisfaction of those ends yields to man his "utility" or "satisfaction" or "happiness." Value in the sense of valuation or utility is purely subjective, and decided by each individual. This procedure is perfectly proper for the formal science of praxeology, or economic theory, but not necessarily elsewhere. For in natural-law ethics, ends are demonstrated to be good or bad for man in varying degrees; value here is objective — determined by the natural law of man's being, and here "happiness" for man is considered in the commonsensical, contentual sense. As Father Kenealy put it:

This philosophy maintains that there is in fact an objective moral order within the range of human intelligence, to which human societies are bound in conscience to conform and upon which the peace and happiness of personal, national and international life depend.

And the eminent English jurist, Sir William Blackstone, summed up the natural law and its relation to human happiness as follows:

This is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law … demonstrating that this or that action tends to man's real happiness, and therefore very justly concluding that the performance of it is a part of the law of nature; or, on the other hand, that this or that action is destruction of man's real happiness, and therefore that the law of nature forbids it.

Without using the terminology of natural law, psychologist Leonard Carmichael has indicated how an objective, absolute ethic can be established for man on scientific methods, based upon biological and psychological inquiry:
because man has an unchanging and an age-old, genetically determined anatomical, physiological, and psychological make-up, there is reason to believe that at least some of the "values" that he recognized as good or bad have been discovered or have emerged as human individuals have lived together for thousands of years in many societies. Is there any reason to suggest that these values, once identified and tested, may not be thought of as essentially fixed and unchanging? For example, the wanton murder of one adult by another for the purely personal amusement of the person committing the murder, once it is recognized as a general wrong, is likely always to be so recognized. Such a murder has disadvantageous individual and social effects. Or to take a milder example from esthetics, man is always likely to recognize in a special way the balance of two complementary colors because he is born with specially constituted human eyes.

One common philosophic objection to natural law ethics is that it confuses, or identifies, the realism of fact and value. For purposes of our brief discussion, John Wild's reply will suffice:
In answer we may point out that their [natural law] view identifies value not with existence but rather with the fulfillment of tendencies determined by the structure of the existent entity. Furthermore, it identifies evil not with non-existence but rather with a mode of existence in which natural tendencies are thwarted and deprived of realization…. The young plant whose leaves are withering for lack of light is not nonexistent. It exists, but in an unhealthy or privative mode. The lame man is not nonexistent. He exists, but with a natural power partially unrealized. … This metaphysical objection is based upon the common assumption that existence is fully finished or complete. … [But] what is good is the fulfillment of being.

After stating that ethics, for man as for any other entity, are determined by investigating verifiable existing tendencies of that entity, Wild asks a question crucial to all non-theological ethics: "why are such principles felt to be binding on me?" How do such universal tendencies of human nature become incorporated into a person's subjective value scale? Because
the factual needs which underlie the whole procedure are common to man. The values founded on them are universal. Hence, if I made no mistake in my tendential analysis of human nature, and if I understand myself, I must exemplify the tendency and must feel it subjectively as an imperative urge to action.

David Hume is the philosopher supposed by modern philosophers to have effectively demolished the theory of natural law. Hume's "demolition" was two-pronged: the raising of the alleged "fact-value" dichotomy, thus debarring the inference of value from fact", and his view that reason is and can only be a slave to the passions.

"No man is omniscient or infallible — a law, by the way, of man's nature."

In short, in contrast to the natural-law view that man's reason can discover the proper ends for man to follow, Hume held that only the emotions can ultimately set man's ends, and that reason's place is as the technician and handmaiden to the emotions. (Here Hume has been followed by modern social scientists since Max Weber.) According to this view, people's emotions are assumed to be primary and unanalyzable givens.

Professor Hesselberg has shown, however, that Hume, in the course of his own discussions, was compelled to reintroduce a natural-law conception into his social philosophy and particularly into his theory of justice, thus illustrating the gibe of Etienne Gilson: "The natural law always buries its undertakers." For Hume, in Hesselberg's words, "recognized and accepted that the social … order is an indispensable prerequisite to man's well-being and happiness: and that this is a statement of fact." The social order, therefore, must be maintained by man. Hesselberg continues:

But a social order is not possible unless man is able to conceive what it is, and what its advantages are, and also conceive those norms of conduct which are necessary to its establishment and preservation, namely, respect for another's person and for his rightful possessions, which is the substance of justice … But justice is the product of reason, not the passions. And justice is the necessary support of the social order; and the social order is necessary to man's well-being and happiness. If this is so, the norms of justice must control and regulate the passions, and not vice versa.

Hesselberg concludes that "thus Hume's original 'primacy of the passions' thesis is seen to be utterly untenable for his social and political theory, and … he is compelled to reintroduce reason as a cognitive-normative factor in human social relations."

Indeed, in discussing justice and the importance of the rights of private property, Hume was compelled to write that reason can establish such a social ethic: "nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding for what is irregular and uncommodious in the affections" — in short, reason can be superior to the passions.

We have seen from our discussion that the doctrine of natural law — the view that an objective ethics can be established through reason — has had to face two powerful groups of enemies in the modern world: both anxious to denigrate the power of man's reason to decide upon his destiny. These are the fideists who believe that ethics can only be given to man by supernatural revelation, and the skeptics who believe that man must take his ethics from arbitrary whim or emotion. We may sum up with Professor Grant's harsh but penetrating view of
the strange contemporary alliance between those who doubt the capacity of human reason in the name of scepticism (probably scientific in origin) and those who denigrate its capacity in the name of revealed religion. It is only necessary to study the thought of Ockham to see how ancient this strange alliance is. For in Ockham can be seen how philosophic nominalism, unable to face the question of practical certainty, solves it by the arbitrary hypothesis of revelation. The will detached from the intellect (as it must be in a nominalism) can seek certainty only through such arbitrary hypotheses.

The interesting fact historically is that these two anti-rationalist traditions — that of the liberal skeptic and the Protestant revelationist — should originally have come from two … opposite views of man. The Protestant dependence upon revelation arose from a great pessimism about human nature … The immediately apprehended values of the liberal originate in a great optimism. Yet … after all, is not the dominating tradition in North America a Protestantism which has been transformed by pragmatic technology and liberal aspirations?

Thoughts On Authority

I selectively ignore and follow rules and authority because I question wether or not (1) that authority can be justified and (2) the jurisdiction of the rules applies. For example, if I am invited into your home, I am technically under your authority, and I will accept this because the jurisdiction (I.E. the home) is yours. Obviously, I can't just walk into your home arbitrarily (or worse yet, break down your door) with loud music playing on a boom box and a cigarette hanging from my mouth without your permission. However, as soon as I leave your home, that authority dissapears - your jurisdiction as an individual ends. I can light my cigaratte, listen to my boom box as I please. In short, as soon as I leave the jurisdiction of authority, which is usually decided by property boundaries, the "rules" (of your household in this case) dissapear.

The rules, by their very nature, cannot extend beyond the property of their jurisdiction. The individual has just authority only over their own person and property; this is as far as their jurisdiction applies. Your household cannot make rules for my household, for you have no just authority over it because you do not have just ownership of it. However, what this "exercise" simultanously observes is that there is such a thing as just authority, which is based on the just ownership of property. This just authority is also a naturally arising phenomenon in human nature. The individual that homesteads/purchases and stewards a given piece of property is the just owner of that property, as a result and measure of their control over it, and as such have natural authority over that property (see John Locke). The vast bulk of social problems can be solved or lessened by properly accessing who the rightful owner is, and consequently who's authority applies in a given situation.

A note on the idea of "equality in authority": It also remains as an unaviodable truth that this natural authority will never be equally distributed due to the diverse, individualistic nature of man. Some people will always have larger and smaller jurisdictions than others, and there will always be people with more and less property then others. This does not necessarily imply that heirarchy is natural as an institution so much as it implies that a variant, unpredictable and unstatic (I.E. it is changing over time) structure is natural as an institution. It is neither a pure equilibrium or a heirarchy. It is like a relatively random graph of ups and downs. Thus, both the egalitarian and the monarchist are wrong because they are trying to impose structures of authority that are not natural: the egalitarian, on one hand, trying to equalize everyone's ownership over property, and the heirarchist, on the other hand, trying to pyramidize everyone's ownership over property.

Suppose that you claim authority over property that you do not own or steward. Suppose that you claim that you have "authority" over someone else's property, or even worse, over an entire territorial area, if not the world (or, worse yet, a claim of "equal communal ownership" on a world-wide scale, otherwise known as the ideology of global communism). I will reject your so-called authority outright as a fake. I will not subject myself to the "rules" of unjust property owners and thus false jurisdiction. If the jurisdiction is not legitimately founded, then we are dealing with "unjust authority" that should be resisted at all costs. The only authority that I recognize is that of the rightful owners (and it is a collectivist fallacy to assume that "the rightful owners" means a rigid heirarchy or small cabal of "evil capitalist pigs").

Everything else is literally criminal under sound ethical and legal principle; no individual or group can truly have just authority over property that they do not in reality justly own or steward. An enforced claim of authority over property that you don't own is called theft and fraud. An enforced claim of authority over the person of another is called slavery (as well as horrible acts such as assault, murder and rape). It must be realized that all "crime" involves action commited by a human agent as an expression of unjust authority over the person or property of others (in violation of the just authority of the victims). To rightly reject crime is to reject an unjust exercise of authority, and simultanously to uphold the just authority of the individual over their person and property.

Of course, when all of the above is taken to it's logical conclusions (by applying the same criterion to government that we are applying to individual citezens), it becomes apparent that government is nothing more than a highly organized criminal gang with an unjust monopoly claim on authority over a vast territory of property that it does not in reality justly own or adequately steward. Government is the institution that has been empowered to "legally" engage in criminal acts that nearly everyone concedes is a crime when done by a citezen (taxation = theft, war = mass murder, conscription = slavery).

Government is a monopoly of the use of force. And this criminal gang has somehow resigned the vast bulk of people to it's criminal activity and literally turned it into a seemingly permanent institution. In essence, then, "a criminal gang that sets itself up as an official legal institution to plunder the populace on a repeatable basis" is the proper definition of the word government. Phase I is "your money or your life" (the initial usurpation of authority), but Phase II is when the people forget about Phase I and act as if the status quo is a tradition, a fact of nature, that we cannot do without or is basically impossible to change or get rid of. Worse yet, they may look to their aggressors as heroes and saviors (Phase III) !

I admit, I do not in practical fact completely adhere to this view of government (because, admittedly, the implications are very hard for most people to deal with), or rather, I still balk at the conclusion of abolishing goverment wholesale. But when viewed logically the anarcho-capitalist position is correct. Logically, it appears so correct as to shatter many of one's "hopes" in a society where all of us are brought up to believe in the utter necessity of having some kind of government (even worse, most of us have been conditioned to believe in the utter necessity of one, central government, as if a less centralized system would be anarchy - and further, we have largely been conditioned to blindly accept that so-called "democracy", which is really only a combination of mob rule and an expansion of the access to government for political parasites, is the best kind of government), and that total chaos is the only alternative.

Out of all anarchist positions, anarcho-capitalism is the most sound one, because most other anarchist ideologies reject authority as a whole, often leading them towards anarchist communism. Further, many anarchists seem to think that "you can do whatever you want under any circumstance" is anarchism. Libertarian anarchism (better known as anarcho-capitalism) is unique because it does not reject all authority; it seeks to replace what it sees as unjust authority (both government and private crime) with the upholding of just authority (private property and self-ownership). The foolish non-libertarian anarchist often finds themselves advocating private crime (usually acts of overt violence), while the libertarian anarchist opposes such private crime. Most forms of anarchism, many of which are left-wing, make the mistake of calling for the abolition of both government and private property equally. In this sense, the non-capitalist anarchists are much more radical than libertarian anarchists, as the anarcho-capitalist in fact wishes to protect the institution of private property; they view government and private property as polar opposites and enemies.

Of course, the paradox that minimalists/minarchists like myself find ourselves in is that, from our perspective, you might just need a government to adequately uphold the just authority. You just might need a government to decide who the just owner is, and thus decide where the just authority lies; to resolve conflicts of authority. But the anarcho-capitalists critique of the state is as clear as a bell. Its logic seems flawless. For an anarcho-capitalist response to this is that we are now relying on an unjust authority to resolve conflicts of authority, and that this unjust authority we have created or are relying on will inherently rule in favor of itself consistantly and cause countless amounts of conflicts of authority itself!

Afterall, how are conflicts between the authority of the state vs. anything else to be resolved? The anarcho-capitalist is correct in pointing out the obvious: the government can no longer be an impartial judge in conflicts of authority when those conflicts are between itself and others. Thus, government will have a natural tendency to rule in favor of its own authority, rule against objections to its authority, and as a result, rule against people's just authority by law. To the anarcho-capitalist, this scenario of government judging in its own case is no different or better than if a private conflict of authority between a robber and his victim were dealt with by having the robber judge the case.

The anarcho-capitalist points out that in allowing one institution to have ultimate judgeing powers in conflicts of authority (I.E. government), you have in essence exempted that institution from having to abide by the confines of just authority itself, for you have basically given that institution arbitrary authority over that of everyone else. In short, by its very nature, government has no arbiter or institution above itself that can judge its authority. A state is inherently an unjust claim of authority if it cannot be held to the same standard that it holds its subjects to. While you can turn to the state to possibly resolve private conflicts, if a conflict in authority is between the state and a private individual or group, such as when the state violates the authority of an individual citezen or group of citezens, then inevitably you have no choice but to turn to your own aggressor to judge in the case.

The net effect of this is that the state is empowered to violate the authority (and thus rights) of the populace at large because it has no real way of being subjected to any outside authority at all as such. Inherently, an institution that is the sole judge of authority is bound by no authority but its own ad hoc whim, it has no genuine way of being limited by the authority of others, and is thus lawless (as in criminal) in how it operates. If this is the case, then how is creating a government going to do anything but institutionalize and centralize unjust authority into one group? If the state is inherently a usurpation of authority from its just owners, yet on the other hand a stateless atmosphere cannot adequatety uphold that initial authority, what is the solution? Either the minarchist position is wrong and the anarcho-capitalists are right, or we both are missing something, or there is no answer (it leads to a paradox).

Enough With the Jewish Conspiracy Theories

by Bill Barnwell

Every so often, I have the privilege of being bombarded with emails from people who believe that Jews are responsible for everything from 9/11 to slow restaurant service. In the strange little world of these guys, Jews are to blame for every evil under the sun. Also if you don’t have the "courage" to admit it, then you are a "coward," "fool," "Jew-lover," or worse. Well count me among the dissenters who believe that this group is full of it.

Yes, that’s right. I’m a fool for not believing that 9/11 was a staged event planned by the U.S. and Israel. I’m also a fool for not believing that these characters are heroic truth seekers for buying into all sorts of paranoid delusional nonsense with no real evidence to back it up. I hardly see how such people are either heroic or a help in the cause for liberty.

Let’s take 9/11 and events that followed for an example. There is a difference in saying that the U.S. government spun the aftermath of 9/11 to win public support for its war on Iraq and that the government caused 9/11 just so it could attack various Middle Eastern countries to do Israel’s bidding. There is a difference between saying Israel was happy about, or supported our invasion of Iraq, and saying that Israel forced or caused these events to happen through their omnipotent influence. The problem with conspiracy theorists of all stripes, especially from the racist branch, is that they wildly blow things out of proportion and read events into the past and present without much support for their positions. There’s no nuance of thought. It’s always the worst-case scenario and "the Jews" are always cast in the worst possible light.

This most recent wave of attacks from those who believe that Jews are hiding under their beds each night came as a result from my most recent column on the Bush/McCain policy of escalation in Iraq. This particular column didn’t attract a ton of attention until one particular nutty talk show host – who believes in paranormal activity and takes seriously every conspiracy theory involving Jews – linked to the piece on his site. As a result, I received many emails from his readers informing me that the real problem wasn’t Bush or McCain. The real problem is – you got it – the Jews!

I’ve noticed that people who suffer from paranoid hatred of any particular racial or ethnic group are able to work their targets into any conversation and blame them for any problem. If you were to actually read the above-cited column, it had nothing to do with Jews or Israel. But these people sincerely believe, however, that when you get down to it, the root of the problem is really the Jews. That’s whether we are talking about an Iraq escalation or anything else they don’t like. While this group claims to be lovers of liberty and further claims to oppose the War Party, I have a feeling that they would have no problem with the idea of waging war on Israel and/or imposing anti-freedom measures upon Jews in America and around the world.

The problem with plenty of such racists (and yes, the term "racist" – while one of the most misused and overused words in political and cultural debate – perfectly fits this crowd) is that they are only selective in their views of liberty and freedom. Because they are sincerely convinced that "the Jews" really do "cause all the wars in the world" (my email box indicates that the drunken Mel Gibson is not the only person who believes this) many of them feel justified in urging the most anti-freedom attitudes and beliefs towards Israel and Jewish folks. These guys rightfully deplore racist statements towards whites, Arabs, and others, but they have no problem changing their tune when it comes to Jews. As such, it makes little sense for libertarians to take these people seriously.

Another problem is that some of the wilder conspiracy theories, particularly those that are obsessed with Jews, is that they completely dumb down the wider debate. Conspiracy theorists on a whole are not real keen on nuance. They can’t distinguish between "the government might not be telling us everything about 9/11" and "the government caused 9/11." For those who are obsessed with Jews, they would qualify that last statement with "the government caused 9/11 by colluding with Jews and their Zionist supporters." Or better yet, "Jews caused 9/11." For the conspiracy crowd, if there are some inconsistencies they immediately jump to the worst and most wild conclusions, regardless of whether or not the evidence supports their cause.

Now I know my audience, and I know that last sentence has just ticked off a lot of people who might be reading this. You’re now going to be tempted to fire off an angry email denouncing my ignorance of the government’s almighty strength and/or the all-powerful influence of the Jews. You’re going to send me links to websites proving "the truth" about 9/11 or links showing "the truth" about "the Zionist agenda." Well, I’ll do you guys a favor. I call on every LRC reader who is actually interested to do a web search and read the garbage out there "proving" the government blew up the Pentagon and/or that Jews have their hands in everything. Then make up your own minds. If you were able to recognize the reference to the paranormal talk show host who blames most things on Israel, go read his stuff too. Then you can decide for yourself if the whole rest of the world has it wrong and some guy who believes in space aliens and his gullible followers has it right.

There is, of course, an opposite end to this silliness. Plenty believe that one cannot legitimately critique the Israeli government in any way, shape, or form, without being "anti-Semitic." Millions of Christians support a variant of "Christian Zionism" (a term they themselves use) because they believe that the "end-times" will focus around the modern nation of Israel. They further believe in tearing down the Al-Aqsa mosque at the Temple Mount and rebuilding an Old Testament style Jewish temple for renewed Mosaic sacrifices. Thus, many in the dispensational crowd of Christianity condemn Arabs outright and believe that Israelis can do little wrong.

These points of view are dangerous in many respects, but at the very least these types of folks are infinitely more pleasant than those who sincerely believe that Jews are the root of all evil.

Unfortunately, I have to hear it from both sides. As an Arab, I constantly have to listen to bizarre claptrap from some family members about how bad the Jews are. As I writer, I hear it all the time from the conspiracy crowd. In such cases, I am proud to defend the Jewish people against these kinds of nutty attacks. However, as a Christian, I am always hearing from fellow Christians how I don’t support Israel enough. I also hear from this group that I don’t really know or believe the Bible since I do not teach or adhere to the very bad theology of pretribulationalism and dispensationalism.

Are we really that simple of thinkers? Is the choice really between being a politically correct (and/or dispensational) cheerleader of modern Israel or the even worse choice of being a conspiracy theory believing nut who blames Jews for all problems in the world?

As for the second group of Jew-haters, I really don’t want much to do with them. Taking them or their baseless ideas seriously does absolutely nothing for the cause of freedom. In fact, it detracts from it. I also have no problem with this group wanting nothing more to do with me. I highly welcome such an outcome. As for the rest of you, go ahead and read their stuff if you want, use your brain, and ask yourself who really has a hold on truth and reality.

Man, those mind controls from the Jews really must have their hold on me. Yeah…right.

3000 American Deaths in Iraq

by Ron Paul
Before the US House of Representatives, January 5, 2007

Mr. Speaker, Saddam Hussein is Dead. So are Three Thousand Americans.

The regime in Iraq has been changed. Yet victory will not be declared: not only does the war go on, it’s about to escalate. Obviously the turmoil in Iraq is worse than ever, and most Americans no longer are willing to tolerate the costs, both human and economic, associated with this war.

We have been in Iraq for 45 months. Many more Americans have been killed in Iraq than were killed in the first 45 months of our war in Vietnam. I was in the U.S. Air Force in 1965, and I remember well when President Johnson announced a troop surge in Vietnam to hasten victory. That war went on for another decade, and by the time we finally got out 60,000 Americans had died. God knows we should have gotten out ten years earlier. “Troop surge” meant serious escalation.

The election is over and Americans have spoken. Enough is enough! They want the war ended and our troops brought home. But the opposite likely will occur, with bipartisan support. Up to 50,000 more troops will be sent. The goal no longer is to win, but simply to secure Baghdad! So much has been spent with so little to show for it.

Who possibly benefits from escalating chaos in Iraq? Neoconservatives unabashedly have written about how chaos presents opportunities for promoting their goals. Certainly Osama bin Laden has benefited from the turmoil in Iraq, as have the Iranian Shiites who now are better positioned to take control of southern Iraq.

Yes, Saddam Hussein is dead, and only the Sunnis mourn. The Shiites and Kurds celebrate his death, as do the Iranians and especially bin Laden – all enemies of Saddam Hussein. We have performed a tremendous service for both bin Laden and Ahmadinejad, and it will cost us plenty. The violent reaction to our complicity in the execution of Saddam Hussein is yet to come.

Three thousand American military personnel are dead, more than 22,000 are wounded, and tens of thousands will be psychologically traumatized by their tours of duty in Iraq. Little concern is given to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in this war. We’ve spent $400 billion so far, with no end in sight.

This is money we don’t have. It is all borrowed from countries like China, that increasingly succeed in the global economy while we drain wealth from our citizens through heavy taxation and insidious inflation. Our manufacturing base is now nearly extinct.

Where the additional U.S. troops in Iraq will come from is anybody’s guess. But surely they won’t be redeployed from Japan, Korea, or Europe. We at least must pretend that our bankrupt empire is intact. But then again, the Soviet empire appeared intact in 1988.

Some Members of Congress, intent on equitably distributing the suffering among all Americans, want to bring back the draft. Administration officials vehemently deny making any concrete plans for a draft. But why should we believe this? Look what happened when so many believed the reasons given for our preemptive invasion of Iraq.

Selective Service officials admit running a check of their lists of available young men. If the draft is reinstated, we probably will include young women as well to serve the god of “equality.” Conscription is slavery, plain and simple. And it was made illegal under the 13th amendment, which prohibits involuntary servitude. One may well be killed as a military draftee, which makes conscription a very dangerous kind of enslavement.

Instead of testing the efficacy of the Selective Service System and sending more troops off to a war we’re losing, we ought to revive our love of liberty. We should repeal the Selective Service Act. A free society should never depend on compulsory conscription to defend itself.
We get into trouble by not following the precepts of liberty or obeying the rule of law.

Preemptive, undeclared wars fought under false pretenses are a road to disaster. If a full declaration of war by Congress had been demanded as the Constitution requires, this war never would have been fought. If we did not create credit out of thin air as the Constitution prohibits, we never would have convinced taxpayers to support this war directly from their pockets. How long this financial charade can go on is difficult to judge, but when the end comes it will not go unnoticed by any American.

FYI

I will not be posting at BMB anymore so all my posting will be done here.

Have a nice day,

KBL

The Luddites

The central idea of the luddites is that the advancement of technology and industry will inherently replace all human labour eventually and is therefore inherently corrupting in this sense. The luddite philosophy should probably be considered as anti-modernist or primitivist, because it is based entirely on a bitter resistance to the advancement of technology and industrialization; it also should be considered rural in its consistant application, because in order to live the life of a luddite one must abstrain from all industrial activity and all that comes from it. Taken to its logical conclusions in the context of the modern world, the luddite position would imply that machines or robots will replace human labor completely. Fictional illustrations of a luddite transformation, in which robots begin to replace human labor in the name of maximizing utility, can be found embedded in the works of Issac Assimov.

The initial luddite movement was a reaction to the beginning of the industrial revolution. In short, certain sections of the economy that thrived previously became unprofitable and out of demand, because new technologies came out and replaced them. This is something that is natural that cannot be avoided in any economy: change and innovation. Further, it is actually necessary. Let us use the advancement from horse and buggies to cars as an example. Indeed, when cars came out, the people operating horse and buggies certainly slowly went out of buisiness. It was inevitable; but what must be realized is that what this actually did was clear the market. In short, it simultanously opened up new job oppurtunities in other areas (I.E. the manufacturing and sale of cars); it signaled to everyone that "this area of the economy (horse and carriage services) is less efficient and less profitable"). It would be absurd to argue that we should have protected the jobs of the horse and buggy people, or stopped the advancement of technology to cars to make everyone reliant on horse and buggies instead.

The consistant position would be that it is correct and indeed necessary for inefficient firms to go out of buisiness when they are out competed by more efficient ones. But the luddites interest is opposed to this. Their main interest is to keep those jobs. What the luddites are thus asking for is protectionism of some sort; I.E. they want their inefficient firms to be propped up, despite the technologcal changes that make those areas null or void. Or, the radical luddite calls for the abolition of modern technology, and thus a return to strict agriculture. In either case, the luddite's interest is to stop technological advancement and artificially retain their jobs in areas that were make unpractical by such technological advancement. It is all about their personal self-interest in employment, regaurdless of the demand for that employment. In essence, then, they actually desire what amounts to a monopoly in their sections of the economy.

Immediately, we already have come to one giant hole in the luddite position. Namely, that the new technologies themselves create new jobs. Someone has to make the machinery. Someone has to ensure the machinery is running and repair it. There will always be a demand for human labor. The luddites assume that somehow this demand will perish with the advancement of technology. The reality is that for every job lost due to technological advancement, just as many or more open up. In reality, there are an endless amount of possibilities for jobs. If everyone made a list of all of the things we would like, we would end up with a galore of potential jobs to be created in order to appease such demands. Of course, what limits how well we can actually produce those demands is decided by finite factors: land, labour and capital. It is determined by the resources available and the labor of people to extract and make use of those resources.

It is an interesting question to ask: why do we have jobs in the first place? The answer is scarcity. Scarity simply means that there is a finite array of resources at our disposal, there is a finite amount of people to extract those resources. And, of course, the ability of people to extract those resources varies. If we did not have scarcity, noone would have to work a day in their lives. Everything would just fall like mana from the sky. But obviously such notions are simply nonsense. There is not enough labor and resources in the world to whisk any arbitrary demand of anyone into immediate existance. I may personally like a ham sandwich, but I cannot just click by ruby slippers twice and have it manifest before me. It requires labor and resources to produce the ham sandwich; I.E. jobs. Scarcity simply dictates that in order to get something, resources and labor is required. This is what provides the natural incentive for having jobs in the first place. The luddite philosophy is thus essentially imploded by the fact of scarcity. Scarcity determines that there will always be jobs. The idea of robots running everything is an intrigueing idea, but ultimately it is nothing short of fiction.