The Road Ahead

I don’t like the direction our country is taking. I see us heading down the path towards a type of soft socialism. It seems to me that society is ready to let the government take care of them; they seem to almost welcome it. I would be against it even if I thought it could work but to me that’s the great irony of it. I don’t think it will or can. It’s just going to lead to a lot of misery before the country comes to its senses and we try dig ourselves out of the hole we dug.

You know the old saying that you don’t have a heart if your not a liberal when your young and you don’t have a brain if you not a conservative when your old? Well actually it can’t be that old of a saying because it’s using the modern definition of liberal and conservative. I must have been a heartless youth because I’ve never been a liberal, in the modern sense at least. I have gotten more conservative over the years though, but always with a strain of libertarianism. At first I was drawn to libertarianism because of the ideology of it. I guess I was reading too much Heinlein, but over the years the conservatism reasserted itself and I came to see the value of tradition and certain institutions in our culture that deserved more protection from the government than strict libertarianism allowed. Over the last couple of years though I have begun to see that whatever values that those traditions and institutions may have the government can not protect them. That the cost involved in making government powerful enough to preserve them is a cost that is to high too bear.

Take drugs as an example. Drug abuse whether it is alcohol, methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, heroin, whatever places a huge burden on family. Family is one of those bedrock institutions in our civilization that I feel is worth protecting, there fore it is a fair trade to sacrifice some of my natural rights to ensure that protection for families. I’ll give up my right to smoke or inject anything I would like except for the traditionally approved drug, alcohol, so that the institution of family can be preserved from the detrimental affects of drug abuse. The problem is that that’s not the only right I am giving up anymore. I could read out a laundry list of rights that you and I’ve given up to the war on drugs, but for the sake of brevity I’ll bring up the one most sacred right we have, our right to life. I can’t look it up at the moment so I’ll have to water down this statement somewhat but I’m nearly as likely to be killed by police officers exercising a no-knock warrant on the wrong house than from a home invasion. I would say that that holds true in all but the most violent parts of the country. The irony is that the safer your community the more you have to fear that the gang shooting your dog and busting down your front door in the middle of the night with guns at the ready will be those that have sworn to serve and protect you. The tragedy is that we are losing war on drugs. No matter how many rights we surrender it’s a problem that government has proven it can’t fix. We have only to look into our own past to our experience with alcohol prohibition to see that it doesn’t work. Prohibition just compounds the problem funneling huge amounts of money to the most unsavory organizations imaginable, which just leads to ever escalating war that we continue to lose.