Like so many politicians from both parties, Joe Biden and his family have figured out how to personally profit from big government (one of the many reasons why Washington is a “wretched hive of scum and villainy“).
Though I’ll be the first to admit that influence-peddling usually is immoral rather than illegal, so I like to focus on the real problem – which is a big government.
If the public sector didn’t have so much power, people would have much less incentive to give buckets of money to people like Hunter Biden.
Speaking of the President’s son, he’s currently on trial. Given my disdain for him and his family, you might think I’m cheering for a conviction.
But that’s not the case. Jacob Sullum’s column in Reason summarizes my skepticism.
A federal jury in Delaware today began hearing the gun case against Hunter Biden, which alleges that he committed three crimes when he bought a revolver in October 2018. …As a matter of statutory law, the case against Biden is straightforward. He has publicly admitted that he was regularly smoking crack cocaine around the time he bought the gun… A conviction seems almost certain. …The law assumes that every illegal drug user who possesses a gun is ipso facto a public menace, regardless of how he actually behaves. That assumption, several federal courts have ruled in cases involving marijuana users, is inconsistent with the Second Amendment. …Judging from survey data on drug use and gun ownership, something like 20 million Americans are committing that felony right now. The Justice Department prosecutes only a minuscule percentage of those potential defendants. That is partly because such cases are not a high priority, which tells you something about the logic of treating this offense as a felony that is currently punishable by up to 15 years in prison (thanks to legislation that Biden’s father signed in 2022). …The haphazard, wildly uneven enforcement of this widely flouted statute, which criminalizes conduct that violates no one’s rights, would be troubling even if it did not arbitrarily strip people of their Second Amendment rights.
That last sentence is key.
Hunter Biden may not be a good person, but he wasn’t impinging on anyone else’s liberty by owning a gun or doing drugs.
To emphasize that point, here’s the subtitle of Sullum’s column, with the relevant four words highlighted.
By the way, I’m not being partisan for Democrats.
The same principle applies to the New York case in which Trump was accused of getting a loan by overstating the value of his collateral.
If that’s a crime, then millions of other Americans also are guilty.
But, more important, the lender surely did its own assessment and due diligence. Moreover, Trump paid back the loan. There were no victims. Nobody’s rights were violated.
Which is why I’ll conclude with a plug for libertarianism. It doesn’t matter that Hunter Biden and Donald Trump are flawed human beings. What matters is whether they do things that violate the rights of others.
If and when that happens, that’s when law enforcement should get involved. Until that time, the government should leave them alone.
Dan Mitchell is co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and Chairman of the Board. He is an expert in international tax competition and supply-side tax policy.
