Where Cheney is Wrong

I like Dick Cheney. I think he's an asset to our nation, and a man to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.

Generally speaking, I agree with his stances on various issues.

And on gay marriage, he has a reasonably consistent position: people should be free to marry whom they choose, and the several States should decide for themselves what they will allow.

But the trouble is this: marriage is not about freedom or liberty, it's about a government sanction of a binding relationship. It's a special contract, with centuries of legal precedent governing it. I say that not to make an appeal to tradition, but rather to say we should tread lightly in these matters, until all of the ramifications are clear.

Extending marriage, or even civil unions, to same-sex couples means giving a societal stamp of approval on their relationship.

And I don't think that's a good idea. I have a variety of reasons for thinking it's not a good idea, about which others may disagree.

So while I agree with Mr. Cheney that people should be allowed to do what they will, they should not demand that I approve their decision.

Is my position consistent? Sure. Do what you will, but don't ask my blessing.

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Rush Limbaugh Is Not My Leader

He is a leader of the libertarian*-conservative movement, but he's not the leader of it. It has no leader, nor does it need just one leader. It needs what it has: millions of leaders.

For the record I listen to Rush nearly every day, and mostly agree with him. Sometimes I disagree, and sometimes when I do so it turns out he was right all along. But he is not always right -- just usually so.

* I don't care if Libertarians or libertarians agree with that assessment. Rush is a free marketer, and despite self-labeling as a conservative and championing socially conservative positions, he is equally outspoken in favor of individual liberty.

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Limited Government and Social Conservatives

Over at Power and Control, M. Simon asks:

How do you enforce traditional values and at the same time promote limited government? Until Republicans resolve that question neither the traditional values people nor the limited government people are going to trust the party.

I reply:

The question presupposes that traditional values (a term I will use without scrutiny) need to be enforced, and that social conservatives by their nature want government to enforce their values.

However, most social conservatives want merely not to have laws which are opposed to those values, and possibly for the government to advocate traditional values, as opposed to advocating non-traditional ones.

That is what Prop 8 was all about, I thought. It's not that we care what other people do, really, it's that we don't want the government actively supporting, with legal protection, nontraditional values. That's very different from saying we don't want anyone doing nontraditional things.

It's true that on some level we don't want anyone doing nontraditional things, but since of course we recognize tolerance and pluralism and limited government as higher Enlightenment principles, it's best to keep government away from that area. [I add here that for "tolerance" to have any meaning as a Virtue, we must be forced to make some sacrifice to obtain a worthy goal. The sacrifice we make is to allow something we dislike in order to obtain permission for our own faulty behavior, for no one is perfect. Those who deny wanting to control the behavior 0f others thereby turn tolerance into a nonce.]

So the answer is that we should all oppose government action which would change social mores, rather than supporting government action enforcing them.

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Google Shrugs

World Net Daily reports on Google's alleged sandboxing of Atlas Shrugs for its groundbreaking coverage of the Obama birth certificate fakery:

On July 4, Geller featured a story about a board-certified forensic expert who declared Obama's online birth certificate a "forgery" and an "obvious fake." She attributes most of her problems with Google to that report.

"I think that it's the birth certificate story," Geller said. "All of the sudden, my numbers were down by 10,000."

She has also featured reports on Obama's support of Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga and cases of alleged campaign finance fraud involving his campaign. Geller believes Google is censoring her stories because it objects to their content.

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs trots out the free speech canard. No one is stopping you from speaking, Ms. Geller. Google is not the government but a private company, though I find it increasing difficult to fault people for not seeing the difference.

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Government is the Devil's Evil Twin

Over at Power and Control, Simon says:

The government IS the Devil. Not metaphorically. Really.

Everything you get from government will have a price much larger than the value of the object gained. Some times the price will not be extracted from you. Sometimes it will be from your children, your grand children, or ten generations hence. But the full price the government wants will be extracted at compound interest.

We are still paying the price for trying to be a free people while holding slaves. My great great grand parents lived on another continent when all that went on. And yet the price is being extracted from me.

I think I blogged a generalization of this a while back, but maybe I just thought of it and never did. Ah, found it, in that link.

Government creeps. Given power in one area, it will keep that power as leverage to extend its reach into another.

You cannot deficit spend without an eventual tax increase -- or the lack of an otherwise obvious decrease.

You cannot say that drunk driving (without actually harming anyone or breaking any traffic laws) is illegal without eventually losing the right to take any other risky action.

You cannot have Roe v Wade and not later get Kelo.

And you cannot grow a bureaucracy big enough to manage the health care system without surrendering your right to criticize the government. You watch.

At least the devil lets you enjoy the crap you sold your soul for. Government doesn't even give you that.

Government is not the Devil -- it's the Devil's evil twin.

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Obama Missing the Point

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is running for President of the United States.

Transcript of Obama’s Remarks at San Francisco Fundraiser Sunday

[...]

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.

No, we don't care what you're going to do for us. We don't want you to do anything for us, because what you want to do for us is going to end up being done to us.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

[The following was cross-posted at Redstate]

Dear Senator Obama:

The government only has a small number of jobs. Bringing employment opportunities to rural Pennsylvania, or Illinois, or California, is not among them.

The government's first job is to defend the people from foreign enemies, such as the human rights violations of Chinese bankers and Middle Eastern terrorists.

Defending the people individually from each other also is the government's job. And too, we let the government take care of parks, roads and bridges and other such common areas. That's about it.

But the poisonous witch's brew of notions that somehow the people of small town flyover country are helpless without you, and that we don't have jobs, and that the Bush and Clinton Administrations let us fall through some imaginary cracks, and that all of that makes us bitter enough to hate anyone not like us -- that is just the wrong way to look at things.

(More...)

It is despicable and un-American, and I use that term advisedly, to encourage people to be bitter at the government for not doing enough to help them. The American way is self-reliance, not the desperate bleating of a people living only for the next chance to suckle at the government's teat.

In your class warfare, you foolishly suggest that our alleged bitterness over a lack of jobs causes us to cling to guns and religion. You even said it makes us dislike people who are not like us. Do you not care whom you insult, nor with what hypocrisy?

Guess what, Senator: we know that the jobs aren't as plentiful nor as lucrative in our little towns and small cities as they are in the metropoli of your dreams for us. We read the papers. But we also know that where we live, we don't have to lock our doors at night. We can leave our cars unlocked at the grocery store, or in our driveways. And we even have driveways of our own, rather than having to cram ourselves into mass transit. Our schools don't have metal detectors, because they don't need them.

You have the cart before the horse. We choose to live out here, because we can. It isn't any supposed bitterness over lack of government jobs which causes us to cling to guns and religion. We live here in part so we can go hunting and fishing now and then.

And we like our little churches. They don't tell us that the government created AIDS, either. It's not their job.

We choose to live out here because we like our neighbors, for even the nosiest don't tell us how to live. It's not their job.

And Senator Obama, it's clear from all that we have seen, that the Presidency is not, and must never be, your job.

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A Human Pendulum

Fool me once, shame on me.
Fool me twice, the full weight of the law and multinational military force on you.

An editorial at NRO details the current, predictable situation caused by the continued power grab made by Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends). Unable to win political support for himself, al-Sadr has attempted to use violence to get his way. But his amateurish and repeated efforts show that his real intent is to win power for himself, not to establish a secure Iraq. He swings back and forth, sometimes suing for peace, but only when his prosecution of war has failed.

The Dhimmocrats and their coconspirators in the liberal main scheme media has tried to spin the latest effort by Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends) as some general setback for the Administration's policy in Iraq, rather than simply a result of the continued power grab by this one guy. Now that he is standing down his forces, otherwise known as giving up, it's time to finish him.

For his latest round of rebellion against the legitimate, duly elected governing authority of his country, I think it would be a beneficial step for all humanity of Moqtada al-Sadr ("Mookie" to his friends) were made into a human pendulum, or otherwise were made to assume room temperature.

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This Must Not Stand

Artists for Liberty?

Scandalous.

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Politics of Greed

Following the intellectual, spiritual, and literal bankruptcy of the Soviet bloc of Marxist states in the 1980's, it seems that mankind would have learned his lesson. The reality of the results of those arrogant experiments in economic and social engineering should have quashed for all eternity the fantasy of a government solution to every problem. But it did not. Especially in this election year, the socialist panderers are stumbling over one another to offer magnanimous bribes to the electorate in order to secure its favor.

The socialist panderers in the Clinton and Obama campaigns tell the people that government can and should supply them with all of their needs, and can pay for it by taxing the wealthy "their fair share".

But what is a person's "fair share"? If two people bring their lunches to school and see a classmate with nothing to eat, fairness (between the two who brought lunches) would be found if each were to give the hungry student the same amount. Fairness in taxes would dictate that we each pay the same amount, but that is not what is suggested.

No, by the definition of "fair" used in the Democratic primary race, fairness means that those who have more should be required to give more, not of their own free will, but by force of ballot. What they really mean is that they don't think it's fair that some people have more than others in the first place.

It is a two-edged sword, this socialist pandering. On the one side it punishes success and discourages those who have worked hard from continuing to do so. On the back cut it slices away any desire for the poor to lift themselves out of their own troubles by their own efforts.

And no one challenges the socialists on their misdeeds.

When the Democrats mention the current tightening of mortgage credit, it isn't to say that people should not take on expenses they can't afford. It's to promise more government help, more interference in the market, even though it was precisely this interference which led to the problem. Home ownership is a political winner, so pandering politicians force banks not to deny too many loans.

Who stands up to the prattling of this Tyrant, turning aside his demands for instant gratification in favor of a more lasting Pursuit of Happiness? No one. Meanwhile, the Democrats play the envy of the Have Nots against the guilt of the Haves, creating a climate in which self reliance borders on hate speech.

For greed is not just the province of those already wealthy wanting more than their "fair" share; it's also the dwelling place of those who have little but want others to supply them with what they will not supply for themselves.

In this Illinipundit thread, the question is asked "Who is advancing Conservatism?" I responded there with:

Who is advancing Conservatism? That's the wrong question. I understand the shorthand of assigning a label to a set of ideas and all, but in the end it is the ideas themselves, and not the movement comprising them, that is important.

And 'Conservatism' is a misnomer, if so widely accepted a word can be a misnomer. Conservatism is the practice of holding on to the good aspects of a policy or situation, even if it means accepting the bad aspects; it stands in contrast to Liberalism, which is rejecting the bad aspects of a policy or situation even if it means letting go of the good ones.

The set of ideas we currently think of as 'Conservative' (and yes, I do it too) are really Libertarianism with a high value placed on the right to Life and abstention from sex and certain drugs. Conservatives are also more likely than Liberals to internalize the law into morality, which is another aspect of liking stability.

The real question is: Who is taking a stand and insisting that the mindset of Western Civilization is what we use to govern and will be the one we teach the next generation?

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Cratocracy

Faith in the power of government. Governing (especially attempting to govern well) for the sake of gaining and preserving power.

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How Far Will We Go?

My recent post (In Case You've Forgotten) demanded defeating and utterly discrediting Islamofascism, ending with

The questions of how far we go to defeat them, and with which of our own ideals we will temporarily part to do so, I leave to another day.

I suppose it is a bit of an open question whether we need to temporarily set aside any of our ideals. Things temporarily set aside have a way of becoming lost, of course.

But in an odd twist on the ad hominem buteo gallus argument, what sacrifice will those of us not on the front lines make to preserve our own liberties? Who will demand, despite all reason and human history, both freedom and peace without the sacrifice of blood in their pursuit?

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote "You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. But don't ever count on having both at once." Conversely, as Franklin is quoted, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". But how do we decide whether a liberty is essential or the safety temporary? In an age in which transnational jihadists and hyperthyroidal governments may use instant global telecommunications and the infrastructure of civilization against one another and us, how can we know whether the freedom we seek from the latter will compromise the peace we desire from the former?

In short, how far will we go to defeat Islamofascism?

Many say that there is no peace without freedom and justice, that an occupied or enslaved people is not at peace. But Heinlein and I use "peace" in its classical meaning, as the absence of war. A conquered people is at peace, having surrendered their essential liberties to an invader. And it is this conquered peace which the Islamofascists desire -- over us.

In I Know My Rights, we saw that there are many kinds of rights, but those rights are at once layers of protection for and mere shadows of more fundamental ideals. For instance, the right to travel, assemble, and speak are both practical requirements needed to ensure our ability to control our own governance and a necessary consequence of the ideal of personal sovereignty: we own ourselves. No person should own another, and if a group can control where a person comes and goes or says when he gets there, the group would have effective ownership of the individual.

I do not mean to imply that the rights of travel, assembly or speech are limited solely to issues of sovereignty, nor that sovereignty can be maintained by their exercise alone. Ideals are in the end dependent on the maintenance and defense of all rights. American ideals include

• Personal Sovereignty - we own ourselves, and not each other
  
• The Golden Rule - Treat others as you would have them treat you
• Nondescrimination - neither the government, nor increasingly an individual, should discriminate between individuals based on their group membership
• Majority rule - this one smacks the other ideals around
• The Rule of Law
• Honor in War
  
• There are many others, but I have to move on.
  

But rights are not the ideals they shadow, and it may be possible to emphasize some of the layers of protection over others for a time. Rather than be foolishly consistent and insist on winning all battles, a wise general knows that sometimes losing a battle can win a war.

We find the use of nuclear weapons repugnant, because it violates our ideal of Honor in War -- civilians should be excluded from military threat. Yet we know that the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. It was an example of a terrible cost to be paid, stepping back from pursuit of some of our ideals in order to defeat a threat to all of them.

Similarly, if a child has been abducted or a bomb threat issued, we either grudgingly or willingly consent to a search of our vehicle, home, or person. Some might stand on principle and refuse to be searched without reading a bench warrant, and to them my only comment would be "consistent fool". Yet at some point the Amber Alerts and Terror Threat Levels may elicit the measured response to the baying of an imaginary wolf.

Ideals are as much or more a part of culture as art, language, or religion. Americans, for instance, have an innate cultural insistence on freedom generally and to our cherished liberties specifically. In fact, I would go so far as to define culture as a shared set of ideals. I don't think it's trading too much in ambiguity to say then that if a culture is a group with shared ideals, preserving the culture will necessitate preserving the ideals.

While charges of theocracy and dictatorship abound, the real and perhaps more ominous trend in the last several decades is toward populism and rule by opinion poll - the tyranny of the majority. It is therefore counterintuitive that our elected officials would take a break from their prostrated supplication to refuse pursuit of cultural ideals held by even the slimmest majority. And if an ideal is not held by the majority, is it our ideal?

So there is a line to draw somewhere between the situation on one hand in which we are sure the threat is real enough and the rights we are surrendering will come back to us, and on the other that the threat is too ephemeral to fear and the rights to fragile to lose. Heinlein's peace and Franklin's security require the citizen to be vigilant against his own government, but just as mindful of the threat posed by outsiders. There is in the end no magic formula for deciding when liberty should be ceded, except that we do it only when we must, and as little as we can. Let the soldier not doubt that he is defending a free country.

But that free country has enemies, and those enemies need to be treated as such. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that those who do not share our ideals mean us no harm. They do mean us harm, and when we find measures to defeat them which impinge only theoretically on our liberty, we should ignore the theory and destroy the enemy.

When conditions return to their natural order, we may then stand on our shared ideals and demand either our liberty, or the head of him who dares violate it.

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The Ungreen Party

If I had my own party, it would not be like the two major American political parties. It would also be unlike the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, or any other. Well, maybe a little like them.

To have one's own party is an exercise in intentional projection. Let us pretend, therefore, that there are more than, say, two people who would join a party that reflected my point of view. It hardly seems likely, but this is my blog.

I am green. I really don't consider myself an environmentalist, but I love the woods, hate litter, and I have a compost pile. However to me the Earth is not a Mother but a tool, at once a very large resource and a smallish planet circling a smallish star at the edge of a smallish galaxy, all of which are safely nestled in a caring hand. The Owner of that hand I believe holds us responsible for our use of the resource, but is also more concerned with other things.

I think most people are squarely in that same dichotomy of cognitive dissonance: there is a Creator to whom we are accountable, but our place in the universe is pretty insignificant. In the end, it seems right to leave the world and universe in at least as good a shape as we found it. It also seems right not to fret too much that we cannot.

My party would recognize the right of people to hold property, whether that be a paperclip or a continent, and to direct the use of that property as they see fit.

Humans and their ideals matter more to me than money or pollution. My party would be in favor of war to defend the freedom of other nations to direct their own affairs, but would otherwise leave them alone to do so. My party would not favor war to defend the environment, nor to correct or uphold unequal distribution of wealth.

My party would work to end the War on Drugs, as the War has proved to be more harmful than the Drugs.

My party would defend the right to keep and bear arms, not in terms of hunting, target practice, or even self defense, but simply as a right.

My party would defend the right to life, from the moment of conception to the last sweet breath.

My party would reject multiculturalism, farm subsidies, protectionism, hate crime laws, Jihad, the minimum wage, affirmative action, and smoking bans.

My party would build a wall and deport all illegal immigrants. We would then allow anyone who wanted in to come in, as long as they will speak English, renounce their foreign citizenship and loyalties, and meet certain reasonable background checks.

My party would know that nations are not people, and cannot be held to the same standards of conduct. A nation cannot be expected to respond as a person would. Yet each nation has certain rights among the others.

But the biggest reason my party would be so small is that we would assert that the only legitimate functions of government are to defend the rights of its citizens from internal or external violators, and to settle such disputes that may arise. In the end, my party would have as its highest goal the reduction of the overall size, scope, power, and importance of government at all levels, until such a time as it was able to fulfill its legitimate functions rather than wasting our resources trying to do things it should not be doing in the first place.

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Give a Man a Fish

Socialism comes in two flavors, the kind practiced in democracies in which the people have discovered how to vote themselves free bread, and the kind practiced in dictatorships in which the dictator or oligarchs have discovered how to starve the people on it.

There is an old liberal saying:

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day;
Teach him to fish, and he will never be hungry.

The arrogance implied in that statement is astounding. Which came first, the starving poor or the liberal? Come to think of it, it's a harder question than I thought.

Socialism gives the people bread, fish, or whatever the government decides they "need". Since the people do not have the ability under socialism to feed themselves, tomorrow the government must continue to give the people bread, while enduring their whining compaints. The bread is baked from flour ground by those who will never bake or till. The grain is grown by those who will never grind or bake. And eventually everyone pays for it in blood, since the system falls apart without someone holding a gun.

Capitalism teaches the people to fish, or bake their own bread, or figure out their own health care. It requires no one to force the people to till, or grind, or bake, because the people will do these things with the hope of wealth but with the knowledge that they will be rewarded for the cleverness and diligence with which they do so.

Socialism is the enemy of capitalism not just because the two economic systems are incompatible in their methods and goals, but because socialism demands more and more control over its subjects, while capitalism does not want to control. Socialism requires stifling dissent, for if people remember that they don't need the government, they will rebel.

Socialism, and its sister communism, require thinking of the world as a zero-sum proposition, in which a person can become wealthy only by impoverishing someone else, and the world is composed of competing groups out to enslave one another. In fact, wealth is most often created by the mutual benefit of two or more parties, and the less they try to enslave one another, the more mutual benefit they can accrue. When one of those parties is a health care provider, one of them gains health, which is more valuable to him than the mere money gained by the other.

Capitalism, by contrast with socialism, works best when people are free to decide all aspects of their own affairs, whether they till, grind, bake, join the Marines, or become a doctor. When decisions are made for people, their initiative dries up, and the initiative of the people is the life blood of capitalism. Capitalism is freedom.

Socialism has no life, only the blood of its dissenters.

Will people try to steal from one another without some kind of government to resolve disputes between them? Universally. But socialism requires them to steal from one another.

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Government

Governments tax, exercise eminent domain, put down riots, enforce laws, and even wage wars in order to please the many at the expense of the few, or to do things which most of the people find abhorrent, yet are necessary for their freedom, prosperity, or even survival.

If governments refused this role, they would have no reason to exist.

And if governments did not do these things, someone else would -- someone who we would quickly come to call the government.

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Toward Better Work

I've caught myself straying from what I arrogantly see as my mission here, which is to advance the cause of liberty conservatism through thoughtful, careful use of the twin pillars of persuasive rhetoric and annoying snark.

To both my readers (and by the way, happy Mother's Day, Mom!), my humble apologies, and you can look for more persuasive rhetoric and even more annoying snark in the future.

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In Which a Banana is Exposed

What an amazing feat of mental acrobatics.

Ali Eteraz knows that something is wrong in politics, and his answer is to throw out all religion under the guise of throwing out jihad:

When I say “religious supremacism” I mean the ideology of theocracy, which in the Muslim milieu agitates for the domination of political Islam, ...

(ok so far)

... and in the Western milieu agitates for infiltration of the government by religious (usually Evangelical) zelaots who then legislate on the bases of their religious belief.

Spellcheck aside, the only place that superficially fits his opiated description is the United States, albeit with a President who has never once, in his entire career as an executive, legislated.

But to be as charitable as possible, I will assume that what he meant to say was that he can't oppose religious extremism that wishes to destroy his civilization without opposing all religious involvement in government. This, despite the historical and prima facie evidence that religion is a civilizing influence, serving to keep men from tearing at each other's throats. Religious fervor has helped, along with the respect for science, logic and the rule of law, to create and sustain the very civilization he is so quick to abandon.

It is exceedingly rare for a Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, or even a Gaian to use force to advance his religion.

By applying the label "theocracy", he lumps jihad and social conservatism together. It's the same old brown moral equivalency banana, wrapped in shiny yellow paper.

He goes further and exploits without development a false choice, as Simon outlines in his post, that he must either oppose or support religious and ideological exclusion in unison. As far as I know, neither Republicans nor Democrats are planning to decapitate their opponents following a feisty episode of Meet the Press, or no matter what happens in a given election. The French may see things differently, but in the country with Evangelicals pushing their narrow religious agenda, political violence seems not to be part of the strategy.

I find it entertaining that the explanation he gives for opposing the institution of partisanship includes a justification by status quo of institutions generally.

That might confuse, except when seen in light of his unstated premise: all cultures and philosophies are equally valid. If one distrusts the adequacy of his own philosophy so much as to regard it the equal of those who openly advocate genocide for those who fail to fully agree, I see no reason to grant him even the smallest concession of insight. Perhaps I am wrong in this, for he also appears to believe quite strongly in the moral superiority of his position.

To sum up: Ali, reject the choices you have for political parties, if you wish. While almost any explanation would suffice for such a step, the one you gave did not.

w/t: Simon at Classical Values

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The Happy Chains of Individualism

After the 2006 elections, I posted a list of what I want from my government and its leaders, summarizing with:

I want leaders who encourage individualism in self reliance, self control, self defense, and self expression.

America is a nation founded on the principles of limited government. It was a new and radical plan, successful thus far only because it has relied on one fundamental truth: a free people who know that they are responsible for their own well-being and who have an ownership stake in their country will work harder and fight harder than a people who are mere subjects to the will of the State or a King. They will be free to exercise their creativity, and creativity harnessed to unity is unstoppable.

An implicit foundation for the above is individualism, and its four bases as stated above - self reliance, self control, self defense, and self expression - must be the province of each citizen if the nation is to endure. Yet only the last, self expression, seems to have popular currency. Nationhood itself is under attack, as those loyal to transnational groups see internationalism as the way out of strife among nations.

There are some today who, like Marx a century and a half ago, see the world in terms of a struggle among groups. Individuals, to the collectivists, are only valued as parts of the groups to which they belong. Their reliance is on the group, their control is an exercise in group leadership, their defense a shared struggle against the other groups, and their self expression is valued only to the extent that it promotes group values. Collectivists give lip service to the value of each individual, soon belied by the systematic eradication of any action or thought which strays from those approved by the group.

The self reliant culture of the young expanding America has become a culture of adolescent porcine uncertainty over whether to suckle from the teat or to gorge at the trough of government.

In some not-too-distant future, if we allow the flame of individualism to be extinguished by the pall of collectivism, we will know why: people became less willing to rely on themselves alone to achieve their dreams.

For it is insufficient to demand the right to free expression while at once demanding that someone else supply for us our needs and protect us from all misfortune. The Nanny is the Tyrant's wicked stepmother: we cede to the government the power to protect us from bad luck, and then from poor decisions, and then from all risk, until finally we must ask government for permission to do things which it ought not dare take control.

Virtue as an ideal, and the many virtues that were formerly upheld as prerequisites for respectability, has been replaced by the ideal of Fame. We see the famous and infamous as icons of success, the example we would be wise to follow. Glamor, not wisdom, is seen as the benchmark of a life well lived.

Ignoring virtue leads to a lack of self control. Unable then to control ourselves, we either find it frightening to undertake our own defense or we wickedly enjoy the condition that others cannot defend themselves. In either case, the government steps in to separate the wolves from the sheep, and finds itself with ever more wolves, and ever more sheep.

At the bottom of every social ill is a failure of individuals to rely on their own ability, to control themselves, to defend themselves and those for whom they care, and to insist that their government step aside. Undo the individualist foundation and the nation will fall, because a collectivist people, loyal to their groups, will have neither a stake in the nation nor the will to defend it.

If an ideology comes along that violates any of the four principles, it shows itself to be incompatible with all of them, and Americans should stand against it.

But if individuals are free to care for themselves, to succeed or fail, to defend themselves and to speak the words they choose, they will take on the bonds of loyalty, which are the strongest bonds of all.

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One Fiftieth Free

According the the Billings Gazette, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) has agreed with the State Legislature: Montana will not be part of a national ID card.

"We also don't think that bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., ought to tell us that if we're going to get on a plane we have to carry their card, so when it's scanned through they know where you went, when you got there and when you came home," said Schweitzer, a Democrat.

"This is still a free country and there are no freer people than the people that we have in Montana."

My regular readers (both) know that I'm either a law-and-order conservative or a stubborn libertarian, depending on the humidity. So things like the Real ID act give me fits.

However, I'm always a Federalist, and I love to see States thumbing their noses (as it were) at the District of Columbia.

So when Maine, Idaho, and Arkansas passed resolutions against Real ID or the National ID card, I was only briefly uncertain about it.

The Real ID Act specifies that to get a nationally recognized ID card, a person would have to prove they were in the country legally and supply a variety of detailed information about themselves. While that seems to be a good idea from an anti-terrorism and immigration standpoint, it falls down pretty quickly when you consider that proving legal status would entail supplying documentation that would be less trusted than the National ID card would be. So by forging primary documents (birth certificate, etc.), an evader would receive an authentic, trusted card. Or two, or three.

In the computer security field, we call that "attenuation of privilege", and it's a sign of poor design to make it part of the system.

The benefits of Real ID are supposedly in efficiency, but the Act requires tremendous record-keeping, and would be a bureaucratic nightmare. Combine your State Department of Motor Vehicles with the Internal Revenue Service, and you get an inkling of how ugly and invasive the monster would become.

And it would never go away.

So thank you, Montana, for taking the lead. I hope other States choose freedom.

(w/t: Slashdot)

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Libertarian SoCons

Over at Classical Values, Eric had a fine post (as if he ever has anything else) before the November elections about Bill Clinton's characterization of the Republican Party as enthralled by the demonized Social Conservatives.

I think there are a lot of libertarian-leaning social conservatives, as odd as it sounds. We understand the clean-room simplicity of libertarian principles, but also that the tidiness falls down in the face of modern reality. There are also a number of issues, namely abortion and drugs, on which social conservatives largely disagree with libertarians.

Americans, by and large, like to think of themselves a favoring small government, personal liberty, and the rest. But the devil in the details here is defining "small" and "liberty". Given the question, e.g., "Should people be able to control what goes into their own bodies?", most people will say yes. But ask them about PCP or Vallium, and they'll start in about endangering others or the protecting the li'l chil'rens. Oh, and don't touch my farm subsidy.

The issue of abortion falls squarely on the question of when life begins, or rather, when the 'fetus', a collection of cells inside a woman, becomes a 'baby', a human being entitled to legal protection. I believe that moment is the instant of conception, but I understand some people disagree. When pro-choice libertarians can see the unborn child as a person whose rights need to be defended, they become pro-life libertarians.

The War on Drugs baffles me. Why the government should care who ingests or injects what, I don't understand. I think I'll cover what people do when they're on drugs, addiction, and other issuesf an upcoming post (unless the black helicopters prevent it).

A big problem for the Libertarians is Islamic terrorism. The Libertarian philosophy, being a creature of Western lineage, doesn't have room for jihad. Libertarianism can't abide by efforts to root out terrorism with privacy-crowding methods, nor with taking the fight to the terrorist's home turf. Libertarians are left with the plan of sitting around waiting for some jihadist loser to blow himself up.

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