The Conservative Versus Libertarians: Looking for laws to create shared values
John Stossel and Ann Coulter had a wonderful debate recently in front of a group of college Libertarians in Washington D.C. over the nature of personal liberty. During the debate Coulter told John and the audience that Libertarians were a bunch of pussies for pandering to liberals with a social message of drug use and gay marriage. I normally agree with much of what Stossel, Judge Napolitano, and Glenn Beck who are all declared Libertarians state, but in this debate seen below, I am on the side of Ann Coulter 100%. I personally deplore drug use of any kind, and that includes over-the-counter medicine. I would never use marijuana as an ingested smoke into my lungs under any circumstance. I resist even taking aspirin or drinking alcohol. I think anyone who drinks alcohol to get drunk is an absolute fool. I have ended long-standing friendships over drug use and even abuse of alcohol, so I have no tolerance for it among the general population. Even in my teenage years where such behavior was expected, and I lived a life from 16 to 18 years old that would fill encyclopedia volumes with wild adventures, I had a sign in my car that indicated that no smoking was allowed. And it wasn’t…………for anybody. I have even thrown people out of my car for lighting up cigarette in the back seat while I was driving. I have no tolerance for drug or alcohol abuse and I have always been that way. So like Ann Coulter, my biggest problem with modern Libertarians is their permissiveness of drug use and the name of their movement, which is way too close to the word “liberal.” So I do not identify myself as a Libertarian. The barrier for me is their permissiveness of social debaucheries behind a flag of liberty.
The question that arises from Libertarians is how can government control what goes on in the bedroom of citizens, or dictate what an individual puts into their bodies? For me, government can’t, and shouldn’t be in the business of social behavioral regulation. That type of thing would normally be regulated to the spiritual pursuits of an individual which would create the goals people strive to live within. This would work fine if people shared similar values, such as a majority of the population wished to live by Christen values or Buddhist ideas, but in the absence of such social conviction there is a kind of free-for-all mentality that causes some to impose their freedoms on others who don’t share their values. So a law is necessary under those conditions, and a penalty for that law must be swift so it is respected by the public as a shared value.
For instance, if I’m in line at Kings Island, a popular amusement park in Southern Ohio and there is a guy in front of me smoking a marijuana cigarette, he is making a decision based on his personal liberty to impose upon me the expelled air from his lungs that contain within it chemicals I do not want in my body. Currently the law protects him from me, because I cannot just go up and knock his face into another dimension as he imposed upon me the marijuana smoke from his lungs. Because using drugs in public is illegal, the conflict is averted, where it wouldn’t be if marijuana use in public were legalized. There is nothing more disgusting than such public displays where the careless use of intoxicants can be seen coming out of the mouth of an individual and the only way you can prevent yourself from ingesting it yourself is to hold your breath. Such a thing is nearly as disgusting as seeing discarded cigarettes on the ground of a parking lot, or walkway that has been saturated with rain and are smashed flat. When in a public place I am always cautious to avoid stepping on them because I don’t want to drag that trash into my car, or my home as the old cigarette might become lodged into the tread of my shoes to fall out within my property littering it. I am just as cautious about looking for places in public that people have spit on the ground. I do not want to step in the spittle of some other person and drag their chemical intoxicants into the carpet of my vehicle on the way home. The rights of liberty from the person who spit on the sidewalk do not supersede my rights to maintain my property free of their discarded saliva, or cigarettes.
With liberty comes responsibility and if the social trends of the day leaned in the direction of social valor, then I might embrace the Libertarian designation a bit more amiably. I have no desire to visit the city of Amsterdam because of their loose drug laws, and now that Colorado has passed legislation legalizing pot, I may never visit that state in the years to come. The very idea of a body of people who collectively wish to participate in detrimental drug use is disgusting, and changes the way I view the entire state. I find the tendency to use drugs even for bi-polar disorders to be deplorable. I would like to see the human spirit overcome shortcomings and illnesses in the most self-reliant fashion possible—and I don’t see the Libertarian political movement going in that direction. Instead, it appears to be a happy middle place between what the Republicans once stood for, and what the hippie liberals promote actively–human weakness.
I hate more laws, and encourage breaking unjust laws as the situations dictate. The ultimate question is who decides what good and proper social behavior is—is it the Republicans, Democrats, or Libertarians? The answer is in none of them. Before the kind of freedom that Libertarians are striving for can ever occur the human race has to have a desire to behave with quality. They have to want to live quality lives and to respect the quality of other peoples’ lives. Without a firm definition of quality and what makes one thing better than another one persons freedom becomes another person’s hell. Without a spiritual bonding agent that is shared between one group of people and another, freedoms will collide and impose on unwarranted victims the pursuits of less stable personalities and their flaws.
The argument between Ann and John above is the direction that I see America going. As for the liberals, the Democrats, the communists and socialists of collectivism, I don’t even recognize them as having a seat at the table of tomorrow. I see them as having the same kind of living quality as any other animal on Earth. They live, eat and die in predictable fashions but are governed through their lives by animal instincts, the desire to have sex, consume food, and sleep. Without a personal commitment to any higher thoughts or causes, they are no different to me than an average household pet—and they will lose their standing all together in the future of America between the pot-headed Libertarians and Republicans like Ann Coulter who are trying to return the party back to the ideas it was founded on. As for me, no political party represents my thoughts best but the old Anti-Federalist Party of Thomas Jefferson. All these new political variations are lacking an inherit wisdom that is governed by personal valor. Without a human desire to be good, all the laws and political posturing of any collective group of individuals is a worthless pursuit that lacks sustainability. So long as Libertarians embrace drug use of any kind, I will never have an “L” next to my name in any professional or casual reference. I’ll stay with Independent—which is what the aim of all politics should be.
Rich Hoffman
“If they attack first………..blast em’!”
