Federal Court Female Draft Decision: One More Reason To Learn To Peel Onions

USAToday reports today that a federal court in Texas has ruled, or decided, or whatever we call what they do that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to require men to register for Selective Service without requiring woman to register.

A quick, albeit careless perusal of the linked article reminds me no amount of time is as wasted as that time spent determining constitutionality, unless we learn to peel onions. Let me explain.

Apparently, neglecting to register for Selective Service when a man turns 18 leaves him unable to get a bunch of goodies from the federal government. I wouldn’t know, I was in the Army before I even turned 18. That was back when I was old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway. Women, oppressed as they are, are not allowed to register for the draft, but they still get the goodies, among which are college loans and fat federal jobs after graduation. Men among us have decried unfairness and sued the government for relief and apparently won. I’m not sure what winning looks like in this case. The decision isn’t one where the government is forced to reconcile its laws accordingly (which begs the question why anyone bothered). Maybe it sets precedent. Ask a lawyer.

Common sense says we’ll get one of three possible outcomes from this decision: women will have to start registering for the draft, men won’t have to register but will still get the goodies, or the whole thing will be ignored. My money’s on the whole thing being ignored, but I’m cynical that way. There’s no way that the government will stop giving out goodies… that’s what they do.

What’s that got to do with peeling onions? Aside from making me want to cry, it reminds me that this is one more issue in the news that will be wasted because people won’t “peel a layer from the onion” and ask themselves the more important, underlying question: is conscription constitutional? A standing army isn’t constitutional. Neither is slavery. How could being forced to donate your life potentially, your labor assuredly, and your freedom completely to “serve” in an unconstitutional organization be constitutional? I’ll tell you how: we’ve traded the simple reading of the Constitution as it is written for the opinion of 9 lawyers in black robes. No reading comprehension necessary. Get back to Dancing With The Stars.

If I had my way, we’d all be asking our ourselves how the hell they think they have the power to force our sons and daughters to fight in undeclared wars anyway. But I’ll be wasting my breath if the rest of us spend all of our time arguing whether or not it is fair for women to be denied combat roles in the military, or whether or not women should have to be at risk of being drafted in order to get the same goodies as the men, or whatever the conversation will devolve to instead of getting to the real issues.

I’ll be peeling onions around here. Hopefully more than I have been over the couple of years since setting this site up. Why don’t you join me? Head over to the Facebook page and rant a little. Thanks for stopping by, and come back again.

 

Paradox, Shmaradox: A clearly amateur but hopefully compelling debunking of Schrödinger’s Ballot Box

Today FEE.org put out a post about something called “Schrödinger’s Ballot” which posits that there is an inherent contradiction, a paradox, in the concept of democracy. Here is the link. I’ll briefly sum it up and then address where I believe that the contradictions really are.

Philosopher Richard Wollheim published an article call “A Paradox in the Theory of Democracy” in 1962. He sets up the scenario something like this:

A committed democrat (note: lower case “d”) sincerely believes that social policy should be decided by a democratic process.

This person expresses his personal belief on the issue by voting for or against. In this case, let’s say he votes against a policy.

After to votes are counted, imagine we find that the measure passes. This is the opposite of what the committed democrat wanted to have happen. Here is the paradox:

The committed democrat has to believe both that the policy should be adopted because the democratic process produced the result, and he has to also believe that it should not be adopted because of his personal belief concerning the matter.

Now I’m not sure if that constitutes a paradox at all, but there sure is an argument, well…at least half of an argument that I hear all the time. Democrats said for the eight years of the Obama presidency that Republicans were mean spirited racists any time they disagreed with an Obama policy. They said that Republicans needed to stop complaining and accept the “will of the people” and a “mandate” that Obama was doing what the people wanted. In other words the democratic process did what it was supposed to do, damn the hard feelings on the other side.

These days Trump supporters gleefully remind the Democrats (and democrats: small “d”) of the same. And D(d)emocrats aren’t walking all that talk any better than their R(r)epublican counterparts did while they (we) were getting Obamacare shoved down our throats. So I’m wondering if there is a paradox at all, frankly, concerning how people rectify the complications of a democratic process for accomplishing ANYTHING.

You see, here’s the thing: both sides of this wrangling are lying when they say that they believe that a democratic process ought to decide policy. Both sides only say that when their guy wins, or the policy they support is decided in their favor. When they lose, all Hell breaks loose like it was a waste of time anyway.

Democrats, and to a lesser extent Republicans like to pretend that their positions are reasonable, and the other guys’ positions are the wacky ones. They both paint the other side as advocating a violation of their rights, and that they are just trying to protect “religious liberty” or “the right to choose.”But the truth is that both would rather use violence to get their way than to accept not getting their way at all. I know, I know what you are thinking. “There he goes with all that talk about violence again. I bet he’ll remind us that ‘taxation is theft’ before he is done as well.” Hey, I’m sorry but face it: if it was such a good idea, and if “the American people have sent a mandate to the President” then WE WOULDN’T NEED A LAW IN THE FIRST PLACE. Really. People would just do it. Or not do it. Or whatever. The mere fact that you want a law against marijuana use, or for a Constitutional amendment that bans flag burning means you think people will disagree with you and do it anyway. And you are willing to use government to stop people. (Those who know me are wondering why I didn’t use the hyperbolic phrase, “men with guns and badges” right there instead of “government.” Hey, I’m trying to lighten up a little! Sorry, inside joke I guess.)

Anyway, I think that explains all the crazy reactions we have seen from both sides in recent history concerning elections, executive orders, regulations, etc. If people really believed that some democratic process was good for anything except a car load of kids deciding what fast food place to hit on their way out on a Friday night, people would live with the results of said election(s).

Nope. Democrats and republicans use the democratic system as a facade that gives legitimacy forcing people to do what they want them to do. I don’t think there is a paradox at all. A paradox would mean that people really believed that the democratic process is the way to resolve these things. None of them really do.

Hey, thanks for reading today. Tell your friends if you think this is worth other people reading. I’m not very good at it yet but who knows, maybe with a little practice and some constructive criticism I’ll get better.

ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FORMAL AND EFFECTIVE FREEDOM: Why libertarians and progressives don’t communicate about freedom.

I’ve touched on this before. I blamed semantics for my inability to communicate the message of individual liberty to progressives and conservatives. “Surely,” I thought “if we can just agree on what liberty is, we can come to some agreement on how to get there.” A recent, short Facebook exchange with a very smart progressive online acquaintance prompted me to dig a little deeper into this divide. I’m glad I did.

What I’m about to write about will be inadequate. I have skimmed a number of scholarly articles about this but I have barely scraped the surface, so if any of this grabs you I encourage you to do your own research.

Bottom Line Up Front: Instead of accepting my own definition for freedom, I’m going to use the term “formal freedom” for the standard libertarian term, and “effective freedom” for what progressives use. I didn’t’ make these terms up by the way. Smarter people did. I’ve been trying to argue that there is only one freedom and prove that my version is the real one. I now accept that there is two ways to define freedom. And here’s the rub: both are legitimate. Libertarians and progressives just need to work together to encourage effective freedom in ways that we can both live with.

Libertarians see liberty from a “freedom-from” position. To a libertarian, a person is free when he no one is forcing him to do something he doesn’t want to, or using force to keep him from doing something he wants to do. Of course, all bets are off if what he wants to do includes using force on someone else. That would be logically inconsistent.

Progressives see liberty from a “freedom-to” position. To a progressive, a person is not free if he doesn’t have the means to do that thing that he is otherwise free to do. Progressives and libertarians agree on a lot of things that a person is free to do/ not do. Where we part ways is how we go about empowering people to do what they want, but don’t have the necessary tools to actually do it.

For example, contrary to some of the progressive rhetoric about libertarians wanting to see poor people starving on the street, sacrificed on some kind of “free market alter,” nothing could be further from the truth. We love people just as much as progressives do. That’s why we encourage free market capitalism so strongly: we really belive that it is the best way to ensure the least amount of people end up in that condition as possible. We really do, progressives. Really. And there is science to back that assertion up. So bear with us a little.

Alternatively, I’ve been convinced that the progressive agenda was really about “soaking The Rich” and that issues like poverty or access to necessities are really just excuses. But the vast majority of progressives just want hungry people to have food, and they see market capitalism as the reason they don’t have it. What I am starting to realize is that they look out into the economy and examples of market capitalism failing to do what libertarians (and conservatives) say it should do. Further, if government is supposed to secure liberty, progressives expect government to intervene in order to end the disparity. When resources are moved from where they aren’t being used to the betterment of society toward where they are being used that way, the mission of “securing the blessing of liberty” is clearly made evident. The evidence is right before everyones’ eyes.

Libertarians are quick to point out that what we are talking about when we say “market capitalism” is a far cry from what we have now. What we have now is a far cry from true free markets. But where libertarians advocate moving toward free markets, progressives advocate more central management of the economy instead. I get it: more of the same gets more of the same. When progressives advocate more central management of the economy, libertarians see more of what keeps the system from working. More of the same gets more of the same, again. And we stare at each other incredulously wondering why we would be willing to sacrifice people over “politics.”

Here’s the rub: both of us want a different system in place to allocate resources fairly and equitably. Both of us want it because we want people to be prosperous. Both of us want people to be free. Both of us believe that it is the proper role for government to ensure we are all free. So why the arguing?

Back to the different versions of freedom we espouse. How is a person free to eat if he can’t get any food? How is a person free to own a home if he can’t get a mortgage? How is a person free to go to college if he is too poor to pay the tuition? To a progressive, the answer is simple: government exists to ensure people are free. Government should ensure that people have the resources they need to do the things that they have a right to do. Effective freedom.

Libertarians on the other hand believe that formal freedom, freedom from coercion is the best way to ensure effective freedom. That is because we believe that the greatest enemy to freedom is the government itself. Government has a necessary monopoly on the initiation of force, and when it uses that force in ways that restrict our freedom, even if it is to provide the resources that proponents of effective freedom advocate, we see a reduction of liberty, not an increase in freedom. At best what we see is a transfer of “freedom” from one group to another. And I can see where that might seem “fair” to some people, it comes with enormous moral hazards. I submit that those moral hazards tend to make the problems worse rather than better. I wish libertarians and progressives could get past the yelling and investigate these occurences together. Conservatives are unwilling to do it at all.

We libertarians get a little carried away with rhetoric sometimes. “Taxation is theft!” isn’t helping our image with progressives, for sure. As I have said, there is a certain shock value we hope to gain when we say it, but let’s face it: there has been too much shock and not enough value, so I hope libertarians reign that in a bit. I’m trying to myself.

So here’s what I hope we can do, we libertarians and progressives. I hope we can come together and balance our approaches to government involvement in the betterment of people’s’ lives. I’m willing to meet you in the middle. Let’s start by understanding that we really want the same goals accomplished: human and civil rights protected. Economic prosperity made available to everyone. Then let’s respect each others’ concerns about the second and third order consequences to possible solutions to the problems we face. We have a lot of work to do and we’ll never get it done if we can’t talk to each other.

Words Have Meanings: Are You Hearing What I’m Saying? Communicating the Message of Liberty.

One problem with communicating the message of freedom is that Americans don’t even know what freedom is. Ask an American and you will hear any number of rambling answers that approach the general area but are so different from each other that conversation on any level approaching civility seems to require a definition of terms. And then almost always an argument about whose definition is correct.

This was recently made more clear to me as I discussed speech rights with a young man from Austria a few nights ago. We were discussing how Europeans see Americans and how that vision differs from how we see ourselves. In the conversation he said that Europeans are “as free as Americans”.

“No, says I” I interjected. I asked him if people could be arrested for a Nazi salute in Austria (I have no idea personally except that the young man I’m talking about told me that it is true). He said yes and I said that in America the vast majority would find it in poor taste but that it is not illegal. He seemed incredulous. We discussed gun laws and some other things that constituted activities or possessions that are illegal in Europe but legal here. We discussed social programs that provide “free” services in Europe but that are contentious political issues here. The ACA for example. I pointed out that most people in America are not against the services being provided in some way, just not by forcing people to pay for them though taxation. America was founded by a tax revolt, after all.

I could see the gears spinning in his head. He got it, superficially at the very least. But he still contended that Europeans were just as free as Americans.

Fighting back the urge to launch into a dissertation, I allowed the conversation to move on to other things, but it has been on my mind since then. Nagging me. How can he think Europeans are as free as Americans if they can’t do the same things, have the same things or keep as much of their income as we can? Clearly they aren’t as free as we are.

Here’s the thing: his definition of freedom is different than mine. And his definition for freedom is very similar to what just about all American non-libertarians apply to freedom.

I’ll get into those definitions in another post. But for now I submit that a big part of the lack of civility in political discourse is caused by people who can’t resolve how stupid, or how evil someone on “the other side” must be if they can’t clearly see that our argument is the only moral one. There is no reason to be rational with a sociopath, after all. Those people just need to be beat down. It’s the only language they understand.

So I’m going to devote some time and mental energy toward ways we liberty advocates can communicate ideas about liberty to people who bring different definitions to the words we are using. Words like violence, coercion, the State, and liberty. Most people in the liberty movement share common definitions for these words. People outside the movement don’t, and we need to do something about it if we are going to spread the message. The world needs it.

Thanks for reading. Thanks in advance for participating by leaving comments and inviting other people to read it as well. Conversations require two way communication. Let’s have a conversation.