Across the country, states are examining whether marijuana ought to be decriminalized—and with excellent reason: The “Drug War” has proven as costly a failure as Prohibition, and the number of Americans who languish in prison on drug charges has grown to an outrageous 1.1 million. It is crass to look at this ugly fact in merely monetary terms, but let’s start with dollars and cents and work upwards from there: Think of the billions it costs to keep these men away in tiny cells, under guard—away from their families, unable to raise or support their children. Think of the productive work they otherwise might have done, were they not in prison. Think of the taxes they might have paid. Think of the children who grow up without fathers. Then think of all the civil liberties we have had to sacrifice in order to make the War on Drugs possible. These civic and economic costs are laid out in stark detail in a symposium on the Drug War sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. (Full disclosure: for 10 years, I have edited their guide to U.S. education, Choosing the Right College.) Small-government advocate Doug Bandow gives the prudential case for declaring peace in the Drug War, while “bad-boy” columnist Gavin MacInnes unfolds his long love-hate affair with narcotic substances, in a column that’s aptly summed up by its title, “Legalize Pot: It’s Bad for You.”
A more troubling argument is offered by Reason editor Matthew Feeney, who also seconds the fiscal and civil liberties case for legalization—but goes further, in a direction we might not want to follow. He argues for a principle called “self-ownership,” which lies at the heart of radical libertarian thought. As he writes:
Another columnist, a man whose work I deeply respect, echoed this sentiment in an interview with me published last fall. The great Walter Williams, who has done more to banish nonsense from discussions of race and economics than almost anyone else, defended the sale of human organs by referring to this same principle:
Here I think that Dr. Williams is mistaken, that he has confused liberty with libertarianism. Not one of America’s founders understood liberty in such a radical sense, as Samuel Gregg documents in his careful historical study,Tea Party Catholic, which I had the honor of editing. “Self-ownership” in the sense that anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard understood it would certainly have struck Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and even John Locke (not to mention John Adams and the other conservative Founders) as a principle not of liberty but of “license.” A society based on license, each of them believed, would quickly degenerate into chaos, and promptly yield to tyranny. History bears out their anxieties: Nations where the state collapses completely, as it has in Somalia, do not give way to sober collections of rational individuals respecting each other’s rights—but to feudal squabbles for power, small-scale despotism, civil war, and finally (if the inhabitants are lucky) to the rise of an autocratic state. Petty tyrants who dominated Europe during the Dark Ages (800-1050 or so) were so abusive of the rights of the peasants under their control that the rise of kings and parliaments was a step forward for liberty—albeit a small one on a very long road. The old American slogan “ordered liberty” is a helpful one, but it’s actually redundant. Liberty cannot exist without order. Order is its necessary, but not sufficient, condition. To call for “ordered liberty” is a bit like asking a car salesman for “a good minivan—one with a steering wheel and brakes.”
Let’s look at “self-ownership” a little bit more closely. There is an important core of truth in it that is worth emphasizing, after a century of totalitarian dictatorships. Certainly, the past 100 years of history ought to make us sympathetic, right off the bat, to a presumption that each of us owns himself. If we don’t, who does own us? Our neighbors? The local bishop? The men in Washington, D.C. or at the United Nations?
A strong dose of self-ownership thinking in 1914 might have stopped the rulers of Europe from forcibly drafting millions of men to fight a brutal war over frivolous causes. Had self-ownership prevailed in Russia, millions of peasants would not have been deprived of religious freedom, thrown off their land, deported thousands of miles to Gulag camps, starved to death, or simply shot. Had Germans respected self-ownership, they would not have “Aryanized” (that is, looted) the property of Jews, deprived them of civil rights, and finally exterminated them in camps. Had Japan respected self-ownership, it would not have sent its soldiers to China to engage in mass rape, organized pillage and slaughter, and use Chinese prisoners as human guinea pigs for biological weapons. Self-ownership might have prevented the death by shooting or starvation of up to 80 million people in Mao Zedong’s Communist China. And so on. As R.J. Rummel documented in his classic Death By Government, in the twentieth century, States have been responsible for 133.1 million civilian deaths—and that does not include unintentional deaths caused during wartime. Every one of those deaths was a murder.
Those of us who defend the need for a State after all that organized, State-based slaughter have got some explaining to do. But so do defenders of license. While the government of China is indeed responsible for millions of forced abortions, most of the uncounted tens of millions of unborn children who died in abortion were killed with their mother’s consent, while the state stood by and watched. That is the libertarian Holocaust, brought on by the sick implications to which “self-ownership” can be taken. It’s a bitter irony that Western leftists defend this one exercise of a principle which they otherwise hold in contempt—gleefully imposing their degraded notions of the Common Good, and trampling on the rights of individuals to work, trade, speak, and pray, but defending this single instance of radical, libertine self-ownership. A woman is free, in Barack Obama’s America, to abort her nine-month fetus—but not to buy a health insurance plan that doesn’t include pediatric dental care, or to work as a maid for less than the minimum wage.
We have seen the dark implications of abandoning self-ownership—and the equally dismal outcome of letting this principle run free of all sane constraints. So is there a middle course on the question of self-ownership, a “golden mean” that accounts for the ways in which we really ought to own ourselves, while preserving the rights of others? There is, but it takes more serious thinking than you might realize right off the bat.
Some might step in at this point and say that they are pro-life libertarians, who recognize the “self-ownership” of the unborn child. I wish them well, and hope that they can convince their co-religionists, but I doubt they will have much success. The brute, biological fact of the unborn child’s utter dependence, for nine long months, on the flesh and blood of another human being will strike most libertarians as an outrageous imposition on the liberty of the mother, who has every right to expel this “intruder” from the sanctuary of her womb. It is true that a woman who willingly engages in sexual intercourse knows the risk of pregnancy, and rightly incurs a liability for any children whom she conceives. Our laws still recognize the liability incurred by a man who gets a woman pregnant—eighteen long years of child support. We could logically impose a similar duty on a mother, demanding of her nine months’ physical sanctuary. That would allow us to outlaw any abortion that does not directly threaten the mother’s life and is not the result of rape. Such a law would eliminate more than 98 percent of abortions in America, and as a legal compromise it might well be the best we can do.
But is abortion the only case where self-ownership, in chemically pure form, can prove addictive or even toxic? Self-ownership, standing alone, would require that we dismantle every workplace safety law, every law against racial discrimination or prostitution, and every environmental regulation. Cases where power plants foul the water and give thousands of people cancer would have to be settled in civil court, by tort claims pursued by the sick people or their survivors, against the large corporations that had poisoned them. Doctors could refuse to treat dying patients, unless they could prove that they could pay. Gladiatorial combats to the death would be perfectly legal, so long as every “ultimate fighter” signed a binding contract with fully info
rmed consent. Kinky people really could sell themselves into sexual slavery, and the state would come to retrieve them if they changed their minds and escaped. Would all this really amount to an expansion of liberty? Would it be a victory for “freedom” as we value it? Whatever we called such a society, it most certainly would not be the country that America’s Founders risked their lives and sacred honor to establish.
Next week, I will examine the validity, on its own terms, of self-ownership, and show how it can be a useful concept, if firmly placed in the context of who human beings are, how they really live, and the sanctity and dignity of the human person.
John Zmirakis co-author, with Jason Jones, of the upcoming book The Race to Save Our Century. His columns are archived at The Bad Catholic’s Bingo Hall.
And today we celebrate...