A glimmer of libertarianism

The (D) after his name suggests there are cases where Rep. Barney Frank has voted against the principle he states here about the anti-gambling bill, but for now, it’s useful to point out that at least one Representative in Congress has a clue about his role:

“If an adult in this country, with his or her own money, wants to engage in an activity that harms no one, how dare we prohibit it because it doesn’t add to the GDP or it has no macroeconomic benefit. Are we all to take home calculators and, until we have satisfied the gentleman from Iowa that we are being socially useful, we abstain from recreational activities that we choose?… People have said, What is the value of gambling ? Here is the value. Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn’t that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.

That’s 89% fantastic. I’d change only the last sentence, to something like this:

If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we do not have the power to prohibit it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.

That gets to the true principle, based on the liberty guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Congress gets its powers from us. It does not grant us our rights. Kudos to Rep. Frank for stating what needs to be said.

Hat tip: Hit and Run

This is not an argument for unions

Why do we keep hearing that employees are powerless against big, bad corporations? Lately, it’s always Wal-Mart, as it is in this story, except the story reveals the lie in the anti-capitalist sales pitch:

For months, politicians and activists have been saying that the low prices at the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), come at a tremendous cost to its low-paid employees. They point to lawsuits that contend the company discriminates against women and forces low-paid employees to work through lunch breaks and after their shifts, without extra compensation. Wal-Mart has also been boosting its political contributions to stop initiatives aimed at forcing the retailer to raise pay and benefits … .

Using contentions in a lawsuit is little more than hearsay until the case is resolved, of course. And I’m not sure how any company could “force” employees to do anything. Barring accusations of slavery, grudgingly acquiescing to an employer request isn’t a forced action.

Oh, wait, sorry. I got lost on the way to the bulk of the story. Here it is:

Now, as Wal-Mart rolls out a new round of workplace restrictions, employees at a Wal-Mart Super Center in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., are taking matters into their own hands. On Oct. 16, workers on the morning shift walked out in protest against the new policies and rallied outside the store, shouting “We want justice” and criticizing the company’s recent policies as “inhuman.” Workers said the number of participants was about 200, or nearly all of the people on the shift.

This demonstrates an intelligent response. If they don’t like what’s going on, they should leave. Granted, stopping at the front entrance isn’t quite far enough, and chanting “We want justice” is probably excessive. But I’m missing the forced part that amounts to an injustice. They’re equal partners in a transaction. When they accept that, they’ll find they’re not as powerless as they’re told. This concept is simple enough, and here is another data point, if they’re interested in learning the real lesson.

What else should we amend out of the Bill of Rights?

I’d planned to write something about a poll in today’s Washington Post indicating that 53% of Virginians support the proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage. But David Boaz explained this story in the perfect context, so I’ll excerpt a bit here.

All these journalists are doing the supporters’ work for them. Bans on gay marriage have passed everywhere they’ve been placed on the ballot. That’s what the supporters of the Virginia amendment want voters to think they’re voting on. But that’s not what the Virginia amendment really does.

Same-sex marriage is already prohibited in Virginia, and there’s no prospect of legislative or judicial change in that fact. So this amendment is touted as banning something that is already banned.

Read his commentary. It’s short, and spells out exactly what the bigots want to achieve.

From the article, there are two useful quotes from people who clearly slept through their civics lessons while still in school.

“My religion teaches that marriage is between a man and a woman, and quite frankly, that’s all I need to help me understand how I need to vote,” said Sandy Ledford, 57, a housewife from Botetourt County, in the state’s rural southwest. “It’s pretty simple for me.”

“I’m not a homophobe,” said Charles Wortham, 60, a dentist from Hanover County, outside Richmond. “My view is simply that marriage is there to establish a legal process for the procreation of children. It’s Mother Nature. Same-sex couples can’t naturally reproduce, so it doesn’t seem like they should be able to marry like a traditional family.”

So we should enact the parts of the Bible that suggest stoning, slavery, and other such actions we’ve abandoned? And when will we implement fertility tests into the marriage licensing process? Worth asking, since he’s not a homophobe.

Will he figure out how the Constitution works on November 7th?

Until today, we were nothing more than a nation of lawlessness strangely organized with sham system of courts, laws and rules. Thankfully, President Bush fixed that oversight by signing the torture bill into law. Consider these quotes from our Dear Leader:

  • “With the bill I’m about to sign, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people will face justice,” Bush said.
  • “It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill that he knows will save American lives,” Bush said. “I have that privilege this morning.”
  • “We will answer brutal murder with patient justice,” Bush said. “Those who kill the innocent will be held to account.”

That last quote deserves a little ranting. Patient justice is an interesting euphemism for beating the shit out of detainees until we get the answer we like. And it’s worth noting that our president wants refuses to hold those who torture the innocent to account. Worth noting, since more than 200 years of legal, ethical, and historical precedent suggests this is the wrong action.

One more quote warrants attention:

“Over the past few months, the debate over this bill has been heated, and the questions raised can seem complex,” he said. “Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few. Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously? And did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”

With time the question we’ll most ponder is whether or not this generation took the threat seriously. As long as we scrunch up our faces with mad determination, we’re doing well. This president sees no distinction between accepting the threat and taking specific actions to counter the threat. He is incompetent.

Does this make me a political vegan?

This, from an article about Sen. Specter’s efforts to acknowledge existing Constitutional principles within the recent torture bill, shows what’s wrong with Congress:

But for at least some Democrats involved in lobbying on the bill, the defeat of these amendments — plus Specter’s — was not entirely an unhappy result. Some lawyers representing detainees told lawmakers before the vote that they were convinced the Supreme Court would strike down Bush’s version of the bill.

They argued against a compromise — such as Specter’s unoffered amendment — on grounds that it could make the outcome more difficult for the court to reject, a senior Democratic aide said. “We were hearing from some of the constitutional experts that . . . it is better to leave the pig ugly than put lipstick on it,” the aide said, explaining why Democrats did not propose a habeas corpus amendment that might have won.

I understand the logic, but it’s a sad indictment of the hacks in Congress that everyone can just leave the mess to the Supreme Court. That’s certainly no guarantee that the President will be held to his Constitutional limits.

Do it for Thomas Jefferson

Should any polls suggesting that Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban will fail needs to focus on stories like this one from Manassas:

In the past three years, the Manassas City Council has received two applications for home-based massage therapy businesses, and members have approved both. Then Howard Daniel, who is gay, applied.

The backlash against Daniel’s request began last month when nearly two dozen people, many of them members of a local church, spoke in opposition to it at a public hearing. When it came time for the city to decide on Daniel’s application the next week, council members balked and voted instead to consider changing the city’s zoning laws.

The city’s response and the community opposition have blindsided Daniel and his supporters, one of whom had an anti-gay message written on his car.

Manassas should be familiar to anyone who cares about individual rights.

Questions of discrimination are already sensitive in Manassas, which is currently under federal investigation for housing policies that allegedly target Hispanic residents, a violation of the Fair Housing Act.

It’s all okay in this case, though, because the members of the council are principled:

If the council votes on Daniel’s application at next Monday’s meeting, at least three of the council’s six members said they are likely to vote against it. One is Jackson H. Miller, the Republican candidate for the 50th District of the House of Delegates, who introduced the motion to approve another massage therapy business a year earlier.

“I’ve had a mixed record on home businesses,” Miller said. “I’m opposed if neighbors are opposed. That’s been my standard,” he said, noting that he voted with the council earlier this year to reject an application for a home-based optometry clinic.

This majoritarian belief that individual rights are subject to the review of others must stop. Until it does, it just reveals bigotry. It’s that simple.

I am not a right-wing economist

I haven’t read the associated study, but the way The Observer reported the findings lacked what I think is the correct assumption about the flat tax. Consider:

Flat taxes fail to boost revenues, as their advocates claim, and are likely to be abandoned by the countries that have introduced them, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund.
…

But the IMF analysts who carried out the research cast doubt on the main advantage claimed for flat taxes: that they increase revenues by allowing people to pocket more of their hard-earned cash, and thus persuade them to work harder.

That’s not really the point. Tax equality is the main advantage because income redistribution is ethically wrong. The government shouldn’t be punishing anyone through its tax policy, which is the core result of progressive income taxes. The government should set the tax rate to generate the necessary revenue to meet its (legitimate) expenditures. Ultimately, the flat tax is a means, not the goal.

The report is here.

Love is the family value, not gender distribution

I find this news interesting:

Former U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds, the first openly gay person elected to Congress, died early Saturday at Boston Medical Center, several days after he collapsed while walking his dog, his husband [Dean Hara] said.

Mr. Studds has been in the news lately for something that happened more than three decades ago. (Read the story if you don’t know what it is, or why it’s relevant.) But that’s not the interesting part. That last part, his husband, is the key.

A major newspaper can report that as part of the story without including sidebar’s about the deteriorating state of Massachusetts as a result. That’s instructive. But the accompanying fact of Mr. Hara’s involvement in making decisions prior to the death of Mr. Studds shows how vital marriage equality is to America. In any other state, Mr. Hara would be left out of such decisions. It’s possible, perhaps probable, that the person he loves would have died alone had the highest court in Massachusetts not acknowledged that the state must treat every citizen the same. That would’ve been the tragedy, not the equal exercise of civil rights.

Gender myopia and sexual violence

I don’t want to imply any less seriousness surrounding these findings, because they’re worth noting and correcting:

Nearly 60 percent of women in Ethiopia is subject to sexual violence by a partner, a new UN report revealed yesterday.

The report said violence against women persists at high rates around the world, and governments are not doing enough to prevent it.

This is a real issue, and stopping it is a legitimate government task. However, given the UN’s misguided stance on equality, this makes me angry:

At a news conference launching the report, Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Jose Antonio Ocampo called violence against women “a pervasive phenomenon- it’s really a global problem that has to be addressed.” “According to the quantitative estimates, which certainly underestimate the amount of violence that occurs, at least one out of three women experiences violence at some stage of their lives,” he said. “The report states that the major form of violence takes place at the domestic level, in the households … and it takes place in societies throughout the world.” In addition to spontaneous violence, the report also condemned what it found to be high levels of institutionalized violence, such as female circumcision, estimating that 130 million girls and women living today had undergone this practice.

I’ve made the distinctions between male and female genital mutilation before, mostly to explain that it’s a difference in degree, not kind. I stand by that. The UN rightly addresses female circumcision as institutional violence, yet promotes male circumcision as an appropriate prevention tool against HIV infection. From the Fact Sheet, consider these statements:

Depending on culture, circumcision is usually performed soon after birth or during adolescence as a coming-of-age rite.

It is estimated that globally, about 20% of men, and some 35% of men in developing countries, are circumcised for religious, cultural, medical or other reasons.

And:

Female genital mutilation/cutting (sometimes incorrectly referred to as female circumcision) comprises all surgical procedures involving partial or total removal of the external genitalia or other injuries to the female genital organs for cultural or other nontherapeutic reasons.

There is no condemnation of injuries to male genital organs for cultural or other nontherapeutic reasons, even though such reasons are explicitly included to explain why parents cut their male children. If the UN (and anyone else who denies the obvious similarities) browsed through justifications for female circumcision in countries that permit it, they would recognize arguments bearing a striking resemblance to the reasons given for male circumcision in developed nations. Hygiene, aesthetics, partner approval, they’re all there. So what’s different? Do we permit assault because it’s not as bad as murder?