RE: What If There Was Never A War On Drugs?
This kind of stupidity is baked into human thinking.
People that want liberty will always be a minority ( as we see in now with the amount of people voting for the corrupt and venal Clinton))
Daniel Okrent wrote an excellent book on prohibition, Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition detailing the various social movements pushing for Prohibition, Unsurprisingly, FDR sitting in his den sipping martinis while directing the Bureau of Prohibition was a symbol of the Northeastern progressives who led an influential, but largely unrecognized component of the movements. It wuld have been a perfect book (well researched and organized), bur Okrent keeps making excuses for the Progressives while admitting the harm they did.
There are two great hindrances to effective governance: do-gooding and rent-seeking. The combination of these motives is known as "Baptists and Bootleggers"
Prohibition and the "War on Drugs" are simply the symptoms of human stupidity. I can guarantee you that a program (not a government run program, but a social movement) designed to shape humans into logical and responsible actors would not just be opposed by the do-gooders and the rent-seekers, but by the people themselves who do not want to be held responsible for their own actions.
What a great comment @stevescoins, I agree that the vast majority of people don't want actual freedom. Freedom takes responsibility like you said, and that means hard work. Better for them to just get stuff handed to them if their cage is nice enough.
As for the government and groups, well freedom is the decentralization of power - each person takes control of their own. That can't be allowed to happen if someone wants to obtain power more easily.
That is a take I will have to think about for a while...it does make sense. Compare to "Absolute power corrupts absolutely"
How would you look at that concept in relation to Hobbe's Leviathan?
Free doesn't mean one is above the law. Just laws are needed in society.
If a government has absolute power we have all seen the horrible things that happen. Imprisonment without trial. Mass murders in Communism. etc
If an individual claims absolute power over themselves, what is the worst that happens? They do criminal actions at a personal level. Stopped eventually by others with their right to self-defense.
you are absolutely right. rule of law beats the hell out of rule of man...the problem is that you have to have just men to enforce the law, and so few of us are just.
To be effective at enforcing the law, one has to be aggressive, and again so few of us are aggressive. You need that intersection of just and aggressive, and both are rare to begin with.
You need the sheepdogs to protect the flock against the wolves. Like you say, sheepdogs are the rarest of them all.