War & Peace Quote by Milton Friedman

Friedman’s genius here is that he doesn’t argue about drugs first; he argues about the country you become when you try to police them into extinction. “Armed camp” is a deliberately martial image, collapsing the distance between domestic policy and wartime footing. It frames the drug war as a kind of permanent mobilization, where suspicion becomes civic infrastructure and the state learns to treat its own people as potential enemy combatants.

The line is built as a moral escalation: from the aesthetics of militarization (“armed camp”), to the human toll (“jails filled with casual drug users”), to the institutional corrosion (“an army of enforcers”). That last phrase is the tell. Friedman isn’t only worried about punishment; he’s worried about a self-interested enforcement class that grows with the problem it claims to solve. The subtext is classic public-choice skepticism: once you create budgets, agencies, careers, and political points around prohibition, you guarantee pressure to expand surveillance and lower the evidentiary bar.

“Empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence” lands as both civil libertarian warning and constitutional critique. It evokes stop-and-frisk logic, no-knock raids, asset forfeiture, and the ways “probable cause” can be culturally redefined when policymakers feel panicked. Context matters: Friedman was a free-market economist, but this is less a market brief than a legitimacy brief. He’s telling “friends of freedom” that the real danger isn’t intoxication; it’s the normalization of coercion in everyday life, sold as virtue.