An abortion dilemma?

Jane has become pregnant and wants an abortion, which is perfectly legal. She goes to her doctor and he says he will not treat her because he is ethically opposed to abortion.

Jill is becoming sexually active and wants to use birth control pills. Her doctor prescribes them for her, but when she goes to the pharmacy, the pharmacist refuses to fill her prescription because he is also ethically opposed.

If you’re reading LR, there’s a decent chance you’re pro-choice as I am, and the actions of the doctor and pharmacist above are probably appalling. The question is, what do we do about it?

If you’ve read LR more than once before, you should already know the answer. Say it with me…..

Nothing!

That’s absolutely right. Without consistent ideology, we don’t really have anything. Being a libertarian – or simply being an ethical human being – is all about abstaining from the use of force to get others to live how you want them to live. If we force the doctor to give girls abortions, then we have enslaved that doctor. If we force the pharmacist to fill all prescriptions, we have enslaved that pharmacist.

Choice is the golden egg that life has wrought humanity. We must protect it at all costs.

Revolt avoided this time around

A time for revolt

That is an article I wrote over a year outlining the need for a revolt against our government in the unlikely event elections were not held on this day. I’m glad to see that things never got that bad and some degree of order and sanity is still intact. Obviously, that’s not enough in and of itself. From here we must continue the pursuit of liberty.

Campaign for Liberty

Let’s keep marriage the way it’s supposed to be

Marriage, in it’s most classical sense, is the joining together of a well-to-do man and a lovely young woman. Man has money, girl has beauty, and a transaction is made. The man gets exclusive rights to a fertile vagina, and the woman is taken care of and financially secured.

What’s blasphemous today is all these beautiful young women marrying men with no money. This has got to be stopped. The ideal couple is, and always will be, a 20 year old full chested young girl to a 60 year old white man. We don’t want our nation’s children being raised by poor people, do we?

We, the people of the State of California, have spoken by passing Proposition 8 and defining marriage to be between a man and a woman. This is a great step toward maintaining its sanctity and denying rights to those who have no business claiming them. Now it’s time to take the next logical step and allow marriages of only 18-25 year old girls to white men 60 and older with 6 figure net worths. Only by denying rights to all the “new age” hippies can we achieve a truly moral society.

Free Market Government

Link – Dealing with Police

Getting it right

“They should FIRE Bernanke and Paulson, and have people like Peter [Schiff] on the helm of US economy.”

The above is a response I read to this video of Peter Schiff dispensing his usual free market based economic wisodom. I felt this worth a comment because it’s important to not simply recognize who is speaking with logic, but to get the whole picture right.

What’s wrong with that quote is the idea that someone should be “at the the helm of the US economy.” The logic that makes Peter Schiff’s words ring so true is based on markets doing what markets do: setting prices and exchanging goods based on supply and demand. The idea of free market by definition shuns leadership (dictatorship) by some individual or set of individuals.

So, while I see little wrong with firing Bernanke and Paulson, let’s remember to get it right – we don’t need Bernanke, Paulson, Peter Schiff, or anyone running the economy – markets and the players in those markets can handle themselves.

A bailout would be unethical

I’ve already posted on the logic of why a federal bailout of wall street firms is a terrible idea economically. That should seem obvious to anyone. Government management of economic matters only ever does one thing: artificially affects prices. Printing money inflates the system artificially and drives up prices of everything. Using the Fed to set low interest rates artificially drives down the price of money (more precisely, the price of debt). Purchasing insolvent “illiquid” assets drives up the prices on those assets in the sense that it keeps them from falling down to a level where the market would actually be interested in purchasing.

Artificial pressures on prices are unfair and unethical to the players in the economic system. They always result in bad investment, because goods are being traded for something other than a real market value. An accumulation of bad investment always ultimately results in an economic bubble that must burst to correct itself. That is the nature of economic systems – people must pay the price for poor investment.

Just as much as the initial government pressures that influenced and supported poor investment were unfair to the market, so too is the action of propping up that failed system with an artificial bailout. This prevents the market from draining the bubble, as needs to happen, and course-correcting so that prices and investments can return to a sound state.

In addition to all this economic logic, there is one overriding reason why bailing out ailing investment firms with federal money is completely and entirely unethical, and it has nothing to do with whether doing so will fail or succeed. The simple fact is that the mob (some people call it government) has no right to decide that it needs $3000 dollars of my money (probably more than that, but a rough estimate based on the taxes I pay and the budget for the bailout) to help some private companies that have nothing to do with me, and do this without my consent.

If the bailout plan passes congress and I attempt to withhold $3000 of my tax money, men with guns will certainly come for me and throw me in prison. That is insane! Our people must wake up and recognize that there is an ethical element to government and how it spends its money and how it takes money from the people that cannot simply be ignored. Just because we have the infrastructure in place to take money from citizens whenever we want and spend it on whatever we want does not make it right.

Government should be allowed to collect some taxes and spend them on courts, transportation, non-aggressive defense, and other matters of reasonable infrastructure. The mob cannot take my money just because it paternalistically thinks it knows how to spend it to help me better than I can spend it to help myself. That is truly insanity.

Intervention is the problem – not the solution

What Iran crisis?

If citizens of the United States have the right to keep and bear arms, why should the member states of the world not have the right to keep a military? Nobody spends more on their military forces than the United States, and somehow we like to act as though it’s wrong for someone like Iran to develop strength as well. The idea of nuclear non-proliferation is as insanely unfair as saying that anyone who hasn’t yet gotten broadband internet should never be allowed to have it. Nothing like setting the rules expressly against those who are already behind.

I titled this post after reading an article that asked the question of how the US should deal with the “Iran crisis.” The thought of Iran as somehow posing a crisis situation for our country belies a disturbing reality existing in the political thinking of the United States. How can we view a nation as presenting to us a crisis when they have done nothing to either us or anyone else, and they have not threatened to take any aggressive action toward us or anyone else.

Our invasion of Iraq was unfounded enough, but at least they had something to be framed as a history of aggression, even if that history was more than a decade old when we decided we must destroy them.

The way we treat other countries both reflects our current attitudes toward individual rights and inevitably shapes the evolution of those attitudes into the future. If we view Iran as a problem when they have not even done anything to hurt any other country, then what stops us from passing more and more laws to criminalize people haven’t hurt anyone else? The war on drugs has seen enough innocent people just trying to live their own lives put behind bars. If we continue down this path, we are sure to see more of the same.

My question remains, in the end, what Iran crisis?

Should opposite-sex marriage be legal?

Same-sex marriage is up there on the list of current hot political topics. If the legality of same sex marriages can be questioned, why does nobody ever question the legality of opposite-sex marriages? This seems especially weird since our culture spends a great deal of effort trying to ensure that children and teens of the opposite sex never sleep in the same place, but once they hit the 20s, we change gears and do whatever we can to prevent those of the same sex bedding together. That’s just plain weird.

I digress, though. The real issue is about rights (i.e. special privileges) given to married couples by the government. For whatever reason, there is a large group of the population that is concerned with giving these same special privileges to couples of the same sex. I think I have to agree. We should not be giving out special privileges to same-sex couples. Just the same, though, we shouldn’t be giving special privileges to opposite sex couples.

The entire idea of marriage rights in the first place is discriminatory bullshit. It enacts legal favors to those who marry, which as a consequence discriminates the very ugly, the severely handicapped, and those who are just really bad at relationships. More than that, it discriminates against those who simply choose not to marry. Why should the class of married people have any rights not conferred to the class of unmarried?

As far as rights of joint ownership and property transfer following a death, and anything related to that, there’s no need for marriage for people to enjoy these rights. Two people (or even three or four!) can form any private contract they wish. Whatever contract people wish to form should then be honored by the courts and the government.

Same-sex marriage is not the issue. Marriage is the issue. The word marriage should mean nothing to the government, and the people can go about their business.

The Non-Aggression Principle

The foundation of liberty theory, to me, is very simple: everyone should be able to do whatever they wish so long as it does not infringe on others’ right to do the same. This is sometimes further simplified to “live and let live.”

Doesn’t that sound beautiful? You don’t tell me what to do, and I won’t tell you what to do! What I definitely won’t do is send men with guns after you to systematically extract a large portion of your earnings throughout your life and spend that money on whatever I wish.

I talk about rights a lot and how I believe in people’s rights, but at the same time I speak out against universal healthcare, something that some people label as a right. So, what gives? How do we decide what’s a right and what’s not? 

I prefer to go a little different direction than answering that question directly, and instead ask, how do we determine what rights are worth while, and what ones are not?

The key to understanding this and how we can all live freely in a non-aggressive fashion is dividing rights into two categories: negative rights (what I like to call liberties) and positive rights. Don’t be alarmed by the adjective – negative does not mean bad in this case.

Positive rights are those rights which require something from someone else in order for you to claim them. For example, if it were decided that every child had a right to have a laptop, then that would require people to build those laptops and people to pay for those laptops. Positive rights can be considered enslavement rights because they must enslave some people in order to provide for others. In the case of the laptops, the people who build laptops could possibly be considered enslaved because they must build those for the children to have them. More realistically, though, it’s the entire population that is enslaved to provide for the children, because it’s their money that is siphoned through taxes to pay for the laptops. That means a certain portion of each person’s work is enslaved service to purchase those laptops. 

Universal healthcare falls within this same category. If everyone is entitled to it, that mean all of us, regardless of our needs, wants, or beliefs relating to medical care, would be forced to give of our income to support the medical care of others. Doctors would be enslaved to treat anyone and everyone – a medical professional loses all rights to say no, and their skills are used against them as they are made slaves to society’s will.

Negative rights (liberties) on the other hand, are those rights that require nothing from anyone else to be utilized – you only need people to not get in your way or prevent you from exercising the rights. Liberties are great, because it is easy to see that they are natural and engrained in human existence. To take away another’s liberties is unethical – who has the right to take away another person’s liberties when that person has done nothing to them? Liberties can include things as simple as the right to run. We all have the ability to run by virtue of being human. All we need to exercise this right is to do it and not have someone tell us we cannot.

Owning a gun is another example of a negative right, or a liberty. Property ownership is a pretty natural thing, and all a person needs to be able to keep a gun is to go buy one and not have the government prevent them from having it (naturally, if the government chose to intervene, they would do so with guns of their own in support – mobs are great).

The truly important concept with positive and negative rights is the understanding that in a society, the existence of high amounts of positive rights and high amounts of negative rights are inversely correlated. That is, the more negative rights you have, the fewer positive ones you have, and vice versa. This is easy to see when we realize that positive rights enslave people, and people who are enslaved lack liberties. Enslavement through positive rights like universal healthcare is undeniably an uncalled for aggression of the mob government over those people who want no part of such a system.

If we could all live and let live, nobody would have to take from me to fill their own desires, but the mob government feels it has the ability to do that, and since they have lots of guns on their side, the reality is they probably can…. I just wish I had a say in my own life. Slavery sucks.