This year's Liberty & Society seminar at Pitzer College saw a first: A blog set up by and for the students. It's called Cafe Liberty, (apparently sans l'accent aigu, merci you very much) and offers a fun collection of personal banter, professional development discussions, and serious cogitatin' about liberty-related stuff. We can thank William Perales, he of the Eagle and Elephant blog, for that waaaay cool innovation. And I can thank Robert Sarvis for posting at Cafe Liberty a list of links to legal resources—the Institute for Justice, the Federalist Society, and the like—that I'd meant to post here.
Showing posts with label Liberty and Society 2005. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberty and Society 2005. Show all posts
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
L&S: "Interstate Commerce Blues," EU Verse
Although the 2005 Pitzer Liberty & Society Seminar ended over a week ago, I'm still catching up on my posts about it. Call it not "liveblogging," but "livedblogging." Sorry for the delay but, as the lovely dgm describes, I've been busy sweating, getting puked on, and sleeping in stretch limos.
As (then) co-blogger Steve Horwitz noted while he actually was liveblogging the seminar, I made the students suffer through a performance of "The Interstate Commerce Blues." Practicing for that, um, pedagogical lesson led me to refine the song in various ways. I've updated the original version accordingly.
I played the tune during the Q&A part of my lecture, "Writing, Reading, and Respecting a Constitution." Although much of what I discussed applied to constitutions generally, I definitely focused on the U.S. Constitution. The lyrics of "The Interstate Commerce Blues" attest to that.
This year our seminar had an especially large number of foreign students. In particular, we had a surprising number of students from countries in the EU. In order to drive home the point that many principles of constitutional law apply generally, regardless of the foundational legal document in question, I decided to write a verse about the EU for "The Interstate Commerce Blues."
I tried to write it in French, but didn't get very far on my own. Three French-speaking Canadian students—Olivier Ballou, Heloise Robinson, and Marc-André ("Marc") Brisson very graciously took up the task. Here is the verse that they largely wrote, and that I sang as an offering, "To our friends in the EU, from your friends in North America":
The Interstate Commerce Blues: EU Verse
To the tune of "House of the Rising Sun"
Time: 3/4. Key: Am. Tempo: Moderate.
En Bel-gique y'a un Parle-ment,
Am C D F
Pour L'Union 'ropé-enne,
Am C E7
Qui fut la ruine des simples gens,
Am C D F
Par ceux qui les gou-vernent.
Am E7 Am
Fin.
Friday, July 15, 2005
L&S: Wrapping Up
We're about to head into our last session, which is a faculty roundtable discussion of the tough issues and challenges facing libertarianism. Since we'll all be up front dispensing pearls of wisdom to our young charges, there won't be any live-blogging. And since I'll be offline until I'm home, I just wanted to take this chance to thank Glen and Tom for hosting this event this week, and to say how much I've enjoyed doing it. It's added a really fun and intellectually valuable (yes, I said that with a straight face) element to the faculty experience here. I hope that we've managed to convey both the fun and intellectual excitement that these seminars involve, not to mention the exhaustion for us "rapidly approaching middle age" faculty.
If you're a student interested in libertarian ideas, coming to an IHS summer seminar is an opportunity you should not forgo.
L&S: Contractual Relationships
Tom suggests that couples in romantic relationships would be wise to adopt explicit, or at least quasi-explicit, contracts specifying what activities constitute violations of trust. Agreeing that “If you should engage in any touching of lips or genitalia with someone else, you must inform me before the next time we engage in similar activity” establishes a bright-line rule that coordinates the expectations of both parties.
During the break in Tom’s lecture, Steve H. observed that the above rule makes most sense in a semi-casual “college” relationship. For more committed relationships, more restrictive rules would be justified, because a broader range of external interactions would constitute a breach of trust. Suppose, for instance, that your husband has lunch with a young woman – let’s call her Sara – and they spend their entire meal staring at each other with storms brewing in their eyes. But nothing more happens. Has the commitment been violated? How could a vague rule against “romantic attractions” be properly interpreted or enforced? The problem is that the crime, if any, consists entirely of mental events. Fights could easily ensue from the failure of the rule to coordinate expectations on verifiable aspects of the external world. Even a highly committed couple might do better with a less restrictive but more objective rule (“no touching of lips or genitalia with other people”), or perhaps a more restrictive and more objective rule (“no lunches with members of the opposite sex without prior notice and consent”).
A simplistic way to deal with the problem is to say that any relationship requires trust and good faith. That should go without saying. The point is that even a relationship with sufficient trust and good faith could suffer from divergences of expectations, which can erode the underlying trust. Bright-line rules, in personal relationships as well as in law, can serve an important function.
L&S: How Far Down Does Libertarianism Go?
Our final formal lecture of the week is Tom Bell talking about "Living Lives that Respect Liberty." Tom's theme is whether "the political is the personal." That is, does the libertarian understanding of the ideal political order also apply to our personal and family lives? Can we apply the ideas that we've been exploring all week to solve inter-personal problems in what Hayek called the "micro-cosmos?"
This is a question that I find to be particularly fascinating. In a recent contribution to a symposium on "Ayn Rand Among the Austrians" in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I tried to argue that Hayek's work suggests that the organizations of the micro-cosmos (like firms or families) not only are, but in some sense should be, organized along collectivist, altruistic lines. This differs from Rand's belief that the principles of individualism and self-interest should go "all the way down."
Another recent contribution along these lines is a fascinating article by the economist Donald Wittman, entitled "The Internal Organization of the Family: Economic Analysis and Psychological Advice" that was published in the journal Kyklos in February 2005. Here's the abstract:
This article shows that therapeutic advice for behavior within the family is to create a functioning property-rights system and to emulate voluntary transactions within a competitive economic market. The optimal organization of the family requires that relations are structured so that non-cooperative game playing is minimized and transaction costs are reduced. The article employs economic analysis to explain why 'setting limits' is preferred to punishment (Pigouvian taxes). It also explains why there is conflict between children and their parents even when the parent's utility is the present discounted value of the child's utility function.That abstract undersells how good this article really is. I read this article and said "Yes!! This perfectly articulates my own tacit understanding of why I parent the way I do." Wittman's running example is the middle school kid who keeps forgetting his lunch every day. The "punishment" parenting strategy is to yell at the kid or take something away, but only after bringing that lunch to school for him. Wittman argues that a more efficient and effective solution is to simply say "you forget your lunch, you don't eat," which internalizes the cost back on the child and relieves the parent of having to bear the costs of bringing the lunch and enforcing the punishment, all of which are deadweight losses in comparison to the "Coasean" solution. It should be noted that more "libertarian" sorts of parenting strategies are more effective the older the child is. The "Coasean" solution requires children of an age to understand the costs and benefits of the choices in front of them.
Tying it to Tom's lecture, Wittman is arguing that the libertarian political also works in the personal. To be clear, Tom is not saying that it is always the case that the political works in the personal, but that we should at least think about the ways in which it might and might not.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
L&S: I'm Just Kidneying
Well James is at it again. His final talk is on "The Market for Transplantable Human Organs." He's distinguished among "current" markets, "futures" markets, and "cadaveric" markets, aligning with immediate sales, promised sales in the future, and selling the kidneys of the recently dead (cue Monty Python here). What's scaring me at the moment is that as he began his discussion of the "current market," he placed a small cooler on the table in front of him. After the appearance of Flossie earlier in the week, it's not clear at all what might be in there.
James' style of handling these controversial subjects is really worth emulating. It's a marvelous mix of humor and a very clear, precise, almost syllogistic, structuring of his arguments. The eminently enjoyable Scottish accent only adds to the fun.
L&S: Happiness and Income Inequality
A seminar participant, Heloise Robinson, who is familiar with the burgeoning “happiness” literature, told me something a couple of days ago that could provide a novel defense of economic inequality. The happiness literature seems to show that increasing wealth doesn’t really correlate with increasing happiness; instead, individuals appear to have a certain “set point” of happiness they tend to reach regardless of material success, so long as their material well-being is above some minimum level. (This much I knew already.) I pointed out that while I don’t think I’m appreciably happier (or sadder) than I was in graduate school, I still wouldn’t want to return to my graduate school income, which was less than a third of my current income. I brought up this point to show that maybe we care about things that don’t necessarily lead to “happiness” as measured in surveys.
Then Heloise said – and this is the part that was new to me – that measured happiness does seem to correlate with doing better over one’s lifetime. People like to perceive that their condition is improving. So how does this connect with economic inequality? As Steve Horwitz noted in his lecture earlier today, much of the mobility between quintiles of the income distribution happens because of life cycles: people start off in low quintiles, then tend to move up over time as they get older and acquire more experience and skills. (This happens within quintiles too, of course.) To the extent this is true, the happiness literature could be taken as an argument in favor of greater income inequality, because people moving through their lifetimes and up the quintiles will be experiencing larger improvements in their positions.
I wouldn’t want to rely on this as the sole argument in defense of income inequality (Steve made many more), but I do think it’s a counterintuitive implication of research usually deployed by researchers who wish to denigrate capitalist institutions.
L&S - Work and Leisure
Last night, during the Q & A after the showing of the "1900 House", Steve Horwitz made a point that had never ocurred to me before. We all feel tremendously busy and stressed - or so we tell surveys - yet the stats show we are actually working less compared to the 1950s, let alone the 1900s. Steve's take on this is that our leisure has become much busier and so (in some sense) stressful. I found this thought provoking ( in a good sense, not the British one). I can see how this is clearly true. I would add a couple of points. One is the extent to which leisure and life in general, involve travelling to a much greater degree. A lot of this travel is time-critical in some way and in general we find that both tiring and stressful. The other point is this. I'm not sure adult leisure is that much busier. The big change is that child leisure has become much busier and also much less self-directed. To give a personal example, as a child I entertained myself and was pretty much left to my own devices. Today middle class parents in particular are crucial for both organising and enabling their children's leisure and spend a vast amount of time ferrying them around. I suspect this may well be a transitional effect. James Tooley's idea that the future of education is to move away from 'school' to an institution that combines education and entertainment is very suggestive here. Of course one element in all this is the huge panic over child abuse and abduction but we can only hope that this will start to diminish.
Steve is now demolishing economic myths about income distribution, standard of living etc. This is very useful because there are so many myths around in popular discourse. Some of this is due to deliberately misleading argument but I increasingly think the big problem is a combination of innumeracy among both journalists and the general public and the way that many statistics are not made available in an accessible way. All those OECD studies are great but they have very little effect on the public consciousness.
L&S: Economic Mythology
In a previous lecture, Steve Horwitz took on a single economic myth – namely, that the Great Depression was a monumental failure of capitalism that was cured by the New Deal and WW2. An important myth to debunk, no doubt. But I like his current lecture even better, because here he takes on three economic myths:
• That the cost of living has risen steadily throughout the 20th century.
• That the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
• That women earn 74 cents for every dollar that men earn.
Steve makes the important point that each myth has a kernel of truth, which helps explain why the myths persist. Nonetheless, the truth is often nearer to the opposite. Myth #2 is the best example: it’s true the rich have gotten richer – but the poor have also gotten richer. Steve does a phenomenal job of demonstrating this. Belief in Myth #1 is driven mainly by the fact that, while most things have become dramatically less expensive, a small handful of things have indeed gotten more expensive. Housing is the most important of these. As Steve observes, housing has also improved in quality, so the rise in price can be misleading. Still, increasing demand in the face of relatively inelastic supply also plays a role.
Economic mythology is much like religious mythology. Religious myths are often based on small bits of history and reality that have been exaggerated, dramatized, and embellished. For instance, the Trojan War probably did occur, but Homer’s account is not exactly a reliable record of the event. There was also probably a great flood, or perhaps many such floods, that provided the basis for numerous religions' flood myths. But if you want the truth about the flood, ask a geologist or archaeologist, not a theologian. Likewise, economic myths start from bits of truth that are stretched and warped into works of fiction.
L&S: Markets and Modernity
This morning's first talk is Steve Davies on "Are We Still Living in Western Civilization?" And what he means by that is that we have shifted to a more global/modern civilization from a distinctly western one. He argues that our modern civilization first appeared in the west, but is not really that "western" and is becoming less and less "western" as time progresses. The key differences between the "west" and "modernity" include:
- the transformation of family life (from being a political/economic unit to an emotional one)
- the shift from a "Christian civilization" to a civilization with a lot of Christians in it
- the shift from agriculture to industry
Steve is wrapping up with some of the implications for our current global situation. Right now, he's addressing the sort of conservative critique of modernity (money is icky, there are no chances for true "heroism", etc.). This resistance to modernity also characterizes fundamentalist Islam, and Steve has just sketched the connection between the historian Werner Sombart (one of those opponents of modernity) and that Islamic tradition.
He's now nicely pointing out that "modernity" does not equal "the west." Or better yet, "modernization" does not equal "westernization." Having said that, he notes that there are elements that are necessary to modernity, while others may be optional. Specifically, any attempt at modernization must include these three elements:
- rule of law
- personal liberty
- critical rationalism
L&S: Varieties of Ignorance
Almost every evening at this L&S seminar, in the span between the last presentation and the start of the evening social, we gather in discussion groups of 10 or 12 people. Students usually get assigned to different groups each evening, on a random basis, to maximize the likelihood that we'll all get the chance to meet one another. Last night, though, we tried something new: we assigned students to discussion groups on the basis of their specializations.
Unsurprisingly, I got all the many students who want to study law. Because most of the students at this seminar have yet to start graduate school, I had only a few students who have begun (or in one case, completed) a J.D. program. (I had a few more students studying abroad in programs that would roughly equate to extended undergraduate legal studies in the U.S.) Together, we discussed nuts-and-bolts career topics such as how to study for the LSAT, how to finance law school, and what sort of jobs to consider upon graduation.
Later, comparing notes with my fellow faculty members, I discovered that only my group had concentrated on career issues. Each of the other faculty members had, of course, also been assigned students interested in his particular specialization. The students in their groups, however, appear to have discussed not career issues but rather substantive topics in economics, history, or philosophy. What accounts for that difference?
Given that most of the students here remain in their undergraduate studies, relatively few of them have begun taking classes in the law. I thus face a great many students with only an outsider's understanding of the law's inner workings. My colleagues, in contrast, face students who have already begun taking classes in economics, history, or philosophy, as the case may be.
All of the students here still have a great deal to learn. And my fellow faculty members take pains to make their lectures accessible to every student. Nonetheless, as these reflections show, I tend to face a slightly different sort of ignorance than my colleagues.
Only very few of the students at an L&S seminar will have begun studying what I lecture about. My fellow faculty, in contrast, can count on finding a fair number of budding specialists in their audiences. I don't think that realization will or should change how I lecture, given that each of us must aspire to reach non-specialists. I see now, though, that it probably does give me some unique challenges.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
L&S: Horwitz On Family Values
I haven't been blog-slacking, really. I've been busy responding to the many, many comments to my post on the Kelo Amendment. Todd Zywicki very kindly gave me a link on the Volokh Conspiracy, triggering a flood of traffic. (Thanks, Todd!)
Steve Horwitz now offers us comments on the "1900 House" video that he just showed. He apparently feels no need to work in a reference to sodomy. To the contrary, his talk concerns family values, albeit from an economic point of view. He just mentioned "Ozzie & Harriet"! For all that, though, it proves fascinating.
No sex, no guitar, no laser light show . . . and yet people listen. Gee, do you think that Steve knows something about teaching?
L&S: Pillars of Salt
Glen has moved from J-Lo's butt to a much less tasteful example for a point about insurance. Suffice it to say, the sodomy theme begun by James and Flossie has become quite the meme this week. And Glen is indulging in a range of puns that he should be ashamed of. Chris Martin, our much beleagured seminar director, looks like he's eaten a pound of bad shrimp and has the pallor of the recently deceased.
The only thing I'm sorry about is that Danny Shapiro is missing this fun. Those of you who know the sound of Danny's laughter can understand why hearing him in stitches is itself a source of amusement.
L&S: "A Butt Damaging Incident"
Only Glen could use J-Lo's butt as an example for a lecture on the economics of risk.
L&S: Riding the First Wave
Steve Davies is currently working his way through a very informative history of the individualist feminism of the 19th and early 20th century. I love this lecture and I think it's one of the most fascinating for the students as few of them really know this history. Introducing them to the Grimke sisters, Harriet Martineau, Josephine Butler, and all the rest is really important to both understanding a key piece of the history of libertarian ideas and to realizing that articulating a modern-day libertarian feminism is a worthy and important project. My Liberty and Power colleague Roderick Long has done great work on this front, and I'm hoping that my own work (PDF warning) on the family can contribute to such a project as well. Opposition to the war is not the only place libertarians can find common cause with elements of the Left.
What's especially nice about Steve's lecture is that he links together the early feminists' critique of state intervention in the market, their support for voting rights and other forms of political equality, and their opposition to the "traditional" marital relationship under which men were the complete and total masters of the household. In all cases, women were treated as second class citizens, comparable to slaves, and saw these changes as providing them with the demand for equal treatment that is at the bottom of the first wave of feminism. In the US, as Steve points out, the individualist feminist movement was linked with the abolitionists, often via Quakerism.
For me, teaching history, or listening to it being taught, is a form of magic, as modern students are often so ignorant of elements of history that have direct bearing on their current beliefs and you can literally see their eyes and minds opening up when they learn things of which they were previously unaware. This is particularly true for libertarian students, who have often suffered through college courses where the parts of history that offer information about, and support for, their own intellectual traditions are frequently omitted or caricatured. Good history gives students something the desperately need: intellectual ammunition (to use an old Randian phrase). Frankly, if I were a student at an IHS seminar, the history lectures would be the ones I'd be paying rapt attention to, jotting notes furiously, as a way of preparing for returning to campus with new material for class discussions and research papers. Even as a faculty member, I always come home from these seminars with new bits of history that I previously didn't know.
L&S: Bell on the Constitution
Let me just add one point to James' last post, with which I'm in agreement: deconstructionists also argue that the meaning of words changes depending on power structures. Those with power have the ability to influence the meaning of words in particular ways, undermining any "fixed" meaning they might have.
Tom is wrapping up his talk now, which has been very good. I think he's given us a new meme though. In expressing his frustration with the Kelo decision, he looked skyward, clenched his fists, and nearly screamed "Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelo!!!!!" Of course, there was only one possible reference for that action. You might go here too.
Right now, Tom is singing the "Interstate Commerce Blues", complete with guitar, to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun". And we're now getting a new verse, in French, dealing with the EU.
L&S: Deconstruction
Tom's just briefly criticized deconstruction in response to a student question. Tom claimed that deconstructionists believe that words have no meaning, illustrating this by claiming that according to deconstructionists the meanings of the words "dog" and "cat" are interchangeable.
Now, I'm no defender of deconstructionism, in large part because I'm very unfamiliar with the arguments that surround it and don't want to make any claims in a debate that I'm not familiar with. But from the little I understand I think that Tom's characterization of deconstruction is rather unfair. Instead of holding that words have no meaning, deconstructionists, I believe, make the much weaker claim that words have no *fixed* meaning, and that the meanings of words alters between speakers and listeners. And this doesn't seem that bizarre to me.
Incidentally, for a really nice--and amusing--account of deconstruction, read Morris Zapp's synopsis of his (fictitious) paper "Textuality as Striptease" in David Lodge's wonderful novel *Small World*.
L&S: Takings -- an Error in Constitutional Framing?
Tom, in his lecture on “Reading, Writing, and Respecting a Constitution,” is talking about the infamous Kelo decision. Here’s the relevant text of the 5th Amendment:
…[N]or shall private property be taken for public use without compensation.On the one hand, the plain meaning of “public use” does not include the transfer of property to a private entity like Pfizer or CostCo. That’s private use. But on the other hand, that means the amendment just doesn’t say anything about takings for private use. Maybe those are okay even without compensation.
Now, it seems pretty unlikely that the Framers would place greater restrictions on takings for public use (by requiring compensation) than on takings for private use. But on a plain language reading of the 5th Amendment, that’s what it sounds like they did. In order to get around this reading, one must claim that takings for private use are ruled out by some other clause of the Constitution. For example, one could say that eminent domain is not an enumerated power, and thus prior to passage of the Bill of Rights, the federal government could not take property at all, whether for public or private use.
I want to buy this reasoning, but it troubles me for two reasons. First, it’s usually said, and the historical record generally confirms, that the Bill of Rights was written to place additional limits – or perhaps clarify limits – on the government. Yet on the reading above, it turns out the 5th Amendment actually gave the government a new power. That’s at least odd. Second, if the writers of the Bill of Rights did intend to enumerate a new power, the phrasing of the clause in question is simply bizarre. It does not sound at all like a grant of power. It sounds like the writers expected government to take property from time and time, and they just wished to place a constraint on that power.
The more I think about this, the more I think we’re just looking at a simple mistake in the writing of the Constitution. The Framers probably just assumed that private property would only be taken for public use – taking for private use seemed self-evidently wrong – so they only saw the need to require compensation for public-use takings. But the language they chose did not unambiguously rule out the private-use takings. If I’m right, then we have a genuine conflict between original intent and plain meaning as modes of constitutional interpretation.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
L&S: In Case You Were Wondering...
…There hasn’t been much L&S blogging today because we had the afternoon off. Most people spent the time playing at the beach or sightseeing. In the evening, Tom and his wife d hosted their annual barbecue at their home in San Clemente, from which I just returned. (Thanks, Tom and d!)
I did give a lecture this morning, prior to the break, that no one posted about. I can only assume my co-bloggers were so stunned at my keen insights and sharp wit that they were rendered uncharacteristically speechless. The gist of my lecture is summarized in this two-year-old post. But there’s one point I neglected to make this morning that I’d like to note here.
Beyond the fact that externality and public good problems are endemic to democratic and bureaucratic processes – hence making it odd to refer to such problems as “market failures” – it should also be noted that government regularly creates externality problems where they did not exist before. For example, when government socializes health costs (whether through public ERs, Medicare/Medicaid, or full-blown single-payer systems), it turns private health risks into matters of public concern. Helmet laws are justified on grounds that motorcycle riders end up in public ERs. Tobacco lawsuits are justified on grounds that some smokers’ health costs were covered by Medicaid. And now obesity, a quintessentially individual matter, is touted as a matter of “public health” because some of the medical costs associated with obesity get carried by the taxpayers. These government-created externality problems are then used to argue for regulation of lifestyle choices.
(Note to liberals: It is only a matter of time before conservatives use public healthcare costs as the basis for further bludgeoning of homosexuals, since homosexual practices do in fact carry greater health risks. They’ve already done this to some extent, but their arguments smacked too much of bigotry. But soon they will copy the rhetorical templates that liberals have successfully deployed in the tobacco and obesity debates.)
L & S - More on the Economics of Prohibition
The Stossel video we saw last night raised a couple of issues for me which I think it ignored and libertarians generally ignore as well. He sets out the negative effects (costs) of prohibition. There seems to be an unspoken assumption among libertarians that these are an inevitable result of prohibition and must always arise. However a moments thought will show that this is not so. To follow on one of James's examples from yesterday, necrophilia is prohibited, but we don't see criminal body snatchers digging up cadavers or killing people (like Burke and Hare) to provide cadavers for necrophiliacs. More substantially, we have had drug prohibition since 1922 in the British case and the 1930s in the US, but the negative effects only became very apparent and substantial in the 1970s. Partly this is due to a shift from 'smart' to 'stupid' prohibition but reflection shows the critical factor is the level of demand. If we have two variables prohibit (Yes/No), and demand (High/Low) there are four outcomes Y/H, Y/L, N/H and N/L. If demand is low then the choice between legalise and prohibit is in fact a philosophical one with relatively minor practical effects - neither option is likely to carry substantial costs. However if demand for the service or substance is high then we have a grim choice because both legalisation and prohibition will have substantial costs. (It is worth adding that we know what the costs of prohibition are but we don't know for sure what the costs of legalisation would be. It would be foolish however to assume that they would be trivial). On balance I would argue that the costs of prohibition are still going to be higher, because, given that prohibition is going to be less than fully effective (to put it mildly!), you will have the costs of prohibition and some of the costs of use (which may well be exacerbated by such prohibition induced problems as purity etc). However we should not glibly dismiss the costs of widespread demand for and use of drugs or assume that we have a choice between a bad policy and a painless one.
This means that the key issue is to reduce demand and the practical question is how to do this. History has some interesting cases for us, particularly the way in which the catastrophic alcohol problem of later 18th and early 19th century Britain was resolved (so far as this could be done). This was done not with prohibition but by use of the tax code to encourage a shift from gin to beer, the spontaneous but also encouraged emergence of the pub, which made drinking once again a social activity governed by a whole series of formal and informal rules, (and also raised the marginal cost of drinking by making necessary to walk a certain distance to get one), and by making heavy drinking deeply unrespectable, uncool and [very important in the British case], fearfully lower claars). This is the way to go for me and coming up with a social strategy of this kind to reduce drug use will make the principled argument for legalisation much more convincing to the wider public.
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