Sunday, May 31, 2009

I agree the way to end abortion is "through prayers, conversion of hearts, and changing people's worldview." I agree the killer of this immoral abortionist employed immoral violence. So why should we support entrusting the cops with the employment of immoral violence? In other words, why should we support political means to put an end to this social evil? Are political means necessarily less evil than freelance means?

Say abortion is illegal in Kansas. Say Tiller believes he has a moral obligation to provide his "service" to women desperate to end their pregnancies. Say cops surround Tiller's abortion mill demanding he cease and desist from performing his ghastly procedures. Say he refuses to cease and desist. He keeps killing babies. In fact, he's so dedicated to his twisted cause he kills babies without collecting a fee, because he so empathizes with the plight of women so desperate to be relieved of their pregnancies.

Say the cops storm the abortion mill and kill Tiller. Does the morality of killing an abortionist change because the people doing the killing are licensed by the State to do the killing? Will the prolife movement be any less implicated in the killing of the abortionist? Is society any more ordered and civilized when State agents carry out actions that are barred the rest of us?

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Saturday, May 16, 2009

I believe all of the American colonies at the time of the Revolution allowed full religious freedom--even those colonies, like Virginia, which had an established state church. By the same token, the citizens of the United Kingdom today enjoy full religious freedom, notwithstanding the U.K.'s establishment of the Church of England as official state church.

Of course, you can take the position that establishment of any church infringes on full religious freedom, as it forces those who don't belong to the church to support it financially, via taxation. I whole-heartedly agree with that position. But, as an anarchist, I oppose all taxation as legalized extortion. Moreover, whether you're an anarchist or not, if you're going to oppose Virginia's or Britain's state churches on grounds of religious freedom, to be consistent you're going to have to oppose state schools, which force us to support them financially even as they inculcate the state's moral and religious values to our children.

I do not accept the namby-pamby secular humanism of the Royal Oak Public Schools. I pay hard-earned dollars to send my daughter to the local Whore of Babylon affiliate, whose benighted and obscurantist belief system is more in line with my own. Yet I'm compelled to support the namby-pamby secular humanism of the Royal Oak Public Schools. The state school system infringes on my personal and religious freedom.

As for Germany, I see the same namby-pamby secular humanism stifling religious freedom there. If I were a German libertarian, I would take small comfort in the disestablishment of German churches. Merely espousing unorthodox beliefs about World War II, the purity of the Allied cause or the justice of the Allies' firebombing of densely populated German civilian areas, can land you in the hoosegow in Germany. I'd stay in Pennsylvania even if the legislature were to establish Quakerism as state church--so long as I were free to worship in the church, synagogue, mosque or Wicca orchard grove of my choice.

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Friday, May 15, 2009

Quote from: Belloc
Usury-why that is a great pillar of those "authoratative" Spanish monks crafting free-market capitalist idol.silly Popes Leo XIII, Pius IX, JP2,etc....

I certainly yield to the "silly popes" when it comes to moral theology. But I believe they're conflating moral theology and economic science when they condemn bankers charging "excess" interest (i.e., committing usury) and employers paying "insufficient" wages (i.e., failing to pay the minimum wage). The popes' hearts are in the right place, but their economic knowledge is lacking. They certainly aren't doing the poor any favors.

Setting an arbitrary ceiling on any good or service--such as oil or money-lending--merely creates a shortage of that good or service. Remember when the government tried to protect the poor from greedy oil companies by controlling gasoline prices in the 1970s? All those price controls did was create long lines at the gas pump. And that's all the government does when it passes laws against usury: lenders stop lending to people who would otherwise freely borrow at the higher interest rate. By the same token, setting an arbitrary floor on any good or service merely creates an oversupply of that good or service. That's why minimum wage laws create an oversupply of labor, i.e., unemployment, among the young and unskilled.

This is in fact a case of the Spanish monks' "authoritativeness" in economic science (but not moral theology) surpassing that of the popes. There's no crime in that--popes never claimed to be infallible in matters of economic science, weather forecasting, stock-picking, sports, or astronomy. I whole-heartedly agree with the rest of Vox's post, though.

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Sunday, May 10, 2009

Dear Mr. Redifer:

I almost canceled in early 2008. In the course of the Republican presidential campaign, U.S. Representative Ron Paul, R-Texas, created quite a buzz among younger and Internet-savvy voters. He raised questions studiously ignored by political elites and mainstream media--about the U.S. Government's role in the world, the astronomical costs of the U.S. military empire (i.e., 575,000 troops in 130 foreign countries, all of whom hate us for "our" freedom to bomb and blockade them), and the malinvestments generated by the Federal Reserve Bank's fiat currency and counterfeiting schemes.

Rep. Paul finally had a forum for a message he--and other libertarians and Constitutionalists--had espoused for years. He took on Rudy Giuliani before a hostile audience, pointing to 9/11 as blowback and an inevitable consequence of our interventionist foreign policy. He generated millions of dollars in small-donor campaign contributions. He won Internet poll after Internet poll. He even won Fox News polls--to the obvious dismay of leading neocon mouthpieces like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

So how did my beloved Morning Friendly receive this cleansing breath of fresh political air? Your editor Ron Dzwonkowski's screaming winter 2008 headline said it all: NO CHANCE TO WIN.

I concluded long ago that mainstream media organs like the Detroit Free Press exist not to promote political analysis and debate, but to lend legitimacy to the narrow parameters of "responsible" Establishment discourse--to the detriment of the average American. Diversity should mean more than hiring black and female columnists to repeat the same trite and tired Democratic-Republican, liberal-neoconservative dogmas. I enjoy your comics page and your sports, business and local coverage. You did a bang-up job exposing corruption in the Detroit Mayor's Office and City Council. But I am no longer inclined to spend my hard-earned and now diminishing dollars on welfare-warfare state propaganda.

The Detroit Free Press is part of a dying industry. You can't blame all of the print media's demise on economic conditions. Intelligent and independent-thinking people now recognize the Internet as their only source for real news and views. I wish you well.

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