Tessa Talk

Calling People Nazis II

2010-09-21T10:17:00.003-04:00

"Hitler" and "Nazi" have become pretty much all-purpose political insults on the internet. Because the Hitler/Nazi phenomenon was so complex, there are numerous ways in which a person and/or his political views can resemble them. If you have a particular axe to grind, you are likely to grab onto that one aspect of the Nazi phenomenon and ignore other aspects. You can single out Christianity, socialism, fascism, nationalism, authority, obedience to authority, militarism, or racism. Did I miss any? Those who single out fascism tend to ignore the fact that communist regimes put Hitler in the shade when it came to slaughtering people. And those who single out religion tend to ignore that the communist regimes were not religious.

Serious thinkers want to understand why these massive political slaughters happened, and what we can do to make sure they never happen again.

Let's all be socialists - or not.

2010-08-29T08:53:00.002-04:00

At dinner last night with extended family, we discussed one person’s experience in New Zealand, a socialist country where most residents seem content with their government. I was informed that 96% of the population loves the country just the way it is. It’s fairly hard to immigrate there. The cops are actually nice to people. Health care – even dental work - is provided to all comers free of charge. And the income tax rate is about 50%. However, I was told that people are generally content with that. I did not try to verify any of this, but just assumed for now that it’s true and let it stew in my brain.

A few days earlier, I’d read a Time Magazine article about the best countries to live in. Interestingly, small, cold, politically neutral, socialist countries came out very much on top. The U.S. was in 11th place.

So what’s stewing in my brain is that socialism is something that a lot of people like and want. It’s something that many Americans are demanding more and more of. And socialism seems to be working for a number of countries. These countries are generally small, homogenous, neutral in geopolitical affairs, and spend most of the taxes they collect on stuff that benefits the people directly. I would note that these countries are not building empires or attempting to police the world. It looks to me like socialism “works” on a small and somewhat consensual basis.

A few days prior to that, at a family reunion, I was discussing what it could mean to be a “libertarian socialist,” which one young member of the family claims to be. Many libertarians would consider this a contradiction in terms, since socialism as we know it has always been a coercive system. But I guessed that this young person tacked “socialist” on there to counter an assumption that many people have about libertarianism – that libertarian necessarily means “every man for himself,” and somehow outlaws cooperation, charity, or any kind of social safety net. Socialism, of course, is entirely compatible with libertarian principles, as long as it’s voluntary, and no one is being forced into “the system” at gunpoint. Obviously, the elements of socialism in American society are part and parcel of our coercive system of government. I’m going out on a limb here, but I really don’t think that Americans object to socialism nearly as much as they object to coercion.

People have an underlying moral feeling that voluntary, contractual relationships are morally superior to forced relationships. Why else would people do mental gymnastics to fabricate a “social contract” within the forced relationship of citizens to government? We constantly hear things like: “you consented to their control when you did X.” And “X” could be when you were born here, when you got into your car, when you got a job, or whatever. But if you didn’t know you were consenting, or to what you were consenting, how could that possibly be valid? How can a person consent to anything by being born? We also hear constantly that we are bound by contracts that were made between other people, long before we were born, such as the U.S. Constitution. Or that we consented to “the way things are” when we voted, or when we didn’t vote!

Why would people so desperately try to find a consensual contract somewhere in there unless they felt that consensual relationships were morally superior to brute force? They are desperate to have us all believe that we consented, even though we didn’t know we did, and even though unknowing consent is no consent at all.

The fact is, none of us natural–born citizens consented to any of this, especially not in any conscious, specific way. I guess people who become citizens actually do take an oath of allegiance to the United States or something like that.

People like to say, “love it or leave it,” whenever we express a desire to change the status quo. Now “love it or leave it,” can be a reasonable choice – in a romantic relationship, perhaps, or your home town, or even a small country like New Zealand. However, to me, it seems unreasonable to say this about the United States, which has swallowed up most of the livable part of North America. People aren’t usually quite cruel enough to tell us to “love or leave” the whole planet – at some level, I think we all know that people have some kind of right to be at least somewhere that life is possible. “If you don’t like oppressive government, move to Antarctica,” does not strike me as reasonable at all. Neither does: “If you don’t like Jim Crow laws, leave the south.” Or, “if you don’t like Nazism, leave Germany.”

But I think that any “right” to live where we were born conflicts with our desire to form communities with like-minded people. And I think this conflict needs some closer analysis in light of what comes next.

My epiphany was that we actually could have social contracts – real ones, and lots of them. In the past, when I’ve tried to imagine an anarchistic society, I’ve often come up with lots of communities, each with its own rules. Anarchy, to me, is not an absence of rules, but the freedom to choose the rules one lives under. People obviously want social rules, but different people want different ones. And different people want different rules enforced in different ways, and arranged in different hierarchies of moral importance. For instance, in hypothetical community A, two men get married and everyone celebrates with them. In community B, there is quiet but tolerant disapproval. In community C, a gang goes to their house and kills them.

Any gay person with a brain would not choose to live openly in community C. Community B would have to offer compensating benefits to outweigh the disapproval. Community A would win unless other factors made it less desirable. Should community C be “allowed” to exist? Should gays (and others) go there and insist on their right to live there and be tolerated? If gays simply abandoned community C and flourished in communities B and A, would community C mind its own business? Community C might think that community A should not be allowed to exist.

I don’t know the answers to those questions. People would do what people would do. But the United States right now looks to me like hundreds of communities, wanting hundreds of different sets of rules, but all thinking they should have one set, and fighting bitterly over what set that should be. So we have approximately 400 million people hating and trying to change each other, and spending a lot of energy to forcefully impose their values on others who have different values. And if we don’t like all this hating and imposing – well, we should love it or leave it.

So, I propose social contracts – real ones, and lots of them. We can only imagine what this would look like; communities could be pretty big (like a state) or pretty small (like a town). Each community would have an actual contract between its organizers and every single adult resident, with specific rights and obligations on both sides. Each community could decide on an age of consent – how long people who are born there are allowed to live there without signing the contract, and whether or not to tolerate non-signers and on what terms.

If we like the mythology of the social contract, why not make it a reality? Imagine actually knowing what to expect from one’s “government” instead of pinning one’s hopes on campaign promises that a candidate has no obligation to fulfill (and most likely no intention, either). Imagine knowing your rights and obligations up front, instead of things being legal one month and illegal the next, and instead of your “fair share” changing drastically from one year to the next according to the political tides and the self-interest of professional liars.

It’s only natural to wish to impose our most passionately held moral principles on the whole world. Of course some communities would have rules and practices that were abhorrent to others. So what else is new? Abhorrent practices exist right now within the United States and all over the world. And much as I would love to have the whole world live by my values – it doesn’t.

To be quite honest, real social contracts actually would impose a few of my values on the world, and would create a path toward more of my values (if this were not true, I would not propose them, would I?). The value of “live and let live” is at least a start. Honest social contracts are more in line with my values than power-serving mythologies are. And, as I mentioned previously, I don’t think people would remain in places where they’re persecuted, and the sovereignty of the community where they are accepted would not allow persecutors to chase them wherever they go. Do we really care if people sit around hating people who are out of their reach?

I think, for instance, that if antebellum northerners had consistently and sincerely welcomed blacks to the northern states and protected them from pursuit, that the slave states could have been “drained” of slaves and a horrible war could have been avoided. I think this didn’t happen because northerners were racists and authority-worshippers, and had other reasons to conquer the south. Slavery (though not oppression) died in the Civil War, and that was a good thing as far as it went. What was not so good was the death of the idea of peaceful secession. Divorce, after all, can and does prevent murder. (“Is that a hint?” asks my husband.)

But seriously, some means for peaceful separation is an essential part of a voluntary contract. If there is no peaceful way to get out, then violence becomes the only way to respond to oppression (a la Burning Beds and such). The “contracts” we are currently born into willy-nilly have no escape clauses other than leaving our friends, family, and country.

Please tell me what you think!

Consent of the Governed?

2010-06-02T09:04:00.000-04:00

Consent of the Governed?

Is Religion Dangerous?

2010-05-21T12:20:00.005-04:00

I have a friend who believes that religious ideas are dangerous, and his opinion is shared by many. He points out that colossal amounts of cruelty, destruction, death, and torture have been done in the name of God, while very little (maybe none) has been done "in the name of atheism." While this is technically true, I feel that continuing to rail against the dangers of religion in the 21st century is really beating a dying horse when the cruelty, destruction, death, and torture has pretty much picked itself up and moved into the camp of secular government. Traditional religion is no longer the problem, nor is atheism the answer. While nobody's likely to kill anyone in the name of atheism per se, millions of people have been killed in the name of "godless" communism, fascism, and democracy. Religion has certainly been useful in the past for justifying war and cruelty, but religion is not strictly necessary.

The question that interests me is, what is strictly necessary to justify war and cruelty? My friend says that communism is "like a religion." Like a religion? In what way? Communism is based on an atheistic theory of social development. Is it like a religion only in that it's been used to justify the death, torture, and economic exploitation of some people by other people? My friend seems to want to draw a line between religious and secular ideas, but I think this is the wrong place to draw the line. I want to draw the line between ideas, religious or secular, that allow some people to kill and exploit others and ideas that don't.

My friend condemns religion for man's inhumanity to man, and yet admits that at least some secular philosophies have been used the same way. I would point at something broader than religion: any belief system that gives some people permission to use aggressive violence against others. Religions have certainly done that very nicely throughout mankind's miserable history. And yet, as the grip of theistic, supernatural religions has loosened on people's minds, and science and secularism have come to the fore, secular theories have done a remarkable job of picking up the slack. It seems, then, that God is not necessary to justify exploitation and violence, and therefore atheism is not enough to save us from it.

We can't understand what is dangerous - or not - about religion unless we can define exactly what religion is. Is it dangerous to believe in a god? Is it dangerous to believe in things we can't prove through reason and evidence? Perhaps. Yet I know many, many people who use their religious beliefs to keep them on the path of love and compassion. I am tempted to believe that humans create God in their own image, rather than the other way around. That God is the essence of the way we want to relate to people, whether it is with compassion, understanding, and love, or hatred and condemnation. I am tempted to believe that God is ultimately a way of avoiding responsibility for the goodness or badness of one's own soul, and that faith is ultimately a way of avoiding responsibility for the beliefs that support one's actions.

I believe that this avoidance is ultimately what makes any belief system dangerous. What if we taught our children: before you believe something, check with your own mind - does it make sense to you? Before you do something, or say something - check with your own heart - does it feel kind to you? Perhaps God is nothing more, and nothing less, than the goodness and truth in your own soul. Religions often teach that the human mind and heart are evil. Thus we are taught to distrust our own feelings and our own reasoning, and to place our trust outside of ourselves - in the writings and preachings of some authoritative voice. Once we distrust ourselves, this authoritative voice can have its way with us.

Once we trust authority more than ourselves, we can be exploited and used in whatever way the authority wishes. The religious and political history of mankind can be seen as a competition to hold the reins of authority and control the mind of humanity. Because those who control the mind of humanity, control humanity's productive capacity, and can live at ease on the labor of others.

We can see the primitive origins of human exploitation of humans in the gangs of armed raiders that used violence to plunder the first farming communities. People could not exploit the labor of others until settled communities began producing something in excess of what was needed for survival. Then the excess could be taken without destroying the source. And so some people learned to live by taking what others had produced by threatening them with injury or death. It's not a large step, perhaps, to go from hunting and gathering animals and plants to hunting and gathering from human settlements. Certainly it would be a more thrilling way of life for the strong and brave. Such direct plundering was violent and dangerous, because those being plundered were apt to try to defend themselves and their produce. And some plunderers, perhaps as they got older, wanted a more settled and peaceful life. To get the best of both worlds, and settle into the very communities they were plundering, they had to come up with a rationale for the exploitation. To live off the labor of other humans in ease and comfort, you need to somehow neutralize their defenses.

What you need is a world view and a moral code that makes your exploitation of them right, proper, legitimate, and good. This is the role of religion, the authoritative voice that neutralizes the self interest of the exploited. When goodness consists in obedience to authority, the brute force on which it ultimately rests can be kept in the background as a last resort. Brute force then becomes a righteous thing that happens only to "bad" people. While an independent community might band together to fight off marauders, the mythology of legitimate power brings the community over to the marauders' side, leaving anyone who resists alone against the community and the marauders together. Given that humans are social animals, this technique is extremely effective.

We could say that religion is the mind control and government is the brute force, but it's not quite that simple and divisible. Religion has always been used to legitimize power, to condemn self-defense by the exploited, and give its holy blessing to aggressive violence by authority. Religion promises rewards in heaven for obedience to authority here and now. Religion and government can at times be indistinguishable. But increasingly, over the centuries, power has sought to legitimize itself with more secular ideas, to give itself scientific underpinnings that the modern mind will still accept. This process has produced many power struggles and territorial disputes between religious and secular authorities.

The questing rational mind is always a danger to authority, as the questing rational mind likes nothing better than to knock over old theories and propose new ones, and this includes the ideas that support authority and the exploitation of some humans by others. And so authority has long waged war on the rational mind and sought to freeze ideas where it wants them. This is ultimately an impossible task. So along with trying to suppress thinking, exploiters must come up new and better theories of exploitation, and new and better ways to impress them on people.

I believe that the concept of freedom of religion was a big signal to humanity that theistic religion was no longer needed as the rationale for exploitation. When the supernatural realm was set free from this function of justifying power, it no longer mattered what people believed about it. The Age of Reason had brought forth new rationales for power, new secular mythologies that could be sold to an increasingly secular-thinking populace. Only the dullest witted person could fail to notice that freedom of religion never extends to freedom from exploitation by secular authority. Neither personal nor religious moral codes are ever allowed to interfere with the economic exploitation of the community by those in power. Freedom of religion was the power elite kissing the supernatural world goodbye - people can have whatever fantasies they like on Sundays, as long as they are loyal to the State and pay the tribute it demands. Of course, wherever people still believe in religion, the authorities will use it shamelessly to promote their power, but for those who think themselves too sophisticated for religion, authority now has other philosophical cards to play.

To understand power, community, and morals, it is essential to comprehend the division between people getting along with each other, and people getting along with an exploiting power class. To get along with each other, people must of necessity have rules of conduct and ways to resolve conflicts between them. The magic of society is that when (and only when) certain boundaries are respected, individual interests harmonize and promote the well being of all. We are a social species, and social rules come naturally to most of us, like language. Yet there are always those few who do not internalize social rules, and the rule-abiding people must have ways to defend themselves and the fruits of their labor from these antisocial people.

Authority is all about getting past the defenses of the productive community to get people's stuff without getting hurt.

In the modern age, centralized, monopolistic, official power has been increasingly sold to humanity as a way to protect social boundaries, thus placing the moral rationale for power squarely on society's need for order and peace. This is the central power myth of our age, and yet it is the exact opposite of the truth.

Authority is all about getting past the defenses of the productive community to get people's stuff without getting hurt.

The Social Contract is no more true than the Divine Right of Kings. Far from protecting social rules and boundaries, government-created legislation breaks through those essential boundaries, allowing some people to plunder others without getting hurt. Government is like an insidious virus that attaches itself to our white blood cells, hiding inside our defensive mechanisms so they cannot protect us. We cannot live without our white blood cells, but neither can we thrive when they are turned against us. We cannot live in society without order; but neither can we thrive when that order is turned against us.

The exploiting classes have taken the rules that help society function peacefully, claimed them as its own, and mixed them into the rules that maintain their power. Most of us have a deep-seated respect for society and its rules: we respect the law and take pride in being law abiding. I believe this comes to us naturally and instinctively, and in most people these feelings and instincts are naive and unanalyzed. Those in power would have it this way. If people were educated about law and legislation, they might see the difference. They might begin to see that legislation is not law, but permission for antisocial behavior disguised as law. They might see the difference between the rules of the community and the rules that protect the plunderer.

I think people who hate and fear theistic religion have missed a few centuries. Democracy is the religion of America now. We kill and torture in the name of democracy now. We indoctrinate our children in the myths of democracy. Democracy does not promise us rewards in the afterlife, but more cynically, promises us all a chance to plunder our neighbors.

An Earth Day statement

2010-04-22T13:13:00.007-04:00

Well, it's Earth Day. A day for lots of people to say lots of silly things about Our Mother, The Planet. Like how good she is to us and how we should be kind to her and "save" her, and so on.

Mother Earth does not love the human race. Nor does she hate us. She has no feelings about us at all. She was here long before we evolved to scamper around on her surface, and she will likely be here long after we're gone. We, on the other hand, depend completely upon her for life and everything that makes life enjoyable. Mother Earth is a stunningly beautiful, dreadfully abusive, and unforgiving mother from whom there is no escape.

Humans are not capable of destroying the planet, or even life on the planet. But from a completely humanocentric perspective, it is important to preserve the planet's capacity to sustain our lives. And beyond that, most of us want much more than just a life; we want a life that is enjoyable, comfortable, and interesting.

Now I will stop speaking for others, and just say that an enjoyable, comfortable, and interesting life, for me, includes lots of other species, large areas of wilderness, clean air and water, lots of energy and technology, peace, and freedom to pursue my individual interests. Furthermore, I don't just want all that for myself. I won't be really satisfied until every human being on the planet has an enjoyable, comfortable, and interesting life as well. Their specific requirements for that may be somewhat different from mine, but I suspect that much of what I mentioned is basic to all of us. And I'm not done yet. I also want to accomplish all this in a way that will be sustainable for many future generations.

Why does that feel like an impossible dream? If we all want these things, in various degrees, what is getting in the way of their achievement? It seems to me that our current numbers are too large for all of us to have a really good life. I would rather see four billion people well-fed, happy, and free, than 12 billion with many of them hopelessly starving, miserable, and/or enslaved. Watching nature shows, it does rather look like it's in the nature of every species to expand its population to the point where survival becomes increasingly difficult for many. That difficulty, of course, is caused by all the other species doing the same thing. And as people grow more numerous, the pressure on those other species, and the wild, humanity-free places where many of them thrive, grows greater.

But I wonder if humans are even capable of reducing their own population voluntarily, and I wonder if there are as yet undiscovered ways to make all of us comfortable here. Perhaps what is needed is more ingenuity. More smart people. Or more freedom for smart people to accomplish things.

Human beings spend a tremendous amount of energy killing, torturing, enslaving, and imprisoning each other; and a great deal of ingenuity figuring out new ways to do these things. This is something I have never really understood. Isn't our gigantic, abusive, inescapable Mother Earth a big enough adversary for us? Shouldn't we be using all our combined intelligence and strength figuring out ways to deal with the disasters and diseases she throws at us? Why do Earth's children insist on fighting all the time instead of cooperating to make their lives better?

I regret that I cannot publish comments in Chinese

2010-03-23T15:05:00.002-04:00

I'm not an English-only fascist, but despite my best efforts, I cannot read Chinese, and I don't want to publish comments when I don't know what they say. Write in Spanish, and I might have a fighting chance!

Imagine there's no government ...

2010-03-23T14:35:00.004-04:00

It's very easy to listen to government advocates tell you what they're going to provide for you and just believe it. They paint a picture, and you don't have to use your imagination at all. This is especially appealing if you've been raised by television and school, and actually have no imagination.

Schools for everyone - health care for everyone - roads and bridges and dams - national parks and clean water - protection from criminals, and so on. You just obey, and cough up a lot of money, and a bunch of people called "government" will provide all of these good things for you. It takes a bit of imagination to picture what could be there if these people called "government" didn't take your money, didn't demand your obedience, didn't provide anything - and instead left us in freedom to use our own resources and come up with our own solutions. Why do so many people assume that we'd have nothing -- that we'd just sit on our hands, lamenting that we have no education, no doctors, and no roads to drive on? The assumption is that problems can't be solved unless someone is holding a gun to someone else's head - either to get the funding for something or to make sure that the something gets done.

Why so much faith in the power of violence? Why so little faith in the power of cooperation?

Should we put God back in Schools?

2009-11-08T14:28:00.006-05:00

This post is in response to a Facebook conversation resulting from the question: Should we put God back in Schools?

Okay, since people seem determined to address this question seriously, I will try to be serious myself, instead of just poking fun at the question itself.

It can be very hard to say which particular moves are better or worse within a political system as screwed up as this one is. Ideally, there would be no public schools, no taxes, no guys with guns taking kids away from their parents if they didn't send them to school, and so on. As always, it's impossible to predict the spontaneous order that would result from the free actions of millions of individuals, so I won't even try to describe my own imaginings of what might come to be. Let's just assume that parents would choose the education they thought best for their children (or children would choose...) within the means of their unexploited income. They would obviously choose to educate their children according to what they believe is true: their own worldview and their own values. To do otherwise is insane (unless you're living under a regime so oppressive that it will kill you if you express unapproved beliefs).

Some people have world views that are based - however imperfectly - on scientific thinking: i.e., reasoning logically from the available evidence. Others believe in other epistemological methods in addition to that, such as faith and divine revelation. Many have secular moral views that are held with as much religious fervor and as little evidential grounding as those of religious people. But none of us perceives the world perfectly, and the best we can do for our children and students is to teach them what we believe to be true, and how we believe truth is acquired.

When people start picking up guns (making laws) to force their own world views on others or on others' children, oppression and strife results. I think this is the inevitable result of a national, tax-funded, mandatory educational system. People are forced to fund it, children are forced to go there, and bitter strife over what should be taught follows as inevitably as night follows day. The strife over how all our children should be educated results from the nationalistic assumption that all children living under the control of a specific "government" within some political boundary can and should be educated the same way. Everyone has ideas about it, and everyone believes that their ideas should be forced on everyone else.

A vague question like: should we put God back into schools? entails so many undefined assumptions that it really can't be answered. Distinctions must be made between schools that are freely chosen and those that are forced on people. Also, "God" certainly must be defined if the question is to be answered.

I bring whatever divinity I possess wherever I go. I try to bring love, and a profound respect for the humanity of others wherever I go. I try to seek the truth with an open mind. I would say that if you think God needs to be in a school or anywhere else, you must take him (or it) there yourself: you must take your own conception of him (or it) inside of yourself. Don't try to make laws about it. Leave others in freedom to pray or not pray to whomever they please. Leave others in freedom to seek truth the way they think best, and to speak what they believe to be true. Beliefs, values, and world views cannot be changed by force. But if you live your own conception of God, others may be drawn to that conception.

Of course, these are just my ideas, based on my values ...

Free Health Care or Health Care Freedom?

2009-11-07T17:11:00.005-05:00

I've been wanting to write a follow-up to my first post about health care, and here it is. I believe that we do have a right to "free" health care, but not in the sense of having a right to goods and services that someone else has produced without having to pay for them. What we do have a right to is the freedom to take care of our bodies as we see fit. We have a right to be unmolested in the area of health care as much as we have this right in every other area of life. We also have a right to health care services that cost what they would cost in a voluntary market, free from government intervention. I think that most people vastly underestimate the effect of more than a century of government intervention on the prices in the health care market.

Interventions are rarely initiated by government itself, much less by popular demand, but by business interests seeking government protection from the ruthless demands of the voluntary market. Those most able to pay the admission price to the government's boudoir can buy government guns to protect their interests from the free will of health care customers and providers.

The AMA became a national organization in 1847. Its publicly stated goals were to raise the quality of health care, and protect people from "quacks." And its not-publicly-stated goals included: to protect and increase the income and status of white male doctors within the profession; to restrict the practices of other professionals and other schools of thought in medicine; to control medical schools to restrict the supply of doctors; and to punish price competition among doctors. Of special note was the Flexner Report of 1910, which resulted in legislation further restricting entry into the profession, especially for women, blacks, and Jews. Jews were often able to acquire their education abroad; many medical schools especially for blacks were shut down.

The AMA recently apologized for its racist policies of the past. But at the time, the AMA was just doing its thing as a trade union for white male doctors; it was government enforcement that allowed them to succeed. And the gains of any trade union, monopoly, or cartel always come at the expense of other workers and businesses. The free market is the ever-present enemy of established business. Once you're on top, it's just "good business" to pay the government to protect your position there. You disseminate propaganda to the effect that the upstarts and alternatives are a danger to consumers, and must be regulated out of existence, or kept in a very small pen. Then the government will come to the consumers' "rescue" by limiting their freedom of choice.

For many decades, the AMA and the government have been "protecting" us from black, Jewish, and female doctors; "protecting" us from being served by other professionals such as midwives, osteopaths, homeopaths, pharmacists, and chiropractors; "protecting" us from cooperative medical plans; and so on. In general, for more than a century they've been "protecting" us from less expensive alternatives, and from our own freedom of choice.

It doesn't take too many brain cells to realize that when cheaper alternatives are outlawed, the prices of the restricted supply of the approved good will rise. Thus for a long time, doctors and drugs have become increasingly expensive relative to other goods, over and above the effect of the government's currency inflation, which affects all goods in the market.

With no alternate universe available, it's impossible to say what would have happened over the same period of time in a voluntary market. The government and the medical establishment can claim credit for everything good that has happened in medicine for the last 150 years, and blame all problems on the tattered vestiges of freedom that still remain, and there is no way we can prove them wrong. All we can do is point to economic theories that the average person does not understand.

Mid-20th century, the government interfered in the market with wage and price controls, and employers began offering hospital insurance to employees in lieu of higher wages. Over a decade or two, hospital insurance and then general outpatient health care insurance became the norm. As people got used to third-party payment, they lost touch with the actual price of medical care. And with employers providing insurance, they were shielded from the price of their insurance premiums also. Thus patients were left on the demand side of medical transactions, with very little awareness of the cost of what they were demanding.

This situation was a perfect opportunity for the established medical profession to push their prices up and up, and to sell more and more procedures, office visits, or drugs. When insurance is paying, patients will generally do whatever their doctors suggest, and price is no object. People want to get as much out of their insurance as they can. Thus insurance increases demand and causes prices to skyrocket.

This effect was exacerbated by the policies of Blue Cross/Blue Shield. These major insurers paid "cost-plus," which created an incentive for hospitals and doctors to increase costs, while The Blues generally paid the claims with no questions asked.

The system happily relieved doctors of any concern about their patients' pocketbooks. They could bill insurance companies for much more than they would demand from their patients face tofface. With hospitals, doctors, and drug companies all on the insurance bandwagon, the costs of healthcare rose dramatically; the incomes of doctors, hospitals, and drug companies rose dramatically; and the insurance premiums paid by employers rose dramatically along with them.

When insurance premiums began to rise beyond the means of small businesses and individuals, people began talking about cost control. This took the form of HMOs that attempted to control demand by restricting patients' choices. But the time was also ripe for government to step in and save the day by becoming the insurance company of last resort, first just for the poor and elderly, and later on for everyone.

The government is the ultimate insurance company, because they can extort all the money they want from helpless taxpayers with the help of their gun-toting thugs, and when they don't feel like doing that, they can just create money. Inflationary monetary policy is more palatable to people than gun-toting thugs, because people don't understand that value is being stolen from the money that's still in their hands.

Once the government becomes the insurer of last resort, prices can go through the roof with no visible effect on the average medical consumer. But this game can't go on forever. Eventually the economy begins to show the strain as the demands of 300 million medical consumers are met with more and more expensive products and services. There is really no escape from the laws of economics; rising taxes and rising inflation will eventually wreck the economy.

People become accustomed to the idea that medical care is something you can't possibly pay for without help. What they don't understand is that they are paying for it in many, many indirect ways, but they don't make the connection between economic malaise and the impossibly high cost of the medical care to which everyone has a "right." In fact, we're paying much, much more for it in all these indirect ways than we would if each of us just paid for it directly.

When the economy begins to crumble and crash, politicians must scramble to get the whole mess under control before disaster makes them politically vulnerable. By now, people are thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that they have a "right" to all the health care they want. And since they've been trained to believe that more government is the answer to every problem, there is nothing for the politicians to do but engineer a government takeover of the entire medical economy.

Now that people are getting desperate about cutting medical costs, it's funny how they're suggesting many of the very things that were outlawed and restricted--by the government, at the AMA's request--so long ago. All through the 20th century, M.D.s were marking out the territory they wanted, and paying people in government to protect the territory of their restricted cartel. They made sure that only M.D.s would be legally allowed to do many procedures and services that could easily have been done by less educated, less expensive professionals. The purpose of the AMA was always to raise the incomes of the doctors that belonged to it. And they succeeded in doing this at the expense of all the people who would have been doctors, all the patients those doctors would have served, all the patients who would have been served by other professionals, as well as those who would have been served by alternative therapies that were suppressed or not allowed to develop.

A friend of mine recently opined that we need a nationalized medical system because (for one thing) nobody can afford the cost of cancer treatment on their own. I did a little research on cancer treatment specifically. The cost of cancer treatment has risen astronomically, mostly due to the almost unbelievable prices of new anti-cancer drugs. It's gotten so bad that people are being bankrupted just by the small slice of the total cost that their insurance companies require them to pay.

Why do these drugs cost so much? I've talked here about the AMA, the insurance effect, and the government, but the Federal Drug Administration is also an important part of the cost picture. The FDA makes it tremendously expensive to get a drug approved, and the patent only lasts for a few years, so the drug companies have to recoup huge expenses and make all the money they want to make on that drug in just a few years' time.

In addition to this reality, they price the drugs high because they can - because insurance companies and/or government will pay for it. And also because the demand for life-saving drugs is pretty inflexible, as evidenced by people going bankrupt to pay for them.

Now imagine that we took insurance and government out of this picture. All that's left is the companies who make the drugs and the patients who need them. Who thinks that the drug companies would price their products so high that nobody could pay for them? Even when people are willing to impoverish themselves and their children to pay for life-saving drugs, there is ultimately a limit to their resources. Another lesson of basic economics is that you can't make money by pricing your product so high that nobody can buy it.

In a voluntary market, medical goods and services would be forced to compete for people's dollars with all the other things that people need and want. People would control their own demand, and spend their own money as judiciously as possible. The medical industry would have to bring its prices within the reach of ordinary people's budgets. And of course, more reasonable forms of insurance, as well as charity, would fill in the gaps between personal budgets and medical costs.

This freedom of choice, this personal autonomy, is what we have a right to. The freedom to take care of our own bodies the way we think best. The freedom to choose our own practitioners, our own medical philosophies, and pay for our own care in a voluntary market.

As yet, I haven't touched on the issue of controlled substances. Throughout most of the 20th century, the government has assumed the power to prohibit or allow citizens to use various chemical substances for medical or recreational purposes. If we grant the government the power to allow or prohibit what drugs and medicines we take, we have surrendered our sovereignty over our own bodies. How anyone can still believe he is free after surrendering control of his own body is beyond me.

If we grant the government the power to control what we're allowed and not allowed to ingest, then this power is up for grabs to the highest bidder. The law enforcement/prison industry wants more drugs in the criminal category, and wants the power to draw the line between recreational and medical uses. Doctors want drugs in the prescription category, so that people have to pay for office visits in order to get drugs. Governments want to declare substances unhealthy so that they can collect "sin taxes" on them.

We have a right to freedom in health care as much as we have a right to freedom in everything else. We have a right to choose our own foods, poisons, and medicines without the interference of busybodies and gun-toting thugs. Our need for health care is being used against us by opportunistic politicians and rapacious business interests. It's being used to impoverish and control us. The problem is not that we can't afford decent health care; it's that we can't afford this lack of freedom.

Evil People and Hatred

2009-10-29T16:17:00.013-04:00

Recently Larken and I watched the movie "The Green Mile" for the first time in many years. Having just written my last post about how people always think they're doing the right thing, it was challenging to be reminded just how unspeakably, deliberately evil some people are. Of course the movie is entirely fictional, based on a Stephen King story about characters living or working on a Death Row in a 1930s prison. But there really are people like the villains in that film: people who simply enjoy making other people suffer--which, it seems to me, is pretty much the essence of evil.

Does my premise break down when we look at the worst people on earth? How could mass murderers and child rapists possibly think they're doing the right thing? Well, I do believe that on a conscious level they usually know that what they're doing is wrong and evil, but on some deeper level, below their own awareness perhaps, they've decided that being "evil" is the right choice for them. For some reason they've decided that being "good" just doesn't work for them. It's hard--maybe impossible--for normal people to understand why someone would feel this way, but criminal psychologists keep trying to figure it out.

And why, you might think, should we even try to understand -- let alone forgive -- these horrible people? Especially those who are completely unrepentant, and will keep on doing heinous things until someone stops them with a bullet? How could such a person deserve understanding and forgiveness?

I don't think they do deserve it, and I don't think that's the point. The understanding and forgiveness is for us: because it's not good for us to be filled with hatred and anger. And it's for practice: because if we can understand and forgive the most dangerous and twisted people among us, surely we can also think kindly of good-hearted people with different points of view. It's to diffuse the power of hatred, one person at a time. It's to see everyone as a human being, even when our minds are screaming, "monster!"

One of the Death Row guards in The Green Mile is a sadistic creep who is obviously there to witness and cause suffering. Sadistic people will always be drawn toward those who are seen as less than human, where society gives tacit permission or even encouragement to sadistic abuse. Criminals are a very convenient group for this. Although it's gone out of fashion to abuse groups of people based on unchosen things like skin color or sex, we can still get lots of tacit approval for being cruel to people who have ostensibly chosen to be something that we hate: criminals, drug users, welfare recipients, rapacious capitalists, gun-toting government thugs, or whoever we personally love to hate the most. Righteousness allows us to hate people while maintaining our self-respect, because those people deserve to be hated for what they have chosen to be.

Hundreds of movies (including The Green Mile) cater to an appetite for righteous retribution - the worse the villain is, the better people can feel about enjoying his cruel end, especially with the knowledge that it's not really happening. And very rarely does a hero kill a villain in cold blood, because that would make us all uncomfortable -- the villain almost always makes himself an immediate threat just before his horrific demise.

Why do we enjoy these movies so much? If we simply enjoyed violence and mayhem for its own sake, the writers would not be so careful to make the bad guys deserve what they get. I think that in a society where few of us will ever experience real violence, we feel a need to vicariously conquer evil and danger.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Nor would I ever suggest that understanding and forgiveness be allowed to get in the way of protecting ourselves and others from aggressors. Whether the aggressors are deranged serial killers, burglars, tax collectors, or prosecutors - we must find ways to render harmful people harmless. But it should be done as humanely as possible, without malice, anger, or hatred; not just for the sake of those aggressors, but for the sake of ourselves and the world.

I remember trying to think of prison guards as if they were rhinos or hippos - large, dangerous, stupid animals. You don't have to hate a dangerous animal; you just have to proceed with caution when you're in its territory. Some criminals are more like rabid dogs, where there's nothing to do but shoot them. But again, we don't hate rabid dogs; we feel sad that they're both incurable and dangerous. Imagining people to be animals is dehumanizing, you might say! Yes it is. But because the violence of animals is both impersonal and morally neutral, in some cases this fantasy can diffuse our righteous anger.

Normally, people dehumanize others in order to hate them more conveniently. Group identity helps us dehumanize those outside of the group. Righteousness helps us feel good about hating. And politics allows us to murder, rob, torture, and imprison those we hate indirectly, keeping the blood off our own hands.

I am proceeding here on the premise that hatred is an enemy of mankind, and that we should do whatever we can to discourage this feeling in ourselves, and to avoid that which inflames it. The idea that people are always doing what they believe is right may be hard for us to believe in some cases, but I think that if we were omniscient, we would be able to see how it's true. And the effort to see how it's true puts us in touch with the humanity of those we could otherwise easily hate.

Everyone is Doing What he Believes is Right

2009-10-26T15:24:00.010-04:00

I propose that everyone does what he thinks is right, all the time. Even when people do something that they think is theoretically wrong, there is some reason for it that makes it right for them at that moment.

For instance: "I know it's wrong to steal, but my kids are hungry, and I just can't bring myself to beg." For this person, stealing feels wrong, yet it also feels like the best option for him at that time. Or: "I know it's wrong to cheat on my wife, but I may never feel this way again." Or, "I know it's wrong to lie in court, but these evil tax protestors could destroy our civilization."

Temptation, we could say, is a struggle between the rightness and wrongness of an action in our minds. Frequently it's a struggle between what feels right for ourselves, right now, and what feels right for others and the future.

I see this as the interminable conflict of morality - the needs of the self and the present as opposed to the needs of others and the future. It is not a conflict between good and evil, but a matter of getting the balance right. Happiness is a state of the self in the present moment, and happiness is the best thing in life. But regard for others and the future can be essential to keeping those happy moments flowing as the "now" progresses through time.

Society consists of the complex interplay of many actors trying to achieve the proper balance between self and others, and between now and the future. And morality is the attempt to codify behavior in a set of rules that achieves the best balance for everyone.

We can purge ourselves of anger and hatred toward those who hurt us if we can really see that everyone does what he believes is right all the time. Everyone, deep down, thinks that his own morality is best, and should be imposed on everyone else. Before you say, Oh no, not me! consider this: I believe that the best way to achieve happiness for all is to leave people in freedom as much as possible. I believe that one person's freedom should be restricted only by the equal freedom of others. I would impose this morality on everyone else by using deadly force if necessary to defend myself and others from aggression. That which we would impose on others by deadly force is the essential core of our morality. Above that core, we have varying degrees of tolerance, indifference, and approval. But the behavior that we would enforce or prevent by means of deadly force is the behavior that matters the most to us. And of course we are equally responsible whether we wield the gun ourselves or get "law enforcers" to do it for us.

I believe, simply, that society works best when violence is not used at all; therefore my morality approves of violence only when it's used defensively. I believe that defensive violence is good to the degree that it's necessary to counter aggressive violence.

But that's just my morality. And probably yours, too, if you're reading this. My morality flows from the value I place on the happiness of every human being, and is informed by all the knowledge I have at my disposal, whether from books, personal experience, or whatever. What is good? and how is good best achieved? The answers to these questions give shape to our personal moral codes.

If we want to understand others, it's important to realize that others have different answers to these questions, based on their own ideas about human beings and the world. And if we wish to change their ideas or present them with new ideas, we should do this with as much charity and goodwill as we can muster. We must try to get into their minds, behind their eyes, and into their shoes as much as possible, in order to understand their idea of what's good, what's bad, and when it's appropriate to pick up a gun.

Of course, we really can't see the world completely from someone else's point of view. The best we can do is to imagine. This is one of the reasons I'm an anarchist. If I cannot walk a mile in someone's shoes, I will not presume to run his life.

But many others, I well know, see things very differently. Other people whole-heartedly believe that people's lives should be run by others. They believe that the main virtue for most of humanity is obedience to authority, and that the use of deadly force by that authority to enforce their obedience is virtuous and necessary.

Perhaps your mind rebels at this. No, no! you say, No one can really, truly believe that! These people are just rationalizing their evil desire to dominate others! I think that those of us who love freedom instinctively feel this way because it's almost impossible for us to imagine not knowing what we know, and not understanding what we understand. It seems impossible that these people really, really, deep down inside, don't know any better.

It's hard to imagine the world view of people far back in history because we are aware of what has happened since their time, and they were not. We cannot expunge that awareness from our minds any more than they could magically see things the way we do. People like to feel morally superior to people who lived in the past. And perhaps we are morally superior, because morality has evolved since their time, but this is not to our credit. People do their best within the confines of their own time period, their own intelligence, their own culture, and their own knowledge.

I think that anarchistic morality, with its emphasis on maximum freedom and minimum violence, is the best morality there is. Because, duh -- of course I'm going to embrace what seems right to me. To live by what seemed wrong to me would be just insane. And because I think my moral code is best, it logically follows that I think the world would be better if everyone embraced it.

We cannot get through to people by clubbing them over the head with how bad and wrong they are. The reason is that they don't think they're bad and wrong any more than we think we are. I've been persecuted, prosecuted, imprisoned, robbed, viciously slandered and derided, all in an effort to show me how bad and wrong I was. None of it has ever had the slightest bit of success.

I guess I can see that I'm obviously very bad and wrong from their point of view. But their bludgeoning has done nothing to convince me that their belief system and moral code is superior to the one that I hold. In fact, the bludgeoning only demonstrates that their morality hurts people, and their morality readily justifies throwing aside numerous other moral tenets in order to hurt people. That, I think, is one mark of a bad moral code.

I do not think that bludgeoning, either physical or verbal, leads people to a higher truth. I think that bludgeoning generally makes people hold defensively onto whatever they already think. I know we're all really tired of trying to be nice to people who advocate that we be shot for our beliefs, and dull-wittedly blame it on us. Their beliefs are a threat to us, and we have every right to defend ourselves from them. But understanding these people better can only help us defend ourselves. And forgiving those who persecute us can bring us more peace of mind.

Without taxes, how would we get the poor to subsidize the rich?

2009-10-14T16:22:00.004-04:00

I frequently come up against the accusation that, because I don't approve of taxation, I don't care about the poor. In many minds, paying taxes to a ruling elite equates with helping the less fortunate and supporting society. But take a look at the U.S. Debt Clock. So far this year, this country's ruling elite has spent $500 billion on war, $300 billion on interest to the Federal Reserve; $50 billion on subsidies; and $1100 billion on big-business bailouts. Is it just me, or does this look rather like slaughtering the poor and enriching the very rich?

Let's look at a smaller example that's closer to home. A few years ago, the government stole a lot of our money and imprisoned my husband for a year because we'd had the audacity to spend our money according to our personal values (like helping the poor and creating jobs) instead of contributing it to bloody mayhem and enrichment of the already rich. Since then we've been living on very little, due to a combination of the government's past persecution and our own personal choices. While Larken devotes himself to fighting tyranny full time, I devote myself to homeschooling my daughter. Neither of these endeavors is very lucrative.

In short, we have a pitiful income. Recently, the amazingly generous people on Larken's email list sent me lots of money as an anniversary gift. I was thrilled to have money to spend on homeschooling, and I spent a sizeable chunk of this windfall on things for my daughter's education.

It occurred to me, as I was carefully spending this money, that we had recently paid our township about $2500 in school taxes for the public schools that we've never used. Now, isn't the theory behind public schools that they're supposed to guarantee that all kids - both rich and poor - have access to education? And aren't taxes supposed to kind of even things up by making the rich subsidize the poor? Since we're obviously getting nothing personally for our $2500, I became curious about the income levels of the families we were subsidizing.

I could not find any information on our specific township. And I could not find any figures that I could absolutely trust; the best information I could find was on Wikipedia. But with that caveat, what I learned was that our county ranks 67th on a list of the richest counties in America, with a per capita income of about $31,000, and a median income of about $61,000. So the average family of three in this county has an income of $93,000 a year. I also discovered that the cost of living in Pennsylvania is almost dead average, and that the poverty line of $18,000 for a family of three is the same for all 50 states, despite the fact that the cost of living can vary tremendously from state to state.

I don't know exactly what our yearly income is, because it fluctuates a lot, and I don't manage our finances. But I know it's a heck of a lot closer to $18,000 a year than it is to $93,000! In short, we (the poor) are paying $2500 a year to pay for the education of relatively rich people's children. And if we refused to pay this tax, the sheriff or somebody would take our house away from us. If we said, "Hey, we're educating our own child, so we're just going use this money to buy educational stuff for her," people with guns would show up and make us homeless. Ah, the benevolence of government!

"Now, tut, tut!" I can hear the socialists saying, "It's your choice not to use the public schools. You're paying taxes so that those schools are available to everyone, including you. If you can't afford to educate your child yourself, just send her to the school your taxes have paid for!"

Well, isn't that a little weird? There's a hair salon just down the street. What if they decide they're going to force everyone in the neighborhood to pay them a yearly "tax" -- enough to pay for hair cuts for everyone all year, and then everyone will be entitled to haircuts free of charge? After all, our whole society benefits from people having decent-looking hair! If you want to go somewhere else, you're free to go somewhere else and pay for a hair cut. If you want to cut your own hair yourself, you can do that, too. But you have to pay the tax anyway, because the tax ensures that everyone in the neighborhood has access to haircuts. And if you don't pay the tax, the hair salon people will come with guns and take your car.

If you don't like that plan, I guess you just don't care about the poor!

Why I'm an Anarchist:

2009-10-14T14:12:00.007-04:00

I'm an anarchist because I believe that every human being has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I'm an anarchist because I believe that every human being belongs to himself, and belongs to others only by choice. I'm an anarchist because I believe that violence is allowable only in defense of life, liberty, or property. I'm an anarchist because I believe that the only legitimate government is by the consent of the governed. My political philosophy is probably stated best by this section of the Declaration of Independence:

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, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

But you might wonder why, being an anarchist, I would use the words "legitimate government" and refer to a piece of the Declaration that mentions "government." Isn't anarchism the opposite, or the absence of government?

Well, yes and no. Anarchism is the absence of government as we know it, or government by a ruling class that claims the exclusive right to use aggressive force to achieve its ends, and claims the right to control everything and everybody within its "jurisdiction."

But the term "government" can also be used to describe a set of rules and methods of enforcement that regulate some types of social relationships and are agreed upon by everyone to whom they apply. A government instituted by mutual consent to protect everyone's rights is not a government-as-we-know-it; it is, in fact, well organized anarchy.

If your first thought is: "but the whole purpose of government and law is to force people to do things they don't want to do and not do things they want to do," then you have hit the nail right on the head. That is exactly the purpose of government-as-we-know-it, and it is by its very nature nonconsensual.

I reject the common belief that social order, peace, cooperation, organization, and beneficial collective actions are impossible without a ruling class specially endowed with the right to use aggressive violence. In fact, I believe that all these good things are much easier to achieve when aggressive violence is consistently shunned by everyone as a matter of principle.

I am not a starry-eyed utopian, either. I am an anarchist because I see both strength and weakness in human beings. Our strength is our intelligence, ingenuity, compassion, and ability to work together to achieve common goals. Our weakness is our desire to dominate others and promote ourselves at their expense. Given our nature, I believe it's very dangerous to give one group of humans permission to use aggressive force to control another group of humans: This permission is like the Ring of Power in Lord of the Rings, of which Gandalf says:

I would take this ring with the intention of doing good, but through me it would wield a power too terrible to imagine.

Thousands of years of human history is testament to the truth of this, and we have but recently left the bloodiest century in the long, bloody, cruel history of mankind. Despite this, I dare to believe that humans, at heart, are becoming more humane. The horrors of the 20th century were not due to the degeneration of human nature, but to the addition of advanced technologies to the ancient arts of slaughter and domination.

I am an anarchist because I love my fellow man. And how does one express love toward six billion human beings? I cannot hug them all. I cannot feed them all. I can affect only a small fraction of humanity in a positive way. But for everyone else on the planet, the best thing I can do is to respect them and leave them in peace. I can simply refrain from demanding and advocating the enslavement, imprisonment, or death of others for my benefit. I can personally grant everyone their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without any interference from me.

That's why I'm an anarchist.

The Fourth of July and the Worship of Violence

2009-10-04T16:07:00.005-04:00

Why -- when people almost universally say that they think aggressive violence is wrong -- and people almost universally say that they believe it's better to believe truth rather than falsity -- why, when you suggest that human beings could have a society that is not based on violence (via "government" coercion), why do the ones who like you run away with their ears covered, and the ones who don't like you revile you and call you a terrorist?

This year, contrary to my usual habit, I actually went to my hometown flagpole ceremony on the 4th of July. Some local person always gives a little speech, and I really haven't wanted to go since the year the speaker implied that people who disagree with the government about taxes are probably going to hell. As expected, I found the whole aura of the celebration revolting and disturbing. Revolting because all those people were openly worshiping violence -- and disturbing because many of these people I grew up with and loved, and still love.

People reserve their highest praise for trained killers who obey the orders of politicians. All euphemisms and rhetoric aside, that is what soldiers are. There are other ways to "serve one's country," of course, but the very best, and bravest, and most honorable way is to kill people that politicians order you to kill. These people are "fighting for our freedom" as they empower the greedy, bloodthirsty gang that enslaves us all.

If you dare to suggest that our freedom would be better served by getting rid of the greedy, bloodthirsty gang that sends our brave young sons to their deaths to increase its own power and wealth, they look at you as though you just shot Jesus in the head. Which I guess, in a way, you did.

The people of my hometown generally claim to be Christian; but I believe that the true religion of most of them is state-worship with some Christian decoration on top. I believe their Christian god is subservient to their government god. Let's assume for just a moment that religion really is about love, compassion, and people living together in peace and harmony. Why then -- when you suggest that consistent condemnation of physical aggression would serve those ends better than glorification of it -- why are people so determined to avoid hearing you?

People seem absolutely desperate to identify themselves with what they perceive to be the greatest power. For those who believe in him, God is the greatest power in the universe. But the government is the greatest power here on earth. People don't want to admit that they're siding with the strongest gang because it's a lot safer to be part of it than to pit yourself against it. I suppose it's hard to admire and respect yourself if you see it that way. But if you can convince yourself that the gang is good and that you really believe in what it's doing, then your loyalty to it is righteous and honorable, rather than cowardly and self-serving.

Larken and I have received a lot of disapproval for taking a stand against a very powerful gang called the U.S. government. In this disapproval, there is a strong current of "you got hurt, therefore you were wrong." It would seem that in this moral system, financial self-interest and personal comfort are the ideals to strive for, and any goals that threaten these ideals are bad and wrong. Never mind that two million people are in prison while we picnic happily with our families and friends in our beautiful little community. Never mind that people are suffering and dying and living in desperate poverty all over the world due to war and other coercive government "solutions."

People live their lives as if "might makes right." But don't they really know, deep down, that truth is independent of power, and that aggression is evil? Why do they refuse to give up this addiction to power?

Perhaps the answer is in our biology. We all come into the world tiny and helpless. The first being to impinge on our emerging consciousness is a seemingly omnipotent, omnibenevolent mother. Perhaps it is imprinted on us so early in our lives that power and goodness are one, that most of us will never be able to reason our way out of this emotional box. Perhaps it was imprinted in our genes before we were even born, and it's part of our animal nature to bond with the strongest leader we can find.

But it's clear that some part of the human psyche is not satisfied with this. For hundreds of years, people have schizophrenically wrung their hands over the atrocities of war while glorifying the governments that make them happen. Maybe a better kind of society is struggling to come into being.

Calling People Nazis

2009-10-03T19:28:00.006-04:00

What does a person really mean when they call you a "Nazi"?

A socialist friend of mine recently attempted to insult me by calling me a "Nazi" -- despite the fact that she fits into National Socialist shoes much more comfortably than I ever have. To really be effective, an insult should have at least a molecule of truth in it. This got me thinking about why people use this insult even when it's completely inappropriate.

In the dictionaries, the first definition of a Nazi is always an actual member of the National Socialist German Worker's party of Germany, which came to power in Germany in 1933, under Adolf Hitler. These bona fide Nazis are obviously a dying breed, and I am obviously not one of them.

The second definition is a person who holds views similar to those of the historical Nazi party. Assuming that people have given up on Hitler and the establishment of Germany as a world power, the "similar beliefs" that people might still hold are anti-Semitism and the natural supremacy of Germans, Aryans, or white people. Um, no. That's not me either.

Because of the way in which Hitler seized and maintained control of his country, suppressed his opposition, and sought to strictly dictate every aspect of people's lives, the word Nazi is also associated with dictatorial control or fascism. It's sometimes used in a generic way to describe anyone who is fanatical about controlling people in some way. For instance, the smoking nazis, the local building nazis, the music nazis, the clothing nazis. Well, I'm pretty fanatical about not controlling people. Although, if you asked my family, they might say I was a spelling nazi or a nutrition nazi.

This is just a fun fact: in the south of Germany, the nickname "Nazi" was used to mean a clumsy, foolish person. Opponents of National Socialism thought this coincidence was quite apt.

In the Soviet Union, the terms "Nazi" and "National Socialist" were forbidden after 1932, probably because they wanted the word "socialist" for themselves, and didn't want it tainted. Soviet literature always refers to the Nazis as "fascists."

So let's look at "fascism" for a moment: This concept came into being with the anti-communist political movement of Benito Mussolini, formed in 1919. At dictionary.com, "fascist" is defined as "dictatorial or extreme right-wing views," and "reactionary or dictatorial views." A longer definition describes fascism as "A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. [Robert O. Paxton, "The Anatomy of Fascism," 2004]

"Socialism" is generally considered progressive, leftist, and the last stage before communism. Hitler's achievement was to weld socialism and fascism together, creating a completely authoritarian state, where no area of life was left uncontrolled.

One of the strange fictions of the 20th century is the attempt to place fascism and socialism/communism at opposite ends of a left-to-right political spectrum, when they are merely different aspects of authoritarian control. They belong together and complete each other, since a dictator can't completely control and mobilize his people unless he controls their economic lives.

The left-to-right political spectrum has changed so much over the centuries that it really should be scrapped altogether. The best reason for scrapping it, perhaps, is that it has no place for people who advocate and defend freedom. When this country was founded, economic freedom was considered "leftist." Anarchism has almost always been considered "leftist." But now the ideas of our founders are "reactionary," and there is no place for them in the managed economies of modern leftism. And here I have my friend trying to place me over on the "right" with the Nazis, when I believe in maximum freedom and no government at all. So what, exactly, do I have in common with those guys aside from the fact that some ignoramus thinks we all belong on the "far right" side of some nonsensical spectrum? In fact, if you look up "The Rise of Hitler - the 25 points of Hitler's Nazi Party" you'll find quite a few points that the average American voter (not to mention my supposedly "leftist" friend) would cheer for if they were cloaked in contemporary political language (with the United States and Americans substituted for Germany and Germans).

But I really don't think my friend was trying to insult me by implying that I was a socialist, or a nationalist, or even a fascist. I think she was trying to call me a racist, because I didn't vote for Obama. Silly as it may seem, she seems fairly convinced that all opposition to Obama is based on the president's partially African heritage. Never mind that I would pick Walter Williams for president over Hillary Clinton any day. Some people just can't seem to comprehend principled opposition to their new hero.

I sometimes call people Nazis myself, but I generally reserve this epithet for members of our own national socialist, empire-building, freedom-crushing government when I have the misfortune to come into contact with them. People who knowingly bring grievous harm to others by "just following orders" remind me very much of the Nazis at Nuremberg.

Do women have the right to control their own bodies?

2009-09-18T18:33:00.006-04:00

The problem I have with most pro-abortion people is that they are stunningly hypocritical. While they speak from one side of their mouths about a woman's right to control her own body when she wishes to get rid of an unwanted fetus, from the other side they deny her the right to control her own body in a thousand other circumstances.

If a woman's body belongs to her, then she has the right to exchange sexual favors for money, she has the right to be photographed however she likes, she has the right to either take or refuse any drugs, medicines, vitamins, and foods (natural or unnatural) that she chooses. She has the right to refuse or consent to medical treatments according to her own medical and moral beliefs. She has the right to give birth how and where she chooses, attended by persons of her own choosing. She has the right to defend her own body and her own life from aggressive attack. She has the right to use her own time, talents, and energy to earn property, and the right to dispose of that property according to her own values.

In fact, one of the only circumstances where a woman's right to control her own body can be legitimately questioned is the circumstance of pregnancy, where another human being depends on her body for its life. What rights, if any, does that unborn human have? When there is a conflict of interest between a woman and her unborn child, they cannot both win.

The thing that is so disturbing in the anti-liberal pro-abortionist position is that it denies a woman all ownership rights over her own body except in that one circumstance where there is an obvious conflict with the rights of another human being, i.e., abortion.

Thus, the term "pro-choice" to describe this position is absolutely inaccurate. The term should be "pro-abortion" or "anti-fetus." These people are not pro-woman, pro-choice, or pro-freedom in any way.

I know that many different types of people support a woman's right to control her own body, even at the expense of an unborn child, and I am not painting all of these people with the same brush. Those who are consistently libertarian, and choose to come down on the woman's side in any conflict of interest between herself and a fetus, are not being inconsistent or hypocritical.

But if the right to abort a baby is the only woman's right that you support, and you would deny her the right to make choices about her own body in a thousand other circumstances, then calling yourself pro-choice, or even liberal, is just a bald-faced lie. The accurate name for you would be pro-abortion, anti-choice authoritarian.

And the rest of us have to wonder, what are these pro-abortion authoritarians really all about? Given that they're hypocritical enough to call themselves "pro-choice," it's very unlikely that they're ever going to answer this question honestly. It might be interesting to ask, but we won't expect a straight answer.

My best guess is that most of the pro-abortion crowd are really about population control, at least for those who support abortion rights within the context of socialist authoritarianism. They have no problem with large populations of tax-slaves working for the enrichment of political elites; they just don't want too many slaves. Their agenda is simply to thin out the population of slaves to a more manageable level by encouraging the slaves to choose abortion for themselves. If the agenda of the power elite changes, they will just as easily support mandatory, forced abortions, or perhaps outlaw abortion and switch to mandatory, forced pregnancies.

Anyone who disagrees with this speculation should at least come up with another explanation for the fact that these pro-abortionists have no interest in other libertarian issues, nor the slightest regard for the rights of the unborn.

On the abortion issue itself, I would just say this: Roe vs. Wade, while generally viewed as a really bad piece of case law, and hated by extremists on both sides, seems to represent something close to an American consensus. An embryo aborted in the first trimester may indeed have a beating heart, but it is not yet a sentient being and does not suffer any pain. The pregnant woman has at least a month to make a decision about whether or not to carry through the pregnancy. In all it seems to me like a reasonable compromise between the rights of the woman and those of the fetus when the woman truly does not want to bring the pregnancy to term. To me, both extremes have unacceptably inhumane results.

Is health care a basic human right?

2009-09-18T14:56:00.008-04:00

A response to the Facebook poll: Should health care be considered a basic human right?

If health care is a basic human right, then why are so many people speaking in such nationalistic terms--complaining, for instance, about illegal aliens, as if only Americans are human beings? Citizens of Mexico are humans, too. So are citizens of Nigeria, and China. If health care is a basic human right, then it is a basic right of every human being in the world.

Much of the conflict in the current health care debate comes from confusion about the concept of "rights." Many Americans cling to an old-fashioned definition of "rights" which denies the validity of positive rights like the right to adequate health care. So allow me to take a moment to clarify the difference between positive and negative human rights.

Health care is a positive right, which means it is a right to certain goods and services produced by others. The right to health care creates a corresponding obligation for others to produce and provide those goods and services. In contrast, a negative right, like the right to life, requires only that others refrain from killing you. Thus, negative rights require nothing more than acknowledgment and self-control from others, while positive rights require production and provision of goods and services. Of course this does not mean that positive rights do not exist--only that they require much more effort to "defend."

Another difference between positive and negative rights is that negative rights place a negative obligation on all other humans equally; your right to life requires all other humans to refrain from killing you. But a positive right entails the obligation to provide goods and services; it cannot be required of those who cannot produce and provide those goods and services, but only of the relatively small segment of humanity that has the ability to produce them. The obligations of this particular group (in this case, doctors, nurses, drug companies, etc.) can be somewhat mitigated by taxing everyone who receives income to pay those who must actually do the work. This spreads the obligation more evenly over the human population.

I think it's obvious that the defense of humanity's right to health care requires the establishment of a world organization devoted to assessing the needs of all countries and ensuring that those needs are met, with as much fairness as is humanly possible. This organization must be granted power, first of all, to tax the entire working/investing population of the world (though perhaps individual governments could tax their own citizens and hand it over all at once). Funding would probably be best accomplished by steeply progressive taxes on income and wealth. Secondly, the organization must have the power to deploy doctors, nurses, and medical resources where they are needed most. At first, this system would undoubtedly entail a massive influx of money and personnel from the richer to the poorer countries of the world, but only until such time as health care resources are deemed by the central medical authority to be distributed evenly over the world.

It is to be hoped that American medical personnel would voluntarily and happily embrace their placements in foreign countries for the good of humanity. However, the central medical authority must have the ability to enforce the fair distribution of medical services if necessary. Possibly large fines could be levied on anyone who refuses deployment, and this money could be used to pay others who are willing. Possibly doctors and nurses could be barred from practicing their chosen profession if they refuse to accept their assignments.

We would hope that stronger measures, such as imprisonment, would not be necessary to enforce compliance from doctors and nurses. However, imprisonment has always been required to enforce the payment of taxes, and this is not likely to change. In the United States and other developed nations where the first phase of universal health care will undoubtedly entail higher taxes coupled with a lower level of health care services, strong measures may be required to enforce compliance with the new health care tax for certain segments of the population.

While sensible, progressive thinkers will undoubtedly embrace the plan and pay the new taxes voluntarily, the United States is unfortunately home to a great number of potential domestic terrorists who care for no one but themselves, and regard all socially progressive programs with extreme paranoia. Their propaganda attempts to discredit the very concept of the positive rights essential to a socially advanced society. Sadly, we are likely to experience a vicious backlash against the health care system from this backward group, and additional taxes may be needed to pay for the incarceration of any who refuse to comply with the new laws.