United Liberty
Penn Jillette backs Gov. Gary Johnson
Fri, 05/25/2012 - 1:40pm | posted by Jason Pye
Penn Jillette, half of the magic duo, Penn & Teller, has been everywhere the last few years. In addition to their almost nightly performances at the Rio in Las Vegas He and Teller hosted Bullshit!, a libertarian-themed show on Showtime that took on conventional wisdom and junk science.
More recently, Jillette has been acting as a political commentator. He appears regularly on various shows on CNN and Fox News and has been known to write an occasional column on political issues.
However, his recent criticism of President Barack Obama over the so-called on “war on drugs” gave him the opportunity to note on Hannity that, while he disagrees with many of the policies pushed by the White House, he is backing Gov. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee for president.
Here’s the entire segment of Jillette with Sean Hannity:
It’s time for us all to stop being ignorant hypocrites and start being TRUE conservatives!
Pragmatic libertarians (minimal-statists) and “true” Conservatives agree that many, if not most, of society’s problems are caused by government usurping choices that could better be made by individuals themselves, and that government is just about the worst way of doing almost anything. Where libertarianism normally parts company with “fake” conservatism is over moral issues. But a true conservative would have no problem with agreeing that what people do with their own bodies, and especially in the privacy of their own home, should be supremely their business and that anything else would entail ignoring the basic tenet of limited government.
Fake-Conservatism on the other hand has much in common with socialism - Authoritarian-socialists and Fake-Conservatives appear to harbor the belief that nature does not exist and that any human can be “re-educated” into being anything society wishes. Leftists therefore tend to believe that little boys can be conditioned into preferring dolls over toy soldiers, and similarly, Fake-conservatives believe that adults can be coerced into choosing alcohol over marijuana. A true conservative, just like a pragmatic libertarian, would immediately reject both ideas as nonsense.
If you support prohibition then you are NOT a conservative.
Conservative principles QUITE CLEARLY ARE:
1) Limited, locally controlled government.
2) Individual liberty coupled with personal responsibility.
3) Free enterprise.
4) A strong national defense.
5) Fiscal responsibility.
Prohibition is actually an authoritarian War On The Economy, Constitution and All Civic Institutions of our once great nation.
It’s all about market and cost/benefit analysis. Whether any particular drug is good, bad, or otherwise is irrelevant - as long as there is demand for any mind altering substance there WILL be supply; THE END! The only affect prohibiting it has is to drive the price up while increasing the costs and profits - and where there is illegal profit to be made criminals and terrorists thrive.
The cost of criminalizing citizens who are using substances similar but no more harmful than those that are perfectly legal - like alcohol and tobacco, is not only hypocritical and futile, but also simply not worth the incredible suffering and damage it causes.
Nothing can stop the Libertarians now- they have MAGIC on their side…
Seriously, I can find no flaw in Penn’s argument, but logic and reasoning are not going to convince folks who have a vested interest (financial or political) in seeing that the ‘drug wars’ continue.
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