Cato Institute
Remember, these are the people who think freedom is child prostitutes working for heroin.
What? Please elaborate.
This just screams, “I’m going to sprinkle some partially true information, then rely on you to make wild inferences.”
So, please, talk more. These types of claims typically will either… 1. teach me something I didn’t know, or 2. disintegrate immediately under scrutiny of explanation.
I’m open to either outcome.
Not OP, but the Cato Institute is an American Libertarian think-tank founded by one of the Koch brothers (and others). I’m NOT going to try to look up in OP’s specific claim, but they are mostly extreme anarcho-capitalists. Massively oversimplifying here, but they believe in objectively false things like “big government bad, big business good” and “society should BE the free market” and “Ayn Rand is a good author”
Some more extreme Libertarians believe you should be able to buy/sell literally everything, i.e. guns, drugs, children’s teeth, whatever you can think of.
Okay of three things you’ve listed. The only thing that’s illegal to sell in the United States is drugs. Which arguably should be legal. Most of the real crimes associated with drugs are related to the sale and distribution, not the use. So making it legal would reduce crime and allow users to seek help without stigma.
Points of interest include (lower numbers are better):
- 22nd in terms of gun rights
- 50th in terms of recreational marijuana, but 17th for tobacco and 10th for alcohol.
- 42nd in asset forfeiture
- 50th in travel freedom
- 1st in terms of campaign finance freedom
- 15th in maternal mortality (lower number is worse on that one)
[off topic?]
A while back, someone posted a question, 'why do all Socialist countries fail?"
I pointed out that Canada seemed to be robust. He shot back a message that the Right Wing Heritage Foundation had deemed Canada freer than the United States.
I then asked why we couldn’t have Canadian style healthcare in the USA, since Canada wasn’t a Socialist country?
He never got back to me.
Just to be clear, Canada is definitely not a socialist country. If your tactic was just to bait him into the Healthcare pill that’s cool and all but misusing terms to make points tends to backfire in the end.
If you think about it, my correspondent was the one misusing terms. He could have said that Obama’s ACA was based on a plan GOP Mitt Romney introduced. He was so scared of the Socialist boogeyman that he couldn’t handle the idea that a capitalist country could have laws to help the citizens.
Our state government is the most corrupt in the country.
Freedom always suffers when the people with power dole out privileges and patronage to the ‘right people’ but deny rights and protections to everyone else. Happens every time
“For some people who may not love freedom as much as I do, you might say, well, we’ll trade off other values, equality, equity, you know, preventing people from doing bad things to themselves even if they were free,” Ruger said. “Look, that’s fine. But the fact is, if you love freedom, you have to let people and individuals make the choices that they make for themselves, again as long as they’re not directly harming other people.”
Yep.
Unless it’s an abortion. They don’t mean that kind of freedom.
