If Only We Cared About Privacy Rights as Much as we do about Gun Rights

This week has been a tumultuous one for the world of politics. Between the Boston Marathon bombings, the failure of the Senate's Gun Control Bill, and now the CISPA bill, it has been a busy one to say the least. Today The House passed CISPA, it's second attempt at the bill, by a 288-127 margin with 194 of those votes for coming from the Republican Party.

The concerns about CISPA are well known. Privacy advocates claim it tramples the Fourth Amendment by allowing corporations a free hand to share your data with the government, without need of a warrant, and most importantly, with impunity. But the more peculiar aspect about CISPA is that it and its predecessors (the first CISPA bill, SOPA, PIPA, etc.) are all being pushed from members of congress in the Republican Party. In this party that I identify with most, we have seen it staunchly dig in to defend the Second Amendment in recent weeks, regardless of the bill, its intention, or even the bipartisan support for it. The Republican Party has historically claimed to be the party of small government and championing the constitution. But I ask, do our Republicans in congress know that the Bill of Rights to the constitution actually has more amendments than just two?

So we will allow absolutely no encroachment on the Second Amendment, but we will create a law that literally destroys the Fourth Amendment? As a gun owner, I had no qualms with the Senate's bill as I for a long time have questioned why there are any exceptions to background checks. Here in Texas, I have bought two firearms at gun shows from licensed vendors two different times, and received two background checks as well. But, if you are buying from a private seller, none are needed. You would think there would be more rancor from gun vendors being held on unequal footing, but I digress. My point is, we won't even allow common sense legislation on the gun issue. Anything that comes near the Second Amendment is off the table. Yet, we want to pass a law that allows corporations to share our private information with the government, the very same government the proponents of CISPA decry whenever gun legislation comes up to a vote? A bit of a dubious stance, don't you think?

Mike Rodgers, the author of CISPA, says that is not the intention of the bill and have labelled detractors as "14 year-olds" who do have issues with the bill. We are living in a world where Bank of America mistakenly foreclosed on hundreds of homes and is just now receiving punishment, where the investment banks got everything they wanted in deregulation, then only a decade later manage to tank the world's economy (with some help from shaky government statutes and naive borrowers) and received no punishment whatsoever. Just using those examples, the proponents of CISPA then want us to assume the businesses here will not abuse their power? Not only is it laughable, it is just downright stupid. Businesses will always find rules to exploit and it is tough enough in this climate to hold anyone accountable. It isn't an indictment on business in America, it is just human nature. If it is profitable and within the law, someone will find a way to accommodate and we do not need to be crafting laws that are overly vague to make things even easier to exploit.

That is the main problem with CISPA and was also a shortcoming of SOPA, both bills outsourced responsibility to the private sector with no recourse if this new power was abused. Everyone wants better cybersecurity, just like everyone wanted better protection of digital copyrights, but we want it the right way. Simple amendments that would have made CISPA more palatable were struck down. Mike Rodgers is adamant in that CISPA will not strip your rights, even though the language is quite implicit in that it will (not to mention, the largest hacking threat is from abroad, which this law will not help with). If he is so strong in the belief for his cause, wouldn't he want to assuage the fears of the bill's opponents, especially in the Senate and in the White House, so this bill would pass? It is quite damning with the fact that he doesn't want to. One can only imagine as to why. Maybe it is because he stands the most to directly benefit from this version of CISPA passing? That's right, here we have a congressman crafting a law in which he will directly benefit from monetarily. It is crooked, disgusting, shameful, and an affront to our way of life.

But let us not focus on only Rodgers' self-serving legislation. The bigger issue at stake is, yet again, the Republican Party has found itself on the wrong side of a very important issue. The 2012 election showed that the Republican Party had the wrong stance on women's rights and immigration. Being the main supporters of SOPA probably didn't help, either. Now, we are rationalizing the hypocritical stance of inviting government intrusion onto one constitutional amendment, all the while fighting vigorously to stop government intrusion onto another. You cannot call yourself the party of small government and of the constitution when you pick and choose which constitutional freedoms to sell off. But privacy be damned, we have our guns and that is the only thing that we seem to care about.


References:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57580310/senate-hits-pause-indefinitely-on-gun-bill-reid-says/
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/cispa-passes-house-vote-faces-senate-possible-veto-1C9357282
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/04/17/should-you-be-panicking-about-cispa/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/17/federal-gun-registry_n_3101204.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3htEqpr99lk
http://www.forbes.com/sites/morganbrennan/2013/04/18/the-latest-bureaucratic-bungle-of-the-foreclosure-settlement-bounced-checks/
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-04-19/parsons-blames-glass-steagall-repeal-for-crisis
http://techland.time.com/2011/11/17/sopa-wont-stop-online-piracy-would-censor-everyone-else/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57580268-38/cispa-permits-police-to-do-warrantless-database-searches/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/chinese-hackers-us-block_n_3022088.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2013/04/16/obama-issues-cispa-veto-threat/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130417/16253022748/oh-look-rep-mike-rogers-wife-stands-to-benefit-greatly-cispa-passing.shtml
http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/pro-cispa-backers-spend-over-100-times-more-lobbying-opponents/

Peter Wehner Has Blood on His Hands

In a recent opinion piece on the Washington Post, Peter Wehner continues to advocate why the US should continue the War on Drugs (followed by a rather amusing PostScript). This is undoubtedly in reaction to the changing public opinion on Marijuana as well as the measures passed in Washington state and Colorado. In his opinion piece, Wehner espouses the ideas that legalization is wrong as addiction rates will go up and that countries that have dabbled in legalization have switched back. Despite massive evidence on the contrary (the Czech Republic, The Netherlands, Portugal, and Norway to name a few) all Wehner shows is failed rhetoric.

Saying this current drug war has been a failure is an understatement. Since ramping up in the 1970s, incarceration rates are up (we have the highest total and per capita, the number quadrupling since 1971), drug use is up (we lead the world!), law enforcement budgets are only increasing, and all those with no end in site. Not to mention, our country learned the folly of banning another substance, alcohol, in 1920 and took only 13 years to realize how large a mistake that was. Sure, historians now argue that the era did curb American drinking habits, but any modest gains made were offset by the sheer amount of carnage wrought by indirectly creating a massive black market and criminal presence by banning a popular substance that has a strong demand and a strong market.

Perhaps that is what irks me the most. I used to think Republicans wanted to "run the government like a business" and we are always espousing the ideas of adapting to markets and being savvy businessmen, willing to change to the demands of commerce, trade, and capitalism, but that is not the case of late, especially with Wehner and his ilk. This current War on Drugs fails where the era known as Prohibition failed in that it refused to acknowledge basic economics: supply, demand, and how markets work.

So when alcohol was banned in 1920 with the implementation of the 18th amendment, did demand for alcohol suddenly go away? It did not, and despite the best efforts of Federal Prohibition agents, the criminal element adapted to demand and the now open market. They saw room to make a profit and the era we all know as the "roaring twenties" was ushered in with the likes of Al Capone and the Purple Gang. The 18th amendment created these villains, empowering them since they had no legal competition to compete with. Just as with any product, as long as there is demand, a business be it legal or from the black market, will accommodate.

Not much is different in today's prohibition, today's war on drugs. The cartels that are giving the governments of Mexico and the United States so much trouble were created by prohibition laws passed by those very governments. This is is the ugly truth that drug warriors such as Wehner do not want to admit. The cartels are "Frankenstein's Monster" and the United States is a bewildered Dr. Frankenstein indecisive on how to act against its own creation. These cartels, just like Al Capone and his cohorts, came to be by addressing the demand in the marketplace, demand created by outlawing substances instead of taxing them and regulating them, as any sound government should.

So we have a senior Republican, someone who has been involved in politics and shaping drug policies for several decades, that would have trouble passing a high school economics exam. To make things worse, by attacking supply without reducing demand has only made the Cartels more money. These voices arguing for the continued drug war simply are not reasonable and this issue transcends allegiance to political parties, it is an allegiance only to logic.

It is about looking at the facts. One of their worries is that drug use will go up. I am sure it will, as people will want to experiment, as it probably did with alcohol when prohibition was repealed. But you know what? Things will normalize. On that subject, two of the most profound arguments I have found for ending this prohibition come from a former Judge in California, Jim Gray:



And the group known as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP:

Former judge Jim Gray mentions that the Dutch managed to do something pretty amazing with Marijuana, they made it boring. Like any legal drug, people use it as part of their daily lives and move on. No moving on to the next drug or going on a crazy bender or any of the "gateway drug" nonsense (Not to mention a new study points to tobacco actually being a gateway drug). Also more profound are the former law enforcement personnel in the second video, talking about how all their efforts to fight this drug war were fruitless as the people they arrested were immediately replaced, often by even more ruthless criminals. Why you ask? It is just economics! These organizations, the drug cartels in this case, will still find a way to accommodate demand as long as there is demand to accommodate. So arrest all you want, conduct raids all you want, spend all you want, kill all you want, the market will not go away because some people still want to do drugs.

When do we get the chance to be pragmatic? When can we say that, at the very least, some drugs are worse than others and should be prioritized? Not with Wehner. They are all bad and their usage "shatters lives." The thing to realize, as our forebears in the 20s and 30s realized, is it all worth it? No. People didn't stop drinking then and the government just ended up shattering more lives by trying to enforce the ban on alcohol. It is the same now. This drug war has raged for 40 years  and we have prioritized locking up nonviolent offenders over those who harm others. Our SWAT teams and police forces have been militarized, the former now conducting more raids against nonviolent offenders and the war on drugs costing nearly a trillion dollars. For our neighbors to the south, close to 60,000 people were killed fighting the war in just six years leading up to December 2012.

All of this is despite the fact that, especially with our current economic woes, legalizing drugs could save close to 76 billion dollars a year, as estimated by Harvard Economist Jeffrey A. Miron.

So what does a drug warrior like Wehner do, in spite of such overwhelming evidence? Nothing. Unwilling to look at the costs, the burdens placed, the lives "shattered," the economic and academic data (Yes, I am going to trust Milton Friedman over Wehner) or just the fact that this drug war has failed and as I mentioned in a previous post, the government just doesn't know better when it comes to individual freedoms. I think the role of government should be to ensure that its citizens have access to information to educate them about the potential affects of their personal decisions, not dictate and incarcerate people for harming only themselves.

Wehner argues in his op-ed, "GOP should stand firm against drug legalization" but I argue, the "GOP should stand firm against Drug Warriors." We need to get back to being businessmen, we need to get back to being fiscal conservatives, leaving the moral issues for those who have the time to ponder such things. We also should look at history and acknowledge that for nearly the first 150 years (1783-1920) in this country, factories were staffed, bills were passed, bridges spanned, railroad tracks lain, and articles written all despite the fact that most drugs were legal on a federal level. The fabric of society did not tear apart, quite the opposite actually.

Maybe when drug warriors like Wehner get their heads out of the clouds, they can look down at their hands and see them covered in blood. Blood from the innocents, blood pouring from wounds caused by misguided morality, a hatred for the facts, and a phobia towards sound economic policy and the pillars of small government.


References:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gop-should-stand-firm-against-drug-legalization/2013/04/02/32bd5f7a-915c-11e2-bdea-e32ad90da239_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2013/04/03/postscript-wehner-on-re-criminalizing-drugs/
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0404/Support-for-legal-marijuana-may-have-reached-tipping-point-poll-finds
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500368_162-4222322.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_capone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNN-SBkAym4
http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/november2011/11212011nicotine.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Drug_Abuse_Prevention_and_Control_Act_of_1970
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/aclu-police-militarization-swat_n_2813334.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/06/opinion/branson-end-war-on-drugs
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/11/01/mexican-daily-nearly-60000-drug-war-deaths-under-calderon/
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2008/12/03/einstein-insanity-and-the-war-on-drugs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution