The Drug War’s a Dead Letter Without the Police State
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Never mind, for the moment, the question of the Drug War’s moral legitimacy.  Never mind whether the government has the right to prevent mentally sound grownups from deciding what substances to put in their own bodies, or what substances to buy from and sell to others. Let’s just consider, as a practical question, what effectively enforcing the drug laws actually requires. Imagine a government trying to enforce the drug laws, if the common law “search and seizure” protections, found in the Fourth Amendment and analogous provisions of the state constitutions, were enforced according to the plain mean

No, Really, Government IS Glamorous!
The story originated in Washington State’s Tri-City Herald, but it was the Miami Herald’s reworked headline that caught my attention: “What you want to know: How Sarah Palin spent Thanksgiving.” No, not especially. As a matter of fact, not at all. But presumably a lot of people do want to keep up with her social calendar and know every little detail about her life. Her new book has sold half a million copies already. That’s scary — and not just because Palin happens to be the glamour girl of the moment. This whole idea o

Giving Thanks for All the Wrong Reasons
Most Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving this year as they have done most every year in modern times – by family gathering to socialize, eat turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy – with perhaps a brief thought spared for the first Thanksgiving in 1621, when a small group of colonists from England broke bread with some Wampanoag indians in celebration of their survival a year after arriving at Cape Cod in their sailing vessel, the Mayflower. Many present-day Americans have a kind of idolatry associated with those events and that time, and indeed such an untapped, almost entirely uncivilized and unpopulated wilderness has its appeal in an era where we now deal wit

Still Breaking Those Eggs–And the Omelets Still Taste Like Crap
In an earlier commentary piece, “Breaking Eggs to Make Libertarian Omelets,” I mentioned the Romanian “libertarian” Sorin Cucerai.  As I pointed out there, Cucerai doesn’t equate the “free markets” and “liberalism” he advocates with anything so simple as, say, doing what you want with your own stuff, or freely cooperating and exchanging with others as you see fit.  No!  The fundamental prerequisite of a “liberal” order, as Cucerai sees it, is separation of the individual from the means of subsistence.  A “market” economy can only exist when the individual is deprived (by such expedients as Enclosures) of direct access to a source of food, so that he has

Health Care: Waiting to Exhale
The US Senate’s Democrats pushed the federal government’s latest corporate welfare scheme — fraudulently labeled “health care reform” — past a key cloture vote on Saturday. The outcome of that vote dramatically enhances the American insurance industry’s prospects for receiving what may be the largest taxpayer subsidy in history. How big is the subsidy? It’s impossible to predict with any certainty, but we can rationally speculate. The Obama administration’s claims that “health care refor