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Mr. Stolyarov Cited in The Heartland Institute’s Articles on E-Cigarettes, Medicaid Estate Recovery, and Doctors Withholding Treatment

Mr. Stolyarov Cited in The Heartland Institute’s Articles on E-Cigarettes, Medicaid Estate Recovery, and Doctors Withholding Treatment

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G. Stolyarov II
May 17, 2015
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My remarks have been cited in three new articles from The Heartland Institute regarding health policy issues.

* FDA Moves to Regulate E-Cigarettes – Article by Matthew Glans

As a nonsmoker, I do not have any attraction to e-cigarettes, but I am opposed, on both moral and practical grounds, to any attempts to restrict them. This article by Matthew Glans cites my remarks with regard to recent FDA attempts to limit the availability of e-cigarettes to young people.

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Excerpt:

FDA’s push to regulate e-cigarettes may invite unintended health consequences, says Gennady Stolyarov, editor-in-chief of The Rational Argumentator. Although many nonsmokers have absolutely no attraction to e-cigs or tobacco products of any sort, for some individuals, e-cigs may work as a substitute for traditional tobacco products or as a part of a transitional approach toward the cessation of smoking.

E-cigs lack the high levels of more than 40 carcinogenic byproducts found in traditional tobacco smoke, and they also minimize the harm caused by secondhand smoke, says Stolyarov. If somebody wishes to smoke, it is better for that person’s health and the health of others if the person smokes an e-cigarette.

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* California Seizes Estates of Deceased Medicaid Patients – Article by Kenneth Artz

This article by Kenneth Artz cites my remarks in opposition to the Medi-Cal “estate recovery” program, whereby California Medicaid recipients’ homes can be expropriated from them upon their deaths.

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Excerpt:

Stolyarov says the estate recovery program is an example of an extremely hardhearted government program that forces people to suffer because of family members’ prior debts or health care needs.

“A person should not lose the family home because one of his or her deceased parents had little or no income and took recourse to Medicaid to pay for treatments for terminal cancer or another terrible disease,” Stolyarov said. “This is especially true given the fact most Medicaid recipients have no easy way of knowing their estates are put in jeopardy when they sign up for the program.”

This situation also sends a cautionary message about socialized health care arrangements purporting to provide “free” medical care, Stolyarov says.

“There is always a cost, and there are always strings attached when any aspect of health care is centrally planned,” said Stolyarov.

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* Dutch Doctors Withholding and Withdrawing Treatment from the Elderly – Article by Kenneth Artz

It is essential to treat all medical patients as human beings with decision-making autonomy, whose lives are worth living. In particular, a decision to shorten life by forgoing medical treatment should never be made by anyone except the patient him/herself. This article by Kenneth Artz cites my remarks regarding a recent study in the Journal of Medical Ethics is that withholding treatment from certain patients (particularly the elderly) appears to be becoming a default decision by doctors in the Netherlands in many cases – rather than a decision deliberately opted into by patients.

While people ought to have a right to voluntarily refuse medical treatment, it is also the case that they should have the right to insist on any and every measure that could possibly prolong their lives, even if their chances are remote. If a patient wishes to try a treatment that has a remote chance of succeeding, but where the alternative is a certain death, that patient’s desires should not be overridden by a central authority or even a medical expert.

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Excerpt:

It is extremely important to respect the liberty of patients to make choices regarding their medical care and the aggressiveness with which they want to fight for their lives, says Gennady Stolyarov, editor-in-chief of The Rational Argumentator.

“What is disturbing about the findings of this study is that withholding treatment from certain patients—particularly the elderly—appears to be becoming a default decision by doctors in many cases, rather than a decision deliberately opted into by patients,” Stolyarov said. “The culture of medicine should always be guided by the premise that taking action to save life is the default, and only the patient should be able to make a different decision.”

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After a Twelve-Year Mistake in Iraq, We Must Just March Home – Article by Ron Paul

After a Twelve-Year Mistake in Iraq, We Must Just March Home – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
March 23, 2015
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Twelve years ago last week, the US launched its invasion of Iraq, an act the late General William Odom predicted would turn out to be “the greatest strategic disaster in US history.”

Before the attack I was accused of exaggerating the potential costs of the war when I warned that it could end up costing as much as $100 billion. One trillion dollars later, with not one but two “mission accomplished” moments, we are still not done intervening in Iraq.

President Obama last year ordered the US military back into Iraq for the third time. It seems the Iraq “surge” and the Sunni “Awakening,” for which General David Petraeus had been given much credit, were not as successful as was claimed at the time. From the sectarian violence unleashed by the US invasion of Iraq emerged al-Qaeda and then its more radical spin-off, ISIS. So Obama sent the US military back.

We recently gained even more evidence that the initial war was sold on lies and fabrications. The CIA finally declassified much of its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was the chief document used by the Bush Administration to justify the US attack. According to the Estimate, the US Intelligence Community concluded that:

‘[W]e are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed…’ And: ‘the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.’

But even as the US Intelligence Community had reached this conclusion, President Bush told the American people that Iraq, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”

Likewise, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “bulletproof” evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaeda was contradicted by the National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that there was no operational tie between Hussein’s government and al-Qaeda.

Even National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s famous statement that the aluminum tubes that Iraq was purchasing “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs,” and “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” was based on evidence she must have known at the time was false. According to the NIE, the Energy Department had already concluded that the tubes were “consistent with applications to rocket motors” and “this is the more likely end use.”

It is hard to believe that in a society supposedly governed by the rule of law, US leaders can escape any penalty for using blatantly false information – that they had to know at the time was false – to launch a pre-emptive attack on a country that posed no threat to the United States. The fact that they got away with it simply makes it all the easier for Washington’s interventionists to try the same tricks again. They already did with Libya and Syria. It is likely they are also doing the same with claims of a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine.

Last week President Obama correctly blamed the current chaos in Iraq on the Bush Administration’s decision to invade. He said, “… ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion. Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

However, if the US intervention in Iraq created the “unintended consequences” of ISIS and al-Qaeda, how is it that more US intervention can solve the problem?

A war based on lies cannot be fixed by launching another war. We must just march home. And stay home.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor – Article by Sanford Ikeda

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Sanford Ikeda
February 28, 2015
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People sometimes support regulations, often with the best of intentions, but these wind up creating outcomes they don’t like. Land-use regulations are a prime example.

My colleague Emily Washington and I are reviewing the literature on how land-use regulations disproportionately raise the cost of real estate for the poor. I’d like to share a few of our findings with you.

Zoning

One kind of regulation that was actually intended to harm the poor, and especially poor minorities, was zoning. The ostensible reason for zoning was to address unhealthy conditions in cities by functionally separating land uses, which is called “exclusionary zoning.” But prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, some municipalities had race-based exclusionary land-use regulations. Early in the 20th century, several California cities masked their racist intent by specifically excluding laundry businesses, predominantly Chinese owned, from certain areas of the cities.

Today, of course, explicitly race-based, exclusionary zoning policies are illegal. But some zoning regulations nevertheless price certain demographics out of particular neighborhoods by forbidding multifamily dwellings, which are more affordable to low- or middle-income individuals. When the government artificially separates land uses and forbids building certain kinds of residences in entire districts, it restricts the supply of housing and increases the cost of the land, and the price of housing reflects those restrictions.

Moreover, when cities implement zoning rules that make it difficult to secure permits to build new housing, land that is already developed becomes more valuable because you no longer need a permit. The demand for such developed land is therefore artificially higher, and that again raises its price.

Minimum lot sizes

Other things equal, the larger the lot, the more you’ll pay for it. Regulations that specify minimum lot sizes — that say you can’t build on land smaller than that minimum — increase prices. Regulations that forbid building more units on a given-size lot have the same effect: they restrict supply and make housing more expensive.

People who already live there may only want to preserve their lifestyle. But whether they intend to or not (and many certainly do so intend) the effect of these regulations is to exclude lower-income families. Where do they go? Where they aren’t excluded — usually poorer neighborhoods. But that increases the demand for housing in poorer neighborhoods, where prices will tend to be higher than they would have been.

And it’s not just middle-class families that do this. Very wealthy residents of exclusive neighborhoods and districts also have an incentive to support limits on construction in order to maintain their preferred lifestyle and to keep out the upper-middle-class hoi polloi. Again, the latter then go elsewhere, very often to lower-income neighborhoods — Williamsburg in Brooklyn is a recent example — where they buy more-affordable housing and drive up prices. Those who complain about well-off people moving into poor neighborhoods — a phenomenon known as “gentrification” — may very well have minimum-lot-size and maximum-density regulations to thank.

When government has the authority to restrict building and development, established residents of all income levels will use that power to protect their wealth.

Parking requirements

Another land-use regulation that makes space more expensive is municipal requirements that establish a minimum number of parking spaces per housing unit.

According Donald Shoup’s analysis, parking requirements add significantly to the cost of housing, particularly in areas with high land values. For example, in Los Angeles, parking requirements can add $104,000 to the cost of each apartment. Parking requirements limit consumers’ choices and increase the cost of housing even for those who prefer not to pay for parking.

Developers typically build only the minimum amount of parking required by law, which indicates that those requirements are binding. That is, in a less-regulated environment, developers would devote less land to parking and more land to living space. A greater supply of living space will, other things equal, lower the cost of housing.

Smart-growth regulations

In the 1970s, municipalities enacted new rules that were designed to protect farmland and to preserve green space surrounding rapidly growing cities by forbidding private development in those areas. By the late 1990s, this practice evolved into a land-use strategy called “smart growth.” (Here’s a video I did about smart growth.)  While some of these initiatives may have preserved green space that can be seen, what is harder to see is the resulting supply restriction and higher cost of housing.

Again, the lower the supply of housing, other things equal, the higher real-estate prices will be. Those who now can’t afford to buy will often rent smaller apartments in less-desirable areas, which typically have less influence on the political process. Locally elected officials tend to be more responsive to the interests of current residents who own property, vote, and pay taxes, and less responsive to renters, who are more likely to be transients and nonvoters. That, in turn, makes it easier to implement policies that use regulation to discriminate against people living on low incomes.

Conclusion

Zoning, minimum lot sizes, minimum parking requirements, and smart-growth regulations demonstrably and significantly increase the cost of housing for everyone by raising construction costs and restricting the supply of housing.

The average household in the United States today, rich or poor, spends about a third of its income on housing. But higher home prices hit lower-income households disproportionately hard because a dollar increase in housing expenditure represents a larger percentage of a poorer household’s budget. Indeed, the bottom 20 percent of households spends around 40 percent of income on housing.

In other words, these land-use regulations are unfairly regressive. Relaxing or even removing them would be a step toward achieving greater equity.

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
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This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
An Analysis of Ethical Issues in the Film “Jurassic Park” (2004) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

An Analysis of Ethical Issues in the Film “Jurassic Park” (2004) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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G. Stolyarov II
July 26, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2004 and published on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  The essay earned over 18,000 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  ***
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 26, 2014
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The central ethical dilemma of the 1993 Steven Spielberg film, Jurassic Park, hinges on the question of whether man should employ his knowledge of genetics to revive a species that had become extinct as a result of natural processes. The scenario presented by the film is one of utter pandemonium and devastation after carnivorous dinosaurs, such as velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus rex defy security measures and trample on the human-built infrastructure of Jurassic Park. From this arises a more complex series of questions: to what extent should man manipulate genetic information? Which species can he legitimately revive, and which must he refrain from reanimating? At which point is it proper to state that one has taken sufficient precautions against potential threats and proceed with a given project?
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John Hammond is the founder of Jurassic Park, an entrepreneur who wants to give his visitors an absolutely genuine experience in observing revived dinosaurs and omit no element of the Mesozoic era, even the carnivorous dinosaurs that view humans as prey. Hammond introduces a group of scientists to Jurassic Park and seeks to convince them to give their professional endorsement to the endeavor as a means of mollifying his investors. He repeatedly ignores warnings from Dr. Malcolm and others that the situation is likely to go awry and arranges the tour to take place when there is a high likelihood of a storm occurring. In the meantime, Dennis Nedry, who programs the security systems in Jurassic Park, seeks to steal valuable dinosaur embryos and sell them on the black market. In order to escape and cause havoc in Jurassic Park, he disables the security systems and lets the dinosaurs loose during the storm. By the time the security systems are reestablished, the dinosaurs have already penetrated the main compound.

Dr. Ian Malcolm is a chaos theorist who constantly warns that Hammond’s seeming control over the course Jurassic Park will follow is a mere illusion, that there are numerous factors that cannot be foreseen when two species separated by 65 million years of evolutionary history collide. His prediction is realized, as the all-female contingent of dinosaurs finds a way to reproduce by spontaneously changing sex, as their frog DNA permits. Drs. Grant and Sappler, specialists in the fauna and flora of the Mesozoic, display concern about Hammond’s introduction of certain species into the park which would not be able to adapt to an age in which they do not belong and behave as if they were still in the Mesozoic.

In order to protect visitors from the dinosaurs, Jurassic Park possesses a system of security fences and remote feeding, which allows goats and other medium-sized mammals to be airlifted into the dinosaur cages while keeping humans out of harm’s way. Unfortunately, this does not take into account the fact that carnivorous dinosaurs are instructed by their instincts to hunt their prey, not ingest passive critters that are delivered to them. When Nedry disables the security systems, the dinosaurs have their chance to lunge at the tour vans in search of more active, human prey. They have also begun to feed on one another, the velociraptors consuming small dinosaurs and being in turn hunted by T. rex. The velociraptors are the most agile, coordinated, and intelligent of the dinosaurs, and have even learned to open door handles, surprising even the initial skeptics of the Jurassic Park endeavor. During the course of the dinosaurs’ siege of the Jurassic Park compound, Hammond’s hopes to revive Jurassic Park with enhanced security measures are shattered, and the objective of the humans becomes, as Dr. Sappler suggested, to save the lives of those endangered by the catastrophe. Hammond is not thrilled with the destruction of his most ambitious dream, and regretfully eyes the fossilized mosquito at the tip of his cane, but he must eventually come to terms with the reality of his experiment’s failure.

Jurassic Park’s failure results in numerous fatalities, including that of the visiting lawyer, the chief programmer, and the man in charge of feeding and containing the dinosaurs. Other lives are placed on the line, including those of Dr. Grant, Dr. Malcolm, and Hammond’s own grandchildren. Even after security is established, no place on the island is safe, as the velociraptors penetrate into the main compound and a helicopter is summoned to evacuate the survivors. Aside from the human toll, the consequences of leaving an unmonitored dinosaur ecosystem in place are problematic, to say the least. The dinosaurs are able to breed and entrench themselves on the island. The films which follow Jurassic Park explore the situation on the island after humans return to it to face a far stronger and more aggressive dinosaur population. Moreover, The Lost World depicts a threat to the mainland human population as a T. rex is illegally imported into the United States. These problems were, obviously, not foreseen by Hammond and other creators of Jurassic Park.

The creation of Jurassic Park was an attempt at beneficence, intended to grant visitors of all economic standings an experience hitherto closed to them, a glimpse at an era 65 million years in the past. Moreover, Hammond sought to exercise his autonomy in employing scientific knowledge of genetics to engineer new species in order to earn profit and personal satisfaction. However, the principle of nonmaleficence was neglected in this process, since, though Hammond did take security precautions intended to avoid harm to visitors, he did not fully consider other potential threats and carried the project forward without analyzing possible implications of blending dinosaur DNA with that of frogs or subjecting the park’s security to the control of the unstable and unreliable Dennis Nedry.

An alternate course of action to the swift establishment of Jurassic Park would have been to proceed at a more cautious pace and be more discriminatory as to the features included in the park. Herbivorous dinosaurs alone would not have posed a dramatic threat to human lives, and would likely have been docile enough to be contained by the security measures that the park possessed. This is supported by the fact that Dr. Grant and Hammond’s grandchildren were able to pet a gigantic herbivore and only received a burst of mucus in the face.

Moreover, a more selective process for employment at Jurassic Park might have been able to weed out individuals like Nedry, who was principally responsible for security failures. Every field of human existence has its blackguards and deceivers. This does not justify curtailing endeavors in those fields, but it does warrant a more stringent approach toward keeping those individuals out of positions of power.

As for employing the DNA of frogs, it might have been possible to locate a species that does not spontaneously change sex and use its genes to fill the “gaps” in dinosaur DNA. Dr. Malcolm’s ideas of a complex interplay of factors determining the outcome of a given event should not deter individuals from undertaking endeavors as novel and ambitious as Jurassic Park, but the complexity, which I think is perfectly within the grasp of human cognition, does need to be taken into account. This would fit the ethics of principlism, as Jurassic Park already fulfills the standards of beneficence and autonomy, and nonmaleficence can be achieved by taking stricter precautions to control the dinosaurs and the security measures of the park. The principle of justice would necessitate that individuals like Hammond have the right, like all others living in a free country, to use their property and create a profit-making venture (this can be termed comparative justice in a paradigm where the right to free enterprise exists in a majority of cases).

How the Drug War Drives Child Migrants to the US Border – Article by Mark Thornton

How the Drug War Drives Child Migrants to the US Border – Article by Mark Thornton

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Mark Thornton
July 20, 2014
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Most attentive parents today rarely allow their children to go unsupervised, particularly in public. It starts with the wireless baby monitor for the crib and ends with the ever-present cell phone at college graduation.

This is what makes reports from the US-Mexican border so perplexing to most Americans. It is hard to believe that parents would send their children, even young children, to travel many hundreds of miles, up to 1,600 miles without guardianship, or under the control of “mules” who guide the children with the hope of a safe voyage to the United States.

The journey is both harsh and dangerous. The northern regions of Central America (i.e., Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) and Mexico are some of the most dangerous areas of the world. The climate can be harsh, roads and travel conditions are mostly poor, and the children are subjected to robbers, kidnappers, rapists, government police and soldiers, drug cartel members, and bandits of all sorts.

As unbelievable as it seems, Central American parents are sending their children, or more often asking their children to join with them in the United States, in large numbers. In many cases the children flee on their own accord without any guardian.

A decade ago US Border Patrol agents apprehended only several hundred unaccompanied children per year. Over the last nine months they have caught nearly 50,000. Official estimates project the capture rate to reach 10,000 per month by this fall. Those numbers actually hide the enormity of the problem because historically the problem was largely restricted to Mexican children who could be immediately returned to Mexico. During the last couple of years, the majority of growth has come from children from Central American countries and these must be processed and turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (part of HHS).

One suggested reason for the explosion of child immigrants from Central America is the perception and rumors that children from Central America who cross the border will receive a “proviso” which might suggest a permit to stay in the US legally. However, it seems that the proviso is really just a notice to appear in immigration court for deportation proceedings. Whether this gives the children more time in the US, or whether it increases the probability of them being allowed to stay in the US for humanitarian reasons is unclear. In one report, only 1 of 404 children specifically mentioned the possibility of benefiting from US immigration reform.[1]

Even if the proviso rumor was having an impact, it does not explain why the children and their parents would risk such a dangerous journey in the first place.

The Role of the Drug War

The underlying cause for this mass dangerous migration is the US’s war on drugs. Central American countries have become the conduit by which illegal drugs move from South America across the US border. Unlike conventional media sources, who will sometimes vaguely mention violence and instability in Central America as a cause, The Economist [2] quite correctly found the source of the problem in America’s war on drugs:

Demand for cocaine in the United States (which, unlike that in Europe, is fed through Central America), combined with the ultimately futile war on drugs, has led to the upsurge in violence. It is American consumers who are financing the drug gangs and, to a large extent, American gun merchants who are arming them. So failing American policies help beget failed states in the neighbourhood.

The result has been that the drug cartels have a great deal of control over much of northern Central America. The cartels control the governments, judges, police forces, and even some prisons and some of the military through a combination of bribery, threats, and outright force.

As a consequence of this control drug gangs and cartels can operate in the open or they can operate deep within the jungle beyond the reach of the law. In turn, the drug cartels can act above the law and as a result they have created a culture of violence, building on the civil wars of previous decades.

The countries in the northern Central American region, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, have the highest murder rate of any region in the world. The region’s murder rate is 7.5 times the murder rate of the North American region.

Globally, the top murder rate in any given year since the 1990s has been Honduras or El Salvador. In 2012, nearly 1 out of every 1,000 citizens in Honduras was murdered. In addition to murder, there are high rates of other types of violence, crime, and intimidation. A very large percentage of the entire Salvadoran-born population has migrated, mostly to the United States.

In addition to violence, the war on drugs has been a disruptive force for the Central American economies. After reading about the region, is anyone likely to make travel plans to go there, or to consider opening a business there? Obviously, the war on drugs has been highly disruptive for job creation, commerce, and international investment outside the drug cartels themselves. Therefore it would be more correct to say that it is not so much the attraction of opportunities in the US, but the lack of and reduction in opportunities in Central America that are spurring emigration, and that this is directly linked to the war on drugs.

When you try to make sense of parents sending their children on such a dangerous undertaking, just remember it is just another despicable result of the war on drugs with few solutions.

The Economist recommends the repeal of the war on drugs and the legalization of drugs globally as the solution. Its second best solution is for the United States to finance an effort to rebuild the institutions (i.e., police, courts, prisons, etc.) and infrastructure (i.e., military, transportation, and education systems) in the countries of Central America:

Such schemes will not, however, solve the fundamental problem: that as long as drugs that people want to consume are prohibited, and therefore provided by criminals, driving the trade out of one bloodstained area will only push it into some other godforsaken place. But unless and until drugs are legalised, that is the best Central America can hope to do.

In other words, ending the war on drugs is the only solution.

Notes

[1] http://www.unhcrwashington.org/children/reports, p. 31.

[2] “The drug war hits Central America: Organised crime is moving south from Mexico into a bunch of small countries far too weak to deal with it,” The Economist, April 14, 2011.

Mark Thornton is a senior resident fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and is the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He is the author of The Economics of Prohibition, coauthor of Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War, and the editor of The Quotable Mises, The Bastiat Collection, and An Essay on Economic Theory. Send him mail. See Mark Thornton’s article archives.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Mises Explains the Drug War – Article by Laurence M. Vance

Mises Explains the Drug War – Article by Laurence M. Vance

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Laurence M. Vance
October 26, 2013
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Air travelers were outraged when the FAA announced that there would be flight delays because air-traffic controllers had to take furloughs as a result of sequester budget cuts. But there is another federal agency whose budget cuts Americans should be cheering — the Drug Enforcement Administration.

According to the Office of Management and Budget’s report to Congress on the effects of sequestration, the DEA will lose $166 million from its $2.02 billion budget. Other agencies that are part of the expansive federal drug war apparatus are getting their drug-fighting budgets cut as well.

These cuts, no matter how small they may actually end up being, are certainly a good thing since over 1.5 million Americans are arrested on drug charges every year, with almost half of those arrests just for marijuana possession.

Although 18 states have legalized medical marijuana, seven states have decriminalized the possession of certain amounts of marijuana, and Colorado and Washington have legalized marijuana for recreational use, it is still the case that in the majority of the 50 states, possession of even a small amount of marijuana can still result in jail time, probation terms, or fines. The federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act, with a high potential for abuse and with no acceptable medical use.

Since the federal government has not followed its own Constitution, which nowhere authorizes the federal government to ban drugs or other any substance, it is no surprise that it has not followed the judgment of Ludwig von Mises when it comes to the drug war.

The war on drugs is a failure. It has failed to prevent drug abuse. It has failed to keep drugs out of the hands of addicts. It has failed to keep drugs away from teenagers. It has failed to reduce the demand for drugs. It has failed to stop the violence associated with drug trafficking. It has failed to help drug addicts get treatment. It has failed to have an impact on the use or availability of most drugs in the United States.

None of this means that there is necessarily anything good about illicit drugs, but as Mises explains “It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices.” But, as Mises contends, the fact that something is a vice is no reason for suppression by way of commercial prohibitions, “nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of a government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora’s box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism.”

The other mischievous dangers of the drug war that have been let loose are legion. The war on drugs has clogged the judicial system, unnecessarily swelled prison populations, fostered violence, corrupted law enforcement, eroded civil liberties, destroyed financial privacy, encouraged illegal searches and seizures, ruined countless lives, wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hindered legitimate pain treatment, turned law-abiding people into criminals, and unreasonably inconvenienced retail shopping. The costs of drug prohibition far outweigh any possible benefits.

But that’s not all, for once the government assumes control over what one can and can’t put into his mouth, nose, or veins or regulates the circumstances under which one can lawfully introduce something into his body, there is no limit to its power and no stopping its reach. Again, as Mises makes clear “[o]pium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.”

“As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life,” Mises goes on, “we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail.”

Mises tells us exactly what the slippery slope of drug prohibition leads to. He asks why what is valid for morphine and cocaine should not be valid for nicotine and caffeine. Indeed: “Why should not the state generally prescribe which foods may be indulged in and which must be avoided because they are injurious?” But it gets worse, for “if one abolishes man’s freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away.”

“Why limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body only?” Mises asks. “Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music?”

When it comes to bad habits, vices, and immoral behavior of others, in contrast to the state, which does everything by “compulsion and the application of force,” Mises considered tolerance and persuasion to be the rules.

“A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper,” Mises explains. “He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.”

For Mises, there is one path to social reform, and “[h]e who wants to reform his countrymen must take recourse to persuasion. This alone is the democratic way of bringing about changes. If a man fails in his endeavors to convince other people of the soundness of his ideas,” Mises concludes, “he should blame his own disabilities. He should not ask for a law, that is, for compulsion and coercion by the police.”

In a free society, it couldn’t be any other way.

Laurence M. Vance is an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute and the author of Social Insecurity, The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom, and War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism. Send him mail. See Laurence M. Vance’s article archives.

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This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Obama’s Syria Policy Looks a Lot Like Bush’s Iraq Policy – Article by Ron Paul

Obama’s Syria Policy Looks a Lot Like Bush’s Iraq Policy – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
June 19, 2013
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President Obama announced late last week that the US intelligence community had just determined that the Syrian government had used poison gas on a small scale, killing some 100 people in a civil conflict that has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. Because of this use of gas, the president claimed, Syria had crossed his “red line” and the US must begin to arm the rebels fighting to overthrow the Syrian government.

Setting aside the question of why 100 killed by gas is somehow more important than 99,900 killed by other means, the fact is his above explanation is full of holes. The Washington Post reported this week that the decision to overtly arm the Syrian rebels was made “weeks ago” – in other words, it was made at a time when the intelligence community did not believe “with high confidence” that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.

Further, this plan to transfer weapons to the Syrian rebels had become policy much earlier than that, as the Washington Post reported that the CIA had expanded over the past year its secret bases in Jordan to prepare for the transfer of weapons to the rebels in Syria.

The process was identical to the massive deception campaign that led us into the Iraq war. Remember the famous quote from the leaked “Downing Street Memo,” where representatives of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration discussed Washington’s push for war on Iraq?

Here the head of British intelligence was reporting back to his government after a trip to Washington in the summer of 2002:

“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

That is exactly what the Obama Administration is doing with Syria: fixing the intelligence and facts around the already determined policy. And Congress just goes along, just as they did the last time.

We found out shortly after the Iraq war started that the facts and intelligence being fixed around the policy were nothing but lies put forth by the neo-con warmongers and the paid informants, like the infamous and admitted liar known as “Curveball.” But we seem to have learned nothing from being fooled before.

So Obama now plans to send even more weapons to the Syrian rebels even though his administration is aware that the main rebel factions have pledged their loyalty to al-Qaeda. Does anyone else see the irony? After 12 years of the “war on terror” and the struggle against al-Qaeda, the US decided to provide weapons to the allies of al-Qaeda. Does anyone really think this is a good idea?

The Obama administration promises us that this is to be a very limited operation, providing small arms only, with no plans for a no-fly zone or American boots on the ground. That sounds an awful lot like how Vietnam started. Just a few advisors. When these few small arms do not achieve the pre-determined US policy of regime change in Syria, what is the administration going to do? Admit failure and pull the troops out, or escalate? History suggests the answer, and it now appears to be repeating itself once again.

The president has opened a can of worms that will destroy his presidency and possibly destroy this country. Another multi-billion-dollar war has begun.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission.

Illiberal Belief #6: Good Intentions Are Enough – Article by Bradley Doucet

Illiberal Belief #6: Good Intentions Are Enough – Article by Bradley Doucet

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The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
November 11, 2012
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  There is a tendency among some people to focus almost exclusively on intentions. They may not explicitly believe that motives are all that matter, but they speak and argue as though that were the case. They spend a lot of time praising people they think have good intentions, who they imagine will act in ways that are beneficial to others, while condemning those they think have bad intentions, who they imagine will act in ways that are beneficial to themselves (either disregarding others or knowingly injuring them).There are several reasons why being overly concerned with people’s intentions in this way is misguided. First, it is simply not possible to be sure what another person’s motives are in any given instance. We are not mind readers, so when we infer someone’s intentions from his or her actions and declarations, we do so with a greater or lesser amount of uncertainty. To claim to have knowledge of another person’s mind is simply arrogant. It is sometimes not even possible in certain cases to be sure about our own motivations, much less someone else’s. This is because intentions are complex. We likely have several reasons motivating any given action, some of which even push us in opposite directions.

A second problem with obsessing about intentions is that actions which benefit oneself often benefit others as well. If I work in order to make money, those who voluntarily purchase the product of my labour also benefit, and this is equally true of any voluntary market transaction. This kind of self-interest should be praised as the motor that drives the world to become ever more prosperous, with condemnation reserved for that sub-category of self-interested actions which actually do harm the interests of others.

Finally, it has been said before, but it bears repeating: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions alone—even redefined to include benign self-interested intentions, and even setting aside the very real knowledge problems involved—are simply not enough. What’s the use in wanting to help the poor, for instance, if the manner in which I choose to do so succeeds only in perpetuating their plight? If one wants to do good, one must actually learn how to do good, or one may very well inadvertently end up making things worse. Instead of wasting time judging people based on what we imagine their intentions to be, we should focus on whether what they are saying makes sense, and on whether the results of their actions are actually good.

Bradley Doucet is Le Quebecois Libré‘s English Editor. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness. He also writes for The New Individualist, an Objectivist magazine published by The Atlas Society, and sings.
Consequences of an Interventionist Foreign Policy – Article by Ron Paul

Consequences of an Interventionist Foreign Policy – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
September 23, 2012
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The attack on the US consulate in Libya and the killing of the US Ambassador and several aides is another tragic example of how our interventionist foreign policy undermines our national security. The more the US tries to control the rest of the world, either by democracy promotion, aid to foreign governments, or by bombs, the more events spin out of control into chaos, unintended consequences, and blowback.

Unfortunately, what we saw in Libya last week is nothing new.

In 1980s Afghanistan, the US supported Islamic radicals in their efforts to expel the invading Soviet military. These radicals became what is known to be al-Qaeda, and our one-times allies turned on us most spectacularly on September 11, 2001.

Iraq did not have a significant al Qaeda presence before the 2003 US invasion, but our occupation of that country and attempt to remake it in our image caused a massive reaction that opened the door to al Qaeda, leading to thousands of US soldiers dead, a country destroyed, and instability that shows no sign of diminishing.

In Libya we worked with, among others, the rebel Libyan Fighting Group (LIFG) which included foreign elements of al-Qaeda. It has been pointed out that the al-Qaeda affiliated radicals we fought in Iraq were some of the same groups we worked with to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya. Last year in a television interview I predicted that the result of NATO’s bombing of Libya would likely be an increased al-Qaeda presence in the country. I said at the time that we may be delivering al-Qaeda another prize.

Not long after NATO overthrew Gaddafi, the al Qaeda flag was flown over the courthouse in Benghazi. Should we be surprised, then, that less than a year later there would be an attack on our consulate in Benghazi? We have been told for at least the past eleven years that these people are the enemy who seeks to do us harm.

There is danger in the belief we can remake the world by bribing some countries and bombing others. But that is precisely what the interventionists – be they liberal or conservative – seem to believe. When the world does not conform to their image, they seem genuinely shocked. The secretary of state’s reaction to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi was one of confusion. “How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction,” she asked.

The problem is that we do not know and we cannot know enough about these societies we are seeking to remake. We never try to see through the eyes of those we seek to liberate. Libya is in utter chaos, the infrastructure has been bombed to rubble, the economy has ceased to exist, gangs and militias rule by brutal force, the government is seen as a completely illegitimate and powerless US puppet.  How could anyone be shocked that the Libyans do not see our bombing their country as saving it from destruction?

Currently, the US is actively supporting rebels in Syria that even our CIA tells us are affiliated with al Qaeda. Many of these radical Islamist fighters in Syria were not long ago fighting in Libya.  We must learn from these mistakes and immediately cease all support for the Syrian rebels, lest history once again repeat itself. We are literally backing the same people in Syria that we are fighting in Afghanistan and that have just killed our ambassador in Libya! We must finally abandon the interventionist impulse before it is too late.

Representative Ron Paul (R – TX), MD, was a three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President. See his Congressional webpage and his official campaign website. 

This article has been released by Dr. Paul into the public domain and may be republished by anyone in any manner.

Federal Student Aid and the Law of Unintended Consequences – Article by Richard Vedder

Federal Student Aid and the Law of Unintended Consequences – Article by Richard Vedder

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Richard Vedder
July 8, 2012
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RICHARD VEDDER is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. He received his B.A. from Northwestern University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Investor’s Business Daily, and is the author of several books, including The American Economy in Historical Perspective and Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 10, 2012, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

FEDERAL STUDENT financial assistance programs are costly, inefficient, byzantine, and fail to serve their desired objectives. In a word, they are dysfunctional, among the worst of many bad federal programs.

These programs are commonly rationalized on three grounds: on the grounds that assuring more young people a higher education has positive spillover effects for the country; on the grounds that higher education promotes equal economic opportunity (or, as the politicians say, that it is “a ticket to achieving the American Dream”); or on the grounds that too few students would go to college in the absence of federal loan programs, since private markets for loans to college students are defective.

All three of these arguments are dubious at best. The alleged positive spillover effects of sending more and more Americans to college are very difficult to measure. And as the late Milton Friedman suggested to me shortly before his death, they may be more than offset by negative spillover effects. Consider, for instance, the relationship between spending by state governments on higher education and their rate of economic growth. Controlling for other factors important in growth determination, the relationship between education spending and economic growth is negative or, at best, non-existent.

What about higher education being a vehicle for equal economic opportunity or income equality? Over the last four decades, a period in which the proportion of adults with four-year college degrees tripled, income equality has declined. (As a side note, I do not know the socially optimal level of economic inequality, and the tacit assumption that more such equality is always desirable is suspect; my point here is simply that, in reality, higher education today does not promote income equality.)

Finally, in regards to the argument that capital markets for student loans are defective, if financial institutions can lend to college students on credit cards and make car loans to college students in large numbers—which they do—there is no reason why they can’t also make student educational loans.

Despite the fact that the rationales for federal student financial assistance programs are very weak, these programs are growing rapidly. The Pell Grant program did much more than double in size between 2007 and 2010. Although it was designed to help poor people, it is now becoming a middle class entitlement. Student loans have been growing eight to ten percent a year for at least two decades, and, as is well publicized, now aggregate to one trillion dollars of debt outstanding—roughly $25,000 on average for the 40,000,000 holders of the debt. Astoundingly, student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt.

Nor is it correct to assume that most of this debt is held by young people in their twenties and early thirties. The median age of those with loan obligations today is around 33, and approximately 40 percent of the debt is held by people 40 years of age or older. So when politicians talk about maintaining low interest loans to help kids in college, more often than not the help is going to middle-aged individuals long gone from the halls of academia.

With this as an introduction, let me outline eight problems with federal student grant and loan programs. The list is not exclusive.

(1) Student loan interest rates are not set by the forces of supply and demand, but by the political process. Normally, interest rates are a price used to allocate scarce resources; but when that price is manipulated by politicians, it leads to distortions in the use of resources. Since student loan interest rates are always set at below-market rates, too much money is borrowed for college. Currently those interest rates are extremely low, with a key rate of 3.4 percent—which, after adjusting for inflation, is approximately zero. Moreover, both the president and Governor Romney say they want to continue that low interest rate after July 1, when it is supposed to double. This aggravates an already bad situation, and provides a perfect example of the fundamental problem facing our nation today: politicians pushing programs whose benefits are visible and immediate (even if illusory, as suggested above), while their extraordinarily high costs are less visible and more distant in time.

(2) In the real world, interest rates vary with the prospects that the borrower will repay the loan. In the surreal world of student loans, the brilliant student completing an electrical engineering degree at M.I.T. pays the same interest rate as the student majoring in ethnic studies at a state university who has a GPA below 2.0. The former student will almost certainly graduate and get a job paying $50,000 a year or more, whereas the odds are high the latter student will fail to graduate and will be lucky to make $30,000 a year.

Related to this problem, colleges themselves have no “skin in the game.” They are responsible for allowing loan commitments to occur, but they face no penalties or negative consequences when defaults are extremely high, imposing costs on taxpayers.

(3) Perhaps most importantly, federal student grant and loan programs have contributed to the tuition price explosion. When third parties pay a large part of the bill, at least temporarily, the customer’s demand for the service rises and he is not as sensitive to price as he would be if he were paying himself. Colleges and universities take advantage of that and raise their prices to capture the funds that ostensibly are designed to help students. This is what happened previously in health care, and is what is currently happening in higher education.

(4) The federal government now has a monopoly in providing student loans. Until recently, at least it farmed out the servicing of loans to a variety of private financial service firms, adding an element of competition in terms of quality of service, if not price. But the Obama administration, with its strong hostility to private enterprise, moved to establish a complete monopoly. One would think the example of the U.S. Postal Service today, losing taxpayer money hand over fist and incapable of making even the most obviously needed reforms, would be enough proof against the prudence of such a move. And remember: because of highly irresponsible fiscal policies, the federal government borrows 30 or 40 percent of the money it currently spends, much of that from overseas. Thus we are incurring long-term obligations to foreigners to finance loans to largely middle class Americans to go to college. This is not an appropriate use of public funds at a time of dangerously high federal budget deficits.

(5) Those applying for student loans or Pell Grants are compelled to complete the FAFSA form, which is extremely complex, involves more than 100 questions, and is used by colleges to administer scholarships (or, more accurately, tuition discounts). Thus colleges are given all sorts of highly personal and private information on incomes, wealth, debts, child support, and so forth. A car dealer who demanded such information so that he could see how badly he could gouge you would either be out of business or in jail within days or weeks. But it is commonplace in higher education because of federal student financial assistance programs.

(6) As federal programs have increased the number of students who enroll in college, the number of new college graduates now far exceeds the number of new managerial, technical and professional jobs—positions that college graduates have traditionally taken. A survey by Northeastern University estimates that 54 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed or unemployed. Thus we currently have 107,000 janitors and 16,000 parking lot attendants with bachelor’s degrees, not to mention bartenders, hair dressers, mail carriers, and so on. And many of those in these limited-income occupations are struggling to pay off student loan obligations.

Connected to this is the fact that more and more kids are going to college who lack the cognitive skills, the discipline, the academic preparation, or the ambition to succeed academically. They simply cannot or do not master well much of the rather complex materials that college students are expected to learn. As a result, many students either do not graduate or fail to graduate on time. I have estimated that only 40 percent or less of Pell Grant recipients get degrees within six years—an extremely high dropout or failure rate. No one has seriously questioned that statistic—a number, by the way, that the federal government does not publish, no doubt because it is embarrassingly low.

Also related is the fact that, in an attempt to minimize this problem, colleges have lowered standards, expecting students to read and write less while giving higher grades for lesser amounts of work. Surveys show that students spend on average less than 30 hours per week on academic work—less than they spend on recreation.  As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa show in their book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, critical thinking skills among college seniors on average are little more than among freshmen.

(7) As suggested to me a couple of days ago by a North Carolina judge, based on a case in his courtroom, with so many funds so readily available there is a temptation and opportunity for persons to acquire low interest student loans with the intention of dropping out of school quickly to use the proceeds for other purposes. (In the North Carolina student loan fraud case, it was to start up a t-shirt business.)

(8) Lazy or mediocre students can get greater subsidies than hard-working and industrious ones. Take Pell Grants. A student who works extra hard and graduates with top grades after three years will receive only half as much money as a student who flunks several courses and takes six years to finish or doesn’t obtain a degree at all. In other words, for recipients of federal aid there are disincentives to excel.

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If the Law of Unintended Consequences ever applied, it is in federal student financial assistance. Programs created with the noblest of intentions have failed to serve either their customers or the nation well. In the 1950s and 1960s, before these programs were large, American higher education enjoyed a Golden Age. Enrollments were rising, lower-income student access was growing, and American leadership in higher education was becoming well established. In other words, the system flourished without these programs. Subsequently, massive growth in federal spending and involvement in higher education has proved counterproductive.

With the ratio of debt to GDP rising nationally, and the federal government continuing to spend more and more taxpayer money on higher education at an unsustainable long-term pace, a re-thinking of federal student financial aid policies is a good place to start in meeting America’s economic crisis.