Quotulatiousness

March 16, 2013

First big blow against the cult of secrecy

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

The “most transparent administration” may be forced to be a bit more transparent after a US federal judge declared National Security Letters to be unconstitutional:

Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled in a decision released Friday.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing so-called NSLs across the board, in a stunning defeat for the Obama administration’s surveillance practices. She also ordered the government to cease enforcing the gag provision in any other cases. However, she stayed her order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We are very pleased that the Court recognized the fatal constitutional shortcomings of the NSL statute,” said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a challenge to NSLs on behalf of an unknown telecom that received an NSL in 2011. “The government’s gags have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools. Our client looks forward to the day when it can publicly discuss its experience.”

[. . .]

NSLs are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more.

NSLs are a powerful tool because they do not require court approval, and they come with a built-in gag order, preventing recipients from disclosing to anyone that they have even received an NSL. An FBI agent looking into a possible anti-terrorism case can self-issue an NSL to a credit bureau, ISP or phone company with only the sign-off of the Special Agent in Charge of their office. The FBI has to merely assert that the information is “relevant” to an investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.

March 5, 2013

Coming soon: the Police-Industrial Complex

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Radley Balko interviewed by Vice:

How did 9/11 alter the domestic relationship between the military and police?

It really just accelerated a process that had already been in motion for 20 years. The main effect of 9/11 on domestic policing is the DHS grant program, which writes huge checks to local police departments across the country to purchase machine guns, helicopters, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. The Pentagon had already been giving away the same weapons and equipment for about a decade, but the DHS grants make that program look tiny.

But probably of more concern is the ancillary effect of those grants. DHS grants are lucrative enough that many defense contractors are now turning their attention to police agencies — and some companies have sprung up solely to sell military-grade weaponry to police agencies who get those grants. That means we’re now building a new industry whose sole function is to militarize domestic police departments. Which means it won’t be long before we see pro-militarization lobbying and pressure groups with lots of (taxpayer) money to spend to fight reform. That’s a corner it will be difficult to un-turn. We’re probably there already. Say hello to the police-industrial complex.

Is police reform a battle that will have to be won legally? From the outside looking in, much of this seems to violate The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. Are there other ways to change these policies? Can you envision a blueprint?

It won’t be won legally. The Supreme Court has been gutting the Fourth Amendment in the name of the drug war since the early 1980s, and I don’t think there’s any reason to think the current Court will change any of that. The Posse Comitatus Act is often misunderstood. Technically, it only prohibits federal marshals (and, arguably, local sheriffs and police chiefs) from enlisting active-duty soldiers for domestic law enforcement. The president or Congress could still pass a law or executive order tomorrow ordering U.S. troops to, say, begin enforcing the drug laws, and it wouldn’t violate the Constitution or the Posse Comitatus Act. The only barrier would be selling the idea to the public.

February 28, 2013

“All rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are subject to reasonable limitations”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

The Supreme Court of Canada demonstrated a lack of belief in the value of free speech in yesterday’s Whatcott ruling:

The very first line in the Supreme Court’s calamitous decision in the case of Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott gives a clue to where it is going. “All rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” it declares, “are subject to reasonable limitations.”

This is a legal truism, but as always it is as important what the Court did not say. It did not choose to begin a ruling on an important freedom of speech case with a ringing affirmation of the importance of free speech, or what an extraordinary thing it is to place restrictions upon it.

Indeed, in its haste to get on with the limiting, it did not even pause to properly quote the section of the Charter that grants the state such authority. The Charter “guarantees” the rights set out in it, Section 1 declares, “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The limits don’t just have to be reasonable. They have to be “demonstrably justified.”

Where the Court’s view of such limits is expansive and approving, the Charter is grudging (“only”) and cautious (“demonstrably”). That’s as it should be. If we accept the bedrock premise of a free society, that government is its servant and not its master, then it is up to the state, always, to ask the citizens’ permission before it intrudes on their liberty, and to prove its necessity: it is never the citizen’s obligation to show why he may remain unmolested. That spirit is lamentably absent from the Court’s reasoning.

February 27, 2013

Parliamentary Budget Officer conducting “constitutional vandalism”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

Senator Anne Cools is displeased by the PBO’s ongoing legal and media campaign against the Federal government:

An independent senator says the parliamentary budget watchdog, Kevin Page, overstepped his mandate by taking the government to court in a battle for spending figures, and the Senate should force Page to withdraw the legal proceedings.

In a speech to the Senate Tuesday, Sen. Anne Cools argued that Page’s regular comments to reporters and more recent comments to his international counterparts about his battles with the government over spending figures were “provocative and inflammatory public statements” that are “intolerable and unacceptable.”

Page’s actions, Cools argued, were tantamount to contempt of Parliament, were a breach of parliamentary privilege and were affecting the Senate’s credibility to carry out its functions.

“Contemptuous and un-parliamentary,” she said of Page’s actions and comments, “they are constitutional vandalism.”

“They are inappropriate conduct from a Library officer under the direction of the Speakers of the Senate and the House of Commons. This Senate cannot accept this and should take some ‘shock-no-more’ actions.”

February 19, 2013

US Supreme Court okays search warrants issued by dogs

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:14

A glum day for civil liberties:

Today the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that “a court can presume” an alert by a drug-sniffing dog provides probable cause for a search “if a bona fide organization has certified a dog after testing his reliability in a controlled setting” or “if the dog has recently and successfully completed a training program that evaluated his proficiency in locating drugs.” The justices overturned a 2011 decision in which the Florida Supreme Court said police must do more than assert that a dog has been properly trained. They deemed that court’s evidentiary requirements too “rigid” for the “totality of the circumstances” test used to determine when a search is constitutional. In particular, the Court said it was not appropriate to demand evidence of a dog’s performance in the field, as opposed to its performance on tests by police. While the Court’s decision in Florida v. Harris leaves open the possibility that defense attorneys can contest the adequacy of a dog’s training or testing and present evidence that the animal is prone to false alerts, this ruling will encourage judges to accept self-interested proclamations about a canine’s capabilities, reinforcing the use of dogs to transform hunches into probable cause.

Writing for the Court, Justice Elena Kagan accepts several myths that allow drug dogs to function as “search warrants on leashes” even though their error rates are far higher than commonly believed

February 11, 2013

Police dogs as “probable cause on a leash”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:19

Jacob Sullum on how credulous courts have granted police dogs the power to circumvent Americans’ right to be free from intrusive search and seizure by police officers on fishing expeditions:

The deputy and another officer who arrived during the stop nevertheless went through Burns’ truck for half an hour or so, reaching up into the boat, perusing his cargo, looking under the seats and the hood, examining the gas tank and the undercarriage. They found no trace of drugs, although they did come across the loaded pistol that Burns mentioned to them once it was clear they planned to search the truck.

“They were cool with the gun,” Burns says. “If it had been California, God knows what would have happened.” He was so relieved that he barely minded the delay and inconvenience, which stretched a brief traffic stop into more than an hour. “I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not a super-libertarian,” Burns says. “Once I realized that the pistol was not going to be an issue, man, they could have spent all day going over that car and under that car. My only concern was that one of the guys might have slipped something in to cover up for the fact that they didn’t find anything.”

That’s one way of looking at it. But even if you are neither a lawyer nor a super-libertarian, you might wonder 1) how often this sort of thing happens, 2) how it came to be that police can get permission from a dog to rifle an innocent man’s belongings, and 3) whether that state of affairs is consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The answers, in brief, are 1) fruitless searches based on dog alerts happen a lot more often than commonly believed, 2) dogs acquired this authority with the blessing of credulous courts mesmerized by their superhuman olfactory talents, and 3) this dog license is hard to square with the Fourth Amendment, unless it is reasonable to trust every officer’s unsubstantiated claim about how an animal of undetermined reliability reacted to a person, a suitcase, a car, or a house.

All of these issues come together in two cases the U.S. Supreme Court heard a few weeks after Bob Burns was pulled over. Florida v. Harris raises the question of how a judge knows that a dog’s alert is reliable enough to justify a search. Florida v. Jardines asks whether police need a warrant to use a drug-sniffing dog at the doorstep of a home. These cases, which will be decided by this summer, give the Supreme Court an opportunity to reconsider its heretofore unshaken faith in dogs, or at least limit the damage caused by the amazing canine ability to transform hunches into probable cause.

February 5, 2013

The President’s “license to kill”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

At Reason, Jacob Sullum has a few concerns about the information that came to light in a Department of Justice memo leaked to the media:

The Justice Department white paper on “The Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or an Associated Force,” noted earlier tonight by Mike Riggs, fills in the fine print of the license to kill claimed by President Obama in several ways, none of them reassuring. The main conclusion of the paper, which was obtained by NBC News, is that “it would be lawful for the United States to conduct a lethal operation outside the United States against a U.S. citizen who is a senior, operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force of al-Qa’ida without violating the Constitution or…federal statutes…under the following conditions: (1) an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; (2) capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and (3) the operation is conducted in a manner consistent with the four fundamental principles of the laws of war governing the use of force” — i.e., “necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity.”

[. . .]

More generally, the white paper fleshes out the Obama administration’s argument that U.S. citizens killed by drones are getting all the process that is appropriate in the circumstances; hence the Fifth Amendment, though implicated, is not violated. And since these targeted killings are lawful acts of self-defense, the Justice Department says, they do not violate the law against killing U.S. nationals in foreign countries or the executive order banning assassination. After all, “A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination.” Duh.

The problem is that to accept this position, you have to put complete trust in the competence, wisdom, and ethics of the president, his underlings, and their successors. You have to believe they are properly defining and inerrantly identifying people who pose an imminent (or quasi-imminent) threat to national security and eliminating that threat through the only feasible means, which involves blowing people up from a distance. If mere mortals deserved that kind of faith, we would not need a Fifth Amendment, or the rest of the Constitution.

January 31, 2013

Talking secession … again … and again … and again

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Paul Wells has a few thoughts on secession:

The reason we have spent nearly 40 years debating the effect of referendum results a few points this side or that of 50 per cent is because we have all known for nearly that long that any separatist “victory” in a referendum will be a close thing. If there ever were such a vote, 50 per cent plus a bit on a confusing question, then a sovereignist Quebec government would run into difficulties that don’t have much to do with the text of the Clarity Act and would not be eased by Tom Mulcair’s attempted compromise.

The Supremes sing the hits better than anyone. In their opinion on the Secession Reference, the top court got everyone excited with Paragraph 88, which identifies (Andrew Coyne and many others have said it “invents”) an “obligation on all parties to Confederation to negotiate constitutional changes to respond” to “the clear expression of the desire to pursue secession by the population of a province.” Every six weeks ever since there has been an op-ed in Le Devoir invoking the “obligation to negotiate” as Quebec secessionists’ trump card after a future third-time-lucky majority referendum vote.

It would be so lovely if somebody read more than one paragraph. Having discerned an obligation to negotiate where few had seen one before, the Supremes then ask the obvious question: “What is the content of this obligation to negotiate?” That’s a hell of a question, and since it comes precisely one paragraph after the one that gets everyone so excited, it’d be swell if a few people followed what comes next. The justices promptly “reject two absolutist propositions.” The first is “that there would be a legal obligation on the other provinces and federal government to accede to the secession of a province, subject only to negotiation of the logistical details of secession.” To anyone who says a Yes vote must lead to secession on Quebec’s terms, “we cannot accept this view.” Make the Yes vote as big as you like — Quebec could still not “dictate the terms of a proposed secession to the other parties: that would not be a negotiation at all.”

[. . .]

So a secession attempt would be just about infinitely more complex than the conventional wisdom usually assumes. I haven’t even considered the near-certainty that local secessionist, purely dissolutionist, or U.S.-annexationist movements would pop up across Canada if Quebec began a secession attempt. But surely governments of good will can overcome dissent? Well, maybe, except that the last time Canada’s governments attempted a coast-to-coast set of constitutional amendments — the Charlottetown process of 1992 — the unanimity and best efforts of every head of government in the land wasn’t enough to ensure passage.

There’s a powerful narcotic quality to any conversation that mentions the “Charlatan Accord” for most Canadians over the age of 40: you can see eyes glaze over and lids get heavy the instant that process enters the discussion.

January 9, 2013

What does “status” mean in the Canadian First Nations context?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:23

If you’re confused by the current debate over First Nations people and their relationship with the Crown, you’ll probably want to read âpihtawikosisân‘s explanation of “status” and other terms-of-law that are used in these discussions:

It has been my experience that many Canadians do not understand the difference between Status and membership, or why so many different terms are used to refer to native peoples. The confusion is understandable; this is a complex issue and the terms used in any given context can vary greatly. Many people agree that the term ‘Indian’ is a somewhat outdated and inappropriate descriptor and have adopted the presently more common ‘First Nations’. It can seem strange then when the term ‘Indian’ continues to be used, in particular by the government, or in media publications. The fact that ‘Indian’ is a legislative term is not often explained.

As a Métis, I find myself often answering questions about whether or not I have Status, which invariably turns into an explanation about what Status means in the Canadian context. The nice thing is, as time passes, fewer people ask me this because it does seem that the information is slowly getting out there into the Canadian consciousness.

To help that process along, I figured I’d give you the quick and dirty explanation of the different categories out there. Well…quick is subjective, I am after all notoriously long-winded.

H/T to Andrew Coyne, who retweeted the link from @romeoinottawa.

Why stop at a mere trillion dollars?

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Zero Hedge on the trillion dollar platinum coin nonsense:

A year ago, out of nowhere, the grotesque suggestion to “resolve” the US debt ceiling with a platinum dollar coin came, and like a bad dream, mercifully disappeared even as the debt ceiling negotiations dragged until the last minute, without this idea being remotely considered for implementation, for one simple reason: it is sheer political, monetary and financial lunacy. And yet there are those, supposedly intelligent people, who one year later, continue dragging this ridiculous farce, as a cheap parlor trick which is nothing but a transparent attempt for media trolling and exposure, which only distracts from America’s unsustainable spending problem and does nothing to address the real crisis the US welfare state finds itself in. And while numerous respected people have taken the time to explain the stupidity of the trillion dollar coin, few have done so as an integral part of the statist mainstream for one simple reason — it might provide a loophole opportunity, however tiny, to perpetuate the broken American model even for a day or two, if “everyone is in on it.” Luckily, that is no longer the case and as even Ethan Harris from Bank of America (a firm that would be significantly impaired if America was forced to suddenly live within its means), the whole idea is nothing more than “the latest bad idea” straight “from the land of fiscal make believe.” We can only hope that this finally puts this whole farce to bed.

[. . .]

Taking these sorts of actions would almost certainly worsen, not ease, the coming battles over the spending — a second reason to be skeptical of the idea of the trillion dollar coin. As we have noted before, the debt ceiling is just one of three brinkmanship moments looming in the next few months. The across-the-board spending cuts that constitute the sequester have only been delayed for two months, and absent new legislation, will start in March. Even more troubling, on March 27 the latest continuing resolution ends and, absent new legislation, all nonessential government programs would have to shut down for lack of funding.

Third, throwing the trillion dollar coin into this mix would not only intensify these two other fights, it would likely poison the well even further in future budget negotiations. With split government, fiscal policy making requires bipartisan agreement. The cliff compromise earned support from both parties, marking a welcome — if brief — respite from partisan politics. The last thing Washington needs is a further escalation in gamesmanship.

Finally, there is a slippery slope from avoiding the debt limit to outright debt monetization. Although proponents see it as a technical fix to a problem that, in their view, never should occur, it means the Treasury would have established a precedent to thwart Congressional limitations on spending and the debt ceiling.

Outside of the legal questions, nothing precludes the Treasury from issuing a coin to pay down the full $16.4 trillion in debt in one fell swoop: true monetization. A trillion dollar coin also would subvert the whole budget process, undermining already fragile public confidence and spooking financial markets. And based on the criteria put forth by the rating agencies, it would represent a stunning failure to devise credible political processes to resolve the longer-term budget issues for the US. A downgrade would very likely follow, in our view.

December 20, 2012

Borking, in retrospect

Filed under: Government, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Walter Olson on the historically nasty confirmation battle that kept Robert Bork off the US Supreme Court:

Of course the confirmation critique that makes it into every Bork obituary isn’t Heflin’s or Johnston’s. It’s Ted Kennedy’s blowhard caricature, intended for northern liberal consumption, of “Robert Bork’s America” as “a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution,” and so on.

Never in memory had a judicial nomination been fought in such language. Why?

As a constitutional law scholar, Bork had distinguished himself even among conservatives for his scathing critique of the Warren Court, which he accused essentially of having made up constitutional law as it went along.

To organized liberal groups, on whose behalf Kennedy was acting, this was the next thing to a declaration of war. Yet they couldn’t exactly come out and defend making up constitutional law as you went along as their own vision for the high court.

Instead, they served up a steady diet of vitriol and wild oversimplification, especially in TV ads and other messages delivered outside the confirmation hearings.

The Washington Post itself opposed Bork’s confirmation, yet nonetheless editorialized against the “intellectual vulgarization and personal savagery” to which some of his opponents had descended, “profoundly distorting the record and the nature of the man.”

December 19, 2012

Clever wording can’t take away an enumerated constitutional right

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:54

Megan McArdle on the pious hopes of those who hope to bring in draconian gun control regulation by abstruse and intricate verbal gymnastics:

Others are suggesting a de-facto ban, accomplished either through a huge tax, or a ban on ammunition. Oh, I’ve also seen calls to limit the amount of ammunition people can buy, but I don’t think those people have thought this through. For starters, the number of bullets used by a typical rampage shooter is about what a target shooter or hunter might go through in an afternoon or two of range practice. And most gun homicides are not rampage shootings; they have one or two victims, and a correspondingly small number of cartridges expended. Moreover, even a very strict per-purchase limit would permit people to accumulate ammunition over time.

No, the people who want to tax guns at 17,000%, or ban ammunition, or make cartridges cost $2,000 apiece, are the only ones hinting at something that might make a real dent in America’s unusually high rate of gun homicide. Except for one thing: you can’t do an end-run around an enumerated right with some sort of semantic game. Chief Justice John Roberts is not Rumplestiltskin; he is not bound by the universe to disappear if you can only find the correct secret word.

You cannot accomplish back-door censorship by taxing at 100% all profits of any news corporation named after a “carnivorous mammal of the dog family with a pointed muzzle and bushy tail, proverbial for its cunning.” You cannot curtail the right to protest by requiring instant background checks and a 90-day waiting period on anyone who wants to assemble with 500 of their friends in a public area. Nor can you restrict the supply of ink used to print Korans. If you pass a law like that, the Supreme Court will say “nice try, guys” and void all the painstakingly constructed verbal origami that was supposed to make civil liberties infringement look like an innocent exercise of the taxing power.

December 1, 2012

The ACLU and the introduction of sex as a civil right

Filed under: Books, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:33

For Reason, Debbie Nathan reviews a new book by Leigh Ann Wheeler:

When it comes to Americans’ understanding of sexual privacy and public sexual expression, most of us are effectively members of the American Civil Liberties Union. This is so even for people who carry no card, pay no dues, and — if such a thing were possible — have never even heard of the organization.

That’s the takeaway from How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, Leigh Ann Wheeler’s dense but fascinating account of the ACLU’s wildly successful efforts, since its founding almost 100 years ago, to bring sex under the purview of the Bill of Rights. Wheeler, a Binghamton University historian, could have stuck with a wonky narrative about a long march of law and jurisprudence. Instead, she’s taken what she calls an “empathic” approach. She has combed vast archives, including personal correspondence of the ACLU’s founders and decades of files from the national office and local affiliates.

From these papers she has assembled a story about men and women working through their own sexual passions and contradictions as they shaped a legal and political practice for the entire country. She reveals how activists pushed, slouched, and pushed some more to arm their fellow citizens with sexual rights, even as those rights provoked further conflicts, including among ACLUers themselves.

November 7, 2012

No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

L. Neil Smith explains one of the most significant reasons that the most recent US election didn’t seem to offer much in the way of choice between the two major party candidates:

No matter how hard Productive Class folks may work at trying to put good people into office, people who respect the Bill of Rights, as well as our dignity as individuals, every single time, we end up with a non-choice between two sets of rapacious gangsters, government parasites and their corporate lookalikes who, differing only in the excuses they use to justify it, see us only as cattle, to be herded, branded, milked, and slaughtered. On the rare occasion that someone decent pokes his head up — Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul — it’s cut off by the socialist mass media, pack animals who give prostitution a bad name.

Beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, the game is rigged, with people who actually work for a living assigned the role of perpetual losers, expected to bow down to Authority no matter how ludicrous its demands, required to observe the letter and the spirit of the law no matter how often, or how outrageously it’s flouted by the insatiably power-hungry. Those who object — especially if they get together to air their grievances — are labeled rednecks, racists, or terrorists by the socialist mass media, depending on what’s in fashion at the time. The truth has no place in this process, only the virtual reality created by the socialist mass media at the behest of their thuggish clientele.

To make things even worse, members of the Productive Class find themselves in the role of shuttlecock in a game of political badminton that has been going on for two centuries. Fed up with the failures and excesses of, say, the Republicans, voters will replace them with Democrats, only to be reminded, in short order, that Democrats suffer failures and commit excesses of their own. Four years after that, experiencing political amnesia again, they put Republicans back in power, when what they ought to do is dump “both” major parties (which are really only one entity, the party of endless lies and coercion) altogether.

October 30, 2012

Pushing for “medical marijuana” makes full legalization less likely

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

L. Neil Smith makes the point that supporters of medical marijuana may be missing:

What I do mind — and perhaps I am alone in this, who knows? — is weak and disingenuous politics with regard to drugs. It was the issue of “medical marijuana” that first got my goat this way. I don’t doubt for a microsecond that the weed makes life easier and longer for those suffering certain diseases, and I believe that those who would deny them that relief are little better than scavengers on the misery of others.

But observation — and my knowledge of history and human nature — suggests that the majority of those who advocate the legalization of pot “purely for medicinal purposes” do not require it for that reason. They simply want to slip the nose of their personal camel under the edge of the tent, and I find that approach sneaky, dishonest, and cowardly.

I believe that if they had spent the past fifty years pushing the Ninth Amendment right to roll up and smoke whatever frigging vegetable you wish, marijuana would be legal now, and there would not have been a “War On Drugs” handy for the psychopathetic enemies of liberty to transform into a War on Everything, including the American Productive Class.

I think we’ve seen the high point for medical marijuana. The proof of that lies in a current initiative to “Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol”, on the ballot in my home state of Colorado this year. The title says it all, although the details could be gruesome, ending in a mess found in some states and all military bases, where the government runs the liquor stores (about as well as they run everything else). In the Air Force, when I was growing up, some officious snoops regularly examined the records of the store and your commanding officer would get a tattletale letter if they thought that you were buying too much booze.

Whatever that amounts to.

This is not a kind of progress any that real libertarian would recognize. The fact that advocates of the measure make a major selling point of taxing the stuff only makes it worse, both in principle and practice. First, by what right does anybody steal money from me when I choose to spend it on some things and not on others. Furthermore, when I was just entering college, a smoker could buy a pack of Marlboros out of a machine for 35 cents. Today, the price per pack is nudging five dollars, and only a small fraction of that is attributable to inflation.

Exactly the same thing will happen with marijuana.

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