I say send KPMG or some other big accounting firm in there at let them rip 'em to pieces. I bet the would find so much corruption and just plain old crappy management of funds it would make you vomit.
oh and it sounds like this lady doesn't even know what an off balance sheet transaction is. Off balance sheet transactions are exactly what the SEC prohibits, if any person did such a thing in a publicly traded company they would be thrown in jail for a long time. But of course all the rules apply except to those in government. My philosophy teacher said that he read an article listing all the laws that apply to us but don't apply to them. I don't remember the number but it was really big.
Audit the Fed? Yeah, that would be interesting, no? I am continuously perplexed at the transition we are finding ourselves as a nation and the "awakening" that I've been hearing about for the last two years. What "awakening"? To what? From what? No one really knows. Conservatives cash their welfare checks on the way to Tea Party Tax Protest events, and I'm wondering what's going on.
My strength is in political philosophy, and while I know the basics of the economic fundamentals I'm by no means an expert -- which is to say, I don't concern myself with the laws and by-laws of the SEC or the financial markets.
What good will auditing the Fed to in the long-run? I agree with it, I support it... but to what end? It's the right thing to do, and this may be the end in itself; however, what will come of it? Ron Paul has talked about introducing a secondary currency backed by hard commodity (gold and silver tender) as a way to faze out the corrupt fiat currency. But, again, to what end? I'm by no means attempting to be a pessimist, but I'm curious what will come of a people wherein I consider have reached the place of Mormon 2 who rally around empty political slogans, twinkie phrases, and even correct causes for all the wrong reasons.
I'm looking for prediction, and with what I see evidenced of the people themselves I repeat that I am constantly perplexed at this "awakening". Perhaps this is normal for an economic "recovery", but I wouldn't know because I've never been through one like this (nor has anyone else, if you agree with the likes of Greenspan).
Audit the Fed and see what will happen; introduce a secondary currency, and I'll be there with bells-and-whistles to see where the chips fall.
Do what is right, let the consequence follow -- we know how this story ends, our duty is to make sure we're not caught supporting the "lesser of two evils" in the process but that we actively promote righteousness in principle -- not ill-perceived practicality.
ill-perceived practicality huh? You mean like Ron Paul's stance on the drug war. If you notice, his first points are almost always that it has failed (referring to the results as to explain why it's wrong) and that it's expensive, racists etc etc. almost nothing about how it's a violation of personal liberties. In doing this he is completely negating the fact that the law has a teaching effect. Legalizing drugs now would teach people that doing drugs is ok.
But maybe we shouldn't get into the drug war on this particular blog post considering it has nothing to do with the drug war.... That's it Ben, post one on the drug war... please......
Well, we can run with the straw-man here in this thread... I apologize in advance, I am bored and have nothing to do on a Saturday night -- so this will likely be a long post.
Ron Paul is right, the drug war has failed and is costing us billions upon billions of unnecessary dollars. I've read Paul's comments on the war-on-drugs pretty extensively, and I fully agree with his assertions. He has readily stated that an overnight legalization of drugs would end badly, but one must understand the context wherein he nearly always talks about the war on drugs. He talks about it to illustrate a fundamental principle: Punish the infringement of life, liberty, and property for those specific reasons, not because of copious other tangents. If a drunk driver hits and kills a small child, punish him for murder -- not because he was drunk and got in an accident; if a person killed another person while high on drugs, punish him for murder -- not because he was high on drugs; etc. If a drunk driver hits and kills someone, who cares if he was drunk? This doesn't change how dead the victim is. My great-uncle still drives better drunk than sober, and he has never been in an accident... Punish the infringement of life, liberty, and property, and let the people be free to move and act accordingly. The reason why drunk driving laws, drug laws, and other insane "laws" have been passed is because we have first failed to rule adequately in matters pertaining to life, liberty, and property.
Freedom works when you let it. Fear of the uncertain reigns supreme, as the desire for control over nature increases. Interesting that the answer for uncertainty presents a plethora of answers that can only be defined as Lucifer's pre-mortal plan. The war in heaven is truly still raging -- who is on the side for freedom and liberty, and who fears uncertainty and tries to find security through coercive control?
The Greeks I think had it right in their thinking of right and wrong -- in that they didn't have a real concept of right and wrong as we have it today. Their perception was based around knowledge; any person who actually knew something would act according to it. What we consider "good" they equated to "knowledge", and what we consider "evil" they attributed to "ignorance". When a man committed what we today consider a crime, they merely thought that a man was ignorant of certain truths and must be taught in order to be self-governing. They would restrain him and basically send him to school until he "learned" the truth. This is the same concept our jails are supposed to operate by. The judicial branch, in history and even biblical interpretation, was the branch that associated the act to the actor; it attributed the act of agency to the agent in rendering "justice". There is no real crime in being drunk or driving, but only in infringing on another indivdual's life, liberty, and property. To argue the legitimacy of DUI legislation due to the heightened probability of a drunkard getting into an accident and hurting someone is a weak tangent showing little knowledge of freedom.
Our society has lost sight of one of its basic fundamental foundation: personal accountability. We somehow think that by us spending $100,000 on a brand-new Viper that we can force everyone else around us to insure themselves against hitting us. I was on the freeway in traffic this last week when a truck two cars behind me hit the car behind me which caused it to hit the Toyota 4-Runner I was a passenger in. There was no damage to the 4-Runner or to the truck that failed to stop and caused the accident; however, the car that was sandwiched between us all was a brand-new Corolla that was just purchased the day before, and it sustained enough damage for all three of us. The lady and her live-in boyfriend jumped out of the Corolla in tears while yelling and screaming that they had just bought the car. For a half-hour they were in a tirade against the truck that had hit them, as he searched for the company's insurance card in the truck to no avail. These people in the Corolla were threatening law-suit, physical violence, and every possible act against the man that hit them unless he fixed the damages done to their brand-new car. When the Corolla people found that there was no proof of insurance, they again brook down sobbing. It wasn't until I went over there and told them that all brand-new cars have comprehensive insurance and explained that their own insurance would take care of it without suing this guy that they looked at me like a deer-in-the-headlights. It had never occurred to them that they had already taken some method of personal accountability and could solve it that way -- they were too busy on a tirade to make their enemy pay for his infraction against him. I don't think Christ meant: Agree with thine enemy while thou are in the way with him, but after you leave him -- sue him to death and get every penny back from him. I agree that this man should actually pay for the damages; however, I also assert that the Corolla people should have had a mindset of being personally liable for incurring personal risk. However, their first thought was: I'm going to make him pay for what he's done! In our fear, we have overstepped the lines of personal accountability and have socially accepted pre-emptive infringement legislation. So much for being innocent until proven guilty. I cannot force my neighbor to insure himself, although I can take him to court to return lost equity in an instance of infringement of life, liberty, and property. As a responsible citizen, however, I would certainly see the wisdom in insuring myself in case I ever made a mistake. It would seem most strange indeed if I bought a brand-new car and I immediately went next door to force my neighbor to get insurance just in case he ever hit my car. Yet, this is exactly what has happened and the ideology behind such things as the war on drugs, drunk driving laws, seatbelt laws, helmet laws, licensing, mandatory health screenings, mandatory insurance, etc.
We have become a preemptive society, scared of the unknown and trying desperately to preserve our status-quo. The arguments for DUI legislation are all absolutely fallacious! There is not a single drunk driving accident that could not be solved through merely adhering to the principles of life, liberty, and property. Seatbelt laws are wholly unnecessary and absolutely immoral. How can I force my neighbor to wear his seatbelt? Yet, this is what we've done. Where does our government get its power but through the people? If the people do not have the power to do something individually, they have no power to delegate this duty to government to act in their stead collectively! Either the power of government comes from the people through what they can do individually, or through usurpation and tyranny (Paine, Franklin, Washington, Sam and John Adams, Hamilton, and Henry -- to only name a few founders and early thinkers that spoke extensively on this subject). If I cannot personally do something to my neighbor in restricting his movements, I cannot delegate it to my representative to act in my stead. Licensing has yet to prove that it creates safety in society more than merely punishing the infraction of life, liberty, and property. What is harder for a judge to say: "Your reckless driving has caused an accident and your license is now suspended and you cannot drive" or "Your reckless driving injured another's life, liberty, and property and you are no longer capable of self-government in driving"? Freedom works when you punish the infraction of life, liberty, and property -- the problem is, we just don't do that. We strike plea deals, we barter, we trade, we question down, and we establish a legal system that is anything but consistent.
As a tangent, I have one question I have yet to be answered: While it is true that seatbelts save more lives than not, it is also true that many fatalities occur because someone was wearing a seatbelt where they otherwise would have been safe without wearing it -- in such cases, is the government then liable for wrongful death in coercing a population into doing something that eventually killed them?
Freedom works, I can't say this enough. Freedom and fear, however, cannot co-exist. Freedom and fear's inability to co-exist is not intrinsic, but society's actions to calm their fear always end in some facade of safety through control. Fear thrives on control; it feeds off it, it devours it, it craves and hungers for it. When the people fear, heightened coercion is not far distant. Today, people needlessly fear drugs; if people were to merely stand up and establish a society that punished the infringement of life, liberty, and property to the point where people, like the Greeks of old, became knowledgeable enough to be self-governing -- the vast majority of our laws would be obsolete and inadequate yesterday.
But knowing how tight the adversary plays on the fears of mankind nowadays (as prophesied), I see no quick resolution to anything happening.
It is ironic indeed that our answer to Satan's fear is to more further establish Satan's plan.
Who is on the Lord's side, who? Who will promote freedom, no matter the cost -- and allow the Children of God to be free?
As I look across the political spectrum, I am disgusted by the Latter-day Saint politicians who should know the principles of freedom and fight to establish them, but who kowtow to modernist sophistry of more control and heightened laws to "protect" society. They should know better! They have no excuse! They are endowed from on high with knowledge of our preexistence and our Father's divine plan -- and their actions counteract all fundamental understanding of these principles. Freedom exists naturally -- not through the forced accountability of the state against the individual through corrupt legislation.
ok so case in point, you are saying that the laws made to restrict freedom (in this case to do drugs) is inherently flawed. Ok. Nonetheless it does have a teaching effect.
I'm curious about your opinion on the prop 8 then. Isn't that essentially us telling gays that they cannot be married like we are and participate in the same benefits? The church obviously wasn't too concerned with peoples individual right to marry whom the pleased.....
While I totally support your fight for liberty and freedom, I simply don't hold it on as high a plane as you do obviously. When you look in the scriptures, you almost always find liberty being mentioned with regards to religious freedom (to allow the church to grow) I don't know, just a thought.
I am not sure what you mean by the teaching effect, Taylor. To my understanding, it is not the role of government to teach what is right and wrong morally. Sure, using drugs could be considered immoral. But who is to say what "drugs" are immoral and what conditions justify taking drugs? After all, you have probably taken pain killers at some time in your life. You took them to alter your physical or mental state because you deemed it personally necessary for your well-being. Even if you were wrong, you are still free to do so. The issue is simply this: government's role is not to baby-sit us and tell us what is or isn't morally right. Government's role is to protect the individual from being attacked in his person, property, or liberty from another source. That is it! Government is not to restrain the individual from doing things that others consider immoral per se. I am happy to post on drugs, but to say that legalizing drugs is bad because it tells people that drugs are ok seems absurd. After all, eating fried chicken everyday is legal, but that doesn't mean people think it is ok. Freedom is about allowing people to decide whether or not something is ok for themselves. The point Ron Paul is making about the war on drugs is that coercion doesn't work. Freedom works and we should give up on the notion that we can make people good by forcing them to be good. The theory of coerced morality doesn't work, and neither does its practice.
Instead of posting a long dissertation on this thread, I have just posted it on my own: http://libertarianthink.blogspot.com/
It was about time that I finally put something out there so I wouldn't have to rewrite it every time someone asked me about Prop 8 or Republics and Democracies.
I understood Taylor to mean that the established "law" (whether good or bad) creates certain patterns of behavior within a society (in other words, the "law teaches" or frames their concept of spacial awareness and society), and that if one behavior is established the social construct and thought will follow accordingly. We have gone down the road of Socialist-Democracy for so long, that the behavior pattern of society will have a difficult time accepting the responsibility of freedom. If this is what Taylor mean, I agree.
yeah, congressman Simpson from Idaho (our congressman) is the cosponsor of the bill to audit the fed. Good times...
Well Ben, I'd have to disagree, I think it's a very legitimate concern. If you legalize drugs you WILL teach people that drugs are ok. Whether or not laws should or should not teach is kinda mute because they DO.
I had a roommate before getting married who was a convert to the LDS Church while he was in the Navy. He was your typical Military convert that had lived a life full of every debauchery known to man. He gave, the last week I was in the ward before being married, the one lesson that has ever continuously stood out to me. His main point was to show that in a world that denies God (and without a Church or morality), the political "law" becomes the only code for "right or wrong". So long as something was not "against the law," then it was okay. He held this perception as he lived his life before becoming a member, and never thought anything wrong so long as he didn't break a law. As such, it seems pretty cut-and-dry that legalizing drugs to these types of people would be promoting drugs in a sort of way. Yeah, probably -- but so what?
Punish the infringement of life, liberty, and property. That's the problem with the war on drugs -- somehow the law changes depending on the person's mental state of being while committing the infringement and the person is never punished accordingly. Somehow "temporary insanity" is a reason to not "educate" or "teach" someone while taking them out of society to make sure they'll never do such an action before. We look at "punishment" instead of "helping". We consider jail a bad, bad thing -- not as a place of restitution (to the "victim" and the criminal).
We have a religious moral code that tells us to stay away from drugs; however, even in our own scripture we see that it was acceptable to drink alcohol. I mention this because I argue there is nothing intrinsically bad in drinking alcohol; it is a commandment given for us in our Latter-day (for various reasons, but the most important being that we've just been commanded to not drink it), but it has not always been so. We are morally held accountable for the law we've been given, and are not punished that which we have not received.
Well remember, just because something is legal, doesn't mean it is right. The fact that you know this means that others probably realize the fact too. We are a free people as we are a moral people. But freedom does not come by coercing that morality, for that undermines itself. People have their own way of deciding the morality of something without government telling them one way or the other. If we rely on government for moral direction, we are in for trouble. After all, just because giving to charity is right, doesn't mean we should coerce it. To make it legal NOT to give to charity does not mean that society is saying it is good. No, I am more concerned with the unintended consequences of a policy of making things illegal simply because we find them reprehensible. If laws do indeed teach, let us more justly teach the people that freedom is better than government regulation. Let us teach the people that government's role is not to regulate personal habits. The precedent set by drug laws has indeed taught some false principles. Repealing these laws would teach the correct principle: that people are agents unto themselves to choose what they wish without infringing on the rights of others. Besides, power is not given to government to regulate such things, and until it is given through a constitutional amendment, such laws are unconstitutional and not legally binding upon the people, by definition. Now, if you wish to teach people that drugs are wrong, and I believe this a worthy venture, I suggest other, more justified avenues for doing so. Teach people by persuasion and friendship, not by coercive government legislation.
13 comments:
I say send KPMG or some other big accounting firm in there at let them rip 'em to pieces. I bet the would find so much corruption and just plain old crappy management of funds it would make you vomit.
oh and it sounds like this lady doesn't even know what an off balance sheet transaction is. Off balance sheet transactions are exactly what the SEC prohibits, if any person did such a thing in a publicly traded company they would be thrown in jail for a long time. But of course all the rules apply except to those in government. My philosophy teacher said that he read an article listing all the laws that apply to us but don't apply to them. I don't remember the number but it was really big.
Audit the Fed? Yeah, that would be interesting, no? I am continuously perplexed at the transition we are finding ourselves as a nation and the "awakening" that I've been hearing about for the last two years. What "awakening"? To what? From what? No one really knows. Conservatives cash their welfare checks on the way to Tea Party Tax Protest events, and I'm wondering what's going on.
My strength is in political philosophy, and while I know the basics of the economic fundamentals I'm by no means an expert -- which is to say, I don't concern myself with the laws and by-laws of the SEC or the financial markets.
What good will auditing the Fed to in the long-run? I agree with it, I support it... but to what end? It's the right thing to do, and this may be the end in itself; however, what will come of it? Ron Paul has talked about introducing a secondary currency backed by hard commodity (gold and silver tender) as a way to faze out the corrupt fiat currency. But, again, to what end? I'm by no means attempting to be a pessimist, but I'm curious what will come of a people wherein I consider have reached the place of Mormon 2 who rally around empty political slogans, twinkie phrases, and even correct causes for all the wrong reasons.
I'm looking for prediction, and with what I see evidenced of the people themselves I repeat that I am constantly perplexed at this "awakening". Perhaps this is normal for an economic "recovery", but I wouldn't know because I've never been through one like this (nor has anyone else, if you agree with the likes of Greenspan).
Audit the Fed and see what will happen; introduce a secondary currency, and I'll be there with bells-and-whistles to see where the chips fall.
Do what is right, let the consequence follow -- we know how this story ends, our duty is to make sure we're not caught supporting the "lesser of two evils" in the process but that we actively promote righteousness in principle -- not ill-perceived practicality.
ill-perceived practicality huh? You mean like Ron Paul's stance on the drug war. If you notice, his first points are almost always that it has failed (referring to the results as to explain why it's wrong) and that it's expensive, racists etc etc. almost nothing about how it's a violation of personal liberties. In doing this he is completely negating the fact that the law has a teaching effect. Legalizing drugs now would teach people that doing drugs is ok.
But maybe we shouldn't get into the drug war on this particular blog post considering it has nothing to do with the drug war.... That's it Ben, post one on the drug war... please......
Well, we can run with the straw-man here in this thread... I apologize in advance, I am bored and have nothing to do on a Saturday night -- so this will likely be a long post.
Ron Paul is right, the drug war has failed and is costing us billions upon billions of unnecessary dollars. I've read Paul's comments on the war-on-drugs pretty extensively, and I fully agree with his assertions. He has readily stated that an overnight legalization of drugs would end badly, but one must understand the context wherein he nearly always talks about the war on drugs. He talks about it to illustrate a fundamental principle: Punish the infringement of life, liberty, and property for those specific reasons, not because of copious other tangents. If a drunk driver hits and kills a small child, punish him for murder -- not because he was drunk and got in an accident; if a person killed another person while high on drugs, punish him for murder -- not because he was high on drugs; etc. If a drunk driver hits and kills someone, who cares if he was drunk? This doesn't change how dead the victim is. My great-uncle still drives better drunk than sober, and he has never been in an accident... Punish the infringement of life, liberty, and property, and let the people be free to move and act accordingly. The reason why drunk driving laws, drug laws, and other insane "laws" have been passed is because we have first failed to rule adequately in matters pertaining to life, liberty, and property.
Freedom works when you let it. Fear of the uncertain reigns supreme, as the desire for control over nature increases. Interesting that the answer for uncertainty presents a plethora of answers that can only be defined as Lucifer's pre-mortal plan. The war in heaven is truly still raging -- who is on the side for freedom and liberty, and who fears uncertainty and tries to find security through coercive control?
The Greeks I think had it right in their thinking of right and wrong -- in that they didn't have a real concept of right and wrong as we have it today. Their perception was based around knowledge; any person who actually knew something would act according to it. What we consider "good" they equated to "knowledge", and what we consider "evil" they attributed to "ignorance". When a man committed what we today consider a crime, they merely thought that a man was ignorant of certain truths and must be taught in order to be self-governing. They would restrain him and basically send him to school until he "learned" the truth. This is the same concept our jails are supposed to operate by. The judicial branch, in history and even biblical interpretation, was the branch that associated the act to the actor; it attributed the act of agency to the agent in rendering "justice". There is no real crime in being drunk or driving, but only in infringing on another indivdual's life, liberty, and property. To argue the legitimacy of DUI legislation due to the heightened probability of a drunkard getting into an accident and hurting someone is a weak tangent showing little knowledge of freedom.
Our society has lost sight of one of its basic fundamental foundation: personal accountability. We somehow think that by us spending $100,000 on a brand-new Viper that we can force everyone else around us to insure themselves against hitting us. I was on the freeway in traffic this last week when a truck two cars behind me hit the car behind me which caused it to hit the Toyota 4-Runner I was a passenger in. There was no damage to the 4-Runner or to the truck that failed to stop and caused the accident; however, the car that was sandwiched between us all was a brand-new Corolla that was just purchased the day before, and it sustained enough damage for all three of us. The lady and her live-in boyfriend jumped out of the Corolla in tears while yelling and screaming that they had just bought the car. For a half-hour they were in a tirade against the truck that had hit them, as he searched for the company's insurance card in the truck to no avail. These people in the Corolla were threatening law-suit, physical violence, and every possible act against the man that hit them unless he fixed the damages done to their brand-new car. When the Corolla people found that there was no proof of insurance, they again brook down sobbing. It wasn't until I went over there and told them that all brand-new cars have comprehensive insurance and explained that their own insurance would take care of it without suing this guy that they looked at me like a deer-in-the-headlights. It had never occurred to them that they had already taken some method of personal accountability and could solve it that way -- they were too busy on a tirade to make their enemy pay for his infraction against him. I don't think Christ meant: Agree with thine enemy while thou are in the way with him, but after you leave him -- sue him to death and get every penny back from him. I agree that this man should actually pay for the damages; however, I also assert that the Corolla people should have had a mindset of being personally liable for incurring personal risk. However, their first thought was: I'm going to make him pay for what he's done! In our fear, we have overstepped the lines of personal accountability and have socially accepted pre-emptive infringement legislation. So much for being innocent until proven guilty. I cannot force my neighbor to insure himself, although I can take him to court to return lost equity in an instance of infringement of life, liberty, and property. As a responsible citizen, however, I would certainly see the wisdom in insuring myself in case I ever made a mistake. It would seem most strange indeed if I bought a brand-new car and I immediately went next door to force my neighbor to get insurance just in case he ever hit my car. Yet, this is exactly what has happened and the ideology behind such things as the war on drugs, drunk driving laws, seatbelt laws, helmet laws, licensing, mandatory health screenings, mandatory insurance, etc.
We have become a preemptive society, scared of the unknown and trying desperately to preserve our status-quo. The arguments for DUI legislation are all absolutely fallacious! There is not a single drunk driving accident that could not be solved through merely adhering to the principles of life, liberty, and property. Seatbelt laws are wholly unnecessary and absolutely immoral. How can I force my neighbor to wear his seatbelt? Yet, this is what we've done. Where does our government get its power but through the people? If the people do not have the power to do something individually, they have no power to delegate this duty to government to act in their stead collectively! Either the power of government comes from the people through what they can do individually, or through usurpation and tyranny (Paine, Franklin, Washington, Sam and John Adams, Hamilton, and Henry -- to only name a few founders and early thinkers that spoke extensively on this subject). If I cannot personally do something to my neighbor in restricting his movements, I cannot delegate it to my representative to act in my stead. Licensing has yet to prove that it creates safety in society more than merely punishing the infraction of life, liberty, and property. What is harder for a judge to say: "Your reckless driving has caused an accident and your license is now suspended and you cannot drive" or "Your reckless driving injured another's life, liberty, and property and you are no longer capable of self-government in driving"? Freedom works when you punish the infraction of life, liberty, and property -- the problem is, we just don't do that. We strike plea deals, we barter, we trade, we question down, and we establish a legal system that is anything but consistent.
As a tangent, I have one question I have yet to be answered: While it is true that seatbelts save more lives than not, it is also true that many fatalities occur because someone was wearing a seatbelt where they otherwise would have been safe without wearing it -- in such cases, is the government then liable for wrongful death in coercing a population into doing something that eventually killed them?
Freedom works, I can't say this enough. Freedom and fear, however, cannot co-exist. Freedom and fear's inability to co-exist is not intrinsic, but society's actions to calm their fear always end in some facade of safety through control. Fear thrives on control; it feeds off it, it devours it, it craves and hungers for it. When the people fear, heightened coercion is not far distant. Today, people needlessly fear drugs; if people were to merely stand up and establish a society that punished the infringement of life, liberty, and property to the point where people, like the Greeks of old, became knowledgeable enough to be self-governing -- the vast majority of our laws would be obsolete and inadequate yesterday.
But knowing how tight the adversary plays on the fears of mankind nowadays (as prophesied), I see no quick resolution to anything happening.
It is ironic indeed that our answer to Satan's fear is to more further establish Satan's plan.
Who is on the Lord's side, who? Who will promote freedom, no matter the cost -- and allow the Children of God to be free?
As I look across the political spectrum, I am disgusted by the Latter-day Saint politicians who should know the principles of freedom and fight to establish them, but who kowtow to modernist sophistry of more control and heightened laws to "protect" society. They should know better! They have no excuse! They are endowed from on high with knowledge of our preexistence and our Father's divine plan -- and their actions counteract all fundamental understanding of these principles. Freedom exists naturally -- not through the forced accountability of the state against the individual through corrupt legislation.
But enough from me for now...
ok so case in point, you are saying that the laws made to restrict freedom (in this case to do drugs) is inherently flawed. Ok. Nonetheless it does have a teaching effect.
I'm curious about your opinion on the prop 8 then. Isn't that essentially us telling gays that they cannot be married like we are and participate in the same benefits? The church obviously wasn't too concerned with peoples individual right to marry whom the pleased.....
While I totally support your fight for liberty and freedom, I simply don't hold it on as high a plane as you do obviously. When you look in the scriptures, you almost always find liberty being mentioned with regards to religious freedom (to allow the church to grow) I don't know, just a thought.
I am not sure what you mean by the teaching effect, Taylor. To my understanding, it is not the role of government to teach what is right and wrong morally. Sure, using drugs could be considered immoral. But who is to say what "drugs" are immoral and what conditions justify taking drugs? After all, you have probably taken pain killers at some time in your life. You took them to alter your physical or mental state because you deemed it personally necessary for your well-being. Even if you were wrong, you are still free to do so.
The issue is simply this: government's role is not to baby-sit us and tell us what is or isn't morally right. Government's role is to protect the individual from being attacked in his person, property, or liberty from another source. That is it! Government is not to restrain the individual from doing things that others consider immoral per se.
I am happy to post on drugs, but to say that legalizing drugs is bad because it tells people that drugs are ok seems absurd. After all, eating fried chicken everyday is legal, but that doesn't mean people think it is ok. Freedom is about allowing people to decide whether or not something is ok for themselves.
The point Ron Paul is making about the war on drugs is that coercion doesn't work. Freedom works and we should give up on the notion that we can make people good by forcing them to be good. The theory of coerced morality doesn't work, and neither does its practice.
Instead of posting a long dissertation on this thread, I have just posted it on my own: http://libertarianthink.blogspot.com/
It was about time that I finally put something out there so I wouldn't have to rewrite it every time someone asked me about Prop 8 or Republics and Democracies.
I understood Taylor to mean that the established "law" (whether good or bad) creates certain patterns of behavior within a society (in other words, the "law teaches" or frames their concept of spacial awareness and society), and that if one behavior is established the social construct and thought will follow accordingly. We have gone down the road of Socialist-Democracy for so long, that the behavior pattern of society will have a difficult time accepting the responsibility of freedom. If this is what Taylor mean, I agree.
I also absolutely agree with Ben.
yeah, congressman Simpson from Idaho (our congressman) is the cosponsor of the bill to audit the fed. Good times...
Well Ben, I'd have to disagree, I think it's a very legitimate concern.
If you legalize drugs you WILL teach people that drugs are ok. Whether or not laws should or should not teach is kinda mute because they DO.
I had a roommate before getting married who was a convert to the LDS Church while he was in the Navy. He was your typical Military convert that had lived a life full of every debauchery known to man. He gave, the last week I was in the ward before being married, the one lesson that has ever continuously stood out to me. His main point was to show that in a world that denies God (and without a Church or morality), the political "law" becomes the only code for "right or wrong". So long as something was not "against the law," then it was okay. He held this perception as he lived his life before becoming a member, and never thought anything wrong so long as he didn't break a law. As such, it seems pretty cut-and-dry that legalizing drugs to these types of people would be promoting drugs in a sort of way. Yeah, probably -- but so what?
Punish the infringement of life, liberty, and property. That's the problem with the war on drugs -- somehow the law changes depending on the person's mental state of being while committing the infringement and the person is never punished accordingly. Somehow "temporary insanity" is a reason to not "educate" or "teach" someone while taking them out of society to make sure they'll never do such an action before. We look at "punishment" instead of "helping". We consider jail a bad, bad thing -- not as a place of restitution (to the "victim" and the criminal).
We have a religious moral code that tells us to stay away from drugs; however, even in our own scripture we see that it was acceptable to drink alcohol. I mention this because I argue there is nothing intrinsically bad in drinking alcohol; it is a commandment given for us in our Latter-day (for various reasons, but the most important being that we've just been commanded to not drink it), but it has not always been so. We are morally held accountable for the law we've been given, and are not punished that which we have not received.
Well remember, just because something is legal, doesn't mean it is right. The fact that you know this means that others probably realize the fact too. We are a free people as we are a moral people. But freedom does not come by coercing that morality, for that undermines itself. People have their own way of deciding the morality of something without government telling them one way or the other. If we rely on government for moral direction, we are in for trouble. After all, just because giving to charity is right, doesn't mean we should coerce it. To make it legal NOT to give to charity does not mean that society is saying it is good.
No, I am more concerned with the unintended consequences of a policy of making things illegal simply because we find them reprehensible. If laws do indeed teach, let us more justly teach the people that freedom is better than government regulation. Let us teach the people that government's role is not to regulate personal habits. The precedent set by drug laws has indeed taught some false principles. Repealing these laws would teach the correct principle: that people are agents unto themselves to choose what they wish without infringing on the rights of others. Besides, power is not given to government to regulate such things, and until it is given through a constitutional amendment, such laws are unconstitutional and not legally binding upon the people, by definition.
Now, if you wish to teach people that drugs are wrong, and I believe this a worthy venture, I suggest other, more justified avenues for doing so. Teach people by persuasion and friendship, not by coercive government legislation.
very good, I understand your point.
Post a Comment