As if one hot-button cultural debate recently engulfing NRB wasn’t enough, strong opinions about drug legalization have been in the air lately, too. (Okay, that pun was bad even by my standards.  Sorry.) Over at Reason, Radley Balko observes that Sean Hannity and John Stossel recently had the same fight:

Unfortunately, Fox Business seems to have edited the exchange considerably to fit in one segment, in doing so leaving out some of the most potentially illuminating elements, such as what happened after Hannity challenged Stossel’s statistics. But Hannity’s main point comes through loud and clear: prohibiting drugs is legitimate because of the harm drugs can make users do to others.

I’ve said before that drug policy is low on my political priority list, and for that reason I usually abstain from debates on the subject (though I’m definitely with Ann Coulter when she says it’s not a victimless crime for the simple fact that, thanks to the welfare state, the rest of us pay the price of druggies’ stupid decisions—why are we even talking about legalization before making the crime truly victimless?). However, maybe I can help narrow the focus a bit.

The libertarian position sees drug use as a matter of personal freedom, but I’m not so sure.  John Locke believed that freedom was not simply “liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases,” but liberty to “have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.” Locke also held that freedom over one’s own body was not absolute (emphasis added):

…a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases. No body can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.

And:

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself…

If human beings don’t have the right to enslave themselves to other people, it stands to reason that they can’t enslave themselves to other things, either, providing a philosophical justification for prohibiting addictive substances in a free society. This is one of the reasons the freedom to use drugs ranks so low on my sympathy meter, though I might be persuaded that society should tolerate such self-enslavement—if legalization proponents could prove that drugs’ harmful effects really were limited to the user. I absolutely reject the idea that we can be free to impair our senses or mental faculties enough to make us a threat to others.

David Kaplan cites two studies indicating that behavioral impairment from marijuana is a real concern.  Hannity points out that after Amsterdam legalized cannabis, the opposite of libertarians’ rosy predictions happened: drug violence is way up. If we are to change the United States’ current drug policies, the burden is on legalization advocates to explain why these concerns are groundless after all, that there isn’t a behavior-altering aspect to the drugs to be legalized after all.  Until then, spare us the talk of “personal freedom” and “legislating morality,” if you please.

Yes, the same can be said of alcohol.  No, I’m not interested in criminalizing alcohol.  But y’know what? I actually don’t feel any philosophical devotion to alcohol’s legality, either—merely a practical judgment that alcohol consumption has been so engrained as a legitimate societal practice for so long, that trying to turn things around on that front would probably be more trouble than it was worth (although, by the way, Prohibition was a tad more effective than you’ve probably heard).

At the very least, can we agree to do away with the idiotic phrase “War on Drugs”?  Calling something a “war” presupposes some sort of ending point, enabling legalization advocates to insipidly proclaim we’ve “lost” the war because…people still do drugs. But obviously, we don’t enact criminal law because we expect to completely eradicate the practice of something for the rest of time. If we did, we would have thrown in the towel on the “war” on murder or “war” on theft ages ago.

That might not be much common ground, but it’s something.  How about it, fellas?

_____

Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.

Nah, just kidding.  Here he is on Flotilla-Gate, siding with the enemies of civilization, as usual:

I am anxious not to be overly judgmental in telling Israel exactly what to do. I think it’s in many ways they’re business.

Hold it, Cal, that doesn’t sound so bad to me.  Maybe the NRB crew has been too tough on him. Just wait, grasshopper…

But it’s our business because we are, not only very close allies of Israel, we finance Israel, so any weapon they use, ship they own, or plane they own, or any threat they make, we back them up.

Ah, now there’s the Crazy Uncle Ron we all know and love!  For just how much we “back up” Israel these days, click here and here.  Or maybe here.  Then again, you could also click here, or perhaps here…

We back them up on this embargo preventing food and medicine going into Gaza.  So we’re morally responsible and people see us as one and the same.  So-but I think this is atrocious. But I think sanctions and embargos and boycotts preventing goods from going in is actually an act of war, so this is why recently a few of us voted against sanctions against the Iranians…it’s absolutely wrong to prevent people that are starving and having problems, almost like in concentration camps, and saying, ‘yes, we endorse this whole concept that we can’t allow ships to go in there in a humanitarian way.

If you, unlike the Congressman from Texas’s 14^th District, feel the slightest sense of obligation to inform yourself about the facts of any given situation before opening your mouth (and feel obliged to tell the truth about those facts once you do know them), you’d know this is all bogus: the blockade was born out of legitimate and urgent security concerns, the IDF has been letting humanitarian aid through, and Gaza’s “concentration camp”-like conditions have been vastly exaggerated.

How did Paul react when Don Imus pointed this out?

Well, they’re [Hamas] an elected government, I mean, Hamas? We have thousands of our soldiers dying to say that we want elections, and we want democracy, so we finally get one in Palestine, and they elect Hamas, and then all of a sudden, ‘oh, you elected the wrong people! [laughs] So, you’re not legitimate, you stole the government!’ Well, our CIA, when we have elections, frequently rig elections, and is Karzai a truly elected leader of Afghanistan? He’s a puppet. So this whole notion that we should die for spreading democracy and then when we get democracy we undermine it. I mean, this all started back in the fifties when Mossadegh was elected as a legitimate democratic leader of Iran, and we went, and our CIA, that was our beginning of the CIA overthrowing governments, and we got rid of him.

Note well that none of this addresses Imus’s question.  However overly optimistic some may have been about the power of elections to transform the Middle East, or whatever the CIA did or didn’t do in the past (and beware taking Uncle Ron at face value when it comes to history), it’s all immaterial to whether or not Paul’s initial characterization of the situation was accurate.  It’s clearly not, but Paul doesn’t seem to care.

This, along with his overall record of lying on behalf of anti-liberty Islamic bigots, more than proves that reasonable, informed people can no longer claim in good conscience that Ron Paul is an honest man who can be trusted to accurately assess foreign policy questions. (This, of course, makes him ultimately unreliable in any policy area.)

They’re probably not the best people in the world, but, y’know, didn’t we talk to the Soviets?  They weren’t very good people. We talked to the Chinese over the years, and they were thugs. And yet, in talking to them and dealing with these countries like China, actually our relationships have improved. So this whole idea that we have absolute control over people in Palestine, Gaza, and the West Bank, I don’t think that’s right.

“Not the best people”?!  Rod Blagojevich and Paris Hilton “aren’t the best people.” Hamas are monsters.  It’s not as if the two governments disagree on an issue or two, or they just had some trade agreements that went sour.  6,000 rockets since 2007, murderous & bigoted children’s television, and their very charter committed to Israel’s destruction; doesn’t any of this qualify as “an act of war” in Paul’s mind?  Who’s calling for “absolute control over” the Palestinians? Further, where does Paul draw the line regarding what talking to one’s enemies can and can’t accomplish? (Then again, the decade the free world spent talking to Saddam Hussein worked out pretty well, so maybe Paul’s on to – oh, wait.  No it didn’t…)

If Hamas’s current aggression doesn’t justify military force and skepticism toward negotiations, it’s hard to imagine what would persuade Paul to give Israel the green light—or whether or not he feels Israel is entitled to any options other than “surrender” and “die.”

Paulestinians relentlessly boast that Ron Paul is Congress’s last true conservative, but nothing could be further from the truth.  His refusal to make moral distinctions between fundamentally unlike states and his childlike faith in talking to evil plant him firmly on the hard Left.  The Right indulges such immoral nonsense at America’s peril.

_____

Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.

Now Lou Dobbs really is Mr. Independent.

The last of CNN’s original news anchors just announced he is leaving the network he joined in 1980, and this evening’s episode of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” will be its final broadcast. He will continue to host his national radio program. Dobbs revealed his motives in a straight-forward statement at the program’s opening:

Over the past six months, it’s become increasingly clear that strong winds of change have begun buffeting this country and affecting all of us. And some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem solving.

He said chief among his concerns would be illegal immigration, America’s foreign policy, and defending “our now weakened capitalist economy.” The former host of Moneyline added that he sought contractual release to address these issues “in the most honest and direct language possible,” an opaque admission of what everyone already knew: Dobbs’s views are increasingly out-of-step with CNN’s dominant bias.

Translated into plain English, his statement says:

• President Obama has been far more radical in office than his campaign rhetoric;
• His policies are busting the budget, destabilizing the border, and undermining the fundamental principles of the American economic system; and
• The network I have worked at for 27 of the last 29 years wants me to shut up about all this.

Dobbs concluded he is fielding a number of offers, and “I will let you know when I set my course.” Last month, I noted Dobbs met with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes last month. However, an anonymous Fox spokesman told the New York Times today, “We have not had any discussions with Lou Dobbs for Fox News or Fox Business.”

Wherever he goes, he will be one of the few mainstream broadcasters revealing the extent of the nation’s compounding illegal immigration problem. Just weeks ago, someone fired a shot at his New Jersey home, an action Dobbs said followed “weeks and weeks of threatening phone calls.”  The left-wing Talking Points Memo blog has tried to portray this as nothing more than a “Hunter’s Errant Bullet”! Where is the left-wing outrage over illegal immigrants’s “lack of civility?”

We look forward to learning his next move and hope it will allow him to solve many of the issues he has so long been reporting.

What do you think? Is Lou going to Fox or some other media outlet, moving to a think tank, or will we soon see Lou Dobbs involved in electoral politics in some capacity?

Addendum: Here is CNN’s bland coverage.

Not necessarily all good news, for Fox or Dobbs.

Over the weekend, I recounted news that Lou Dobbs may leave CNN for Fox Business. With Fox’s acquisition of John Stossel and Tucker Carlson, NewsCorp entities are well on their way to becoming the home of most conservative television personalities. This leaves CNN with Dobbs, Bill Bennett, Ed Rollins, and sorta Republican David Gergen; MSNBC has Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan.

Properly executed, the move could benefit everyone: Dobbs is more ideologically at home with Fox, and FB would gain Dobbs’s unmatched financial reporting and the viewers he would bring to the struggling network. If Dobbs could connect with as sizable an audience there as at CNN, it would be a win-win situation. But there is a definite downside to this conservative consolidation — for Fox, the commentators, and conservatism.

Fox would love to boast that it had gained virtually the last remaining center-Right news program on any competing network. However, a shrewd programmer has to arrange his talent for maximum ratings. Television and radio are different than the web, where unlimited virtual space means one can simply put up a new link or add a new website for a budding star. Since there are only so many hours of prime time in broadcasting, eventually someone who would anchor a prime time show on another network may end up being relegated to an undesirable time slot. Even in this era of TiVo, that means drawing an unnaturally small audience and making less of an impact than he would elsewhere.  Since rational organizations give the greatest influence and rewards to those who draw the most viewers/readers, an overabundance of talent can mean first-rate employees receive second-rank treatment. In other words, poor scheduling leads to buried talent, which is bad news for the commentator.

For the network, having several personalities with a single outlook leads to topic (and conclusion) redundancy. As readers of this blog know, that is why MSNBC is so dull. (Four hosts, including one rebroadcast, all saying: “Blue Dog Democrats are evil! The town hall protesters are Astroturf, tea-bagging racists!”….) The alternatives are viewpoint diversity or the network micromanaging each show to avoid tedium. This is part of Fox’s advantage: it also employs center-Left commentators like Juan Williams, Alan Colmes, Bob Beckel, Geraldo, and (I’ve always assumed) Greta. On MSNBC, one is only left to guess whether tonight’s guest will be from The Huffington Post or Nation.

If Fox acquires all the name conservatives, that gives the other networks even more incentive to neglect conservative coverage, because Fox is (as the White House is currently crusading to portray them) “the conservative network.” As it stands, CNN viewers are exposed to center-Right views at least two hours a night, and FB programming is conservative at that time, as well. If Dobbs is replaced by a center-Left anchor, it circumscribes the range of opinion and of news consumers who come into contact with a different point of view. If a line-up change gives networks cover to fortify a single-viewpoint commentary, that’s a loss in its own right.

Finally, if Dobbs does not get as many viewers on Fox Business as he did on CNN, it will be construed either as a failure of Fox Business or a rejection of Dobbs’ message, either of which will be construed as failures of conservatism.

These concerns will probably remain hypothetical. Even if Dobbs makes the leap, having two networks to program should provide sufficient flexibility — to incorporate Dobbs. But down the road, there must be more outlets, less commentary, or the inevitable onset of the law of diminishing returns.

The New York Times reported this week that Lou Dobbs of CNN and leader of The Independent Nation met with Roger Ailes of Fox News last month. Unnamed people familiar with the meeting told the Times,  “Mr. Dobbs is a potential hire for the Fox Business Network.”

To those of a certain age, Dobbs is as remembered as host of Moneyline (the  7 p.m. lead-in to Crossfire) as he is for his outstanding independent show, and like Glenn Beck before him, he is increasingly out of place at the network Ted Turner founded. Both parties could do much worse.