One of my discussion board members – Searaptor22 (teenager from Indiana with a good head on his shoulders), posted a link to the Libertarian Party website and why he’s a libertarian.
http://www.lp.org/issues/lp-oss.shtml
Four of their five points, I can mostly agree with. Really, the only point I can only partially agree with is #5. 1,3 and 4, I believe in full.
The one I blatantly disagree with is #2, quoted below.
Step 2. End Prohibition
Drug prohibition does more to make Americans unsafe than any other factor. Just as alcohol prohibition gave us Al Capone and the mafia, drug prohibition has given us the Crips, the Bloods and drive-by shootings. Consider the historical evidence: America’s murder rate rose nearly 70% during alcohol prohibition, but returned to its previous levels after prohibition ended. Now, since the War on Drugs began, America’s murder rates have doubled. The cause/effect relationship is clear. Prohibition is putting innocent lives at risk.
What’s more, drug prohibition also inflates the cost of drugs, leading users to steal to support their high priced habits. It is estimated that drug addicts commit 25% of all auto thefts, 40% of robberies and assaults, and 50% of burglaries and larcenies. Prohibition puts your property at risk. Finally, nearly one half of all police resources are devoted to stopping drug trafficking, instead of preventing violent crime. The bottom line? By ending drug prohibition Libertarians would double the resources available for crime prevention, and significantly reduce the number of violent criminals at work in your neighborhood.
My reasons are pretty simple – if everything is allowed, everything will be done. It’s also part of the reason why I disagree with #5 – the ‘root’ causes of crime is sin. We can blame-shift all we want, blame society, environment, etc…. but all of these things do nothing but absolve people of personal responsibility. John MacArthur tackles this point at length in his book The Vanishing Conscience. The U.S. has become a ‘nation of victims’ and everybody’s busy passing the blame for their doing wrong off on something other than themselves.
MacArthur puts it this way:
In this matter of self-examination we have to get in touch with our conscience. And I want to address that issue this morning. A couple of years ago I wrote a book called The Vanishing Conscience, which at least for me was a very, very important and foundational book. And it is still in print for which I’m grateful. But in that book I recounted a news report that I had read some years before. It was 1984 and an Avonca Jet crashed in Spain. As always after a crash like that investigators study the accident scene looking for the black box. The black box is the cockpit recorder, and that’s important so they can reconstruct the conversation as well as the electronics, the technology is recorded in that black box unit to try to determine why the accident happened.
Amazingly when the found the black box and they played the recording it revealed that several minutes before the plane flew straight into the side of a mountain, a shrill computer synthesized voice from the planes automatic warning system told the crew repeatedly “pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up.” The pilot inexplicably snapped back “shut up gringo!” and flipped off the switch. Minutes later the plane smashed into the mountain and everybody was, of course instantly killed.
When I read that It appeared to me to be a great illustration of how the conscience functions. And how a modern people treat their conscience. Conscience is the souls warning system. And it tells us when to “pull up” to go another direction, to make an immediate midcourse correction because were flying into disaster. Conscience is described for us in the second chapter of Romans verses 14 and 15. Here we learn that every body has a conscience when they come into the world, it’s a gift from God, given to every human being. The pagans called gentiles here, the nations, who do not have the law, they don’t have the mosaic law they don’t have the scripture. But they do instinctively things that are in the law. Because though they don’t have the written law, they are a law to them selves. Now what that tells us is that when God made man he made him not only a physical creature, but He made him a spiritual creature. In his physical creation man has certain capabilities, certain reflexes. He has senses, physical senses. And in his spiritual creation he has also some moral senses, some moral reflexes, some moral information. And that is the law of God written in the heart. And everybody coming into the world has a sense of right and wrong, has a built in ethical code. A built in moral compass.
In addition verse 15 says to the law written in there hearts, “there conscience bears witness.” Now that introduces us to the conscience. The conscience is a witness. The conscience gives testimony. The conscience speaks. And it speaks as to how we respond to the law. And so verse 15 says the conscience works in the thoughts alternately accusing or else defending. Now let me sum that up by simply saying, everybody who is created, comes into the world with a sense of right and wrong. That is the law written in the hearts. In addition to that, God has put the conscience, and the conscience is a warning device that sounds off when we violate that law. Or affirms when we obey it. The conscience is not that law it is merely the warning device.
As such it’s priceless to us. Because when it says “pull up, pull up, pull up!” It is giving us critical information. Warning us that continued flight in the same path is deadly. Conscience is to the soul what pain is to the body. We would like to avoid pain as much as possible but at the same time we recognize that pain is a gift from God. If you didn’t have pain you would destroy your self. Its what we learned last week, didn’t we. In studying Leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease. You are anesthetized, once your nerves no longer responded you can literally destroy your-self because you feel nothing. Pain is critical to physical preservation. And so the Conscience is critical to spiritual preservation.
Now when you come into the world with this sort of basic morality, and a responsive witness to that morality, that either indicts you or honors you, in response to how you conduct your-self according to that innate morality. When you come into the world that’s only a minimal provision by God. To strengthen your conscience, you need to continually inform it not only of that basic morality that’s written in your heart, but of that very refined comprehensive moral law recorded where? In scripture. As you raise your children you teach them the law of the Lord Deuteronomy 6 says you teach them the law of the Lord “when you stand up, lie down, sit down, walk in the way.” In other words all the time, all the time, your teaching, your teaching, your teaching, your children the law of God. Because you want that law basic law written in their hearts, strengthened and developed and built up and fulfilled and completed. And so you teach them the law of God. And the more they know about the law of God the richer there understanding of scripture, the more truth there to activate the conscience to warn them. The more information the conscience has the better.
Our society attacks that. Our society under the price of the power of the air, has two objectives. Objective number one, is destroy the moral law, so that the conscience is misinformed. Train people against what is innately the law that is in their hearts when they’re born. Give them a new morality, not the morality of the Bible not God’s law. We want people not to think biblically. We want them freed from that so we’ll construct another morality and we’ll pour that into their lives, through every means possible. That’s destructive.
The destructive impact of recreational drugs (as well as other things such as same-sex marriage, abortion, etc….) have been well-documented. Legislating it into law may curb some of the crime rate… but you would have a whole other issue now. Keeping alcohol legal, for example, has not stopped people from driving drunk, going into insane drunken rages and hurting people or even hurting themselves. And though alcohol is a ‘drug’ that can be taken in moderation (and not to excess), legalization of things like weed, pcp, lsd, x and others are a whole other issue in and of themselves. Imagine the druken man who beats his wife, but gets stopped by a police tazer. Now imagine that man on PCP instead.
Scary enough for ya ?
They say that high folks (folks under the influence of alcohol or drugs to the point where they are intoxicated with it) ‘tell the truth’ a bit more. I’ve seen this firsthand repeatedly. And the truth is… that people are sinful. I’ve seen the drunk relative rant and rave in a drunken stupor about how he really doesn’t like certain family members anyway and then proceeds to curse his own mother out. Yet, when not under the influence, he’s such a nice guy. The issue with crime, drugs, etc…. is not economic, but moral.
People don’t murder people for drugs. If drugs were legal, there’d be a whole other set of issues that people would find to latch onto and murder people, rob people and steal from people to get.
People over in African countries would consider our ghettoes to be palaces. With Somali and other warlords armed with thousands of rounds of ammunition, they’d consider the U.S.’s worst inner city to be safer. With the opportunity to work, live in your OWN apartment and not be forced to live in a shanty with 8-9 other relatives…. the chance to eat more than three times a week… many aspire to leave their countries wracked in civil war and come here.
And with these things that others don’t have… our problem of crime – especially violent crime – remain. The problem isn’t education or economics. It’s a sin issue. The fix isn’t intellectual. It’s moral and spiritual.
No political party is the solution to mans’ woes. Only Christ is. And until He returns, there will be no perfect political party.
—–
