George Will has a column on why legalizing pot is a bad idea. I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to.

First, because I already agree with his basic premise. And two, because the reason I don’t want pot legalized has nothing to do with fancy arguments and everything to do with petty personal prejudices.

I wager that’s the reason many people believe what they believe, too.

Yesterday I got an invitation for a far-away event with Yaron Brook, the new public face of Objectivism. I can’t go but I’d like to. Ever since Brook started appearing on Fox News, my sympathy for libertarianism/Objectivism has increased fivefold. Why?

Well, he does present compelling arguments much of the time.

But mostly it’s because he doesn’t seem like a complete jackass.

Most libertarians I’ve met are twitchy overgrown adolescents who are one step up from Trekkers on the appealing personality scale. They are curt, bitchy, brittle and huffy. When you’re around a libertarian, it’s always Thanksgiving dinner and they’re the teenaged cousin with the giant anime collection who’s read one book too few and stays coiled in his chair, waiting to blurt out some “shocking” comment he thinks is ahead of its time but is actually two hundred years old, in a boorish, loudmouth Penn Gillette way.

I just don’t like them. They bug me.

Brook doesn’t seem to be these things in public, and that’s half of why his message is getting across. Whatever the Ayn Rand Center is paying him isn’t enough.

Which brings me back to pot. I quite simply have a recovering alcoholic’s inante snobbery about other people’s substance abuse; “Well, at least I was never hooked on illegal stuff!” It makes no sense. Neither does much of life as we know it.