Federal Drinking Age Breeds Contempt for Law

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Jim

Michelle Minton (Competitive Enterprise Institute) has a piece advocating rolling back the drinking age. She observes:

Statistics aside, the drinking age in the U.S. is difficult to enforce and discriminatory toward adults between 18 and 21 years old. The current age limit has created a culture of hidden drinking and disrespect for the law.

I want to emphasize the last point, disrespect for the law. In my long gone youth, drinking was illegal for me in Virginia, so my friends and I would drive to DC where we could drink and dance legally; so much for breaking the link between drinking and driving. At school, I knew of several people making fake ids; one trick was to make driver’s licenses for a distant state that would be unfamiliar locally. Far from limited access to alcohol, moonshine was readily available. Further, as long as it was all illegal, liquor was preferable to beer.

Those early adult years are a particularly bad time to subject citizens to irrational legal restrictions as they make personal choices about the ideas that will guide their lives. Some will learn that it is valid to abuse politics to impose the irrational on others. Others will learn that legal standards are arbitrary and not tied to protecting individual rights. A few will be punished and have their futures compromised in order to make an example for others; teaching the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the many.

As a parent, I looked at these restrictions and the hidden culture of drinking from a different perspective. In our community, a young man died from alcohol poisoning. Despite being in the company of others, no one attempted to get him help when he was having convulsions, because the law would get them into trouble. To avoid the penalty from underage drinking, one young man died and several went to jail for his death. The legally imposed restrictions upon honest communication are harming and killing our kids.

As Minton mentions in her piece, countries with less restrictive drinking laws have fewer problems with youthful drinking. Without the interposition of government threats, parents and their kids can have honest and responsible interactions about drinking without being distracted by the draconian risks imposed by statute.

While President Obama claims to have been elected with the youth vote, what has he done on this issue? Individuals who voted for him are made criminals by an irrational law and his Administration has proposed nothing to correct this injustice.

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Not an Emergency, but a Suicide Attempt

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Jim

Are our current economic problems an emergency?  Politicians in both parties have said so and claimed that we have to abandon principles, act for the sake of action, and when those actions fail we must blindly act again.

In The Ethics of Emergencies [Virtue of Selfishness, p. 47], Ayn Rand wrote:

An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible—such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck.  In an emergency situation, men’s primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land, to put out the fire, etc.)The principle that one should help men in an emergency cannot be extended to regard all human suffering as an emergency and to turn the misfortune of some into a first mortgage on the lives of others.

How does this relate to the current situation perplexing our befuddled President Obama?

First, this situation was chosen.  For decades, our government has pursued policies using force in an effort to make contradictions facts.  Through careful deliberation by legislators, planning by the executive, and the participation of the electorate, we chose to create this problem.  Sarbanes-Oxley, the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac…by our choices, we chose our consequences.

Second, this situation was expected.  Attempts by government to use force to violate fundamental contract rights have certain consequences.  History has demonstrated this fact.  It is not a question of if but when they will be felt.  The consequences of our policies were identified by Aristotle thousands of years ago…didn’t you get the memo on political degeneration?  Fools may claim that they did not know, but evasion does not mitigate their crime.

Third, this situation is not a function of time.  True, it will end in some fashion, at some point, but it will do so as a consequence of our choices.  Having failed to properly identify government’s role in causing this problem, our politicians proscribe poison as a cure.  Continued evasion of facts will extend the duration and escalate the intensity the consequences of our previous mistaken choices.

Fourth, in misidentifying our present circumstance as an emergency, our politicians have hijacked what would be a reasonable response to an emergency and misdirected it towards an illegitimate political end.  We have a bipartisan consensus that force by government is a practical way to achieve altruistic moral ends, subordinating the individual to the needs of others.

This orgy of sacrifice characterized the Bush Administration’s rhetoric.  Our last election was a choice between a candidate that said that individuals should be immediately forced to sacrifice to others (Obama), and another that said that such force should only be used after individuals failed to volunteer themselves for sacrifice (McCain).  As elections have consequences, it should be no surprise that our President and Congress have accelerated the rate of compelled sacrifice as chosen by the electorate.

Fifth, as this situation continues to degenerate in response to ill-conceived government interventions, we risk creating a condition in which human survival is impossible, a political cannibalism of the weak feasting on the strong.  This gets to the heart of naming the nature of our current economic problems; we are not experiencing an emergency, but instead a suicide attempt.

Contrary to the protestations of our pragmatic leaders, now is precisely the time that we need to act according to principle.  In directing government action, this means refocusing on the fundamental question posed by Socrates, “What is Justice?”  In the political context, the answer is the protection of individual rights.  In order to save our lives and our republic, the Congress must begin by undoing what it has previously done in violation of that principle.

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Ready for a Free Market Revolution?

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Jim

Tonight I attending a talk by Yaron Brook and Don Watins about their new book Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government.  I am excited to read this book and a quick summary of the chapter titles will demonstrate why that is true [emphasis added]:

 Part I – The Problem
1) The Incredible Unshrinking Government
2) Why Government Grows
3) With Friends Like These…
4) The 2008 Housing Meltdown: A Crisis that Government Built
Part II – The Solution
5) Rethinking Selfishness
6) The Morality of Success
7) The Business of Business
8) The Nobility of the Profit Motive
9) Selfishness Unleashed
10) The Dynamism of the Market
11) The Regulatory State and Its Victims
12) The Immoral Entitlement State
13) You Are Not Your Brother’s Health Care Provider
14) Stopping the Growth of the State

The key point from tonight’s talk is that morality drives politics with the key conflict being between rational selfishness and altruism, which literally translates into otherism.  In the political domain, these moral ideas are expressed as individualism versus collectivism.

A corollary to that point is that it is ineffective to argue against statist and collectivist policies based upon either economics or pragmatism.  The issue is that facts, consequences, and causality do not matter to those supporting the statist and collectivist policies; instead they chose to support that which is STUPID, because they think that such a choice is the moral thing to do.  Altruism justifies stupidity as a moral act, because it benefits someone else at the cost of one’s own greater values.  Note, stupid is my word choice not the authors.

Yaron Brook was very forceful in making the point that freedom advocating individuals need to reclaim the words that the statists have corrupted with invalid definitions.  These corruptions rob the political discourse of the concepts required to express the argument for individual rights.  One of those words cited by Brook is “selfish”.

Without selfish, there is no Selfish Citizenship.

In the future, after reading the book, I expect that I will write more about it.  Don’t wait on me!  Get the book and read it yourself.

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Plato’s Laws – Tradition vs. Innovation

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Jim

This post is part of my commentary series on John David Lewis’ short book Early Greek Lawgivers.

Lewis begins his book with a scene from Plato’s Laws, in which three men discuss the best laws for a fictional city.    In examining this discussion related to the source for laws, Lewis identifies two major themes that are relevant today; the first is tradition versus innovation. (Note that I will address the second theme in a subsequent post).

When I was in school, this was the essence of what defined the left vs. right political continuum.  Those on the left were for change, reform, and innovation; while those of the right were focused on deference to tradition and restoring society to the true path of the past.  Similarly, in “Terrorism in democracies; Its social and political bases”, Ted Robert Gurr identified two general political motivations for terrorist organizations:  radicalization from the left and reaction from the right (Origins of Terrorism, p. 87-92.).

Today, this left-right continuum is criticized as no longer making sense.  One point of criticism is the similarity of the fascists and communists in their methods and goals, thus it does not seem relevant that they should be on opposite poles of this continuum.  Yet, this placement was based upon the backward looking vision of fascists for restoring past national glories and the communists progressing to a new condition based upon the synthesis of past contradictions.

Now, there is a move to create a new more relevant continuum.  The Libertarian quadrant may be the alternative most commonly seen by students.  Craig Biddle of The Objective Standard offered his own alternative recently, which he called “Political ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ Properly Defined”.    However, I find that these alternatives are actually different tools for a different purpose instead of being actual alternatives and are attempting to hijack existing useful concepts by redefining them with limited referents.  Further, while relevant to reframing current political debate in some places (like the US and Canada), these so-called alternatives are typically not relevant historically nor currently where such are not the alternatives actively in the political debate.  Thus, if you live in the moment and the history of political ideas overtime and their impact are not relevant to you then such may be alternatives for your limited perspective.

Why are alternatives attractive?  Our current major political parties are coalitions that combine factions without a consistent perspective on the traditional view of left and right.  Further, government has expanded to such a wide variety of policies that the same person can be a traditionalist on one set of issues and an innovator on a different set.  The so called alternatives seek to reconcile these contradictions by developing a unifying theme related to the relationship between the individual and the collective.  Ironically, those that champion such alternatives typically put themselves on the right when they are actually not traditionalists.

Contrary to the policy based view on left vs. right, today what had been left is now right, and through the neoconservatives leftists are attempting to set the agenda for the Republican Party, which is considered traditionalist today, but was downright leftist 150 years ago.  Using a non-US example, the Russian communists were leftists in the 1910’s, but had become the right by the 1980s.

Personally, as I see that tradition versus innovation is a constant choice over time and place, I find that it is currently and historically relevant to conceive of these alternatives as left vs. right.  Today, that would put both Obama and Romney on the right as the defenders of a tradition of an expansive and invasive government.  Meanwhile, those like myself are leftists as we champion refocusing the government upon its proper domain of protecting individual rights by subordinating retaliatory force to objective law; truly an innovative agenda in the present political context.

As an example, conservative Robert Bork has argued in favor of the maintenance of Social Security regardless of its constitutionality because it has become part of our American tradition and therefore should not be changed.  Is such an argument from the left or the right?  To me, it seems obvious that argument is from the right given its traditionalist orientation, yet he advocates government coerced retirement planning.

The left vs. right continuum represents the relationship between the present political conditions and the direction (past vs. future, tradition vs. innovation) advocated for policy.  As such, it remains relevant.  Instead of replacing a valid concept with an alternative, a new and separate concept related to the how policy reflects the advocated relationship between the individual and that state should be used.

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The Last Goode Democrat

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Jim

As a junior in High School, I thought that it was dishonest that my government teacher in public school failed to disclose her political affiliation; she was a Democrat, but was never honest enough to tell us students…but we knew.

Personally, I have been labeled as liberal by Republicans and as a conservative by Democrats, which provides evidence supporting my assertion that I am independent and nonpartisan.  However, in the vein of full disclosure, the only party that I have actively previously affiliated with to the point of attending county party meetings is the Democratic Party.  Deep down, in my political heart, I was a Jeffersonian; so in the past, I defaulted to be a dissident Democrat.

In 1992, this became particularly embarrassing to me as the Democrats selected Bill Clinton to be their standard bearer.  I recall on the night that he was elected watching him prance upon the stage after his election was assured and I exclaimed at the television that Bill Clinton was a “God damn blind mf’r!!”, so afterwards I referred to Bill Clinton as Oedipus Rex, and continue to do so.

In the conflict between what was a true Democrat, Clinton or a Jeffersonian such as me, I decided that Clinton and not I was the true Democrat; Aristotle’s Politics taught me that point very clearly, but more on that in a later post.

Around that period of time Virgil Goode was still a Democrat and a thorn in the side of Democratic Governor Doug Wilder, whom I subsequently supported in his bid against Chuck Robb in the Democratic primary for Senate.  At the time, while being teased by friends for the incompetent Democratic candidates, I referred to Virgil Goode as the last good Democrat.

Today, Virgil is running for President.  He changed from the Democrat to the Republican Party as a congressman.  Now, he is affiliated on the Virginia ballot as a Constitution Party candidate for President in the 2012 election.  Do I support him now?  No.

To be clear, Goode has not changed; but with experience and thinking hard upon issues of government, I have.  Goode is not an advocate of individual rights; instead he and his new party are focused outside of reality upon a God that does not exist.

Based upon the 7 principles of the Constitution Party, I disagree that:

  1. Life begins at conception.  If that was true, then “God” would be the ultimate abortionist.  As a matter of conscious and informed choice, I hold that abortion is a positive good that can advance the life of the woman.
  2. God sanctioned that a family should be founded upon one man and one woman.  I disagree as two parents of the same sex can be fit parents to a child without parents.
  3. The Constitution should be interpreted as intended by the Founders; however, the Constitution has been amended.  The 14th Amendment specifically puts equal protection of the laws and due process limits upon the states to be enforced by the federal government; this process has been called “incorporation” by the Supreme Court.
  4. The states should have expansive powers to oppose individual rights as imagined by the Confederates.  Who are you for the collective or the individual?  I am for the individual.
  5. An anti-immigrant stance is justified because “illegal” immigrants have violated U.S. law.  However, US immigration law is a racist ass created by Senator Ted Kennedy; we need to embrace and bring home Americans who were by accident of birth born elsewhere.  America is not a place so much as an ideology about life; there are people born elsewhere that are ideologically American and some born in the US that are ideologically alien to the idea of government protecting individual rights through the subordination of retaliatory force to objective law.

While I have yet to make an endorsement for President, and will do so now that the conventions have ended; at this point, I would like to be clear that I do not support Virgil Goode’s bid to be the Constitutional Party candidate for President of the United States as he and his party’s platform do not advocate the protection of individual rights.

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