Category Archives: Individual Rights

Values Vulgarizers

Foreign Policy, Individual Rights, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, The West

One of our regular contributors here on Barely a Blog makes an uncharacteristically incoherent comment on his own blog:

“…on the subject of the war against civilization …Mercer gets it (she just wants us to fight it Marquis of Queensbury rules with our foot in a bucket.)”

Can he be serious? Apparently. Wait for this: Accolades for offering a strident defense of the West go to the prototypical open-borders Objectivist, whose positions are generally indistinguishable from those of the neoconservatives.

Philosophical incoherence at its best.

But it’s predictable. In my commentary over the years—cultural and political—I’ve mounted a systematic defense of Western values as I see them. This includes—gasp!—defending the distinctly Western character of the US (and the West), something the neocons and the Objectivists who ape them daren’t do.

The neocons and their Objectivist friends, on the other hand, have cheered the unprovoked bloodletting in Iraq and have deceptively framed as individual rights the “values” the US is planting in that country’s blood-soaked soil.

Because of their incremental convergence over the decades with the liberal left, this axis has, to all intents and purposes, embraced “equality” as a value for which they’re prepared to drag the country kicking and screaming to war.

Iraq is a colossal bit of social engineering. To the fact that the US is not defending individual rights in Iraq—not by any stretch of the imagination—add the matter of jurisdiction. A constitutional American government has no right to use the property of Americans to free people around the world. The Iraqi people, moreover, did not sanction the American government’s faith-based democratic initiative. These are the fictions for which neocons and their Objectivist tagalongs are willing to kill and have others killed.
Nation building and assorted mindless meddling have also found a place within this “philosophy.”

So what is my apparently constricting prescription? First, bring the armed forces home, so they can protect this country, not Kosovo, Korea, and Kurdistan. Next, scale back mass immigration, legal and illegal. Defending negative liberties at home is more effective and less violative than waging aimless, unwinnable, rights-sundering wars.

As anyone who’s followed my writing over the years knows, I most certainly support fighting and winning just wars. (The position I deride in this post equates unjust war with a defense of the civilization—a position too dumb and evil for words.) My stance is congruent with individual and national sovereignty, constitutional principles, and just war ethics.

Again, the prototypical warring Objectivist our misguided friend praises is indistinguishable from a neoconservative. He is tough on crime, in general (a good thing), big on war crimes (a bad thing), and even bigger on the idea of inviting the Third Word to our shores. All of which the left supports. There’s a reason the media has grown fond of the neocon/Objectivist/Catoite hybrid.

In the age of unreason, violence-for-values verbiage defeats my own coherent defense of the West. Atavism trumps reason, because it appeals to primitive emotions.
This is the vulgarization of values.

Minimizing the Crime of Home Invasion

Aesthetics, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Individual Rights, Natural Law, Private Property, Race

Don Lemon, one of CNN’s not-very-bright, cherubic, soft-spoken “girlie-men,” called the murder of Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor a “robbery gone wrong.”

In other words, the four career criminals who invaded Taylor’s home and shot and killed him were modern-day Jean Valjeans. Like Victor Hugo’s protagonist in Les Misérables, these thugs intended only to take a loaf of bread, sate their hunger, and then leave. (Please don’t tell me I have to post a “cynicism alert” every time I’m being, well, cynical.)

Let’s unpack this.

Confronted with a criminal breaking and entering, there’s precious little a homeowner can do to divine the intentions of the invader. If you violate someone’s inner sanctum, then he or she ought to proceed from the premise that you’re willing to violate the occupant.

The law ought to proceed from the same premise. 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, I believe this is the rule in the US. (Although, not in Cool Britannia.)

This is why neighbors are out in force to demonstrate their support for Pasadena hero, Joe Horn (good luck finding this story on the major news networks’ sites; I couldn’t):

Horn “shot and killed two suspected burglars at his neighbor’s home last month… The neighborhood has been awash in controversy ever since the two men, Miguel Dejesus, 38, and Diego Ortiz, 30, were shot.
The whole thing started when Horn called 911 to say that two men were breaking into his neighbor’s home.

In a tape of the 911 call released to the media, the emergency operator can be heard urging Horn to remain in his home and wait for police to arrive.
‘You’re gonna get yourself shot if you go outside that house with a gun. I don’t care what you think,’ the operator said.
Horn disagreed.
‘You wanna make a bet?’ he said. ‘I’m gonna kill ‘em.’
After the shooting, a shaken Horn called 911 again.
‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘They came in the front yard with me, man. I had no choice. Get somebody over here quick.’”

[Snip]
“Values” is a buzzword not only in the presidential campaign. There is a veritable revival of the civil rights movement around certain criminal core values. African-Americans are coalescing around thugs to make the case that, wait a sec; what case are they trying to make? You tell me. If the issue is indeed race, then the Juvenile criminal from Jena came close to killing a white boy; these two black men robbed the home of whites.

Incidentally, why do you suppose this story is so hard to trace?

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.)