Green the Vote, the activist group that has been out in force the past few months gathering signatures for State Question 797, which would legalize recreational marijuana in the state, didn’t reach anywhere close to the number required to put the question on the November ballot, despite claiming it reached that number in late July.  The story here.

So Green the Vote’s president Isaac Caviness made an executive decision to make the false claim to the media that they had surpassed 120,000 signatures, despite only gathering around 32,000.  His rationale was strategic: if Oklahomans perceived momentum or popularity in the recreational marijuana movement, it would energize them to get involved too.  But if he wanted to get more signatures, why not say they were 5,000 short, or 10,000? If everyone thought that they’d surpassed the required number, wouldn’t that make prospective signature-givers stay home instead?  The strategy wasn’t only short-sighted, it just didn’t make any sense.

Caviness also sacrificed the credibility of recreational marijuana supporters by making them appear dishonest to the rest of the state. The only contact many Oklahomans may have with the recreational movement may be in the form of the many articles written about Caviness’s deception. So his strategy not only failed in the short run, it just made future recreational activism that much more difficult.

Caviness did mean well: he had only the welfare of the movement in mind, but strategies like this cannot be viewed as a viable option.

The only effective strategy for libertarians in this state is honesty and hard work. Deception, dirty deals, compromise will poison this movement, and render it utterly ineffective.

I will say, however, that the 797 petitioners are some of the most hard-working, dedicated volunteer activists I’ve ever witnessed. If Oklahomans ever get a taste of a more free, more peaceful society, it will be due to the work of these anonymous volunteers working behind the scenes.

Marijuana Moment: Oklahoma governor approves less restrictive medical marijuana regulations

Oklahoma Watch: Medical marijuana will be a cash-only market, with hassles for all

High Times: Nevada’s marijuana tax revenue expected to reach $70 million this year

Reason: New York inches towards legalizing recreational marijuana

Common Dreams: In bid for ‘dystopian’ surveillance power, Facebook asking big banks for customer data

New York Times: An airline scans your face. You take off. But few rules govern where your data goes.

Techdirt: Surprisingly rational TSA plan to drop screening at small airports has almost zero chance of getting off the ground

Washington Post: Don’t let the government censor blueprints for 3D-printed guns

FEE: Steel tariffs are hammering the U.S. nail industry

National Review: Armed bystander thwarts shooting at Florida back-to-school picnic

The Week: The private prison industry, explained

LA Times: Bugging conversations between criminal defendants and their attorneys is bad news

Boing Boing: Surveillance camera shows off-duty NYPD cop dropping a weapon near man he shot in the face

Chapter 10 of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom should be read by everyone, especially young idealists who attach themselves to an ideology of top-down social control:

“That socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learnt by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals, they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and Italy the success of Fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority agreeing on a particular plan for the organisation of the whole of society; others had already learnt the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what a majority of the people agree, but what is the largest single group whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible; or, if no such group large enough to enforce its views exists, how it can be created and who will succeed in creating it.”

Hayek’s entire body of work is a devastating critique of the type of social control that socialists propose. And he does it, not by name-calling or discounting the arguments of the Socialists, but by taking them completely seriously, and giving them every benefit of the doubt. This is the way to approach the socialism debate, with open ears, and compassion for your intellectual adversary. It’s refreshing to be able to now discuss the merits of socialism and a freed market with someone who has leaned toward a form of socialism for several years but listens to my arguments on an almost daily basis. It is possible to hold a sustained, pleasant conversation with someone who is at odds with you politically if approached in a non-defensive manner.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win in New York has brought phrase “democratic socialism” into the limelight, and a tidal wave of editorials from the “Right” have risen denouncing the ideology. Which is all well and good, but how many of those editorials have referenced Mises, Hayek or the others who defended the market economy against the socialist intellectuals of the 20th century? By all means, lets drag out the foundations and theories of socialism and pit them against those of a market economy. Let’s have the socialist calculation debate again, let it be discredited for the current generation. In fact, a nice socialist calculation debate should probably be waged every 50 years or so, kind of like a Spring cleaning, to shake out the socialists from not only the Left but also the Right, because the dominant welfare-warfare-ism of the Republican Party and virtually the entire Right Wing has paved the way for national destruction just as surely as the “socialism” of the Left has. The War on Terror, viciously promoted by the Right for a decade after 9/11 was nothing more than socialism the wealthy, connected cronies who build the myriad war goodies that are then used against Third World populations who have no means of defense against such horrors. But I digress.

Many young people who become passionate about politics do so out of a desire to change the world for the better. They’re idealists, they refuse to accept the world they’ve been handed and gravitate toward movements that they feel are working towards change, to a more peaceful, better fed world, one with dignity afforded to more people, more employment, higher wages, and more chances of advancing. Many are attracted to socialism, because, in a superficial sense, it proclaims to be the standard bearer for all the previously-mentioned goals. These are the very people that are primed for the philosophy of liberty, it just takes a non-defensive approach on the part of someone who already understands it.

Libertarianism, and the message of liberty itself, has tragically been co-opted by the Right, who’s buffoonery discredits libertarianism in the eyes of anyone with a hint of idealism. Libertarianism is neither Right nor Left. It’s goals are the goals of the young idealist/socialist, but its path to those goals are vastly different.  Libertarians seek to unleash the power of choice, where government is a mere referee to the voluntary exchanges of each individual.  Socialism, for all its humanitarian rhetoric, seeks the abolition of choice. Only the State is allowed to make choices.  Socialism is authoritarianism in a distilled, pure form.  There is nothing democratic about it, as the only type of government that is capable of suppressing markets is totalitarianism.

Advocating libertarianism means stripping it from its association with the “conservative” Right. Conservatives have been the most outspoken in many of the biggest socialist programs in US history. The Drug War, for instance. The Left, and pretty much every young “socialist” is for ending the Drug War. Which, if they examined what they were advocating for, they would see they were advocating for the expansion of choice, because they understand that the restriction of choice in markets for marijuana, cocaine and other substances has led to a crisis of over-incarceration, the growth of a massive police state, and a plague of community-destroying black markets. They only need a slight push to understand that the expansion of choice in every aspect of life would alleviate every social ill that they seek to remedy. But that push can only happen if they aren’t scoffed at and discounted. Idealism is the source of the power of libertarianism, but libertarianism itself has been hijacked by illiterate buffoons both online and on television. It must be reclaimed if it is to regain its persuasive power.

Libartarianism is the true idealism. It’s the home of those who aren’t afraid to advocate for what seems at the present to be a distant Utopia.  We see an as-yet unrealized world, a future where the liberty has allowed us to evolve into something more than a species that enslaves, starves, and murders itself, where the spontaneous forces that have arisen from the trillions of choices of billions of people have guided us to something more than we have been thousands of years.

Marijuana Moment: Oklahoma medical marijuana campaign reports show that grassroots can trump big money

KJRH: 282 people apply for Director of Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority position

Politico: How Silicon Valley became a den of spies

The Intercept: Google struggles to contain employee uproar over China censorship plans

Counterpunch: NATO is a goldmine for the US Military/Industrial Complex

Zero Hedge: Noam Chomsky: “Israeli intervention in US elections overwhelms anything Russia has done”

Washington Examiner: The NSA routinely fails to protect privacy, but no one is fixing it

NICK GILLESPIE: 3D-printed guns are a great example of technophobia in media, politics

GovTech: Cops wearing cameras: What happens when privacy and accountability collide?

Fox: Air Force remains silent after huge meteor hits near US military base

Futurism: Engineers use CRISPR to create a new species with just one chromosome

Is from my wonderfully musty copy of the book, Facts and Comments, by Herbert Spencer, in a short essay entitled, Patriotism:

“Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling — anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called — in a somewhat startling way. It was at the time of the second Afghan war, when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man — then a captain but now a general — drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying — “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.””

When I see veterans in public, I don’t look at them with the reverential awe that some feel, I look at them in the same way that I might look at someone who’s survived a tragic natural disaster with their wits barely intact.  I give them the benefit of the doubt: their idealism meshed with the propaganda fed to them throughout their lives about the nobility about arming themselves in the defense of the State, thinking they were actually defending their country, their hometown, family, and friends. In reality, they became fodder for various wars of Empire somewhere across the globe. Some realize it too late, once they’ve committed hideous crimes in their government’s name. A government that forgives them of the crimes, but sends them home to be judged by their conscience night and day until they commit suicide or go insane.  It’s a grim testament to the stubborn inability of men and women to eliminate their moral compass that soldier suicides routinely outpace combat deaths.

Murdering other people is not natural. In Losing Tim, a book I reviewed a few years ago for Antiwar.com, an intimate portrait is painted of the living hell that one veteran experienced before blowing his brains out at the dinner table.

Soldiers are fed the religion on the State in pure form, right into the vein.  The more foreign innocents that are murdered, the more they need that belief in the State religion to prevent them from descending into the mental chaos of “moral injury” and PTSD.  Veterans are another class of victims of the State, and more should be done to prevent our government from creating new ones.

KGOU: Oil and gas companies spent half a million dollars trying to defeat medical marijuana in Oklahoma Ed: Here’s the list:

• Chesapeake Energy: $25,000
• Cimarex Energy: $75,000
• ConocoPhillips: $50,000
• Continental Resources: $100,000
• Devon Energy: $100,000
• Enable Midstream Partners: $25,000
• Gulfport Energy: $50,000
• Helmerich & Payne: $15,000
• Newfield Exploration: $100,000
• OG&E Energy: $25,000
• Phillips 66: $25,000

High Times: Governor of Illinois passes law to give students access to medical marijuana in school

National Review: Apple becomes first trillion-dollar public company

Volokh: Free speech and computer code–3D printer gun-making files and beyond

Techdirt: Report: TSA’s ground-based ‘VIPR’ teams are expensive, quite possibly useless

DOUG BANDOW: Would you send your son or daughter to die for Montenegro?

PAT BUCHANAN: War with Iran could destroy Trump’s presidency

FEE: How coders, not Drug Warriors, are preventing opioid overdoses and saving lives

The Free Thought Project: 54 years ago, government and the media created and spread fake news to start war with Vietnam

Alternet: Does microdosing psychedelics have any medical benefits?

From Chapter 10 of Hayek’s terminally under-read Constitution of Liberty, and the second place I’ve discovered so far of his use of the formation of crystals to illustrate the emergence of a spontaneous order in society:

“Though people more familiar with the manner in which men order physical objects often find the formation of such spontaneous orders difficult to comprehend, there are, of course, many instances in which we must similarly rely on the spontaneous adjustments of individual elements to produce a physical order. We could never produce a crystal or a complex organic compound if we had to place each individual molecule or atom in the appropriate place in relation to the others. We must rely on the fact that in certain conditions they will arrange themselves in a structure possessing certain characteristics. The use of these spontaneous forces, which in such instances is our only means of achieving the desired result, implies, then, that many features of the process creating the order will be beyond our control; we cannot, in other words, rely on these forces and at the same time make sure that particular atoms will occupy specific places in the resulting structure.

Similarly, we can produce the conditions for the formation of an order in society, but we cannot arrange the manner in which its elements will order themselves under appropriate conditions. In this sense the task of the lawgiver is not to set up a particular order but merely to create conditions in which an orderly arrangement can establish and ever renew itself. As in nature, to induce the establishment of such an order does not require that we be able to predict the behavior of the individual atom—that will depend on the unknown particular circumstances in which it finds itself. All that is required is a limited regularity in its behavior; and the purpose of the human laws we enforce is to secure such limited regularity as will make the formation of an order possible.”

News9: State Board of Health passes new medical marijuana rules

Tulsa World: Latest draft of medical marijuana rules could be ‘nearly impossible’ for businesses to follow, attorney for group says

High Times: Study shows increased cancer survival rates among mice given CBD

The Intercept: Google plans to launch censored search engine in China, leaked documents reveal

28pages: FBI agent told not to help 9/11 victims build case against Saudi Arabia

Reason: FDA may soon allow MDMA prescriptions for PTSD

The Federalist: Let’s debunk the misleading panic over 3D guns

TAC: The little-known black hole in the Pentagon’s budget

JAMES BOVARD: Have you gained or lost weight? Congratulations, the TSA is now tracking you for suspicious activity

Motherboard: Google is still planning a ‘smart city’ in Toronto despite major privacy concerns

Forbes: Privacy revolution: How blockchain is reshaping our economy

From Chapter 6, On Paternal Power, page 32, of John Locke’s 1689 work, Second Treatise of Government: 

“The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be where there is no law: and is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists. (For who could be free when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?) But a liberty to dispose, and order freely as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be the subject of the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.”

Libertarianism is the clunky neologism used to denote the philosophy given expression in the above passage from Locke’s 329-year old book. I’ve never really been comfortable with the term, it seems so second-rate next to the word originally used to indicate support for the spontaneous forces of society, which is liberalism. Some advocates for liberty even believe the term ‘liberalism’ should be recovered from the supporters of a massive welfare state, something I don’t really see as possible now. Deirdre McCloskey’s idea hits closer to the mark than the others with her phrase of “market-tested innovationism”.  I actually prefer ‘voluntarism’ as a fairly clear and simple term to signify support for a free society. After all, we supporters of liberty advocate for the extension of voluntary interaction into every possible social sphere. We advocate for the removal of all restrictions on any voluntary interaction between consenting adults.   We advocate for the rule of law as Locke envisions it, law that protects us not only from other citizens but also from government interference.