But now I understand something more fully that I once only understood abstractly. I see how utterly ridiculous it is to think that the state can be the right means to help those who are poor or living at the margins of society. The state is their enemy, as it is for everyone else.
— Jeffrey A. Tucker via Mises.org; 12/17/2007
http://freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071211/NEWS06/71211072
I will no longer be providing links to the Detroit Free Press, because they don’t have a permalink structure and source articles go stale after about a week, which is terribly annoying as a blogger. In any event, a recent article about the pending smoking ban in Michigan cited that:
“The action could squelch a decade-old effort by anti-smoking advocates to rid public places of smokers. ”
As always, an improper application of the term “public” exacerbates the debate. What anti-smoking advocates want is to rid private places of smokers. When we begin to recognize that your restaurant is your property, we will be able to table the issue permanently. But as long as people continue to delude themselves into thinking that your restaurant is “public” property, smoking, trans fats, nude dancing, beer sales on Sunday mornings, etc., will continue to be banned.
Perhaps another way to look at the issue is like this: If we grant legislators the power to ban smoking, then we also grant them the potential power to make every establishment tolerate smoking, however unlikely a scenario that might be. Politics cuts both ways.
Of course, there is always the question of whether politicians have solved all of life’s far more pressing problems. And they haven’t. So unless smoking is a higher priority than, I don’t know, robbery or murder or theft or poverty, they shouldn’t worry about it in the least.
When they cure all other social ills, we can still remind them that property is property, and rights are rights.
Another renegade gunman, another day.
In the wake of the Omaha mall shootings, and reminiscent of other, similar tragedies in recent history, I’ve again found myself pondering some questions, thanks to Franc’s post yesterday, “The Omaha Mall Massacre: Thank You Government!“.
Terrible tragedies like Omaha, though rare, continue to occur with alarming-enough frequency, and the story always has the same ending: “By the time officers arrived six minutes later, the shooting was over.”
Gun-control opponents (myself among them) are often quick to tout the axiomatic, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” But isn’t this nearly universally true, already?
The preponderance of evidence suggests that it’s already extremely unlikely that one of the “good guys” has a gun. It hasn’t happened yet to my knowledge, but sooner or later someone is going to thwart one of these fuck-tards with a well placed lead-sandwich. Sooner or later, the ass-hat with a rifle is going to walk into the wrong mall, the wrong bank, the wrong restaurant — the one where someone else is not afraid to stand his or her ground. I’d certainly rather it start happening sooner, than later.
If you’re in favor of keeping guns out of the hands of reasonable, law-abiding people, your vote is clearly cast for “later, rather than sooner,” and for that, you should be quite ashamed.
Every victim of gun violence represents failure of the State in its most hallowed charge: keeping safe its citizens. When the State can’t protect you (as has been demonstrated time after time after time,) to whom do you turn?
