Pardon me if I don’t feel sorry for Bill Bennett for the negative reaction to his recent confessions to being a gambler. David Frum began his NRO column on Monday, “Who knew that praising good could generate such ill will? Who imagined that when it came to judge a man it would matter so little who he really was and what he’d really done?” Frum has it backwards. The antipathy for Bennett in many quarters stems not from his “praising good” but in his role as “drug czar” in which he repeatedly advocated imprisoning drug users to save them from themselves.
Now comes Stanley Kurtz arguing that it is perfectly all right for Bennett to take a different stance on the social harm of gambling than he does on drugs. “When he treats gambling and drug use differently, William Bennett is simply articulating America’s existing policy distinctions on these two issues. You have to want to destroy William Bennett pretty badly not to realize that it’s alright for an American to take different moral views on gambling and drugs, and not be run out of town for it. I’d like to see Michael Kinsley and William Saletan address this point, but I’m not holding my breath.”
I cannot speak for Kinsley or Saletan who are not, of course, libertarians, but I can explain how many libertarians are likely to react to this latest display of hypocrisy by Bennett. You see, Bill Bennett is more than a moralizer — a role to which I, for one, do not object. We need moralizers and if that role is left solely to he who is without sin, then no one gets to say anything about anyone’s bad behavior. That’s the trap laid by the moralists on the Left, as Frum correctly notes.
But Bennett is more than a moralist; he is a prohibitionist. And he is more than a prohibition advocate, he was the drug-czar almighty. For years he defended the current policy of ruining the lives of drug users — regardless of whether their actions were harming others. Many of us still recall his condescending reply to Milton Friedman’s open letter to him in the pages of the Wall Street Journal where he chided the Nobel Prize winner to be serious. From editorial page to podium, Bennett loudly and righteously defended the policy of wrecking havoc on his fellow citizens who indulged in different vices than he did — whether or not their vices happened to interfere with their abilities to perform their jobs or be good parents. It did not matter whether or not they had “spent the milk money.” All that mattered was whether they were caught by the cops. Then off to the clink with them.
Kurtz says that Bennett is entitled to run a different cost-benefit calculation for gambling than for drugs. Then why has he now said he is setting a bad example to others and quitting? Either he has just changed his cost-benefit analysis this week, or he was a hypocrite last week. Kurtz and Bennett cannot have it both ways. Frankly, I do not care much for charges of hypocrisy which seem to be easy attempts to hoist one’s opponents by their own petard without taking a stand oneself. Bennett’s problem is not so much hypocrisy, as it is refusing to do unto others as he would do unto itself. His own personal vicious behavior — and vicious he has now admitted it to be — undercuts his claim to righteously persecute by law the vices of others. And do not forget that gambling is quite illegal in many places.
Bennett’s behavior also reveals something more insidious than hypocrisy, though it is a very old tale. Those who argue most loudly that, were it not for state coercion, people would go to hell in a hand basket have long been suspected of speaking knowingly from introspection. Think Jimmy Swaggart. Bennett provides an even better example. Bennett has had three consumptive vices of which we know: cigarettes (which he had to give up to take the drug-czar position), gambling (which he now has to give up to preserve his viability on the lecture circuit as virtue authority) and, obviously, food. In his latest admissions he stresses that he broke no laws, which is also true of his consumption of nicotine and calories. Lucky him.
This only means that his vices do not carry the additional legal baggage that he would willingly impose on others with different vices. So suppose, instead of merely issuing a statement that he was through with gambling, he had to hire a big-time lawyer (other than his brother), and go to court in handcuffs like Robert Downey Jr. has had to do. Downey is a sad character, but why does he deserve the orange jumpsuit and jail-time for his admittedly self-destructive behavior and Bennett only our compassion and goodwill?
Perhaps Bennett (or Kurtz) would respond that, were Bennett’s chosen vices illegal, the laws would have saved him from himself. But this incident proves only that, unless one prohibits all vices, which the virtue proponents like Bennett deny they favor, poor weak souls like Bennett will find some other legal pleasure to abuse. The only question is what happens to them when they are caught. For the average citizen smoking marijuana, they get the tender mercies of such places as the Circuit Court of Cook County where I used to prosecute real criminals. In California and elsewhere, they get both the Clinton and Bush justice departments prosecuting as felons sick people acting legally under state law.
Naturally, Bennett opposes medical-cannabis initiatives. In a 2001 Wall Street Journal essay he dismissed them “as little more than thinly veiled legalization efforts.” So much for his compassion for the suffering of others, not to mention his ability to make morally relevant distinctions. Here is where Kurtz’s defense of Bennett based on positive law unravels completely. In what universe does opposition to medical cannabis under sanction of state law and subject to state regulation create even close to the social harms caused by legal gambling? But Bennett is not interested in such nuances. He disregards the judgment of the electorate of at least eight states who voted to allow this practice. He knows better than the voters. Just ask him. He advocates punishing sick people and denying them access to physician-recommended medical cannabis just so other people do not get high.
Frankly, I just do not see the virtue in this position, much less the compassion Kurtz and Frum show Bennett, who has only to withstand a bit of the verbal abuse he dishes so well. All this is why some libertarians think this latest admission of Bennett’s vices significant and worthy of criticism, not whitewash. Oh, Bennett gets to stay in town as long as he likes. He’ll be back on the lecture circuit soon enough. Let’s hope, though, that he refrains from writing a new book about his terrible experiences at the blackjack tables. How long do you think it will take for him to join the new crusade (already in progress) to prohibit gambling and to throw people in jail in the future for what he did in his immediate past? Anyone taking bets?
— Randy Barnett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor at the Boston University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Cato Institute. He is the author of The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law. His new book, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, will be published this fall by Princeton University Press.