Author: Kevin

Freedom isn’t Free

I have put off commenting on the recent NYT piece by the woman who underwent “pregnancy reduction” with the exception of one comment I left at The Spoons Experience: 

That is, indeed, pretty horrifying.

But should the state mandate that she carry the triplets to term? Should our government have that power?

Should that woman be mother to three, much less one?

Spoon’s response was not unexpected:

Should the state have the power to mandate that she not murder her children?



You bet your fucking ass it should.

Well, Mike Spenis has weighed in, and said what I wanted to say.  Here’s a taste:

Unsurprisingly, the no-abortions-at-all rule seems to be the unanimous preference among those who would prevent this sort of thing in the future, and that, my friends, is what this is all about.



If you have the right to abort your pregnancies, you can do if for whatever reason you want; for a good reason, or a stupid reason, or even for no reason at all. You can do it for reasons that would horrify your neighbor, or do it for reasons that would horrify us all. That’s what choice means.

Now, replace the phrase “abort your pregnancies” with “purchase a gun” or even “home school your children” and we’re all back on the same page again.

This is part of the price of freedom. This is what choice means.

It means people get to make bad choices.  Venal choices.

Abortion is one of the topics that, like religion, comes up regularly on message boards and generates pages of debate argument.  It boils down, for people like me and Mike, as a question of “when is a fetus a person?”  When do the rights of the fetus become equal to the rights of the woman carrying it?  For Spoons, it’s apparently at conception.  For me, it’s somewhere during the second trimester, so to err on the side of caution I draw the line at 12 weeks.  After that, it becomes a question of medical necessity, and that’s all.

I look forward to the day when technology allows us to fertilize and carry embryos to term outside the human body, to extract a fetus and place it in a uterine replicator.  The question of abortion will become moot.  But until then abortion will continue, legal or not, and the decision to abort will remain often a venal one.

Freedom has costs.  This is one of them. 

 

I’m Saving This One for Posterity

 

Rich Lowry in a recent National Review Online column lays it all on the table:

W.’s Double Binds  He can’t win — even if he does!

 

Sometimes a political figure becomes so hated that he can’t do anything right in the eyes of his enemies. President Bush has achieved this rare and exalted status. His critics are so blinded by animus that the internal consistency of their attacks on him no longer matters. For them, Bush is the double-bind president.

 

If he stumbles over his words, he is an embarrassing idiot. If he manages to cut taxes or wage a war against Saddam Hussein with bipartisan support, he is a manipulative genius.

If he hasn’t been able to capture Osama bin Laden, he is endangering U.S. security. If he catches bin Laden, it is only a ploy to influence the elections.

If he ignores U.N. resolutions, he is a dangerous unilateralist. If he takes U.N. resolutions on Iraq seriously, he is a dangerous unilateralist. If he doesn’t get France to agree to his Iraq policy, he is ignoring important international actors. If he supports multiparty talks on North Korea, he is not doing enough to ignore important international actors.

If he bombed Iraq, he should have bombed Saudi Arabia instead, and if he had bombed Saudi Arabia, he should have bombed Iran, and if he had bombed all three, he shouldn’t have bombed anyone at all. If he imposes a U.S. occupation on Iraq, he is fomenting Iraqi resistance by making the United States seem an imperial power. If he ends the U.S. occupation, he is cutting and running.

If he warns of a terror attack, he is playing alarmist politics. If he doesn’t warn of a terror attack, he is dangerously asleep at the switch. If he says we’re safer, he’s lying, and if he doesn’t say we’re safer, he’s implicitly admitting that he has failed in his core duty as commander in chief.

If he adopts a doctrine of preemption, he is unacceptably remaking American national-security policy. If the United States suffers a terror attack on his watch, he should have preempted it. If he signs a far-reaching antiterror law, he is abridging civil liberties. If the United States suffers another terror attack on his watch, he should have had a more vigorous anti-terror law.

Bush’s economy hasn’t created new jobs. If it has created new jobs, they aren’t well-paying jobs. If they are well-paying jobs, there is still income inequality in America.

If Bush opposes a prescription-drug benefit for the elderly, he’s miserly. If he supports a prescription-drug benefit for the elderly, he’s lining the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. If he restrains government spending, he’s heartless. If he supports government spending, he’s bankrupting the nation and robbing from future generations.

If he opposes campaign-finance reform, he’s a tool of corporate interests. If he signs campaign-finance reform, he’s abridging the First Amendment rights of Michael Moore (whose ads for Fahrenheit 9/11 might run afoul of the law).

If he accuses John Kerry of flip-flopping, he is merely highlighting one of the Massachusetts senator’s strengths — his nuance and thoughtfulness. If he flip-flops on nation-building or testifying before the 9/11 commission, he proves his own ill-intentions, cluelessness, or both.

If he doesn’t admit a mistake, he is bullheaded and detached from reality. If he admits a mistake, he is damning his own governance in shocking fashion.

If he sticks with Dick Cheney, he is saddling himself with an unpopular vice president, giving Democrats who can’t wait to run against Cheney a political advantage. If he drops Cheney, he is admitting that the Democratic attacks against his vice president have hit home, thus giving Democrats who have made those charges a political advantage.

If he loses in November, the voice of the American people has spoken a devastating verdict on his presidency. If he wins, he stole the election.

That’s it precisely.

 

More on “Violent but Protective”

 

Back in June I wrote three pieces on the difference between violent and predatory, and violent but protective.  They were:

 

“(I)t’s most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can”,

 

Violence and the Social Contract, and

 

Governments, Criminals, and Dangerous Victims.

 

This topic has been a recurring theme of this blog, dating back to the beginning of it with Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection, parts I and II, and I’ve linked to other pieces on the topic as well, such as Eric S. Raymond’s The Myth of Man the Killer, and others.

 

Well, here’s another.  Back in Is the Government Responsible I quoted a friend of mine who once wrote:

The vast majority of people are good, decent “herbivores” who just wander around, harming nobody. Unfortunately, there are a small number of carnivores out there, who would prey upon the herbivores. The fact that some of the herbivores have the ability to defend themselves and others makes ALL herbivores safer, and only makes life appreciably more dangerous to the carnivores. I don’t think there is a huge amount of violence out there….but there is SOME.

 

I don’t carry guns so that I can shoot people, I carry a gun so that if somebody tries to do something violent or bad, I can put a stop to the violence. The idea is actually one of being able to bring to bear overwhelming force in the face of force, so that the first person doesn’t try to use force in the first place.

Via Mostly Cajun I found a very interesting piece based precisely on this précis:

 

On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs, by LTC Dave Grossman, USA (Ret.)

 

Excellent piece.  RTWT.

 

“May Have Some Truth”

 

SOME truth.  Gee, ya THINK?

 

Today’s edition of the Tucson Citizen has this little AP blurb on page B-1:

Bush uranium claim may have some truth

 

WASHINGTON – It was one of the first signs that the intelligence used to go to war in Iraq was wrong: The White House repudiation of 16 words in last year’s State of the Union speech that had suggested Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Africa.

Yet even as two recent reports sharply criticized prewar intelligence, they also suggested President Bush’s claim may not have been totally off-base.

A British report concluded that Bush’s statement and a similar one by Prime Minister Tony Blair were “well-founded.” In his speech, Bush had attributed the uranium claim to the British government.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report found inadequate evidence that deposed Iraqi President Saddam had been rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. It cited various reports, however, that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. Thus, although Bush cited only British evidence that was determined to have been inconclusive, other intelligence files clearly contained other inconclusive evidence of the truth of the claim.

And anybody who can access Instapundit can find every single link they’d ever need to know that it’s COMPLETELY TRUE. 

 

But bloggers aren’t journalists.

 

Riiiight.

 

Precisely

 

Another masterpiece from Allapundit:

If a Police Officer Says It, It Must Be True

 

Very shortly after I started this blog I did a transcript of an NRA piece exposing a case of a police official, in that case Sheriff Ken Jenne of Broward County, Florida, deliberately misleading a CNN reporter concerning “assault weapons.” 

 

Here’s another one.

Should gun ban be extended?

 

The federal law that prohibits the manufacture, sale and possession of semiautomatic assault weapons will expire Sept. 13 unless Congress and President Bush renew the ban.

 

However, the U.S. House of Representatives has yet to act on a bill to do so, and Congress will recess Friday until after Labor Day.

 

“I think it’s something to consider,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach, R-6th, of West Pikeland. “I want to see what a final bill would look like.”

 

One House bill would provide a straight 10-year extension of the assault weapons ban.  Another measure has been introduced that would outlaw more firearms, said Gerlach. 

 

He added that Congress could vote on the bill when lawmakers return to Washington, D.C., in September.”

 

Law enforcement feels it’s been effective,” said Gerlach, “so that’s good feedback to have.”

 

Last week, the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association passed a resolution to encourage Congress to renew the 10-year assault weapons ban that President Clinton signed into law.

 

East Pikeland Police Chief James Franciscus, who serves as Chester County Police Chiefs Association financial secretary, supports extending the ban.

 

“If the ban is lifted, people will be able to purchase fully automatic weapons, and they will be able to use those automatic weapons,” he said. ”  It could jeopardize the lives of the public or police officers or others.“

Gee, that’s what Ken Jenne implied but did not actually say.  (There’s more to the op-ed, but it’s the typical boilerplate “HORRORS!” piece.)

 

I have a question:  Should people so ignorant of the law be police chiefs?   Or, if he actually knows the law and is lying, should people willing to frighten the public with a non-existent boogeyman be in such positions of power? 

 

I think not.

 

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. – Winston Churchill

The bulk of my writing (and reading) time this last week has been occupied in an educational but otherwise fruitless discussion on the topic of the (il)legitimacy of government and the the fundamental “rightness” of anarchy (defined as “absence of a ruler,” not “chaos.”)
 
The discussion began, if you care (and if you don’t, why are you reading this?), over a piece at the group blog, No Treason concerning Al “Howlin’ Mad” Gore’s comment about “digital Brownshirts” and the reaction of many of the conservative bloggers to this calumny. That post went up June 27 and has garnered (as of this writing) 126 comments. If you’ll look below, you’ll find four posts, including one by my first guest blogger Aaron Gunn, on the same topic which have garnered (as of this writing) 77 comments. In addition to that, this conversation has inspired Francis W. Porretto to pen an essay on the topic.

Like there haven’t been enough words thrown around, I feel the urge to expand upon the theme myself, and since this is my blog and I can do what I want, so I shall.

I did a little reading around over at No Treason which, if you’re unfamiliar with the reference, is named after a treatise by Lysander Spooner. Spooner was a nineteenth century abolitionist – and a lawyer, among other things.  Spooner’s treatise was, essentially, on the illegitimacy of any government that compelled anyone by force to support it. For those who have not read it, it is available in three pieces:

Part I: No Treason
 
Part II: The Constitution

Part III: The Constitution of No Authority

Law professor Randy Barnett wrote his recent book Restoring the Lost Constitution in part because of Spooner’s treatise, and dedicates the book to Spooner and to James Madison. In the preface to it, Barnett writes:

Growing up, I was like most Americans in my reverence for the Constitution. Not until college was the first seed of doubt planted in the form of an essay by a nineteenth-century abolitionist and radical named Lysander Spooner. In his best-known work, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), Spooner argued that the Constitution of the United States was illegitimate because it was not and could never have been consented to by the people on whom it was imposed. Although as an undergraduate I found Spooner’s argument unanswerable (and I must admit so it remained until I was in my forties), the problem was largely theoretical. My mind may have doubted, but my faith remained.
 
Until I took Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. The experience was completely disillusioning, but not because of the professor, Laurence Tribe, who was an engaging and open-minded teacher. No, what disillusioned me was reading the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Throughout the semester, as we covered one constitutional clause after another, passages that sounded great to me were drained by the Court of their obviously power-constraining meanings.

I, myself have gone through a similar disillusionment. I began studying the law as it relates to the Second Amendment of the Constitution starting back about 1995, and the decisions of state, federal, and higher courts did for me what numerous Supreme Court decisions did for Prof. Barnett. (For anyone interested, Clayton Cramer’s For Defense of Themselves and the State: Legal Case Studies of the 2nd Amendment to the U. S. Constitution is an excellent compendium of the jurisprudence on this topic, though it was written as a Master’s thesis so it can be a bit dry in places. I understand Clayton has a few on hand he’s willing to sell at a reasonable price. He might even autograph them!)
 
Spooner had a similar effect on John T. Kennedy – one of the contributors to No Treason (the blog). John writes:

A little background: I’d been a liberal for most of my life. As a very young man I’d fancied myself a communist, I even carried Mao’s Little Red Book around with me for a couple of years reading it like scripture. But as I settled into making a living I embraced a more typical and pedestrian American liberalism. I felt the proper function of government was to help people. I always voted a straight democratic ticket up until 1992. Clinton was the very first liberal I couldn’t bring myself to vote for, but that was only because I didn’t trust him.
 
The launching of the Clinton administration was punctuated by the fiasco in Waco. I initially supported the government’s role at Waco, but at the same time I was haunted by the sense that something was terribly wrong with this government. Not something that could be blamed on a scoundrel like Clinton but something much deeper. I didn’t know precisely what it was but I knew I wanted a whole lot less of it. By 1994 I was gleefully cheering Republicans on in their crusade to cut back government. By 1996 it was pretty clear to me that their crusade was a scam.
 
This is about the time I was introduced to Spooner’s work.
 
I’d been thinking quite a lot about what the proper function of government was. I studied the Constitution and other works of the founding fathers to understand what they thought. The founding principle of American government was that just government required the consent of the governed. But there was a nagging question that kept coming up: Who consented to this constitution, this government? I couldn’t figure it out. I heard legal scholars describe the Constitution as a form of contract. When asked how a contract could be binding on people who had not even been born, they’d brush off the question with the assurance that an explanation of how such a contract was valid was too technical for the layman to understand.
 
But how could they consent to what they did not understand?
 
This was by no means the focus of my inquiries into the proper function of government, it was just a nagging puzzle that wouldn’t go away. I assumed the Constitution was a valid contract for reasons I didn’t yet fully understand.
 
So Lysander Spooner’s writing hit me like a truck. A big truck.
 
Spooner revealed the dirty little secret: There is no contract. The Constitution is not a contract, in substance it’s nothing like a contract and it has no morally binding force on anyone.
 
—

This didn’t instantly turn me into an anarchist, that came a little later, but it crippled me as an advocate of government. Never again could I propose any government activity without knowing that I was advocating that it be forced upon others regardless of consent.

I’ve undergone quite an epiphany myself, actually, in the ten or so years my political trek has taken. Mine has been quite recent, too, as evidenced by the four pieces I have displayed prominently on the left side of this blog, under the heading, The Courts Will Not Save Us Trilogy and The Denoument.
 
I am, however, still an “advocate of government,” unlike Mr. Kennedy et al. In comments one John Lopez and I had the following exchange:

(Lopez) That’s Barnett’s likely audience — folks who pointedly refuse to think. Barnett’s book is wonderful for folks who want to feel better about their preconceptions. And that category includes roughly, oh, 100% or so of voting conservatives, sitting around scratching their arses and wondering why Things Ain’t Whut They Used To Be. None of them want to hear that their precious Constitution, Bill Of Rights and all, is so much hot air. Their delusions are just too tender to be poked with a sharp truth. Look upthread at what started this discussion. D’ya think self-labeled “Digital Brownshirts” have *any* *ability* *at* *all* to deal with logic?
 
Not true, John. Not that the whole thing isn’t a delusion – it is. But it’s a shared delusion. Like money, it has value so long as enough people believe it has value.
 
Because if enough people lose their faith in the delusion, we devolve back to the age in which the world is only ruled by large men with weapons, and our illusions of “rights” vanish.
 
I think I’ve pegged the difference between our worldviews. You actually think that there are such things as “individual rights” that exist outside the belief systems of any culture. I don’t. But I’m all for maintaining the mass delusion, and improving it whenever possible. At a minimum I want to slow the decay of the delusion, because I think what actually happens over time is that the actions of the power hungry lead to the disillusionment of the masses, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
 
Freedom is magic, John. It works only so long as we believe.

And that is, in essence, my epiphany. Oh, the seeds have been there in the back of my mind for a long time. After all, I wrote the piece linked above there – What Is a “Right”? before I started this blog. I wrote another piece, Hoist the Black Flag! in the middle of the four pieces of “The Courts Will Not Save Us.”
 
But for me, it all boils down to Churchill’s quote at the beginning of this essay:

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.

All forms of government are coercive. There is no magic wand that will allow individuals to “protect their production” from the coercive State. Lopez and Kennedy et al. hope for one, but even they acknowledge that it doesn’t exist. I have referenced Tytler’s (probably apochryphal) piece on why democracies fail on several occasions, but the canvas of history shows that all forms of government are coercive, and all are transient. The more free, the more ephimeral. The more statist, the more brittle. The historical record indicates that the power of the individual has grown through each and every cycle of history, albeit with some horrifying conditions on the downturns. Our Constitutional Republic, flawed as it is, has produced the most free, most resilient, most powerful and most productive nation this world has yet seen. That cycle, by appearances, is closing. It may take another fifty years or another five hundred – that remains to be seen.
 
Or perhaps, just perhaps, the horse will learn to sing. Perhaps enough people will come stick their fingers in the dike, and stop it from crumbling. Perhaps enough will believe in the magic, and make the world be as it should, not as it is.
 
Because that’s the magic wand the Anarchists need to make the world work the way they want it to: A population that understands that it’s all a mass delusion – and that chooses to believe in that mass delusion with all its might.
 
But until then, the few of us who understand that it’s all a delusion and believe anyway would like the help of the ones who see the delusion, but won’t help sandbag the dike. Because the downturn promises to be very ugly, and putting it off as long as possible seems indicated.  
 

Want to See What Happens when You get a Link from U.S.S. Clueless?

 

And he gets a link from Instapundit?

Yowsa!

 

I’m FAMOUS!

 

In a roundabout fashion.  Steven Den Beste linked to the post below with the WMD eye test cartoon.  That, in itself, would be responsible for about a thousand hits over the next day or so.  However, Instapundit saw fit to link to Steven’s post, so The Smallest Minority is getting an Instalanche as well.

 

I think I’m going to need to pay the proprietor of Photobucket some more money.  My account is going to seriously abuse his bandwidth this month.

 

Kinda cool, though.