A little diatribe on “rights”

I’ve talked several times before about “rights,” noting that conservatives believe in a limited set of natural or human rights, while liberals believe in an expanded set that go far beyond human rights. Today a Canadian columnist gives a nice illustration of the difference in conservative/liberal perceptions in the area of hiring:

Human rights laws and tribunals are based on the notion that being hired, promoted, serviced and esteemed is a human right. It isn’t. Being hired, promoted, serviced and esteemed is a human ambition. It’s a justifiable ambition, but still just an ambition.

A human right is to be sovereign in one’s legitimate sphere. A human right is to select whom to hire, promote, service or esteem. It’s to decide with whom to associate. It’s to have an opinion, silly as it may be. It’s a human right to be an idiot.

To illustrate: A Canadian Jew who won’t hire a Canadian German or Muslim is a fool. There’s only one fool worse: a “human rights” commissar who would force him.

Where individuals exercise lawful choices, human rights are protected. People’s motives are their own business. Most people aren’t morons. When left to their own devices in a free society, most will select whom to hire, promote, service or esteem on the basis of enlightened self-interest, not prejudice.

There are attractive ambitions and ugly rights, but the ugliest right still trumps the prettiest ambition. When one protects a human ambition, no matter how noble, against a human right, no matter how ignoble, one enters the wasteland of social engineering, the barren realm of statism. At best, it’s the tyranny of good intentions. While a tyranny of good intentions is better than a tyranny of evil intentions, it’s still tyranny. Soon all intentions vanish, and only the tyranny endures.

Very nice – especially the last paragraph.

The hole in liberal philosophy

I’ve touched on this before, but Hillary’s recent socialistic policy pronouncements brought it to mind again. Simply put, here is the question:

What is the destiny of the United States?

Treating government services like a boutique

The topic of not wanting to pay for defense came up here the other day, making this little article a contemporary topic.

The Rev. John Schwiebert, 68, and his wife, Pat, 62, are conscientious objectors to war. As such, they have refused to support the U.S. military by withholding all or part of their federal income tax since 1977. They do not object to paying taxes, however, and for the past several years have paid the amount they think they would owe in federal taxes to Multnomah County instead.

Regardless of your moral stance, this is tax evasion. I would prefer not to pay for many, many federal government services and programs, and I would like to see federal taxes reduced to a fraction of their current level. But while I wait (with little hope) for that to happen, I pay the full amount of my taxes.

I do this regardless of whether I feel that what I’m paying for is asinine, immoral, or counterproductive. That is the consequence of living in a representative democracy. I think the approving tone of this article would change dramatically if they were talking about people withholding taxes for abortion or AIDS research.

The tyranny of the majority cuts both ways.

It’s science! Libs really do hate the rich

UC Davis researchers took 120 students and gave them arbitrary amounts of play money. They then made it possible for them to buy the right to take money from the “rich” or to give money to the “poor.”

“What we show is that anger and annoyance towards people who earn more,” Fowler says, “cause [participants] to punish nearly as much as they do in public goods games.”

I suspect that the results would have been much more mixed if they had tested an average cross section of the population instead of students from a California college. They probably had one conservative student in their sample.

Another question concerns inherited wealth vs. earned wealth: in the study, the money was given to the students, rather than being earned. It would be interesting to see if the results changed if they made it clear that the differences in wealth were due to differences in success at some task.

Orwell was only 23 years too pessimistic

Thanks to Kim du Toit for this little gem:

According to recent studies, Britain has 4.2million CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people in the country – which amounts to 20 per cent of the global camera total.

It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.
…
Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, gave a stark warning last year that Britain is turning into a Big Brother society where the lives of millions of inhabitants are tracked from cradle to grave.

A study commissioned by his office concluded that within 10 years, surveillance will be all-pervasive, spurred on by Government claims that it is needed to fight terrorism. The report appeared to reinforce Mr Thomas’ claim two years earlier that “we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society”.

This totally creeps me out. It could be 3 times a day and it would still creep me out. I know the standard arguments of “Why would it bother you if you aren’t doing anything wrong? and “It’s worth it for the improved safety,” and I think they’re very, very weak.

The idea of people watching me bothers me, period. People watching me without me knowing it creeps me out. The claim that most of the surveillance is not viewed by human eyes is specious: it can be, so the result is the same for the observed party. And in an era of data mining and database amalgamation, with this magnitude of surveillance it’s pretty straightforward for an interested party to track every trip you take and every transaction you make, piecing together your entire life. I thought my life was my own, but in Britain I would have to share it with any interested law enforcement official.

The article above now talks about a new innovation: they’re putting speakers on some of the cameras so that camera viewers can yell at evil-doers. As Mssr. du Toit points out, that is the final touch needed for the fully functional Big Brother system.

I guess we can be thankful that we had an extra 23 years.

The Evan Sayet speech, John Rawls, and geoff’s cosmic plan

Ace put up a post on Evan Sayet’s speech at some conservative conference. Very interesting point, though it was often accompanied by cheap shots and hyperbole. Basically he’s saying that the fundamental tenet of modern liberalism is to avoid critical judgment of everything and everybody except those who make critical judgments.

More than avoidance, this philosophy actually deems it evil and/or ignorant to make critical judgments. The criminal is not bad, he is simply disadvantaged or misunderstood. The terrorist is not bad, he is simply doing what he thinks is right.

Next on the chopping block: the right to be fat

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but in the UK they’re now treating families who do not toe the line on obesity treatments as child abusers:

Liberals, Conservatives, and the US response to the second Cold War

In the previous post I talked about the rapidly evolving balance of power in the world, where the unipolar world of the past 15 years is now turning into a world with a Western alliance and an Asian alliance. An interesting side issue is how this situation will be perceived by liberals and conservatives, once they are made aware of it.

The annual prison population update and reformation of the conservative agenda

It’s that time again:

A record 7 million people — or one in every 32 American adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.

Normally shortly after the release we get an article in the NYT or LAT bemoaning the rise in the prison population, particularly given the drop in crime. Then conservatives respond with the causal argument, pointing out that it’s more likely that crime is dropping *because* more criminals are incarcerated.

This is typical for these discussions: liberal commenters are concerned about fairness and equity in society and in the justice system, while conservatives are concerned about the execution of justice and public safety and order. Steven Levitt’s controversial theory that abortions are the cause of reduced crime has been about the only interesting innovation in the debate in the last decade. But I’d prefer not to get into that here; besides, I have yet to unpack the box with Freakonomics in it.

Reformation of the Conservative Agenda. What I *would* like to discuss is the desirability of modifying the conservative approach to the justice system. As I mentioned to a commenter a few weeks ago, one of my themes going forward is addressing the necessary reformations of the conservative agenda. I touched on the subject of reformation in the Is health care a “right?” post, but I’ll be more explicit and thorough in this and future posts.

The right to self-defense

Ace just put up a post trying to help Jackie Danicki find the two thugs who assaulted her on the London Tube. Amid the sympathy generated for Ms. Danicki, the incident stimulated a secondary discussion concerning the lack of a right of self-defense in the UK. Since I was going on about rights the other day, I figured this would be a good time to revisit the subject of the right to self-defense.

Most of my quotes will come from an article by the Cato Insitute entitled “Self Defense: An Endangered Right.” I encourage you to read the whole article.

Childrearing with discipline and respect

Just had someone visiting the blog by following the search term for “boy dad sir respect.” Interesting. My wife’s and my opinion on discipline and respect is that you can almost never have too much. Our parenting recipe calls for adding love to balance out the discipline, not slacking off on discipline to prove your love.

So far we’re delighted with the results, but we haven’t hit the teen years yet.

Is health care a “right?”

[Horribly long, what with all the historical stuff - I apologize]

Liberals and conservatives often have a difficult time communicating because they have different definitions for words. A “good economy,” for example, means one thing to conservatives (a healthy economy) and another to liberals (a just economy). This is a leading contributor to the lamentable rarity of rational debate on the issues.

The definition of a human “right” is another area where a huge gulf underlays liberal/conservative discussions, but is rarely addressed directly. So what is a “right?”

The tightening noose

[This is a skeleton of what will someday be a much more better type of essay]

The couple who were banned from smoking in their own home reminded me of my long-standing fear for the preservation of civil liberties. The threats to civil liberties come from 3 sources: liberals, conservatives, and the government. All three claim to celebrate civil liberties, but all 3 have only whittled them away.

Nearly at the bottom of the slippery slope

You knew the ban of cigarette smoking in workplaces, then in restaurants and bars, and then in public places, would continue to creep and encroach on the liberties of smokers. You weren’t wrong:

Condo owners lose right to smoke in own home