Capitol Hill’s drug warriors self-injected their latest fix of high dudgeon  in early March, after the abduction of four Americans — two of whom were subsequently murdered — by drug traffickers in Mexico. On March 8, US Senators Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Rick Scott (F-FL) announced proposed legislation to designate Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.”

Marshall admitted more than he probably intended on the subject when he described the abductions/murders as “a tragedy and a symptom of a larger problem stemming from the culture supported by our national leadership.”

Why do Mexican drug cartels exist? Why do they smuggle cocaine, heroin, and other substances into the US? Why are they willing to kill to protect their turf and snuff out competition?

Because, as Willie Sutton supposedly said when asked why he robbed banks, “that’s where the money is.”

Why is that where the money is?

Because politicians like Roger Marshall and Rick Scott want it there, that’s why.

After a century of the “war on drugs,” a few lessons which were obvious from its beginning remain glaringly so.

Lesson 1: Some people like to use drugs, and are going to do so whether they have Marshall and Scott’s permission to do so or not.

Lesson 2: Most people like to make money, and some are going to do so by providing drug users with drugs, whether they have Marshall and Scott’s permission to do so or not.

Lesson 3: The kind of people who are willing to make money without the permission of Marshall and Scott are also willing to kill to keep making that money.

Lesson 4: There’s nothing Marshall and Scott can do to change Lessons 1, 2, and 3.

Those lessons explain why we don’t very often see aspirin or beer distributors gunning their rivals down on the street.

When customers can walk into a variety of stores to buy what they want (in known quantity, quality, and strength), and when trade disputes can be settled with lawyers rather than with guns, everyone’s a lot safer.

Marshall and Scott don’t want you to be safer. They want you, and those who sell you the things you want, to live in terror of their disapproval. They are, in a word, terrorists.

Oddly enough, they’re also both veteran drug dealers themselves — Marshall as a prescription-writing obstetrician, and Scott as a “healthcare executive” who parlayed a fortune made facilitating Medicare fraud into a career in politics.

The continuing terror campaigns they order and sanction — from abducting merchants and customers off the street and putting them in cages, to deploying cops and troops abroad to violently suppress dealers — guarantee that their opponents will likewise turn to terror.

Marshall, Scott, and the cartels are mutually supporting peas in a rotten pod.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The US government’s bi-partisan war on your right to publish embarrassing videos of yourself proceeds apace. As of March 6, Reuters reports, the White House is “working with Congress” on legislation that would give US president Joe Biden authority to pretend that he can ban TikTok.

As I’ve written before, I’m all in favor of banning government use of TikTok. And all other apps. And smart phones. And the Internet.

And as I’ve pointed out before, the idea of a general ban on TikTok for the American public is unconstitutional, stupid, insane, and evil.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t silver linings in this cloud of political idiocy.

The first and most easily foreseeable consequence of Congress passing such legislation, and Biden invoking its awesome alleged power, would be the reinvigoration of the “cypherpunk” phenomenon.

Within minutes of a general TikTok ban, every American Gen Zer — or at least every American Gen Zer who hadn’t already figured this stuff out for purposes of bypassing copyright to download obscure Japanese anime videos — would become a budding expert in “side-loading” apps onto smart phones, using Virtual Private Networks to go boldly where everyone went before the politicians said they couldn’t anymore, and just generally waving his, her, their or xir middle finger in Biden and Company’s faces.

A secondary consequence would be app developers increasingly catering to a growing user base interested in avoiding “walled gardens” like Google Play and the Apple App Store,  both because they’re vulnerable to stupid government censorship tricks like a TikTok ban, and because they’re inclined toward limiting developer/user relationships for their own reasons, even when not forced to do so by politicians.

And those two trends would, in turn, resuscitate the insanely great idea of the “Wild West” Internet, a golden age when users did what they darn well pleased — because they could, and because clueless politicians were powerless to stop them.

Which might conceivably even bring us to the Promised Land: The Internet as its own global super-jurisdiction, completely immune to political control by any regime for any reason. Politicians would be left with the choice of cutting “their” serfs off from the Internet entirely (and likely getting overthrown for it), or conceding that cyberspace isn’t, and isn’t ever going to be, their turf.

To steal an abbreviated Eastwoodism:  Do you feel lucky, politicians?

If so, as the not-very-old saying goes,  ____ around and find out.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Readers of the Wall Street Journal opinion page on March 1 may have had to double-check that April didn’t arrive early.  Or at least that the byline for an editorial lambasting Republicans who “have campaigned on free-market principles but governed as corporatists — supporting subsidies, tax breaks and legislative carve-outs,” all “policies that benefit corporate America [but] don’t necessarily serve the interests of America’s people and economy” wasn’t Ralph Nader’s.

A closer look at “Why I Stood Up to Disney” shows that it’s business as usual for governor Ron DeSantis, who may style his Florida “the state where woke goes to die” but whose crusade against the Magic Kingdom remains haunted by the grim, grinning ghosts of what Nader alternately calls “corporate socialism” and “government guaranteed capitalism.”

Three decades before DeSantis’s threats to micromanage Mickey, a different Republican governor was eager to “kick down any hurdles” in the Mouse’s way. George Felix Allen’s red carpet wasn’t enough to bring Disney’s America to Virginia, yet the unrealized project faced uncannily similar criticisms.

Murray Rothbard called it an examplar of “subsidized, state-directed growth: the opposite of free markets” (not unjustifiably, given nine-figure handouts) and the “vulgarized, shlockized” output of a conglomerate more devoted to pandering for profits than safeguarding “the old Disney tradition.” Rothbard also anticipated DeSantis’s charges of “cultural Marxism” by tracing the pedigree of Disney’s historical research to “the notorious Foner family of Marxist scholars and activists.”

DeSantis could have read in the pages of The Wall Street Journal about how, despite Walt Disney’s admission that “my father was a Socialist,” his ideological inheritance amounted to little more than honing draftsmanship skills by copying imagery of “the big, fat capitalist with the money” placing “his foot on the neck of the laboring man.” The Walt Disney’s Uncle $crooge comic book might have been just as cartoonish, but when developing the character of a post-Ebenezer Scrooge McDuck, Carl Barks took pains to distinguish the fanciful treasure hunter from “the millionaires we have around who have made their money by exploiting other people to a certain extent.”

Even the website of Rothbard’s own Ludwig von Mises Institute includes his “Eisnerizing Manassas” alongside Philip S. Foner’s edition of The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine.  And Disney didn’t need help from “the Communist-dominated Fur Workers Union” or “the Communist-dominated Drug and Hospital Workers Union” to get audiences to line up for The Lion King while Rothbard wrote his warning.

DeSantis professes to be merely putting Walt Disney World Resort on a level playing field with the Sunshine State’s other theme parks like Universal Studios and SeaWorld.  Yet his insistence on cutting off “a way for the left to achieve through corporate power what it can’t get at the ballot box” when “it is unthinkable that large companies would side with conservative Americans” reveals a willingness to use his electoral votes as carte blanche to override those voting with their untaxed dollars — or their feet.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Free mice in free markets” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Wilson, North Carolina], March 6, 2023
2. “Free mice in free markets” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Madill, Oklahoma Record, March 9, 2023
3. “DeSantis’ Disney stance anti-free market” by Joel Schlosberg, The Daily Advance [Elizabeth City, North Carolina], March 14, 2023
4. “DeSantis’ Disney stance anti-free market” by Joel Schlosberg, Rocky Mount, North Carolina Telegram, March 14, 2023
5. “DeSantis’ Disney stance anti-free market” by Joel Schlosberg, Reflector.com [Greenville, North Carolina], March 14, 2023