The greatest revolution and most dramatic advance toward a freer and far better future has been the flowering of marijuana legalization throughout the nation. Congress is now poised to give the cannabis industry banking rights, hitherto denied to them. Legalization takes the honors not primarily due to the many health benefits from its use, but because its legalization took the beating heart out of the tragic, almost century-long War on Drugs. The drug war is now terminal, as can plainly be seen. The arguments developed to discredit marijuana prohibition apply to the entire bureaucratic superstructure, as the public can clearly see. A flood of editorials and jeremiads, of which I contributed a small amount, were too much for the policy to withstand. No one could deny the injustice of the drug war. This phenomenon is probably one of the primary benefits of such prolonged struggles for liberty: the best minds are forced to develop and unleash the most devastating and convincing of arguments to combat the tyranny. Books, columns, speeches, documentaries, all of this will exist long after the battle has been won, stockpiled like an armory in the event that they ever need to be made use of again.
The foundation of a free society is voluntarism. All mutually-consenting contracts and interactions are permitted. The instigation of violence is prohibited. This has always been the ultimate goal. But it seems clear that it won’t happen all at once. Small victories will build on one another, and liberty activists will gain ground. The logic of liberty applied to one issue will then be transferred to another. More people will wake up to this logic, and then one day we will have reached a point where the principle of voluntarism has been pushed further than ever before. But pushed in a self-conscious, philosophical manner. Nothing by accident, and therefore more permanent. That is the ultimate goal.
