Category Archives: Individual Rights

“You’re The First Line Of Defense For Your Family”

Crime, Family, GUNS, Individual Rights, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property

I’m a hard-core propertarian. This is, in part, because I believe in the sanctity of life—not only in a man’s right to keep his earnings, but his right—even obligation—to defend his life and the lives entrusted to him with all his might. A right that cannot be defended is no right at all. This is why I’d go as far as to say that all burglaries ought to be considered potential home invasions from both the standpoint of the home owner and the law.

Confronted with a criminal breaking and entering, there’s precious little a homeowner can do to divine the intentions of the invader. It should be assumed that anyone violating another man’s inner sanctum, will be willing to violate the occupant.

A home owner ought to be permitted to deploy deadly force in defense of his home and family. In general, albeit with a growing number of exceptions, the Castle Doctrine proceeds from this premise.

Still, you’ll often find reporters calling a deadly home invasion a “robbery gone wrong.” As though the criminals who invaded the home were some modern-day Jean Valjeans. Or that unless the visitors announce their intentions to harm the homeowners, it must be presumed that they intend only to take a loaf of bread—like Victor Hugo’s protagonist in Les Misérables—sate their hunger, and then leave.

In this context, I was stumped when the always-interesting Lawrence Auster bristled because a news reporter used the more severe term for the crime of breaking and entering:

… burglary is when a person illegally enters private property and steals things. A home invasion is when people illegally enter a home in order to terrorize, harm, or kill the residents… If we start calling all burglaries “home invasions,” we lose the distinction between them.

All burglars are home invaders.

The less said about the 2007 invasion of the home of Dr. William Petit of New Haven, Connecticut, the better. I blogged about it at the time. Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky took great delight in raping mother Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her 11-year-old daughter Michaela Petit, after which they strangled the mom and set the home afire before fleeing. The two daughters died of smoke inhalation.

What killer and rapist Komisarjevsky wrote in a 40-page letter to some author is revealing:

“‘All were compliant,’ he wrote. “This time I took a risk, pulled the trigger, and the chamber was loaded. … The Petit family passed through their fears and into terror. … It was captivating, validating that this pain in me was real. … I was looking right at my personal demon, reflected back in their eyes. … Hayley is a fighter; she tried time and time again to free herself. … Mr. Petit is a coward; he ran away when he thought his life was threatened, and ran away to leave his wife and children to madmen…”

AND:

“I’m ultimately responsible for my own actions. … Had Mr. Petit fought back in the very beginning, I would have been forced to retreat. … You’re the first line of defense for your family not law enforcement.'”

[SNIP]

The fact is that these criminals entered the Petit home through an unlocked door. The least a man can do is lock the house before he retires, and if he refuses to arm himself, let him arm an alarm system.

I don’t mean to be “insensitive,” but skirting this indelicate matter simply will not do. Life is too precious.

UPDATED: Economic Indices Ignore ‘Century of the State’

Economy, Free Markets, Individual Rights, Liberty, The State, The West

Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada and Chile have leapfrogged over the United States on the Fraser Institute’s index of economic freedom.

“In this year’s index, Hong Kong retains the highest rating for economic freedom, 9.05 out of 10. The other top 10 nations are: Singapore (8.70), New Zealand (8.27), Switzerland (8.08), Chile (8.03), United
States (7.96), Canada (7.95), Australia (7.90), Mauritius (7.82), and the United Kingdom (7.81).”

Forty-two data points are used to construct a summary index and to measure the degree of economic freedom in five broad areas:
1 Size of Government: Expenditures, Taxes, and Enterprises;
2 Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights;
3 Access to Sound Money;
4 Freedom to Trade Internationally;
5 Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business.

With some variation, The Heritage/WSJ’s economically freest countries are these:

1- Hong Kong
2- Singapore
3- Australia
4- New Zealand
5- Ireland
6- Switzerland
7- Canada
8- United States
9- Denmark
10- Chile

Lest you forget, these indices provide important but woefully incomplete data. Long ago, Pierre Lemieux, a libertarian Canadian economist (a friend too) explained:

“If ‘economic freedom’ is inseparable from the rest of human liberty in a social context (using one’s property to express dissenting opinions, travel, have sex, grow marijuana, store one’s firearms, raise funds from “public” investors, etc.), the freedom indexes are off the mark.

“This explains why some countries ruled by hard tyrannies (as opposed to the soft, Tocquevillian brand we know in the West), where nobody in his right mind would want live except to make a buck as a privileged foreigner or a member the local nomenklatura, make it to the top of the list. Who would want to live in Hong Kong (ranked 1st of 151 countries in the HF/WSJ index), that is, under one of the worst tyrannies on earth, and so much so for its very efficiency? Who would want to be a peasant under other Asian tyrannies like Singapore (ranked 2nd)?”

“The selective definition of economic freedom also explains why the indexes show growing economic freedom while everybody who lives in the real world must know that the 20th century, rightly described by Mussolini as ‘the century of the state,’ is continuing in the 21st with a vengeance. During the 12 years of the HF/WSJ index, economic freedom is supposed to have increased. For example, over that period, both the U.S. (now ranked 9th) and Canada (ranked 12th) have improved their scores by 11%, while in both countries (and others) the Surveillance State was growing uncontrollably, including on financial markets. In the U.S., so many business executives are going to jail that perhaps repression will have to be outsourced to China.”

“Thus, the ‘economic freedom’ that is being measured is a rather special animal: it is the freedom to do what is narrowly defined as freedom in the statistics underlying the index. In practice, the freedom indexes encompass some general conditions for economic freedom (like a stable currency, or narrowly defined ‘property rights’), specific government restrictions or controls (on foreign investment, for example), and consequences of state intervention (the informal economy or corruption). And, of course, the weights assigned to the components of the indexes are arbitrary.”

“I am not saying that such indexes are totally useless. They do regroup variables that are correlated with GDP per capita and its growth, but keep in mind that GDP is a very unreliable construct that reveals basically nothing about the general welfare, and is based on arbitrary value judgments (this is pretty standard welfare economics: see my upcoming article in The Independent Review). The indexes may correlate with the difficulties the businessman will have with local bureaucracies. They may even indicate opportunities for investors to make money in limited contexts, assuming the information has not already been incorporated in prices. The HF/WSJ publication even contains some useful country summaries and international statistics.”

“But the freedom indexes have little to do with ‘economic freedom’ as we use the term in politics, economics and philosophy.”

UPDATE (Oct. 17): Interestingly, John Stossel has addressed Myron’s question:

“This evening on Eric Bolling’s show, Follow the Money, when I argued that economic freedom brings prosperity, lefty lawyer Ron Kuby said I was ‘full of it’ because the freest countries are not at the top of a list of the world’s richest countries:

1- Monaco
2- Liechtenstein
3- Norway
4- Luxembourg
5- Channel Islands
6- Qatar
7- Bermuda

But this is deceptive nonsense, like so much of what lefty lawyers say. It’s no surprise that small oil-rich nations, tax havens, and countries with old wealth have the highest per capita income. But the freest counties are all near the top of the list. Here’s Heritage’s list of the least economically free countries:

172- Democratic Republic of Congo
173- Libya
174- Venezuela
175- Burma
176- Eritrea
177- Cuba
178- Zimbabwe
179- North Korea

Do you want to live in any of those counties? I sure don’t.”

UPDATE II: Cyber Warfare: Is It Libertarian?

Individual Rights, Iran, Israel, libertarianism, Natural Law, Technology, War

“There is a pithy aphorism from a Tractate of the Jewish Law regarding the right of self-defense. The Talmud, as the law is called, is a veritable minefield of complexities and interpretations. The rabbis would have prefaced their edict with extended discussion. They would have argued about the threshold that must be met before a pre-emptive strike can be carried out, what constitutes imminent danger, and whether defensive actions apply only to individuals or to collective action as well. These scholars belonged to a people that spent a good part of their history perfecting the Christian art of turning the other cheek. Yet ironically, and doubtless after careful consideration, the rabbis recommended that, ‘He who rises to kill thee, ye rise earlier to kill him.'” (See “Facing the Onslaught of Jihad”)

Likewise, I am not a pacifist, although I am a libertarian.

There is no doubt in my mind that Iran would evaporate Israel if it could. Yet mention to Iran’s apologists that Israel is being considered by Ahmadinejad as The Bomb’s designated test site, and the reply one invariably gets is, “Oh, c’mon; are you referring to all that ‘wipe Israel off the map’ stuff? Haven’t you heard of ‘Scheherazade of the Thousand and One [Arabian] Nights? Ahmadi’s excitable. That’s his style. Chill, man.”

[READ “That Persian Pussycat.”]

There is a strong suspicion that Israel is behind “The Stuxnet worm, ‘the most sophisticated malware ever’ … [it] has been discovered infesting Iran’s nuclear installations. There’s growing speculation that these were indeed the intended targets of what the mainstream continues to call a ‘virus’ — it only infects certain Siemens SCADA systems in specific configurations. There’s also speculation that it’s state-sponsored malware, with fingers pointing at either Israel or the U.S.”

Reuters reports that “Cyber warfare has quietly grown into a central pillar of Israel’s strategic planning, with a new military intelligence unit set up to incorporate high-tech hacking tactics, Israeli security sources said on Tuesday.”

To be sure, hacking is a violation of property rights. That is as clear as crystal. Why, spam is trespass. But this alleged Israeli property trespass is also non-violent (I doubt very much that Israel is messing with systems that sustain life).

It would seem to me, then, that if indeed Israel is under a real existential threat from Iran—and not everyone believes this—the Jewish State has found the quintessential libertarian method to begin to combat some of the Iranian menace.

What do you think?

UPDATE I: TokyoTom: An act either does or does not comport with the libertarian non-aggression axiom. I spoke about your logical error in “LIBERTARIAN WRANGLING”:

“From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who, while fleeing the law, happens on a scene of a rape, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because a murderer has performed it?”

Iran’s leaders have threatened to annihilate Israel. They could easily do so, given Israel’s size. The act jibes with their beliefs. The more senior leader, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, right-hand man to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, once explained with lethal logical that “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.”

They know Israel would never launch a nuclear strike first. Iran’s top dogs have clearly done the math.

The men and women of the Israeli military, with their families in mind, have come up with a peaceful way to mess with this program of mass destruction threatening their community. And libertarians protest this? Don’t you just love the way so many libertarians inveigh against the evil of nuclear weapons, except when they are pointed at Israel?!

UPDATE II (Sept. 29): With respect to “contemplationist’s” comment here, I thought it was obvious to all libertarians who regularly weigh in on BAB, that the debate about the proper purview of the state is limited to its enforcement of natural rights only. That’s the mandate of the state in classical liberal thinking. As I have said often, to the extent that the American Constitution respects the natural law, to that extent only is it legitimate. It should be obvious to the same folks, for example, that, unlike Glenn Beck or other “Constitutionalists,” this writer views a great deal of the constitution as an affront to man’s natural rights. The 16th Amendment, for example.

“Sometimes the law of the state coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute,” I wrote in a March 20, 2002 column.

“Contemplationist” has broadened the nightwatchman role of the state in classical liberal theory—confined as it is to the protection negative rights only—to include a plethora of positive duties, including intervention into the economy.

That’s statism, not classical liberalism. The debate in this post, in particular, is as to whether the Israelis, in disabling Iran’s nuclear-related cyber-operation, are defending their natural, negative rights.

UPDATED: Statism Starts With YOU! (Chuckie Misses Bush)

Debt, Economy, Healthcare, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Liberty, Morality, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Republicans, The State, Welfare

The following is from “Statism Starts With YOU!”, now on WND.Com:

“Why did federal regulators not intervene sooner? A tragedy could have been averted. That was the first demand made following the accidental death of 8 spectators, and the injury of 12, at the California 200 off-road race. The derby was held in the Mojave Desert, in the Lucerne Valley. The driver of one of the racing trucks lost control of his vehicle, flipped and landed on bystanders, who are in the habit of getting as close as they possibly can to the tracks.”

“Evidently, what draws fans of desert racing to the sport, attest Phil Willon and David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times, is the ‘the danger, dust and noise of watching 3,500-pound trucks roaring past — close enough almost to touch — and then rocketing into the air over treacherous jumps with nicknames like ‘the rock pile.'”

It’s all great fun until something goes terribly wrong. Then it’s someone else’s fault.” …

This tragedy, off-the-beaten-track, well illustrates the dynamics of state encroachment. Statism always and everywhere begins with The People.”

The complete column is “Statism Starts With YOU!”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

UPDATE (Aug. 20): “I miss Bush intensely,” said one of the main Republican ideologues, Charles Krauthammer. “Iraq ended this week fairly successfully. And the economy, Obama purchased with the stimulus; it’s his economy.”

That’s the depth of the thinking of your above-average Republican.