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11A065
That Other War
by Jim Davies, 3/6/2011
Last week the parasites who purport to protect us all in the Homeland grabbed some headlines by simultaneously arresting 678 people from sea to shining sea, just in time to coincide with the visit to our President by the one from Mexico. The 678 are described as "gang members." The subdivision that pulled it off was ICE, a new ancronym that had slipped by me: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The operation must have cost us quite a bunch. Direct from its own web site comes this explanation: "Transnational criminal street gangs have significant numbers of foreign-national members and are frequently involved in human smuggling and trafficking; narcotics smuggling and distribution; identity theft and benefit fraud; money laundering and bulk cash smuggling; weapons smuggling and arms trafficking; cyber crimes; export violations; and other crimes with a nexus to the border." That's quite a mixed bag. "Gang" means a set of friends who often meet together and shoot the breeze. "Criminal" means someone who breaks a government law, whether or not doing so causes anyone harm. "Foreign" means someone born elsewhere, which nobody can help. Now comes the list of offenses alleged: "ID theft" and perhaps "cyber crimes" are harmful, but "smuggling humans" is simply moving people where they want to go for a fare duly paid, like Greyhound does, "narcotics smuggling" is about bringing people pleasure-yielding substances they wish to buy, "money laundering and cash smuggling" are about doing what government compels us to do - to use its worthless paper in trade - and moving stuff across borders is, again, entirely harmless since in reality borders are merely imaginary lines drawn on government maps.
To try - and spectatcularly to fail - to prevent Americans buying what they want to buy, 15,000 people died, last year alone. As the expert guest Eric Olsen admitted, no significant reduction has resulted in drug use here, from all that carnage. The drug war is an abject failure and a bloody mess. If all US laws prohibiting drug use were repealed tomorrow, all that carnage would immediately cease. The so-called gangs and cartels would go out of business, for they could not possibly compete on price and quality with the products on the pharmacy shelf. We know this for certain, because since alcohol prohibition was repealed in 1933, not a single pair of rum-runners has battled on the street. Would it result in more drug-overdose deaths? - probably not, but even if it did, every one of them would be self-administered. With freedom comes responsibility. Of course, simple repeal is not enough; what government can repeal, government can re-institute - and government itself is by far the most potent, intoxicating, destructive drug ever invented. This poison must be eradicated, the source destroyed; and that is exactly what will happen when it's replaced by a zero government society.
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So with a couple of exceptions, this
expensive operation has netted nobody doing any harm. Meanwhile
Calderone and Obama are telling each other how urgent it is to do
more of the same, while more people are being killed in one
city alone than in Afghanistan. Take a look at this
interview on Thursday's PBS 
