After nearly three years and 700 posts (nearly a book’s worth!), I’ve decided to put blogging aside for other efforts. It has been a wonderful opportunity to express myself, and in the process, to improve my writing and the composition of my arguments. However, my audience has always been, and will likely remain, tiny. To the 50 or so people who make up our readership, thank you so much for visiting. I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I will continue to share my opinions, plus items of interest, on our Facebook page. I hope you will visit there, and perhaps join and contribute.
From your article of March 31 (Canadian warship seizes $100M of heroin in ‘massive’ high seas bust), it’s difficult to appreciate how much is involved in making such success stories possible. Consider all the Canadians sailors who have volunteered to serve on HMCS Toronto, and all the taxpayers working and sacrificing to fund the massive expense of such an endeavor. Add in the activists, bureaucrats, and politicians who have laboured long and hard to prosecute the War on Drugs. This sacrifice of manpower and wealth should not go unappreciated, and I thank all participants on behalf of those who will benefit the most, yet cannot speak for themselves – other drug dealers.
Having no recourse to all the legal mechanisms available to vendors and consumers of candy, tobacco, alcohol, and other such goods, drug dealers must rely on violence to police each other and to take market share. Surely, no one is happier than they that one of their competitors has been dealt a crippling blow at no expense to themselves. Because Canadians have done the dirty work, remaining dealers are saved the trouble, and, even better for them, can now increase the price of their products in response to the reduction in supply relative to demand. More money for less effort. Let us all bask in the warm glow of our accomplishment.
The Victoria Libertarian Book Club has been boosted by the membership of Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jim Powell. Jim specializes in the history of liberty, and his most recent book is “The Fight for Liberty: Critical Lessons From Liberty’s Greatest Champions Of The Last 2,000 Years“. I have, of course, purchased the Kindle version, and placed near the top of my queue.
Jim used to keep a website called Liberty Story, and a large part of it is archived here. The site has about 20 brief articles concerning people and events critical to the advance of freedom, as well as a few other items. You will see that Jim’s is a very accessible writing style, and the history is both illuminating and motivating. Additionally, from March 8, there is this – “Remembering Harriet Tubman on the Centennial of Her Death” -
“Few freedom fighters were more tenacious than petite Harriet Tubman, the African-American slave-turned-abolitionist who died March 10, 1913 when she was about 92. She escaped to freedom, then was reported to have gone back into the Confederacy 19 times, risking capture as she “conducted” some 300 slaves to freedom. Although she was illiterate, she came to know the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast region so well that she could take confusing, zig-zag routes, making it hard for pursuers to figure out where they might be able to intercept her. She was tough, too, enduring brutal conditions and always packing a pistol.”
Jim and I have exchanged a few emails, and he seems to be a gracious and intelligent person. He has been fighting for the cause a long time, and I am flattered that he would bother to join such a humble group so far from his home. I hope that he might one day make his way up here, and see our own little contribution to the history of liberty.
