And to My Liberal Friends, See What A Carte Blanche Commerce Clause Gets You?
(posted by Mona)
Reason’s Jacob Sullum is dueling it out with Cully Stimson over drug policy in the LAT: Part I, Part II. Stimson decrees that drug laws “protect the public good,” public good, of course, being an abstraction that has neither rights nor duties. Those inhere in individuals. (And even if you do not believe in rights, legislating prohibitions on consensual behavior for “the public good” has historically been a great source for emiserating individuals under the aegis of lofty sounding, moralistic rhetoric.)
In Part II of the exchange, Sullum defends the much-maligned but very important concept of state sovereignty, and is dubious that a reasonable person (or SCOTUS justice) would advocate that the Commerce Clause allows the feds to trump a state’s law to decriminalize use or possession, my emphasis:
Cully, it amazes me that you or anyone who believes in the rule of law can accept with equanimity the notion that grabbing a bag of marijuana from the dresser drawer of a cancer patient in Colorado or pulling up a cannabis plant in the backyard of an AIDS patient in California amounts to regulating interstate commerce.
Via Pete Guither, who adds about drug warrior Stimson’s paean to the rule of law:
Second, it’s harder every day to talk straight-faced about the rule of law as it relates to preventing sick people from taking medicine, when our government ignores the rule of law in so many areas (think FISA).
D’accord.
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:04 pm
I recall reading that some liberals were actually defending the use of the intepretation of the commerce clause by which state medpot laws are overridden, to avoid undermining the legal basis for the regulatory state.
The good thing, though, is that even this reading of the commerce clause and the supremacy doctrine, taken together, only means that the feds can independently enforce federal drug laws despite state decriminalization. The states can still decriminalize drugs and refuse to contribute their own resources to the drug war. This, by itself, would be enough to cripple the drug war (which depends on state and local participation in “interjurisdictional task forces” to supply the vast majority of its foot soldiers). If every city and state in America would simply tell the feds “OK, you enforce it yourself,” it would be a huge blow for liberty.
Of course then they’d probably try attaching mandates to some kind of federal aid.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:49 am
“Of course then they’d probably try attaching mandates to some kind of federal aid.”
Bingo.
I think education funds would be the likely carrot/stick, sort of like highway funds are the carrot/stick for minimum drinking age laws. So long as the Feds can tax a state and then selectively withhold funds from that state, federalism is an illusion. Which is why my only legislative/political priority at the federal level is something that prohibits the Feds from such selective spending.
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
Anytime, you hear the phrase “public good”, you should ask yourself: good for whom? And at whose expense?
It’s scary to hear Americans justifying oppression on the basis of the “common good”. I’ve been reading The Ominous Paraellels lately, and that kind of rhetoric comes straight out of Nazi Germany.
It’s how the Nazis justified their extreme statism.
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Natasha, I agree with you basically, but many on the left advocate such things as “social justice” and make appeals to the “common good.” Only individuals can behave justly or unjustly, or be the victims of injustice. The abstraction of “society” owes me nothing, and vice versa. (None of which is to say I reject all safety net programs, depending on a number of variables; but that is a matter of pragmatics and the sort of community I want to live in. Not in any notions of “common good.”)
That all said, I don’t think the liberals who invoke the “common good” equate to Nazis.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Natasha, I agree with you basically, but many on the left advocate such things as “social justice” and make appeals to the “common good.” Only individuals can behave justly or unjustly, or be the victims of injustice. The abstraction of “society” owes me nothing, and vice versa. (None of which is to say I reject all safety net programs, depending on a number of variables; but that is a matter of pragmatics and the sort of community I want to live in. Not in any notions of “common good.”)
That’s got to be the single biggest difference I notice between libertarian types and, well, everybody else. We hear “common good” and want to vomit, thinking it a ruse by which some private party benefits at the expense of everyone else. Of course we know these “private parties” are often within the government itself.
And this isn’t necessarily the difference between “right wing” and “left wing”, but a particular strand of awnry Anglo-American individualism and just about everyone else. That kind of reductionist, cynical individualism is at least as angering to the national greatness and populist conservative as it is to advocates of “social justice”.
Just when you think the most disgruntled, disaffected folks (apart from militant seperatists, granted) are listening to Lewis Black and Jello Biafra, the minute they start complaining that the public sector is being starved the even more disillusioned libertarian will burst their bubble and reveal the greedy interests that exist within “the people’s romance”. Indeed, the angry leftist is actually quite romantic. How daft!
Ok, that was all just a bit of piss taking on my part…
And why I am talking like a stereotypical Brit? Must be all that Peep Show I’ve been watching lately.