 we are recording. Here we go. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Generally Irritable. I'm your host Erika Redick and with me today is Mr. Archie Flower from the Libertarian Party. Now Archie, you are the chair of the Vermont Libertarian Party. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay, what does that mean to be the chair of the Vermont Libertarian Party? Well, I'm hoping that it means that we can build out some serious infrastructure this coming year. The geek inside of me loves doing research and I've gone back and looked at historical data about the Vermont LP and 30-ish towns have been actually registered in the last like decade. Interesting. So let's back it up for a moment. To be a minor party in Vermont, you need to have 10 towns registered or coordinated however they want to phrase it on the Secretary of State's page and then you form the State Committee. So we're a minor party officially and what that means is that we can run candidates on the ballot by having a committee say the candidate is on the ballot. So like the Addison County Committee put me on the ballot for State Senate this last time. The Caledonia District Committee I think put JT Dodge on the ballot for State Committee. So that's what that means is as a minor party we don't have primaries but we're still a party. We are still capable of doing party-like things and so on. So the 30 some odd towns historically I went back and looked at our records and towns that we don't have right now organized have been in the past. So that's my goal is to get those towns reorganized to get those counties reorganized and then the major party status comes with I forget the particular statute but so governor lieutenant governor. So hold on hold on I'm gonna interrupt you RT I don't get far down the logistics. Yeah yeah I got into the news. So I but I love it. I give a little history about the Libertarian Party that's in Vermont that's great. What I what I'm really looking for is what does it mean to be a libertarian? You know I have what I believe about it. A lot of people have an opinion about what it means to be libertarian. Of course we were just talking about how somehow we get called racist for being libertarian. My black husband has been called a racist against black people as a libertarian which is very strange. But you know so the concept or the party the idea libertarian people don't really understand. Could you explain to people what it means to you and what you think how it represents as a party? It comes down to live and not live. It comes down to every person respecting the inalienable and equal rights of every other person. Now yes that's that's the root word. Sorry for interrupting keep going. No no that's okay. So the the general idea is actually I believe we were founded as a very libertarian nation. If you look at the Declaration of Independence we hope these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And I love their philosophical precision in this because they talk about the pursuit of happiness not happiness itself. No one owes you what it takes to make you happy. Wait wait wait Archie hold on hold on hang on there. Are you telling me that I am responsible for my own happiness? Not basically. Oh my god. In a nutshell. What? You mean I can't make you give me your stuff so that I can be happy? That would be correct. What? Well then forget about it. No seriously. So really like I've heard that before. Libertarianism is that a word? Yes it's really closer to the founding principles than any of the other parties. I believe it is and one of the things I'd like to say is that the Libertarian Party is basically the founding of this nation plus about two centuries of lessons on how to keep government small because we have not applied those lessons. Government is huge right now. We do live in an imperial state but yes that's what people don't you know one of the so let me back up everyone. I've asked Archie to be with me today because the drug debate you know decriminalization and things like that has really taken center stage in a lot of states over the last several years. We've seen marijuana become either legalized or decriminalized and um is it 23 states I think or 20? I don't know the number but it is impressive. It's something like 20 some odd have medicinal marijuana then a bunch of them have decriminalized it and now you have Oregon who completely decriminalized everything. Yep spotlights on there. Okay so you heard about that. Yep. And so now a lot of people who know me know that I got sober 11 years ago and now I don't hold any baggage or ill will towards anybody who is a user or any struggles with any of that stuff so my experience I have a couple of different frameworks for having this conversation. One is I'm a recovering addict and so I have a certain kind of opinion about things but also I'm very libertarian and so I don't believe that my choices for myself should affect the people around me and so what I really wanted was a libertarian who could who could do a good job of explaining what it means what libertarian means how it relates to the drug war and Archie I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions some of which are going to sound adversarial and I totally don't mean it to be I'm going to ask you the questions that I've heard opponents of legal of legalization say and I'm going to ask you some of those questions because I really want people to have I have no opinion on this topic I kind of do but I don't so let's all flesh it out together that's what we're looking for today absolutely and that's because like we were talking about before we started rolling the camera you know I really was disappointed that he was not included in the presidential debates I'm sure my metric is simple if you're on enough ballots to theoretically win the electoral college you should be in the damn debates or at least invited I that sounds like a that sounds reasonable do we even what are the rules even to be included so the commission on presidential debates is formed by the republican and democrat parties so they set the rules yeah yes that's so chinsy yes are you serious I'm serious oh my it's it's not a public thing it's it's made by the parties okay it's made by the duopoly duopoly yep that's good is that a real word it is in libertarian circles we use it all the time duopoly right that down um that is really funny so okay so I was listening to something today about now your argument that you said to me what I said I want to talk about legalizing drugs and like the libertarian viewpoint and I said you know can you share with me this information you said you can talk well about how it's an assault on the Bill of Rights yep okay so why don't we start there right okay talking about if we're talking about the foundation of the country you know and our and the United States is liberty libertarian party liberty founding how in your view or the libertarian view does drugs being illegal how how is that an assault on the Bill of Rights actually that's a perfect segue to explain why i'm a libertarian to begin with all right 1996 or seven something like that I was reading a newspaper the article was about some man that the Vermont state police put a camera on his property and they saw so so they saw marijuana on his property they put a video camera on the property to find out who was tending the plants and they caught the guy what's the problem with this what's the problem with this they did it without a warrant this was like is that even legal exactly and what makes this story worse is the Vermont Supreme Court upheld this man's conviction yep second so so so the police saw was it on private property I believe it was so they saw on private property somebody had some weed and they went on to said private property and installed camera yep on persons private without a warrant isn't that wait wait 96 that was before the Patriot Act yep so which this was this was long ago in a galaxy far far away and that's what i'm saying like how can you spy on um citizens so being outraged kind of like you are now I started studying the Bill of Rights I started studying the Constitution and that led me down the path towards finding libertarianism I found authors like Claire Wolfe and Del Neal Smith and Vincent Prenowitz and Ein Rand and a whole plethora of other people and influences and at first probably for three to four years I considered myself just a constitutionalist I didn't I wasn't politically aware enough to find a party or be a member of a party or anything like that in fact I I only joined a party in 2016 and that was the LP Nicholas Sarwark was on stage at the national convention I wasn't there I was watching it live yeah and he said something to the effect of if you don't join you can't make a difference and I'm like yeah I can't fault that logic we we need people to start making a difference and so yeah I before that I wasn't a joiner you know like many libertarians I'm kind of a loner in that sense and it's like you know what okay I get it do you have to reverse this tendency though this is this is literally I've literally said this part of the problem with conservatives generally small see all the conservatives right which I put libertarians under is we're all like with that live you do you I'm a do me we'll just be over here and and and we can agree to disagree and so it's fine and so I think that affects our ability to like set aside some of our differences and come together to fight against the push yeah yeah the board do it very well okay finish please so so you joined so that's why I joined was because of the fourth amendment being violated like that um that's what started me on my studies and if you take any amendment you're gonna basically see some kind of violation from the war on drugs the the war on drugs has empowered the state it has created basically a police state where the police are the standing army that the founders warned us of I'm not let me let me say it this way I'm not anti-police yeah I I I'm gonna throw a term at you you may have never heard um many in the libertarian party consider themselves anarchists I consider myself what is called a minarchist minimal government I don't I don't go with the no government route because I want juries I want you know if someone is is accused of committing a crime I want juries and juries are an institutional form of governing period every time someone tries to convince me otherwise they end up with a mess of cognitive dissonance and yeah okay thanks for trying well and that's what the point is so you'll need a mechanism to deal with people who violate our rights yes I'm so I'm not anti-police I just think that the current institutions we've built up are way out of control they are hyper militarized against us I mean they have access to all kinds of toys that civilians aren't allowed um literally there's a dod website about excess military equipment being sold to domestic police yeah you know it it's a huge problem and I'm just gonna say it this way speaking of the war on drugs and libertarianism and current events had the LP been listened to back when we said hey let's not do the war on drugs folks riona taylor would still be alive or at least or at least in this counterfactual she wouldn't be killed by the same you know mechanism I mean I can't say that in every possible multiverse she'd be alive if the LP had been adhered to but in terms of you know within the logic of the counterfactual there'd be no reason she'd be murdered the way she was well and so so the big thing is you know when we take a step back right so I think pretty much anybody can agree that drug addiction is not good okay you're a cocaine addict you're a whatever addict there's a good chance your life is pretty bad yep things are not good and so the let me back I'm trying let me back up a second so what is so the main argument of libertarian of the libertarian party say for decriminalizing drugs is that I'm I'm me and I can do whatever I want because I'm the only person I affect is that the gist of it no right we we don't say we're the only people we affect we absolutely recognize externalities so let's say you have you know you build a factory and you start polluting okay you're putting crap into the atmosphere that other people are going to have to deal with that's an externality in terms of social externalities such as a drug addict they are going into people's houses they are stealing you know they're being violent that sort of thing those things are not defensible and it it really irritates me that too many people within this debate can't see that okay let's take alcohol for a moment we we as a country experimented with prohibition yes and now it's over and we still have alcoholics okay and eighty four thousand people die a year and and we have people that um have fine relationships with alcohol some people are are able to drink and be fine so if you're able to drink and be fine you aren't affecting someone else but if you're an alcoholic and you get behind the wheel while drunk a lot of libertarians say period no victim no crime okay yeah so if if you get behind the wheel drunk you should be fine blah blah blah you you shouldn't be there they're against any form of policing that i'm not here's why you are driving a 3000 pound steel missile and it could easily harm someone because you're not capable of making safely navigating the thing right it would be as if someone unholsters their handgun and puts their trigger in the finger guard in the trigger guard um and waves it through a crowd well no victim no crime i didn't shoot anybody you are directly threatening their life if if if you believe as a libertarian i tell them that you could use physical force to stop someone from doing that then you should believe as a libertarian that you can use physical force from stopping someone from drunk driving well and so that's that's the line is are you endangering someone and that's one of the things that it has been so sort of off-putting to me personally about the libertarian argument and let me be straight okay this is nothing to do with like libertarian republican democrat people do a terrible job justifying what they believe just generally a lot of people will just you know i believe whatever i believe and not because i was told and i'm just gonna go along with it and i can't rationalize or explain it um so this is not a cut on libertarians by any means people in general are terrible at this no i i i agree yeah but it's one of those like people who so i'm a christian and so they're people who are christian and will argue that well because the bible says so it's like dude um unless first of all unless the person is christian bible is not an authority and so using that as an authority is stupid and they're not going to listen to you and b if you can't rationalize your argument with something other than the bible then you need to go back and look at what your argument is and why you believe what you believe because there it doesn't need to be because the bible said so it's usually if you dig into it there's a reason that the bible says so it's because it's for maximum human flourishing you know what i mean like so libertarian i rock with but don't say things like oh well drug addicts don't hurt anybody so it should be fine i'm like that is literally stupid you can't say that so so if we know that drug addiction and um drug sales and stuff like that are harmful and can create harm how does that how does that like reconcile with the do no harm principle wait what is it called i got that wrong non-aggression principle non-aggression principle so oh okay so then if we so if we know that it can cause harm and people hurt each other then why wouldn't we just automatically make it illegal okay let's pretend i have some rum in this coffee yes which doesn't have to be pretend if we took a moment to break but i'm not going to pour rum in my coffee if i take a sip and just sit here for the rest of the day i'm not harming anybody i'm so harmed i'm so harmed archie no not really no so not only do i sense the sarcasm in your tone of voice but you were rolling your eyes when you said that now if on the other hand i do get sloshed and go to my car and drive to the store for some twinkies i'm putting people in and directly in harm's way and i don't know who i'm it's it's a general type of harm and it could be a five-year-old kid playing ball by the side of the street it could be an 80-year-old grandmother going to see their you know grandchild be born it could be anybody it could be somebody's building i've i've seen people drive well yeah somebody's house it could be mere property damage as well right absolutely so so the idea is that as long as you're not committing a crime in conjunction with the drug use is that the idea is that the difference basically yeah okay the drug use itself is not a crime the potential after effects could lead to crime but the biggest thing i think that leads to crime is that it's a black market is that we put violence into that system by keeping it illegal and let's say you're a drug dealer and you have product directly on you and the 10-year-old comes up they have the lot of cash they want to buy from you it's no more a felony to sell to them than to sell to someone over 18 is it they they're gonna get busted regardless of who they sell to so they may as well sell to that 10-year-old shouldn't they think about it that way is that for real by keeping it black market we are incentivizing drug dealers to sell to whoever has the cash that's okay we cannot protect our children by making it black market that's one of the biggest reason is there no there's no like in danger wouldn't you get like a second charge or something for endangerment over there there may be secondary charges but the realistic prosecute prosecute to prosecute a real record of prosecutors charging these crimes is that they're mainly gonna plead down to get someone higher up on the food chain right it's like that kid that kid that's buying the meth from this dealer hypothetically the prosecutor doesn't really care about them do they they're using that dealer to get to someone higher and they're only going after that higher dealer because they're trying to advance their career they're they're not the whole the whole war on drugs is corrosive to law enforcement it's corrosive to courts it's corrosive to the bill of rights the whole system and it breaks down it's it's a huge wedge between civilians and police on on the civilian side of things you don't want to get caught with drugs so you're not going to help the police find violent people if if you have drugs on you you're not going to go to the police and say yeah this person was violent because of a drug sale yeah uh who were they selling drugs to me yeah you know well and i on the other side i've heard stories of police officers talk about uh or er staff emergency room staff talk about how you know uh people will just dump a person who's overdosed on heroin or something they'll just dump them out of the car in front of the ER and run away or people won't call the police and call for help because the person has died or sick or you know made themselves hurt themselves and they don't want to get busted for the drugs so they do nothing and then you have and then you just hear all of these stories of people like panicking and of course they're on drugs so they're making terrible decisions anyway and making it worse by trying to get away with whatever it is that they've done basically like because they're too afraid to get caught for doing drugs a friend dies of a drug overdose because they can't go to the hospital right exactly and stuff like that so it makes me wonder one of the things that i've often said so i've actually said for many many years that i think all drugs should be legalized because i believe that it when you when you create a black market you're always going to have problems you can't control it you've now given it over to crime syndicates um you have no transparency around it um you have shame you have guilt you have all of these things that make it so that people won't get help they won't see guidance and you create problems where there were none and yes i've heard actually that the and i i don't have i don't maybe you know better i've heard that uh the mob basically let's write word uh organized crime basically the mob was created out of prohibition of alcohol pretty much do you know if can you share a little bit about that do you know but i'm not a historian i really wish i were because history is a fascinating topic with all kinds of lessons for us if we were to really pay attention yeah but the general gist of it is when you create a black market you are providing a direct pipeline of cash to whichever person is going to be the most violent within that market save that again argie when you create a black market you're creating a direct pipeline of massive amounts of cash directly to the person who is willing to be the most violent within that market because that's what's rewarded exactly if if you are the person to establish warlord-like control over a market every single drug user within that area is a cash cow for you have you watched breaking bad out of curiosity are you a fan okay i haven't i don't my husband will tell you anything like you know oh orange is the new black is so funny ha ha i'm like if you'd ever been to prison you wouldn't think it was funny i thought it was funny mainly because um kate moldrew uh starred as jane way and she's my favorite star trek captain and she was in she was in that as some russian she was a good captain wasn't she she was the best captain because she was the most scientific i'm not i'm partial to the original series okay that's what i grew up on so i'm partial to that absolutely series as well which one was that oh my god my brain's voyager yes voyager star trek voyager guys you're listening to two star trek nerd talk about decriminalizing drugs in the libertarian party um so so what you were saying if you asked if i'd watch breaking bad you were gonna yep well just in terms of how much cash they end up with at the end of the show got it so this this is one of the things that like as an example my nephew is a board patrol agent in south texas and so prior to the trump administration um you know he would tell us stories about oh well you know they built okay yes so there's the section of the wall but all they do is put a ladder up to it or they dig a hole underneath it like they found tunnels and all kinds of stuff in the way that they um throw up excuse me the the way that they um pack human beings with drugs to bring them across to do stuff and then you see all of these awful disgusting things that the drug cartels are willing to do you see the number of people that they murder and slaughter at the border i mean my nephew's told me stories where like people will be at the border getting ready to cross to go to school because people don't realize especially on the texas border it's you know it goes across towns so you have kids on either side of mexico or the united states or going to school at the same school people working across and stuff like that and so there's usually like a gate to get through and so there'll be hundreds of people just standing there waiting to cross the border to go to school or work and the drug cartels will come by and just mold them all down kill them all innocent people just going to work in school and i wonder really will that go away if we decriminalize drugs here because we have we have such a market for it in the united states i was going to go down the mental health it will wait and hold that off but we have such a market here for drugs if we decriminalized everything tomorrow do you think we'd see the cartels go away do you think we'd see some of the stuff get better we would see the violence drop the cartels would have to adapt to the new open market model rather than the black market violence model so violence dropping would be an economic inevitability because when you yes when you when you incentivize violence by keeping it a black market you're going to get more violence when you open up that market and take away if if if you're a drug dealer and you can make more profit by not being violent which you can be in a open market that's the route you're gonna go but can but this is so this is the question can you be though because you're still competing and now you may even have more competitors for your product we don't see the ceo van heizer bush whacking the ceo of budweiser do we back during prohibition alcohol had the same incentives selling alcohol had the same incentives as selling myth does right now and you had mafiosos whacking other mafiosos on a regular basis and put a hit out on this guy because he's my direct competition and i want to make more money that doesn't happen with alcohol these days one of the things i heard was that uh the government actually was like poisoning alcohol and so we're having people make you know bathtub gin or whatever and you didn't know what was in it you didn't know the strength you didn't know whatever and then the government poisoned it at one point so it killed a bunch of people because they were trying to make it so people wouldn't drink it and it's like i think that's with wood alcohol yeah yeah and that's one of the arguments i think people make about or i heard about the legalization of marijuana in vermont was oh well we'll be able to regulate it and i've heard this libertarian argument you know oh they said it like it was a like a theme you know regulate you know you know you know what the strength is you know blah blah blah blah and that somehow that's better we've lost some good people due to drugs being contaminated um cherry Garcia comes to mind but is that really is that really a good way of looking at it though like there's so as with most complex topics there are a myriad of different facets to it and that's only one part of the argument yeah for me the primary part of the argument is lessening the violence well and not so here's so then that's so there's another question right some of the arguments i've heard for decriminalization sound a lot like people just trying to make up excuses to make it okay like oh well we can regulate it and we can then know how strong it is and it's like i feel like you're just saying that to try to placate the people who don't want you to decriminalize it and i'm not saying it's it's like people who say well we should be able to keep our guns because we go hunting and it's like no the second amendment is not about hunting the second amendment is about us being able to protect ourselves from each other and a tyrannical government so you're using an argument that doesn't even make sense why don't you just argue what reality is which is the second amendment says specifically that it's to protect ourselves against each other and a tyrannical government so the so the government trying to take away my second amendment rights tells me that it was there for a reason and it's exactly this moment in reason that we're standing in right now because you're trying to take it away from me so why don't libertarians just argue what you said earlier which is it's against the bill rights is that too simple? i feel like we have to make excuses i think that it depends on the particular libertarian how well versed they are with the thing yeah each topic i mean you can take almost any topic and you can study it for a lifetime i mean it's a phenomenal amount of information to have to deal with so it depends on how long they've been a libertarian how well they've studied up on the issues and here's the thing who's their particular audience in that particular moment because one argument that may win against you know a more right focused audience may fail against a left focused audience and vice versa or an independent audience or a non-voting audience or you know typical american demographic wide spectrum audience yeah you know if it's if it's if you're arguing a particular point and you've got right people right right right word leaning people left word leaning people independence and non-voters all in the same audience you can't choose the same argument that you would if you were focusing on any particular i mean so here we now now so i hear what you're saying argie and i just come off the campaign campaign trail with you so we know we have to tailor our messaging absolutely but i wonder how much of a disservice we do when we don't argue the the basics you know i mean like when we don't when we try to make it was it thorough maybe i want to say it was thorough it may not have been thorough i could be totally misremembering this but the basic gist of the quote uh to paraphrase for every hundred people striking at the tree only one person is striking at the root and and a lot of people will focus on the leaves rather than the roots and the tree of tyranny has grown some very deep roots hasn't it isn't that the truth this is uh for anybody who's watching ah yes so you know it's one of the things that uh my husband is so sweet he got this for me for christmas um did he get the anti federalist papers for you as well what's that did he also get you the anti federalist papers no that's the other side of the argument you should definitely pick those up write that down on okay i will do that but it's one of the things that you know we were talking earlier about how people uh certain kinds of people will manipulate the definition of words so that they can yeah you know justify whatever wrong it is that they're unconstitutional thing it is that they're doing you know like oh well when they said well regulated the militia they meant the army is like no they didn't it meant people who knew how to shoot guns and protect themselves from your silly face and i was about to say your audio cut out there but obviously no i saw myself you paused yeah but you know we don't have to ask well this isn't live you can bleep it out in post-production no no no uh but you know we don't have to we don't have to wonder what the founding fathers thought when they wrote the declaration of independence and the bill of rights it's all right here they explain themselves they say there's we don't have to redefine words we don't have to philosophize or think about it they don't now erica are you saying you're an originalist yes yeah so here's the beauty of that going back to um social media how did they phrase it someone on the left now i'm not saying i'm for or against trump's latest supreme court pick Amy cony barrett cony barrett thank you yeah i haven't studied anything really about her so i'm not gonna have an opinion because i don't know her what i do have an opinion on is originalism and i've seen people on social media say oh so you want to go back to treating people of color is three-fifths of a person and it's like that's not what originalism means also that's not what three-fifths of a person it was not saying that they're not a whole human being that's well that's that's a whole other debate keep going keep going a whole other debate a whole other you know rather whole to go down or not yep no we'll go all i'm saying is that originalism simply means looking at what we currently have as amended and going back to the original authors of each piece and trying to figure out what they were intending for that particular piece so what did the founders intend for the second amendment that's originalism and what their intention was was really really clear you cannot disarm the american people period no ifs no caveats no buts no questions no nothing the american people can have their weapons and that needs to be what i call infantry parody which means if if a if a military infantryman can have it then an american civilian can have it yep and it's that simple okay i was just going to go off on the second amendment thing i'm going to try to stay on topic here i might have to have you back for a second amendment but it is but it is uh on topic in the sense that the war on drugs is the war on the bill of rights and that includes the second amendment well and this is the thing is is what i have noticed about many of the laws and programs that we see in government today not previously not textualism like what it was supposed to be but what we currently do today in our legislature and the rules that are set forth by our unelected fourth branch of government um are things to help lessen the consequences of personal decision making did you track with me there so it seems like to me most of the rules now being put in place or the laws being put in place are to prevent me from suffering the consequences of my own decision making yeah cradle to grave care by the government correct it's it's as if they believe they understand better how to live my life than i do yep it's completely anti-individualism which is the basis kind of i would say for our bill of rights and the constitution it's personal responsibility i am free to rise and fall on my own merits yeah free of government interference and intrusion yep and then people will say things like well but it's not like that people get in the way and all these things and whatever and it's like okay well and then we have the law we have a mechanism for when you invade my rights or when i invade your rights it's called the court of law it's called judges and lawyers and things like that i'm innocent until proven guilty you're innocent until proven guilty and we have a process for writing that out does that mean everyone is treated fairly all of the time no obviously because people are trash but isn't it more important to try to set up the most possible the fairest most possible system rather than forcing everybody to behave a certain way so as a libertarian i am all about consent and you can have economic consent which is a free market and you can have social consent which is a free market of ideas and if you centralization and decentralization are are anti-podes and you have our government opposites anti-podes okay so you have a government trying to centralize things more and more and more and more and it's not just okay have you heard the phrase politics is downstream of culture yes okay basically i think your laws and rules are created once culture has changed its mind and shifted yeah so i i think this goes back to your point about this is more than just government doing this government really is kind of following our general culture at the moment which is why we need to as libertarians and freedom-minded individuals we need to not just be fighting government and government encroachment we need to be defending individualism at every opportunity we get and educating people yes that's that's that's that's the best offense is educating our fellow americans as to what we inherited from the founders right and so centralization in social affairs or the free market of ideas leads to kind of a puritanical society a a rigid society of you know robotic like people bored like people that you don't get to choose your own life because of that you don't get to be the individual that you want to be because of that you know we see that in so many various dystopias that you know georgioro well didn't create a blueprint he he wrote that as a warning yeah not not not an architectural blueprint for the american government um so that's the key point to keep in mind is is not what are our goals as a society how do we reach them libertarians say let's use consent let's use voluntary methods let's use education let's minimize violence violence should only be used in defense of rights but archie people are too stupid to think for themselves and we and they'll make bad decisions and be stupid and so therefore we have to protect them a libertarian counter to that is that these people that are saying people are too stupid are often promoting democracy so if they're too stupid to run their own lives how are they how are they smart enough to pick people to run their life for them i don't think people are too stupid to run their own lives i think people are capable of running their own life if they're given you know the tools to do so sorry that's one big reason i'm for separation of school and state oh say more about that are you a pink floyd fan no okay because the song um where they go we don't need no education we don't we don't need no thought control well that's what schools are these days is is indoctrination centers they're not designed to actually educate kids so that kids can actually think and reason for themselves they are designed so that we have essentially worker drones that yeah don't think well and and they're told what they are and are not allowed to think yes with you're familiar with the overton window yeah yeah that's precisely that comes from well why don't hold on to indoctrination tell tell tell the audience what the overton window is the overton window comes from the idea that public discourse has a very narrow range of allowed opinion and when someone goes outside of a loud opinion the the whole tone of a debate can change um i'm not going to dive into any particular conspiracy theory but if you look at a anything on social media that has anything that looks like a conspiracy theory you can see the very same rhetorical patterns played out every single time and those patterns are like well that's a conspiracy theory therefore you're an idiot you know it it's it's always some kind of strong man it's always some kind of to dismiss it's always some kind of logical fallacy it's always some kind of rhetorical method to keep their brains on track it goes right back to 1984 and thought crime where if if if because people have a lot of people have been programmed to stay within that overton window and that's kind of what it refers to and if they think the thought that's outside it they have mechanisms built in to rein that thought back in and and reject it yeah pull out of hand you know well and you see that a lot especially this year with a lot of the conversations about race and racism in this country and stuff like that it's you know my black husband has been called a racist because he wants to be left alone by the government to rise and fall on his own merits meritocracy you're a racist because you because they assume that black people they infantilize black people as if black people are unable to take care of themselves make good decisions and rise to the top and it's like you're you in order to assume what you're saying is true the assumptions are racist yeah and then i have to disregard all the successful black people i've ever seen met or heard like you are trying to force me to believe that black people are incapable and i won't do that i'm not going to do that with you and you know i got called a racist my husband got called a racist they said he internalized his the white supremacy and so the the thing about that that whole conversation it follows many of the same rhetorical patterns because it's still the overton window and right here i am on twitter the other day saying basically racism is completely antithetical to libertarianism and here's why and i gave my direct breakdown of the non-aggression principle and then within that thread and sub threads a whole lot of people started calling me racist or implying it and it's like really come on look at the start of where we started this thread you know look at what i said here i'm obviously saying racists aren't libertarian so am i saying i'm not libertarian because it's because you won't no archie the problem is you won't acknowledge that you're a racist and that's why you're a racist so every racist yeah and you denying your racism makes you a racist there's there's that meme too that well that's that you know if if uh if the witch floats she's a witch if she sinks she's not it's it's exactly the same kind of unfeasifiable logic yes she drowned she wasn't a witch oh my god um what is talk to um would you share with our listeners archie and just just to reiterate hey everybody generally irritable here my guest today is archie flower he is the libertarian party chair in the state vermont he ran for state senate this year in adison county right that's right yes um just generally cool guy has a lot of knowledge about the libertarian party and i've had a lot of really fun conversations and listening to him talk over the years which is why i wanted to have him on the show um talk tell everybody a little bit about what the non-aggression principle is i i will do that but i do want to backtrack for one moment and just say i meant to say this earlier i love the name of this podcast generally irritable um i have i have said before that i am the animal hospital for pet peeves so i totally get the irritability with today's politics because it's a mess so the non-aggression principle breaks down to this simple phrase this is how i define it the libertarian party doesn't officially nationally it doesn't officially define it um however the vermont libertarian party did pass a statement of principles last november and we do officially define it in that and that is simply this it is immoral to initiate force or fraud against a non-consenting person oh say that again it is immoral to initiate force or fraud against a non-consenting person okay i mean isn't that like obvious one would think so i'm like does that have to be stated is that dumb yes it does have to be stated if you've seen some of the conversations i've had you would know that this is not a obvious truth this is not as self-evident as some people might want to think it is well and isn't that i mean i feel like what you just did was summarize the initial bill of rights kind of so here's the thing in my study of the bill of rights and rights in general i think i can narrow it down to two very broad scope rights simply self-ownership self-autonomy and the right of reciprocal non-aggression so if i don't force my way on you you don't force your way on me but if i initiate force you have every right to draw your pistol or rifle or whatever is handy and make me stop with all do necessary force and that's the right to life yeah well that that comes from self-ownership self-autonomy that right yeah what is you know i heard who was it i heard a uh oh not larry elder it's another larry no walter williams i heard talk about the the idea of self-ownership and you know that i i own myself i am in charge of my own decisions my own labor i make all of the decisions for myself you know whatever and it seems like that is really the foundational basis for liberty yep it's like i am responsible for me is that basically what that means i would agree yeah you said yeah and then when you say self autonomy what exactly do you mean by that oh that that's that's just self-ownership restated in different words okay so basically i i i am responsible for me this is my body you don't have any rights to it it's me sucks bug off so well let me ask you this circling back around to the government control of drug industry now my understanding is you could even buy heroin over the counter up until like the 50s or 60s or some opiate there was some version of all of these things available pretty much over the counter do we why i mean i remember i remember talking to one of my neighbors he was a truck driver and he said he used to get speed basically over the counter to drive trucks and i find it fascinating that these things used to be easier to get do we know why or what happened to start the war on drugs or for these things to be made illegal class one drugs or anything like that so this goes back to history and therefore is not my strong suit however i gotta look it up i will say this the war on drugs empowers government government seeks power so just from those alone you can see that there's going to be a preponderance of of laws that hand government more power i mean it's it's it's like a kid with the cookie jar so let off okay so then where does now this is this is not erica or this is the argument right so we're then does the government ever an appropriate role for government to protect us from ourselves that's a very interesting question i'm not sure anyone has ever actually asked me that particular question because that's what it comes down to right is you know earlier we were talking about how so many of our laws and rules that are being passed are about protecting us from our own decisions right so is ever an appropriate role of government and keeping us safe from ourselves if there is such a role it would be very narrow in scope and it would be very it would have to be like something like euthanasia you know if you are racked in extreme pain government's role is simply to make sure that the choice you're making is actually your choice if if a doctor says yeah i'm going to give you you know these drugs to you know fall asleep forever government's proper role is simply making sure that your choice is actually that the doctor isn't violating your consent right that the doctor isn't making some kind of use of of you for their own purposes and is actually abiding by yep that's my choice i'm in i'm in pain i'm never going to not be in pain i don't want to live like this so but even that now that's not protecting us from ourselves that's protecting us from predatory predators and we already have lost well it kind of is protecting us from ourselves because it's really just you know making sure that the decision really is ours rather than rather than being victimized by somebody else we can make decisions that aren't really what we would normally decide if we're under duress you know that kind of thing like right a government can can well and again see now in libertarian theory a government can certainly void a contract that was signed by both parties if it finds that the contract was made under duress but even that again that's now that is protecting well i guess that could be both that could either be protecting us from other people or protecting us from ourselves if we don't have the ability to make a good decision i guess i mean from from the point of view of if okay that makes sense actually of sound mind then the government has no role as far as i can tell in protecting us from ourselves got it okay so okay so there's we found a line we found a gray area that's what i was curious about because one of the things i've found is a lot of times the horrible stuff that we see in our past has come from government interference so when you talk about like the jim crow laws you talk about slavery you talk about a lot of the things redlining things like that that was the government yep to assist in prejudice um now we're talking about the war on drugs that's the government deciding that it's going to seize control over this industry because isn't it i mean that's basically what it is right they've nationalized the drug trade yeah and oh that's weird i never thought about it that way so the government and so let me i think i'm going to restate something that you've already said which is basically that the government nationalized the drug trade right so now all these drugs are class one class a drugs that you can't get unless you get permission right they've nationalized the drug industry and they just call it pharmaceuticals now instead of dope or whatever exactly that goes back to the overton window and how someone styles their rhetoric so wow okay the pharmaceutical industry sells stuff in the open market the illicit drug trade sells dope to addicts that is so fascinating but we see so many addicts of over-the-counter drugs that you're really cloaking that reality with those words which is a whole lot of what happens in our society these days especially because so this is so this is one of the things i i heard these statistics something like 60 000 people die every year of drug overdoses 80 some odd thousand die of alcohol who knows how many people die of cigarettes uh and secondhand smoke and stuff like that um i don't know that number somebody can share put it in the comments will knows it but that's so not even about who dies or the volume of people harmed it seems like it's like what can we control and what can we make the most money off of and how can we manipulate people and things because if if you guys really thought that deep uh that criminalizing these things or making them illegal or harder to get would make a difference alcohol and cigarettes would still be illegal yeah so this isn't really about protecting people nope well it's really kind of bums me out so it's real that's that is just sort of really landing on me right now so forgive me if i'm a little bit distracted now because i just go oh my god this is so interesting so now as a candidate and i'm sure you got this too i had a ton of people reach out to me about the decriminalization of marijuana in the state of america and i got a lot of emails and videos and things that are very much reminiscent of reefer madness and you know things like calling weed the devil's lettuce and stuff like that and there are some of these people i really like as people you know so i don't mean to tease them and make fun of them as if they're dumb or anything but i just don't it just seems like it's sort of hysterical thinking when you're not also trying to make alcohol illegal or anything like that like how can you fight against marijuana as if it's the world's worst thing when so many more people are harmed by stuff that's legal while drinking even they'll they'll be at the keyboard saying marijuana should stay illegal they'll take a sip of their rum you know i mean and it's not even there's certainly a lot of conscious hypocrisy in our world but this is is is very sublimated this is very unconscious they don't it's that cognitive cognitive dissonance of alcohol is allowed by society and even praised by society therefore i'm not going to go after that but you know the devil's lettuce that's a salad i would like you know uh you have marijuana and and you call it weed you call it dope you call it you know all these you know unsavory things it's again coming back to that rhetoric it's again coming back to indoctrination and programming and libertarians aren't necessarily saying yeah let's go do drugs and that's one of the biggest myths we know oh my god is is we're not saying yes please go smoke please yeah please you know inject whatever it's saying the government shouldn't be using violence to tell people not to do it if you as a person want to say you know you create some nonprofit dedicated to educating people to not do drugs that's a perfectly libertarian uh sphere yeah it's perfectly within the libertarian sphere because you are then engaging in the free market of ideas you are then engaging in trying to you're not trying to use force to get someone to do something you're not trying to mess with them you're trying to get them to consent to your point of view through argumentation through logic through reason through compassion through empathy you know those are being a human being yes to other human beings yes being a human being yes and the government when we can make the government force you to think the way that i want you to you're not gonna force that you're not gonna use force to get people to think sorry what do you mean i'm not gonna be able to use force to be able to get people to think the way you want that's you can use government to make people change their actions not their thoughts that's what is so fascinating to me about some of this stuff that people don't understand is the only way that you can change a person's mind about whatever it is they believe is engaging in honest conversation and bringing it out to the light yes that if if somebody is a is a a racist let's just say or let no we'll stay on topic if somebody's drug addict say and i've worked with a lot of recovering addicts i have worked with people uh through the 12 steps helping them get sober helping them get back on their feet i could yell at them all day not to be a heroin addict or a cocaine addict or an alcoholic or whatever it is i can yell at them all day and tell them that they're wrong and that they're bad i have not found that that is useful in helping people change their behavior absolutely people want to people need to understand why things aren't going the way that they want people need to understand why they're suffering from the things that they're suffering from people need to you know like what what person do you know has changed their behavior from you yelling at them other than myself i try it with my husband all the time it doesn't work why won't you act right no i'm just kidding in all seriousness though um this idea that shutting down free debate uh or shutting down or closing the door on ideas even bad ones that that somehow benefits society i don't understand where that comes from what world are people living in that that works not only that but i i think it's a fear-based thing and the fear isn't necessarily of the other idea the fear is that one's own ideas are inadequate the people who most promote censorship tend to also be people that can't reason their cells out of a paper bag you are i i have to agree with you arty i really do i think that what's really interesting about a lot of these arguments is that everyone just follows along with whatever anybody tells them right like oh if you're a christian and you have to be anti-drug because you know whatever or if you're um an anarchist you have to be pro whatever because blah blah blah as if we're not individuals with our own minds and our own experiences and things that we have to work through to decide for ourselves what we believe to be best for us and for our families and it's like you believe that you know better when you can't even argue with me about why i believe you can't even justify what you believe why should i do what you're telling me to do show me better for me and i'll consider it but they can't yep so so what do you think about or again decriminalizing all drugs have you looked into i i have not done any kind of deep dive into the laws they just passed i have heard about this in passing so i don't know specifics i do think they've decriminalized all hard drugs so one thing that comes to mind is how are they going to handle i mean if if it's not against state law are they going to cooperate or not cooperate with federal enforcement because the feds certainly haven't decriminalized cocaine or meth or heroin etc i think it's a good thing generally i think it's going to be a spotlight on them for the next few years until other states do it and i hope that they do it well because if they don't then anti-drug people pro drug war people are gonna you know point and laugh at orgon and say well we shouldn't emulate them well and that's what it's because here's the thing is you know what if you want to decriminalize it fine and you want to go down that because i think portugal did that too right like we have countries that have done it that we can look at their experience and see what we think but more importantly one of the things that's frustrating about places like oregon or vermont when you're talking about decriminalizing you're not just talking about decriminalizing but you but oftentimes they're also on the other end um i hate to use the word promoting it or condoning it but when you start saying that oh well then people can live on the street because being homeless is constitutional you can live on public property in your sickness and your filth and and we're not going to prosecute you when you harm people because you're mentally ill or drug addicted right that's sarah george vermont way of dealing with things uh safe injection sites oh it's fine if you shoot up in our bathroom you know all of these things what what my concern is okay so we decriminalize things we want to change our you know our relationship to this stuff we want to restore some liberty reduce government control i'm for that what i'm not for is all of the other nonsense that they go along with to try to make it easier for drug addicts to be drug addicts like no you're not going to have safe injection sites no you're not going to start putting needle boxes in all public restrooms so that i can be concerned about whether i'm walking in on somebody shooting dope you know no you're not going to come into my place of business and force me to let you use my bathroom so you can shoot up there you know like that's what's happening in places like seattle and portland and so you just go no dude you know what i'm not going to judge you and i'm gonna and i'm gonna make a space for you to get help when you're ready but that doesn't mean you get to encroach in my personal space and bring your addiction into my business my home my street etc so i'm going to make the analogy here because i i i will say that i'm strong on the ideas of why the war on drugs violates the war on the middle of rights i am not yet as well versed on how a libertarian society can really deal with addiction and and the associated the associated social problems that come with it right other than high level stuff such as education um voluntary efforts to help those people get off drugs you know that kind of thing those very broad stroke types of things but what i will say is this what it sounds like you are saying is you want the government to not only be neutral about drug use but also drug addiction and i can totally go with that because when the government was not neutral on the subject of race and it created jim crow laws that carried huge effects societally and then it went and got rid of those laws but it didn't remain it didn't go neutral it went on the other side and now we have things like affirmative action and so on that's not true neutrality government should be neutral on all social issues and it should let the people deal with social issues and it should only get involved when someone commits an actual crime and or threatens to eg drunk driving that's one of the big things i think that people have a hard time with libertarian ideals or beliefs ideology is where does so one of the things people will say as a libertarian is you know my rights uh your rights end where my nose begins now a little bit you know pass that right but that that's the gist of the expression right so at what point can you recognize harm being done to other people like i'm trying to think of a really good i had a good example in my mind and it totally just went away so if i'm uh that's one but i think that's one of the big things people have a hard time or that scares them about libertarian ideals right so if we decriminalize staying on topic if we decriminalize drugs um what then do we do as a society to deal with drug addiction uh well i guess drug dealing wouldn't be but you know if we still have because you're you know the cartels aren't going to go away overnight um like the marijuana thing this has been my this has been so stupid watching vermont debate the whole decriminalization and marijuana marketplace has just been an absolute joke um you know 30 tax on weed is stupid nobody is going to stop buying from their dealer down the street to go to pearl street beverage and buy the weed counter 30 higher at a 30 higher fee probably not even as good a weed as you can get so like nobody who's the first of all you so you're not going to eliminate any of that stuff you're still going to have people dealing drugs illegally or whatever unless we decriminalize dealing drugs too do we decriminalize drug trafficking is there is there any line at all for the government in the conversation about drug production and distribution no the only thing for drug production would be fraud so for instance um let's let's take alcohol yeah if uh anhyzer bush decides to start you know uh doping their alcohol with impurities that would constitute fraud and therefore the government could step in and that's it so in now now that's assuming um the the general idea that when a normal consumer goes to purchase alcohol they're purchasing what they expect therein lies the possible fraud so if if if if you go to purchase heroin on this new open market and they've doped it up with baking powder i don't know what they do but you know let's just throw that out there and if if that's wrong then i'm naive on drug things and that's okay with me um but you know hey uh 50% of my heroin is baking powder this is not right and and the government could be like yeah you doped it with 50% baking powder to pad your profits and that's fraud and blah blah blah and they have a case and now they own your company or whatever you know that kind of thing it's that kind of line because because that's a different but that's a that's a different crime that's an act crime that we've decided is an infringement on our rights and our liberties because you exactly didn't tell me what i was getting right okay exactly so i think we'll you know what i haven't been paying attention how long we've been on here we've been on quite a while yeah i'm like this went so fast um i have so many things i want to talk about we might i might have to have you back archie you and i play a little historical research and come back and have another conversation about this but we'll we'll start to wrap it up here because i think that you actually unintentionally highlighted something super important and it was funny i was listening to a conversation what's that guy honey that you the podcaster that you like to listen to that no no the guy that's like from iran or something value tainment um this guy there's this podcast called value tainment i don't remember what the guy's name is but he interviewed ron paul okay Patrick something so he you know ron paul is like the most famous libertarian in the united states um he inspired a lot of us to start looking at libertarianism liberty ideals fundamentals foundational principles etc love ron paul and he was so he was interviewing him and he goes oh you know so ron if you know if they make weed legal would you smoke it or something and he was like no and he was like why you know come on why not man you know and ron paul was like just because i think it should be legal and i don't think the government should interfere does not mean i'm going to run out and do it yeah bingo it was really funny that you're like you know cutting it with baking soda and you know i don't really know because there's this concept or there's this this perception that any of us who believe that oh what happened to camera or video just died yeah um oh we don't have the continuous battery plugged in so i'm just going to talk in on a blank screen here for a little but there's this idea and this concept that any of us who are libertarian or want to decriminalize drugs or whatever that we must all be a bunch of junkies and dope fiends hotheads needs to die oh there we go so you can cut that out in post-production oh no it's fine i don't care it's happening before we before when i got started all i had were my batteries and i'd be by myself so i'd have to run to the other side of the camera replace the battery and come back but normally we have a continuous battery now that you can plug in for the camera so it's fine anyway so what do you think about this idea that all of us who believe that drugs should be decriminalized and that we should take a different route that we're all just a bunch of dope fiends that that's definitely a myth that needs to die it it especially since you don't know how to cut heroin aren't you i mean really what a bad drug user you are absolutely horrible yeah i i confess the thing about it is for every possible freedom there are an infinite number of choices i mean look at how many various religions there are right and yeah to exercise i i call it freedom of conscience rather than freedom of religion because that's a little bit broader yeah to exercise freedom of conscience to advocate vehemently for exercising freedom of conscience doesn't mean i'm going to go out and be a particular religion it doesn't mean i'm going to be you know jewish or hindu or buddhist or christian or or atheist or or any particular religion it means it's not my choice what you follow that's all that means same with freedom of speech um the westboro baptist church the super anti-gay church i'll defend their point of free speech they absolutely have the freedom of speech to say what i want to say i will vehemently oppose the content of that speech but i'll defend your right to say i will just as vehemently defend their right to freedom of speech same with drug use i'll defend someone's right to you know shoot up heroin doesn't mean i'm gonna go out and get a needle and shoot up heroin myself and i think that it's it's not just a myth about drugs it's a myth about freedom in general that advocating for someone's freedom to do a thing also means advocating doing the thing no it does not it doesn't period all it advocates for in reality is that the choice isn't mine for their life i totally wanted to say something else but that is such a good point to end on i'm just going to leave it at that because that is ultimately what it comes down to and i guess i'll just say no matter how hard we try and no matter how badly we want to you cannot legislate a man's heart absolutely it doesn't matter how many rules we put in place it doesn't matter how many laws we passed we cannot legislate a man's heart and so this idea that somehow we can control outcomes by controlling people is just foolish and we see it because human beings will figure out a way around that control no matter what it is bingo thank you very much for having me on your podcast it's been an absolute pleasure and i look forward to another such opportunity in the future thank you archie thank you so much for coming on again everyone i want to thank archie flower he is the libertarian party chair for the state of vermont archie if people want to reach out to you and they want to learn more about the party or you and what you guys do what's the best way for them to reach you our website vtlp.org vtlp vermont libertarian party yep dot org got it not net or com or anything else and they can email me directly at chair at vtlp.org awesome awesome i love it i love it archie i'm looking forward to hearing more about the libertarian party in the future i love what you're doing getting people organized and motivated educating people we need more people like you in the fight for our freedom and for our liberty and uh that's what it's all about so thank you for joining me today thank you everybody for joining us uh feel free to comment below we're going to be uh we recorded this ahead of time because i'm going to be uh unavailable for the live show but comment we're going to be reaching uh you know we're going to be looking at your comments we're going to be reaching out and you know writing back so feel free to say anything that would be useful or interesting to add to the conversation especially if you have any historical knowledge for the things that we both forgot about uh but anyway thank you again generally irritable with aircretic y'all have a good night