Category Archives: Individualism Vs. Collectivism

UPDATE II: Freedom To Choose? Only When It Comes to Abortion (BHO Agrees)

Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Justice, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Reason

For a libertarian, it is “highly problematic to insist that by virtue of her fertility, a woman loses a title in her body.” It is equally wrong to tell a dope-head (or a fat-head, for that matter) what not to ingest, inject or smoke.

In libertarian law, the legislator has no place in a voluntary exchange between adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these may be (like dwarf tossing).

Ever selective, and never principled, about the freedoms they champion, left-liberals (as opposed to classical liberals) believe that the right to have an abortion (at the public’s expense) is sacred. Nobody should come between a woman seeking such a procedure and her doctor. (Agreed, so long as she and not me pays for the termination.)

Forget about the right of the same woman to work for whomever she wants to without the intervention of a third party (a union). Freedom of association holds no sway with liberals when it comes to labor law. Pinko pukes religiously believe that it is good and just to compel an employee to join a union and remit union dues.

The Michigan Statehouse has changed this sorry state of affairs. “Organized crime” is outraged.

Predictably, CNN reporters and anchors have utterly ignored individual rights in their coverage of the Michigan vote, focusing the network’s collective bias on the fact that wages in right-to-work states are freer to adjust with the market (read lower):

The House approved two bills, which the Senate already passed last week. Both chambers are dominated by Republicans.
On Tuesday evening. Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, signed the legislation, which allows workers at union-represented employers to forgo paying dues.
Thousands of people, many of them union workers, gathered outside the statehouse, chanting and holding signs as snow fell. At least three school districts were closed as teachers traveled to Lansing to protest.
There are 23 states which have right-to-work laws, mostly in the South and western plains states, where union membership is relatively weak. Nationwide, union membership stands at 11.8%. …”

UPDATE: BHO Agrees. The language of rights doesn’t belong in the “escalating fight over changing Michigan into a right-to-work state.” Rights are about things like publicly sponsored abortion, welfare, and so on.

The ass with ears (AWE) said that “the State Legislature’s move to ban the required paying of union dues was all about politics.”

That’s a non sequitur, professa. For even if the Michigan Legislature’s vote were political, whatever that means—everything politicians do, by definition, is political—it does not make it wrong.

Logic was never “The Ass With Ears'” strong suit.

UPDATE II: Why I Am So Sad (It’s not About Libya, Israel or 9/11)

Democracy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Private Property, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

The current column, now on WND, is “Why I Am So Sad.” An excerpt:

“I AM SO SAD—and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats—Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season, and by so doing, make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in DC” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because … ”

The complete column, “Why I Am So Sad,” can be read now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE I: In answer to a Facebook reader, my saying that, “More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran” is not collectivist. It is, overall, correct, not least as a just sentiment intended to discourage interventionism.

Moreover, as a libertarian thinker, I choose to offer meaningful insights that comport with reality, rather than score reductive, pedantic points for the sake of theoretical purity. Tell the Arabs rioting that YOU are one of them b/c you, an American, bought the city their ancestors inhabited for centuries. I’m a private property absolutist, but the institution of private property has a cultural and historical dimension and context.

UPDATE II (Sept. 14): For describing a reality the US brought on itself with its Lawrence of Arabia complex, I am accused by a reader of “sympathizing with these al Qaeda people.”

For one, how in logic do you arrive at sympathy for savages from this:

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

Force breeds force; nation building where you have no business imposing your will—will results in what transpired in Libya. Fact: Those idiotic and arrogant interventions have a price. These are the people our diplomats were working with in a patronizing foolish way. I just heard Hillary say as much. This was, in part, a reaction to imposed authority. Yes, Hillary is trying to separate the attackers from her lovely rebels. Our reader is buying what Hillary is selling because it feeds into a storyline neocons simply can’t resist.

I suggest the reader mine the Archives here. I’ve documented this vehement hate for the US—beginning in our decade long expeditions to the region—that have seen the US remain over there indefinitely.

Americans do not understand the culture. The writer actually grew up in the region, so I have a better inkling. I hear Hillary declare that the ambassador was working with the “rebels” and that they had come to love him. Oh yes? That’s Lawrence-of- Arabia type romantic rot. And can you be that dumb? A smile and outward charm don’t mean they like you! But our navel-gazing, patronizing (unarmed) diplomats think that everyone should love the US despite its actions in the region, in general, and in Libya, in particular.

I suggest the reader reconsider the logic of his accusation. Calling reality as it is does not imply sympathy for the offending parties on my part. I suppose the reader would prefer that I fulminate irrationally like some of the neoconservative Jihadi and Sharia trackers whom he probably follows. (And who never even mention the possibility that we should, as true patriots, defend our own porous borders, before we violate and then presume to “defend” the boundaries of other nations.)

UPDATED: Orgy Of Sentimentality Finally OVER!

Democrats, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Propaganda, Reason

“Faking It” was a gem of a book published in 1999, if I am not mistaken. Its thesis was that ours is a society whose every facet is permeated with phony sentimentality, and with the elevation in every sphere of “feeling, image and spontaneity,” over “reason, reality and restraint.” The fraud and the poseur have the run of our institutions and cultural products!

And, as was evident from the 2012 Democratic National Convention that has finally ended, things have only gotten worse.

Granted, the Republicans might be “the drag queens of politics,” and should not be trusted until they repent, in earnest and in action.

It goes without saying, moreover, that the men and women who took to the podium at the RNC did not talk Austrian economics. They did, however, mix it up with economist Milton Friedman, so to speak.

In other words, Republican representatives—irrespective of their invariable and inevitable political treachery—do still evince some intellectual familiarity with the natural principles of the economic order, something that was utterly absent from the sensibilities expressed by the repulsive Democrats, decamping from Charlotte tonight.

In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedman put his finger on the backdrop to the growth of collectivism: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

Of course the NPR-cited Fact Checker found no errors of fact in Michelle Obama’s endless emoting. How can emotions be graded for factual content? There were no facts that mattered in the First Lady’s remarks!

In well-functioning people, the intellect is not separated from the affect (i.e. the emotional). They are integrated. When people are rational, they observe reality as it is, and are more likely to be concerned with justice and avoid misplacing compassion.

What we witnessed at the 2012 DNC was a mud-slide of sentimentality, unmoored from reason or reality, and backed by the might of voracious electoral majorities.

UPDATE: Apologies to readers on Facebook who said I got too wordy. My fault. I had to “medicate” to watch BHO and the other offal. I will get back to my solitary glass of wine a day now that the orgy is over.

The Facts of Society Vs. The Facts of Socialism

Barack Obama, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Socialism, Sport

How they try! The “media mafia” is struggling to mitigate the words that’ll be “Obama’s political epitaph”: “You didn’t do that.”

No sooner is someone found to have alluded to the obvious facts of society—that with exceptions, individuals achieve with the support and mentoring of those who care about their endeavor—than he is said to be like Obama.

Thus PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is up the creak without a paddle, conflating Romeny’s words at “the 2002 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies in Salt Lake City,” with Obama’s “You didn’t do that” comments.

ROMNEY:

“You Olympians, however, know that you didn’t get here solely on your own power,” he said. “For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers encouraged your hopes. Coaches guided, communities built venues and organized competitions. All Olympians stand on the shoulders of those who lifted them.”
Sound familiar? It’s a bit like the “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” line by President Obama in Roanoke, Va., earlier this month.

OBAMA in “context” and unplugged:

“…you didn’t get there on your own.
You didn’t get there on your own.
If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.
Somebody else made that happen.”