ChrisCam Broadsheet

2559.\\ The Greenroom » The Sweetness of Doing Nothing

I couldn't agree more.

This, folks, is what it looks like when government is doing too much. Government is too big. Some of us have been pointing this out for decades, but I think more and more of the Americans who don't pay much attention, as long as their lives don't have to change too much, are now waking up and realizing that government has gotten big enough to actually fulfill Michelle Obama's promise: to actually change our lives.

The truth is, Americans don't want government to change our lives. Government that does less is what more and more people are realizing we need. We don't want government that's big enough to force us to buy health insurance - or to make lesser and cheaper medical treatments the "norm" in order to save "society's" resources. We don't want government that thinks it has some reason to care how many rooms there are in our homes, and how they are heated and cooled. We don't want government that's big enough to force talk radio, TV, or internet content into a state-approved homeostasis between "left" and "right." We don't want government that can kill our jobs by making it too expensive to employ us. We certainly don't want government that employs members of a thuggish service employees' union and caters to their demands - demands that can only be satisfied by confiscating more and more from the private sector's producers: those to whom the same union employees display a surly and unhelpful demeanor when the taxpayers have the misfortune to need to do business with the government.

The ugly face of big government is plastered across every facet and every communication medium of modern life, here in 2010. What we need to realize is that it isn't possible to have big government that looks and acts any other way. This is it: this is what activist government - government that won't let us go back to our lives as usual - looks like. The time has come for government to stop "fixing" things.

Reported by Christo the Elder on March 17, 2010 @ 13:21

 TAGGED AS: Barack Obama, Big Government, Congress, HotAir, Liberty, Michelle Obama, Socialism

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2558.\\ In Your FACE!

I wonder how shocked Barry was when Ingrid Martin told him to shove his health plan up his squeaker? Joe the Plumber redux.

Reported by Christo the Elder on March 16, 2010 @ 09:47

 TAGGED AS: Health Care, Health Care Reform, Obama, ObamaCare

 |   PERMANENT LINK

2557.\\ Some Reasons for Optimism

Amid the doom and gloom of America's fiscal destruction and abolition of liberty at the hands of Obama and the Democrats, there is some glimmer of hope for the Republic.

USA Today illustrates the future demographics of the major nations of the world with its usual colorful graphics.

It isn't a panacea, but it sure does look good compared to, say, the debt and military power projections for the same time period.

Reported by Christo the Elder on March 16, 2010 @ 09:09

 TAGGED AS: America, Decline, Demographics, Economy, USA Today

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2556.\\ Obama's Health Care Illusions

If you think anything contained in Obamacare will reduce the cost of health care, you're delusional.

Blanket statements aside, there are a series of facts available to disprove anything Barry says about the monster socialist bill he's trying to ram down the throat of America. Robert Samuelson does the work the rest of the press ought to have been doing since last summer by neatly destroying any notion of Obama saving you money on health. The reality is that socialized medicine costs more, produces less and makes everyone unhappy.

Don't believe it? Think this reporter is a right-wing nutjob? Inclined to believe in ancient astronauts and 9/11 conspiracy theories instead? Well, read the piece and then argue the facts. And this article comes from the guy who hasn't voted in 30 years cause he thinks it interferes with journalistic integrity.

Best bit:

You probably think that insuring the uninsured will dramatically improve the nation's health. The uninsured don't get care or don't get it soon enough. With insurance, they won't be shortchanged; they'll be healthier. Simple.

Think again. I've written before that expanding health insurance would result, at best, in modest health gains. Studies of insurance's effects on health are hard to perform. Some find benefits; others don't. Medicare's introduction in 1966 produced no reduction in mortality; some studies of extensions of Medicaid for children didn't find gains. In the Atlantic recently, economics writer Megan McArdle examined the literature and emerged skeptical. Claims that the uninsured suffer tens of thousands of premature deaths are "open to question." Conceivably, the "lack of health insurance has no more impact on your health than lack of flood insurance," she writes.

How could this be? No one knows, but possible explanations include: (a) many uninsured are fairly healthy -- about two-fifths are age 18 to 34; (b) some are too sick to be helped or have problems rooted in personal behaviors -- smoking, diet, drinking or drug abuse; and (c) the uninsured already receive 50 to 70 percent of the care of the insured from hospitals, clinics and doctors, estimates the Congressional Budget Office.

Though it seems compelling, covering the uninsured is not the health-care system's major problem. The big problem is uncontrolled spending, which prices people out of the market and burdens government budgets. Obama claims his proposal checks spending. Just the opposite. When people get insurance, they use more health services. Spending rises. By the government's latest forecast, health spending goes from 17 percent of the economy in 2009 to 19 percent in 2019. Health "reform" would probably increase that.

If you buy the Obama snake oil on health care reform, then you'd better pony up and get yourself some nice flood insurance too.

Reported by Christo the Elder on March 16, 2010 @ 08:29

 TAGGED AS: Barack Obama, Failure, Fraud, Health Care Reform, ObamaCare, Obamanomics, Socialism

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2555.\\ Sino-American Showdown

I don't have time to write much about this since I'm dealing with an irritable little girl who just got her ear tubes this morning.

Suffice it to say, this article in the Telegraph today paints the picture of the clash many have been predicting for years (hand raised).

What's interesting is that the showdown is likely to be triggered by economics instead of traditional great-power politics, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard points out.

Best bit:

As America's creditor - owner of some $1.4 trillion of US Treasuries, agency bonds, and US instruments - China can exert leverage. But this is not what it seems. If the Politburo deploys its illusiory power, Washington can pull the plug on China's export economy instantly by shutting markets. Who holds whom to ransom?

Any attempt to retaliate by triggering a US bond crisis would rebound against China, and could be stopped - in extremis - by capital controls. Roosevelt changed the rules in 1933. Such things happen. The China-US relationship is no doubt symbiotic, but a clash would not be "mutual assured destruction", as often claimed. Washington would win.

Reported by Christo the Elder on March 15, 2010 @ 16:02

 TAGGED AS: America, China, Economy, Military, Politics, The Telegraph

 |   PERMANENT LINK

2554.\\ History's Verdict Coming Fast(er)

A number of interesting events this week that have totally slid under the collective radar. Frankly it is amazing given the level of discord on the subject of Iraq and George Bush just a few years ago.

Remarkable Newsweek cover for March 8.

And then there's this from the New York Times of all places:

At the same time, Bush profited from the fact that he kept a low profile and didn't snipe at his successor, a task left to his vice president, who therefore took upon himself the enmity and scorn previously directed at his former boss. Dick Cheney was, in effect, a lightning rod, and he was joined in that function by Sarah Palin, who slid neatly into the slot Bush had occupied in the mind of all good liberals for eight long years. Hatred and contempt of Palin is now the favorite pastime of those who have abandoned the cowboy from Texas and transferred their obsessive animus to the belle of Alaska (who, I say again, is more formidable than many in both parties believe.)

Meanwhile, Bush's policies came to seem less obviously reprehensible as the Obama administration drifted into embracing watered-down versions of many of them. Guantanamo hasn't been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday's Times with the subheading "Change or more of the same?" Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who -- yes, that's right, George W. Bush.

And now, right on schedule, Bush has resurfaced (just as I imagined him doing a year ago last September ) to join Bill Clinton in a humanitarian relief effort. He is officially a member in good standing of the ex-presidents club, and the longer he lives the more his reputation will be burnished.

And then we hear about Bush being asked by Obama to help out in Northern Ireland. This in the UK's marxist Guardian:

Amid alarm in the US at the prospect of a UUP no vote, Bush telephoned Cameron last Friday to ask him to plead with the UUP leader, Sir Reg Empey, to endorse the deal. While the UUP does not have enough votes to scupper the deal, political leaders in the US fear a no vote from the UUP could undermine support for the settlement within the DUP and among the wider unionist community.

The Guardian understands that the White House is so concerned that the US economic envoy to Northern Ireland, Declan Kelly, persuaded Bush to intervene. The former president, who took a close interest in the peace process during his years in the White House, telephoned Cameron to ask him to use his influence to persuade Empey to vote for the deal.

"There was a feeling that a conservative to conservative conversation was the right way to go about this," said one source familiar with the transatlantic negotiations. "This conversation was borne out of the concern that Empey is holding out." Another source familiar with the contact said: "This is the most active thing George W Bush has done in his post-presidency period. He has been incredibly restrained and diplomatic since leaving the White House. He has maintained radio silence."

One source familiar with thinking on Northern Ireland on both sides of the Atlantic added: "The fact that George W Bush has decided to intervene is really significant. He was interested in the peace process as president and appointed an envoy. It is a general sign of how concerned people are in the US about what David Cameron is up to."

Could it be that with everyone's hatred focused elsewhere and with a few years of history that people are looking back and thinking, "You know, he wasn't Satan after all. Hell, he may just have been right about that Iraq thing."

And here is what he said 7 years ago:

Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world. Our nation and our coalition are proud of this accomplishment -- yet it is you, the members of the United States military, who achieved it. Your courage -- your willingness to face danger for your country and for each other -- made this day possible. Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.

Operation Iraqi Freedom was carried out with a combination of precision, and speed, and boldness the enemy did not expect, and the world had not seen before. From distant bases or ships at sea, we sent planes and missiles that could destroy an enemy division, or strike a single bunker. Marines and soldiers charged to Baghdad across 350 miles of hostile ground, in one of the swiftest advances of heavy arms in history. You have shown the world the skill and the might of the American Armed Forces.

This nation thanks all of the members of our coalition who joined in a noble cause. We thank the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland, who shared in the hardships of war. We thank all of the citizens of Iraq who welcomed our troops and joined in the liberation of their own country. And tonight, I have a special word for Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld, for General (Tommy) Franks, and for all the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States: America is grateful for a job well done.

The character of our military through history -- the daring of Normandy, the fierce courage of Iwo Jima, the decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies -- is fully present in this generation. When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength, and kindness, and good will. When I look at the members of the United States military, I see the best of our country, and I am honored to be your commander in chief.

In the images of fallen statues, we have witnessed the arrival of a new era. For a hundred years of war, culminating in the nuclear age, military technology was designed and deployed to inflict casualties on an ever-growing scale. In defeating Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, Allied Forces destroyed entire cities, while enemy leaders who started the conflict were safe until the final days. Military power was used to end a regime by breaking a nation. Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war. Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.

In the images of celebrating Iraqis, we have also seen the ageless appeal of human freedom. Decades of lies and intimidation could not make the Iraqi people love their oppressors or desire their own enslavement. Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food, and water, and air. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices. And everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We are pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We have begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We are helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave -- and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

The Battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001, and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men -- the shock troops of a hateful ideology -- gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the "beginning of the end of America." By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation's resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed.

In the Battle of Afghanistan, we destroyed the Taliban, many terrorists, and the camps where they trained. We continue to help the Afghan people lay roads, restore hospitals, and educate all of their children. Yet we also have dangerous work to complete. As I speak, a special operations task force, led by the 82nd Airborne, is on the trail of the terrorists, and those who seek to undermine the free government of Afghanistan. America and our coalition will finish what we have begun.

From Pakistan to the Philippines to the Horn of Africa, we are hunting down al-Qaida killers. Nineteen months ago, I pledged that the terrorists would not escape the patient justice of the United States. And as of tonight, nearly one-half of al-Qaida's senior operatives have been captured or killed.

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of al-Qaida, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more.

In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused, and deliberate, and proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th -- the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.

Our war against terror is proceeding according to principles that I have made clear to all:

Any person involved in committing or planning terrorist attacks against the American people becomes an enemy of this country, and a target of American justice.

Any person, organization, or government that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent, and equally guilty of terrorist crimes.

Any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups, and seeks or possesses weapons of mass destruction, is a grave danger to the civilized world, and will be confronted.

And anyone in the world, including the Arab world, who works and sacrifices for freedom has a loyal friend in the United States of America.

Our commitment to liberty is America's tradition -- declared at our founding, affirmed in Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, asserted in the Truman Doctrine, and in Ronald Reagan's challenge to an evil empire. We are committed to freedom in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in a peaceful Palestine. The advance of freedom is the surest strategy to undermine the appeal of terror in the world. Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life. American values, and American interests, lead in the same direction: We stand for human liberty.

The United States upholds these principles of security and freedom in many ways -- with all the tools of diplomacy, law enforcement, intelligence, and finance. We are working with a broad coalition of nations that understand the threat, and our shared responsibility to meet it. The use of force has been, and remains, our last resort. Yet all can know, friend and foe alike, that our nation has a mission: We will answer threats to our security, and we will defend the peace.

Our mission continues. Al-Qaida is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations, and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people. The proliferation of deadly weapons remains a serious danger. The enemies of freedom are not idle, and neither are we. Our government has taken unprecedented measures to defend the homeland -- and we will continue to hunt down the enemy before he can strike.

The war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide. No act of the terrorists will change our purpose, or weaken our resolve, or alter their fate. Their cause is lost. Free nations will press on to victory.

Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home. And that is your direction tonight. After service in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters of war -- after 100,000 miles, on the longest carrier deployment in recent history -- you are homeward bound. Some of you will see new family members for the first time -- 150 babies were born while their fathers were on the Lincoln. Your families are proud of you, and your nation will welcome you.

We are mindful as well that some good men and women are not making the journey home. One of those who fell, Corporal Jason Mileo, spoke to his parents five days before his death. Jason's father said, "He called us from the center of Baghdad, not to brag, but to tell us he loved us. Our son was a soldier." Every name, every life, is a loss to our military, to our nation, and to the loved ones who grieve. There is no homecoming for these families. Yet we pray, in God's time, their reunion will come.

Those we lost were last seen on duty. Their final act on this earth was to fight a great evil, and bring liberty to others. All of you -- all in this generation of our military -- have taken up the highest calling of history. You are defending your country, and protecting the innocent from harm. And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope -- a message that is ancient, and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah: "To the captives, 'Come out!' and to those in darkness, 'Be free!"'

Thank you for serving our country and our cause. May God bless you all, and may God continue to bless America.

You know, it just doesn't seem that controversial in hindsight.

Reported by Christo the Elder on March 9, 2010 @ 12:54

 TAGGED AS: Barack Obama, George W Bush, Iraq, Mission Accomplished, President

 |   PERMANENT LINK

2553.\\ Access to Information is Not a Fundamental Right

In times such as these, where more people believe in alien abduction than have faith in the fidelity of the Federal Government, it is often with distress and alarm that I encounter news reports of such utter nonsense that it literally causes heart palpitations.

I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, that the great intellectual powerhouse that is common wisdom believes the things it believes. My 4 year old believes that Lost should be on every day, for instance. My 13 year old believes that any logical argument can be countered with 'whatever'. I'll lay odds that if you polled the world on who best represents the best hope for mankind they might just pick a fictional character. I would choose Jack Bauer, but that is beside the point.

To paraphrase Marcus Aurelius, it is pretty ridiculous to be surprised at anything which happens in this life. So it comes as no great shock, although with a meaningful level of distaste, that 4 out of 5 people polled around the world believe that the Internet, and access to it, is a fundamental human right.

I'll wait just a moment to permit Locke to finish turning in his grave. Excellent. Thank you John. And now allow me to disabuse 80% of the masses of their silly notions of 'rights'.

I think that in 2010 we must allow for the premise that rights devolve into two general categories: Natural and Civil (or Legal). Natural rights exist existentially. Humans are born with natural rights derived from God or Nature or the Cosmos or Nothing or whatever you believe in. These rights exist as a result of our existence. They are universal, are not granted by anyone or any group, cannot be revoked, cannot be given up voluntarily, cannot be modified or added to. They simply are and they are inalienable. The right to exist would be the classic one in this category. By virtue of being human and coming into this world, we have the right to live.

The Romans gave us an early sense of the right to our own imagination, conscience or soul: "the body indeed is subjected and in the power of a master, but the mind is independent, and indeed is so free and wild, that it cannot be restrained even by ... the body." And while Seneca was probably not the first to ever conceive of the notion, he may have been the first in the West to apply natural rights to the issue of slavery in order to argue against it. He pointed out that slavery was something imposed on the body from outside. It wasn't something you could do to yourself because at the heart of it, the freedom of the soul is an inalienable right. Slavery, therefore, could not exist as an extension of nature but only as an artificial socio-political construct imposed upon people. Seems obvious now, but it made him pretty unpopular since it basically argued that no man ought to be enslaved.

Inalienable rights were also described in early Sharia Law. The Islamic formulation sounds rather familiar and prevented "the right to take away from his subjects certain rights which inhere in his or her person as a human being." Fascinating that it predates John Locke by 1000 years.

Speaking of the Enlightenment, this is where we get some of our greatest thinkers on the subject of natural rights. But I'd go back a bit further and quote Martin Luther on the subject. Luther enhances the notion of the freedom of conscience and applies it to religion: "Since, then, belief or unbelief is a matter of every one's conscience, and since this is no lessening of the secular power, the latter should be content and attend to its own affairs and permit men to believe one thing or another, as they are able and willing, and constrain no one by force." Boom. Separation of Church and State and the liberty of conscience.

Thomas Hobbes took a slightly different view. He argued that the single natural right was that of self-interest. Or as he puts it in Leviathan: "to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto." The right to life and conscience naturally flows from the innate right of liberty that we are born with. By having the latter you guarantee the former two.

John Locke gives us three inalienable rights. We have the right to life in which everyone is entitled to live once they are created. We also have the right to liberty in which everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn't conflict with the first right (i.e. you don't have the right to kill someone and violate their right to life). Lastly we have the right to estate or property whereby everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn't conflict with the first two rights. I think Locke would pour cold water on the notion that music or software on the Internet is and ought to be owned by everybody who can download it. It is owned by the person who created it by natural right. Nothing you can do will ever change that.

The Scottish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson worded it slightly differently: "Thus no man can really change his sentiments, judgments, and inward affections, at the pleasure of another; nor can it tend to any good to make him profess what is contrary to his heart. The right of private judgment is therefore unalienable." You quite simply cannot by any will or force give up your right to liberty. It is therefore inalienable. Since you can't voluntarily give it up, it is there whether anyone agrees or not.

Thomas Paine added to the notion that natural rights cannot be granted by fiat or ruling or charter since this would imply that they could be revoked by the same instrument that granted them (i.e. a Constitution). As he says: "It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect -- that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. ... They...consequently are instruments of injustice."

Which leads us to the second category of rights: those that are not natural but constructed and agreed to by compact between men, groups, tribes or between the ruled and the rulers.

I'll call them civil rights. These are derived from legal constructs and are based on customs, laws or actions by legislatures. The classic example is the right to vote. You're not born with this as part of your innate human nature, it is granted by a state. It is only applicable in a state. If the state went away, so would the right. They are relative. They depend on a context established by culture and politics. The right to vote would have no meaning in a society where there was no voting.

Civil rights are artificial. They exist only as a result of the social compact between people. There is no right to go to school if the school doesn't exist because we are stone age homo sapiens in small nomadic tribes in the savannah. In that context, the right to school would only exist by permit of some law or other element of the social compact as it is in our society today. My test for what constitutes a civil right versus a natural right is simply to ask would that right exist in the absence of modern civilization? What rights do Jack Shephard and the other surviors of Oceanic 815 have while they're on the island? Certainly not the right to Medicare. They have natural rights only. As the series progresses, they form various types of social compacts to establish other rudimentary forms of civil rights such as voting on where to go and what to do. But as a whole, the characters have only their natural rights. If the right is temporary or based on some grant in the form of a law, charter or act of legislature, if it exists only within a certain socio-political context, then it is a civil or legal right, not a natural or fundamental right.

The early Sharia Law granted various civil rights. In the Constitution of Medina written in the mid-600s, the rights were specifically enumerated. In fact, that document describes rights for various groups and classes of people. It provides various civil rights to non-Muslims, for example: "The security (dhimma) of God is equal for all groups; non-Muslim members have equal political and cultural rights as Muslims. They will have autonomy and freedom of religion; non-Muslims will take up arms against the enemy of the Ummah and share the cost of war. There is to be no treachery between the two; non-Muslims will not be obliged to take part in religious wars of the Muslims." Pretty straight forward and rather progressive. One wonders what the world be like today if they had adhered to that formulation.

At any rate, the Islamic example highlights another aspect of civil rights. They have various subdivisions and subclasses that differ between contexts. There is, for example, a distinction between positive rights and negative rights. A positive right grants permission to do something or receive something. Receiving welfare would be a positive right. Negative rights grant permission to do nothing or receive nothing. This the right to be left alone, an entitlement to non-interference. The right against robbery is a negative right. However, because civil rights are contextual, some rights are both positive and negative depending on the political context. In the United States voting is a negative right, that is, you have the right to vote but you don't have to vote. In other countries voting is a positive right. You have the right to vote and you do not have the right to not vote. You must vote or face a penalty.

There are other classes of civil rights. There are individual rights, group rights, liberty rights and claim rights. There are even other formulations entirely of civil rights. The most popular one divides them into a hierarchical set of three 'generations' of rights, each dependent upon the previous generation. The point is that all of these are established only via social compact between peoples. They don't exist without that government or charter or law.

Yes, various historians and philosophers have argued that natural rights don't exist at all or they do exist but only when civil rights are first established. Thomas Aquinas sliced and diced the meanings of natural and positive civil rights. Edmund Burke, Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham are among those who think natural rights are rubbish and any right to life can only exist when laws permit it. There are others who quibble about the natural right of a man do something versus the natural ability of him to do it. I would say that it is a complicated matter. But what cannot be denied is the basic principle of the right to liberty of one's own conscience. No law granted by any authority can violate this right to thought. It exists in nature, it exists without government, without law and without agreement. It is involuntary and inalienable. Given that this 'natural' right exists regardless of context, I cannot but endorse the notion that there are at least two categories of rights. Even if there is only a single natural right, there is still at least two categories.

Which brings me to why I felt compelled to write this history of philosophy lecture. There is no natural right to the Internet or the information on it. Let me repeat, humans do not have a fundamental right to the Internet. The Internet only exists because it was invented by man. Access to it only exists because governments have permitted that access. The information on it is only consumable because the owners of that information permit its use. Whether any of this is desirable or progressive or needed is irrelevant. The fact remains that access to information on the Internet (or off it for that matter) is permitted and that permission can be revoked at will. It is most certainly not a fundamental right.

You may even argue that it isn't a right at all. If it is any kind of right, it is a civil right. And within that category it may still not even be a right. If it is at all, it is not a First Generation or even Second Generation right. It may be covered under the Third Generation right to communicate but even that seems a stretch since you can communicate without the Internet. In any event, none of the Second or Third Generation rights are even universally recognized or granted. Even the First Generation rights are applicable to only a fraction of the human race. It is entirely dependent on law, politics, policy and societal context.

There is no right to own a dog. You may own a dog, it isn't illegal, but you do not have a right to it that is enshrined in and protected by founding documents. The act of owning a dog is enabled or prevented by local laws. I would argue that the same principle applies to the Internet. It is a medium. You have no more 'right' to a medium than you do to a dog. Secondly, there is nothing that the Internet provides that cannot be obtained some other way. You don't have a 'right' to watch Hulu or chat with perverts on Chatroulette. You can get medical advice without WebMD. You can learn history and philosophy without ChrisCam. Sure the Internet makes it easier to get information or communicate. But in the same way a car makes it easier for me to get to New York, I have no entitlement to a car. I can walk to New York.

Perhaps there are societies out there (looking at you Scandinavia) where the social compact includes an entitlement or civil right to a car (or free access to the Internet). This is likely to also be the society where the civil rights are so vast and so enumerated in such detail so as to adversely impact the natural right to liberty. You can already see some of this in our own society. Recently passed hate crime legislation makes it worse to commit a crime when thinking something that is disagreeable to the majority of the society. It may intend well, but it treads on the natural right to liberty of conscience and liberty of thought upon which the entire social edifice is built. Such a society cannot, therefore, endure. It will eventually contravene natural rights to such a degree that it will collapse by decay or armed insurrection. Our Founders understood that. That is why they constructed our social compact to protect natural rights as the bedrock of the system. Violate those rights and the rest is meaningless.

The Internet and/or access to it is not a fundamental right. Neither is it a civil right. The act of attempting to make it so will by its very rationale trample on the natural rights which underpin the civil ones.

Reported by Christo the Elder on March 8, 2010 @ 11:35

 TAGGED AS: Aquinas, Civil Rights, Edmund Burke, Hegel, Hutcheson, John Locke, Liberty, Lost, Luther, Natural Rights, Paine, Rights, Rousseau

 |   PERMANENT LINK

2552.\\ Sowell: Too Many Apologies

Brilliant piece today by Thomas Sowell.

I think he hits it straight on when he identifies and laments the absence of personal responsibility in our society. It has been creeping for years, of course, even decades. But the success of the American Republic is absolutely dependent on individualism and responsibility not collectivism and blame.

We are now embarked on a grand experiment in collectivization and group think. It may work out. But it certainly represents the end of the experiment that began in 1787.

Best bit:

For more than a century, the intelligentsia have been trying to get us to focus on the "root causes" of crime-- supposedly created by "society"-- instead of locking up thieves or executing murderers.

If some people don't have the money or the achievements of others, that too is society's fault, in the eyes of those for whom personal responsibility is an outmoded idea.

Personal responsibility is a real problem for those who want to collectivize society and take away our power to make our own decisions, transferring that power to third parties like themselves, who imagine themselves to be so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us.

Aimless apologies are just one of the incidental symptoms of an increasing loss of a sense of personal responsibility-- without which a whole society is in jeopardy.

Reported by Christo the Elder on February 24, 2010 @ 09:57

 TAGGED AS: America, Constitution, Thomas Sowell

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