Defense and the National Interest � 4GW comes to a town near you

Chet Richards, in 4GW comes to a town near you uses the Mexican cartels' growing use of Atlanta as a distribution hub to state that, while the state is not fading away, "in some areas, large numbers of people are transferring their primary loyalties to organizations other than the state to which they happen to be citizens."

Chet states,

Bill Lind suggests that the defining characteristic of 4GW is “a crisis in the legitimacy of the state.” This is sometimes simplified to “the decline of the state,” but it does not mean that states everywhere are going away. That is patently not the case.

Generally, Lind's point is taken to mean that - in post-Westphalian times, it has been moral for the state - and only the state - to crack one's skull; while it has not been moral for you, me, our family, our church, some cljavascript:void(0)ub, or any other entity to do same.

But there is another aspect to this. Apparently, in some people's minds, legalizing or not legalizing narcotics is a moral statement.

For example, a friend recently told me that if cocaine were to be legalized, then parents could not tell their children to to use it. It is hard to think of a polite reply given the level of violence and human degradation which the so-called War on Drugs has caused.

This further ignores the point that, for example, many other parents, who happen to believe that eating non-Kosher foods to be immoral, have nevertheless successfully raised their children without needing to inflict some wanton War on Non-Kosher Foods on the rest of society.

Nevertheless, in my friend's mind - and that of many other Americans - the state has some body of moral authority so that, by legalizing cocaine, it would somehow legitimize it.

Others, such as me, think that cocaine's legal status has no bearing on its moral status one way or the other, so this calls into greater question the so-called War on Drugs.

If Lind is correct, then with time my friend's viewpoint should recede.