With its brutal excesses and reliance on snitches and finks as informants, I don't think it's far off-kilter to describe the modern-day drug war as oddly similar to the Salem witch trials.

Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that very often have little to do with securing general happiness but instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.

Every day Big Government heaps demands and restrictions upon businesses that sink some enterprises, cause others to direct resources away from serving customers and instead toward jumping through hoops of lawyers and regulators, and prevent other operations from ever getting off the ground.

To best serve the public happiness, government shouldn't do things it cannot do well - anymore than Wal-Mart should provide goods and services that people don't like.

Markets are nimble and efficient, gathering the collective but disbursed intelligence of the economy's players and communicating up-to-the-minute realities of prices, product availability, etc. Government is typically cumbersome, plodding, and slow.

Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs, our policy against narcotics -- like any public policy -- comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.

Advocacy groups, politicians, and bureaucrats use the government to advance their private good instead of the common good.

Markets respond not to political pressures channeled through various committees, subcommittees, lobbies, and special interests but to the immediacies and exigencies of the economy - in other words, what's happening now.

Laws do not curb the lawless. After all, that's why we call them 'lawless.'

Bureaucracies typically move slowly, clumsily, and without much regard for the wants and needs of the people they supposedly serve.

Instead of doing more badly, government should focus on doing less well.

The government doesn't create wealth of its own it can only take it from some and distribute it to others or dictate particular public uses of private resources.

The more government does, the greater chance that its efforts will be tilted toward a particular group's good, instead of the common good.

Markets help people pursue their happiness more efficiently and effectively. Because they are so effective, markets provide benefits right here and right now, even while government is busy batching the protection of happiness.

Political changes and reforms do not usually favor the general populace. They benefit those who are positioned to best organize and advocate for their policies.