The way of the world is to praise dead saints and persecute living ones.
Nathaniel Howe
Image of the Day
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| Via Rand Paul on Twitter |
Tweet of the Day
Spendthrift-in-Chief Obama, with an $18.1T debt plus $94T in unfunded liabilities, is calling for a $4T budget, at minimum YOY increases.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) February 3, 2015
FCC, hands off the Internet! NO to lawless regulation of the Internet as a utility, NO to government "ownership" or trumping state policy.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) February 3, 2015
"Boondoggle" Obama,after doubling the publicly-held debt and losing a decisive midterm election, don't you know elections have consequences?
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) February 3, 2015
Rand Paul and Chris Christie Step Into It: Anti-Vaccine I got clobbered with all the usual childhood diseases, no doubt caught from one of the contagious kids at school. I think the worst part of it was having to stay home while my younger siblings went out with my Dad to see the latest Disney flick at the theater; I didn't get a rain check. I understood, of course, it wouldn't be fair for other people at the theater to catch it from me, but I was missing out on an anticipated movie.
We shouldn't forget it was natural for this topic to come up given the recent measles' outbreak and one of then Gov. Rick Perry's fatal kerfuffles in the 2012 campaign involving the HPV vaccine mandate. To a certain extent, I anticipated Rand Paul's reaction, given his dad's own similar tough stand against allegedly rogue vaccines and relevant attack of Perry by Ron Paul on similar groups. There are all sorts of issues: the nature and extent of vaccination, the seriousness of the illness, the intolerance, ineffectiveness or potential unintended, bad effects of the individual vaccine for particular children, the ability of the parent to diagnose and control for the illness through voluntary quarantines, etc. I don't want to oversimplify the issue. Aren't we trumping parental rights? But the issue is whether the infected, unvaccinated child affects other children--especially those who cannot tolerate vaccines.
I don't feel the need to go beyond Walter Block's analysis of the issue; the contagious person, whether or not intentionally, is risking the other person's life or health. He's not going to hurt the vaccinated kids, but the risk is to the small number of children or others who haven't or cannot be vaccinated. (There have been pregnant women who have died from diseases with available vaccines.) This is a straightforward application of the non-aggression principle. In general, the victim's unalienale right to life and health outweighs your personal preferences.
Choose Life: Beautiful Children With Down Syndrome
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| McDonald's Super Bowl ad featuring 8-year-old Grace Ramsburg Via LifeSiteNews |
Facebook Corner
This is one of those cases where you really need to see the quote in context. I classify myself as a libertarian-conservative in the context of the Old Right, which battled with FDR's fascialism and was non-interventionist. Rothbard looked at fusionists with all the suspicion that fellow AnCaps view minarchists--as a little bit pregnant with Statism. So Rothbard was really addressing the likes of William Buckley who would reluctantly agree that the War on Drugs is dysfunctional. In fact, most people outside of America don't view American conservatives as real conservatives because we are vested in the classical liberal tradition. Ironically Rothbard had his own form of fusionism: paleolibertarianism. http://mises.org/library/listen-yaf
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall |
Joe Cocker (with Jennifer Warner), "Up Where We Belong"
