Celebrating Individual Rights: The foundation of civilization

Two hundred and thirty five years ago, Americans cast off the bonds of tradition and stood up for liberty based on inalienable individual rights. At the time, we were the only nation of the then-developing world to take this principled stance. What the rest of the world was doing was irrelevant. What was important was acting on what was right.

Thanks to the courage, foresight and principled thinking of those early citizens, a country was created which made the rights and lives of individuals the basis for placing limits on the power of the community. Eventually, a constitution was written limiting the power of government and protecting the wide and grand sphere of individual freedom. America set the standard for respecting human dignity.

In the subsequent two centuries, America led the world toward freedom and prosperity. Progress occurred commensurate with our loyalty to those founding principles. Where we strayed, painful lessons were learned at the cost of great suffering. A civil war. A lingering great depression. Where we stayed true, liberty was extended.

We need to reclaim those founding principles. Listening to the ideas of other nations is fine—but when they take us in the direction of increasing government control over our private lives, we must ignore the childish cries, “But Mom, everyone else is doing it.”

In particular, we need to find our own unique solution to the problem of rising health care costs, one that respects the rule of law and the property and liberty rights of individuals. In the long run, abandoning those ideals will not bring us peace, prosperity—or for that matter, affordable health care.

If some future study unquestionably demonstrated that we could achieve universal access to medical care at a sustainable cost--if only we would be willing to reinstate chattel slavery—all men worthy of respect would turn away in horror and disgust. The civilized world understands that slavery is never justified.

So too must we turn away from all solutions which entail coercion in place of persuasion and voluntary exchange—for exactly the same reasons that we reject slavery. The fundamental premise of the new health care law--that a proper function of government is to coerce one man into being another man’s keeper—must be rejected outright. Nobody has a moral claim to another man’s life or honestly earned property—not even to a little of it.

This country has recently seen the revival of the sentiments of the Boston Tea Party. It is time to move on to the next step and once again declare to the world: We will live in freedom. We will honor each individual’s right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness—and the political solutions we craft will stay within these bounds, even if the rest of the world does not.

Our founders began with what they held to be self-evident moral principles, and then looked for solutions consistent with those principles. Mistakes were made, but by holding to the standard of individual rights, legal protection has been extended to people of all races, to women as well as men—not as members of a class, but as individual human beings.

We must do the same with the challenges we face today—start with what is right. We must be ruthlessly loyal to equality before the law and the respect the rights to life, liberty and property. Any solutions to our sluggish economy or costly health care must be consistent with these fundamental principles of a moral and civil society. An individual mandate to purchase health insurance initiated and enforced by government should not even be in the tool box.

It’s time to recommit to our original oath and once again be leaders of the world in the cause for human dignity.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Let us live, not just celebrate, the meaning of July 4th.

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Legal Plunder

I have yet to receive a convincing answer to the following question:

If it is wrong for your neighbor to come to your house and demand you pay for his health care, why is it ok if the whole neighborhood gets together and makes the same demand?

To Repeal or not to Repeal

Today's post is at The Black Ribbon Project blog:

A Tale of Two Emails on the Repeal of the PPACA

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Quote of the Day - Inalienable Individual Rights--or not?

This is the crucial point...This is the point which allows no compromise. You must choose one or the other. There is no middle. Either you believe that each individual man has value, dignity and certain inalienable rights which cannot be sacrificed for any cause, for any purpose, for any collective, for any number of other men whatsoever. Or else you believe that a number of men — it doesn't matter what you call it: a collective, a class, a race or a State — holds all rights, and any individual man can be sacrificed if some collective good — it doesn't matter what you call it: better distribution of wealth, racial purity or the Millennium — demands it. Don't fool yourself. Be honest about this. Names don't matter. Only the basic principle matters, and there is no middle choice. Either man has individual, inalienable rights — or he hasn't.

--Ayn Rand "To All Innocent Fifth Columnists", 1941

If you consistently hold that a man has an inviolable right to his own life, and only to his own, then a majority vote can not justify "redistribution" of property for any purpose. Not "universal" health care. Not "public" education or other "public works." Not "the greater good of society." Not anything.

Those who advocate taking from another without his explicit voluntary consent are violating a man's right to his own life.

Abandoning the principle of a man's right to his own life is not compassionate. It will not and can not lead to peace and cooperation but instead results in power struggles and an ever escalating use of force.

The best way to help the poor, and promote peace, is to rigorously protect individual rights--for everyone.

It's the right thing to do.

(HT Kelly Valenzuela for pointing me to the article)

Hungry for Freedom

"The jovial forty-three-year-old leaves us a painful but effective lesson, because although we have no elections to vote directly for those who govern us, nor courts to accept claims of police abuse, much less means by which a citizen can denounce the immigration restrictions holding the national territory in their grip, we still have our bones, our skin, our stomach walls, to reclaim, by way of the fragile terrain of our bodies, the rights they have taken from us."

From Generation Y, the blog of Cuban, Yoani Sanchez, winner of International Press Institutes's (IPI) 60th World Press Freedom Hero, and the Prince Claus Award, discussing a friend who has gone on a hunger strike to protest the political oppression in Cuba.

HT Mark Perry at the Enterprise Blog where he states:

"When the history of Cuba’s freedom movement is written, it’s likely that Yoani Sanchez will be recognized as a national hero and freedom fighter, the equivalent of Lech Walesa in Poland or Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic. Yoani Sanchez demonstrates that we should never underestimate the power of one courageous individual with a computer, a blog, and intermittent access to the Internet (Sanchez says she has not actually been able to see her own blog since 2007), or the individual’s power to change the world in the Information Age, especially with a message of freedom and individual liberty. Intellectual figures like Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of Yoani and her powerful message of individual freedom in one of the only remaining regimes of totalitarianism left in the world."

What then, is the law?

Bastiat could have been talking about the new health control law. Don't be fooled by the new tactic of the White House and Democrats, the PPACA can not be fixed, or improved. It is constructed on an improper concept of law, and an improper view of justice.

"What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. ... since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. ... But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense."

-- Frederic Bastiat(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. The Law, 1850 (emphasis mine)

The PPACA needs to be repealed, not revised.

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WANTED: a liberty-based interpretation of Islam

We need more people who think like Dr. Mohammad Zuhdi Jassar, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. He is for individual rights, the US Constitution, separation of mosque and state, and universal liberty.

Speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2010, Dr. Jassar discusses how Islam needs to evolve into modernity, and embrace and integrate the principles of freedom and individual rights.

"[This] is about the liberation of the soul from the shackles of theocracy and fascism."

HT commenter "Trevor" at The Rational Capitalist.

Jefferson on the "redistribution" of wealth

I am not a fan of the term "redistribution" of wealth because it implies that wealth is initially "distributed," thus easing the way towards justifying a re-distribution. In fact, all wealth must first be produced through the combination of human thought and labor. Even natural resources must be identified and collected into a useful form. If a man owns himself, then he surely owns his labor and the fruits of his labor. These facts are the root of man's inalienable right to property.

"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association -- the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
-- Thomas Jefferson(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President Source: Note in Tracy's "Political Economy," 1816

HT Liberty Quotes.

Individuals with Ideas vs. the Collectivism of Race

When Americans can focus on ideas instead of ethnicity, on individuals instead of race --we will have taken a giant step forward in the advancement of civilization. Racism is just one more form of collectivism --all of which subordinate the value of unique individual human beings to the needs, the desires or the identity of the group.

I am grateful to the individuals who stood at the podium in the following clip. It takes courage, integrity, and trust in one's own mind to risk viewing the world out of step with the mainstream.

Ya gotta watch out for them "nice guys"

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 1928

I came across this quote in Frederich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. This warning starts off the seventeenth chapter titled, "The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of the Welfare State" and is an appropriate reminder to us today as government massively expands on the justification of helping some segment of society. The quote prompted me to search for its source, curious about the the context which inspired Justice Brandeis to issue this advice.

The quote is part of Brandeis' dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States. The opinion is worth reading in its entirety as an excellent example of a principled interpretation of the Constitution. The issue at stake was whether or not wiretapping was a violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The 1914 supreme Court case Weeks v. United States had previously established that illegally obtained evidence could not be used in a criminal trial because it violated standards for search and seizure. Brandeis argues that although telephones did not exist at the time of writing of the Constitution, the principle involved is protection of the private citizen's security from government invasion--no matter the form. Here's another taste of his principled reasoning in Olmstead:

'The principles laid down in this opinion affect the very essence of constitutional liberty and security. They reach farther than the concrete form of the case there before the court, with its adventitious circumstances; they apply to all invasions on the part of the government and its employe of the sanctities of a man's home and the privacies of life. It is not the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging of his drawers, that constitutes the essence of the offense; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty and private property, where that right has never been forfeited by his conviction of some public offense-it is the invasion of this sacred right which underlies and constitutes the essence of Lord Camden's judgment...There is, in essence, no difference between the sealed letter and the private telephone message. As Judge Rudkin said below:
'True, the one is visible, the other invisible; the one is tangible, the other intangible; the one is sealed, and the other unsealed; but these are distinctions without a difference.'

Let us hope that the judges who will review the constitutionality of ObamaCare think as clearly and in such a principled manner. It's time to reverse this country's tend toward greater and greater indentured servitude of one citizen for the sake of another and get back to a principled application of individual rights, equally applied to all.

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A Case in Point

I don't want an equal share of loot. I want freedom.

--CAV

Read the rest.

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Hayek on Liberty, Values and Altruism

Another good quote from Hayek's Constitution of Liberty. (Warning: I am cherry picking quotes. There is much to disagree with in Hayek.)

Hayek's appreciation of the importance of liberty both allows him to tumble upon some key ideas, while at the same time distracts him from looking for the even more fundamental principles upon which liberty is properly grounded. I am discovering his propensity for empiricism as manifested in his view that the "wisdom of social progress" (a sort of "wisdom of the crowd" through time) is superior to the individual rational mind for identifying the proper rules and institutions for human interaction. Also, he views the foremost purpose of liberty not as the means for man to live his individual life free from the aggressive acts of other men, but rather as the best way to guarantee the progress of civilization. In the quotes below, however, he drifts close to comprehending one of the problems with altruism, and stumbles into the importance of being free to act upon one's own values.

Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another. --pg 21

To extol the value of intellectual liberty at the expense of the value of the liberty of doing things would be like treating the crowning part of an edifice as the whole.

--pg 33

General altruism, however, is a meaningless conception. Nobody can effectively care for other people as such; the responsibilities we can assume must always be particular, can concern only those about whom we know concrete facts and to whom either choice or special conditions have attached us. It is one of the fundamental rights and duties of a free man to decide what and whose needs appear to him most important.

The recognition that each person has his own scale of values which we ought to respect, even if we do not approve of it, is part of the conception of the value of the individual personality. How we value another person will necessarily depend on what his values are. But believing in freedom means...that we do not feel entitled to prevent him from pursuing ends which we disapprove so long as he does not infringe on the equally protected sphere of others.

A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom. --pg 79

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4th of July

On the 4th of July, I like to use the day to contemplate all that is good and right about our country, its people and its form of government.

Two hundred and forty-four years ago, on this day, a group of men agreed to a statement declaring independence from a tyrannical government. At the time that Great Britain was accused of this heinous crime, it was the freest country in the world. Still, it fell short of a government for free and independent men.

That document was a declaration of independence not just for a band of British colonists, but for all of humanity:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The full and consistent application of the the principle of equal individual rights has yet to occur in this country or elsewhere-but this document correctly names the proper principle to guide our social an political interactions; the mutual respect of the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Even such a clear, concise statement is open to varying interpretation unless we rigorously define each and every salient term. What is meant by equal? Unalienable? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness?

From the second major crisis of liberty which our country faced, I'd like to add the following quote in an attempt to extend our understanding:

Baltimore, Maryland, April 18, 1864

...The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatable things, called by the same name---liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatable names---liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails to-day among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty. Recently, as it seems, the people of Maryland have been doing something to define liberty; and thanks to them that, in what they have done, the wolf's dictionary, has been repudiated.

A. LINCOLN"

Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 7.

Have a wonderful 4th of July.

Living for yourself is not living only for yourself

This is the second of three installments aimed at addressing points made in comments to a previous post. In the first, I explained why I do not think advocating for voluntary funding of government is utopian (i.e. naive or unrealistic). Here, I would like to address another misconception: that in defending an individual’s right to be either persuaded or left alone, I am advocating we all “live only for ourselves.”

I do not “live only for myself”—nor is that what I advocate or promote. I am, however, insisting that each person has the right to exist for his or her own sake and that no one has any unchosen obligations. If a person chooses to be an antisocial recluse—that is their business, and I think, their loss as well. I am simply arguing that it is never right to do by ballot what you would never consider doing as an individual. One example would be demanding at the point of a gun that someone hand over his honestly earned money.

I do not advocate for any right which cannot be applied equally to all. It is this principle of non-contradictory individual rights which creates the barriers to stop each of us from infringing on others.

The basic political question is not “should I value and give my time to others?” (That is an important moral question--but not all that has to do with morals belongs in politics. Morals have to do with right and wrong in general; politics has to do with right and wrong in a social context, especially as related to the institutional use of force.) A fundamental political question is "If I don’t see the value in something, should my neighbors be able to gang up on me and force me into certain actions, regardless of my own judgment?"

Frequently it is postulated that either we put others before ourselves or we put ourselves before others. These two opposing alternatives do not exhaust the possibilities. The alternative I support is as follows: The respect for and valuing of other people is an extension of the respect for and valuing of my own life. My right to live for my own sake does not exist separate from the right of others to live for their own sake. My life is much richer for the interactions and exchanges I have with other people. Provided we keep our interactions voluntary, we have much to gain from sharing our lives, time, riches and values with other human beings.

When steeped in this mutual respect, people are of bountiful value to each other, not as supplicants or duty-bound servants, but as equals. When these rules of proper social interaction are codified in law, we can live amongst each other secure in our person and property, peacefully in freedom, with government acting solely as objective arbitrator and the protector of each and everyone's individual rights.

Up next: Voluntary taxes: How could it possibly work?

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Education and Coercive Funding

The following is a series of letters to the editor published in the Half Moon Bay Review in opposition to a local parcel tax to help fund the local government schools, the latest of which was published today. Also, just today, I found a discussion site that I was previously unaware of hosted by the paper. After carefully reading all of the entries, I will do my best to respond. I am grateful to an editor who is willing to publish my views even though he is in disagreement with them.

LTE 3-17-2010

Budgets are cut. Jobs are lost. Schools are expected to do more with less. The suffering quality of education is a true tragedy—but not the one that most people seem to think.

The spiral of increasing costs accompanied by decreasing quality is an inescapable function of all goods and services provided via state central planning. The best intensions and admirable efforts of the hard working, honest individuals participating in this system can not overcome this economic fact.

The real tragedy is the existence of government schools. Compulsory attendance laws result in the government providing schools for students to attend. This requires funding, which--as in all government programs--is accomplished through the expropriation of private property, subsequently allocated on political terms, not according to quality or economic efficiency.

The strong-arm of government has created a near monopoly in education. Although private schools do exist, the variety of educational options is severely stunted. Because government schools appear to be “free,” and people who chose a private alternative end up paying twice, 80% of primary and secondary students attend government schools. Only the relatively wealthy are able to “opt out.” This crowding out of private alternatives leaves people dependant on government schools—and thus dependant on the political processes to affect both curriculum and funding.

With a captive “customer” base, the normal incentives for providing the best value for the lowest cost no longer exist. Powerful unions increase costs further while bolstering barriers to competition-induced improvements. Schools can not compete for funds by offering a better product, so they are reduced to begging for votes to expropriate even more of their neighbor’s money.

And that is the real tragedy of our educational budget crisis—a tragedy that only the free market and its consistent respect of property rights will alleviate.

LTE 6-2-2010

Measure E is on the ballot to raise money for our local government schools. Cutbacks in state funding mean the education of our local youth will suffer. This is tragic. Education is important and worthy of receiving adequate funding.

In spite of this, I cannot bring myself to support a law that uses the force of government to deprive others of their property. If people cannot be convinced to voluntarily provide financial support to the schools, I know of no moral principle that allows me to force others to act against their best judgment. Our Constitution was written to protect us from precisely this abuse of power by the majority.

It is simply immoral to even attempt to achieve a goal through the use of force, no matter how deeply ensconced in compassion, generosity, or good will. You may try to persuade your friends and neighbors, and tirelessly work to obtain their voluntary assistance (financial or otherwise), but, if you can’t convince them, there is no moral basis for employing the coercive power of the state to aid you in achieving through force what you can not achieve through persuasion.

What is at stake is greater than the plight of our schools. The peaceful coexistence of human beings is grounded upon the recognition of each individual’s right to his own life, liberty and property — and only his own.

The civilized world has come to recognize the immorality of enslaving another human being in order to employ his labor against his will. The next step in our moral progress is to recognize that a man’s property is an extension of his life, and that to seize a man’s property against his will is merely another form of slavery.

For this reason, Measure E is immoral and should be soundly defeated.

LTE 6-16-2010

Proposition E has passed. In spite of being against the principle of government-run education, I have mixed feelings about the results of last week’s election.

In part, I am relieved that the vital services our local schools provide will not suffer the devastating cuts they would have without this financial boost. At this time, for many students and families in our community (including mine) there is no realistic alternative to government schools. I am very appreciative of the relationships and experiences that my son enjoyed in his four years at Half Moon Bay High School. Many of the individuals in the system are excellent human beings devoted to providing a quality education to our children. That said, I continue in my concern that this is a temporary patch on a fatally flawed system, which in the long run is neither moral nor practical. The very existence of government education is premised upon the violation of property rights. Even though 70 percent voted in favor of Measure E, 30 percent of our neighbors will have their property taken against their will. Additionally, history has repeatedly demonstrated the failure of central planning — in business, in education, in health care. (Please see my letters from March 17 and June 2.)

I can only hope that, with more time and experience, more people will come to understand the superiority of a government limited to the protection of individual rights and a society which demands that all interactions are based on persuasion, and in which the initiation of force is always viewed as an illegitimate means for obtaining one’s ends.

Thank you for the opportunity to express my minority view in your publication.

Capitalism is Perfect

In an excellent response to Thomas Frank's attack on Capitalism, Wendy Milling states:

Since politics concerns the nature of government, and the essence of government is force, the full politico-economic application of property rights is a system in which government protects an individual's property rights from violation by others, but does not itself violate them. Capitalism is the politico-economic system of private property rights. It connotes a system whereby property rights (and hence, the other rights) are respected objectively and completely.

Capitalism is perfect...

Assaults on capitalism are rooted in a crybaby metaphysics, and they rely on obfuscations, equivocations, and an attitude of militant evasion. One trick is to make inappropriate demands of capitalism, then stomp and pout and denounce capitalism when those demands are not met.

One of the irrational demands made on capitalism is to provide infinite abundance, usually in some particular object of the demander's whim. The world has finite resources, and man has limited time and is not omniscient. There cannot be an infinite abundance of anything. This is not a flaw in any proposed politico-economic system (especially capitalism, which provides the greatest abundance of all of them), and in fact has nothing to do with systems qua system at all. It is a feature of reality.

A corollary demand is the erasure of all poverty, suffering, and, by logical extension, inequality among man. Appealing to an irrational sense of guilt, this trick ascribes to political systems an implicit, incompatible mission: Make it so that absolutely everyone is healthy, educated, happy, and has all the resources he wants (or some do-gooder wants for him). It then pronounces capitalism as flawed when such conditions do not materialize. Some degree of economic malady exists and will continue to exist under any system, including capitalism. It is not the responsibility of capitalism to eliminate, and it is not a feature of capitalism, but of a special facet of reality: Man's free will

Read the rest here.

Our Neighbor's Money is not Ours to Vote On

My hometown has a measure on the primary ballot to raise money for the local government schools. Cut backs in state funding have left them in a desperate state--forced to shrink or eliminate vital programs and services, which means the education of our local youth will suffer. This is tragic. Education is important and is worthy of receiving adequate funding. After years of homeschooling my children, both are now attending the local high school--so my children's education will suffer unless the schools receive more money.

In spite of these facts, I can not bring myself to support a law which uses the force of government to deprive others of their property. If people cannot be convinced to voluntarily provide financial support to the schools, I know of no moral principle which allows me force others to act against their best judgment. Our Constitution was written to protect the individual from precisely this abuse of power by government and the majority---even though this original meaning has been severely diluted and even lost in recent years.

It is simply immoral to even attempt to achieve a goal through the use of force, no matter how deeply ensconced in compassion, generosity, or good will. You may try to persuade your friends and neighbors, and tirelessly work to obtain their voluntary assistance (financial or otherwise) but if you can not convince them, there is no moral basis for employing the coercive power of the state to aid you in achieving through force what you can not achieve through persuasion.

For this reason, my local Measure E is immoral and should be soundly defeated.

For this same reason, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is immoral and should be repealed.

Use of government force to control how much and what kind of energy private citizens choose to purchase, is similarly wrong and should not be allowed.

What is at stake is greater than the plight of our schools, or the uninsured, or man's purported effect on climate. The peaceful coexistence of human beings is grounded upon the recognition of each individual's right to his own life, liberty and property--and only his own. We are neither masters nor slaves, neither our brother's keepers nor the kept.

This does not negate voluntary cooperation or pooling of resources and efforts to achieve community goals. (Many worthwhile projects can not be achieved without joint support and action.) It simply removes the use of force as a legitimate means of achieving one's goals at the expense of others.

The civilized world has come to recognize the immorality of enslaving another human being in order to employ his labor against his will. The next step in our moral progress is to recognize that a man's property is an extension of his life and liberty, and that to seize a man's property against his will is merely another form of slavery.

Until we are able to remove the intrusive hammer of government force from our private lives, our peace, good will, prosperity--and the moral character of our communities-- are in mortal danger.

To be moral in your interactions with fellow human beings, you must either convince him, or you must leave him alone.

Drawing, Freedom of Speech, the Law of Identity...and Obama's Statism

Everybody Draw Mohammad Day has come and gone.

Over at Draw Mohammad, I have posted a number of sites which participated in celebrating our First Amendment.

True to form, the current US administration has come out in support of those violating Freedom of Speech:

“Pakistan is wrestling to this issue. We respect any actions that need to be taken under Pakistani law to protect their citizens from offensive speech,” said the US State Department official while rejecting a suggestion from a journalist to condemn Islamabad’s actions...“At the same time, Pakistan has to make sure that in taking any particular action, that you’re not restricting speech." (Dawn.com)

How can you "respect any actions to protect their citizens from offensive speech" and at the same time "make sure...your're not restricting speech"?

You can't.

This is a classic example of Obama's (and his supporters) ability to get away with emphatically stating contradictory statements, even in the same speech! Each statement in itself seems reasonable, but closer inspection reveals that placed together they are self-contradictory--an attempt to have one's cake and eat it too. You can't be credited with supporting freedom of speech while at the same time supporting the violation of freedom of speech. Ever since Aristotle formulated his Law of Identity, there is no excuse those who attempt to inform us that A can be both A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect.

Freedom of speech, rationally understood as a corollary of the individual right to life, can not entail both freedom and censorship. No amount of trying to straddle the issue with one foot on freedom and the other foot on the tenets of tyranny and statism, can avoid the fact that A is A, and censorship is censorship.

Either you are for freedom of speech, or you are for government abridgment of speech.

Obama and his administration, in this issue and in so many others, are clearly on the side of statism.

(Excerpted from post at Draw Mohammad.)

The Unleashing the Lash of License Laws

This ribbon is to raise awareness of the recent damage our government has caused to health care freedom and the integrity of the doctor-patient relationship. Under ObamaCare, physicians will be compelled to base their advice and treatment on politically determined goals, even when in conflict with the best interest of their individual patients.

Yesterday I renewed my medical licence. In California, I have a Class G Physicians and Surgeons licence. In order to maintain my licence to practice medicine, I had to attest to the following:

1. having obtained 50 hours of continuing medical education in the past two years, including 12 hours of pain management end-of-life care within the past 4 years, and if 25% or more of my patients are 65 or older, 20% of my CME must be in geriatrics.

2. the zip code in which I practice, the number of hours I work per week in various types of medicine-related activities, my years of training beyond medical school, board certification-if any, foreign languages I am fluent in, and my ethnic background. (In the last2 categories, I was at least given the option "decline to state.")

3. "the name and address of each health-related facility in which you or your immediate family have a financial interest."

After completing the form, I was given the option of contributing $25 for family practice training. The required license fee for the "privilege" of practicing medicine in California is $808.00--however $25 of that fee is a mandatory contribution to a loan repayment program:

Mandatory - Physician Loan Repayment Program Fee California Business and Professions Code section 2435.2 requires applicants to pay a mandatory fee of $25.00 at the time of issuance or renewal of a physician and surgeon's license to the Physician Loan Repayment Program. The Physician Loan Repayment Program encourages recently licensed physicians to practice in under served locations in California by authorizing a plan of repayment of their medical school loans in exchange for their service in a designated medically under served area for a minimum of three years.

In order to legally practice medicine in California, I am forced to fund other physicians who work in "under-served locations."

I paid my own tuition for medical school, which required taking out loans and which I personally paid back every cent. But this personal responsibility is not sufficient for the state of California. The mere fact of choosing to maintain my licence in this state requires me to help others repay their loans.

With the advent of RommneyCare (the Massachusetts universal health care equivalent of ObamaCare) and the subsequent physician shortage and soaring state deficits, proposals in Massachusetts include threats of price controls--and of linking medical licences to treating patients on the state public access plan.

How long before we see similar requirements imposed from a federal level?

For years, physicians have practiced under the government-protected cartel of licensing laws. When the fiscal disaster of ObamaCare manifests as nationwide physician shortages and soaring costs, it won't take long for the licencing laws which have protected physicians from market competition to turn into a leash for government control of incomes as well the practice of medicine.

The One and the Many

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."

-- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) English philosopher and economist Source: On Liberty, 1859

If all mankind minus one desired to accomplish a particular goal, mankind would be no more justified in coercing that one person to participate or contribute, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in coercing mankind.

I am constantly perplexed that so many people are able to understand the first proposition, but not the second.

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