".... people's opinions on this issue are so deeply and fervently..."

".... people's opinions on this issue are so deeply and fervently held that is can be very difficult to persuade them to revisit the evidence  dispassionately. 

But revisit it we must. We seriously mistake the function of government if we think its job is to regulate bad habits or supplant the role of all those subsidiary bodies in society that have responsibility for forming our moral character. Our misplaced confidence in government has once again had exceedingly unpleasant results. 

"A barrage of research and opinion," writes economist Dan Klein, "has pounded [the drug war] for being the cause of increased street crime, gang activity, drug adulteration, police corruption, congested courts and overcrowded jails. Drug prohibition creates a black-market combat zone that society cannot control."

The drug war has wrought particular devastation in minority neighborhoods, as decent parents find themselves consistently undermined when they try to teach good values to their children. When the lucrative profits from black market in drugs make drug dealers the most ostentatiously prosperous sector of society, it is much more difficult for parents to persuade their children to shun those profits and pursue a much less remunerative, if more honorable, line of work. Putting an end to the federal drug war would immediately pull the rug out from under the drug lords who have unleashed a reign of terror over our cities. 
...
The conservative economist Thomas Sowell finds the whole thing more utopian than conservative: "What would make still more sense [than the current policy] would be to admit that we are not God, that we cannot live other people's lives or save people who don't want to be saved, and to take the profits out of drugs by decriminalizing them. That is what destroyed the bootleggers' gangs after Prohibition was repealed. 
....
What is more, the law cannot make a wicked person virtuous. The law is simply incompetent here. What the law can do is provide the peace and order within which men can conduct their affairs. We ought not to shirk our own responsibility by looking to politicians- who are not exactly known for living beyond more reproach themselves - to carry out so important a function. 

When you actually study the beginnings of the federal war on drugs, you uncover a history of lies, bigotry, and ignorance so extensive it will leave you speechless." -Pages 125-127  of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Some people believe that being pro-choice is being on the..."

"Some people believe that being pro-choice is being on the side of freedom.  I've never understood how an act of violence, killing a human being, albeit a small one in a special place, is portrayed as a precious right.  To speak only of the mother's cost in carrying a baby to term ignores all thought of any legal rights of the unborn.  I believe that the moral consequence of cavalierly accepting abortion diminishes the value of all life. 

It is now widely accepted that there's a constitutional right to abort a human fetus.  Of course, the Constitution says nothing about abortion, murder, manslaughter, or any other acts of violence.  There are only four crimes listed in the Constitution:  counterfeiting, piracy, treason, and slavery.  Criminal and civil laws were deliberately left to the states.  It's a giant leap for the federal courts to declare abortion a constitutional right and overrule all state laws regulating the procedure.  If anything, the federal government has a responsibility to protect life- not grant permission to destroy it.
....
Almost all regulations by the federal government to protect us from ourselves (laws against smoking, bans on narcotics, and mandatory seat belts, for example) are readily supported by the left/liberals who demand "choice." Of course, to the pro-choice group, the precious choice we debate is limited to the mother and not to the unborn.

The fact is that the fetus has legal rights - inheritance, a right not to be injured or aborted by unwise medical treatment, violence, or accidents.  Ignoring these rights is arbitrary and places relative rights on a small, living human being.  The only issue that should be debated is the moral one: whether or not a fetus has any right to life.  Scientifically, there's no debate over whether the fetus is alive and human - if not killed, it matures into an adult human being.  It is that simple.  So the time line of when we consider a fetus "human" is arbitrary after conception, in my mind." -Pages 1-3 of Liberty Defined

"An argument we hear even now is that a hundred years ago..."

"An argument we hear even now is that a hundred years ago, when the federal government was far smaller than it is today, people were much poorer and worked in less desirable conditions, while today, with a much larger federal government and far more regulation in place, people are much more prosperous.  This is a classic case of the post hoc, ergo proper hoc fallacy.  This fallacy is committed whenever we carelessly assume that because outcome B occurred after action A, then B was caused by A.  If people are more prosperous today, that must be because government saved them from the ravages of the free market. 

But that is nonsense.  Of course people were less prosperous a hundred years ago, but not for the reason fashionable opinion assumes.  Compared to today, the American economy was starved for capital.  The economy's productive capacity was miniscule by today's standards, and therefore very few goods per capita could be produced.  The vast bulk of the population had to make do with much less than we take for granted today because so little could be produced.  All the laws and regulations in the world cannot overcome constraints imposed by reality itself.  No matter how much we tax the rich to redistribute the wealth, in a capital-starved economy there is an extremely limited amount of wealth to redistribute. 

The only way to increase everyone's standard of living is by increasing the amount of capital per worker.  Additional capital makes workers more productive, which means they can produce more goods than before. When our economy becomes physically capable of producing vastly more goods, their abundance makes them more affordable in terms of dollars (if the Federal Reserve isn't inflating the money supply).  Soaking the rich works for only so long:  the rich eventually wise up and decide to hide their income, move away or stop working so much.  But investing in capital makes everyone better off.  It is the only way we can all become wealthier.  We are wealthier today because our economy is physically capable of producing so much more at far lower costs.  And that's why, just from a practical point of view, it is foolish to levy taxes along any step of this process, because doing so sabotages the only way wealth can be created for everyone."  -Pages 93 & 94 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Americans have been given the impression that "regulation"..."

"Americans have been given the impression that "regulation" is always a good thing, and that anyone who speaks of lessening the regulatory burden is an antisocial ogre who would sacrifice safety and human well-being for the sake of economic efficiency. 
....
The real history of regulation is not so straightforward.  Businesses have often called for regulation themselves, hopeful that their smaller competitors will have a more difficult time meeting regulatory demands.  Special interests have helped to impose utterly senseless regulations that impose crushing burdens on private enterprise- far out of proportion to any benefit they are alleged to bring- but since those interests bear none of these burdens themselves, it costs them nothing to advocate them." -Page 91 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"The story behind the creation of the HMOs is a classic..."

"The story behind the creation of the HMOs is a classic illustration of what economist Ludwig von Mises once said: government interventions create unintended consequences that lead to calls for further investigation, and so on into a destructive spiral of more and more government control. During the early 1970s, Congress embraced HMOs in order to address concerns about rising health care costs. But it was Congress itself that had caused health care costs to spiral by removing control over the health care dollar from so many consumers in the 1960s, and thus eliminating any incentive to pay attention to costs when selecting health care. Now, Congress wants to intervene yet again to address problems caused by HMOs, the product of still earlier interventions.

Now the HMO's are all but universally unpopular, the very politicians who brought them to us are joining the bandwagon to denounce them, hoping the American people will forget, or never be told, that the federal government itself virtually mandated HMOs in the first place.

Consumer complaints about insurers and HMOs compel politicians to draft new laws and more regulations to curry voter favor. More regulations breed more costs, limiting more choices, causing more anguish- and the cycle continues.

The most obvious way to break this cycle is to get the government out of the business of meddling in health care, which was far more affordable and accessible before government got involved. Short of that, and more politically feasible in the immediate run, is to allow consumers and their doctors to pull themselves out of the system through medical savings accounts. Under this system, consumers could save pretax dollars in special accounts. Those dollars would be used to pay for health care expenses, with patients negotiating directly with the physicians of t heir choice for the care they choose, without regard for HMO rules or a bureaucrat's decision. The incentive for the physician is that he gets paid as the service is rendered, rather than having to wait months for an HMO or insurance provider's billing cycle.

With the cash for the MSAs coming from pretax dollars, most Americans could afford deposits that would cover routine expenses that families experience in a year. Insurance would tend to return to its normal function of providing for large-scale, unanticipated occurrences, and would become far more affordable." - Pages 85-89 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Just about everyone is unhappy with the health care system..."

"Just about everyone is unhappy with the health care system we now have, a system some people wrongly blame on the free market. To the contrary, our system is shot through with government intervention, regulation, mandates, and other distortions that have put us in this unenviable situation.

It is easy to forget that for decades the United States had a health care system that was the envy of the world. We had the finest doctors and hospitals, patients received high-quality, affordable medical care, and thousands of privately funded charities provided health services for the poor. I worked in an emergency room where nobody was turned away for lack of funds. People had insurance policies for serious health problems but paid cash for routine doctor visits. That makes sense: insurance is intended to protect against unforeseen and catastrophic events like fire, floods or grave illness. Insurance, in short, is suppose to measure risk. It has nothing to do with that now. Something has obviously gone wrong with the system when we need insurance for routine visits and checkups, which are entirely predictable parts of our lives. " -Page 86 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"In the days before Medicare and Medicaid...."

"In the days before Medicare and Medicaid, for instance, the poor and elderly were admitted to hospitals at about the same rate they are now, and receive good care. As a physician I never accepted Medicare and Medicaid money from the government, and instead offered cut-rate or free services to those who could not afford care. Before those programs came into existence, every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility toward the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm. Hardly anyone is aware of this today, since it doesn't fit into the typical, by-the-script story of government rescuing us from a predatory private sector. Laws and regulations that inflated cost of medical services and imposed unreasonable liability standards on medical professionals even when they were acting in a volunteer capacity later made offering free care cost prohibitive, but free care for the poor was common at a time when America wasn't so "governmentish" (to borrow a word from William Penn). We have lost our belief that freedom works, because we no longer have the imagination to conceive of how a free people might solve its problems without introducing threats of violence- which is what government solutions ultimately amount to."  -Page 85 of The Revolution, A Manifesto