WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR ...

                     WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR ... 

-

     If I were to choose a motto for our age, it would be "wishing 

will make it so."  No matter how sweetly you dress it up, or how 

many cartoon crickets warble it against a starry backdrop, it's no 

more than a crude, unsatisfactory substitute for philosophy or 

science, best suited to the bad-tempered whims of a two-year-old.  

Push it too far -- how much aviation fuel is really in that tank as 

opposed to what you want to be there? -- and it can even get you 

killed.  

     What a person believes is his own business.  If nothing else, 

that's part of the process of natural selection.  Lives based on a 

judicious respect for reality tend to be more rewarding.  Those who 

see clearly and think straight are likelier to reproduce and their 

offspring are likelier to prosper.  Those who choose less rational 

paths will be replaced, statistically, by those who make better 

choices, and the human condition will gradually improve.  You may 

think this is cruel, but it identifies a real phenomenon.  It's the 

way the universe works -- has worked for billions of years -- 

whether you like it or not.  

     The idea that wishing will make it so is most deadly when it's 

applied as public policy.  Then, it doesn't matter that you opted 

to use your head, not when your choices are made for you.  You're 

forced to suffer just as if you'd made the mistakes, instead of 

some bureaucrat or politician.  

     The classic case is the Volstead Act.  For a century before 

its passage, its advocates, who believed that drinking is a Bad 

Thing (which indeed it may be) and demanded a law to keep people 

from doing it, ignored complaints that they were making a mockery 

of individual rights.  For a decade afterward, they ignored its 

secondary effects, which proved more damaging to society than the 

use of alcohol.  

     Prohibition is to blame for a lot that's wrong with America 

today.  It was the beginning of a popular disregard for the law.  

Millions of ordinary people who became criminals by fiat overnight, 

responded by drinking more than ever, many of them for the first 

time, simply to assert their rights.  With the stroke of a pen, 

previously acceptable behavior was lumped together with acts that 

everyone agreed were wrong -- like murder and kidnapping.  Moral 

lines became hopelessly blurred and have tended to stay that way 

ever since.  

     Prohibition put many unsavory types in business -- big 

business, as it turned out -- who are still with us.  In a way that 

could never have happened if the do-gooders hadn't meddled in their 

private affairs, decent people were suddenly exposed to criminal 

(and legal) violence, just as if they were criminals themselves.  

And, although it wound up being partly repealed, Prohibition also 

set precedents for government meddling in every other aspect of 

individual life.  

     Bureaucrats and politicians failed to learn the folly of 

"wishing will make it so" from Prohibition.  Those who scream 

loudest about youth gangs today are the same ones to whom the 

minimum wage, just another kind of Prohibition, is a sacred article 

of faith.  Never mind that any job at a buck an hour beats no job 

at five.  Never mind that minimum wage generates unemployment by 

punishing those who would otherwise hire young, unskilled workers.  

Never mind that, if these kids had any kind of job, they'd soon 

learn enough to get a better-paying one.  Never mind that they 

might even be too busy to join a gang.  Never mind that the minimum 

wage raises the cost of goods and services so that its victims have 

a harder time obtaining food, clothing, and shelter -- in effect, 

that bureaucrats and politicians invented the "homeless".  These 

nasty-tempered two-year-olds -- excuse me, the bureaucrats and 

politicans -- demand fulfillment of their wishes no matter who gets 

hurt, simply so that they can bask in the glow of their own self-

righteousness.  

     To the twisted mindset of Prohibitionism, facts about the 

individual right to own and carry weapons are similarly irrelevant.  

Never mind what the supreme law of the land ordains.  Never mind 

that gun control renders peaceful and productive people -- women, 

minorities, and the elderly in particular -- helpless in the face 

of a criminal element that bureaucrats and politicians created, 

just as they did the homeless.  Never mind that legislators who 

violate their oath of office by advocating gun control should be in 

prison.  They're out to strip a nation of its weapons come hell or 

high water, and they're not going to let a little thing like a 

decent regard for objective reality, social justice, or the Bill of 

Rights interfere.  

     But before you feel too smug, examine your own mindset.  

     You could be guilty of the same self-righteous nonthinking.  

     The so-called "War on Drugs" is simply Prohibition dressed up 

for the 90s.  It can't stop people from making, selling, or using 

drugs any more than the Volstead Act stopped them from making, 

selling, or using alcohol.  It has succeded in boosting the price 

of drugs from pennies a pound to hundreds of dollars an ounce.  

It's driven weak competition from the market and created not just a 

livelihood where there wasn't one before, but a monopoly for the 

most violent and ruthless among them -- and, not incidentally, for 

millions of bureaucrats, politicians, and cops, both honest and 

corrupt.  Worst of all, it's given bureaucrats and politicians 

another excuse, acceptable to the media and the public, to raise 

taxes exponentially and stamp "CANCELLED" across the Bill of 

Rights.  

     Especially the Second Amendment.  

     Never mind that what you do to your own body is your business 

or you haven't any rights at all.  Never mind that the only way to 

protect kids from drugs is the long, hard, grownup task of bringing 

them up right.  (Let's start by abolishing the public schools, 

which concentrate and distribute self-destructive behavior the way 

public hospitals concentrate and distribute disease.)  Never mind 

that before the turn of the last century, drugs were freely 

available and nobody showed much interest in them.  Never mind that 

there wasn't any drug problem until the bureaucrats and politicians 

created it.  

     There's far more to the fight for the Second Amendment than 

simply wishing that the badguys would go away.  We hand them a club 

-- in the form of a contradiction -- every time we agree to any 

kind of Prohibition, and it's childish of us to expect them not to 

use it.  

     Wishing can't accomplish anything by itself.  

     We're going to keep losing our liberties -- and not just to 

own and carry weapons -- until we get our own logical and ethical 

ducks in a row.  

-

L. Neil Smith

Author:  THE PROBABILITY BROACH, THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE, HENRY MARTYN, 

and (forthcoming) PALLAS

LEVER ACTION BBS (303) 493-6674, FIDOnet: 1:306/31.4

Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus

NRA Life Member