Free the Clogged-Nose 25! - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Daily

Free the Clogged-Nose 25! - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Daily

" Ever since George Bush nearly banned the stuff in 2005, the manufacturers have been packing the shelves with a pseudo-pseudoephedrine that might as well be a placebo. The new stuff doesn't work and everyone knows it.Before 2005, you could buy as many Sudafed packages as you did Big Mac sandwiches, and the police didn't care. Now, your 30-day allotment is nine grams. So this seems like it would be enough, but what if you are buying for two people or an entire family, or lose some, or give them away to a friend, or they fall to the back of the cabinet, or you're out of town? And how can you possibly track precisely how much you have purchased? "


Ottavio Paz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1990 for his book The Labyrinth of Solitude. After 20 years of being in print, current editions have several epilogues, the last of which is The Philanthropic Ogre. Here he says:




“The twentieth-century state has proved itself a force more powerful than the ancient empires and a master more terrible than the old tyrants and despots: a faceless, inhuman master who functions not like a demon but like a machine. Civil Society has almost completely disappeared: nothing and no person exists outside the state. It is a surprising inversion of values that would have made Nietzsche himself shudder: the state is Being and exception; irregularity and even simple individualism are forms of evil, that is, of nothingness.”



And he continues…



“The state is neither a factory nor a business. The logic of history is not quantitative. Economic rationality depends on the relationship between expenditure and production, investment and earnings, work and savings. The rationale of the state is not utility nor profit but power — gaining it, conserving it and extending it. The archetype of power does not lie in economics but in war, not in the polemic relationship of capital to work but in the hierarchical relationship of commander to soldier.”