Free Shoes! --- Why I'm a Libertrarian
I believe that life is a gift. That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to delight. You can unwrap it like a present and gaze upon its contents in either joy or horror – depending on what you were expecting.
And dying isn’t that bad. What is the worst that can happen? Either you vanish into nothingness as the atheists suggest, or you enter into a divine cosmos of reward and punishment. Of course, for the nonbelievers there may be hell – but they don’t really believe that. So they have nothing to fear in this life! Believers know they are walking a path that leads to heaven. They have a rod and staff to comfort them along the way. So whether you’re a believer or not, death seems like a win/win situation – either you achieve nothingness or divinity.
Death may be tough for the survivors. Those left behind may weep and struggle to carry on. You, however, being dead, know nothing of it because you no longer exist. Either that or you know that your loved ones will soon be comforted by the presence whose close proximity you now enjoy.
Since dying isn’t worrisome one is free to take chances, assume risk, explore limits, and make positive or negative contributions to the world. The final consequence of death grants freedom in life and provides value to actions. Life may have been already done, a billion times over, but it’s new to me. I’m the first me that has ever done anything on this planet from the first breath of air - ever - to the first travel at speeds up to one hundred miles per hour. In fact, only those born within the past 80 years have ever sped along in an automobile or raced through the clouds in an airplane. Whoever tells you its all been done before is just someone who has temporarily run out of ideas.
If you had a pair of shoes, given to you for free, and you only had them for a short time, after which time you had to return them to the store, would you want to keep them in the closet in pristine condition or muddy them up and wear out the soles? I would want to wear them out until they were virtually unrecognizable because then I would have gotten
one over on the store. Of course the store doesn’t mind because it has insurance. That is my view on life.
The commies and neo-cons and fascists and liberals and do-gooders and universal health carers want to kill all the surprise and fun and danger and joy and pain that life has to offer. They want to beat life with an insurance policy, wrap it in a condom, and cover it in elbow pads and a helmet.
They hate the unexpected. The future unknown is their biggest enemy. They think they can make it known by controlling and ordering the present according to their big plans. But all they really do is make everyone’s life miserable. They want to bring an end to suffering but that can only be accomplished by slaying happiness. They want to rid the
world of pain by spreading a numbness that slaughters joy. They want every shoe in the closet arranged just so, by color and size, so that no poor little shoe ever has to get muddy or left out in the cold. The store owner is grumbling because everyone is holding on so desperately to last year’s model that he can barely give away the new style. He doesn’t want returns in perfect condition – they just take up storage space and clutter the way for new inventory. He’d rather you just got rid of your old shoe somewhere where he couldn’t find it!
It is your right to muddy up your shoe in whatever way you please because it is your gift from the store owner. It’s really his shoe, but he gave it to you to wear for awhile. Anyone who tries to tell you what to do with your shoe is a fool. If they try to force you to do something you don’t want to do with your shoe then you have a right to kill them! Of course, the next morning you might feel bad about it. And you might end up in a tiny shoe closet for the rest of your days. That is no way to live life! So you have to be smart about these things.
That’s why I’m a Libertarian.
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After an intense Bowie-listening experience this weekend, I found the lyrics to Saviour Machine to be appropriate to what you're saying:
"President Joe once had a dream,
The world held his hand, gave their pledge,
So he told them his scheme for a Saviour Machine.
They called it the Prayer, its answer was law,
Its logic stopped war, gave them food,
How they adored till it cried in its boredom.
'Please don't believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
or maybe a war, or I may kill you all.'"
-dommy
http://dinodinodino.wordpress.com
"History has proven time and again that the more people are forced to share, the more miserable they will be and the more they will starve."
You mean, recent history, I assume. As our aggrarian and hunter/gatherer past was all about breaking bread and living communally.
And in recent history, there are many examples of forced sharing (socialism) that work fine for the countries employing them. Not perfect, mind you. But these are countries full of happy, healthy people by all standards.
Look to the Scandanavian counties to start with.
Socialism isn't an evil, it is just a bad option for the US. We are too big and head strong and inventive in our ethos for it. We have other aspirations to fulfill.
"There's nothing wrong with helping others if it's voluntary -- however if you force people to do it against their will that's evil. "
I was listening to an evolutionary psychologist the other day, and it put an interesting framework on what we humans do in our modern world.
Do you suppose hunter gatherers "forced" members of their clan or tribe to "share" with those in the tribe who had less than they? Was this evil?
Do you suppose-- like the religious impulse-- collectivists impulses are unconscious acts granted validity by evolutionary factors? The group forcing its memebers to share obviously promoted the health of the group as a whole.
If all members who were predisposed to hoard what they had were allowed to, strife and warring within the group would be the norm, especially when one's hunger was predominate.
From this perspective, one can see that it is not, indeed, "evil" to force those in a group to "share" if it promotes the survival of the group...
>>Do you suppose-- like the religious impulse-- collectivists impulses are unconscious acts granted validity by evolutionary factors? The group forcing its memebers to share obviously promoted the health of the group as a whole.
Trust me, in your collective tribe if an able bodied hunter wasn't pulling his weight, he most definitely experienced a lot of strife. I'm sure that arguments over the distribution of collective property were actually the cause of most of the violence within groups. There must have been endless disputes about who gets what and why before the advent of private property.
The invention of private property (if it didn't exist before in your primeval utopia) has freed us from the resentment of our fellow hunters. Now that we no longer have to beg from others, we are no longer controlled by them, and guess what: where private property is respected and people are no longer forced to share, there is still plenty of food for everyone. More than enough, in fact. What about the less fortunate? They are taken care of too. As you point out, it is in our nature to have empathy for the deserving poor, who are really unable to provide for themselves.
The best way to ensure that everyone prospers is to have a system that is voluntary. History has proven time and again that the more people are forced to share, the more miserable they will be and the more they will starve.
The question isn't whether most people "believe that there is a whole class of people who cannot, without the help of the government." It doesn't matter if 99% of them feel that way. They have no right to steal from the other 1% to run their child welfare program. They are free to organize a private charity to do so.
"If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind."
John Stuart Mill
English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
Who hooooooo. I kept hearing the Locke references and I was waiting for good ol' Mill to make an appearance - he is one of my personal fav's.
Gosh Claire, if you feel that strongly about helmets, I wonder what your position would be on lawn darts?
I remember playing with them as a kid at a family reunion. And nobody died. But we Irish are lucky.
So lucky in fact, that when I was annoying my parents at home as a kid, they would tell me to go "play in traffic." :)
Of course, I had brothers all close in age and we would terrorize each other and have all sorts of mischief. Stitches were a common thing and I seem to have turned out alright. Now i see parents so overly protective of their children I want to trip the kids one time just so they know what its like to have a scab. (on their shins because the elbow and knee pads and helmets and protective goggles cover everything else) It would shatter their reality. And do them some good before they get into Jr High.
But i dont have kids so my position is subject to change.
I was making a lame attempt to address one of Scott's points (he favors helmet laws) by suggesting that since there are laws protecting children from parental abuse and neglect already, that any other specific law aimed at protecting children is redundant and intrusive. But I acknowledged a while ago that whether or not a child wears a helmet is not the government's business and falls well within the range of decisions that should be left up to parents (unlike the decision of whether or not to kill or willfully harm your kids, which it is no one's right to do to anyone else)
Were the state to try and prevent me from raising my kids the way I see fit, I think I would have to either resign myself to breaking the law, or else find another place to live. I let my kids climb trees, and do other things some parents don't allow their kids to do, because I don't want them to grow up to be fearful. People who never take risks (or who worry excessively about taking risks-- it is virtually impossible to get through a normal day without taking some risk) end up wasting their lives being afraid, and never doing the things that would have made them happy.
Which was Adam's point to begin with. If Scott hadn't responded with the helmet objection, and if Adam hadn't made those remarks about death not being so bad, I would not have felt compelled to respond, because I actually agree with the idea that fear gets in the way of living. What I was concerned about was the reaction of socialists and social conservatives who would point to this article and say "you see? People just can't wait to behave irresponsibly and mess themselves up, so the state must step in to prevent them from doing so." This is such a pervasive attitude, which has been used to justify drug prohibition, all kinds of entitlement programs, helmet laws, curfews for minors, and a host of other intrusive regulations. I think we need to get the message across that people are no more likely to engage in self-destructive and immoral behavior if we do away with all these things. In my experience, it is futile to try to convince nanny-statists that liberty is more important than security, and a waste of time to try to convince social conservatives that liberty is more important than social order.
>>They have no right to steal from the other 1% to run their child welfare program.
Yes, well unfortunately most of my neighbors and colleagues also feel very virtuous about forcing "rich people" to redistribute their wealth. Half of their motivation for supporting government extortion is about wanting to help the poor, and half of it is about wanting to hurt the rich.
Your pleas for morality are likely to fall on deaf ears over here. Of course you are absolutely right about our rights, but when I discuss this with my neighbors I find it more constructive to point out how redistribution ends up harming the poor, and how taxation actually hurts the rich much less than it hurts everyone else.
"Scott, do you agree with all this, or do you still think the state has no right to interfere with the wishes of the community?"
Here is the true crux of the government argument-- WHERE the authority lies for all things governmental.
Tom wants a federal dictatorial system, where the federal government dictates only very special rules that all must follow. After that, I am not sure what he wants.
Since we are a collection of communities, living in states, gathered into a union known as the United States, then sure, there should be a basic framework for federal jurisdiction.
But we have that, and it is called the Constitution.
IF we would follow it, and MAKE the federal government live within its original mandate, you would have no complaints from me.
I joined in on the Ron Paul movement from the liberal side, because I was tired and ashamed of what the federal government was doing all around.
From stepping into California Pot clinics to keeping soldiers in Okinawa, I could see what they had become (not only that, but what we had allowed them to become and are still allowing)...
Granting the federal government the final say in laws has made them the focal point of law making. That's the ding dang deelio.
They should not be the focal point. Your town, your city, your county should be. After that, your state (for things only a state can do like driver's licenses).
That is my position and will be my position. Invert the power structure.
"What if a community within the U.S. decides to adopt Islamic Shariah law for itself? Is that okay with you?"
What if Mars crashed into Saturn?
What if green bicycles were everywhere?
What if basketballs were filled with helium?
For someone hell bent on Libertarian ideals, you sure want to grant ultimate authority to "the state".
Humans will always screw up. Better a screw up only affect one community than the whole nation...
Besides, if one community gets too weird, it will be shunned by neighboring communities.
>>For someone hell bent on Libertarian ideals, you sure want to grant ultimate authority to "the state".
Nope, but I do want to grant the state just this one single authority: to guarantee the liberty of it's citizens.
>>What if Mars crashed into Saturn?
Shariah law may not be an issue here yet, but the clash of cultures is becoming increasingly problematic in some European countries in areas where there are large majority Islamic communities.
What about certain Mormon sects where 15 year old girls have been forced to marry old geezers? If the community is okay with that, is that okay with you? I think practices that involve coercion should be illegal, regardless of what any particular community decides is right for them.
Just wanted to add that some communities in Europe are very keen to rule themselves by Sharia law, and the state is the only thing standing in their way.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1535478/Sharia-law-is-spreading-a...
If you were British, would you want Sharia law to be used as an alternative to British law in some British communities? Isn't preventing this kind of think exactly what the state is for?
coming!!! Be afraid!! Be very afraid!!!!
If the local community wants to pass laws that are consistent with Sharia law, the litmus test becomes whether each individual law violates the constitution or Bill of Rights either nationally or for that province - or whatever the equivalent is in England. If the laws are constitutional and don't violate the rights of the citizens, they can be passed.
Here in the U.S., each state has a constitution and even if laws were passed by a majority in the legislature they would still be open to challenge for constitutionality (if we still worried about that stuff).
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
>>"If the local community wants to pass laws that are consistent with Sharia law, the litmus test becomes whether each individual law violates the constitution or Bill of Rights either nationally or for that province - or whatever the equivalent is in England. If the laws are constitutional and don't violate the rights of the citizens, they can be passed."
So a community can never pass a law that says that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man's in court, or a law that says that converting away from Islam is punishable by death, because The Bill of Rights (in England) and the Constitution (in America) forbids it. If the community wants to push ahead anyway, by attempting to enforce a verdict that is unconstitutional, I assume that it is legitimate for the state to exercise it's authority over the community to prevent that from happening, right? The principle behind this is that the state guarantees, through the Constitution in America and (I think) the Bill of Rights in England that the rights of the individual (in this case the accused) supercede the rights of the community.
Scott, do you agree with all this, or do you still think the state has no right to interfere with the wishes of the community?
I'm jumping to the front so we don't have to go searching. I guess what I am saying is that there are two distinct categories here that are easy to distinguish between
1. Deliberate harm to the child by the parent, or such bad judgment that it would truly rise to "criminal negligence."
2. Judgment by the parents of what is the appropriate things a child is allowed to do, including what risks to take, what morality to adopt, what movies to see, what language to be exposed to, etc.
The state has a right and a responsibility to protect children from their parents in category 1. The state not only doesn't have a responsibility to intervene in category 2, but HAS NO RIGHT TO DO SO. That is my argument.
I understand that you acknowledge the bicycle helmet example as not the best in representing your position, but I nevertheless still believe that you may be advocating the state's rights/responsibilities in category 2. If not, we agree.
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
>>I nevertheless still believe that you may be advocating the state's rights/responsibilities in category 2.
I'm not. A neighbor of mine told me yesterday that her 16 year old son was arrested for violating a curfew on minors imposed by the city, and they ended up having to pay a $300 fine. The boy was just out with his friends after 11 PM, with the consent of his parents, not doing anything wrong. That kind of thing infuriates me.
How do you address the concerns of those who worry that in a libertarian system, children will be dropping like flies because parents are incapable of caring for their offspring without help and guidance from the state?
from the state?
I'd address this by increasing their daily dosage of anti-anxiety meds. Seriously who is asking this question???
Are you asking this question Claire or are you merely asking this question on behalf of the mute masses that are thinking it but not asking it?
I'm trying to think about how a state currently helps and guides children and can't come up with much --- public school? taxing their parents? school lunch vouchers?? crossing guards??
>>Seriously who is asking this question?
I was being a bit facetious about the flies part, but ask anyone you know if they think we should eliminate public education. You'll see what I mean. People flip out when you suggest that.
how they'd feel about eliminating the property tax
I don't know what it's like where you live, but most people in my neck of the woods are incredibly paternalistic. They feel confident that they can look after their own children, but they believe that there is a whole class of people who cannot, without the help of the government. Perhaps many of them actually feel quite virtuous when they pay their taxes. My neighbor has told me that he doesn't mind if our taxes go up, as long as more revenue goes to social programs. I'm sure many people here would agree with him.
P.S. It's not just liberals that think this way. Conservatives who are for the war on drugs and censorship, among other things, are paternalistic supporters of the state "helping" people too.
It's a common sentiment and I think it's misguided--- perhaps they feel morally superior when they pay taxes and know they are helping people who cannot help themselves
But I personally don't believe that --- I think it's an arrogant, condescending, and ultimately destructive world view. In my opinion its as much about wanting to exert some form of control or influence over the lives of strangers as it is about wanting to "help" others. Perhaps they feel comfortable knowing that someone who shares their values is poking into the lives of unfortunates to make sure nothing too out of line is occurring. Really, it's the people that insist that everyone be forced to help these unknown strangers that are causing great damage.
Perhaps they are paying for a service in the sense that by allowing a certain amount of their income to be taken by the state they receive a feeling of moral superiority in exchange.
Anyhow, you, I think, happen to be one of them! :) I only say that because here you are (AGAIN) talking about "other people" whose views you are representing. I think we'd all be better off if people spoke for themselves. There's nothing wrong with helping others if it's voluntary -- however if you force people to do it against their will that's evil.
Also, I'm not sure if I would describe this attitude as "paternalistic" I think that implies a certain level of sternness or severity --- perhaps maternalistic is more appropriate -- but even then, we're talking about unknown adults not family or children --- perhaps neither applies.
and the state has done all it should do and all it has a right to do. Children will unfortunately die from accidents in every system. You'd be surprised how much better people do in a free system than in a coercive one (like we have now). The abuses by the state under the banner of "protecting the children" far outweigh any good they do, and children are more likely to be killed in foster care than in abusive homes (no, that's not an exaggeraion, that's the truth - I worked for a county government and built a managed care system for foster kids - just one of the wonderful things you learn about "the system")
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
I'm not. I just bumped into the title by accident "When the helmet hits the ground".
I was hoping for a bicycle song, but was disappointed.
I gave it 30 seconds...
into the realm of people who post links without first reviewing them
that is the line that none should cross
Once again, it is a matter of common decency and sense and degree to which you succomb to the evilness of government...
IF government were a local entity, then the power granted to it to police and maintain decency would be by locals and not top down statism (Or federal dictation).
IF it were locally grown and granted, I see no problem with using mild coercive laws to help push young children into wearing helmets.
The argument starts of course, on one extreme-- "Does the community have an obligation to intervene when parents are abusing their kids. sexually, physically, mentally?"
I say the community DOES have that right, but I say the federal government DOES NOT. I would even say the state government DOES NOT.
Having the power in the hands of the community allows for recourse when the community goes too far, or takes too much liberty for themselves (and away from individuals.)
In other words, "we allow you to police us as long as we allow it"...
This is government by the people.
Helmets for children gets complicated, because MOST often, the kid will be fine, even if he crashes his bike (lord knows, I took some major tumbles as a kid without a helmet).
So leave it up to the community. Rural communities may say fuck it, the odds are in the kids favor that he'll be fine. High traffic and concrete communities may opt for some law, because the odds are pretty good the kid will fall and hit his head, or the bumper of a car will hit his head...
Again, why hold to steadfast ideologies that don't solve problems, just transfer the onus of problems back onto the individual? They are still problems wherever the resposibility is centered...
>>"So leave it up to the community."
Really? Suppose the community fails to intervene when the child's rights are clearly being violated? Is it not then appropriate for the federal government to intervene.
Imagine a community where the majority belongs to a cult that allows adults to marry minor children. Should those minors not have a right to the same protection as everyone else?
What if a community within the U.S. decides to adopt Islamic Shariah law for itself? Is that okay with you?
where the majority belongs to a cult that won't allow adults over the age of 18 to marry adults under the age of 18
For Adam, with love...
I really like it. I hear the Dylan, of course, but it could also have been on an Alarm album of the 80's (and they wrote songs like this because of their influence by Dylan). Anyway, I really liked it. I might even buy the little punk's CD! THanks scott!
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson