Happily Oblivious is proud to announce that it is hosting its first Libertarian Blog Carnival. Please submit your best libertarian blog articles to be featured in the carnival. If you haven’t heard of a blog carnival before, it’s basically a compilation of articles and blogs focusing on a central theme, in this case freedom and liberty. Please submit your best and/or most relevant work to the carnival to both gain exposure to your blog and help spread the message of liberty. The submission deadline is 12/15/2008 to have your entries considered for the first carnival.

The voters of Switzerland are likely to approve a plan to make prescription heroin available to addicts through doctors and possibly pharmacies. The plan is already being used in Switzerland on a trial basis and is likely to be approved by voters as a permanent measure.

The United States (as the self-proclaimed supreme rulers of the universe) are obviously upset about the actions of the Swiss in attempting to clean up their addicts, slow the spread of HIV and ensure that addicts receive treatment and job training so that they can become productive members of society instead of victims of the drug war. This is patently antithetical to the US government’s desire to control the worldwide drug trade and meddle in the internal affairs of other nations. Although the Swiss program has thus far met success in its dealings with heroin addicts, it isn’t likely to be considered an option in the United States any time soon as our own addicts are considered common criminals and the illegal drug trade is worth billions of dollars per year to the US government. So much for ending illegal drug use by helping people get back on their feet.

I can remember when the Clinton “assault weapons” ban was still in effect. High capacity magazines that had been produced before the ban were grandfathered in as legal, and they commanded a healthy premium over what they do today. The ban didn’t do much to affect crime since assault weapons constituted about 1% of guns use in killing in the United States. You can check the FBI violent crime statistics if you disbelieve me, but a 9MM handgun or .22 caliber rifle is a lot more likely to be used against innocent people that an AK-47 clone.

The second amendment is one of the few rights enshrined in the US Constitution, which has been doing better in recent years. States have been easing restrictions on individuals carrying firearms for self defense, and the results have generally been lower rates of violent crime in states which have made that move. The left has done a good job of pointing out the Bush Administration’s assault on the rights of Americans, but will they respect a right that the founders deemed important enough to place ahead of the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to due process of law?

More restrictions may be placed on the right to keep and bear arms, but I am hopeful that an Obama administration will have its hands full with meddling in the economy, and maybe doing something useful like drawing down combat forces in Iraq. If you have the money and the inclination to buy an SKS or AR-15, then by all means do it now. Just because I’m hopeful doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t hedge my bets.

If you’re not sold on the concept of an armed citizenry then read this excellent piece by Gun Owners of America. There is a very strong case to be made that when law abiding citizens are free to own, carry, and use guns for self defense the violent crime rate drops. Even if one is not sold on the idea of armed citizens preventing crime, armed societies cannot easily experience events like the holocaust, soviet purges, cultural revolution, or countless other genocides perpetrated against largely defenseless populations in the last century.

I’ll leave you with the words of a few great men who agreed that a free people should be armed.

‘The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.’’

— Patrick Henry

‘‘[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.’’

— James Madison, Federalist, No. 46.

‘In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.’’

— Aristotle

‘‘The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose.’’

— James Earl Jones, Actor

A lot of libertarians are angry about the direction that the United States is taking, but just being angry accomplishes nothing. For most people, frustration follows anger and surrender follows frustration. Defeatism is exactly what the liberty movement does not need right now. Over the next few years, I believe that the United States will face a series of crises that will drastically change the economic and political landscape. This is a very dangerous time for liberty in America, as it appears the popularity of socialism and welfarism are on the rise. If you want to live in a free society, you need to take constructive action today. Here is a short list of things that you can do to create a more free society. Depending on your personal preferences and idealogical bent they may not all be for you, but what is important is that you do something.

1. Political Activism

This is probably the least sexy form of activism. Writing letters to your representatives and holding signs at polling places is what many libertarians have been trying for years and they’re understandably frustrated at the lack of impact it seems to have had. This type of activism is pretty weak in a vacuum, but it has it’s place in conjunction with other forms of activism.

2. Civil Disobedience

Refusing your consent is the most direct way to show the violence that underpins every government program. This approach will usually end with you in a jail cell, which is something that people with jobs and family responsibilities usually can’t afford. However, with the economy headed in the direction it appears to be, many of us may have less to lose. Just remember that civil disobedience is a completely nonviolent approach in which the objective is essentially to passively take the violence that the government dishes out.

3. Running for Office

For the purposes of this article I’m categorizing political activism as an attempt to influence the existing political establishment. While running for office seeks to do essentially the same thing, it is different than simply lobbying politicos to do the right thing. It also serves to reinforce the lobbying effort. Small government candidates can swing an election by drawing support away from major candidates who have taken particularly anti-freedom positions. At more local levels, pro-liberty candidates have a realistic chance of being elected and having a direct impact on policy.

4. Educate People

The Mises Institute is one organization educating people about freedom and free markets, but they could really use some company. A perennial complaint among liberty activists is that there are too few of us. The only way to change this is to reach out to people who have either not heard or not accepted the message of liberty. Don’t preach to the converted. It only wastes time and money that could be put to better use.

5. Join the Public Debate

Many people don’t know what libertarians believe because they have not heard the ideas repeatedly in the same way that they’ve heard liberal and conservative ideas. Call talk radio, write editorials and if a conversation about politics comes up, don’t be afraid to jump in. Remember to be engaged but not argumentative or hostile. Just because you’re frustrated with the size of government doesn’t mean that everyone else is approaching the conversation from the same perspective.

6. Become the Media

Complaining about how skewed the mainstream media is does nothing to change the situation. There are libertarian radio shows, reporters, tv shows, and blogs already but there is a need for more content. Start small with a podcast, public access tv show, or small community newspaper. The best of these efforts will grow into outlets that reach a mainstream audience and change the debate.

7. Be Proud

There will be times where people call you nuts or say that your efforts are futile. Do not listen to these people unless it sounds like they’re trying to give you constructive criticism. Believe in what you are doing and have a bit of bravado about it. Present a confident face and give those who would rule over you reasons to doubt their cause.

8. Join *Them*

This is a gray area, and I’m sure that most people who care about freedom would have trouble joining the DEA or ATF, but there may be some government positions which lovers of liberty could take and execute in good conscience. If you live in a rural county and the local sheriff wants to deputize you, perhaps you shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. If the United States does lurch into tyranny it might be a net benefit to have liberty lovers in law enforcement or the military–people who could refuse to execute oppressive measures, tip off the populace and in a worst case scenario help organize resistance.

9. Use the Arts

If you have musical talent or the ability to draw a decent picture, you can use this to communicate ideas of an emotional rather than entirely intellectual way. Political and social movements have always had songs which bound them together through a sense of shared purpose.

10. Enjoy the Freedoms We’ve Got Left

Don’t overload yourself with activism or expect instant payback. A lot of people jump into activism with the expectation that they will single handedly liberate the world only to quickly give up in frustration. Spend time with your family and friends, advance your career and take some leisure too. You don’t have to be doing activism with every spare second you have. Life is short and it should be enjoyed.

Judge Jim Gray is an outspoken critic of the war on drugs and he has also had a long career in the judiciary. There aren’t many people who work inside the legal system who are willing to honestly address the fact that the war on drugs has been an abject failure.

I’ve met a number of current and former law enforcement agents who believe that it is time to change failed American drug policy. In my opinion, members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition make the most convincing case for why we need to end the second major prohibition in US history. The superintendent of my county’s jail is a member of LEAP, and I’m hoping to see more members of the law enforcement community all across the United States joining LEAP.

California recently passed Proposition 8 which bans gay marriage. Many conservatives see this as a step back to good old fashioned American values; they see it as a step in the right direction.

Proposition 8 is, however, an insidious and detrimental assault on the rights of every person in the state of California–gay or straight, if you live in California, you will see repercussions from the passage of this proposition.

The CA Supreme Court had upheld a measure allowing gay marriage earlier this year but the voters have overturned that ruling. What the voters don’t seem to realize is that by taking away the hard earned rights of others, they’re setting the stage to allow the state to remove their own rights as well. If gay marriage doesn’t apply to you, you should still take heed. Now that the state has been given authority to start taking away fundamental rights, each and every person should expect to see more rights disappear more quickly than ever before.

Thought women had a right to vote? Maybe not for long. Thought minorities were allowed to eat in the same restaurants as whites? Perhaps that will soon be ending.

It’s dangerous to take away the rights of a group of people–the rights, in this case, that all other groups of people have enjoyed since this country’s inception. Rights that, in this case, aren’t harming anyone. There is no good reason that anyone should have voted in favor of Proposition 8. It’s hard to gain legal rights from any government. And once those rights have been gained and taken away, it’s even harder to get them back. And by giving the government the right to single out groups of peaceful people who are not harming anyone to have their rights taken from them, I assure you, the government won’t stop there. More rights will begin disappearing from more groups of people. Maybe this time it wasn’t you that lost the right to love whomever you choose. But maybe next time it will be you.

In America’s heartland a battle is raging over so-called safe haven laws which enable parents to freely turn over custody of their children to various organizations like hospitals and fire departments. Most states have safe haven laws which allow parents of infants to abandon the children in hopes of reducing the rates of infanticide and infant abuse. Nebraska, however, has a safe haven law without an age limit, meaning that even teenagers can be abandoned without repurcussions for the parents. Interestingly, teenagers have actually made up the largest group of abandoned children in Nebraska, with some as old as 17 being left.

But with teenagers making up the largest number of abandoned children, Governor Dave Heineman announced a special session of the state legislature on Friday to address the issue. The decision led to an increase in abandonments.

Among the teenagers so far abandoned, six were aged 17, two were 16 years old, six were 15, three were 14-year-olds and three were aged 13. Another eight children aged 11 or 12 were abandoned.

Although I feel strongly that infants and very young children need some kind of safety net to protect them due to their complete inability to care for themselves, I can’t for the life of me imagine why a 17 year old needs a safe haven law to protect them from being abandoned by their parents. At 17, a “child” is old enough to work, become emancipated and live on their own. Do they really need these safe haven protections?

Perhaps, instead of extending safe haven laws almost into adulthood, the answer to the problem of child abandonment can be better answered by encouraging parents to take a more active role in their children’s lives and encouraging personal responsibility among all members of society. Instead of ramping up the welfare state to take care of all of our problems for us and medicating ourselves when the stress becomes too much to deal with, perhaps a better solution is to spark a fundamental shift in American society which encourages each man, woman and child to look for solutions to their own problems instead of looking to pass those problems off on others.

Safe haven laws are certainly beneficial in the case of teenage mothers who would sooner leave an infant in a dumpster than care for it. However, by creating a society of personal responsibility, perhaps we could eventually reach a point where safe haven is no longer needed.

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

Those are profound words spoken of experience by a man who knew, all too well, the pressures faced by those who are “mentally ill” in a modern Western society. Those words were written by Theodore Kaczynski, and although his actions throughout the course of his life have been those of a deeply troubled man, his writings are sometimes so profound as to make me question the sanity of a world that would label him insane. True enough, Mr. Kaczynski is insane by any reasonable standard, but through the fog of mental illness, he saw something real in society that many have yet to find. These words, profound, haunting and true, have been ruminating in my mind, forming the basis for the words which you are about to read.

As much as it’s true that modern society has afforded Western humans with the technologies that we have come to take for granted in the span of only a few hundred little years, society has also changed us in a fundamental way. We are no longer creatures of work and self sufficiency. We are creatures of technology, creatures of dependence, creatures of entitlement and creatures of isolation. We are predestined to need the support of our tribe, but we now shun the tribe in favor of a brightly lit computer screen or television set. Without the technology that we have come to depend on, we would be lost. And with those same technologies, we have become prisoners in our own minds.

Humans are not meant to sit in front of a television and computer screen all day. Humans are not meant to substitute words on a screen for human interaction. Humans are not meant to live a sedentary life, nor are they intended to live to be 100 years old. All of these modern technologies are wonderful, but they have created a society of lonely and inhuman people. We no longer know how to interact with eachother. We no longer know how to find pleasure in simple things. We now seek happiness in a pill instead of seeking the root of our unhappiness so that we may slay it and be free from within.

We no longer accept childishness from our children. If a child acts up, we drug him instead of parenting him. If a child cannot concentrate in school, we assume there is something wrong with him. We forget that children are meant to be playful. Children are meant to test boundaries. Children are meant to be free to explore and learn in their own unique ways. Children are not meant to be locked in a room reading from textbooks. When children behave as children, we no longer accept their behavior as natural. Anything other than perfect is unacceptable and must be dealt with harshly. The free spirit must be removed from each and every child before he learns to think, question and feel.

By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve forgotten that there was once another way to live. We’ve forgotten that our fantasies are sometimes more real than our lives. We’ve forgotten that it’s in our nature to question our reality. We’ve lost the desire to better ourselves. We want the easy solution to each and every problem. We want the answers to be given to us instead of finding the truth for ourselves. We want the magic pill.

We learn to love ease of use. We learn to give up a small bit of freedom here and another small bit there to make our lives just a little more simple. We learn to sign away a bit of privacy in exchange for a bit of weight off our shoulders. We learn not to question those topics to which no answer is easily obtainable. We learn to accept the answers we are given. It’s easier this way. Nobody has to think. Nobody has to argue. Nobody has to question the way things are, and nobody has to fight to make things better.

We’ll take that magic pill if you tell us to because that pill will make us happy. We’ll take that pill because we no longer have to make our own happiness. We no longer have to make our own destiny. We’ll take that magic little pill because we’d all just like to be happy.

But we’ve lost our sense of self. We’ve lost the unique character of the human species. We’ve lost that thing that makes us special. We’ve lost our willingness to question bad ideas. We’ve lost our ability to stand up for what’s right because what’s right is often hard. We’ve lost our drive to improve humanity for humanity’s sake. We no longer care to be free–to answer to only our own happiness, desires and needs. Humanity’s mantra has changed. “Rape me,” we say, “but promise you’ll still love me in the morning.” We can no longer see that he who rapes us could never love us. We’ve become blinded to the pain by our little magic pills. We no longer know how to make ourselves happy. And we no longer care. As long as we have our pill, we don’t need anything else.

But maybe we’re better off without it.

With the election over and Obama officially elected as our “king” to be, everyone is waiting impatiently to see if he is really going to live up to those vague election season promises of “hope” and “change”. While his supporters see the possibility that he may really be in it to change America, I have a much more pessimistic streak in me which makes me wonder if he isn’t just like 99% of the other people that have ever run for president. In other words, isn’t he just a power hungry egomaniac like the rest of them?

Time will tell, but one of the most important issues facing America at this moment is what to do with the Gitmo prisoners, and how Obama handles that situation will tell us a lot about whether or not he really possesses the strength of character that he’d like us to believe he has. I believe that most of the prisoners in Gitmo are probably innocent. If they were truly guilty of terrorism, war crimes or other unspeakable acts, they’d have already been dealt with and the guilty verdicts would have been shoved down our throats as proof of our progress in the war on terror. But those people have largely been left to rot without a trial and without attorneys, all the while enduring torture and isolation. This January we’ll see if Obama really wants to change America.

I came across a very interesting collection of photos from the old Soviet gulags. There isn’t much for me to say about this because I honestly don’t know a lot about the gulags or Soviet era Russian history. I just think the photos are great–not the highest quality, of course, but gut wrenching in the same way as photos from the holocaust or modern war zones. The photos were taken between 1927 and 1953. They come with very little description but I highly recommend that you take a few moments to look through them.