Taxation, Humane, and Other Words

In looking, via the wordpress reader, through posts of various topics, I ran across a post which claims “taxes are an expression of mans humanity.” Those of you who read my posts in favor of libertarianism will have already guessed that I do not agree with that assertion. And I could leave it at that, but I think the whole concept needs some unpacking and some sarcastic, mocking ridicule a serious and reasoned rebuttal. You may be thinking you already know where this is going. Well, let us just see where this does lead.

Project August: Day 12 – Money Is Only a Tool

Well, I apparently botched yesterday’s post. Hopefully this one will be better. So let us go in a different direction. I am pulling from a blog I have not visited before. I found it through my wordpress reader. On this twelfth day of August, 2013, the topic for the day in Project August is money.

Project August: Day 5 – Dominance and Submission as Inherent Nature

On this Monday, August 5, 2013, I am now on day five of my project to post, each day of the month of August, 2013, responses to posts from other blogs. This is turning out to be an interesting exercise for me. I have never attempted this before. Anyway, what shall I talk about today? Yes, I know; you are at the edge of your seat and tingling with anticipation. Hm… As I look through my wordpress reader for blogs I follow, what do I see? Oh yes, Kayla Lords is moving her blogging to her own site. Oh, look, there is an interesting post. Yes, let’s talk about being always Dominant or always submissive.

Project August: Day 4 – Are Libertarianism and Christianity Incompatible?

Today being a Sunday and myself being a Christian, I went looking for something theological to write about. And eventually I found something. Apparently, some people consider libertarianism to be incompatible with Christianity. Obviously, I disagree. So on this Sunday, August 4, 2013, I am going to look at an objection some Christians have to libertarianism.

Project August: Day 3 – Why Ignorance of Libertarianism Is Not a Virtue

Yesterday I mentioned the many attempts to smear libertarianism, and today I am going to talk about one of them. Today I am going to respond to a post over at Huffington Post’s section rather boringly, and perhaps arrogantly, titled “The Blog”. I came across it by looking through posts at the blog of another site, libertarianism.org. There, Aaron Ross Powell responds to a post by Ekow N. Yankah at “The Blog”. Yes, more politics today. But as you will see, I bring this around to D/s as well.

Libertarians and the Law

In a previous post I mentioned the oft used “if you think X should not be illegal then I guess you’re okay with murder” argument. There is a notion out there in the political ether that libertarians who oppose certain laws are just foolish anarchists who want all laws abolished. While some libertarians are anarchists, most, if not the vast majority of them, are not. “You don’t get to pick and choose which laws are obeyed/enforced,” is the general reply to that. “For if everyone only followed/enforced the laws they liked, that would make the law ineffectual and impotent.” Perhaps, but insisting we have an obligation to obey any and all man-made laws makes the law a tyrannic oppressor rather than a protector of rights. Protecting rights is the true purpose of just laws.

Concerning Libertarianism: On the “Cynicism” of Libertarian Philosophy (Updated Version)

You may be thinking I just posted this the other day. But that post was not as well made as it should have been. So I made some changes. This is the updated and (hopefully) improved version.

One of the popular criticisms (and by criticism in this instance I mean denigration) of libertarianism these days seems to be that libertarianism is little more than cynicism. The implied idea being that libertarianism has no ideological footing or moral standing and therefore is just something snarky kooks use to pick on the poor ol’ government that is just trying to help people. Which is, of course, a fully erroneous idea. Libertarianism is, in fact, both moral and optimistic.

Hugo Chávez Is Dead

I was not planning on saying anything about the death of Hugo Chávez, because I have nothing nice to say about him. But apparently a lot of other people do, and not just cult of personality followers in Venezuela. A member of the U.S. House of Representatives, one José Serrano, actually praised Hugo Chávez as a good man and a good leader. And that sort of thing is something I do want to talk about. You have been warned.

“A Followership Problem”

I have talked before about people who are smart enough that they should know better than to say something ridiculously stupid and yet say something ridiculously stupid anyway. Well, this time around, the person is David Brooks. He has written for The New York Times, Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. He seems like he ought to be a pretty smart fellow. Maybe not.

At The New York Times website is a David Brooks column in which he complains that “our fervent devotion to equality” makes difficult “to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.” No, I am not kidding.

He starts out complaining that modern memorials “say nothing about just authority.” Then he explains why modern memorial designers fail.

Some of the reasons are well-known. We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are about victims who have endured oppression, racism and cruelty.

Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect. It’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.

Got that? Forget stories about the civil rights struggle. We need more memorials that remind us all that our betters are “immeasurably superior.” No, seriously. Mr. Brooks thinks this is a significant problem because it is, apparently, a symptom of the problem of people not knowing their place.

Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following. Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.

So basically, it is okay for leaders to believe they are better and superior to everyone else, but you lesser folk need to learn your place and just do what authority tells you to do. I wonder if he has paid attention to the flow of his thoughts here. He complains that leaders are not idolized enough and that the average citizen is vain for questioning government.

In the opinion piece, Mr. Brooks also says this:

You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.

And that is bad because…?

Over at The Agitator, Radley Balko has a scathing criticism of David Brook’s column. It is well worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few snippets:

You know, 1925-1955. The good ole’ days. Back when we still had important institutions like segregation. And lynching. When our elites gave us alcohol prohibition. And when we banned marijuana because the pillars of American society warned us that the drug was helping black jazz musicians take sexual liberties with white women. It was a time when we still sterilized society’s undesirables, when we imprisoned Americans of Asian descent simply because of their heritage. Those were also the days when the U.S. government conducted covert medical experiments and biological warfare testing on its own citizens. Yes, it’s good we were less willing to question our government back then.

[…]

In this particular column Brooks specifically calls for allegiance to our political leaders. This makes me wonder if Brooks owns a television or regularly reads a newspaper. Our politicians are clownish, ridiculous people. Even if you’re the die-hardest of die-hard blue- or red-staters, in your most honest moments you have to concede that Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are absurd human beings. If they didn’t hold positions of power, you’d want nothing to do with these people.

[…]

So those of us who question authority do so not because we’re vain or think we’re better than everyone else. On the contrary. We question authority because we recognize that human beings, ourselves included, are flawed. And we’ll always be flawed. Which means that we will build flawed institutions and produce flawed leaders. We question authority because we recognize that not only is authority (another word for power) inherently corrupting, but also because we recognize the perverse values, priorities, and notions of merit upon which authority is generally granted.

I could not have said it better myself.

How separated from reality does one have to become to believe that the problem in the U.S. is that we question political authority too much? And that doing so is arrogant?

Answering Some Questions – Universal

Day 2 of answering questions posed by Diane Owens.

Question #2
What is something that is universal to ALL human beings?

Death.

And of course, my libertarian philosophy prompts me to say also that there are fundamental rights that all humans have. All humans, not just the ones who are citizens of the U.S. Which is to say, rights are not privileges granted or revoked by a government.

Rights are something all humans have, above or prior to government. Which is to say, government cannot give them to us and it cannot take them away. Yes, a government can infringe on the liberty to exercise one’s rights, but the rights remain regardless of government policy or action. Which means something a government grants you as a privilege to do or to have is not a right. For example, voting is not a right. Voting is a privilege.

And all humans having these rights means even the humans we do not like have them. Racists have them. Fascists have them. Socialists have them. Murderers have them. Terrorists have them. Even the rude people who talk during movies in the cinema have them.

I know this will annoy people of certain political philosophies, but fundamental is the right of property. At the heart of the philosophy in which I believe, is the concept that a person owns himself. Other rights stem from this. And the notion that I do not have the right to infringe your rights also stems from this.

I know this is a subject which people have argued for several hundred years, and maybe you, O reader, disagree with me. But this is my answer to the question. Self-ownership, and therefore basic human rights, belong to all human beings universally. No human has more rights or less rights than any other human.