Category Archives: Private Property

Updated: Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Liberty, Private Property, Race, Racism, Regulation, Republicans

The excerpt is from my WND.COM column, “Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act”:

“The Obama administration, like the gang it replaced, has intervened on the side of a mutant strain of affirmative action – a ‘race conscious’ admissions process practiced at the University of Texas at Austin, now being contested by two white plaintiffs. In case the conservative base reverts to its default position – a belief in the superiority of Republican tyranny – I’ll remind it that Bush had helped to legitimize this proxy-for-race admissions process at the University of Michigan Law School.

In what was surely a triumph of Clintonian triangulation tactics, Bush, in a 2003 legal brief, ostensibly challenged racial preferences at Michigan Law, while simultaneously encouraging, instead, the use of racial cue cards in the admissions process. For example, an applicant could hint heavily at having overcome hardship (‘such as having been shot,’ quipped commentator Steve Sailer at the time).

Housebroken conservatives will reach for the smelling salts at what I am about to say next – they do so each time an attempt is made to explore the effects on liberty of one overarching and overreaching bit of legislation. The culprit in these crippling codes for university admissions – and in hiring, firing, renting, and money lending – is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ‘most radical law affecting civil rights ever passed by any nation’ …

The complete column is “Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act.”

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

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Update (April 4): I hope I have misunderstood Myron’s anti-South stereotypes. Myron seems to have great faith in the power of legislation to renew communities. Alas, the Civil Rights Act most certainly did not “transform” the South for the better. Someone has swallowed whole “HOLLYWOOD’S HATEFUL HOOEY ABOUT THE SOUTH.” The South of John Randolph of Roanoke and John C. Calhoun was aristocratic, if anything. The War Between the States destroyed a patrician way of life.

I recommend Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by historian David Hackett Fischer.

Update II: Coulter’s Message To Tea Party

Ann Coulter, Conservatism, Liberty, Media, Private Property, Republicans, Taxation

GET BEHIND REPUBLICANS. “I get angry at people who act like there is no difference between the parties. That’s insane,” insists Republican Party booster Ann Coulter.

She instructs the tea party to get behind this or the other Republican—Bill Brady in this instance—if they are for “prayer in schools, against abortion and gay marriage.”

Tucker Carlson mentioned a poll that shows tea-party minded individuals (you and me) don’t give a tinker’s toss about these conservative fetishes. Sounds about right.

Coulter clearly doesn’t get what the Tea Party groundswell is all about. Most wealthy, silver spoon-in-the-mouth establishment types don’t get it. After all, their incomes are guaranteed, irrespective of the coming hyperinflation, by a population stupid enough to mistake their message for a message of freedom.

Update I (Feb. 27): Good will runs eternal for Ann Coulter. She takes that to the bank.

There is a scene in “Dangerous Liaisons” where the protagonist, a lying schemer, is “booed and disgraced by the audience at the opera.” No longer welcome in polite society, she retreats to her boudoir never to emerge again.

If American society had an ounce of moral fiber, this would be the fate of Ann Couter and the other LETHAL WEAPONS of the NEOCON variety—the blood-lusting vampires of the Republican War Machine, whose bitch-hot war talk helped send gullible young men to their deaths.

Update II: Daniel Hannan:

“The American patriots didn’t see themselves as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their own minds, all they were asking for was what they had always assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen.

Part of that birthright was liberty from unjust, arbitrary or punitive taxation. The proposition that taxes ought not to be levied except by elected representatives would have been every bit as popular in Great Britain in 1773 as in America. …

The American Revolution, in other words, was inspired by British political philosophy and – more to the point – by British political practice. American patriots saw themselves as part of a continuing British tradition, stretching back through the Glorious Revolution, back through the agitations of Pym and Hampden, back even through the Great Charter to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon common law.”

[SNIP]

IT’S ALL ABOUT PROPERTY RIGHTS, Ms. Coulter, not fetuses or matrimonial vows.

Updated: ‘Take My Pound Of Flesh & Sleep Well’

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Individual Rights, Private Property, Taxation, Terrorism, The State

So wrote Joseph Stack, the pilot of a Piper Cherokee plane, before he crashed into an office building in Austin, Texas, that housed IRS offices.

What transpires when a government says to a desperate citizen, vaguely conscious of his natural rights, “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide”?

What transpires when times get particularly tough. And they just take and take and take what’s not theirs to take. So Joseph Stack said, “Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different …”

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 rules 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 the natural rights of Americans. The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on their property and, by extension, on their lives. Joseph Stack took his, in the hope of taking out some of them.

More here.

Update: Repetition is a theme on this blog. So I will cut-and-paste my last reply to the exact same moral equivalence the provocative, if repetitive, Myron has already advanced. How about coming at me with a new angle? I’m being made to go around in circles. Here goes from our last debate about anti-state violence:

MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh, for example, committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government with the causes of the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” is akin to conflating MY causes with those of Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, again the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin.”

What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that?

Stack is justified in his anger against the shakedown agency and its agents who partake in pillaging their countrymen. He’s wrong to try and kill them. I feel so lame saying this, but it’s the safe thing to say. Incidentally, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was more sympathetic than Fox’s statists on steroids.