US Travel Association president Roger Dow on November 2nd attended a Senate Committee Hearing, calling for reform of the TSA.
The TSA does not need to be reformed; it needs to be abolished. Private businesses have enormous incentive to keep their customers safe and secure. Customers also demand to be treated with dignity and respect. Businesses which cannot devise a way to keep customers safe without meeting both criteria will do worse than businesses which can. As a result, removing the TSA and putting the responsibility on the airlines will result in the most secure, respectful, and convenient security methods rising to the top. Customers will be happier with their treatment and satisfied with the quality of their security, and as a result the airlines will see more customers.
I avoid flying as much as possible. Being manhandled and treated like a criminal by the TSA is so unpleasant to me that I would rather spend more money and time traveling halfway across the country by car just to avoid passing through a TSA checkpoint to get on an airplane.
The TSA will never be effective. They do not answer to us, the customer. They do not care if we’re unhappy. It’s irrelevant to them if their methods make us averse to flying. We are not the customer, we are the enemy. We’re only potential terrorists or criminals.
Reform will not put more people on airplanes. It will not change the TSA’s mandate, which is strictly to perform security theater to make us feel safer. It will not change their attitude toward us. It will not change the tyrannical demeanor their authority gives them, or the somber air of fear their presence in the airport creates. Push for what will really help your industry: the complete abolition of the TSA.
Ron Paul only has one stance I can think of that I fundamentally disagree with, and that’s his stance on abortion.
Natural rights, the cornerstone of libertarianism, comes down to a single issue: property. Given the absolute right to own and defend justly owned property, we inevitably reach the non-aggression principle which states that no one may initiate force or violence against the just property of another.
These fundamental rights make no judgement as to the morality of how you use them. Anyone can spew hateful, vile, reprehensible speech which is racist, obscene, vulgar, and offensive. They can express a desire for the extermination of a class of people, insult your mother’s physique, praise a murderous dictator like Hitler. We may find it offensive and wrong, but they have the right. Or, put another way, we have no right to interfere. If someone is not aggressing against us, we have no standing under Natural Law to stop their activity.
So the only real question is, what defines aggression? The trespass or destruction of your property against your will. Is it an aggressive act to walk by a man bleeding to death in the street without stopping to help? No, it is not. We may say it is reprehensible and vile, that a man who would do such a thing is the antithesis of morality. But what we may not say is that he does not have the right to withhold his aid.
If that person on the street is a child, it does not change this fact. If that child is the man’s son, it does not change this fact. If that child was previously inside a woman’s womb it does not change this fact.
It may be repulsive to be forced to accept, but in order to have a consistent view of rights no one may be forced to assist or care for another against their will. Not even for the sake of a child. The sick may not force doctors to cure them, the hungry may not force farmers to feed them, the poor may not force the rich to fund them. Being forced to provide for a child is no different, in spite of our natural and instinctual desire to defend and protect them, in spite of their innocence or lack of ability to fend for themselves.
Which makes my argument against abortion simple. Regardless of the consequence to the unborn child, it doesn’t have a right to the mother’s womb. If she no longer wants it, she is within her rights to remove it as it is now trespassing. From a rights point of view she has no obligation to consider the consequences of expressing her right to her property in her own body. Again, we may morally berate her; but we may not use force to keep her from aborting.
So if I am saying that parents are not aggressing against children by aborting them or withholding care; am I saying parents everywhere who think their kids cost too much should just stop feeding them, or should cancel a pregnancy because it’s inconvenient? Of course not. They should sell them.
Praying in particular I don’t understand. If God is omniscient, he doesn’t need you to tell him what you’re thinking or what you desire. He knows better than you do. But more interestingly than that is a logical conclusion arrived at by understanding action and its purpose. What is action? It is man attempting to make a change to his environment to remove some felt unease. If man felt no unease, he would be content, and would not act. Man feels unease because he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and his environment is unsatisfactory to fulfill his desires.
An omnipotent, omniscient being such as God, therefore would not act. There would be no desires to fulfill, because his desires would dictate his environs without action. Hence, what good is prayer or worship when your God does not act? If he exists and is omnipotent and omniscient, present conditions will always satisfy him, else they would not have occurred.
What strikes me as odd are the number of devoutly religious austro-libertarians. I basically stole that point directly out of Human Action, yet nearly all the big Austrian names are religious, and many of them enough so that they have written entire books on the subject. With human reason being such a strong part of the foundation of Austrians and Libertarians, it’s surprising to me that many are so strongly religious. Poking holes such as this into religion is trivial when you apply a little reason to the picture.
Perhaps I should read some of their books about religion and see if they discuss these kinds of logical conundrums. It would be fascinating to see the ways they contort themselves to explain them away.
Over at HuffPo, there’s a piece up that’s actually pro Ron Paul. I made a dire mistake though, and read some of the comments. Before I could stop myself, I was hitting the reply button in response to this gem:
I can admire Ron Paul for his candor and consistency. I don’t think there’s a political bone in his body, unlike the othe [sic] snakes on that stage. The man says what he means.
And I agree with his stance on the wars.
On everything else I loathe his policies. He wants to dismantle the government, which is the only mechanism We The People have to pool our collective resources as a nation and to protect ourselves from Corporate tyranny. He defines freedom as freedom of the wealthy to do whatever the hell they want without any restrictions or responsibility as citizens. Whites only lunch counters, anyone?
In Ron Paul world, if you want access to the ideals of the US Constitution you have to purchase them. Freedom from want, freedom from hunger, freedom from discrimination, freedom from fear, freedom from servitude – these are only available to the rich and powerful.
Ugh. Several errors to go after there, all of which would take up a blog post, but I focused on his concept of “freedoms”:
Only one of those is an actual freedom. People have a confused definition of freedom (and rights), because they use the word with different meanings, and then conflate the meanings as interchangeable.
The first four are totally impossible “freedoms.”
Freedom from want? At its face this is absurd. The human condition is want. Every action we take is an attempt to relieve some felt unease, to further our conditions and improve our lives. To not want is to not act. It is a state of perfect contentedness. It is impossible.
Freedom from hunger sounds good, but who is to provide it? If this were a real right, everyone could simultaneously enjoy it. If you’re lost at sea with no land visible for miles, you’re likely to get hungry. How are you to enjoy this “right” or “freedom” to not be hungry then? It is clearly not possible.
Discrimination… We discriminate with every action we take, every day, choosing one over another. When interviewing for a job we discriminate against unskilled or inept applicants in favor of hard-working and intelligent applicants. We discriminate when we buy groceries, picking the cereal that suits us best in terms of cost, flavor and nutrition, over those which are less adequate. Sure, I know you mean against race, sex, or whatever else… But where exactly does it end? There will always be discrimination based on something, it is our very nature to identify more satisfactory over less satisfactory.
These are all what are called “positive rights.” A positive right is one which obligates another to do something on their behalf. One which requires another to give them special treatment, or permits someone to take from another. By definition they cannot apply to everyone equally.
Positive rights are not rights at all. They are fantasies, hopeful visions of perfect equality and utopia in which there is no scarcity, and no human flaws.
All true rights are negative rights. That means they do not require another to act, they just prohibit one from aggressing against another; from initiating violence against their fellow man.
Which brings us to your last freedom. Freedom from servitude. That one, you nailed. That’s a real freedom, a true right. No one has the right to enslave you, to force you to do things against your will, to take from you that which is not theirs. Yet this is the very definition of government, and exactly what Ron Paul is trying to fight.
Unfortunately, the full thing wouldn’t fit so I had to trim it down rather a lot. You got the director’s edition.
I cannot for the life of me remember where I found this quote, but I’m guessing it was Hazlitt or Hayek or someone of the sort: “The problem with socialism is that their fallacies can be stated in a single sentence, but they take a lifetime to refute.”
This column by Steven Pearlstein is an excellent example of this phenomenon, in rapid-fire form. He spews out a dozen assertions, each of which you could write an entire novel refuting.
Here’s my response, which I emailed him:
Your column, “The Magical World of Voodoo ‘Economists’” completely lacks substance. You make numerous claims that various programs are good and equate to progress, but nowhere in your column do you even attempt to explain why.
Reading your column paints me a picture of a person who believes anything done by the government counts as progress. I take it you support Guantanamo and torture? Internment camps for the Japanese Americans in WW2? Maybe you support the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The wars being fought in Afghanistan, Libya, and so on? Supporter of Citizens-United perhaps? If any of these developments are bad ones, what exactly makes the ones you refer to not? Surely you believe some of the 20th (or 21st) century really SHOULD be repealed; that we made some mistakes. That’s all these candidates believe, you just happen not to agree with what they believe didn’t or doesn’t work.
Without explaining any of why you believe those things are all good and proper, you do your reader no favors. You are simply a propaganda mouthpiece. I implore you to fight your battles in the realm of ideas and critical thought, not to stoop to demagoguery and sound bites.
I’ll just leave you with a few points, and I’ll try to be brief.
Social Security: The trust fund is a farce. Members of the Social Security Board of Trustees have admitted it. They also will admit that Social Security does, as Perry claimed, function exactly the same way as a Ponzi scheme. The difference they will say, is a matter of intent. But that’s only partially true. The bigger difference is in a Ponzi scheme, once you know what it is you have the option to get out. Look at the arguments they were making about the Social Security tax and the trust fund when its constitutionality was first called into question, and compare them to now. You will find a complete 180 in their positions if you do the research. If present day claims had been made then, it would have been struck down as unconstitutional.
Great Depression: Contrary to popular belief, Hoover was not a small government guy. Did you know FDR actually ran against Hoover on a platform of less intervention and government? Hoover didn’t leave things alone by any measure imaginable. He did exactly what FDR did. Want to know a secret? There was a severe recession in 1920. Want to know why you’ve never heard of it? Because Harding did almost nothing, and the economy recovered in six months.
Federal Reserve: It hasn’t actually done so great a job of providing us stability. Have you had your head in the ground the past four years? Hard to refute your defense of it since you don’t bother to provide one, but a real and honest discussion about how effective the Federal Reserve has actually been seems perfectly reasonable and healthy to me.
16th amendment: We got along just fine without income taxes for hundreds of years. Personally I think both the people and the economy would be better off getting to keep what they earn. Seems to me that the burden of proof for the necessity of taking people’s hard earned money from them should lay with those doing the taking.
17th amendment: There was a good reason for not having senators popularly elected. Democracy is not a perfect system, not even a great system. It leads to a tyranny of the majority. Which is why the founders set the US up as a Republic; they recognized this simple fact. Having senators accountable to the states rather than the people allowed the states to have a voice in the process. The people are already represented through the House, that was its purpose.
I could go on, or into more detail on a given point, but I hope you at least get the idea. Portraying them as kooks to further your own agenda is just disappointing. I hope you’ll make a shift in integrity and try some honest intellectual debate in the future.
Posted by wobbles on Sep 11, 2011
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