After today’s Supreme Court ruling on ObamaCare, libertarian attorney Timothy Sandefur, of the Pacific Legal Foundation, gave a good radio interview in which stated that the ruling was, in fact, a victory for the United States Constitution. Here is his reasoning (note: you’ll have to deal with a loud advertisement at the beginning):
“It was a pleasure to burn,” wrote Ray Bradbury in the beginning of Fahrenheit 451, and continued:
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
Ray Bradbury, mi tocayo, who as you know died this past week at the age of 91, was, as you may not know, a committed anti-authoritarian, an enemy of the state, a man who loathed tyranny, taxation, tariffs, and all other forms of control, a man who didn’t believe any individual may legitimately be forced to live in any way for another human being and who for this reason antipathized all forms of governmental coercion, whether it was book-burning, book-banning, or bans on big beverages, who therefore devoted so much of his life to fighting that tyranny of the majority AND the minority, which, as he said, “both want to control you” (“Whether you’re a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write. Their society breaks down into subsections of minorities who then, in effect, burn books by banning them”) also memorably wrote, again in Fahrenheit 451, a line of dialogue that compendiates, I think, in several ways, on several levels, his live-and-let-live ideology:
“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”
Ray Bradbury, RIP.
Sometimes you have to see it to believe it.
The following Op-Ed, which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, was written by one Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard — a fact I mention only because you, like me, might be tempted to think that someone with those sort of Ivy League credentials wouldn’t be capable of something so misbegotten. But you and I would both be wrong.
It just goes to show: the human capacity for rationalization is limitless. In this case, what’s being rationalized is the leftist justification of government force.
Here’s an excerpt:
OF all the indignant responses to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to ban the sale of giant servings of soft drinks in New York City, libertarian objections seem the most worthy of serious attention. People have certain rights, this argument goes, including the right to drink lots of soda, to eat junk food, to gain weight and to avoid exercise. If Mr. Bloomberg can ban the sale of sugar-laden soda of more than 16 ounces, will he next ban triple scoops of ice cream and large portions of French fries and limit sales of Big Macs to one per order? Why not ban obesity itself?
The obesity epidemic has many dimensions, but at heart it’s a biological problem. An evolutionary perspective helps explain why two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, and what to do about it. Lessons from evolutionary biology support the mayor’s plan: when it comes to limiting sugar in our food, some kinds of coercive action are not only necessary but also consistent with how we used to live.
Read the full article here.
