However, aside from those philosophical or economic arguments, you can take the easy road and can cite the fact that everything the government touches turns to crap and that government involvement always, necessarily, invariably leads to government control and government restriction. Your politics and philosophy aside, governments only exist to regulate and control everything, and their control only spreads and strengthens over time, not recedes when it becomes unpopular or impractical. As Mises wrote, one government intervention always seems to lead to another intervention to fix the problems that the first intervention caused, et cetera ad socialism. The fact that a net neutrality debate is even necessary is solely due to prior government intervention in creating telecom monopolies and regulating them through the Federal Communications Commission, and the net neutrality legislation that we will inevitably suffer will only beget more legislation. Here’s a helpful hint for your daily life: when you hear “legislation”, think “restrictions of free choices backed by threats of violent punishment for disobedience”.

In the case of the government controls that will follow net neutrality legislation, it might not be exactly the problems caused by such legislation that lead Congress and the FCC to instate new measures to fix those problems, but rather the opportunity to control and the lust for power will simply be too great to pass up. As a rare intelligent and informed redditor put it (hat tip Mises Blag),

So let me get this straight….the government, the same government that punishes success through the tax code, prevents innovation through burdensome regulation, can’t spend within its means, bails out billionaires with working people’s money, and has created a ponzi scheme in the form of social security to threatens to bankrupt the nation, and generally screwed up everything it has ever touched, getting involved in regulating the internet, is going to help increase speech, entrepreneurship, and innovation? Pardon me for being a little skeptical.

I’ll tell you what will really happen. The first 6 months will be fine. Then, first you will see federal taxes on internet purchases, then you will see ‘fairness’ controls that will restrict the content of what you can say, then you will see political speech regulated in the name of ‘campaign finance reform’, then you will see federal business licenses required for selling goods on the internet, required encryption backdoors, required technologies, national ‘internet IDs’, mandatory content filtering, a ban on anonymizing technologies, and 1,000 other terrors that I can’t even imagine right now. Regardless of the pure intents of the people wanting to push government enforced net neutrality, this will make the internet subject to politics and big money interests.

Here is what you will really get… Boy MP3′s sure are disruptive technology, not anymore! The president just appointed the head of BMG as the ‘internet czar’ (czar=no senate approval required!), after a $5 million campaign contribution, and he just decided that MP3s only exist to facilitate copyright infringement, and therefore must be filtered by all ISPs. And you just thought it would make your netflix download faster.

Government enforced Net neutrality is a dangerous idea that only serves to open the door to the destruction of the internet at the hands of government regulators. A better way would be an industry consortium that self-regulated net-neutrality and ostracized companies that didn’t play ball. Plus, people need to vote with their dollars. Your ISP is throttling Netflix? Don’t do business with them.

Contrary to that dolt Al Franken saying that net neutrality is the most important free-speech issue of our time, net neutrality and everything else internet- and telecom-related are solely a government-control issue. We are all born with the absolute right to completely free speech, and the State can only infringe upon that right, not protect or augment it.

The above objection to a Stateless libertarian society implies that society as a whole should use means it considers reasonable to enforce rules and restrictions it considers reasonable on each individual member of the society. Note that libertarian philosophies posit exactly the same thing, to a certain extent: our freedom of association, with which we can shun or ostracize unacceptable members of a group, and our economic freedom, with which we can contribute to the profit and loss of individuals and businesses, would result in a population tending to create for itself the world that it wants, with individual regions or groups deviating from the norm in whatever ways are practical and desirable. However, the crucial difference is in the granting of a monopoly on violence to a privileged group: the State. Because the State, by definition, is not subject to the same set of rules that everyone else in society must abide by, it exists outside of society, enforcing rules on society as it sees fit. And because the State, by definition, enjoys a legal monopoly on the initiation of force, it cannot be expected to be constrained by the society it rules over. The extent to which and the ways in which the State is influenced by its subjects are only according to the desires of the majority and other large, politically organized, powerful lobbies, and not according to the desires of individuals or minority groups outside of those politically influential blocs. In contrast to a free society in which everyone would be free to march to his own drummer, weak/minority groups become marginalized and constrained by powerful/larger lobbies in a Statist society. Even the majority of voters in a given region at a given time often don’t get what they want (e.g., Obama’s foreign-policy and civil-liberties record). Anthony de Jasay’s masterpiece The State is purported to contain the best exposition of this power struggle.

Importantly, a government at any level of geographic jurisdiction (local, state, national, etc.) must enact and enforce laws that are one-size-fits-all, and as most people in Western society have seen from the crony-corporatism and the bailouts of the last few years, most exceptions to the universal laws are made in favor of the (large) companies that help out the politicians the most. Very few people anywhere approve of this, but obviously our only recourse, voting, does no good or else it would be outlawed. As Étienne de La Boétie would remind us, a state continues to exist in the form in which it exists because society at large generally approves of it, but the most important unit of any group, the individual, is persecuted and disenfranchised by the Statist system to the extent that he wants to live his life in peaceful abstinence from the State apparatus and in peaceful disregard of its restraints.

Therefore, however close a state comes to enforcing the mores or demands of the entire populace (in effect, the majority), the libertarian is repulsed by it because no one is permitted the freedom to peacefully abstain from any demand made by that state.

What are some of those demands, made by the State (the majority) on individual subjects, for the purpose of serving the greater good? Paying taxes of all kinds to fund government agencies of all kinds; helping out the less fortunate and otherwise indigent; bailing out business that are “too big to fail”; educating children only in ways that are approved of by local, state, and national school boards; paying for every child’s schooling to promote an educated citizenry; being conscripted into jury service to protect your fellow citizens from unfair prosecution; abstaining from ingesting substances that the State declares taboo and harmful to society; using only State-approved notes as currency; paying for the military’s defense of the citizens and their land; possibly being conscripted into the military; protecting the environment and natural resources; paying for other people’s medical care; protecting the intellectual property of innovators so as to promote more innovation; not harming others in their person or property; and not peacefully (or otherwise) seceding from the State’s geographic jurisdiction over all legal affairs.

As good and noble as many of those causes are, there is no cause so noble as to justify violating anyone’s rights in order to accomplish it. The rights of the one outweigh the needs of the many, and anything else, for that matter. If that is not true, who are you to say which rights of mine shall be ignored and which I shall have the privilege of maintaining? Why must libertarians always defend our person and property against you and not the other way around? Why am I not permitted to demand that you pay for my food, housing, health care, or bank bailout, that you operate your business according to the (lack of) regulations that I want, and that you be subject to the court system that I desire? Because the State says so? The majority voted on it? There’s a social contract? No. That is not acceptable or defensible under any system of logic or morality. Might does not make right, the majority should not rule, and there is no such thing as a social contract.

It is a general truism that ends that are achieved by means of violating anyone’s individual liberty cannot result in a net good. And it is a socio-psychological certainty that the type of people who desire the power to manage the affairs of others will violate individual rights in proportion to the greatness they aspire to. I do not support the means that the State uses to accomplish any ends, irrespective of the desirability of the ends themselves, and therefore I do not want to be a party to any of its activities. I am under no moral obligation to obey any of its demands or respect any of its methods, goals, or agents; I only do so out of concern for my own safety and well-being and because I think we can all accomplish more outside of prison than inside of it.

No person, or group of people, or society, or government has the right to demand anything of me other than that I not demand anything of them. No one has the right to demand that I pay anyone anything that I have not previously, willingly, implicitly or explicitly agreed to pay in return for a specific good or service. No one has the right to tell me how to educate my children, run my business, use my land, or redistribute “intellectual property”, as long as those actions don’t affect anyone else’s equal liberty to do the same. No one has the right to tell me what can and can’t be used as currency, what I can and can’t ingest, or what actions I can partake in with other consenting adults. No one has the right to conscript me into jury duty or military service any more than they have the right to force me into slave labor. The only right we have is for nobody to violate our person, liberty, or property—in other words, to remain in equal moral standing with every other human, such that no one is in a position of power to commit any involuntary action upon another person. From this moral egalitarianism are derived our rights to be free of aggression, fraud, and breach of contract.

These rights are not subject to any terms whatsoever—no modification, no specification, no exception, no infringement, no abrogation, no higher considerations, and certainly not a vote. They are absolute and infinite. I do not demand anything of anyone else, and no one may demand anything of me without my permission and a prior agreement of some kind. Why not? Because I say so. Why don’t I have any moral obligation to pay taxes, serve in the military, serve on a jury, ingest only authorized substances, donate money to a certain cause or group, or obey any of the other myriad restrictions the State places on my person, property, and liberty? Because I don’t want to. They are my body, property, liberty, and rights to manage as I please, within the identical boundaries that simultaneously constrain and protect every other human being; what other reason could I need for claiming my rights?; who are you to say which of my rights is to be violated and to what extent?; who are you to say that what you want for me supersedes what I want for myself?

No one is fit to govern me but myself. What I freely do with my body and property is not subject to debate or vote. What you want for society is irrelevant, and how you want me to behave is irrelevant. The only reasons the mob’s vote has any bearing on our practical world are that the State has the guns and the mob currently chooses not to start with first principles and examine what is right before deciding what is desirable. But it won’t be so forever. Because might does not make right, and the majority should not rule. The majority should not rule any more than one person should. The entirety of the human race save one is no more justified in violating the rights of the one than the one would be in oppressing all of humanity.

When Statists say they agree with our assertion of individual rights to some extent, or that this or that limitation should be imposed by the State, or that not even individual liberty should be absolute, what they are really saying is that they have the right to use the violent, deadly police power of the State to restrict what we do with our minds, bodies, and property, and that not only do we not have a reciprocal right to treat them the same way, we don’t even have the right to make those decisions for our own minds, bodies, and property. It is simply incoherent to assert such dominion over the liberty, property, and even the body of another. The falseness and invalidity of such a claim is self-evident. This is as certain as Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum. Our right to completely control our own bodies is virtually axiomatic (though extensive proofs exist), and all other rights against encroachment follow from it. No claim to a higher good has any bearing on them, and no moral system denying these absolute truths can ever be fair or just.

By the way, if you search for news articles on this story, isn’t it depressing how strongly and confidently many (liberal socialist) authors proclaim that this is what will happen if Democrats don’t run our lives and this is what would happen in a Tea-Party Republican version of America? Liberals should be ashamed to be even peripherally associated with such monumental ignorance, and especially to contribute to it.

The Obama regime has been up to some heavy justice-trampling entirely aside from planting the seeds for takeovers of both the health care and financial trading industries. Glenn Greenwald details Obama’s authorization of the assassination of U.S. citizens. While it’s true that this has become old news and I have even written a few blag posts since this Greenwald post, the quotes are no less juicy:

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations.
[...]
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
[...]
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist.

In more Orwellian news, the Supreme Court ruled that some convicted sex offenders can be kept in prison indefinitely by federal officials (presumably the Department of “Justice”), after they have completed their prison sentences. It is terrifying how broadly sex crimes are defined, how aggressively they are pursued, and how remorselessly people who have only been accused, much less convicted, of sexual crimes are treated. There are people whose lives are ruined because they had oral sex as teenagers or because they walk around naked in their kitchens and their wannabe-tyrant neighbors have some twisted appetite for punishing others for anything they can. This ruling will soon extend to terrorism and all other crimes that some lawyer or judge can construe as being related to “national security”, if it doesn’t already.

The RIAA and MPAA want the government to force all computers to contain software that automatically deletes alleged copyright-infringing material. The best arguments against the RIAA and MPAA anymore are quoting them verbatim and reporting their behavior. As Voltaire quipped, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The RIAA and MPAA could not exist in their present form or commit any of the violations they have become infamous for without a monopolistic state and, particularly, a powerful central government backing them up. By the way, did you know there is an “Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement”? My god, they might as well rename it MiniIntelProp.

We are coming up on Presidential Candidate Obama’s original proposed date (summer 2010) for withdrawing (or at least beginning to withdraw) most American soldiers from Iraq. While I don’t believe he ever actually had any intention of scaling down the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or reducing the U.S.’s military presence in the Middle East to any considerable degree, my skepticism and his duplicity are not even necessarily the most important issues about his promises/plans to withdraw troops. Most important is any well-intentioned president’s inability to divert our military’s path from one of aggression and expansion to one of defense and contraction. There are too many people and too many industrial interests opposing such a sea change for it to ever happen, except that I think America’s impending financial collapse will force the military to contract and withdraw, which side effect will be nothing but good.

You don’t have to be remotely libertarian-ish to be outraged at this: Novartis sales rep who alleges she was raped by a client was subjected to “disciplinary action” by HR, and the managers showed no interest in pursuing the case or bringing the alleged rapist to justice. I don’t have anything to add; the heinousness of it all is self-evident.

I think it’s sad how many people want more nationalization/centralization of all kinds of laws and regulations. An alarming percentage of people think national or even worldwide standards for businesses, behaviors, and just about everything else would make our lives better, but this is exactly the wrong attitude. More diversity of options, as a general rule, makes just about everything better in the long run, mainly because freedom is good for people and more innovation occurs when we can try different things and succeed or fail based on merit. The latest example that prompted me to write this is a comment I read in a discussion thread about stupid alcohol sales laws, commonly called blue laws. The comment read, “i hate the variation in alcohol laws from State to State. this shit needs to be modernized and made uniform across the Nation. i think it’s absurd that in my state, PA, i can’t buy liquor/wine from ANYWHERE but a State store.” Yes, since it is obvious that government and only government has created your problem, then the best solution is MORE government and MORE concentrated power in the hands of people who are EVEN FARTHER removed from your home and your life and who care about you individually EVEN LESS than the people who passed the current laws, if that’s possible. I’m sorry to end on an arrogant or haughty note, but Statists are stupid.

As difficult as it is to define abstract ideas like rights, this much is certain: for anything to be a human “right,” it must apply fully and equally to all people in all possible times, places, and situations. Rights are universal and eternal and can never change. For rights to apply equally to everyone, and for one person’s “right” not to imply an entitlement or an aggression or an asymmetric demand of any kind with respect to another person, all rights are negative. Positive rights are not, in fact, rights, but desires or privileges. This means, for instance, that we don’t have a right to property, but rather we have a right for no one to take our rightfully owned property; when we say we have a right to free speech, this simply means no one can stop us from saying what we want on our own time and our own place, not that society must provide us with a microphone and a podium and pay any attention to us. We don’t have a right to certain things; we have a right for no one to forcibly prevent us from doing the things that everyone else may also do. Rights have an awfully strict definition, especially when you consider they must be identical from the days of the earliest cavemen to the distant, unimaginable future of the human race. That’s why there are so few of them.

Implicit in the idea that everyone has a right to health care is a deeply insidious morality. If it were true that health care were a right, then when an airline passenger had a heart attack mid-flight, or one member of a group of hikers or mountain climbers got injured, or a group of vacationers got stranded on an island and one fell ill, then despite the absence of any medical knowledge among the other people nearby, the person in need of medical care could demand that others treat him. He has a right, after all, to receive medical care from other people, free of charge, and their failure to provide it would be a violation of his rights.

“Health care” consists of expertise, labor, and products supplied to patients from medical professionals and manufacturers. It takes several years of advanced schooling and hard work, facing stiff competition, to even become a doctor, nurse, PA, etc. Turns out treating patients is a full-time job and for most doctors is, in fact, much more stressful and grueling than what most of us consider a “full-time” job. As we all know, you don’t just put on a ring, say, “Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of: health care,” and receive treatment. Labor is required not only to treat you but also to train for years. With our economy becoming more integrated and the worldwide division of labor increasing all the time, millions of people’s labor goes into treating every patient in developed countries.

To claim health care as a right is to claim ownership not only of other people’s property but of the time and effort spent examining you, treating you, and training to become competent to treat you. To claim health care as a right is to claim jurisdiction over the actions, decisions, knowledge, time, and the very bodies of the people whom you are demanding treatment from. To claim health care as a right means the health care professionals and companies forfeit all of their rights to set their own prices for their goods and services—in fact, abrogates their right to charge any price for anything they give you, because you have a right to health care, and society must therefore provide it. No principled ethic of human relationships could permit such wholesale subjugation of one group of citizens by another. Medical care, like all goods and services, can only be provided via mutual agreement, an exchange or contract. Anything beyond that is either charity or slavery.

So now we see that most people do not, in fact, mean health care is a “right” at all, but rather something that they wish everyone could get for a low price. Most people who claim that health care is a right also wish no evil private companies would ever make money off of something needed so badly by so many people, or off of anything else, for that matter. Yeah, and it’d be nice if we could fly around on unicorns and Firefly had never been canceled, but we libertarians live in the real world, despite tiresome claims to the contrary. The next time you start to think anyone has a right to health care, or you hear someone else say health care is a right, remember what monstrous violations of actual human rights this entails and remind yourself or others that health care is only something you wish everyone had easy access to and weren’t overburdened with government inefficiency and regulations.

David R. Henderson writes about its pro-capitalist, anti-corporatist message, focusing largely on the inconsistent stance that one particular Objectivist, Edward Hudgins, takes:

But I don’t think Avatar is an attack on capitalism. One could leave the movie and have no idea, based on just the movie, about James Cameron’s view of capitalism. And while it did have some clichés (most movies do), I didn’t find it loaded. So what is Avatar? In fact, Avatar is a powerful antiwar movie—and a defense of property rights. For that reason, I found it easy to identify with those whose way of life was being destroyed by military might.

In fact, the defense of property rights in Avatar is so clear that, at one point in the movie, when the bad guys are justifying their war on the grounds that they need “Unobtainium,” I turned to a libertarian friend and said, “This is the Kelo decision.” Recall that the Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, decided that it was all right to take Suzette Kelo’s property from its low-tech use as a house so that a major corporation could use it for a “grander” project.

Which brings me back to whether this movie was an attack on capitalism. I think not. To the extent that it makes any statement about capitalism, Avatar is a defense of capitalism. Capitalism is based on property rights and voluntary exchange. The Na’vi had property rights in the crucial tree and various other properties surrounding it. Did they own it as individuals or as community tribal property? We can’t be sure, but probably the latter. They had refused to sell the property to the outsiders. There was nothing the outsiders could give them that would make it worth their while. What should we, if we are good capitalists, conclude? That, just as in the Kelo case, the people currently sitting on the land value it more than the outsiders. The land is already in its highest-valued use. Hudgins and Salam could argue that that’s implausible. Surely there would be some finite price that the Na’vi would take in return for the Unobtainium. Maybe, maybe not. But once the Na’vi have made it clear that they’re unwilling to exchange it, that should be the end of things, shouldn’t it?

Licensed spectrum came into being for a reason. In the early days of radio, unlicensed radio stations in urban areas regularly got into “power wars” with rival stations, leading to plenty of static. Compared to this free-for-all, the licensing of radio stations in the US, and then the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, helped to solve such problems.

Actually, very little of that paragraph has even the ring of truth. As B.K. Marcus and Timoguapo van Swanson have detailed, the homesteading principle based on libertarian property-rights theory and common-law tradition was perfectly capable of resolving bandwidth disputes and remains the best way to resolve them. The Federal Communications Commission served the interests of wealthy, politically connected dinosaurs who didn’t want to keep up with new types of competition, and it continues to serve the interests of large, established companies at the expense of small businesses and consumers today.

David Z. at No Third Solution and many other blaggers have expressed their due outrage at the treatment of the Michigan woman who was threatened with fines and possibly jail time for looking after neighbors’ children while they waited for the school bus. I have nothing to add to this sorry affair except these brief things: 1. This is an expected outcome of Statism; this is not a bug but a feature. 2. Crap like this is probably not as rare as Statolatrists would have us believe. 3. I just want to log this in my long list of examples of State-created divisiveness, of the destruction of voluntary cooperation and community by monopolistic government.

Slate magazine ran a series of articles about the dentistry industry (I bet you never realized those two words rhymed before…me, neither), including this one about why dentistry costs so much. Unsurprisingly, since it appeared in Slate, it is devoid of any serious economic analysis. The only two explanations I could glean from the article were: because government doesn’t pay for it and because other people don’t pay for it. The former would be because of a lack of socialization by our benighted leaders, and the latter because of the way dental insurance operates. Now, while an analysis of dental insurance in America could be of interest and could produce not only suggestions as to how to bring dental costs down but also provide guidance for our medical insurance industry, we get none of that. As far as I know, any actual explanation of the high costs of dentistry must include State-mandated certification (barriers to entry), regulations that prohibit less-educated and therefore lower-paid dental technicians from operating a simple dental-cleaning business (reduced competition), and the fact that for some reason, people purchase insurance for things that are relatively cheap, routine, and totally expected! This increases costs in the same way as it does for medical care!

My friend’s Facebook status currently says, “is definitely a nerd and looking forward to hearing Paul Krugman speak on Friday.” Paul Krugman is a dolt. Now that I’m unemployed, looking to move to Virginia to get in-state residency status to apply to George Mason University and become an economist, I have made this a solid, official, un-renegable goal: I will write a book titled Paul Krugman is a Dolt, it will be published, and it will receive wide acclaim.

It must be embarrassing to be a Statist writing about economics these days. Thomas Woods quotes one Harold Meyerson, who shared the extent of his ignorance with us in his recent Washington Post column. This is gold, Jerry, GOLD!

The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago [sic], is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything.
[...]
[Economists told us] there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn’t exist.

The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes.

Well, honestly, in the Austro-libertarian’s mind, yes, Keynes’s reputation is not only still intact, it has been augmented as never before.

The government has blamed the shortage of water on drought and climate change. And while droughts may be created by a shortage of water, water shortages are created by an abundance of government rein.
[...]
Instead of economical pricing there is political pricing, where pressure groups and special interests are given “rights” to use water during droughts, and at subsidized pricing. Businesses are able to use water for irrigation in the name of boosting GDP, while individuals are asked (or forced) to consume less and less. Government as the friend of the little guy is simply a myth.

Of course one may argue that water is a scarce resource, and, therefore, naturally there may be shortages. Yet all resources are scarce; water is no different from wheat or copper in this respect. Shortages do not exist in a free market because of the price system, including the profit-and-loss mechanism.