Yes, you can make a point with using an example of a small number of people interacting in an isolated system, but you could just as easily create a thought experiment starting from our current situation that people might find easier to follow. Such a thought experiment might look something like this.
Tag: defense
WikiLeaks: Hostile is as Hostile Does
When the US Senate Intelligence Committee declares WikiLeaks “hostile,” the obvious question is “hostile to whom?” WikiLeaks is allied with the American people, while the US intelligence community — and, for the moment at least, the US Senate Intelligence Committee — is our enemy.
The Structure of Your Principles
Part of the challenge of lifelong learning is to understand that the goal is not to add to your collection of “well what do you know’s”, but to assimilate your new knowledge with the creation of, revisiting, modification of, or withdrawing (shedding) from your current set of principles. It does one no good to regard new information as just “interesting,” one needs to test that new learning against the structure, the principles, of one’s information system.
Abortion: A Voluntaryist Perspective
From the moment an egg is fertilized, there is a living cell with a unique set of human DNA. That is — scientifically — a human life. However, science cannot answer questions of morality on its own; that is the realm of ethics and philosophy and religion. Here, we consider the moral question from the Voluntaryist standpoint.
Telling Pricks and Criminals to Stop is Only Half the Battle
I’d like to think that I have a cure for prickish behaviors like racism and bigotry. Does my cure do anything to the pricks in question? Not at all. Rather, my cure is for the victims: responsibility.
How an Airborne Ranger Became a Voluntaryist
Government directives to do evil (whether by commission or omission) do not override our conscience and our understanding of right and wrong. I favor agoristic obviation of government institutions. I support voluntary alternatives to government services as much as I can and continue to encourage government institutions to reduce and eliminate their restrictions on our freedoms.
Law as a Tool to Get What We Want
Imports threatening domestic production? Raise tariffs! Cheap labor threatening labor unions? Enact a minimum wage! Businessmen without scruples ripping off easy prey? Occupational licensure! Boogeyman at the front door? Increase the “defense” budget! Your neighbor is sodomizing his friend in the privacy of his home? Ban all the gays!
If You Need Violence to Enforce Your Ideas…
…your ideas are worthless. Or so goes the meme I’ve seen recently on Facebook. Actually, I’ve seen it before, in the past, and I shared it thinking it was clever. This time around, however, I had a different take.
Spanking is Hitting, Period
“Let people parent how they want to parent” is for things like what time your kids go to bed. You cannot say that when you are being violent to children. And I will say this one more time. Hitting anyone is violent. I will defend the right of children over your assumed “right” to hurt them. If someone starves their child of food, do you protest, “let people parent how they want to parent?!”
Immigration and Social Engineering
Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.