DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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A couple of years ago I was invited to a gathering on behalf of Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who then was a libertarian candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. I was well disposed toward him, but when he started talking, his first subject was legalization of drugs. Now he is the CEO of a marijuana company. Rand Paul is probably the leading libertarian at the moment; he purports to take seriously the threat that someone drinking coffee in an American cafe will be struck by a drone-fired missile.

I find it difficult to take seriously a group of people who worry more about legalizing pot than sharing a world with a billion adherents of a religion that has at its core a requirement to conquer and oppress all who don’t join up, not to mention what it does to those who do.

American liberty is indeed under attack, and a libertarian movement is needed more than ever. But the threat to freedom is not drug laws or drone attacks. The principal threat is the administrative state, which increasingly hems in everything we do and depends hardly at all on the will of voters. This morning, Scott published commentary by Professor Philip Hamburger, author of Is Administrative Law Unlawful?. It is, in my opinion, the most important post we have had on Power Line in a very long time. Hamburger argues that the “modern” administrative state has been accepted as the inevitable concomitant of a complex contemporary society. In fact, he says, it is nothing new: it is, rather, the same kingly rule by extralegal “prerogative” that our Constitution was specifically designed to prevent.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2014 at 04:46 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.