Politicians and bureaucrats thrive by obfuscating issues. In the confusion brought about through improperly framing relevant factors the political caste can shape solutions that serve their interests by drawing more authority and resources into their sphere of control.
Substance abuse is undoubtedly destructive behavior that impacts individuals, families, and, ultimately, societies. However, the solution to addiction and improper use of stimulants requires simply upholding the core tenets of scientific law:
Do all you have agreed to do and do not encroach upon other people or their justly held property.
Contracts and restitution based criminal torts offer the practical means by which legal institutions can rightly incentivize social norms while simultaneously dissuading destructive behaviors among members of a community.
That some people are inclined to abuse themselves by improperly ingesting mind-altering substances or indulge their additions does not justify political involvement in treatment programs, insurance, or the medical industry.
As a study in political-economy, the End of Gun Control considers means and ends as two sides of one universal principle aimed at the maximization of human flourishing by examining incentive structures. We are asking what social and legal arrangements are most conducive to the maximization of wealth, rightly understood as human well-being.
Obviously, crime and destructive behaviors are antithetical to human flourishing and social cooperation. Law, then, is the codification of accepted and expected behavior that allows for just, conflict-free, human interactions enforced by both dissuading and punishing transgressions.
That may sound more confusing than it really is and, again, the political caste enjoys perverting the concept of law, to their own favor, by adding complexity. It is to guard against the perversion of justice that leads us to pursue the universal principles found in common law.
Streamlining Justice
When you understand that scientific law, using contract and torts, preserves liberty, including and especially the right to keep and bear arms, while imposing harsh penalties upon those that engage in anti-social behaviors, the need for complex legislation and cumbersome yet ineffectual enforcement bureaucracies goes away.
It can also be said that individual liberty is both the end and means of sound politics, economics, and law. Individual liberty is also the best way to put an end to every form of gun control while simultaneously promoting a harmonious social order.
Law is the codification of just human conduct. It enables penalizing those that encroach upon others or violate the terms of the contracts they voluntarily enter into. In other words, protecting people and their property from theft, fraud, or force leaves them free to exercise choice as they develop their concepts of well-being. The purpose of law is the protection of liberty and protecting property boundaries is the way of fulfilling that noble objective.
Economics is the study of how to skillfully direct resources toward their highest valued ends for the maximization of human well-being. Creating wealth is achieved either by cultivating previously unowned resources or, more frequently, through the exchange of property with others in marketplaces free from theft, fraud, or force. In other words, economic efficiency requires the liberty to exchange what one has, with others, in order to achieve a greater valued good.
Politics is the institutional exercise of coercive power in human organizations. It is important to recall that power, defined as the capacity to do work over time, involves control over physical resources and the employment of resources always remains subject to the laws of economics, the application of finite resources to achieve virtually infinite desired ends.
The main question to be addressed once understanding the purposes of law and economics is how to orchestrate, or arrange for, the actual legal enforcement mechanisms that will protect a “free state” so that people can be secure in their property and trade toward the creation of wealth (well-being). The orchestration of legal authority usually falls to the realm of politics.
Therefore, this study in political-economy accepts that politics is an inevitable fact of social life and that the resources involved in political activities, too, must be economized.
Economizing resources cannot occur when politicians and bureaucrats exercise monopoly control of governmental authority and preventing such monopoly, i.e., securing a free state, is the true purpose of the right to keep and bear arms found in the Second Amendment.