The Back Story 003 has Morgan answering the following questions: Is closing the border like locking your front door? Do you have a right to restrict another hard working person’s rights? Why? If you have a problem with immigrants coming in and getting on welfare, then your problem is with socialism, not immigration.
Tag: rights
Does Combating Climate Change Justify Violating Rights?
The climate change question is really at least four questions. 1.) Is climate change occurring or is it just normal fluctuations we haven’t yet recognized due to only possessing a couple centuries worth of data? 2.) If climate change is occurring, is mankind entirely or largely to blame?
Getting from Here to There
I’ve been pondering “gradualism” and “pragmatism”– things over which I have disagreed with people in the past. And, I’ll probably continue to disagree in the future. Let me illustrate my thinking.
Authority and Morality
The decisions people make and the directions that people go in may in the end not serve them or lead to the kind of results that they want, but that is for each person to discover on their own. Advice can be given, suggestions can be made, but ultimately each person must walk their own path themselves. To try to play games of authority is to attempt to ignore all of this.
Borders != Doors
Having locks on some doors does not mean that every door, every road, every shopping mall, every border should be locked and should require ID checks. I say this in response to BCFs (Border Control Freaks) who constantly draw a false analogy between sealed borders and a locked door.
Anarchism as Constitutionalism
Trying to refute anarchism by pointing to undesirable instances of anarchy is about as bad an argument as trying to refute Bidinotto’s advocacy of government by pointing to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Whether a state is horrendous or decent depends in large part on its constitutional structure; whether an anarchic society is horrendous or decent likewise depends on its constitutional structure.
A Common Sense Foundation for Liberty
“The foundation of my libertarianism is much more modest: common sense morality. At first glance, it may seem paradoxical that such radical political conclusions could stem from anything designated as “common sense.” I do not, of course, lay claim to common sense political views. I claim that revisionary political views emerge out of common sense moral views. As I see it, libertarian political philosophy rests on three broad ideas.”
Does Evil Justify Evil?
To rely on the argument that as long as there is welfare and the risk of crime, there must be “immigration control” is a really poor argument. You could justify almost anything that way. As long as there is rape, there must be mandatory chastity belts. As long as murder exists, there must be anti-gun “laws“.
Doppelganger
It seems that Jefferson was still romantically attached to liberty; but his eyes and his dreams were on the arising French Revolution. He must have assumed he had left the American experiment in good hands. This is the nature of idea men — they are great at founding dreams, but they are terrible at (if not entirely absent during) implementation.
Freedom of Movement is a Libertarian Virtue
“Freedom of movement” is a libertarian virtue in any location which is not privately owned or where the owner does not opt to restrict movement. Moreover, just because libertarians advocate a fully privatized society, it does not necessarily follow that every square inch of ground will be privately owned nor that every property owner will choose to deny access to visitors and travelers.