Drug Laws

Grand Rounds

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isemmelweis finds the health care industry to be the lone victem of special interest corporate-government collusion:

In all other economic sectors free people drive production, and good things happen quickly. In response to the Atkins craze, sodas and even beer cut out the carbs to meet the wants of a fit society. But in healthcare, rather than serve ordinary citizens, producers court the people in power: big insurers, government officials, and academics.
….
So who�s navigating this ship? While it may be enormous fun for managers, officials, and scholars to control how sick people get medicine, it would be much better if free people chose for themselves.
Yes, it should be much better but isemmelweis is mistaken to think that this problem is restricted to health care, e.g., consider communications and the FCC, agriculture, and education to name just a few areas. We would live in a much healthier world, physically and economically, if this phenomenon did not permeate both the American and the world economy.
There is a lot of interesting reading from the medical blogosphere at Chronicles of a Medical Madhouse which is hosting Grand Rounds XV.

Government Failure

This entry was posted in Constitution Domestic Terrorism Drug Laws Law Enforcement Libertarianism on by

Via Avedon I learned that John Perry Barlow is going to court, is doing battle for our freedom:

Apparently, everyone else who has been arrested as a consequences of these inspections, and there have been many, has pled guilty rather than face the cost and trouble of mounting a constitutional defense.
I might have done so myself had it not been for Gilmore’s willingness to support the handsome cost of my defense. That, and the recognition that unconstitutional behavior by the authorities is constrained only by the peoples’ willingness to contest them.
That his defense has a handsome cost, that people plead guilty rather than face the cost and trouble of contesting in court tells me that we no longer have a system of justice for the people of this country. People must be able to challenge the behavior of government, business, and other people in a timely fashion and at a reasonable cost. The backlogged courts and monopoly cost of legal assistance are significant failures of federal, state, and city governments in the US.

Federalism?

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Jonah Goldberg thinks federalism is a good thing and rues the apparent abandonment of the concept by bush and other conservatives:

The virtue of a federalist, republican form of government is that the more you push these decisions down to the level where people actually have to live with their consequences, the more likely it is they will be a) involved and interested in the decision-making process, and b) happy with the result. Federalism is also morally superior because it requires the consent of the governed at the most basic level.
Goldberg, though, believes the “most basic level” is the individual state when, in fact, state level legislation exhibits the same problems as federal legislation, e.g., it can not properly take into account the local1 context and, as above, legislators at all levels are disconnected from the consequences of their decisions, their feedback loops are broken, the have likely been captured by moneyed interests, and their citizens are poorly served.
It is time for us, the citizens, to eliminate the federal, state, and, perhaps, city monopolies on creating law and implement federalism carried to a more appropriate level, a polycentric government structure.
Via Running Scared.
1At the level where human interactions take place.

Raich v Ashcroft

This entry was posted in Capitalism Constitution Domestic Terrorism Drug Laws Law Enforcement Libertarianism Regulation on by

This is what you should be paying attention to today! Drug War Rant has a detailed guide on the issues and links to the supporting documents.
Though I do not have high expectations that the Supremes will do the right thing Lawrence v Texas does give me a bit of hope. Heck, maybe they will go just a bit extreme and just whack Commerce Clause legislation back to its foundations: the feds only business in regulating interstate commerce is to make sure the states do not establish laws that discriminate against the citizens of other states.

Making the Drug Thugs Useful

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The DEA is about as useful as an appendix. It and the rest of the thugs participating in the so called war on drugs do much more harm than good to the citizens of the US and its dependent countries.
They could, if we must allow them to continue to exist, make themselves a little more useful if they focused their efforts on a real problem. Something that kills 5 million people a year world wide.