By Penn Jillette (From Glenn Beck's Fusion Magazine also)
I don’t speak for all Libertarians any more than Sean Penn speaks for all Democrats. I’m not even sure my LP membership card is up to date. I’ve voted Libertarian as long as I can remember but I don’t really remember much before the Clintons and the Bushes. Those clans made a lot of us bugnutty. When I go on Glenn’s show he calls me a Libertarian, I think that’s my only real credential.
There are historical reasons and pragmatic reasons to be a Libertarian, but there are historic and pragmatic reasons to be a Democrat, a Republican or a Socialist. I don’t know if everyone would be better off under a Libertarian government. I don’t know what would be best for anyone. I don’t even know what’s best for me. What makes me Libertarian is I don’t think anyone else really knows what’s best for anyone. My argument for Libertarianism is simple - personal morality.
I start with the Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” So, essentially our government does what they do with my consent.
I know barely enough about Max Weber to type his name into Google, but it seems he’s credited with asserting the idea that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. I put those two ideas together (my consent and use of physical force) and figure we all give our government the right to use force. So, the way I figure, it’s not okay for our government to use force in any situation where I personally wouldn’t use force.
For example, if I’m not willing to kill a cute cow, I shouldn’t eat steak. I don’t have to kill Bessy right now with my bare hands, but I have to be willing to snuff her if I want to chow down on a T-bone. If it’s not okay for me, it’s not okay for a slaughterhouse. Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral. If it’s not okay for me to break David Blaine’s hands so my magic show has less competition, it’s not okay for me to ask someone else to beat him up. Someone else doing your dirty work is still your dirty work.
If I had a gun, and I knew a murder was happening, (we’re speaking hypothetically here, I’m not asking you to believe that I could accurately tell a murder from aggressive CPR), I would use that gun to stop that murder. I might be too much of a coward to use a gun myself to stop a murder or rape or robbery, but I think the use of a gun is justified. I’m even okay with using force to enforce voluntary contracts. If I were a hero, I would use a gun to protect the people who choose to live under this free system and to stop another country from attacking America. But I wouldn’t use a gun to force someone to love something like say…a library.
Look, I love libraries. I spent a lot of time in the Greenfield Public Library when I was a child. I would give money to build a library. I would ask you to give money to build a library. But, if for some reason you were crazy enough to think you had a better idea for your money than building my library, I wouldn’t pull a gun on you. I wouldn’t use a gun to build an art museum, look at the wonders of the universe through a big telescope, or even find a cure for cancer.
The fact that the majority wants something good does not give them the right to use force on the minority that don’t want to pay for it. If you have to use a gun, it’s not really a very good idea. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It’s just ganging up on the weird kid, and I’m always the weird kid.
People try to argue that government isn’t really force. You believe that? Try not paying your taxes. (This is only a thought experiment though -- suggesting someone not pay their taxes is probably a federal offense, and while I may be a nut, I’m not crazy.) When they come to get you for not paying your taxes, try not going to court. Guns will be drawn. Government is force.
It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people yourself is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness. People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered. If we’re compassionate, we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.
I’m a Libertarian nut because I don’t want my government to do anything in my name that I wouldn’t do myself.
Showing posts with label disease. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disease. Show all posts
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
No More Green Guilt - By Keith Lockitch
I pulled this article from Glenn Beck's free daily email / newsletter. The article appeared in his bi-monthly Fusion magazine. I think it pretty well sums up the issue with listening to the wacko enviro-terrorists and
**********************************************
Every investment prospectus warns that "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But suppose that an investment professional's record contains nothing but losses, of failed prediction after failed prediction. Who would still entrust that investor with his money?
Yet, in public policy there is one group with a dismal track record that Americans never seem to tire of supporting. We invest heavily in its spurious predictions, suffer devastating losses, and react by investing even more, never seeming to learn from the experience. The group I’m talking about is the environmentalist movement.
Consider their track record—like the dire warnings of catastrophic over-population. Our unchecked consumption, we were told, was depleting the earth's resources and would wipe humanity out in a massive population crash. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, forecasted hundreds of millions of deaths per year throughout the 1970s, to be averted, he insisted, only by mass population control "by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."
But instead of global-scale famine and death, the 1970s witnessed an agricultural revolution. Despite a near-doubling of world population, food production continues to grow as technological innovation creates more and more food on each acre of farmland. The U.S., which has seen its population grow from 200 to 300 million, is more concerned about rampant obesity than a shortage of food.
The Alar scare in 1989 is another great example. The NRDC, an environmentalist lobby group, engineered media frenzy over the baseless assertion that Alar, an apple ripening agent, posed a cancer threat. The ensuing panic cost the apple industry over $200 million dollars, and Alar was pulled from the market even though it was a perfectly safe and value-adding product.
Or consider the campaign against the insecticide DDT, beginning with Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring. The world had been on the brink of eradicating malaria using DDT—but for Carson and her followers, controlling disease-carrying mosquitoes was an arrogant act of "tampering" with nature. Carson issued dire warnings that nature was "capable of striking back in unexpected ways" unless people showed more "humility before [its] vast forces." She asserted, baselessly, that among other things DDT would cause a cancer epidemic. Her book led to such a public outcry that, despite its life-saving benefits and mountains of scientific evidence supporting its continued use, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Thanks to environmentalist opposition, DDT was almost completely phased out worldwide. And while there is still zero evidence of a DDT cancer risk, the resurgence of malaria needlessly kills over a million people a year.
Time and time again, the supposedly scientific claims of environmentalists have proven to be pseudo-scientific nonsense, and the Ehrlichs and Carsons of the world have proven to be the Bernard Madoffs of science. Yet Americans have ignored the evidence and have instead invested in their claims—accepting the blame for unproven disasters and backing coercive, harmful "solutions."
Today, of course, the Green doomsday prediction is for catastrophic global warming to destroy the planet—something that environmentalists have pushed since at least the early 1970s, when they were also worried about a possible global cooling shifting the planet into a new ice age.
But in this instance, just as with Alar, DDT, and the population explosion, the science is weak and the "solutions" drastic. We are told that global warming is occurring at an accelerating rate, yet global temperatures have been flat for the last decade. We are told that global warming is causing more frequent and intense hurricanes, yet the data doesn’t support such a claim. We are warned of a potentially catastrophic sea level rise of 20 feet over the next century, but that requires significant melting of the land-based ice in Antarctica and Greenland. Greenland has retained its ice sheet for over 100,000 years despite wide-ranging temperatures and Antarctica has been cooling moderately for the last half-century.
Through these distortions of science we are again being harangued to support coercive policies. We are told that our energy consumption is destroying the planet and that we must drastically reduce our carbon emissions immediately. Never mind that energy use is an indispensable component of everything we do, that 85 percent of the world's energy is carbon-based, or that there are no realistic, abundant alternatives available any time soon, and that billions of people are suffering today from lack of energy.
Despite all of that, Americans seem to once again be moving closer to buying the Green investment pitch and backing destructive Green policies. Why don't we learn from past experience? Do you think a former Madoff investor would hand over money to him again?
It's not that we're too stupid to learn, it's that we are holding onto a premise that distorts our understanding of reality. Americans are the most successful individuals in history - even in spite of this economic downturn - in terms of material wealth and the quality of life and happiness it brings. We are heirs to the scientific and industrial revolutions, which have increased life expectancy from 30 years to 80 and improved human life in countless, extraordinary ways. Through our ingenuity and productive effort, we have achieved an unprecedented prosperity by reshaping nature to serve our needs. Yet we have always regarded this productivity and prosperity with a certain degree of moral suspicion. The Judeo-Christian ethic of guilt and self-sacrifice leads us to doubt the propriety of our success and makes us susceptible to claims that we will ultimately face punishment for our selfishness--that our prosperity is sinful and can lead only to an apocalyptic judgment day.
Environmentalism preys on our moral unease and fishes around for doomsday scenarios. If our ever-increasing population or life-enhancing chemicals have not brought about the apocalypse, then it must be our use of fossil fuels that will. Despite the colossal failures of past Green predictions, we buy into the latest doomsday scare because, on some level, we have accepted an undeserved guilt. We lack the moral self-assertiveness to regard our own success as virtuous; we think we deserve punishment.
It is time to stop apologizing for prosperity. We must reject the unwarranted fears spread by Green ideology by rejecting unearned guilt. Instead of meekly accepting condemnation for our capacity to live, we should proudly embrace our unparalleled ability to alter nature for our own benefit as the highest of virtues.
Let’s stop wallowing in Green guilt. It’s time to recapture our Founding Fathers' admiration for the pursuit of each individual's own happiness.
**************
Keith Lockitch, PhD in physics, is a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on science and environmentalism.
The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is located in Washington, DC. It is a Division of the Ayn Rand Institute, whose mission is to advance Ayn Rand's ideas. To learn more go to http://www.aynrand.org/
**********************************************
Every investment prospectus warns that "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But suppose that an investment professional's record contains nothing but losses, of failed prediction after failed prediction. Who would still entrust that investor with his money?
Yet, in public policy there is one group with a dismal track record that Americans never seem to tire of supporting. We invest heavily in its spurious predictions, suffer devastating losses, and react by investing even more, never seeming to learn from the experience. The group I’m talking about is the environmentalist movement.
Consider their track record—like the dire warnings of catastrophic over-population. Our unchecked consumption, we were told, was depleting the earth's resources and would wipe humanity out in a massive population crash. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, forecasted hundreds of millions of deaths per year throughout the 1970s, to be averted, he insisted, only by mass population control "by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."
But instead of global-scale famine and death, the 1970s witnessed an agricultural revolution. Despite a near-doubling of world population, food production continues to grow as technological innovation creates more and more food on each acre of farmland. The U.S., which has seen its population grow from 200 to 300 million, is more concerned about rampant obesity than a shortage of food.
The Alar scare in 1989 is another great example. The NRDC, an environmentalist lobby group, engineered media frenzy over the baseless assertion that Alar, an apple ripening agent, posed a cancer threat. The ensuing panic cost the apple industry over $200 million dollars, and Alar was pulled from the market even though it was a perfectly safe and value-adding product.
Or consider the campaign against the insecticide DDT, beginning with Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring. The world had been on the brink of eradicating malaria using DDT—but for Carson and her followers, controlling disease-carrying mosquitoes was an arrogant act of "tampering" with nature. Carson issued dire warnings that nature was "capable of striking back in unexpected ways" unless people showed more "humility before [its] vast forces." She asserted, baselessly, that among other things DDT would cause a cancer epidemic. Her book led to such a public outcry that, despite its life-saving benefits and mountains of scientific evidence supporting its continued use, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Thanks to environmentalist opposition, DDT was almost completely phased out worldwide. And while there is still zero evidence of a DDT cancer risk, the resurgence of malaria needlessly kills over a million people a year.
Time and time again, the supposedly scientific claims of environmentalists have proven to be pseudo-scientific nonsense, and the Ehrlichs and Carsons of the world have proven to be the Bernard Madoffs of science. Yet Americans have ignored the evidence and have instead invested in their claims—accepting the blame for unproven disasters and backing coercive, harmful "solutions."
Today, of course, the Green doomsday prediction is for catastrophic global warming to destroy the planet—something that environmentalists have pushed since at least the early 1970s, when they were also worried about a possible global cooling shifting the planet into a new ice age.
But in this instance, just as with Alar, DDT, and the population explosion, the science is weak and the "solutions" drastic. We are told that global warming is occurring at an accelerating rate, yet global temperatures have been flat for the last decade. We are told that global warming is causing more frequent and intense hurricanes, yet the data doesn’t support such a claim. We are warned of a potentially catastrophic sea level rise of 20 feet over the next century, but that requires significant melting of the land-based ice in Antarctica and Greenland. Greenland has retained its ice sheet for over 100,000 years despite wide-ranging temperatures and Antarctica has been cooling moderately for the last half-century.
Through these distortions of science we are again being harangued to support coercive policies. We are told that our energy consumption is destroying the planet and that we must drastically reduce our carbon emissions immediately. Never mind that energy use is an indispensable component of everything we do, that 85 percent of the world's energy is carbon-based, or that there are no realistic, abundant alternatives available any time soon, and that billions of people are suffering today from lack of energy.
Despite all of that, Americans seem to once again be moving closer to buying the Green investment pitch and backing destructive Green policies. Why don't we learn from past experience? Do you think a former Madoff investor would hand over money to him again?
It's not that we're too stupid to learn, it's that we are holding onto a premise that distorts our understanding of reality. Americans are the most successful individuals in history - even in spite of this economic downturn - in terms of material wealth and the quality of life and happiness it brings. We are heirs to the scientific and industrial revolutions, which have increased life expectancy from 30 years to 80 and improved human life in countless, extraordinary ways. Through our ingenuity and productive effort, we have achieved an unprecedented prosperity by reshaping nature to serve our needs. Yet we have always regarded this productivity and prosperity with a certain degree of moral suspicion. The Judeo-Christian ethic of guilt and self-sacrifice leads us to doubt the propriety of our success and makes us susceptible to claims that we will ultimately face punishment for our selfishness--that our prosperity is sinful and can lead only to an apocalyptic judgment day.
Environmentalism preys on our moral unease and fishes around for doomsday scenarios. If our ever-increasing population or life-enhancing chemicals have not brought about the apocalypse, then it must be our use of fossil fuels that will. Despite the colossal failures of past Green predictions, we buy into the latest doomsday scare because, on some level, we have accepted an undeserved guilt. We lack the moral self-assertiveness to regard our own success as virtuous; we think we deserve punishment.
It is time to stop apologizing for prosperity. We must reject the unwarranted fears spread by Green ideology by rejecting unearned guilt. Instead of meekly accepting condemnation for our capacity to live, we should proudly embrace our unparalleled ability to alter nature for our own benefit as the highest of virtues.
Let’s stop wallowing in Green guilt. It’s time to recapture our Founding Fathers' admiration for the pursuit of each individual's own happiness.
**************
Keith Lockitch, PhD in physics, is a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on science and environmentalism.
The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is located in Washington, DC. It is a Division of the Ayn Rand Institute, whose mission is to advance Ayn Rand's ideas. To learn more go to http://www.aynrand.org/
Monday, May 4, 2009
Finally Recovering from the Dreaded Swine Flu......
HYSTERIA. What a bunch of BS perpetrated and hyped by the pathetic and shameless major media outlets. The number of confirmed cases and deaths of Swine Flu keeps jumping around every day or two. How many people have died in Mexico - 150 or 60? In the U.S. ..... 100? No. 1. This poor kid was a Mexican national who was brought across the border, likely for better medical care.
From the CDC's own website, we lose 63,001 people each year to influenza & pneumonia in the U.S. Hell 34,136 Americans die every year from Septicemia. Do you know what this is? Even the detestable CNN reported that "Since January, more than 13,000 have died of complications from seasonal flu."
Now, I was out of pocket all last week on vacation back in my home state of Texas (gasp!) - right next to Mexico! The morning after I arrived, I turned on the TV immediately to the Swine Flu story on FoxNews. Not exactly the best news to start the day, but hey, what are you gonna do? Schools and businesses were shutting down and people were changing their daily habits and routines out of fear and a fraction of the data. I went to malls, restaurants, a business conference and other public places. I shook hands, gave hugs, stood in elevators without reservation. Gaffe Machine Biden then showed his face on a national TV show and told the nation he was telling family not to ride buses, subways, trains, planes, etc. (What a great way to help kick the economy while it's down, Joey! I'm sensing a pattern w/ this administration.) I then got on two more planes at the end of my vacation (because Delta screwed us out of our direct flight, but that is par for the course w/ them) and nearly 3 days later - no swine flu at my house.
Now I am reading that this virus is not as strong as our seasonal flu....no kidding! Why did Mexico get hit with dozens of deaths from this virus last month? Lack of healthcare, poor overall health of the victims, lack of education on how to treat the flu? All of the above. My guess is that they didn't die from the virus, they likely died from dehydration, pnuemonia, or some other complication from a weakened immune system. In the U.S. we have a fairly education popluce (contrary to logical deductions from recent elections), a very good healthcare system that some people want to deamonize and destroy, overall better diets than those in the slums of Mexico City and the rural areas in Oaxaca and we've been administering the annual flu vaccine for years.
Add it all up and I think it's time to move on to our nation's more critical issues. I think I'll go pick up some pork chops for dinner tomorrow.
From the CDC's own website, we lose 63,001 people each year to influenza & pneumonia in the U.S. Hell 34,136 Americans die every year from Septicemia. Do you know what this is? Even the detestable CNN reported that "Since January, more than 13,000 have died of complications from seasonal flu."
Now, I was out of pocket all last week on vacation back in my home state of Texas (gasp!) - right next to Mexico! The morning after I arrived, I turned on the TV immediately to the Swine Flu story on FoxNews. Not exactly the best news to start the day, but hey, what are you gonna do? Schools and businesses were shutting down and people were changing their daily habits and routines out of fear and a fraction of the data. I went to malls, restaurants, a business conference and other public places. I shook hands, gave hugs, stood in elevators without reservation. Gaffe Machine Biden then showed his face on a national TV show and told the nation he was telling family not to ride buses, subways, trains, planes, etc. (What a great way to help kick the economy while it's down, Joey! I'm sensing a pattern w/ this administration.) I then got on two more planes at the end of my vacation (because Delta screwed us out of our direct flight, but that is par for the course w/ them) and nearly 3 days later - no swine flu at my house.
Now I am reading that this virus is not as strong as our seasonal flu....no kidding! Why did Mexico get hit with dozens of deaths from this virus last month? Lack of healthcare, poor overall health of the victims, lack of education on how to treat the flu? All of the above. My guess is that they didn't die from the virus, they likely died from dehydration, pnuemonia, or some other complication from a weakened immune system. In the U.S. we have a fairly education popluce (contrary to logical deductions from recent elections), a very good healthcare system that some people want to deamonize and destroy, overall better diets than those in the slums of Mexico City and the rural areas in Oaxaca and we've been administering the annual flu vaccine for years.
Add it all up and I think it's time to move on to our nation's more critical issues. I think I'll go pick up some pork chops for dinner tomorrow.
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