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14 Hard Questions for Libertarians—Answered

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14 Hard Questions for Libertarians—Answered 14 HARD QUESTIONS FOR LIBERTARIANS ANSWERED EFFECTIVE REPLIES TO COMMON OBJECTIONS Tom Woods Contents What Is This Book? | 1 Question 1: How can you favor legalizing drugs? | 2 Question 2: Wouldn’t banks be unstable without government oversight? | 7 Question 3: Why don’t you want to ban sweatshops? | 13 Question 4: Shouldn’t we restrict gun ownership to keep people safe? | 18 Question 5: What would the poor do without government schools? | 26 Question 6: Doesn’t government deter violence? | 32 Question 7: Don’t we need government to promote renewable energy, and discourage the use of fossil fuels? | 40 Question 8: How can you oppose foreign aid? | 50 Question 9: Can you have law without the state? | 58 Question 10: Don’t you care about the environment? | 65 Question 11: End the Fed? Then what? | 73 Question 12: How would libertarians deal with Ebola? | 79 Question 13: Why don’t you support “net neutrality”? | 86 Question 14: Don’t we need government to supply police? | 93 Appendix A: Another Free eBook – No Strings Attached! | 98 Appendix B: My Free Homeschool Course | 99 Appendix C: Free Audiobook | 104 Appendix D: The History and Economics They Didn’t Teach You | 105 About Tom Woods | 106 WHAT IS THIS BOOK? I launched the Tom Woods Show as a Monday-through-Friday podcast toward the end of September 2013. Ever since I’d started filling in as a guest host on the former Peter Schiff Show in 2011, people had been asking when I’d have my own show. I was flattered, but I was alsopretty busy. Fast forward to late 2013, and the idea seemed more and more attractive. The main reason was this: the work I was doing for Ron Paul’s homeschool curriculum was so time-consuming that I could no longer do the writing and blogging I once did. But if I had a daily program, I could still address the issues of the day, and still feel like I was contributing to the cause, even while my homeschool work was otherwise consuming me. And incidentally, although I’ll discuss Ron’s homeschool program in Appendix A, let me give you an idea of what’s involved. Each full-year course in this K-12 curriculum runs 36 weeks, with five lessons per week. That’s 180 video lessons per course. Plus edits, finding readings, formulating, assignments, etc. Now multiply all this by three and a half courses, which is what I am creating, and you are at 630 videos on history, economics, and government. It is exhausting. It’s also the most important work I’ve ever done. So the podcast was a way I could continue to help spread knowledge and information, while still pouring most of my energy into this unbelievable workload. Now when you cover a different topic in liberty five days a week, week after week, the resulting tran- scripts amount to a veritable primer on liberty. That’s when it dawned on me to produce free eBooks out of these gems I was producing month after month. For this eBook in particular I’ve brought together episodes of my show dealing with interesting and controversial topics you’ll need to know about if you’re going to answer critics of liberty. Let me warn you: some of the answers are quite radical, even for some libertarians. They involve taking the nonaggression principle to its logical conclusion: the stateless society. Even if you can’t follow us that far, I know you’ll find it stimulating to considerthese ideas. Be sure to subscribe to the show (free, of course) on iTunes or Stitcher so you don’t miss your daily serving of liberty education. You can also view the archives at TomWoods.com/episodes. Happy reading! 1 QUESTION 1 HOW CAN YOU FAVOR LEGALIZING DRUGS? In episode 204 I spoke to Judge Jim Gray, a retired superior court judge and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. He ran for vice president of the United States on the Libertarian Party ticket alongside Governor Gary Johnson in 2012. WOODS: I want to start off with your own personal situation. You started practicing law in the early ’70s. Then you were a municipal court judge. You were a judge for 26 years. Were you always against the drug war, or at least some aspects of the drug war, or was this something that you came to through experience? GRAY: Tom, I was a former drug warrior, never really gave it much thought. I was a criminal defense attorney in the Navy. I actually wrote charge sheets for my shipmates, a lot of which were drug involve- ment. I was a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, held the record for the largest drug prosecution in the Central District of California back in 1978 – 75 kilos of heroin, 165 pounds, was and is a lot of heroin. Then you started looking around yourself, particularly when you’re on the bench in your own courtroom, and now the record prosecution is 18 tons of cocaine in one place, and you’re churning low-level drug offenders through the system, and you’re arresting, convicting, and incarcerating even big-time drug dealers. Does that mean that heroin or cocaine is no longer available in whatever city? No, it’s just an employment opportunity for someone else, and you see that probably, as Governor Gary Johnson says, 90 percent of the problems in this area are drug prohibition-related problems. About 10 percent are with the drugs. And I’m not minimizing those, but most of them are about drug money. You finally conclude that we couldn’t do it worse if we tried. So back in April of 1992, as a sitting superior court judge, I held a press conference, a somewhat unusual thing to do, and stated the absolute truth to anyone that would hear: that our nation has to look into and change away from drug prohibition because it’s bringing on unbelievable harms, far more than the drugs themselves. WOODS: If you had legalization, it seems to me that you would also have, of course, a fall in the price of drugs, and so drugs would be more readily available. Given what we know about economics, if the price of something falls, the quantity demanded is going to rise. I think we have to be honest and concede that there would be more consumption of drugs under a legalization scenario. Are you saying that that’s 2 Question 1: How can you favor legalizing drugs? 3 a price that we’re willing to pay because the price of trying to suppress it, which is entirely unsuccessful anyway, is just too great? GRAY: Well, don’t just listen to me. There have been so many neutral studies out there by foundations, by governments. They all conclude that even if it would result in greater drug usage, we still should go away from drug prohibition. But I am going to contest that a little bit. Drugs are fully as plentiful today, particularly for young people, as they could possibly be. In fact, you ask the next ten teenagers you find: which is easier for you to get today if you want to, marijuana or alcohol, and every last one will tell you it’s easier to get marijuana. Because the illegal dealers don’t ask for ID. And then if you go to other areas such as Holland – they have decriminalized these drugs in Holland for decades – or Portugal, the drug usage is pretty much the same as it was before. However, teenage drug usage has actually gone down. Why? You take the glamour out. You take the rebelliousness out of them. And in Portugal, why should I use drugs and go see a doctor? That’s no fun. So I will question even whether we would end up with greater drug usage, particularly if you were to regulate and control them like you do wine, for example, and then make treatment available. In Holland, where they actually have decriminalized all drugs, as I said, problem drug usage has gone down by 50%. Do I need to say it again? Fifty percent. Because now, instead of getting a citation to come see me as a judge, they get a citation to go see a medical team, and they start dealing with them, working with them, helping them, and problem drug usage has gone way down. WOODS: Unlike you, I wasn’t involved in the drug war, but I just reflexively supported it because I had gone through all the elementary and high school propaganda about drug usage. I’m not minimizing the damaging ways in which people can abuse drugs. But the item that really got my attention and that emphasized to me the utter futility of it was judge – Volney Brown, maybe – who tells this story about how law enforcement officials in San Diego had all decided that on one particular day they were going to take down all the heroin dealers on the same day. And they somehow did it. So for about two weeks, you couldn’t get any heroin in San Diego. But within a month it was exactly as it had been before, after the most unprecedented effort of law enforcement coordination ever seen. It was back exactly the way it had been before, except this time they had no idea who was selling the heroin. GRAY: Tom, that’s funny, because Volney Brown was a federal magistrate, and I practiced before him.
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