Are libertarians just Ayn Rand-obsessed pot smokers who want to
hide their money from the tax man? That’s what many critics of the
libertarian movement, and its
seemingly looming moment in American history (as reported by
the New York Times) would have you believe. But maybe
we’re smoking that grass because we’re all too aware of what
government officials do with that money (and to us all)
when they get their hands on it (Ayn Rand did provide some
cautionary tales, if you care to read her books).
Below are just five of the many issues on which libertarian
journalists, independent think-tankers, state-challenging
politicians, and freedom-loving litigators, among others, have
worked to preserve and extend our liberty over the years. These are
issues that matter to us. We think they should matter to you
too—and they already may.
America’s Insane Incarceration Rate
“Every ten or eleven people that
you meet, someone is going to either know someone in prison, has
been in prison with a record, or you met them and they are going
off to prison,” Michael Stoll, co-author of
Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, told
Reason last year.
Those who now fill the nation’s jails, prisons, and detention
centers, says the Prison Policy
Initiative, number about 2.4 million people.
The United States actually has the second highest incarceration
rate in the world, just behind the
Seychelles, says the International Centre for Prison Studies.
That’s an accomplishment, of sorts. Just not the good kind.
After years of escalating efforts against crime, the Land of the
Free has made itself not so very free—and much of its population
not free at all.
Speaking at a meeting of the National Urbal League last month,
libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
noted that “Three out of four people in prison right now for
non-violent crimes are black or brown. Our prisons are bursting
with young men of color and our communities are full of broken
families.”
Paul joined with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) to sponsor
the REDEEM (Record Expungement Designed to Enhance Employment)
Act. The proposed legislation would seal and expunge juvenile
records and create a path for non-violent adult offenders to seal
their criminal records so they can have a fresh start at making
lives for themselves. The law would also give states incentives to
increase the age of criminal responsibility to 18, so that young
offenders are spared the harshest penalties.
Many individuals and organizations, such as the Cato Institute’s
Tim Lynch and Families Against Mandatory
Minimums, would go further, reducing penalties for numerous
crimes and eliminating often-cruel mandatory sentencing laws that
allow little leeway for individual circumstances.
The Insane War on Drugs
The easiest way to get thrown behind bars in
recent years has been by using, buying, selling, or merely
possessing an intoxicant that doesn’t meet politicians’ approval.
Prohibition of alcohol may have failed, but the impulse to
prohibit—and to penalize those who don’t or won’t get with the
program, continues in laws against marijuana, cocaine,
methamphetamine, and myriad other substances.
Reason has covered that war from the beginning—notably,
in the documentary
America’s Longest War, which provides a brief history
of drug prohibition, beginning with Nixon’s declaration of war in
1971 and ending with Obama’s broken promise to allow states to
determine their own medical marijuana policies. The documentary
also puts a human face on the war, examining some of the
individuals victimized by officials’ insistence on telling people
what they can and can’t put into their bodies.
Reason recently focused on marijuana prohibition with a
special issue and online “Marijuana on Main Street” compilation
of stories, videos, and other features. Marijuana arrests have
served as a first bust for many Americans, introducing them to the
police, prisons, and curtailed civil rights.
Libertarians from Milton
Friedman to Ron Paul have
favored marijuana legalization, and recent years have seen real
progress in this arena. Once the focus of reefer madness-style
propaganda, states began legalizing marijuana for medical use in
the 1990s. Colorado and Washington have both
legalized it for recreational use (though the battle
isn’t over).
Check out where marijuana stands in the 50 states
here (though keep in mind that laws are happily evolving).
The Libertarian Party favored full drug legalization as
far back as its first platform
in 1972.
Whatever the Hell Happened to Police in This
Country
You can’t have prisons groaning
full of people busted for drug violations without somebody to put
them there. That somebody is inevitably law enforcement in all its
various permutations—though you might be forgiven for thinking it’s
an occupying army, given the military tactics, equipment, and
mindset that so many police departments have adopted.
Former Reason senior editor Radley Balko, now at the
Washington Post, penned
Rise of the Warrior Cop, a book delving into the
militarization of
American policing, which built, in many ways, on a
paper he wrote for the Cato Institute in 2006.
“The police have become more militarized, more soldier-like in
the last generation or two,” Balko
told Reason after the publication of his book “It
applies to the weapons they are using, the uniforms they wear…to
the tactics they use, to what I think is the most pervasive problem
which is the mindset that police officers take to the job.”
Cato’s Timothy Lynch continuously monitors police
misconduct on a depressingly regular basis. The incidents he
reports don’t all involve cops in tanks and battledress—many
involve corruption, old-fashioned brutality, or general bad
behavior.
There is occasional good news, too. New York City’s notorious
stop-and-frisk program, which overwhelmingly targeted young black
and Hispanic men for Fourth Amendment-defying pat-down searches on
the street, were declared unconstitutional as implemented in 2013.
While not entirely abandoned, city officials have
reined-in the practice.
Small Business-Killing Meddling
Government officials don’t have
to unleash uniformed minions on you to make your life
miserable—they can do the same thing with a web of red tape and a
plague of inspectors. The challenge of making an honest living can
become almost impossible when burdened with bureaucracy.
Karate legend Fumio Demura, who worked as Mr. Miyagi’s stunt
double in The Karate Kid franchise, has been threatened
with the loss of his dojo because politicians in Santa Ana,
California,
decided to grab his (and other business owners’) property for
their pet projects. Upstart bus companies are
smothered by “safety” regulations that favor established lines
at the expense of entrepreneurial outfits.
Washington, D.C. was finally
shamed into relaxing its restrictions on food trucks—popular,
mobile eateries that provide a relatively low-cost way for would-be
restaurateurs to find eager customers without having a huge
bankroll to get them launched.
The libertarian Institute for Justice (IJ) specializes in
breaking down arcane regulatory barriers to small business. These
include rules that would mandate thousands of hours of expensive
and utterly irrelevant cosmetology training before people can
charge a few bucks to braid their friends’ and neighbors’
hair.
IJ also successfully challenged
rules in Louisiana and Minnesota
that reserved the sale of caskets as a monopoly for
government-licensed funeral directors at the expense of those
(including monks!) offering low-cost burial options to grieving
families.
Peace
You can’t enjoy life, liberty, and prosperity if
your ass has been shot off in some politician’s bloody military
adventure. And libertarian-oriented lawmakers feature prominently
among the “wacko-birds”
denounced by uber-hawk, Sen. John McCain (R-Az.). Specifically,
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) ranked
proudly among those called out for opposing drone assassinations
and unprovoked interventions in other countries’ affairs.
“Amash is not only conducting an exemplary districtwide
listening tour on Syria, he’s documenting it via his Twitter
feed and the Facebook page he uses to explain all
his votes and positions,”
wrote Reason editor Nick Gillespie during the debate
over the U.S. response to Syria’s civil war. “Paul added an
amendment to the Senate resolution on Syria that declares the
president in violation of the Constitution if he launches attacks
without congressional authorization.”
And it’s not partisan opportunism. Senator Paul’s father, former
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tx.), opposed then-President George W. Bush’s
insertion of troops into Iraq, saying that “blowback” from
such actions helped fan the flames of terrorism. The Cato
Institute’s Earl Ravenal warned
as long ago as 1980 that intervening in Afghanistan “is likely
to be expensive, risky, and fruitless.”
The U.S. government ignored such advice, and among those trained
in CIA camps to fight the Soviets was, quite
likely, a young
Osama bin Laden.
No wonder that
current polling finds little interest among the American public
for meddling in other countries’ conflicts.
“We were supposed to go into Iraq, hold elections, turn over the
keys, and get out,” Michael Kamber, a photojournalist and editor of
the book Photojournalists
on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq, told
Reason. “That’s not how it works, and we need to think
about that next time we get involved in a military adventure.”
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