This post does have a point. I really liked this post from a blag called The Whited Sepulchre. It rants against “locavores” who want to grow all their own food or buy it from their neighbors and, presumably by extension, to buy most everything in their lives locally or make it themselves, and yet still live something resembling a 20th- or 21st-century life.

Adbusters supports something called “Buy Nothing Day”

(It’s on November 26th. You’re supposed to purchase nothing. Don’t support your neighbors, your friends, or anyone but yourself. Don’t swap your own stuff for anyone else’s. Regardless of their intent, that’ll be the result.)
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I was kind of enjoying their (ahem) unique point of view until I got to this quote. It’s from a guy named Bill Mollison, founder of something called the Permaculture Movement.

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

Oh for the love of God. Where to begin, where to begin.

We are more secure than we’ve ever been because we can’t look out our kitchen windows and see our entire food supply. If the view from your kitchen is your only food supply, and something happens to the area in front of the kitchen window, you’re in deep, deep shit. Google the word “famine” when time permits.

But if you have cheerfully taken part in the capitalist evils of globalization, you don’t have to worry as much. Iowa could waste its entire wheat crop by converting it to enthanol or some other useless boondoggle, and it will hurt me. But there’s always Nebraska. And Canada. And Russia. The Ukraine. As long as those places are growing wheat, and as long as someone in our government doesn’t shut down the supply of wheat (to protect American jobs), then I’ll probably be okay.

As long as some raving locavore doesn’t require me to live off what’s visible from my kitchen window, I’ll be okay.

But wait, Mr. Bill Mollison, founder of the Permaculture Movement, there’s more. I’ve got more for you. Where are you going to get your kitchen, the kitchen you’re going to look out from to view your wheat, your bananas, your strawberries, your lowfat decaf triple-skinny mocha, your carrots, lettuce, arugula, your mineral supplements and your chicken, fish, and occasional slice of roast beef? Where will this kitchen be produced? The kitchen itself. The wood, the brick, the sheetrock, the heat and air vents, the electrical wiring, the ducts, the oven, the stove, the sink and the water faucets? The refrigerator? Pots, pans, and George Foreman Grill? Does that have to come from your front yard?

Will you need to grow the trees for wood within view of the damn kitchen, just to feel safe? Are you going to set up a kiln to make bricks out of local mud? Mr. Mollison, have you ever looked at the different locations that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand blindly coordinates in a united effort to put ceramic tile on your countertops and your floors? Are you going to go off into a blind lefty panic if some of that stuff is manufactured by little dark people who don’t look like you, you racist son of a bitch?

Sorry about that. I can’t stand racism masquerading as compassionate save-the-earth do-goodism. Back to the topic at hand….

Let’s get to the window itself, that window Mollison is looking out of to see his garden and his wheat field and chickens and goats and fish tank and brick kiln and lumber forest and all the other things required to make Bill Mollison feel safe from the efforts of other people in strange places with funny names.

Bill, do you have any idea, any idea at all, what goes into making a damn window? Do you want all that going on in your front yard? Or is food the only thing that makes you break out in fantods if it’s handled by Mexicans? Is it ok if Mexicans or Canadians, or people from across the county line make your window?

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

Ok, we’re getting to the end of that insane sentence. “We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window….and see our friends working nearby.” Hell, is there going to be room for them if Bill Mollison requires all of this industry in his front yard? Or are they all going to be Bill Mollison’s employees?
What will the view have to look like from their kitchen windows if they have the same phobias and anxieties that afflict Bill Mollison?

Do you think we might all be better off if we allow everyone else in the world to compete for the honor and privilege of producing our food, kitchens and windows? And we can give them what we produce in return? And maybe, just maybe, they can one day have a kitchen of their own? With windows?

I think the fact that locavore morans like Bill Mollison don’t go buy a few acres of woods and live off the land with their moran hippie friends is strong evidence of my assertion that they want to live a 20th- or 21st-century lifestyle while still growing and making just about everything on their own. What is stopping them? Land is cheaper than housing. I bet there are enough of them to form a community of idiots who think that that life would be anything but toil, misery, and disease. Why not go practice what they preach? Because they enjoy the amenities of modern semi-capitalist life and the benefits the worldwide division of labor brings, that’s why. Maybe they want to remain active participants in the modern world so they can increase support for the State-backed enforcement of their locavore lunacy on captive victims. Anyone who thinks that a logical extension of locavorism would allow people to be much more than hunter-gatherers or, perhaps, Medieval serfs simply isn’t paying attention.

The Big Election! “Are you for the left or the right? Are you Democrat, Republican? Are you liberal, conservative?” One of the greatest divide-and-conquers in country history. …Let me tell you something about politics: it’s no different from professional wrestling. It’s one great show. At the end of the day, they all get together, and they have their steaks, and they laugh at jackasses like you and I that think we’re important and think we’re actually doing something to change our country. … I would not be shocked, at the end of the day, Mr. Oz pulls away his curtain and says, “I fooled all you retards. All of you.”
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Where’s your favorite pizza place? You know what your favorite pizza place in the world is? Are you going to vote on it? …I live in a little town in Jersey. [Leading up to] the town election, you know when you see the dumb little lawn names? …Now, the guy in the corner of my block is a builder, he had “Bill” on his thing [lawn sign], and the whole town loved “Bill”, we knew “Bill” brings his kids to play softball, and blah blah blah. Two weeks later, a lot of names changed, especially guys that were builders. Now they were for “Fred”. And I really thought, like, “Wow, maybe they’re getting paid to put these things on the lawn. Maybe that’s the deal. Let me check, because…maybe my stock’s a little higher—’Hey, I was a goat on television, and TV guide…’—might get a little extra cash, a little per diem.” So I asked my neighbor, “Why did you have ‘Bill’ on your sign?” “Oh, my god, I love ‘Bill’. I think ‘Bill’ should be the mayor, hands down.” “Why do you have ‘Fred’ up?” “Because I need permits. And when I went to go get my permit, they told me, ‘Well, if you get rid of that sign, we can help you a lot quicker.’”

Now, as much as you think, “Oh, that’s small-town stuff,” don’t think for one second that doesn’t happen in the big picture. The genius part of it all is your mind is manipulated…. And what cracks me up is [people say], “We’re all about education! And I’d like to think that I have my own conscience!” That’s what you’d like to think.
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The only way you can get a full grasp on it is, honestly: do not read one newspaper…and do not watch news for two weeks. …If you stop watching news, you start realizing how ridiculous it is and how much of a scam and a scandal and an agenda it all is, just to manipulate.
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[T]his is what they do: “Here’s the subject: homosexuality. This side believes blah blah blah. This side—” Why is there “this side” or “that side”? Why isn’t it just a conversation? …”Are you with them, or are you with them?” It’s professional wrestling at its genius best.”

I don’t think it’s necessarily correct or all that productive to talk in conspiracy-theory tones like many libertarians do and like Jim Breuer does there, as though everything coming from TV, newspapers, and government employees is part of a consciously designed manipulative plan, but in the end it doesn’t particularly matter if the manipulation is consciously designed or not; if the results are the same whether people’s thoughts and feelings are shaped deliberately or just the natural result of a Statist societal structure, then the effect is equally distressing. People believe that politics and governmental coercion not only can solve problems but are in fact the best way to solve many problems; people believe that Democrats care more about the common man and restraining corporate power than Republicans and Republicans care more about individual rights and economic freedom than Democrats; people believe that voting is a duty that they owe to society and is a privilege that gives them the power to change society and the right to complain about the problems they caused; people believe they are lucky to be granted this power and this privilege by their relatively caring and enlightened government; people convince themselves that voting for the lesser of two evils is not the least bit evil!

Some of that propaganda probably comes from politicians, advisors, and bureaucrats who know that the two-party system is a sham and that voting won’t change anything fundamentally, so that is conscious manipulation. However, I doubt that is the major source of all of those misconceptions. I think it’s clear that the political problems we face are more the result of an all-pervading system than a relatively few evil geniuses, and this makes them less easily surmountable because, at least in theory, the evil geniuses could be replaced with good people, whereas the all-pervading system is much more difficult to even dent, much less take down and replace. We have the advantage that the State must inevitably destroy itself with its bloat and inefficiency, at which point the society that remains must be armed with the philosophical and moral principles to form the foundation of a truly free social order, in which coercion is never an acceptable means of change and no person or group is given power that others don’t have.

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.

This contrast is not good.

No, it isn’t. This brings two important points to my mind. First is Thomas Friedman’s conclusion: the Imperial Federal Government wastes an almost unimaginable sum of its subjects’ wealth. A lot of people, like Republocrats and, especially, Tea Partiers, like to cite America’s lower taxes and fewer regulations and generally more free economy as reasons for our superior quality of life (in some ways). Of course, many also wisely rail against the increasing taxes and over-regulation, etc., as stifling economic growth, and this is as important a subject as any in our modern political discourse. However, an underappreciated facet of that discussion is that the Imperial Federal Government does do a lot of things wrong that most governments don’t. It certainly wastes more money on the military and bloated programs like NASA than other countries. I have the impression that it also favors large corporate interests and is more “corporatist” than most other (e.g., European) governments. We are not more free, less regulated, or less screwed over than other developed countries in any meaningful way. That’s a complete myth. The military is by far the primary reason for this. If most of that money were spent on something useful or productive, our financial quality of life and therefore the strength of our families and communities would grow like we’ve never seen.

The main reason I bring up that link is what it means for China: they’re on the path to the same type of centrally planned bloat that afflicts all societies after they experience some affluence and start becoming complacent and arrogant. I figured it would take a long time for the NIH/NASA/HUD/green-subsidizing type of bloat to replace the corrupt Communist oppression that has characterized that country for so long. Maybe it still will be a while. But from my perspective, they’re ahead of the curve in over-spending and over-regulating themselves into poverty. This might sound kind of stupid because that’s exactly what their Communist government has done for three generations. Maybe it is. Either way, it isn’t a good sign.

According to many people, this 25-year plan looks good for China. In fact, it probably will help the Chinese people in many ways. Many of these things might have been done in a free China. They certainly seem to need some kind of environmentally friendly changes in their cities. But it doesn’t matter how good the ideas are, how well they are managed, how many people they employ, or how much better its government is than it was last century. Central planning cannot allocate resources as efficiently as the free decisions of free people using the price system. Governments can only make decisions politically, which cannot enrich a population as well as decisions that are made economically.

In the end, this means China will have tens of thousands of people conducting basic research that will not help people in proportion to the amount of wealth expended in conducting the research. (If it did, how could we ever tell? How could people decide for themselves what was worth their money and what wasn’t? How could the ineffective expenses be replaced with more economically efficient ones?) They will have unnecessarily expensive, fancy airports that will inevitably be managed by corrupt bureaucrats who couldn’t flip burgers in a free country. (Not that this changes anything.) They will have politically protected, over-funded, deteriorating railways that need subsidies to survive. (At least, that’s the way it happened in the United States, another large country with widely spaced population centers.) They will go through a green bubble like the one Barack Obama is creating over here and be left with companies, products, and R&D departments that exist because of political correctness and not necessarily because of scientific correctness or economic worth.

Better central planning is still central planning. If China had a 25-year plan to get rid of dozens of government agencies/offices and fire hundreds of thousands of government employees (as if that would actually hold up through multiple changes of leadership), that would be real change.

(Hat tip: Henry Blodget)

In a further affront to free enterprise and an indication of where Roddenberry et al.’s biases lay, the most prominently featured businessmen were the Ferengi, a caricature so unrealistic as to be useless as an instrument of social commentary. However, they did give us some useful nuggets of wisdom on occasion, like this miniature economic lesson from Nog to Chief O’Brien in the last season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:

[T]he Great Material Continuum… It’s the force that binds the universe together. …You see, there are millions upon millions of worlds in the universe, each one filled with too much of one thing and not enough of another. And the Great Continuum flows through them all, like a mighty river, from have to want and back again. And if we navigate the Continuum with skill and grace, our ship will be filled with everything our hearts desire.
—Treachery, Faith, and the Great River
 

It’s quite simplistic, but if you replace “worlds” with “people”, it isn’t a bad starting point for an introductory lesson on economics.

It is fitting that such a good example of the interdependence of all people on each other’s material well-being could be articulated only because Starfleet couldn’t simply buy what it wanted: Nog was explaining to Chief O’Brien why he had to set up a string of barters with two middlemen in order to obtain an item they could trade for what they ultimately needed. With currency, the transaction would be consummated between only the first and fourth parties: Deep Space Nine and the ship that had the part they needed. (Or, since they’re all part of a single military organization, I guess Starfleet could have just ordered the other ship to donate the part to Deep Space Nine, but that would have eliminated half the plot of the episode and cost us a good lesson in Ferengi philosophy.)

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.

If you want a recipe for real disgust with the prevailing political establishment, and a real opening for radical critique, one of the things that has to happen is that dissidents need to begin to see that even the longed-for best-case scenario can’t possibly deliver what they want, because what they were promised just won’t fit through the political channels that they had put their hope in. An obvious tool like George W. Bush inspires a lot of fear and loathing; but he also inspires a lot of faith in the myth that if only someone who wasn’t such an obvious tool were in power, these problems would all get sorted out right quick. But when you have a ballyhooed reformer holding the reins of power, over-promising and under-delivering—and when it becomes increasingly clear that politics as usual will keep on keeping on—that’s often when you begin to see a real chance for a crack-up.

Recessions, like hurricanes, leave wreckage behind—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, and sometimes even tattered philosophies.

The philosophy of economic conservatism has long been one of unquestioned deregulation. Conservatives have considered it as a way of unhooking government leashes that the economy strains against, setting it free to run at full speed and lead us to wealth.

Well, that’s certainly how the story goes, and I’ll grant that many economists and politicians labeled as conservative once railed against the tax-and-spend-and-regulate policies of the Democrats. But their influence in the conservative movement has been waning for a good many decades now. I mean, I don’t know of any conservatives who have been calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, numerous cabinet departments, or federal agencies. They still seem to oppose tax increases, but they don’t oppose the spending or the regulation.

But this philosophy seemed to collapse in the moral and financial wreckage of today’s recession. Like many conservatives, I was left facing uncomfortable questions, chiefly: Is capitalism itself fatally flawed?

McDonnold then goes over some of Karl Marx’s theories about why capitalism is fatally flawed. From what I know, it is an accurate representation of Marx’s theories and I’ll give him credit for citing some ideas of Marx other than “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” I think my objections to Marx here would be standard libertarian assertions: the concentration of capital into few hands comes along with the concentration of power into few hands, which is facilitated by Statism and hindered by libertarianism.

As recently as 1980, the US was a nation of mostly small- and medium-sized banks. Employees knew, often on a personal basis, both the depositors and the borrowers. Deposits that were not loaned out had to be kept in low-risk investments such as government bonds.

People who claimed the mantle of conservatism dismantled the regulations behind this system. This shook the industry. Through mergers and acquisitions, resources were centralized. The number of banks declined. Huge conglomerates arose and created the complex world of global finance that later collapsed. This is capitalism’s dark side of impersonal corporations, recessions, and class conflict.

I really don’t buy it. And not because I have this need to object to any and all blame that anyone places on smaller government/more freedom; it’s because we don’t have smaller government and we aren’t more free. This should be obvious to anyone. The president has more powers than ever and the number of laws governing business is ever-increasing. I will always consider the possibility that the particular governmental function that was eliminated or the order in which interventions were eased can yield negative consequences—for instance, I’ve read that some type of tax break relating to home ownership might have induced more people to buy homes they couldn’t afford. However, the correct response to such problems is to keep increasing our personal and economic freedom or to return as many freedoms as possible to us at once, because the government intervention was the problem in the first place.

The problem with conservatives is that they very obviously don’t see government intervention as a problem and they don’t see personal or economic freedom as a solution to anything. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or ignorant. Stop listening to what they say and look at the facts. Their record speaks for itself.

Another famous thinker, Adam Smith, saw a different side of capitalism. Seven decades before the “Manifesto,” he wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” about the capitalism of his day. It was one of small, decentralized firms—butchers and bakers. The driving force was not blind greed but a healthy interest in improving one’s own lot by helping others. It was a capitalism that looked a lot like the banking sector before deregulation.

Is that the “free market” and the “deregulated” banking sector you’re talking about? The one that’s done so much damage?

Capitalism itself is not fatally flawed. But a hyperconservative approach to it is.

Regulations that promote decentralized competition on a human scale are regulations that conserve Smith’s side of capitalism. These regulations should not be the enemy of conservatives; they should be our aim.

When you hear what passes for conservative punditry nowadays, it’s no wonder Republicans are losing power and influence faster than ever. What a stupid, vacuous, hypocritical “ideology.” What an embarrassing collection of misogynist, racist xenophobes, fundamentalist Bible-fetishists, third-rate shysters, and authoritarian police state apologists.

Robert Heinlein said, “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” Libertarians have known for decades, since before Rothbard’s time, that conservatives not only fit nicely into the former group but lead the charge, all while claiming (na&#239vely or deviously) to champion freedom. After 8 years of both stupid and evil efforts to control others, it’s good to see mainstream conservatives are finally realizing and admitting that libertarians were right about them.

Her friends’ responses: “hear hear!” “No guns and arms? That settles it, no more gym.” (admittedly, kind of funny) “But then what the hell am I going to do in Texas? Ah well at least I can still drink and drive.” “True dat!”

No kidding! We should probably also make murder illegal—that would really dissuade demented psychopaths from murdering anybody!

This country sucks because its citizens suck, and it’s only going to get suckier in my lifetime. I am more afraid of fascist police-state advocates like these than I am of gun-wielding maniacs. Mainly because the government will always have guns.

Do these people ever notice that the frequency of maniacal public shootings like the one in Binghamton, NY, has only increased in recent decades along with the increase in police-state measures like gun-control laws? Correlation does not prove causality, but it sure as hell doesn’t prove that the measures prevent mass murders! Get it through your head: We already have somewhat strict gun-control laws, no additional number or severity of gun-control laws will keep guns out of the United States, murderous psychopaths are never swayed by the existing laws against murder or against owning the guns, they will simply turn to bombings or something else if they can’t get ahold of a gun easily, the government will ALWAYS have guns and that is a bad thing (which was the entire point of the Second Amendment), a society would be better off trying to keep people from wanting to shoot 30 people instead of preventing anyone from owning a gun, and the increasing influence that the State has had in our lives during the last century is most definitely a significant source of the strife, hatred, poverty, desperation, isolation, and psychosis that drives people to public mass murder.

The bellowing blowhard busybody brigade complains these crosses — built on land the church owns, with money freely given to the church for that purpose — would encroach upon the views from their yards. Sad as that may be, the view from your yard stops being your own private property once you start looking over another’s land.
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Of course, we are informed government zoning laws require shorter crosses. No doubt; that’s exactly why government zoning is a ridiculous and petty tyranny. Such laws should be immediately and completely abolished.

Leave South Hills Church alone. What goes up on their own property is their own business.

I’ve never even been to Nevada, but I bet Charles didn’t really think such principled advocation of property rights would be looked upon favorably by a city newspaper. (Update: Well, Vin Suprynowicz writes for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and they’ve tolerated him for years, but this was a different paper.)

I understand the objection that many Statists have to a hypothetical world without zoning laws. People would have to suffer hog-fat rendering plants on one side of their homes and airports on another! I doubt that would happen, for a variety of reasons. For instance, homesteading rights for homeowners and homeowners’ associations who were there first and protection against pollution from industrial properties, in a libertarian, common-law tradition, would serve us just fine. And, admit it: the free market is capable of innovating and implementing myriad solutions that you and I and (especially) State bureaucrats never would have thought of. It isn’t a good idea for Statists to deny this truth anymore; steadfast opposition to any and all individual freedoms is more consistent.

Statists imagine that homes and businesses would be ugly, they would pollute, they would be loud, they would generally be impossible to deal with and would lower everyone’s property values, without the stern fist of the State to impose order upon them. Yes, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it. What a nightmare. Almost as hellish as living under a monopolistic state that wastes trillions of dollars and destroys wealth with unmatched tenacity; that extracts property taxes, income taxes, estate taxes, sales taxes, capital gains taxes, and every other tax it can get away with and shoots you dead if you protest enough; that monopolizes the currency, the utilities, the justice [sic] system, the education system; that, in an increasingly transparent and brazen (or clueless) fashion enriches itself at the expense of its subjects; that operates by threatening, fining, beating, kidnapping, enslaving, and murdering people who do things with their own property that it disapproves of—those are far, far worse, by many orders of magnitude, than living across the street from a church that builds three large crosses on its own property.

I did like two passages that Oliva quoted in his post. First, from David Gordon, critiquing Sunstein and Thaler’s conception of “libertarian paternalism”:

In their view, only actions that meet rigid requirements count as full choices. Smokers, research indicates, haven’t fully taken into account the heath risks of smoking. Thus, they cannot be said “really” to choose to smoke. Further, people are often subject to so-called “framing” effects: they will “choose” differently when confronted with identical options, depending on how the options are presented. Choices in these circumstances, Thaler and Sunstein aver, are problematic: how can we say that people in the grip of conceptual illusions are freely choosing?

In other words, their own ideas of choice and individual rights fail under their own argument’s premises.

What is left? Given the authors’ wide net, few actions count as rational choices. There is thus practically unlimited scope for the state to suppress liberty: in doing so, it is not interfering with what the self “really” wants. True enough, the authors preach a mild doctrine. Nudges, not force, are on their agenda. But they lack a rational basis for this limit. If people do not “really” choose their actions, why not forcibly restrict them? After all, doing so may enable them better to achieve what they “really” want—as experts, suitably instructed by Thaler and Sunstein, determine.

Second was a critique written by Tom Palmer of Sunstein’s earlier book, The Cost of Rights:

Mild-mannered University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has been advancing the radical notion that all rights—including rights usually held to be “against” the state, such as the right to freedom of speech and the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned or tortured—are grants from the state. In a book co-authored with Stephen Holmes, The Cost of Rights, he argued that “all legal rights are, or aspire to be, welfare rights,” that is, positive grants from the state. There is no difference in kind between the right not to be tortured and the right to taxpayer-subsidized dental care.

[Sunstein and Holmes fully endorse FDR’s] “second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all.” Among the rights FDR proposed were the rights to “a useful and remunerative job,” “a decent home,” “adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment,” and “a good education.”

…he states that “if the nation becomes committed to certain rights, they may migrate into the Constitution itself”.

There is no one who understands the first thing about freedom or individualism who would mistake a single thought excreted by this useless piece of shit for anything remotely approaching libertarian. It isn’t even paternalistic. It is pure militant fascism.

Cass R. Sunstein would shoot you and your family right in your foreheads before allowing you to live your lives as you please, as free, sovereign individuals.