Douthat on marijuana legalization, gambling, and luxury-libertarianism

This recent op-ed by Ross Douthat is well worth reading.  Like Charles Murray (see, for example, his Coming Apart) Douthat is sensitive to the fact that the live-and-let-live nonjudgmentalism/libertarianism of many in America's cognitive and other elites might "work" fine for those elites but is very costly to the vulnerable at the bottom -- and, increasingly, in the middle -- of America's socio-economic ladder.  Elites, as Murray noted, often make good choices in life (e.g., they don't abuse drugs, they don't overdo it at casinos, they get and stay married) but they are -- because of their politically-correct nonjudgmentalism -- don't "preach what they practice."  Rather, they preach something very different, and something that can, again, be damaging to the vulnerable.  As he concludes:

[L]iberals especially, given their anxieties about inequality, should be attuned to the way that some liberties can grease the skids for exploitation, with a revenue-hungry state partnering with the private sector to profiteer off human weakness.

This is one reason previous societies made distinctions between liberty and license that we have become loath to draw — because what seems like a harmless pleasure to the comfortable can devastate the poor and weak.