Month: December 2022

24 December 2022

correspondent Gommil Jelug points out that while “many people argue for freedom [and decry] safety as a value, any person of reason has those they wish to protect,” and that to ignore “the value of safety is foolish,” and perhaps “hypocritical.”

Of course, every rational person values both safety and liberty. However, we will pit those values against each other with every thought and act. “If it saves just one life” is a contemptible lie, and any thinking person sees right through it. Very few parents build cinder block walls around their front yards to insure against automobiles running into their yards. They have placed the costs of construction and subsequent devaluation of their property against the lives of their children. They regularly put their own (and others’) lives at risk every time they drive down to the QuikkStopp for a six-pack of Coors Slight or a fist full of lottery tickets.

Ridiculing people who pretend that liberty and safety are not in conflict, or who pretend that their hyper-vigilance isn’t dangerously counter-productive, is both logical and coherent. Just not very generous to the mentally deficient.

Jelug adds that one of the (often prohibitive) costs to protecting their children from errant traffic and other dangers are institutionalized zoning and housing authority ordinances, once again revealing an opportunity for libertarian solutions.

15 December 2022

Suction, coldness, darkness, centrifugal force, and states’ rights have one very important thing in common. They don’t actually exist. They are all convenient constructs that help to simplify the analysis and application of natural or social phenomena. “Suction” refers to a pressure differential; vacuums don’t suck, higher pressure pushes. Coldness and darkness respectively are simply the absence of heat or light, measurable physical phenomena, and centrifugal force is just an easier way of understanding the effect of constantly changing momenta.

A moral theory of rights denies the existence of a state having rights, as its existence is predicated on usurping the rights of individual actors, and only individual actors can have rights. Some may argue that rights themselves also don’t exist, and their argument has merit. Rights are an emergent property of (so far) human intelligence. Just as Kepler and Copernicus could wring a coherent understanding of astronomy from the observations of ancient astrologers, and Priestly and Lavoisier could craft chemistry from the bones of alchemy, so too could secular ethicists divine a theory of rights from our mystical forebears. As briefly as bearable, I would define rights as the reciprocal protocols of expectations shown to result in the greatest measure of prosperity, longevity, and liberty to human societies. Reciprocity, of course, is essential. We clearly do not respect the chicken’s “right to life,” any more than said chicken respects the rights of the bugs that it eats. But when a person violates the rights of a person, he has demonstrated his abandonment of the protection of rights. He has surrendered his rights through his own misbehavior. Boiling it down further, some might equate rights with the most basic set of kindergarten rules: Don’t hit people and don’t take their stuff. Refining that thick syrup into finer crystal, I would just say: No Trespassing.

“States’ Rights” are the powers retained within a confederation or a compact, which is the voluntary agreement between states to delegate some powers to a confederate or constitutional body. Within the context of their agreement only do states’ rights actually exist. They are constructs designed to simplify our understanding of federal relations. No sensible libertarian would ever suggest that a state has rights, but an honest reader of the Constitution will see that through their ratification of federal union, states assert and retain their prior authorities.