I read the Dave Barry interview that Eric alluded to earlier. The interview was excellent and it certainly expressed much of what I feel when talking to people about being a libertarian. People who are not familiar with the ideology will most likely try to take any argument to the most unlikely extreme.

If you’re against gun control, you must be for letting every private citizen have nuclear weapons in their back yard.

If you are for legalizing drugs, you must be for giving dime bags of crack to every child below the age of 5.

If you are for getting rid of laws that deal with consensual sexual relations in this country, well, you must be for letting everyone have sex with dogs.

I read an article in Liberty magazine a few years back (I’m not sure when, perhaps Eric can dig it out as he is/was an editor for the magazine) that addressed the problems libertarians have when communicating with the public at large. Many libertarians will go right for the throat when opening up their discussions. Drug laws? Abolish them, all of them. Guns? Automatic rifles to anyone who wants them. Public schools? Blow those suckers up!. The problem is, we often don’t take the time to put issues into context. When we open a conversation with a statement like “Every single drug should be legalized and left to the private sector without harassment of government intrusion of any kind”, it’s gonna repulse people. Statements like these should be reserved for the hopeless (those who have no chance of seeing things your way), or people who are intelligent enough to process them.

I used to be an angry, in your face libertarian. I would go right for the kill at the scent of any blood. However, for any number of reasons, I found this tactic was not very successful. It only served to turn people off to me, or worse, to take me as a joke.

Anyway, back to the Dave Barry interview. This is my favorite part:

Reason: It strikes me as bizarre that a prospective Supreme Court justice has to get up there, in his 40s, and say, “No, I never smoked pot.”

Barry: The whole thing about whether you smoke marijuana or not is so ridiculous. That and whether you protested the Vietnam War. Give me a break. Especially the marijuana thing. I’m inclined to think that anybody who never tried it should not be allowed in public office. But to make them get up there and lie, or at least be incredibly disingenuous, is just embarrassing.

After a while, the way this country deals with drugs is just not funny. What a waste of everyone’ s time and effort. What a waste of a lot of people’s lives. The way we deal with drugs and sex. I saw one of these reallife cop drama shows, and they mounted a camera in this undercover agent’s pick-up truck, right under the gear shift, and they sent him out to pick up prostitutes.

So the whole show consisted of this guy, who’s quite a good actor, driving to this one street, and young prostitutes come up to him and solicit him. He says OK. They get in. They’re trying real hard to be nice. He’s going to pay $23, that’s all he’s got and they said that’s OK. Meanwhile, behind him the other cops, these fat men with walkie-talkies, are laughing and chuckling because here they are about to enforce the law and protect society. They take her to some street and then of course they come up and arrest her. This poor woman–I don’t know whether she’s feeding her drug habit or feeding her kids or whatever. And the cops are so proud of themselves, these big strapping guys.

It just made me sick to see this. To treat these people who are trying to make a living, one way or another, this way, and to be proud of it. It’s on television and we’re all supposed to watch this and feel good about it. It’s just disgusting.

It’s like when cops sell drugs to people and then arrest them. And then we reach the point where I think it was Sheriff Nick Navarro in Broward County [Florida] had his lab making crack so they could sell it. They couldn’t get enough in south Florida, so they had to actually produce it themselves.

What politician would say, “This is really a waste of money to be doing what we’re doing? It’s ridiculous sending cops out to arrest prostitutes when we’re supposed to be concerned about crime in this country.” What politician would ever say that? What newspaper person would ever say that without getting stomped all over by all the other hypocrites?

I guess I see where the police are coming from. After all, if you allow people to participate in prostitution, what’s next? Sex with dogs?