Puritanically Correct Cruelty (Will Grigg)

Will Grigg on how smoking and selling a relatively harmless substance is considered far worse than killing "foreigners" in illegal and immoral wars:

Murray Rothbard famously described the key role played by the quasi-Puritanical New England "Yankees" in constructing the paternalistic welfare/warfare state that afflicts us.

Those of that persuasion, wrote Rothbard, insisted that it was "...each believer's sacred duty to devote his energies to trying to establish a Kingdom of God on Earth, to establishing the perfect society in America and eventually the world, to stamp out sin and `make America holy'...They were deeply involved in the first phase of the federal "war on drugs," the abortive prohibition of alcohol, because Demon Rum supposedly "clouds men's minds to prevent them from achieving salvation..."

They were also enthusiastic supporters of total war, both against the South and then against unredeemed foreign nations, as a way of making the world as holy as they considered themselves to be.

All of these traits are in play in the outrageous story of Iraq veteran and double amputee Scott West and his wife Samantha, who were given a home by Massachusetts-based charity Homes for Our Troops -- only to have the gift withdrawn "after learning that Scott West had been arrested on marijuana charges in 2007 and pleaded guilty in December to a felony of possession with intent to distribute."

Read the rest