The moral obtuseness of paleo-conservatives

Radley Balko evinces a typically obtuse libertarian reaction to a typically horrifying Mexico drug war murder:  in this case, a police chief and his family gunned down in Monterrey.  Of course, it's always the drug war itself that has the chief responsibility with libertarians.  There is no condemnation of the murder or the murderers.  They are compelled, as it were, to murder.

I will grant arguendo that laws may make certain crimes more profitable and more likely and thus those laws may be on balance more costly than the benefits, but only a callous partisan would thereby absolve the killers of their moral responsibility for their acts.   These killers are bad people with the chief moral responsibility for their murder.  It's a stretch to say the drug war "made" them do it.  You need food, clothing, and shelter.  You don't need to get rich quick trafficking cocaine.  These people are callous, generally dull, and greedy people.  I also remain unconvinced that there penchant for violence would not find another outlet in the absence of drug prohibition.  Some people who are not that bright don't want to work 9-5.  They like the money, bling, and power of their present criminal activities.  They will find something to do criminal, whether it's theft, forced prostitutition, human trafficking, counterfeiting, dog-fighting, recreational rape, or generalized shakedowns of legitimate businesses.  It's not like the real Mafia did not preexist prohibition or disappeared after the end of prohibition; instead, it began in the lawlessness that was 18th and 19th Century Italy, and, after the 1930s, the original Mafia changed its attention to skimming profits from otherwise lawful enterprises like the garment and sanitation trade in NYC.

It is certainly true that many of these criminals would have other outlets for their natural criminal tendencies. However, those outlets would not be anywhere near as profitable as the black market for narcotics. Instead of dealing with small, poorly funded gangs having to act as parasites on legitimate businesses, law enforcement is dealing with criminals that are so well funded that they can actually afford to buy and build their own submarines to smuggle their products into the United States.

Furthermore, enforcement of the drug laws has created an environment wherein the most vicious are rewarded. It's no surprise that many of the drug dealers left standing after vigorous enforcement are the sort of hardened career criminals that Roach fears. Beyond them are terrorist groups, especially Islamic terrorist groups, who are most certainly not afraid of killing anyone who gets in their way. The fact that these people get to reap such incredible black market profit only makes the stakes that much more dangerous for the police and intelligence agencies who fight them. Let's also not lose sight of the fact that the Taliban was heavily funded by the opium trade, and that much of the violence hitting Afghanistan today was made possible by Taliban agents in the international drug trade.

Roach's argument that these people would still exist, and that is evidence against the libertarian position here is a nonsensical scarecrow precisely because no mainstream libertarian would ever seriously argue that the criminal element would completely go away in these areas. Even if Pablo Escobar had been able to freely sell his drugs, it is possible that he would have still resorted to illegal tactics because that is just the sort of man he was. We understand and respect the fact that the criminal element in the trade as it is now won't stop being criminals, as a general rule, just because the drugs are legalized. What we seek is a chance to displace the criminal element with legitimate businessmen just as the mafia was displaced by legitimate brewers and distillers after prohibition was repealed.

Roach also doesn't consider how the War on Drugs has aided the welfare state in crippling family life in many inner city communities. The welfare state made it easy for women to support their families without a husband or even an active father figure for their children. The War on Drugs created a lucrative black market that allowed many of their kids to avoid getting educated, avoid learning marketable skills and make large sums of money outside the normal economy. The drug trade has served as the true safety net in many communities, while the welfare state has merely been the most obvious one. Paleo-conservatives need to come to grips with this moral fact.

Finally, it is absurd to say that any mainstream libertarian would argue that a drug dealer is powerless to not murder. Where we disagree with Roach is that we see this sort of thing as being as inevitable as the violence that came out of the trade in illegal alcohol during prohibition. If we are to find fresh outrage in each case, then Roach should likewise find seething outrage every time the police terrorize an innocent family because they couldn't bother to check the street address on the house before ramming the door in. He won't because to do so would be to admit that the cure is increasingly worse than the disease, since many forced drug raids land so little drugs that to describe them as swatting a fly with a bazooka would be charitable.

So much of the empirical case for libertariansim consists of a pretty thin melange of fallacies, where all the costs of the current world we live in are attributed to those laws and institutions they do not like, and all the benefits projected into a yet-to-be-seen world without these laws.  They say this even though obvious complexities present themselves.  Countries with relatively strict drug laws are not unusually violent or lawless-Finland or Singapore come to mind-and Mexico in particular has had a 100 year bloody history rooted in age-old traditions of corruption, demagoguery, and various resentments among social classes.  These aspects of these societies exist in spite of and in parallel to the drug trade.

Finland is also one of the wealthiest nations in Europe, and Singapore is also legendary for its "Fascism With A Friendly Face" style of governance. Those characteristics tend to act as buffers against the sort of lawlessness and violence that plagues poor and too-corrupt-to-be-governed-effectively Mexico. That combination of poverty and laughably weak government is a serious problem with much of Latin America and transcends this one issue.