Date: 07/28/2010

Transcript

Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this legislation; it’s called “The Fair Sentencing Act”. I’d like to rename it, though. I’d like to call it “The Slightly Fairer Re-Sentencing Act” because it really makes an attempt to correct a very, very serious problem in equal justice in our systems. And that effort, I think, we should all applaud. But I would have much preferred the HR3245; I was an original co-sponsor of that along with Congressman Scott. But I think this is a typical example of trying to fix a problem that we invited upon ourselves. In economics, I adhere to the position that once you want to do good in the economy, and with all the best motivations we do things and we create new problems and then we have to go back. If you get two new problems for every intervention, then you’re constantly writing laws. For social policy I believe the same thing. It was trying to improve social policy with crack cocaine. There was no malevolence on this. It was designed to help people, especially the minorities that were using crack cocaine over powder cocaine and they thought this was terrible. And it turned out that it backfired. It actually hurt minorities, it didn’t help them. And here we’re trying to correct this disparity. And it just, to me, confirms the fact that government management, whether it’s the economy or social policy, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

When this country decided it was very dangerous to drink alcohol, and we had to stop it, back in those days in the teens of the last century, they decided in order for the government to do this, they had to amend the Constitution. Can you imagine about anybody being concerned today about what we do here and say, “We have to amend the Constitution”? Oh no, we amended it, it was a bomb, it made alcohol much more dangerous. All the drug dealers sold the alcohol and the alcohol was more concentrated and it was less pure and people died. People woke up and they repealed it. This is what is going to have that happen someday. We need to repeal the war on drugs.