We are a free country, but many people are not aware of what makes us free. It is not simply democracy that makes us free, for the direct rule of a majority can be as tyrannical as the rule of a single dictator. What makes us free is our Bill of Rights, enshrined in our Constitution, in which our founding fathers set down the noble political principle that, regardless of even what the majority may want, there are certain aspects of our lives, of our bodies, and of our activities that must be forever beyond the reach of government regardless of the wishes of any political group that may be temporarily in power. It has not always been that way. Our right to our bodies and to our property has been violated repeatedly throughout history.
Common law gives the state ultimate sovereign right over one's land.
And common law has also, for centuries, given the state the right to legislate personal morals. But the state's authority over our land is merely a hold-over from feudal theories of sovereignty, fiefdom, vassalage. and monarchy. And the state's right over personal morals and what we do with our bodies is a relic from the days that state and church were inseparable. The Libertarian Party believes, as part of its core ideology, that such views regarding the government's authority over one's body and over one's property have no place in an enlightened country on the threshold of the twenty-first century. I have heard all the arguments in support of the drug war.