So if for example it was hard to uniformly enforce laws against murder or child rape, forget about those. But since a law mandating uniform hair length can be enforced with perfection, that’s a go?

I think I prefer the messy democratic approach of passing laws based on trying to mitigate those things which a majority of folks find most troubling.

One of the points of this post is that the DEA, amongst other agencies, probably should not be funded at all because it cannot realistically enforce the drug laws uniformly without taking even more resources from far more legitimate areas of government.

Ideally, no government would be necessary for anything – but few of us are outright anarchists, so at some point you have to accept that laws and regulations are going to exist. Given that, the proper position of the libertarian, I think, ought to be that the only laws and regs that should exist are laws and regs that can be enforced uniformly. Libertarians should further insist that existing laws and regs are either enforced uniformly or repealed before any additional laws and regs are passed.

I’d put it this way – it is far better for individual liberty to have one uniformly enforced law than it is to divide the funding necessary to uniformly enforce that law in order to incompletely(ie, arbitrarily) enforce several other laws. In the former situation, the infringement on liberty is limited to that uniformly enforced law, which is further mitigated by the fact that uniform enforcement allows individuals to rely upon the law in making decisions. In the latter situation, however, the infringement on liberty not only extends into the areas covered by the multiple laws, but is in fact multiplied by the utility of currying favor with the government to ensure that others bear the brunt of the inevitably arbitrary enforcement. In this sense, an incompletely enforced law actually increases the power of the government over the individual far more than a uniformly enforced law.

Why fund the DEA at all? It is arguably the single greatest failure and waste of money in the Federal Government. There are 50 separate states, each one has the ability to dictate it’s own policy regarding drug use – we do not need the Federal government to dictate a policy like that. It is an unnecessary power grab.

In the past, whenever an autonomous drug policy is attempted by one of the states the DEA asserts it’s authority as we’ve frequently seen in California. The enormous amount of money wasted on the DEA would be better spent in border and port security as well as increased funding for the local police.

Soft illegal drugs such as Marijuana and Hashish are a virtual cash cow for the drug cartels and relatively harmless as far as mood altering substances go – but that’s where the majority of interdiction efforts are focused. I advocate the legalization of these “soft” drugs and then slap a high tax on it. The state taxes collected will go directly into the states with the largest populations, the federal tax portion will flow directly to port and border security.

I appreciate your point Mark – but if I can paraphrase “we need to stop wasting money on agencies that persue policies most US citizens either disagree with or are simply neutral towards – and hold Congress accountable for their wasteful pork projects.” It’s just common sense right:)

It strains credulity to suggest that enforcing laws could increase liberty unless you’re talking about a boutique conception of liberty in which laws and government are the ones providing a liberty baseline that humans cannot achieve without its help.

Any libertarian worth his salt will only agree that enforcing laws uniformly can increase liberty if the laws are enforced uniformly LIGHTLY.