November 21, 2004
ONE FOR THE ROAD
Britain: a nation 'in grip of drink crisis' (Martin Bright and Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian, November 21st,2004)
The American 'super-cop' brought in by the Home Office to cut Britain's crime rate warned last night that the nation's binge drinking culture was spiralling out of control and fuelling an epidemic of violence outside pubs and clubs that threatened to overwhelm the police.In his first major interview the former Boston police chief, Paul Evans, described scenes he had witnessed in the early hours of the morning in city centres across Britain as chaos. 'I'm not sure it can get much worse,' he said, in response to police fears that new licensing laws allowing 24-hour drinking would lead to increased violence.
As the government prepares to put tackling crime and antisocial behaviour at the heart of this week's Queen's Speech, Evans is now considering new proposals from senior police officers for tough new sanctions against violent drinkers.
One measure would see binge drinkers caught fighting in city centres given points on their driving licences. Another would give antisocial behaviour orders to offenders banning them from high-crime nightspots.
Evans, appointed last September as the head of the Home Office's police standards unit, will launch a 'Christmas blitz' next month to crack down on alcohol-related offences using on-the-spot penalty fines, sting operations on businesses serving under-age drinkers and closure notices on pubs and clubs associated with violence.
'If you're in the business of fighting crime, then you have to be in the business of dealing with the alcohol issue,' Evans said. 'I have spent an awful lot of Fridays and Saturday nights out there. At one or two o'clock in the morning these places are chaos.
Although social conservatives are often tagged as repressed and interfering busybodies when it comes to vice, liberals and libertarians tend to be downright neurotic on the issue. As with the proverbial cowboy who jumped on his horse and “rode off in all directions”, their inability to confront the realities of human nature leads them to lurch from one extreme to the other, often at the same time. Many who see the total eradication of tobacco from society as the apogee of progress (and who are happy to enlist the aid of the most specious junk science in the cause) will, at the same time, loudly proclaim their god-given right to gamble as much as they want, anywhere, anytime. Progressive Family Court judges who condemn and often sanction a working class parent’s beer habit will then retire to enjoy their single malts and wine-sloshed dinners, telling themselves their appreciation of vintage and attendant culture makes a difference in kind. In some jurisdictions, governments are trying to lower the age of consent while coming on like St. George about protecting young girls from the sex trade. Perhaps the best example of the tortured confusion is seen when liberal jurisdictions like California, New York and Canada move to legalize the possession of marijuana and try to sell it to the public by promising to severely toughen up trafficking and cultivating penalties at the same time.
Prohibition showed that the outright ban of a popular vice can be self-defeating and a boon to criminals. The completely vice-free life may be impossible, and perhaps not even particularly healthy or desirable. But it is folly to pretend that there is no direct correlation between the general accessibility to vice and its use and abuse, with serious collective consequences for all. Everyone has a social duty to accept limits, defined by culture, tradition and the popular will, on his or her access to vice irrespective of any personal ability to indulge modestly or wisely.
In some cultures, such as Italy and Greece, strong, culturally-sanctioned conventions on vice, particularly on when and how to drink, make legal diktats largely unnecessary. Bully for Italy and Greece. In the Anglosphere, a libertarian approach has failed more often than not. A vibrant, resilient society will not permit vice to spiral out of control and threaten family and community. Nor will it allow the agenda to be hijacked by abstract blatherings on man’s inherent goodness and constitutional entitlements. It will face up to the dark side of human nature and keep it tightly controlled, legally or otherwise.
Posted by Peter Burnet at November 21, 2004 7:24 AMHere is what chafes me about the libertarians (and Peter's post is a good example of it): They love to start off with a few noble ideals as axioms, and deduce further laws, consistent with the axioms. When real-life consequences or gedanken experiments show people tending to bizarre, grotesque or absurd behaviors, the libertarians shrug their shoulders and say, well, we must accept that. It never seems to occur to them that the initial axioms could be incomplete, wrong, or contradictory in some subtle way.
I think this is a roundabout way of confirming one of conservatisms central truths - trying to reason your way through life, without recourse to tradition or empiricism, is futile and wrong. Human behavior is too complicated to treat as a theorem in geometry.
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at November 21, 2004 8:56 AMNonsense.
What is needed is to simply punish actions which are anti-social and refusing to give a free pass to people who engage in anti-social actions when 'under the influence.' If someone gets drunk in a public place and causes physical or property damage, he should get jail time, a serious fine, a restitution obligation, etc. There is no good reason to cut into everyone else's fun because some jackass can't control himself.
It's like gun ownership. Just because some hooligan uses a gun to knock off a 7-11 is no reason to take away guns from the law-abiding.
Tailor the rules specifically for a specific situation rather than impose a busybody Nanny state solution wrecking things for everyone and which never works anyway.
Nothing good came out of the Prohibition Era and nothing good is coming out of the Drug War.
Posted by: Bart at November 21, 2004 10:46 AMI agree with Bart. Thugs should see jail time, not fines and restrictions. If you want to drink, then drink, but society will hold you to the same standards of behavior whether you are drunk or sober.
A few questions for the Libertarian who wants to legalize drug use. Would you be happy to know that your surgeon is a user? Or your tax accountant? Or your babysitter?
Posted by: Robert Duquette at November 21, 2004 12:34 PMWhile they are willing to talk about and consider responsibility, the Libertarians are all to often too willing to follow the lead of the Left and react to any attempt at criticism as if it were represion. So the end result is the same as the Left's program.
One of the Libertarian axioms, as mentioned above, is that there is an unlimited right to be a jerk, and a concurrent right to not hear anyone call you a jerk. If they'd remove that axiom, a whole lot of the contadictions and bizarre consequences would go away.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at November 21, 2004 2:06 PMOne of the Libertarian axioms, as mentioned above, is that there is an unlimited right to be a jerk, and a concurrent right to not hear anyone call you a jerk.
Raoul, I've been reading various libertarian books and periodicals for over 25 years, and have never seen anything like that. Straw Man alert!
Regarding the English and drinking: It's only an anecdote, but many years ago on Mallorca, I saw a fight break out in a bar that catered to English vacationers. Two English guys went from uncomfortable silence to attempted murder in nothing flat. Nothing libertarian about it.
Posted by: PapayaSF at November 21, 2004 2:18 PMStraw man perhaps, but my interpretation of what I've read and seen. One thing that got me to give up on the LP was their inability to call a jerk a jerk, or better yet, the willingness to treat being a jerk as an asset.
Well, Raoul, part of the problem with any small political party is that it has a higher proportion of nuts and flakes than mass-based parties do. There's also the greater lure for non-conformists. (This is also true for religions, by the way, which tend to start as obnoxious cults and mellow as they grow in size and age.) However, in my opinion the writers at Reason, for example, have shown no reluctance to label jerks as such.
Posted by: PapayaSF at November 21, 2004 4:22 PMRaoul,
I like to drink. I love football. Thus, when I go to my local watering hole to watch a diverse array of games on a given Sunday and enjoy my favorite adult beverages, I utilize buses and cabs. It's just that simple.
Posted by: Bart at November 21, 2004 6:10 PMRobert:
Your surgeon probably is a user.
Check out the stats on drug use and addiction among doctors.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at November 21, 2004 9:41 PMRobert,
Lawrence Kudlow has made two extended stays at the Betty Ford Clinic and is still considered one of America's foremost economic analysts.
The reality in America is that despite the efforts of the Drug Nazis, that there are tens of millions of people using drugs on a daily basis.
The issue should be left to the private sector and I have no problem with drug testing there. I think that any trucking company or place that uses heavy equipment that doesn't drug test its employees is too stupid for words. In fact, when I went for my current job, the company had a policy of drug testing. When they asked me if it was okay, my response at the time(I was almost 300 lbs not my current svelte 243) was 'As long as they don't worry about testing positive for Mallomars, I'm fine.'
As I've said before, when people fail to function because of drug use, or booze use, or whatever, they should be punished without taking that addiction into consideration.
Posted by: Bart at November 22, 2004 6:32 AMBart,
That would explain how Kudlow gets so much wrong, but since economics isn't a serious profession, noone cares about his alcoholism. If I knew my surgeon was a doper, he wouldn't be my surgeon. I wouldn't wait for his addiction to lead to deteriorating performance, I don't take those kinds of chances with my life if I don't have to.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at November 22, 2004 4:03 PM