The incarceration rates in this free country of ours are an outrage. The American criminal justice system makes the Saudi and Chinese versions look enlightened and humane in comparison. For this I blame the unjust, unholy, unconstitutional War on Some Drugs. I say "some drugs" because, clearly, the War does not target all drugs. I am perfectly free, for example to walk to the party store on the corner and buy beer. I couldn't have done that eighty years ago--not in those simpler War on One Drug days.

With Prohibition, I might well have become a victim of rival mobs trying to corner the beer market in my part of town. Alternatively, one of our finest might have seized me and thrown me into one of the rape pens that pass for our "corrections" system. All for my own good of course!

"Society had a crime problem," Tom Robbins famously wrote, "so it hired cops. Next thing society knew, it had a cop problem."

It's certainly theoretically possible for state-funded security forces to prevent more crime than they preserve. But we'll never enter that Promised Land so long as they have the authority to arrest, taser, beat, bludgeon, shoot, incarcerate and kill peaceable people who ingest or inhale plant products of their own choice.

A paleoconservative calling himself Belloc criticizes Austrian economics. In his view, trad Catholics are "deceived" when they embrace the theories advanced by Jewish agnostics like Mises and Rothbard. I responded as follows:

Austrian is an economic system developed by Menger, Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe and others. Mises and Rothbard were indeed Jewish and agnostic, but their Jewishness and agnosticism does nothing to undermine the validity of their economic theories. Does the fact Newton dabbled in the occult undermine the validity of the calculus?

You're engaging in an ad hominen attack. This is a failure in logic.

For the record, I am a trad and I see nothing "deceptive" about the Austrian school of economics. Indeed, it offers the only system consistent with property rights, individual liberty and human dignity. All other economic systems--corporatism, fascism, socialism, distributism-- are statist. As such, they are deceptive *and* violative of the Seventh Commandment.