Greetings. I was thinking about Ron Paul's stance on the War on Drugs. I happen to agree that Marijuana should be legalized but I am unsure about other drugs.
A voice in my head says basically "think of the children." At which point I picture a neglected child living in filth while there parents get high off of who knows what. Now clearly the same thing can happen with alcohol and not all heavy drug users would be bad parents, especially if the drugs were legalized and readily available. But what about those whose parenting would be affected by drugs. And more to the point, what about neglectful parents in general, whether they are high off some drug or not. How would Ron Paul's America handle these cases? Where do you draw the line between allowing parents to raise their children, and protecting those who can not protect themselves.
As playboymommy has said, his position would be to let the states as well as local governance deal with most issues because every state or locale may have issues that are more common & it's better to let the local people, who understand those issues better, deal with them.
About your case of parents doing drugs, etc......look the drugs isn't necessarily the problem (NOT to say drugs are good at all) but the CORE of the problem is IRRESPONSIBLE BEHAVIOR, & illegality of drugs wouldn't necessarily have caused such parents to act responsibly anyway, they STILL would likely have neglected their kids even if they didn't have access to drugs but all it succeeds in doing is enormous waste of money & resources in the economy to fight these drug-wars. Again, the issue of children, it's better to deal with it on the state-level or city-level rather than monolithic federal government making laws for things which they mayn't even understand.
NOTE : By the way, Paul will allow states to BAN drugs altogether if that's what the local people want or let's say they want to legalize Marijuana but not heroin & others, etc.
What Paul will do is MASSIVELY reduce government-spending & optimize entitlements to tide over the people that are already dependent on it by cutting on the military, unnecessary bureaucracies, corporate-subsidies, bailouts & what not.....which in turn will allow him to leave more money in the hands of the people & which means there'll a lot more money available with people who do charity, I mean don't think poor people donate thousands or millions to charity, its obviously the rich ones that do, so cutting taxes just allows such rich people to donate more than they otherwise could which'll help take care of orphans & other needy people. Obviously, not every rich person donates to charity but they instead RE-INVEST their money into productive activities which leads to more jobs & more goods & services (REAL WEALTH) & lower prices, which benefit everyone but especially the poor.
I think people often get too warped in their head thinking about "money" but "money" in itself is useless, it's the GOODS & SERVICES (REAL WEALTH) that count & the more goods & services there are, the cheaper they'll be & the more people will be able to have a higher living-standard........so how do we maximise goods & services in the economy? People will be incentivised to produce more & more of them if they're benefitting from it & are able to keep what they earn & re-invest it & so on but if government steals most of it & gobbles it up & distributes it among its buddies & financiers that finance their election-campaigns then that's a waste.
People often claim that Paul wants to go BACK to 19th century or whatever but that's NOT the case, the point is to compare where we were & how we prospered. A bunch of slave-colonies were into the most powerful Republic only because taxes & regulations were so low. The total taxes (federal + state + local + debt) were about 5% of GDP back then (RIGHT NOW it's nearly 50%) which allowed productive people to produce more & more goods & services & that created enough prosperity (relative to other nations) that people flocked to US from allover the world! Obviously, their living-standards were nowhere near what ours are but again, the point is that they were much much worse off before that & were able to prosper only because of small government with low taxes & if we'd continued on that path then we'd be much more prosperous right now........rather than under a debt of 15 TRILLION with businesses running overseas due to over-regulation & over-taxation & government's wasteful expenditure.....
Ok.......I went off on a tangent there :o but I
think you've some left-leanings so I thought I should clarify a little bit more on things........& economics is a core issue........as they say, money makes the world go around or whatever
.......feel free to look into Economics & Sound Money section
