There are many people today who relish the idea of freedom...but do they really understand what they are referring to? Here is a simple quiz.
- Should you be required to obtain a license in order to get married?
- Should you be required to have your motor vehicle inspected?
- Should you be required to obtain a permit before you can sell a product you manufactured?
- Should you be required to ask permission from the government before you can add on to your house?
- Should you be required to certify you have received training before you can purchase a product?
- Should you be limited to what you can buy, where you can possess it or how you can use it?
More @ Second Amendment Sisters
In principle, the answer to most of these is no. but in context, the answers become conditional "no"s.
ReplyDeleteThe first one is obviously a no, to a certain extent. Provided, however, that the licenses are "shall issue" and the requirements are clear, one can defend this on the grounds that marriage changes the legal situation of the married individuals (for example, long-standing case law says that spouses cannot be compelled to testify against one another).
The second one is also generally a no, but in a certain limited context it may be valid.
The third is an unqualified no. The fourth is an unqualified HELL NO.
The fifth one requires legal constraints in advance such that the product in question is dangerous AS SUCH to those untrained to even properly store it, much less use it. Private ownership of high explosives and potentially lethal chemical agents might be justifiably put here, because these things can be a serious hazard to one's neighbors even when they are simply not stored properly. A firearm, or even a machine gun, however, does not become a general hazard from being stored improperly.
The last one falls under the same category. Generally the answer to this is no. If the things you are buying are dangerous, but only to you, then those hazards are your problem to deal with.
Basically to whatever extent any of these things are justified, they must be shown in advance to be a serious material hazard to bystanders. Or more colloquially, they must somehow conform to the principle that my right to swing my fist ends at your nose.
Thanks, but how would our forefathers judge them? Probably all no.
DeleteI disagree a little. The third one to me is a maybe. For instance, if you manufacture a complicated piece of equipment that is easy to use, a license to manufacture could be required as proof that you know what you're doing, like an engineer's license.
DeleteI think the fourth one is conditional. In a rural area with plenty of room, go for it, there are small towns and villages in Alaska that have no codes. If you live in Manhattan, something needs to prevent poor construction that can endanger neighbors and passers-by.
I don't really disagree with you on the final one, except that the idea of "dangerous only to me" is nebulous. Your crack use is not immediately dangerous to me,but a crackhead is as potentially dangerous as your example of storing explosives in number four.
Its tricky.
Its tricky.
DeleteCertainly is.
The answer to all of the above questions is a resounding NO.
ReplyDeleteOnce you allow the government the power to regulate ANYTHING, they will soon regulate EVERYTHING. Once they have a little power they will take more and more power until they have it all. Take a look around you... Do you think that you can allow the government to regulate just a few things, things that may be "dangerous" to yourself or to others, and not have them regulate all things?
Is there anything that the government doesn't regulate in some form or another? Anything? Are you OK with that?
A society of free people will regulate itself for the common good without government interference. That is where we got lost as a society. It was easier to just let the government regulate our lives than to regulate our own.
Ask yourself this: What does the government gain by requiring their permission for any of the subjects mentioned in the article? They gain two things... They gain power over the people and they collect a fee. Does society gain anything that they couldn't gain on their own?
Does society gain anything that they couldn't gain on their own?
DeleteNope. & society can build it's own roads also.
"We must begin again to imagine that freedom itself could work. In order to do this, we must learn economics. We must come to understand history better. We must study the sciences of human action to re-learn what Juan de Mariana, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Frdric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Murray N. Rothbard, and the entire liberal tradition understood.
ReplyDeleteWhat they knew is the great secret of the ages: society contains within itself the capacity for self-management, and there is nothing that government can do to improve on the results of the voluntary association, exchange, creativity, and choices of every member of the human family."
Lew Rockwell
What they knew is the great secret of the ages: society contains within itself the capacity for self-management, and there is nothing that government can do to improve on the results of the voluntary association, exchange, creativity, and choices of every member of the human family."
DeleteAmen and Bastiat is my favorite.
Exactly.
DeleteAnd here we are today. We gave our power over to the government because we were too lazy to keep it for ourselves. Or we were too busy. Or too distracted. Or, in more recent times, too uneducated.
We gave all of our rightful power, our responsibilities as citizens of this great nation, to the smooth talking politicians who come around every 2, 4 or 6 years telling what we know to be untruths so that we will love them and elect them again. They hold our babies, pat our children on the head, kiss our wives and shake our hands, thinking all the while that we are ignorant fools. We have become too stupid not to reelect them.
And when we do reelect them they go back to Washington to serve their real masters.
You're a thinker and don't know it.:)
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