The Wall Street bailout was a bad idea. The Stu­dent Loan bailout is another bad idea. Reward­ing bad deci­sions just encour­ages bad decisions.

I believe in legal­iz­ing mar­i­juana. It’s safer than alco­hol, and keep­ing the safer drug ille­gal, while mak­ing the more dan­ger­ous one legal, is unsci­en­tific and illogical.

But past that, I think any drug should be legal. If you take a drug, it doesn’t affect me. By what right do I stop you? If you steal to sup­port your drug habit, or com­mit assault while high, then obvi­ously that requires ret­ri­bu­tion, but the prob­lem is not the drugs; it’s the rob­bery or assault.

How­ever, I should not have to buy you drugs. That’s not fair. Thus, I don’t sup­port legal­iz­ing drugs for those receiv­ing wel­fare or unem­ploy­ment insur­ance. (Also, I obvi­ously don’t sup­port wel­fare or unem­ploy­ment insur­ance. Pri­vate char­i­ties do it bet­ter. Look at how suc­cess­ful pri­vate char­i­ties have been at trans­form­ing people’s lives, and how suc­cess­ful gov­ern­ment wel­fare has been at ruin­ing them.)

The facts: of the 30,000 gun deaths per year, more than half (18,000) are sui­cides. The num­ber of acci­den­tal deaths is about 1000. Each year there are about 3000 deaths caused by med­ical error, about 15,000 deaths caused by acci­den­tal falls, and over 40,000 acci­den­tal deaths caused by automobiles.

In com­par­i­son, civil­ians use firearms to defend them­selves from crim­i­nals between 800,000 and 2.5 mil­lion times per year. About 8% of those (between 64,000 and 200,000) involve stop­ping a sex­ual assault.

If some­one else’s gay mar­riage threat­ens your het­ero­sex­ual mar­riage, you are too weak and too stu­pid to live in a free society.

The gov­ern­ment has no place what­so­ever in mar­riage. George Wash­ing­ton didn’t need a mar­riage license to get mar­ried, and states today have no busi­ness leg­is­lat­ing what hap­pens between con­sent­ing adults. And that includes giv­ing pref­er­ence to any group (e.g. het­ero­sex­ual monogamists).

And as to this idea about civil unions being the both sep­a­rate and equal to marriage…there’s a cou­ple drink­ing foun­tains I’d like to show you.

A doc­tor recently said to me, “I’ll often write a pre­scrip­tion for a more expen­sive med­i­cine just because it has fewer let­ters.” His point was that there are no incen­tives any­where in the sys­tem to reduce health­care costs. Let’s bring those incen­tives back, and make med­i­cine truly uni­ver­sal through lower costs:

• Legal­ize higher deductible insur­ance. This would cre­ate price com­pe­ti­tion for basic med­ical ser­vices, and pre­vent insur­ance com­pa­nies from mark­ing up rou­tine services.
• Lower costs by allow­ing insur­ers to com­pete across state lines.
• End the sub­si­dies and pro­tec­tions given to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies. Right now med­i­cines in Amer­ica cost three times as much as iden­ti­cal med­i­cines (same for­mula, same name) in other coun­tries. It’s time to end that kind of cor­po­rate welfare.