Category Archives: Individual Rights

‘Aviation Gulag’

Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Republicans, Terrorism, The State

A timely, TSA-related blog post at LRC.COM; a reminder that no action has been taken by the tired Tea-Party Congress to abolish the home of the homegrown terrorists of the Transportation and Security Administration:

Rep[robate] John Mica (R-Fl) has treated the TSA to yet another of his verbal lashings: the agency and its security sham are “idiotic,” “a mess,” and “off the charts” when it comes to rates of failure.
John seems to have forgotten we’ve heard it all before, on many, many occasions. Indeed, it’s way past time this chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee moved from words to deeds: Let him wield the power of his office to abolish the TSA.

As was pointed out in “‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,'” “the Fox News Blond Squad” (and its male equivalents) has often “implied that the interminable complainers at the terminals were no more than an insignificant group of noise-makers. Kirsten Powers, a liberal member of that squadron, expressed her satisfaction with the porn protocol. Her sympathies, she said, go out to TSA workers.”

‘The Program’ Behind The Occupy Wall Street Protests

Business, Capitalism, Democracy, Economy, Individual Rights, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Private Property

Tired of listening to mealymouthed left-libertarians laboring to find commonalities with the Occupy Wall Street “sleepover”? You should be. I know I am. I have no sisterly solidarity for socialists.

Here’s the stark reality of this extravaganza: Within the buildings are people beavering away, working for a living. Railing against them without—sitting idle in the parks, streets and on sidewalks—are individuals who trash, scream, sleep for hours on end, loiter, strip down and publicly body-paint each other, copulate and defecate.

Economist George Reisman dissects the farrago of economic errors the protesters and their sympathizers commit: “What the protesters do not realize is that the wealth of the one percent provides the standard of living of the ninety-nine percent.”

Read “How a Highly Productive and Provident One Percent Provides the Standard of Living of a Largely Ignorant and Ungrateful Ninety-Nine Percent” by George Reisman.

UPDATED: The Individual? The Family? What About Property?

Elections, Family, Founding Fathers, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Private Property, Ron Paul

RICK SANTORUM said this during the CNN Western Republican Debate, last night: “I disagree in some respects with Congressman Paul, who says the country is founded on the individual. The basic building block of a society is not an individual. It’s the family. That’s the basic unit of society.”

[SNIP]

What came first; the unit or its constituent parts? Is not a social unit like the family comprised of individuals? And did not the sovereign states precede the union? Although it all begins with the individual, the preeminence of the individual in no way negates the vitality of the family.

CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL REPLIED: “Well, I would like to explain that rights don’t come in bunches. Rights come as individuals, they come from a God, and they come as each individual has a right to life and liberty.”

Someone please stand up for property, next time. The defense of private property rights is urgent as the Occupy Wall Street hooligans encroach.

UPDATE: Contemplationist below is right. With his “Live, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as I observed, Jefferson has “bequeathed us a vagueness that has helped undermine the foundation of civilization: private property.”

UPDATED: ‘To Save One Life Is Like Saving the World’ (Republicans Disagree)

Individual Rights, Islam, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Liberty, Middle East, Palestinian Authority, Religion, Republicans

This may sound chauvinistic, but when nations are consumed with safekeeping their own, by default (and in self interest), they are more careful with the lives of their enemies.

Israel has demonstrated once again its commitment to that Talmudic verse, “To Save One Life Is Like Saving the World.” (The verse was ‘appropriated,” or ripped off, by Islam, and an exclusionary clause written into the equivalent Quranic ayah. Islam’s borrowed version, needless to say, is considerably less humanistic and universal.)

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir expressed bewilderment at the news that,

Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and hundreds of Palestinians crossed Israel’s borders in opposite directions on Tuesday as a thousand-for-one prisoner exchange brought joy to families but did little to ease decades of conflict. …In all, Israel is setting free 1,027 Palestinians in return for the liberty of Shalit. Some have spent 30 years behind bars for violent attacks against Israel and its occupation of land taken in the 1967 Middle East War.
Over 100 of the 477 prisoners released in the first phase of the exchange were taken to the West Bank. The rest were coming into Gaza, apart from 41 who were due to fly out from Cairo to exile in Turkey, Syria or Qatar.

Bashir, a neocon-cum-liberal, is in good company here in the US. The following is from a 2004, Antiwar.com column:

… the neoconservatives at National Review have grumbled about Israel’s “lopsided prisoner exchanges” over the years. One “sofa samurai,” Eric Leskly, [once noted] the startling disparity of exchanging 5,500 Egyptian soldiers, following the Sinai campaign of 1956, “for the lives of the four Israeli soldiers captured in the fighting,” and over 8,000 Egyptians, after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in exchange for 240 Israeli soldiers.
Its official policy notwithstanding, Israel has also negotiated with terrorists for the lives and bodies of its soldiers. As Dr. Boaz Ganor, executive director of the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, told the Jerusalem Post: “Israeli governments are more prone to the influence of public opinion.”

I remember thinking just that when, years back, I watched demonstrators heckle Ariel Sharon after yet another suicide bombing. One man yelled, “If you don’t sort this mess out, I’ll personally pay you a visit.”

UPDATE II: Bar Ron Paul, the debaters at the CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate related not at all to the Israeli position—a consistent preference for doing what it takes to save a life, even if not always strategic.