Category Archives: Individual Rights

On Idiot Ideologues Who Pan Paul

Elections 2008, Ilana Mercer, Individual Rights, Liberty, Private Property

A word about the tinny ideologues who pan Paul because he isn’t perfect: They hate freedom, plain and simple. They don’t know what it is to live without it. They are mollycoddled milksops. Here’s why:

I don’t agree with Paul about everything—I voiced my reservations about his understanding of Islam and the Muslim world in “Some Advice for Ron Paul.”

Without going into it, I don’t much care for his position on abortion. However, unlike Paul’s detractors, I happen to know what living without freedom is like. Paul is as close to The Good Life we could hope to come. Only idiots encased in an armor of worthless ideology—worthless because it exists in the arid arena of their minds, not on earth—would turn their noses up at the prospect of Paul.

Let me share with you a little something: I left South Africa with the proceeds from the sale of my apartment stashed in the soles of my shoes. Had I been apprehended smuggling my property out of that country, I’d have gone to jail with my husband. We both stood taller on that trip. As I am in the habit of sending funds to family, I’ve seen firsthand the same creeping oppression sneak-up on Americans. We’ve already seen the South-African model of detention-without-trial slowly become part of the American legal landscape.

I love life and liberty. Almost more than anything I want to keep what is mine—not to pay the mafia shakedown fee levied on my home (property tax), which means I can never really own my abode, and that ownership is merely nominal. When such prospects loom, I seize them. Being an individualist who loves life and liberty means seizing the day; it means that when one encounters a man whose understanding of freedom and individual rights approximates—if not parallels—your own, you seize the moment.

This is not to say one ought to become a mindless “Paulbearer.” Some have; I have not. (More criticism of Paul’s position on immigration is in “Ron Paul’s Electability.”) Nor does it mean that one turns into an asinine detractor, while deluding oneself that rejecting imperfection is tantamount to a show of principle. What the love of liberty means is seizing the best opportunity at a revolution one has. Those who stand on the sidelines are pussies, and worse, slaves to abstractions.

Update: Barely a Blog friend Steven Browne has continued the thread here. Lest I be identified with the treason faction of the liberty movement—the rank pinkos who promote open borders to the detriment of liberty and property in the US—let me add that Dr. Paul is not sufficiently restrictionist on immigration. As I’ve written, “When government orchestrates an unfettered movement of people into an interventionist state, in which the rights to property, free association, and self defense are already heavily circumscribed by the state—it is guilty of unadulterated social engineering, central planning, and worse.” Aiding and abetting this is philosophical treason.
Our Immigration Archive, in which I’ve demolished most of the feeble arguments advanced by those who are laissez faire on immigration. Admittedly, if one is an anarchist, a meaningless position, then the open-borders stance is the only principled one. But since I’m not a kook (anarchist), but belong to the respectable classical liberal tradition, my position is perfectly congruent philosophically.

Paul was wrong to imply, reductively, that Islamic terrorism in general and September 11 in particular are the sole consequences of American foreign policy. Libertarians cannot persist in such unidirectional formulations. As I’ve said previously, our adventurous foreign policy is a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one, given that Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict across the world. The received leftist wisdom that the Arabs were (and remain) hapless and helpless victims of the West is false and patronizing. As scholars such as Efraim and Inari Karsh have shown, “Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.”

Ultimately, a rational suspicion of power, upon which libertarians pride themselves, must be predicated on distrusting all power, not only American power.

‘Sixteen the Number of the Beast’

Individual Rights, Private Property, Taxation

(The title of the post is that of an essay on the 16th Amendment in Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With a Corrupt Culture.)

A self-satisfied, beaming U.S. Marshal, Stephen Monier, boasted about busting the elderly tax resisters, Ed and Elaine Brown. “They invited us in, and we escorted them out,” Monier strutted, as he described the ruse the feds used to gain access to the couple’s home. At least the feds didn’t kill the Browns.

Doug Powers covered the story here.

Income tax is immoral, not illegal. Most of what the federal government does is immoral, but not illegal. After all, those in power determine what’s licit and what’s elicit. As I’ve written:

“…the right of ownership is an extension of the right to life. If ownership is not an absolute right but is instead subject to the vagaries of majority vote, then so is the right to life…
However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an “organized society” that does the same. In a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.
The Founders intended for government to safeguard man’s natural rights. The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on a man’s property and, by extension, on his life. The Amendment turned government into the almighty source – rather than the protector – of man’s rights and Americans into indentured slaves.”

(Please post comments here rather than send me e-mails; unfortunately, I don’t have the time to reply. More importantly, worthy information is best shared on the blog, where it reaches more people.)

Paris’ Plight

Criminal Injustice, Hollywood, Individual Rights, Law

What’s being done to Paris Hilton is plain wrong.

Let me preface the above with this: She’s an ill-bred slut; a skunk with expensive clothes. She’s a stupid, rude, uneducated, and unkind woman (consider how she and her sidekick mocked those sweet quilting ladies on their reality show, and how they generally show contempt for the “yokels” with whom they slum it on the show).

Every time I’ve heard Paris speak, my impressions have been confirmed; she’s repulsive. As for her so-called allure, in “Sluts Galore,” I identified her as part of the “porn aesthetic,” sporting “sly, weasel-like looks.” I also thoroughly resent that her name mars one of my favorite fragrances, “Paris” by Yves Saint Laurent. (The allure of Paris the city, nothing can alter, except rioting Muslims.)

However, Hilton she was given unprecedented sentence for a low-level misdemeanor.

Here’s what Thomas Mesereau, a defense attorney for whom I have a great deal of respect, said. I praised his defense of Michael Jackson. (The article about that defense almost no one wanted to publish, including a large libertarian site.) Mesereau has said this about the legal plight of Paris—including the sentence, and the subsequent usurpation by the Judge of the sheriff’s authority:

“…you have a judge who is not following the law and who is willing to undermine our sheriff’s department. This judge absolutely has violated every procedure that applies to a situation like this. All her attorneys can do at this point is file an appeal, try and get her out on bail, as a misdemeanor permits one to do, and take it from there…

But I think the whole situation is a disgrace, because this judge undermined our sheriff and actually treated Paris Hilton far worse than anyone else would have been treated in this situation…

This judge knows darn well, because he’s in the criminal justice system, that people convicted of crimes like this, low-level misdemeanors, only spend a few days in jail, because they need to stop overcrowding, and they have to keep violent felons or people accused of violent felonies in jail.

I have had people go in the morning and leave that afternoon. Nobody gets 45 days like this. Nobody is told, you must spend all 45 days. He did it for the cameras. …And I think it’s highly improper…

I think equality should be the major message in our justice system, that, no matter who you are, you’re treated equally with everybody else.

This is a case of celebrity injustice. He did things with her because of who she is, and how much wealth she has, and because there were paparazzi and cameras around, that he wouldn’t have done with anybody else. And he’s created a difficult situation for our sheriff, who is a dedicated public servant, a very decent man. I know him very well.

And he’s trying to treat everybody equally. He didn’t treat Paris Hilton any differently from anyone else. And the judge tried to make it look like he had…”

Update: As usual, the media and the punditocracy are always wrong. Weeks after the fact, Greta Van Susteren of Faux News discovered (not due to any research she had conducted) that Hilton received more time than a wife batterer would. The Los Angeles Times did the journalist footwork (I can’t locate a link). After presiding over a gaggle of “experts” who hooted and hollered for Hilton’s head, Van Susteren has reversed her position.
About this you can be certain: mainstream media are always wrong. I put it down to cultural dumbing down: egalitarian hiring and the feminization of news.

In the chat I had with Jim Ostrowski of Paleo Radio last week, we agreed about the Hilton case, only I insisted on making the following distinctions (they are not mutually exclusive):
1) Hilton is a Ho—an unkind, classless slut. She’s huge because the market adjudicates popularity, not quality.
2) Hilton received unjust treatment by the legal system. (As a mother, I must say that the cry she let out to hers, “Mother, mother, this is unfair,” was horrible to hear.)

In this case, the injustice was by popular demand. The people—the pitchfork-hoisting, philosophical acolytes of the French Revolution—demanded Paris’s empty head, and got it.

Quarantine, Yes Or No?

Classical Liberalism, Ethics, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, The State

“I’m a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person. This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I’ve cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing.”

So said the patient “with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963,” on returning from a transatlantic trip to celebrate his wedding. The trip took him from Atlanta to Europe—Greece, Italy, the Czech Republic, France—and back to Atlanta via Canada and New York. By the man’s telling, he came back not because he realized he had exposed others to a deadly, highly infectious airborne disease, but because “he was afraid that if he did not get back to the U.S., he would not get the treatment he needed to survive.”
“Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose others when he boarded the jets from Atlanta to Paris, and later from Prague to Montreal… He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs.” Apparently he was also told to wear a mask. That too he ignored. If Andrew Speaker—that is the patient’s name—is as smart as he professes, he ought to have known not to expose people without their consent to any TB, much less to a strain associated with a 50 percent mortality rate.

Speaker returned to North America via Canada, driving into the US, a fact that demonstrates consciousness of guilt: He avoided American airlines, as he had been placed on a “no-fly alert,” which, it transpires, was overlooked at the border crossing. I suspect this case is akin, legally, to an individual infected with HIV not informing his sexual partners of his condition.

I’m trying to think of a libertarian argument against coercively confining a man who knowingly and intentionally uses his body as a lethal weapon against unsuspecting innocents. I can’t come up with one. Can you? Another libertarian has expressed a preference for “home confinement with an electronic monitor. This would seem to strike the balance between protecting his liberty interests and the safety of the public.” I like home confinement, only I really do not believe the authorities acted illiberally up until now: they gave the patient the goods (the info), and left it up to him to comply voluntarily. Andrew Speaker, on the other hand, ignored the information and acted recklessly. Should be given a second strike? If he strikes out again, someone could die—especially individuals with a low T cell count (suppressed immunity). Armed and dangerous is how he ought to be regarded. Would an electronic monitor provide ample warning in the event he violated the quarantine? By the time the authorities locate the quarantine violator, he may well have infected a host of people.
In the meantime, Diane Sawyer, who grills her subjects only in the sense Larry King interviews his, has elicited Speaker’s story. It’s a maze of contradictions and dissembling, and is accompanied suspiciously with “sexy” poses of Innocent Andy and a woman with a blond head the shape of Paris Hilton’s, a forlorn look, and big implants. His new wife, presumably. The fact that this is an educated man—a lawyer, no less—doesn’t help his case.