Category Archives: Natural Law

Gunning For Your Rights: Data Vs. Rights-Based Deductive Reasoning

GUNS, Individual Rights, Natural Law, Reason, Science

When motivating for the individual, natural rights to life and property always proceed from an argument from rights and not from a utilitarian, outcome-based position. After all, individual rights are not predicated on an optimal statistical outcome.

With respect to the Second Amendment right of self-defense: Ample empirical data exist of a statistically meaningful correlation between a well-armed citizenry—i.e., in middle-class neighborhoods as opposed to in gangland—and lower crime rates, in aggregate. New Hampshire is an example of a heavily armed, low-crime state.

Moreover, the benefits of a well-armed population redound to the non-carrying crowd. David Kopel is one of the finest and most respected 2nd Amendment scholars in the country. About these “free riders,” Kopel writes the following in the Arizona Law Review, Summer 2001, Symposium on Guns, Crime, and Punishment in America:

American homes which do not have guns enjoy significant “free rider” benefits. Gun owners bear financial and other burdens of gun ownership; but gun-free and gun-owning homes enjoy exactly the same general burglary deterrence effects from widespread American gun ownership. This positive externality of gun ownership is difficult to account for in a litigation context (since the quantity and cost of deterred crime is difficult to measure), and may even go unnoticed by court–since the free rider beneficiaries (non-gun owners) are not represented before the court.

In other words, the unarmed owe the armed among you a debt of gratitude. We subsidize your safety. Read on.

However, what if this were this not the case? What if, for some weird, wonderful, unlikely and inexplicable reason, arming yourself, commensurate with your right to defend your life, increased the aggregate crime rate in your community? Would this hypothetical empirical data somehow invalidate your inalienable, individual right to protect your life, loved-ones and property?

No! It would so do only if you accept that, de facto, you do not posses an inherent right to life and property.

For, at the risk of repeating what ought to be obvious:

… a right that can’t be defended is a right in name only. Inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same right. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life.
By logical extension, Britons are bereft of the right to life. Not only are the traditional ‘Rights of Englishmen’—the inspiration for the American founders—no longer cool in Cool Britannia; but they’ve been eroded in law. The great system of law that the English people once held dear, including the 1689 English Bill of Rights—subsumed within which was the right to possess arms—is no longer. British legislators have disarmed their law-abiding subjects, who now defend themselves against a pampered, protected and armed criminal class at their own peril. Naturally, most of the (unnatural) elites enjoy taxpayer-funded security details. …

Jeremy Bentham: Very Bad For Liberty, Indeed

Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, The State

The following columns make derisive mention of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The columnist (guilty) assumed (guilty again) that her readers, like many good libertarians (namely, natural-rights libertarians), would identify Bentham’s name as a synonym for statism and collectivism, to distinguish from liberty and individualism.

Libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett, I recall, particularly enjoyed this from “A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts” (7/6/2012):

“Why would George Bush care whether a judicial nominee can tell Blackstone from Bentham, when he can’t?”

“More of a Benthamite bureaucrat than a truth seeker” is from “PATRICIDE AND PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT” (September 11, 2002).

Remember Reno!” (9/8/2006) equated Benthamism with legal excesses, whereby the law, “intended as a bulwark against government abuses,” had become “an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the ‘greater good’—the founders’ Blackstonian view of the law” having “been supplanted by a Benthamism that encourages ambitious prosecutors to discard a defendant’s rights.”

“‘Mad Dog’ Sneddon Vs. Michael Jackson” (7/5/2005) mentions once again the Benthamite notion of “the law as an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the ‘greater good.’”

The Library of Economics and Liberty expounds a little more about Bentham the utilitarian, whose “publications were few,” and whose foundational belief was “that all social actions should be evaluated by the axiom, ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’”

In a word, utilitarianism, and by extension, statism and collectivism.

Counter to Adam Smith’s vision of “natural rights,” Bentham believed that there were no natural rights to be interfered with.

Trained in law, Bentham never practiced, choosing instead to focus on judicial and legal reforms. His reform plans went beyond rewriting legislative acts to include detailed administrative plans to implement his proposals. In his plan for prisons, workhouses, and other institutions, Bentham devised compensation schemes, building designs, worker timetables, and even new accounting systems. A guiding principle of Bentham’s schemes was that incentives should be designed “to make it each man’s interest to observe on every occasion that conduct which it is his duty to observe.” Interestingly, Bentham’s thinking led him to the conclusion, which he shared with Smith, that professors should not be salaried.

In his early years Bentham professed a free-market approach. He argued, for example, that interest rates should be free from government control (see Defence of Usury). By the end of his life he had shifted to a more interventionist stance. He predated Keynes in his advocacy of expansionist monetary policies to achieve full employment and advocated a range of interventions, including the minimum wage and guaranteed employment.

Jeremy Bentham was a thoroughbred statist; the quintessential bureaucrat and social engineer, who devised ways to tinker in oder to optimize the individual pawn’s common-good conduct.

Garner: Innocent Actor In Sovereign’s Snuff Film

Founding Fathers, Free Markets, Law, libertarianism, Morality, Natural Law

“Garner: Innocent Actor In Sovereign’s Snuff Film” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Despite its elegant simplicity, the libertarian law is difficult to grasp. This I realized pursuant to the publication of “Eric Garner: 100% Innocent under Libertarian Law.” Some of the smartest, polymathic readers a writer could hope for were easily bullied into believing that by failing, first, to submit to the sovereign and question Him later—Eric Garner had undermined some sacred social compact.

A small-time peddler is killed-by-cop for selling single smokes on a New York street corner. Yet so befuddled were readers over the application of libertarian natural law to the Garner case, that they insisted against all evidence that Garner’s was an understandable death by “civil disobedience.”

“I certainly would applaud those who resist truly immoral laws (like ordering someone to commit torture),” equivocated one writer, “but I am leery to suggest massive civil disobedience of petty regulations which may, in fact, just give rise to more oppressive government to ‘restore law and order.’”

Yes, the poor sod who dared to purchase and dispose of a couple of loose smokes had committed “massive civil disobedience.” Fearing the Sovereign’s vengeance, some of his fellow citizens felt obliged to calibrate just how daringly Garner should have deviated. Did he raise his voice excessively? Did he wave his arms too energetically? All utilitarian, not principled, considerations.

Other readers beat on breast. Hopelessly “torn” were they between my verdict—Garner was an innocent actor in the sovereign’s snuff film—and the proposition that Garner had an obligation to prostate himself before the law to his overlord’s exacting specifications. By failing to do so, Garner had somehow invited his fate.

“Torn” is a word that better comports with images of Gloria Swanson or Marlene Dietrich mid-swoon. What in bloody blue blazes is there to be “torn” over? The right of a man to stand on the curb with a few “loosies” in-hand, and stay alive?

In claiming that Garner was innocent in natural law, I was—or so I was informed—guilty of implying that he had no moral obligation to obey state-enacted positive law. Woe is me—and woe betides that rascal who counseled that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” …

… The complete column is “Garner: Innocent Actor In Sovereign’s Snuff Film,” now on WND.

The Civil Disobedience Ruse

Founding Fathers, Law, libertarianism, Morality, Natural Law, Regulation, Taxation

Despite polite efforts to resist, I was pulled, last week, into a most unpleasant, unscholarly, uncivilized, almost Kafkaesque exchange, in the wake of the publication of “Eric Garner: 100% Innocent under Libertarian Law.” Polite disagreement is second nature when one has been writing controversially and stridently for close on 20 years. However, one is also obliged to swat down any attempts on the part of an interlocutor to score points by sleight-of-hand—by obfuscation. Suffice it to say that ego-bound writing is a bad thing. When the mere prospect of being perceived as wrong is so devastating to a writer; when he becomes maniacal when challenged, digs in and digs up any and all justification for his position, however tangential—that writing ceases to edify.

Another shock to the system was realizing just how difficult the libertarian law is for most mortals to grasp. They say we libertarians make up only 10 percent of the politically conscious public. No wonder. Some of my smartest readers were bullied into believing that to not submit to the sovereign is to undermine some sacred trust or covenant.

So confused were these readers over “Eric Garner: 100% Innocent under Libertarian Law,” that they took off after the pied piper, muttering mad incantations about the understandable death by “civil disobedience” of Mr. Garner.

“Among other things,” wrote one such reader, “there are no real libertarian states and ‘common property’ exists. Thus, while I might have the right to urinate on my driveway, I do not have the right to urinate on (government-owned) Broadway and the cops can arrest me, etc.”

The issue with taxes is also problematic – one who ignores taxes is engaging in civil disobedience and suffers the consequences (this does not make the taxes good but it is not surprising for governments to enforce their own rules). I certainly would applaud those who resist truly immoral laws (like ordering someone to commit torture) but I am leery to suggest massive civil disobedience of petty regulations which may, in fact, just give rise to more oppressive government to “restore law and order”.

Eric Garner did not urinate on public property. Neither did he expose himself to kids. He waved his hands and walked away. Woe is me! As to the comment about “taxation”: yet another WTF moment. Possessing a few loose cigarettes is not a tax offense. Besides, since when do my readers stand up for the “civilizing” influence of the tax collector; a thief by any other name?

Indeed, a few of my readers took off after the rat catcher, wagging fingers at the poor sod who dared to own and dispose of some loose smokes—-committing “massive civil disobedience”—and lived to tell the tale. Scrap that. Civilization is safe. Garner did not live to tell the tale.

Some good news. The natural law has prevailed among the people:

Americans by nearly 3-1 say the white police officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man being arrested for selling cigarettes, should have faced charges from a Staten Island grand jury, a nationwide USA TODAY/Pew Research Center poll finds.

Who was it who counseled that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”?