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[UPDATED] “Online Mobs Drive Ornithologist Into Research Secrecy After Learning He Killed A Bird”

[UPDATE]: The subject of animal rights is complex, and I won’t get into the intricacies of it here — except to point out that those who are calling Christopher Filardi a “murderer” (for euthanizing a bird) believe perforce — by extension — that the domestication of animals is slavery, and that zoos are a form of imprisonment or interment camp, and that pet-ownership, as well, is a form of slavery. Also, when PETA in particular refers to Christopher Filardi as a murderer, what then are they engaged in when by their own admission they euthanize thousands upon thousands of healthy animals a year? Answer: by their own brand of reasoning, they’re engaged in mass murder.

The ornithologist Christopher Filardi has recently been hounded into hiding for publicly practicing his science — which is to say, he carried on what has been the standard practice in the natural sciences for centuries now: he euthanized a kingfisher to collect it as a sample for his museum.

The overwhelming majority of his detractors belong to the Party of Science — id est: members of groups like Earth Liberation Front, which among many, many other things committed a clear-cut act of terror (for which they were convicted) by firebombing the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington, where Dr. Filardi was once a graduate student.

The New York Times wrote a good article about all this, and here is a small excerpt:

The Ornithologist the Internet Called a Murderer

While the expedition was still underway, the museum released the first photographs of the bird, which seemed to be mugging for the camera. The mustached kingfisher became a viral celebrity, under headlines like ‘ridiculously gorgeous.’

It wasn’t until the public realized that Dr. Filardi had ‘collected’ the bird—killing it for the museum’s research collection—that the adulation turned to venom…. While Dr. Filardi was still on the mountain, almost entirely off the grid, the rage spread. Tens of thousands of people signed petitions that condemned his actions, and thousands more signed a petition calling for him to be fired, or even jailed…. [!]

He descended from the mountaintop into an inferno of hate. ‘If they wanted to make me feel horrible and more than a little frightened for my family or welfare,’ he told me, his voice strained, ‘it worked.’

“More than a little frightened.”

Yes.

Yes, indeed, it is more than a little frightening to be harassed in this way — i.e. online through social media — not primarily because you fear for your safety, but because what you suddenly sense before you is an extreme and hostile Borg-like presence that has forever lost some vital part of its rationality.

[Filardi] wrote an essay for Audubon explaining the many steps he’d taken to ensure that the taking of a single kingfisher would not cause harm, including a survey of the population, which he estimated at 4,000—a ‘robust number for a large island bird.’ He highlighted the role the bird played in conservation efforts: After his findings were presented to tribal, local, and national officials, they resolved to protect the area from being mined or logged. His essay received over 900 comments, the most up-voted of which called him a murderer.

[I]t has led him—and many other ornithologists with whom I spoke, almost all of whom asked me not to use their names—to be extremely cautious about attracting any kind of attention. Many research expeditions are no longer being publicized; in some cases, there is a total blackout on media.

Reasoning with a mob, online or off, is of course futile; and there comes a point — such as when members of the maddened mob sign you up via your email address for ghastly websites — that you know beyond the shadow of any doubt that these people will stop at very little, if anything.

The most paradoxical part is that “science” has never been more en-vogue, and yet it’s “science” used as just another dogmatic ideological shibboleth (such as “The Party of Science”) politically driven to the hilt and repeated and reproduced endlessly, until in no time at all it becomes devoid of actual meaning, if it ever had any to begin with, and that is by no means certain. So that now real science, which is a method of observation and gathering evidence carefully and painstakingly, in any and every endeavor (including economics), must be conducted in secret. (Read Sumantra Maitra’s article: “Campus Repression Is So Bad That Academics Are Now Holding Conferences In Secret.”)

This kind of reaction should remind us of previous superstitious taboos against practices like dissecting cadavers, activities that were scientifically valuable but emotionally repugnant to an ignorant mob and obscurantist authorities. In this case, the main push came from precisely the kind of left-leaning activists—particularly PETA and the animal rights crowd—who so often like to pose as advocates of science.

The comparison to a pre-scientific era only seems more appropriate the deeper you probe this case. We already see historical scholarship having to be conducted in secret, just as in the days of the monasteries, in order to avoid attack by a hostile outside world. Now the same thing is happening to science.

There is a lesson here about the psychology of online mobs, and a warning that in an era when science lives by social media it can die by social media.

(Link)



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Intolerance, Individualism, and the Paradox of Dogma

Did you hear about the 18-year-old Utah girl, Keziah Daum (non-Asian), who did nothing wrong last month?

And yet she was harassed like hell, inadvertently sparking an outrageous and indefensible left-wing backlash merely by wearing in celebration and total homage a beautiful prom dress of qipao (Chinese) provenance.

Her putative crime? “Cultural appropriation.”

Let me tell you something:

This is a kind of lunacy.

Let me tell you something else:

The rightwing lunatics who bomb abortion clinics have nothing — and I mean nothing — on the left-wing lunatics who bomb ski resorts and blow up bridges, who are no different fundamentally from the zealots who set meat-trucks on fire and destroy “by whatever means necessary.”

Having tasted firsthand a little of the venom from both sides, right and left, I can tell you without any shred of hesitation or doubt that, in terms of sheer vitriol and sheer numbers, the left is by far the most shrill, hostile, intolerant, blindly dogmatic, and closed-off-to-rational-discussion of any group I’ve encountered firsthand — in fact, the numbers don’t even compare — and I, who am atheist and no right-winger, would sooner talk to a room full of fundamentalist Christians about why abortion should be legal, rather than talking to even moderate enviro groups about, for instance, the many, many environmentally hazardous materials that go into making a single silicon cell for a solar panel, who will sometimes try to shout you out of the room for the very subject-matter of your talk, before even hearing a single word you’ve said.

Henry Wismayer, a self-described “lefty,” just wrote an article titled Liberals: Please Chill Out — and though the article is fairly well-written and he does make a few good points, what his article reveals most tellingly of all, in my opinion, is how even someone aware enough to write such an article, who glimpses that something is wrong in this depth of blind zealotry and dogmatism, is himself so indoctrinated in the fundamental tenets of that same dogma that he cannot conceive his fundamental premises might be wrong (which many of them are): he merely thinks that how “lefties” react is what’s in need of modification.

To even consider, for instance, the notion that climate change is not catastrophic or that human ingenuity can solve it doesn’t even enter into the equation, or his brain.

That is frightening.

It’s as thorough an indoctrination as any religion, and it’s why I’ve long held that dogma (and not God or gods or a belief in the supernatural) is the distinguishing characteristic of religion.

As The Onion (which I’m not really a fan of) once well expressed it:

“College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea: Students, Faculty Invited to Freely Express Single Viewpoint.”

This excellent writer (and individualistic thinker, and no Republican) put it even better:

The cultural and political left is cocooning itself in a bubble of ideological uniformity. This is intended to totally suppress dissent on key issues by making it impossible for anyone to even express a divergent opinion. The result is to entrench leftist dogma, in the hope that a whole generation will graduate from college unable to engage in thoughtcrime.

That’s the dilemma for anyone trying to overturn any aspect of this dogma. How can you debate an issue and change anyone’s mind, when the discussion has been rigged so that your viewpoint is dismissed as illegitimate before anyone has even heard it? So the new orthodoxy seems impenetrable and its hold on the young unbreakable.

If I were to come up with one idea for how the left could cripple itself over the long term, it would be: teach your young adherents that ideological debate is an abnormal trauma and that it is a terrible imposition to ever expect them to engage in it. It is a great way of raising a generation of mental cripples. And that is exactly what they have set out to do.

“Intersectionality” is one of the more recent examples of this new dogma to cross my ken.

Intersectionality is a neologism coined by Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, and it is the latest variation on so-called identity politics: believing, as it does, that you and I are not fundamentally individual human beings, but rather that our identity is determined by how many (minority) groups we belong to. This, says intersectionality, is what unites (and divides) us.

Ultimately intersectionality, like all forms of anti-individualism — which is to say, collectivism — is the impossible attempt to define something by means of non-essentials.

The thing that defines humans — our common denominator, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender, color, or class — is our human faculty of reason.

Our defining characteristic is our rational-conceptual faculty.

Thus, the attempt to make anything else the essential or defining characteristic, whether sex, sexual preference, skin color, gender, or anything else, is to define by means of non-fundamental characteristics: i.e. it is to incorrectly define.

The consequences of this are enormous.

Because accurate definitions are our means of understanding reality and are the guardians of reason and cognitive clarity — “the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration” — defining humans by means of non-essential characteristics serves to divide humans endlessly. It balkanizes and confuses — “first, confuse the vocabulary” — and it pits humans against one another, negating the natural kinship that exists among us, far more than it unifies.

Proper definitions — i.e. defining by means of essential characteristics — is not to say that our secondary characteristics do not matter at all. It’s only to say that these characteristics don’t fundamentally define us, and the attempt to make them fundamental is to make them the tail that wags the dog.

Dogma is the problem.

That’s why the most rebellious thing any human can do is reason and think for herself.

The paradox of dogma is this:

If you successfully shut down all public debate and discourse, is this a way of making sure that you win? Or is it an admission that you’ve already lost?

I’ll leave each individual reader to answer that for him or herself, and I’ll close with this quotation:

“The imposition of dogma succeeds in getting everyone to mouth the right slogans, even as fewer and fewer of them understand the ideology behind it,” wrote Robert Tracinski.




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Scurvy Dog

Scurvy: “By the end, death is mercy.”

Yesterday in the late morning — after reading from a little book which had a small section on scurvy and how, from 1500 to 1800, scurvy killed as many as two million sailors, who on the high seas had limited access to fruit and Vitamin C — I was walking through the grocery store. I was on my way to the ibuprofen aisle (migraines), and there I passed by a seemingly unlimited supply of fruits and juices from around the world, all at very low cost.

I actually stopped in my tracks for a moment and considered this modern miracle, and the ramifications of it.

I thought of how the threat of scurvy, like polio, is one of thousands upon thousands of threats we now no longer think about, and I thought of Jeff Tucker’s article from some time ago about this same thing:

How at any time of the day or night, I can get on my computer or phone and search for the closest local store, get navigation, compare prices, discover nutritional properties, drive or motorcycle or bicycle there, and so on.

I thought of how I could even photograph it or shoot a video of it and share it immediately — and I thought of how none of this was possible even twenty years ago.

How we are in the middle of a quiet revolution which, for all its stealth, is happening far more rapidly than the revolution that made it possible: the Industrial Revolution.

Its quietness, I believe, is why there’s such a lack of consciousness about it. And most of what you hear about it are complaints: too much food, too much consumption, too much excess, too much obesity, evils of grocery stores and dire warnings that we’re ingesting disease-causing things.

Still, the fact remains: to the extent that humans are free, economic freedom is delivering miracles by the day, and hardly anyone seems to care or notice — or, worse, denounces it as dangerous, degenerate, decadent, when in reality it’s the realization of a beautiful dream that all our ancestors throughout history would not have believed possible.

Very recently, after receiving more anonymous, semi-hostile communications, this time from across the pond, concerning an article I wrote on food production — though, to be fair, I’ve also recently gotten some respectful communication from across the pond as well — the poorly reasoned content of the SPAM comments and email made me think of Mr. Tucker’s words anew:

We should all be more conscious of the cause-and-effect relationships operating in the world of human action, which give rise to the unbelievably elegant order of that thing called the free economy: an order, as he put it so well, “fueled by human choices, entrepreneurship, relentless learning, experimenting, imitating, copying, private property, and the freedom to trade; for these are the institutions bestowing miracles on us ever day. We also need to be aware of its opposite, the gargantuan apparatus of compulsion and coercion called the state that operates on principles that are anachronistic to the core. Its principle is violence, and its contributions to the social order are prisons, economic upheaval, and war. It is lumbering, stupid, and angry as hell, and it is the main drag on the world today. The contrast with laissez-faire is overwhelming. There is nothing that the state does that either needs to be done or cannot be done better within the matrix of voluntary action and exchange.”

Voluntary. Yes, let people choose. Even if that means they choose pizza with extra cheese and Taco Bell and Happy Meals, complete with Coke-a-Cola and a plastic straw — not my choice and perhaps not yours, but theirs.

It is, for the record — and this is largely to my latest correspondent(s) — the state and specifically FDR and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was part of the socialistic New Deal, the state and not the natural order of laissez faire, I say, which created government-sponsored farming and the horrible conditions that this thing fosters.

You want better farms, with cleaner, more diverse agriculture? Then get governments out of the farming business, which results in regulations that even supporters call “mind-numbingly complex.”

“Honestly, nobody sitting down today to create a new system would ever dream up such a complicated, convoluted and dual bureaucracy system that we’ve created now,” said Ferd Hoefner, the NSAC’s policy director.

(Link)


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The Life and Death of Alfie Evans



“Whether one likes it or not, it is a fact that the main issues of present day politics are purely economic and cannot be understood without a grasp of economic theory.”

Wrote Ludwig von Mises.

I think his words are true, unfortunately.

Like the human body, knowledge forms an indivisible unity. It’s interconnected and deeply interwoven. Knowledge is hierarchical and contextual: one part flows inevitably into another.

At the foundation of it all is philosophy.

Philosophy forms the underpinnings of all knowledge.

People don’t believe me when I say this, and yet it’s the truth: I don’t particularly care for politics and economics.

The reason — the only reason — I’ve spent so much of my life and my time writing about these subjects is that they’re inescapable, and because they affect our lives so immediately and extraordinarily:

One is either knowledgable about them, or one isn’t.

One is either informed or one isn’t.

One either buys into the easy platitudes of the day — right, left, or middle, it makes no real difference — or one considers the issues for oneself and forms non-dogmatic conclusions.

Package-deals — i.e. what right, left, and middle offer — do not work for philosophy. Philosophy is too vast and complex.

It requires independent thought, and a great deal of it.

It takes a great deal of thought and conscious effort.

It requires independent integration, which is what true apprehension consists of.

One either jumps in and swims, or one is swept along with the tides and the trends — until, in the latter case, one grows old and one day finds that he holds convictions — convictions he’s even willing to die for — the foundations of which, however, he’s never seriously thought about or questioned, but mostly grew up with or among.

This not only can happen: it happens, I think, more often than not. People grow old and die holding like grim death onto beliefs, either secular or non, it doesn’t matter, which they’ve never bothered to seriously investigate. It is a tragedy.

The unexamined life is a tragedy.

The following is for all those who think I exaggerate the dangers of socialized medicine — a very recent event and article, even though in many ways it seems like something out of the Dark Ages: a child who didn’t die when taken off his oxygen, and his fate decided by the state against the parent’s wishes.

From the online library of Law and Liberty (an excellent resource):

In the United Kingdom, a child’s fate was decided [by the government]. The boy, Alfie Evans, died on Saturday at 23 months of age. He had been hospitalized with a rare neurological condition. The doctors decided treatment was futile and recommended it be stopped. The parents went to court to continue treatment. A judge sided with the doctors, and sent the police to make sure no one would interrupt what amounted to a medical homicide. The parents, trying everything they could to save their child, saw their own powerlessness in the powerlessness of the infant even as all involved in this situation were stripped of their innocence.

The authorities removed oxygen from the boy, who, however, refused to die during the day he was left without medical care. Like all living things, the boy wished to live, even with his disease, and so the authorities put him back on life support. At that point the father went to see the Pope, who offered the boy protection in an Italian hospital. The Italian state offered the boy citizenship and to fly him to treatment. The judge refused to allow his parents to take Alfie to treatment.

It was just another event in the news, but it is also a fundamental conflict between faith and the state— between sacred law and political power. The several judges who came to be involved in the case seemed sure that the state should take the child from the family. They told his parents that he would inevitably die, and they insisted on the state’s taking responsibility for assuring death when they did not have to. The court insisted that his death en route to a hospital still willing to treat him would not be tolerated.

What does this conflict mean in terms of freedom and virtue?

The authorities thought they were doing justice. The parents thought they should be free to seek care for their child in another country. The state disagreed and insisted that it would be illegal for them to do so. Observe how each party viewed the requirements of virtue: The father thought he was doing the right thing in taking his boy to the hospital, to save his life. Everything about being a British subject was turned upside down, for he was now required to define the right thing as consenting to allow his child to die on the orders of the very authorities who were supposed to defend Alfie’s rights, starting with his right to life. This father was in the situation of a tragic hero.

What was done was done legally, with expertise, in full view of the public, all according to authorized powers to whom everyone deferred. The judges and doctors embodied a view of justice and wisdom which few seemed to be arguing against publicly—not politicians, not the high officials of the Anglican Church, not any other important organization. Nor were there massive protests over this boy’s fate. It would seem that those who represented the majority of the people of Britain decided in favor of Alder Hey Hospital, so much so that the authority of two parents over their child was denied.

This is a view of the state that would tend to make self-government impossible, for it removes the ground of the difference between freedom and obedience to authority. Theoretically, such a state cannot be legitimated by the consent of the governed, because it does not secure their rights, starting with the right to life. It is legitimated instead by its expert and orderly administration of rules of its own making. Theoretically, the state has assumed control of human life and the definition of its limits—death, ultimately. The state has secured passive consent, so that if it does not face a revolution, there’s nothing to worry about.

Kate James and Tom Evans, Alfie’s parents, argued for their freedom, and for their right to decide for their child. They obviously thought, in taking their child to the hospital, that they had certain rights as subjects of the sovereign and certain duties to their child. Had they let him die, which was what the state would later insist on doing, they might have been prosecuted for neglect. They acted freely, but at the same time compelled by necessity. They sought to match their own moral virtues with the intellectual virtues of the doctors, for the National Health Service is a public institution. This turned out to be impossible.

From Social Contract to Suicide Pact

Britons believe that the rights their government should secure for them include a right to healthcare through the National Health Service. This is the law of the land, and a man like Tom Evans is brought to his crisis because he fulfills the requirements of the laws and believes in their justice—only to find out that the community he is part of does not believe in those rights, but instead in something else.

Since it is not reasonable to expect parents—Tom Evans, other Britons who have come into conflict with the NHS over the fate of their ill children in the past, the others who will no doubt do so in the future—to respect such decisions by the government, it can make no claim to their allegiance under the right to life. Indeed the state is discovering entirely different sources of legitimacy involving not the protection of life, but the weighing and culling of lives and the decision as to what life is worth living and what life is not worth living.

This is the tragic conflict almost everyone is ignoring. We do not think any of us should be put in such a situation in any country where politics is built on human rights. We must now confront an example of one of the most prosperous, peaceful, and sophisticated countries in the world reorienting itself away from saving lives to ending them, if the life doesn’t seem worth living.

To some extent, British authority is now a suicide pact, to borrow the phrase of Justice Robert Jackson, who insisted that the U.S. Constitution was not one. Something very important has been lost if the right to life depends on circumstances ascertained by experts and decided on by judges. And if British hospital and police personnel are willing to enforce such decisions, the loss seems coextensive with the British state. It is not an exception, but the new rule.

(Link — thank you, Marti.)


It is no joke and no game when in any society the state holds this sort of power over individual lives and decisions.

The root cause of this mentality is the notion that healthcare is a right that government grants — or not.

That, in microcosm, is why I’ve spent so much of my life and my time writing about political-economic philosophy:

Because knowledge is life, and knowledge is completely interconnected.


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Jack Kevorkian R.I.P: Doctor Death Dies At Age 83

Jack Kevorkian, who was born May 26, 1928, died two days ago, at age 83.

In the latter phase of his life, Kevorkian campaigned tirelessly to legalize physician-assisted suicide — a subject about which he was intensely passionate (too passionate, some believed) and even served eight years in prison for “acts of euthanasia.”

From 1990 to 2000, Jack Kevorkian was arrested many, many times for helping more than 100 patients commit suicide. He used injections, carbon monoxide, and his now-infamous “suicide machine,” which he hammered together from scraps for approximately $30.

“Those he aided had terminal conditions such as multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and malignant brain tumors. When asked in a 2010 interview about how it felt to take a patient’s life, Dr. Kevorkian said, ‘I didn’t do it to end a life. I did it to end the suffering the patient’s going through. The patient’s obviously suffering — what’s a doctor supposed to do, turn his back?’

“Dying, he believed, should be an intimate and dignified process, something that many terminally ill people are denied, he said.

“He garnered a fair amount of support from other medical practitioners, although most thought he was an extremist. In 1995, a group of doctors in Michigan publicly voiced their support for Dr. Kevorkian’s philosophy, stating that they supported a ‘merciful, dignified, medically assisted termination of life.’

“Shortly after, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that many doctors in Oregon and Michigan supported some form of physician-assisted suicide in certain cases.

“One of his greatest victories occurred in March 1996 when a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that mentally competent, terminally ill adults have a constitutional right to die with the aid of medical experts and family members. It was the first federal endorsement of its kind” (source).

Arguably, Jack Kevorkian’s lasting legacy will be in the fact that he (with the invaluable help of his smart and charismatic lawyer Mayer Morganroth) so thoroughly raised the world’s awareness about euthanasia, and I, for one, was a supporter of him: obviously, if we each possess the right to our own life — and we do — we also (therefore) possess the corollary right to end that life when we choose.

Death, where is thy sting?

Jack Kevorkian, MD, jazz musician, oil-painter, euthanasianist: May 26, 1928 – June 3, 2011

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UN Document Would Give ‘Mother Earth’ Same Rights As Humans

This is for all the folks out there — you know who you are — who over the years have told me that I caricaturize environmentalism and environmentalists; that I present the environmental position “unfairly,” as “too extreme” when I call it what it actually is: namely, neo-Marxism at its blackest, a quasi-secular religion that hates human beings and worships at the shrine of death — e.g.: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs” (John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal).

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself” (Al Gore, Club of Rome executive member).

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth” (president of PETA and environmental activist Ingrid Newkirk).

“If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species…. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental” (Ibid).

Quoting Richard Conniff, in the pages of Audubon magazine (September, 1990): “Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.”

Environmental theorist Christopher Manes (writing under the nom-de-guerre Miss Ann Thropy): “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.”

Environmental guru “Reverend” Thomas Berry, proclaims that “humans are an affliction of the world, its demonic presence. We are the violators of Earth’s most sacred aspects.”

A speaker at one of Earth First!’s little cult gatherings: “Optimal human population: zero.”

“Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere … [We have] an antipathy to ‘progress’ and ‘technology.’ We can accept the pejoratives of ‘Luddite’ and ‘Neanderthal’ with pride…. There is no hope for reform of industrial empire…. We humans have become a disease: the Humanpox” (Dave Foreman, past head of Earth First!)

“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line we … became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (Biologist David Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower” Los Angles Times Book Review).

“The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’”(Paul Taylor, “Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics”).

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism” (Judi Bari, of Earth First!).

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (Maurice Strong, Earth Summit 91).

David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, calls for developers to be “shot with tranquilizer guns.”

Why?

“Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet,” he explains.

Also from David Brower, Executive Director of the socialist Sierra Club: “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”

Quoting the Green Party’s first Presidential candidate Barry Commoner:

“Nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, is necessary to save the country from destroying the natural environment…. Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.”

From Barry Commoner again:

“Environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibility between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it. [The socialist way is better because] the theory of socialist economics does not appear to require that growth should continue indefinitely.”

So much for your unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed:

“Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective” (Harvey Ruvin, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Dade County Florida).

Sierra Club cofounder David Brower, pushing for his own brand of eugenics:

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

That, if you don’t know, is limited government environmentalist style.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history” (Sierra Club board member Paul Watson).

Again from Paul Watson, writing in that propaganda rag Earth First! Journal: “Right now we’re in the early stages of World War III…. It’s the war to save the planet. The environmental movement doesn’t have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually there will be open war.”

And:

“By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down! Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!”

And so on.

But, Ray, this is just the extremist fringe; these folks do not represent the true spirit of the environmental movement, as a reader of this website once told me.

Uh-huh. I suggest you keep telling yourself that so that you don’t have to confront the totality of the philosophy you’ve accepted.

And now there’s this:

UN document would give ‘Mother Earth’ same rights as humans:

UNITED NATIONS — Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “well-being and existence of many beings” is now threatened.

The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.

That document speaks of the country’s natural resources as “blessings,” and grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.

It also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.

“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) who have rights are humans or companies, then how can you reach balance?” Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, told Postmedia News. “But if you recognize that nature too has rights, and (if you provide) legal forms to protect and preserve those rights, then you can achieve balance.”

The application of the law appears destined to pose new challenges for companies operating in the country, which is rich in natural resources, including natural gas and lithium, but remains one of the poorest in Latin America.

Read the full article here.

This, what you just read above, is merely the logical elaboration of the mainstream environmental philosophy, and, among many, many other things, it demonstrates a profound and fatal misunderstanding of the concept of rights, which by definition are compossible.

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“Fetal Rights,” Abortion, And Public Funding Of Abortion

By definition, a fetus does not possess rights because the things in nature that give rise to rights are human individuation and the power of choice, which in turn gives rise to moral agency.

A fetus, however, is the diametric opposite of individuated: it lives parasitically (in a literal sense) off of an individuated host. For this reason, the right belongs exclusively to the host — i.e. the woman — from whom that fetus derives life entirely. When the fetus is born, it becomes individuated, and that is when rights begin.

On this issue, as on many others, I am in complete disagreement with the so-called rightwing and am more aligned with the so-called left. And yet here’s one thing I’d like for someone to tell me:

How does it then follow that because a woman does possess the inalienable right to choose abortion or not, I or anyone else should therefore be forced to fund the abortions of others, as Barack Obama and the leftwing all believe?

Answer: it does not follow.

My rights, your rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

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Individual Rights

Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.

Justice — also known as equity — is nothing more or less than the legal recognition of each and every individual’s right to her own life and her own property.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term rights as, in part, “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way.”

Freedom is the absence of compulsion.

The primary thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.

Compulsory taxation, for instance, means that you are not free to do whatever you wish with your own money, because the government may at any time legally compel you to give to government any amount it specifies.

Voluntary action hinges upon the principle of individual rights:

Are we each free to live as we choose, provided we do not infringe upon the equal rights of others?

Or not?

The most fundamental political question is this: Do we rightfully own ourselves, or do others rightfully have jurisdiction over us?

To ask that question is, I believe, to answer it.

America is the only country in the history of the world founded explicitly and principally upon the concept of individual rights.

At root, there’s really only one way to infringe upon another’s rights, and that is through the instigation of force. Quoting the 19th century political thinker Auberon Herbert:

Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. As long as men are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it – so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership – force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).

As Auberon Herbert notes, force can be direct, as in assault and rape, or indirect, as in fraud or extortion. There’s no other way to breach rights than through the (direct or indirect) instigation of force.

Laws that restrict freedom of production and trade (such as cap-and-trade laws) are an indirect use of force.

Trade tariffs are an indirect use of force.

Military conscription is a direct use of force.

Rights, I repeat, are a formal codification of human freedom. This of course includes the freedom to trade.

Rights are ethical principles, and they are political principles. As such, rights delimit human freedom in large groups.

This latter thing is emphasized because rights would not need to be discovered if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society.

Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice which gives rise to moral agency.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions.

One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?

Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights: if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?

Answer: no one — because rights are inalienable in the literal sense: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked or transferred.

In the final analysis, there’s only the right to your own life: all others – from liberty, to property, to the pursuit of happiness – are an extension of that one.

Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activities. In other words, if it is said to be ‘right’ that they should carry them on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they ‘have a right’ to carry them on. Clearly the conception of ‘natural rights’ originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its preservation; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and claims which make such acts possible (Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, 1884).

The crux of freedom is rights.

The crux of rights is human individuation and moral agency.

A deep connection exists between the right to life and the right to property. The importance of this connection cannot be overstated, yet it is precisely this connection that the leftwing and rightwing are both equally ignorant of.

Quoting Claude Frédéric Bastiat:

Each of us has a natural right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? … Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor, and by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is property (Claude Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1848).

Property is “not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth. The right and interest which a man has in lands and chattels to the exclusion of others. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner as he pleases” (Lectric Law Library).

That is precisely why the crux of freedom and free markets is private property.

It is also why environmentalism, as all other forms of socialism, is inherently anti-freedom.

The reason that laissez faire is the proper social system is not because it “works best,” as many nominal defenders of free markets never tire of telling us. Laissez faire is proper, rather, because it is just. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only economic system that respects and protects the inalienable right to life, liberty, property, and free exchange.

One must never forget: money is property. Money is the symbol of your labor.

The root of real wealth is production.

Compulsory (as opposed to voluntary) taxation is a breach of property rights. It is also, again in the words of Bastiat, “legalized plunder.”

Individual rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light. And yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient. The reason they’ve remained resilient is that they are in a certain sense self-evident: we each, as John Locke said, “have a property in our own person.”

That is the fundamental principle behind rights, and property is an extension of person, nothing more and nothing less.

If you believe in human freedom, you perforce believe in the freedom to trade – fully. For if humans are not allowed to trade freely, humans are not truly free.

No freedom or justice can exist if rights, including property rights, do not exist.

Indeed, the very word rights has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus, as in justice. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, jus “is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.”

Rights entitle holders to certain freedoms – specifically, the freedom to act in a certain way. Notice the phrase “freedom to act”; it is a crucial distinction because rights do not assure you of anything except the freedom to try.

What, though, fundamentally, is the stuff of rights? Of what are they made of?

To begin with, rights are not primaries: they are second-order principles that derive from something deeper. And that something is a thing which is very specific within the human condition. It is the faculty of choice.

If human behavior were automatic, as it is with animals, there would be no question of rights because any action we undertook would not be chosen. Human action would be neither moral nor immoral but amoral, and rights would therefore not exist.

The grizzly bear who mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.

Thus rights are the link between ethics and politics.

Which is why Herbert Spencer and other freethinkers regarded rights as “ethical-political precepts.”

Quoting Samuel Adams:

Among the natural rights are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Rights are another of these things that everyone thinks he understands, but which in fact almost nobody does.

To get some idea of how poorly understood the nature of rights is, one need only look at the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and observe the sheer number of times one would have to breach the rights (usually in the form of property expropriation – i.e.: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”) of some individual somewhere to achieve even a fraction of that Declaration’s stated goals. The UN’s Declaration of Human Rights is a tour-de-force of postmodern, multicultural, neo-Marxist non-thought.

Leftwingers tell us we have the right to healthcare, the right to a job, the right to a smoke-free work environment, and so on.

Rightwingers, on the other hand, say we do not have the right to open our liquor stores on Sunday, we do not have the right to consensual sex with prostitutes, we do not have the right to gamble, et cetera.

Despite what you’ve been told, these views are not opposites; they are a variation on an identical theme, and their common denominator is this: Humans do not possess the inalienable right to life and property, and government bureaucrats are better suited than we ourselves to tell us how we must live. Yet the fact is, there is nothing in nature, neither human nature nor nature apart from humans, that gives government bureaucrats legitimate authority over the person or property of any other human being.

To say that we have the “right to healthcare,” or the “right to a job,” or the “right to a smoke-free work environment” is the same as saying we have the right to the life, labor, and property of another, which we do not and cannot – by virtue of what rights are.

Rights by definition preclude any claim to the person and property of another, even if that person is a doctor.

To say that humans do not have the right to open their liquor stores on Sunday if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to have consensual sex with prostitutes if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to gamble and use drugs if they choose, is the same as saying your life is not yours by right but belongs in some measure to bureaucrats, and that humans to that extent exist only by those bureaucrats’ permission — this in spite of the fact that no government and no governmental bureaucracy in the history of the world has ever proved itself more capable of running the individual’s life better than the individual herself.

Government compulsion, rightwing or left, is the antithesis of individual rights.

There is no such thing as a “collective right,” not in any variation.

Rights, by definition, can only belong to the individuals who make up any “collective.”

That is why the very term individual rights is pleonastic in the ultimate purport, albeit necessarily so: the very definition of the word presupposes individual, since it is only individuals who can properly possess rights.

Quoting George Reisman, who is echoing his friend and mentor Ludwig von Mises:

Only individuals exist; collectives consist of nothing but individuals. Only the individual thinks; only the individual acts; only the life of the individual has value and is important. All rights are rights of individuals.

As it happens, there’s an absolutely foolproof method that exists for determining if something is a right or not:

Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

If you follow that simple principle, and if you remember that property is nothing more than an extension of person, and that money is also property, you’ll never confuse the issue of rights.


[This article appeared, in a slightly altered form, in Chapter 30 of my book].

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Barack Obama Is Suddenly Concerned With Individual Rights

Barack Obama — who, in 2008, at the Philadelphia primary, shocked and sickened so many of us when he said (and I quote) “Just because you have an individual right does not mean that state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right” — has suddenly, it seems, developed an inexplicable regard for individual rights, stating publicly this morning:

“I don’t think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon.”

Presumably, he’s forgetting his aforementioned conviction that “state and local governments [may legitimately] constrain the exercise of rights” — an ignorant and extraordinarily dangerous conviction which statists of every stripe have unsuccessfully tried to defend since the dawn of humankind, with spectacularly devastating results, and yet for once I agree with him: it is not ever good when individual rights are infringed upon. The real question, of course, which he could never answer, is this:

Why is it then okay that my rights are infringed upon — when I am forced, in other words, under threat of fine or imprisonment, to subsidize these public employees whom you champion?

Why must I be forced by government to live for others?

Says who? And why?

No good answer has ever been given to that question because no good answer for it exists.

On a related note, Barack Obama disclosed in that same speech this morning his economic illiteracy once again, telling state governors:

“As the Recovery Act funds that saw through many states over the last two years are phasing out and it is undeniable that the Recovery Act helped every single state represented in this room manage your budgets, whether you admit it or not.”

The refutation of this is sometimes referred to as the Broken Window Fallacy, a term that comes to us from a parable coined by the great French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801 – 1850), which parable demonstrates that wealth cannot come from destruction, that money taken by force — i.e. TARP and the so-called stimulus package — necessarily siphons money which would otherwise have been spent voluntarily on other things, thereby wreaking havoc on economies in an unseen way (indeed, Bastiat himself called this principle “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”).

Here’s a two-minute explanation of the Broken Window Fallacy, by an economist and philosopher whom I admire named Dr. Tom Palmer:

And another:

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Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry, Law Professor Converts, Threatens to Sue

Professor Clark Freshman: Convert
One year ago, I wrote in a previous post that virtually everyone believes in freedom — that is, until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it. Freedom simply means you are left alone: you are neither helped nor hindered. And that’s all it means.

Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that government’s proper sphere of authority does extend beyond protection against the initiation of force.

Like most politicians, today’s politicians, both right and left, believe that human beings are not capable of flourishing without the aid of bureaucrats; these bureaucrats therefore believe they must help us live our lives for us. And nowhere is this unquestioned conviction made clearer than in the issue of drugs.

Drugs, like prostitution, provide us with an excellent example of how the rightwing and the left are not fundamentally opposed but merely disagree on superficialities, insofar as both sides agree that not all drugs should be legal.

This notion is so entrenched in the mind’s of Americans that to question its legitimacy at all is considered lunatic-fringe thinking.

True, there are representatives on both sides of the political spectrum who support legalizing marijuana and perhaps a few other drugs. But start talking about legalizing all drugs on principle, or mention doing away with all drinking-age laws on principle, and all liquor laws on principle, or speak of legalizing gambling and prostitution in all states and cities — and then you really begin to sort out the men from the boys.

The principle I’m speaking of is of course the principle that it is not within the proper sphere of government to be involved in these aspects of human lives.

If we each possess the right to our own life and only our own life — and we do — then drug usage is obviously the right of each individual. The fact that it has become unquestionable to the majority that we do not possess the right to use drugs is we choose is a sad testament to the power of entrenchment.

It is a sad testament to how people get so used to thinking about something in one way that changing minds becomes absolutely out of the question. Yet if you truly believe in freedom, which the overwhelming majority of people don’t, you not only should but must believe in the legalization of all drugs. If you do not, then you do not believe in freedom, and you must choose: freedom or statism.

This point can be made on principle alone, and it is a foolproof argument, the first and strongest line of defense. But it will not satisfy those who believe the proper scope of government does extend into telling us how we may and may not live.

This point was very recently hammered home to a UC Hastings law professor named Clark Freshman, who, in his own words, had “been on the fence for years about the legalization of drugs … and now I’m a victim of this crazy war on drugs.”

The full article, which appeared in this week’s San Francisco Weekly, is entitled “Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue.”

So we have another convert. The only question I have is for Mr. Freshman is this: what the hell took you so long?

(Hat tip Timothy Sandefur.)




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Mandatory Health Insurance And Car Insurance — “A Stupid Analogy”

Tibor Machan
The following article, which I reprint only in part and which destroys the mandatory-car-insurance-mandatory-health-insurance canard, was written by Tibor Machan, who teaches business ethics and general philosophy at Chapman University in Orange, CA:


A Stupid Analogy

Now that Judge Henry E. Hudson of the Virginia district court ruled that the Obama health care measure violates the U. S. Constitution by forcing people to make purchases they may not want to make, there are innumerable sophists who want to refute the rationale for the ruling. They trot out the “argument” that since people living in states may be required to carry auto insurance, they can also be made to purchase anything the government, including the feds, decides they must.

But this analogy fails because people do not have to drive! Yet under Obamacare by simply being living citizens, they would have to purchase health insurance. Never even mind that the state regulations requiring people to purchases auto insurance aren’t universal across the country and different states have the constitutional authority to handle the issues involved in their own way, with no federal mandate dictating to them what they must do.

Furthermore, one rationale in support of the state requirement that citizens who choose to drive carry insurance is that nearly all driving happens on state roads. There is no requirement to get insurance if one stays off them and confines one’s driving to private thoroughfares. And this is because it is the states that claim legal ownership of roads and they then get to set the standards for what those using the roads need to do for the privilege. (Yes, it is deemed a privilege, not a right, because of the state’s collective ownership of most roads.)

So the analogy with state requirements to carry driver’s insurance is fallacious. But when that’s pointed out, another tack is put forth, namely, that ill health is contagious like the plague or leprosy. This is desperate since it is blatantly wrong. One can have all sorts of ailments that will not be communicated to anyone near or far. One can contract ill health, injuries, maladies and so forth without the involvement of others. Sometimes it is just misfortune that brings this about, sometimes it is one’s own reckless conduct, sometimes the recklessness of people with whom one freely associates and rarely because of injuries sustained from what others do. In no such cases are those left out implicated and thus no one should be legally required to foot the bill of the health care measures, including insurance, that may be need to fix or treat things.

The sophists who bring up this line of shabby reasoning are capitalizing on the common sense idea that when people emit harm from their private activities–such as manufacture, smoking, reckless driving, and so forth–they ought to shoulder the burden that befalls others in consequences of it all. In short, no one ought to dump on other people the cost and liabilities of one’s own malpractice.

(Read the full article here.)

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The Electric Tea Party Acid Test — by Zombie

Zombie, an anonymous San Francisco blogger and photographer whom I admire, recently wrote an article for Pajamas Media that echoes what I myself have been saying for years: the left/right, republican/democrat, conservative/liberal alternative is a false alternative, and those two ideologies are really just two sides of the same penny: the one espouses (nominal) economic freedom but advocates government intrusion in political issues (the Right), while the other espouses nominal political freedom but advocates complete government intrusion in economic affairs (the Left). This issue is not a marginal issue — and indeed becomes more and more relevant each passing day, as this country creeps closer to outright revolution.

Zombie’s article is worth reading in full, but if you don’t have the time or the inclination, please take a long look at his graph, which he calls the real political spectrum: collectivism-versus-individualism — or, in my words, freedom-versus-statism. It’s not quite the graph I would have made, but it’s pretty good; and if freedom is ever to win the day, it is this distinction that must be understood:

(Note: to see Zombie’s explanation for his categories, click here.)

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick Wishes America Wasn’t A Free Country

Pretty hard to equivocate this one, no matter how liberal your viewpoint.

Here’s the Governor’s exact words:

“It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t, but . . . it’s a free country. You know, you got to, you got to respect that freedom.”

Deval Patrick said this on the “Jim & Margery Show” (WTKK-FM, Boston) September 1st, 2010.

Here, on video, is the audio:

As Doug Powers drolly notes:

Every now and then, a politician goofs and reveals more than he or she intended, providing a window into the true motives or beliefs. Michigan’s John Dingell claiming that Obamacare is a peachy way to “control the people,” and President Obama saying that America is a world super power “whether we like it or not” are recent examples.

Reader, do the world a favor and send this son-of-a-bitch Deval Patrick a message. Here is his contact form.

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Legalizing Drugs

Everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it.

Freedom means you are left alone; you are neither helped nor hindered. And that’s all it means.

Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that government’s proper sphere of authority does extend beyond protection against the initiation of force.

Humans, say today’s politicians, both right and left, aren’t capable of flourishing without the aid of bureaucrats; so these bureaucrats must help us live our lives for us.

Nowhere is this (unquestioned) conviction made clearer than in the issue of drugs.

Drugs, like prostitution, provide us with a good example of how the rightwing and the left are not fundamentally opposed but merely disagree on superficialities, insofar as both sides agree that not all drugs should be legal.

This notion has been so thoroughly inculcated into the mind’s of Americans that to question its legitimacy at all is considered lunatic-fringe thinking.

True, there are representatives on both sides of the political spectrum who support legalizing marijuana and perhaps a few other drugs. But start talking about legalizing all drugs on principle, or mention doing away with drinking-age laws on principle, and all liquor laws on principle, or speak of legalizing gambling and prostitution in all states and cities — and then you really begin to sort out the men from the boys.

That principle is the principle that it is not within the proper sphere of government to be involved in these aspects of human lives.

If we each possess the right to our own life and only our own life — and we do — then using drugs is obviously the right of each individual. The fact that it has become unquestionable to the majority that we do not possess the right to use drugs is we choose is a sad testament to the power of custom.

It is a sad testament to how people get so used to thinking about something in one way that changing minds becomes absolutely out of the question.

Yet if you believe in freedom, you not only should but must believe in the legalization of all drugs. If you do not, then you do not believe in freedom, and you must choose: freedom or statism.

This point can be made on principle alone, and it is a foolproof argument, the first and strongest line of defense. But it will not satisfy those who believe the proper scope of government does extend into telling us how we may and may not live.

It is frequently argued, for example, by the religious contingent, that if you legalize drugs, the usage of drugs will increase.

“Common sense and common experience tell us this,” says lawyer and radio talk-show host Dan Caplis, incessantly.

Next, we’re offered as evidence that the number of drinkers did increase after prohibition — a statement which is, at best, misleading, and here’s why:

Prior to prohibition, when drinking was still legal, the number of drinkers in this country was on a significant downward trend. For a decade leading up to prohibition, fewer and fewer people were drinking.

This fact is clear and not in dispute. But when, in 1920, the moralizers and busybodies got their way and legislated that the rest of the country must live as they deemed appropriate, and prohibition was then made into law, drinking still continued its downward trend. This went on for about three years.

It is very important to reiterate that the downward trend in drinking began long before drinking had been made illegal.

In the middle of prohibition — when drinking was still illegal — the number of drinkers began gradually to rise.

It continued to do so throughout the rest of prohibition, so that when, in December of 1933, prohibition was finally repealed, that upward trend continued for about a decade. But it was only the continuation of a trend that had already begun while drinking was illegal. This is a critical fact, but one you’ll never hear mention of when you hear people talking about “the number of drinkers increasing after prohibition.”

The next time someone says that “repealing prohibition increased the number of drinkers in this country,” be clear what that means: it means the number of drinkers was already increasing throughout the latter two-thirds of prohibition, and that the upward trend plateaued and then declined a decade after drinking was legalized anew.

Ask yourself also these questions: if, as the religious propound, making substances illegal prevents their usage, how is it that the number of drinkers began rising when alcohol was still illegal?

How is it that in Holland, where many drugs are legal and even subsidized(!), how is it that usage has decreased?

What does this tell us about “common sense and common experience”?

How is it that in Switzerland, marijuana usage has decreased even though it’s been made legal? And Spain?

There are those, of course, who argue that if drugs are legal, crime will increase. This is the biggest canard of them all.

Rest assured, if crime is your concern, illegalization should be what you want done away with.

There exists right now a multi-trillion-dollar underworld built up around illegal drugs, which legalizing would instantaneously crush, and which, as it stands, no amount of law, legislation, or litigation can come close to stopping. Why? The law of supply and demand is unstoppable: if there is a demand for something, supply will meet it, no matter what. All the conservative legislation imaginable cannot negate this fact. One might just as well try legislating against the tide.

When cigarettes and alcohol became so staggeringly taxed, do you know what happened? A gigantic blackmarket swept into the country. That meant more crime. People were smuggling in alcohol and cigarettes because these things could be sold for much cheaper on the blackmarket. They still are to this day.

Decriminalizing brings less crime.

For those who believe that if drugs are legalized, your kids are then more likely to use drugs, I urge you to remember that children have brains. Human beings have brains. We can learn, and we can be educated. We can be taught why not to use drugs. If you doubt the effectiveness of this, observe that cigarettes were legal for any age group until fairly recently, and the number of young smokers was sharply decreasing, and had been since the dangers of smoking were made known. Now that’s it’s illegal, teen smoking is on the rise again, and criminalizing doesn’t help.

Ask any honest school kid if he or she would have trouble getting drugs. Every honest school kid will tell you no. This despite the fact that drugs are illegal.

The inescapable law of supply and demand is why: if there’s a demand, supply will meet it. And no government bureaucracy and no middle-class morality can successfully fight it.

Making something illegal won’t decrease the supply of anything. It will only increase the underworld that provides the supply. This is a economic axiom.

Here’s another:

The only way to decrease supply is to curb demand.

The only way to curb demand is to inform, to educate, to decriminalize.

Each person must choose if he or she wants to use drugs or not, and whether those drugs are legal or illegal has little to do with the choice. There are many things that are legal and that every person has instant access to, but not everyone chooses to partake of. Why so?

The so-called war on drugs is a monumental waste of resources and money; it will continue to be so until the end of time. When something is made illegal, it develops a mystique. It entices. When something is legal, it becomes commonplace and mundane. It becomes no big deal. It is demystified.

Take, for instance, a person who’s grown up in an ultra-sheltered society and compare him or her to a person who’s grown up in the inner-city. Now drop them both off in downtown New York where there’s legal XXX shops on every street corner. Whom do you think will be more curious? And for whom do you think this will be more of a novelty?

And finally, for all the tax-happy liberals out there, think about this: if you legalize drugs, you can tax the living hell out of them. You can then use that tax money to educate with all your half-assed liberal programs, which benefit the “common good.” What more motivation do you need?

It is often said:

“Legalizing pot might be okay, but legalizing cocaine and methadrine, no way. I’ve known wealthy, white-collar, healthy, normal, successful businesspeople who’ve gotten so caught up in amphetamines that they’ve never been able to get off. They died. Suicide. OD. They’ve ruined their lives and the lives of their families. No way you should make these drugs legal.”

This is a repackaged version of the legalizing-creates-more-usage argument. It’s the same argument that drugs shouldn’t be legal because look at all the children born severely retarded and deformed because the mothers used crack throughout the pregnancy.

The first thing we must obviously note here is that all this happened (and still happens) even though drugs are illegal. Observe that making them illegal did not prevent these things from happening. Now ask yourself why.

Remember also that cigarettes and alcohol have ruined more lives and more families by far than every amphetamine combined. Should we therefore make alcohol and cigarettes illegal? And if not, why not? If it’s within the proper jurisdiction of government to run our lives, why shouldn’t we illegalize them?

And why, if that is government’s legitimate jurisdiction, draw the line at amphetamines, alcohol, and cigarettes? Why not let government run everything we consume — be it bacon, beer, or brats?

When gin made it into mainstream London, should it have been illegalized because it created such staggering addiction rates and ruined so many thousands of families?

We often hear: since alcohol can be and often is used in moderation, it should therefore be legal, whereas drugs cannot be used in moderation, and so should be illegal.

Leaving aside the questionable verity of such statements, since when did moderation become the standard for legalization versus illegalizing? That means, then, among other things, that for all those who can’t use alcohol or tobacco in moderation — for all, in other words, who are addicted (roughly half of all drinkers and more than ninety-five percent of all tobacco users) — these substances should be illegal? But for the rest, fine?

Freedom means you are left alone. It means you are neither helped nor hindered.

In this country, as in any just country, government’s proper role is not to be proscriptive or preventative.

In the words of Frederic Bastiat (1801 – 1850):

The nature of law is to maintain justice. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are ‘just’ because the law makes them so (Frederic Bastiat, The Law).