legalize pot and not tax it

Legalize and not Tax Pot
By: Josh “Greenghost2008(you tube screen name)” Brooks
 A few weeks ago, this may, I went to a legalize marijuana rally set up by the Kansas chapter of NORML. I stood next to a person who held the sign “relax and tax it.”  Fortunately only a handful of the 70 or so people attending the rally had this kind of sign. The problem is one of contradiction. While there may appear no contradiction through the ideologies of progressivism or paleo-conservatism, there is one through the liberty perspective. The first notion of legalizing pot upholds individual rights. It upholds the notion that people are sovereign over their own lives and bodies. The second part breaks this principle and claims that our lives are not entirely our own but must be used up by the state. What should be considered by those who wish to legalize and then tax is that a “principled” and “consistent” stand for individual rights is what will secure liberty. Thus I recommend people go to these rallies and do as I did. Hold signs which declare “legalize and not tax it.”
 Taxing pot may be seen as a compromise to achieve short term goals. In other words, if we can placate our masters and offer little servitude then perhaps we can gain some liberty. While this paragraph may only convince moderate libertarians, it is important that the message of liberty should never be tainted with the idea of pleasing the statists. If taxation is immoral and legalizing pot moral then these are the stands to be taken. This is the case even if the majority of the people in an area or in general would support a compromised position. This concept of giving into taxation for a little liberty runs rampant in our whole movement. Some of us try electoral politics in order to work with and compromise with our masters through the libertarian party. This kind of tactic leads to our own movements poisoning. For example, the libertarian candidate for governed in Kansas promoted and supported the fair tax. Not much more need be said on that.
 In case anyone is new to this site here is a short summation of the stand for legalizing pot and not supporting it’s taxation. Human beings are part individuals and part groups. Our personalities and beings are shaped by society but we have certain control over who we are as individuals. So a moderate position between atomism/solipsism and Hegelianism is preferred. This is important to note to bring clarity to my next point as it often gets associated with atomism and the charge that no man is am island, which a straw man of course. Robert Nozick wrote something in “Anarchy, State and Utopia” which is relevant here even if his argument against market anarchism is very weak. Basically as the individual must accept pain in order for greater benefit, statists often imply that the nation-state must except some pain in order to gain greater benefits. This makes taxation legitimate in their eyes. As Nozick pointed out, when a group sacrifices part of itself for the greater good of the group it is simply sacrificing some individuals to other individuals and there is no societal scale of pain and pleasure in the same sense that there is for an individual. This is just one of hundreds of arguments for individual sovereignty. They all share the idea that the individual’s sovereignty is superior to the state and the nation so long as said sovereignty does not infringe on other individual sovereignties.
 Now why a consistent promotion of liberty is important and why in the drug war we should fight for its legalization and not its taxation.  If we fight to legalize pot, but except the statist compromise into our midst, the problem arises of setting precedent. To avoid slippery slopes I am not claiming that every compromise with statism leads to inevitable destruction of our whole movement until we are just a brand of secularized paleo-conservatism. I’m saying that each statist compromise increases the chances of such an event occurring(indeed moderate libertarians already make us all look like paleo-conservatives minus the religion parts). In a manner of speaking, politic philosophy seeks objective truths about reality. These objectivist truths, like those of science, ought not be influenced by popular opinion but by reason. This can be difficult because of political philosophy’s close connection to electoral politics in our world. Just as you would not accept that the distance formula is something other that what it is in order to convince someone that Pythagorean theorem, you ought not promote taxing pot in order to help pot become legal. ( I’ll admit my Randian over tunes here)
 To any none libertarians, I’ll try to put this in a manner that is not full of libertarian jargon. You believe pot should be legal. You believe that a person has a right to do with what they want with their own body. If that means smoking a joint, especially sense it hurt no one, then let them smoke a joint (or what ever names people come up with). Given this, can not you see the connection to taxation. Bob hurts no one by keeping what he rightfully earns to himself.  Just as with smoking pot, keeping a hundred percent of ones earnings does not have a victim. No one is having their rights actively violated. You could argued that the poor will be less off because the middle class is not taxed but hey the a poor man is worse off economically when he or she decides not to steal. The situation is the same and only the details and scale differ. Thus taxation is a punishment of a victimless crime through the violence of the state and throwing people in jail is for smoking pot is also a punishment of a victimless crime. Since we can both agree that victimless crimes are no crimes at all why should one support ridding society of some conceptions of victimless crime and not all?
 In conclusion, a person can avoid holding contradicting beliefs by consistently advocated what they believe. This sounds so blatantly obviously that the reader might think I’m insulting their intelligence. Rather what I’m getting at is that holding beliefs that do not contradict is a project that appears easy at first but becomes a major difficult project as one grows philosophically. Just keep this in mind, especially when it comes to drug war issues, no one is the property of another.