Category Archives: Ethics

UPDATE III (1/1/021): Abortion And A Woman’s Title In Her Body

Abortion, Conservatism, Ethics, Feminism, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Liberty, Natural Law, Private Property

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It is clearly untrue to say that a paleolibertarian is one who always opposes a woman’s absolute dominion over her body, as a poster on Wendy McElroy’s Facebook Wall has implied.

Abortion is one hill I do not care to die on; I’ve committed enough professional Seppuku over the years. However, I have repeatedly stated that, for a classical liberal (at least), “it’s [highly] problematic to say that by virtue of her fertility, a woman loses a title in her body.”

To repeat, for me, abortion is not the hill to die on. It seems prudent not to come out on this issue. Division of labor and all that stuff; I’ll leave it to Wendy McElroy, who, I am sure, agrees that “libertarians can agree that no state funding, local or federal, should be allocated to such a procedure.”

Otherwise, here is Wendy’s brilliant articulation of self-ownership. Watch Wendy on Stossel’s, 7:28 minutes in:

Wendy McElroy: As far as I’m concerned, this is my skin. Everything beneath this skin belongs to me, or I don’t own anything. I am a self-owner-

John Stossel: Even if there is a living being inside you?

Wendy McElroy: If there is a living being inside me, I’m glad you used the word “being” and not “individual with rights,” if there is a living being inside me, it exists on my breath, it exists by my, the blood pumping through my veins, by the food I eat. It is within my skin, and if you say to me that there, that I do not have jurisdiction over my body, that, in fact, society or someone else has jurisdiction, the, the word that describes someone else owning my body is slavery.*

UPDATE I: Glad people have remained civil on Facebook, so far. That’s the way. Always. However much one disdains the procedure, you can’t get away from the fact of self-ownership. You have no right to take custody of another person’s body. They either own themselves or don’t.

You can’t “own” your body in conjunction with other busybodies.

UPDATE II (July 21):

From the hopeless Facebook thread:

Your tortured analogy, MW, does not hold or even come close. Any reasoning about this fraught topic must proceed, at the very least, from a correct analogy. This is why this debate cannot proceed from logic. People lose their logic (or perhaps they never had the ability to reason to begin with) when it comes to abortion. Enough, now folks. The most honest position the anti-a-woman’s-right-in-her-body proponents can advance is this: a woman, by virtue of her biology, does not have total title in her body. As a propertarian, I find this position untenable, but agree that individuals who hold it will try to finesse it. So this is the final word. “Respek,” as Ali Gi would say.

JV: This is what I mean by a lack of reasoning faculties on the topic, and plain dissembling. What irks here is not only that I said, “enough,” and this is my Wall. But that you, JV, frame your “distinguishing” argument” as exhaustive. The initiation of force is most certainly not the only distinguishing feature between the mother and the fetus. (Unrelated: there is a prerequisite for Facebook Friendship.)

UPDATE III (1/1/021):

Libertarians view women as having dominion over their bodies! My comment, then, is on the cultural specter of females freed from men, morality and tradition: how quickly they turn into diabolical libertines. Most women need traditional strictures to balance exhibitionism and promiscuity.

Mitt Must Answer For … Working Overtime

Barack Obama, Business, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Natural Law, Republicans

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is a rogue agency. It is in the business of turning productive people by legislative fiat into common criminals. The SEC hunts for corporate prey using ill-defined, unconstitutional laws. It operates with the understanding that competition in capital markets must proceed from a level playing field. All investors are entitled to the same information advantage irrespective of effort and abilities. In a word, information socialism.

Mitt Romney, says the ponce of a president who has never done an honest-day’s work in his life, has done something to annoy the terrorists at the SEC. He “must answer questions about his ties to Bain Capital.”

On Thursday, Stephanie Cutter, the ponce’s handler, accused Mitt Romney of “misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony,” or “misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investment.”

Boiled down, the charge against Romney is: working overtime.

I kid you not, it is just that: In addition to working “’12 hours a day, six days a week’ on the Olympics from 1999 to 2002,” Mitt might have been putting in a few extra hours at Bain.

OMG!

When will Romeny stop turning the other cheek?

UPDATED: Congress: A Repository Of Contempt

Conservatism, Constitution, Democrats, Ethics, Government, GUNS, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Nationhood, Republicans

A contemptible Congress finds an equally contemptible cabinet minister in contempt of its proceedings.

How significant are these findings for the cause of freedom and justice? Not very.

Republican representatives, as they demonstrated under Bush—who, as I’ve often said, would have wrestled a crocodile for a criminal alien—don’t care about the rights of private property on the US Southern border any more than their Democratic partners-in-crime do.

Farmers, their families, and their best friends are imperiled daily on that border; have been long before Operation Fast and Furious commenced.

The Democratic brand of statism won out in the healthcare confrontation. Since what’s underway in the world’s greatest “deliberative” body is no more than brute politicking—Democrats should delight in their victory and downplay a slap in the face from opponents every bit as contemptible as themselves. That’s the logic of the game.

In the unlikely event that the Republicans win a significant political battle, they should do the same.

Unlikely because, Republicans have betrayed every single important principle that might have prolonged the survival of the republic. This is the nature of the Republican beast, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa included.

…the unconstitutional campaign finance-reform bill and “Sarbanes-Oxley Act” (a preemptive assault on CEOs and CFOs, prior to the fact of a crime); the various trade tariffs and barriers; the Clintonian triumph of triangulation on affirmative-action; the collusion with Kennedy on education; the welfare wantonness that began with a prescription-drug benefit that would add trillions to the Medicare shortfall, and culminated in the Kennedy-countenanced “New New Deal” for New Orleans, for which there is no constitutional authority; the gold-embossed invitation to illegals to invade, and the “camouflaged amnesty” (where illegals are born-again as “guest workers” and then placed on a fast track to permanent residence)—you name it,

Republicans have promoted it to the detriment of liberty.

REMEMBER: “The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.”

UPDATE (June 30): In reply to WCO: Have you read Into the Cannibal’s Pot, WCO? My book, the sub-chapter titled “Civil Wrongs,” in particular, should give you some answers to your question. Civil Rights legislation—property-sundering and sweeping—created a system of patronage and spoils. This is one reason Dixicrat concerns are no longer.

Your Republican Reptile In Action

Ethics, Etiquette, Individual Rights, Internet, Private Property, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Fredrick Ray Hartman, a DC-based statist Republican, in the employ of the government, had petitioned me for Facebook Friendship (not the other way around).

On getting notice of my Facebook Policy, he writes furiously:

“don’t send people [note the royal plural] a copy of facebook policies again…you are being deleted…..i was your friend ditto… removing you from my friends list…..i tried to friend you from another wall and you had the gull [sic] to respond with a facebook policy note….you don’t know your friends i guess…..good luck”

Your Republican politician (or aspiring overlord) in action.

And OMG! What will I do without these Republican faithful “pals” of mine, of whom I have none, as they deserted me on September 19, 2002, when I wrote this op-ed for the Globe & Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers.

Let me remind Hartman and his ilk (statist, power-hungry Republicans, whom we libertarians disavow) that he was the one to petition me for Facebook Friendship, not the other way around. This statist and I (a long-time paleolibertarian) have nothing in common.

This conduct is a taste of what you should expect from your reptilian Republican in office, should you demand that he comply with YOUR rules, enacted on your turf, or property.

This is the chance of all like-minded Republicans on this Wall to join Fredrick Ray Hartman; Unfriend me please.

Ron Paul for president.