Criminals, and Other Anarchists

In response to one of my videos on anarchism, BinaryTasks:

Does the individual not have the right to decide these things? Is it not his property?

Why can a collective decide over the individual’s land? What right does the collective have to impose courts and legal systems on an innocent individual?

Also, if it turns out that having loads of different courts is bad, won’t the market make sure there are few (or a single one, maybe)?

If people are too stupid to decide this for themselves, aren’t they too stupid to decide this collectively?

I respond as follows:

It is right to seek the restoration of ones values when one has been deprived of them non-consensually. That restoration must be done only after it is objectively proven that one has so been deprived, and only after the nature and extent of the restoration has been objectively determined. The alternative is the non-objective determination of guilt, and the non-objective assessment of restoration. The rightness of objective courts is founded on morality, which is founded on the facts of reality.

Ask the reverse: what right does a mugged person have to non-objectively determine the guilt and non-objectively assess the penalty? Answer: none.

There are “loads of different [non-objective] courts” right now: those are the ones assessing guilt and penalties amongst gangs. To date, the various crime families have not decided, on the basis of market forces, that one court is best for them all. Each prefers to be cop, judge, jury, and executioner; each has their own code of alleged ethics, and their own system of laws. They choose to ignore our laws, police, courts etc. They choose to live in an anarchistic system, which is why it is right to give them the ultimate conclusion of what they want: expel them from civilized society, and let them live amongst their fellow animals.

The fact that we have one legal system, and one system of courts, and one recognized police force is a testament to man’s competency to live on this earth.

"Right Wing" Reality Check

For those who insist on deluding themselves by saying that Ontario’s “Progressive Conservative” party (you know, the one that introduced rent controls, a ban on private health insurance, the provincial income tax, etc.) is “right wing”, “centre right”, “right of the liberals” – or that it is the right party to support if you are pro-free-market/pro-capitalism – here’s more evidence to the contrary straight from the lips of party leader John Tory, as reported in today’s Cornwall Standard Freeholder:

Our party has been steadfast and unanimous in saying that (supply management) is a system that is working for the farmers, it’s working for Canada, and we should just leave it alone.

and

We should be more concerned with the fact that we’re importing Chinese apples, and who knows what kinds of pesticides have been used to grow them there, when we have perfectly safe gown apples here in Ontario.

The most that can honestly be said about the differences between the Liberals and the PCs is that the PCs use socialism as a justification for handing out grants, loans, market protection, and special status to certain alleged nobles in society…all of whose wealth and privilege depend upon regulation of – not freedom of – the market. The Liberals, in contrast, regard a socialist system as the ideal. In short: PCs view socialism as a means to a dishonest and corrupt end, whereas Liberals view socialism as a means to a dishonest and corrupt end.

[VIDEO] Damned to Repeat It

My most recent installment (#11) in the “In Defence of Ayn Rand” series just finished uploading to my youtube channel. Titled “Damned to Repeat It”, it is a response to an anarcho-capitalist who has been creating a series of videos called “Ayn Rand Missteps” (Damned to Repeat It is a response to his fourth such video, which deals with Ayn Rand’s politics).

“Damned to Repeat It” has been broken into three parts, each relating to one of the three assertions made by the anarcho-capitalist (who goes by the name aaron0883): libertarianism, anarchism, and voting.

Here are the links to each:

IDOAR #11: Damned to Repeat It, Pt. 1 – Libertarianism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9tFXtqJZo

IDOAR #11: Damned to Repeat It, Pt. 2 – Anarchism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-t0kuZRfg

IDOAR #11: Damned to Repeat It, Pt. 3 – Voting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wGjjNzb_iM

NOTE: sometimes, it takes a few minutes or hours for the videos to propagate through youtube.com’s servers…you might get a “file not found” message (or something similar) for a while. If so, just come back to the links a bit later.

He Who Serves Himself is Served Best

The National Post’s John Turley-Ewart today explains how a state government in Germany is demanding from Nokia the repayment of $63 million in state grants that were paid on the assumption that the Nokia plant would not, a while later, close shop and move to Romania. He concludes his column thusly:

If that money had been spent on retraining workers for industries that could thrive and be competitive in the current economic climate Germany finds itself in, taxpayers would have been better served and so would the Nokia workers who now find themselves unemployed. Dalton McGuinty should take note.

…which drew from me this comment, in response:

The last thing of which we should encourage the Premier to take note is how to “better serve” the taxpayer. Taxpayers in Westphalia would have been served best by not seizing their earnings in the first place: the taxpayer – and the economy – is best served by self-service.

Feel Better About Yourself: Elect (more) Morons

According to a Chicago Sun Times report, City council in Chicago has passed a by-law to ban the possession of little plastic baggies.

Move over Bronfman family, with your cross-border whiskey operation. Make way for the McKeever family black-market little-plastic baggy dynasty.

Notice how uncritically the media report this stuff.

The only thing more stupid: watch now as baggy manufacturers and retailers argue for a “compromise” solution, like say… licensing for baggies; or limits on how many you can possess; or the embedding of a microchip in each bag (tax-funded, of course) to track baggy users; or warning labels (“Warning, exposure to bags like these is highly correlated with drug addiction. Just say no to baggies”); or a baggy tax, the proceeds of which will go to fighting the war on baggies.

I’m setting my stop-watch to see how long before Julian Fantino (Ontario’s police commissioner) says he too needs a baggy tax as “another tool in the belt”.

Tool. Yep.

Objectivist "Political Views" Finally Arrive on FaceBook

Heads up everyone (especially if you are on facebook.com).

A few weeks ago (or is it months now), I wrote to facebook.com and asked that it consider dispensing with the pull-down menu in the “Political Views” field of its member profiles. It allowed things like “Conservative”, “Liberal”, “Very Liberal”, and “Libertarian”, but did not allow Objectivist responses. I suggested, as one of a couple of options, allowing people just to type-in what their political views are.

Good news. I don’t know WHEN it happened, but it appears that it is now possible to TYPE-IN your political views on FaceBook (instead of picking them from a pull-down menu).

I would encourage Objectivists to use the word “Objectivist”, rather than “Capitalist” for one reason: so that people know WHY you support capitalism (i.e., so they do not confuse your metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics to be mystical, irrational, or altruistic, respectively). Let people know that you are impliedly a capitalist because you are committed to the facts of reality, to reason as man’s only tool for obtaining knowledge, to rational egoism as man’s proper ethics, to consent as the requirement for all human interactions, and to capitalism as the only socio-economic system compatible with those commitments.

Cheers,

PM

freedominion.ca begat freedominion.com begat freedominion.com.pa

Those who have been following the issue of human rights laws as they pertain to censorship will be familiar with the complaint being made against freedominion.ca, arguably the most highly-trafficked Conservative discussion board in Canada. As I understand it, after the complaint was launched, ownership of freedominion.ca (and its back-up URL freedominion.com) was transferred to a company that specializes in protecting freedom of speech by hosting web sites in countries that (from what I gather) do not suffer from Internet censorship.

The site is now hosted in Panama (which has been gaining an improved reputation among those who value individual freedom). My understanding is that there was an issue with hosting the .ca domain there and that, as a result, freedominion.com became the only URL that would still bring you to the freedominion website.

Apparently – for reasons unknown to me – there also is now a problem with the .com extension.

The upshot is this: the website remains unchanged, but the website’s new URL is http://www.freedominion.com.pa .

Those who lurk or post on the site should reset their browser’s bookmarks accordingly.

Freedom Requires a Better Defence

{My op-ed, below, appeared on the Western Standard shotgun blog on February 6, 2008. NOTE: this is the first time that I have shared with anyone, in writing, this particular definition of “freedom” (i.e., freedom as control). Prior hereto, I have disclosed this definition, and explained its significance, only to my close friend and colleague, Robert Metz (founder and president of Freedom Party of Ontario). I will explain the significance of this definition in great detail in a forthcoming essay (or book chapter).}

The only thing worse than not defending freedom is defending it so poorly that ones audience is left thinking maybe freedom is not defensible. Consider Ezra Levant, who is currently responding to a human rights complaint for his allegedly “offensive” publication of the famous Mohammed cartoons.

Ezra condemns our human rights commissions’ procedural and evidentiary standards for not being court-like. He thereby implies that censorship would be acceptable did our commissions have court-like standards.

Ezra says censorship is wrong for this reason: we have (he submits) a long history of laws that disallow it. In other words: our laws (allegedly) against censorship are just because they are old. Yet the argument that “old law is just law” implies that we should still have laws that facilitate slavery in Canada, that give only propertied men the vote, and that make it illegal to open your store on Sunday.

Ezra condemns the addition of speech to the original list of things regulated by human rights commissions. He thereby implies that he has no objection to human rights laws concerning employment and housing. Our human rights laws typically cannot prevent someone from denying a person a job or an apartment so long as the reason for the denial is not known to be one prohibited by human rights legislation. Thus, in effect, Ezra’s position is this: nobody should prevent Ezra from saying that a another man’s religious beliefs are dangerous but, if Ezra utters such an opinion, he should lose the freedom to deny that man a job or an apartment. In short: shut up, or put up. That is clearly a self-defeating defence of “free speech”.

To be rational and effective, the advocacy of freedom must be founded upon the material facts of reality.

A human being must obtain values (such as food and shelter) if he is to survive. To obtain values, a man must choose to engage in rational (hence productive) thought. His mind must maintain control of his actions so that his rational decisions will result in the production of values. His mind must remain in control of the values he produces if he is to use them for his own survival and happiness. That control – the control of ones own actions and property – is freedom.

If a man does not think rationally (i.e., if he is irrational), he can live only by obtaining values from someone who does think rationally. If others do not give the irrational man values for free, he can obtain values from others only without their consent; only by interfering with their control of their own actions or property; only by enslaving or expropriating them; only by denying others their freedom.

No amount of rational thought can preserve a man’s life if he lacks freedom. For that reason, the violation of a rational man’s freedom is a threat to his life. Because the irrational man depends upon the rational man’s production of values, the irrational man’s violation of the rational man’s freedom is also a threat to the irrational man’s life. Thus, the life of an irrational man is a murder-suicide in progress. Were a whole society of men consistently to attempt live as irrational men do, the result would be (and, historically, has been) mass death.

It is physically impossible to make another man think rationally, or to prevent him from having racist, sexist, or other irrational beliefs. However, one can make life possible for a rational man by preventing irrational men from violating his freedom. Thus, in a society that values life rather than death, a government’s role is not to compel individuals to think rationally but to defend every individual’s freedom.

When government performs that role well, life and happiness are possible to a rational man because his mind maintains control of the production and use of his values. In contrast, when government increasingly passes and enforces laws to violate freedom, government becomes an ally of irrationality and an enemy of life; it gradually ceases to be a government.

Ezra’s human rights complainant considers Ezra’s silence to be a value. Ezra will not consent to provide the complainant with that value. Were the complainant to obtain that value by physically gagging Ezra, the government would rightly use force against the complainant to restore Ezra’s freedom because life requires freedom. For the government to obtain that value for the complainant by means of force is wrong because life requires freedom.

Ezra’s legal case is, he says, his stepping-stone to the making of a political case. If, in the political realm, he drops his ineffectual legal arguments for freedom, and demands freedom on the ground that it is an indispensable requirement of his life, he will become an asset to the advocacy of freedom, rather than a liability to it.

Re Mark Steyn – Speech vs. Human Rights: Losing the Argument by Shooting the Messengers

I oppose laws, like Canada’s human rights hate speech provisions, that interfere with a person’s freedom to express his opinion. However, I think it is a grave and unwarranted mistake to conclude that those who are hired to judge cases are dishonest in their assessment of evidence or in their application of such laws. Yet that is exactly the implication of Mark Steyn’s recent article in Mclean’s magazine:

In the three decades of the Canadian “Human Rights” Tribunal’s existence, not a single “defendant” has been “acquitted.” Would you bet on Maclean’s bucking this spectacular 100 per cent conviction rate?

The “100 per cent conviction rate” statistic has wound into a tizzy the well-intentioned folks who are upset at human rights commissions in Canada that have been processing complaints concerning the publication of Danish cartoons, or concerning remarks that allegedly “offend” some muslims (Mclean’s is in the midst of a complaint concerning material written by Mark Steyn). It was meant to wind them into a tizzy. The statistic does so effectively because it gives the immediate impression that human rights tribunals themselves (i.e., the judges who hear human rights cases) are biased (e.g., that the tribunals will not evaluate the evidence honestly).

Such is not a conclusion that can rationally be drawn from the rate of “conviction”. Here’s why.

Consider the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s 2006 Annual Report:

How cases were resolved in 2006

There were 1,074 final decisions rendered by the Commission in 2006. Of these:

* 384 or 36% were decisions not to deal with a complaint pursuant to section 40/41 of the Act. In 284 of those cases, complainants were asked to first pursue other redress mechanisms. The remaining 100 cases were out of time, out of jurisdiction, or considered trivial, frivolous or vexatious.

* In the remaining 690 cases, the Commission dealt with the complaints on their merits and ultimately made a decision either to dismiss the complaint, approve a settlement or refer the matter to Tribunal.

* The 297 dismissed cases represented 43% of all cases dealt with by the Commission in 2006. Typically, these are cases that have been submitted to the Commission for decision following an investigation. Cases can be dismissed for a number of reasons, such as lack of sufficient evidence or merit, or because the respondent has taken appropriate action to remedy the situation. This could also include a small number of cases where the complainants withdrew or abandoned their complaints. This percentage represents a fairly steady trend over the past four years.

* A total of 278 cases were settled. This represents 40% of all cases dealt with in 2006. Most of these settlements were arrived at with the assistance of a Commission mediator or conciliator. In a small number of cases, the parties settled the matter on their own.

* A total of 115 cases were referred to the Tribunal in 2006, a number similar to the previous two years.

In other words, only 9.3% (i.e., 115) of complaints were ever referred to a tribunal for a hearing: the rest were either rejected at the outset, dismissed along the way, or settled (often for an apology, or for a nuisance amount paid without any admission of any violation of the law). Clearly, those 115 would be cases in which the Commission decided to refer the matter to a Tribunal because the evidence and law was sufficiently compelling that the chance of loss, for the Commission, was very small. In other words: cases that are referred to the Tribunal for a hearing are cherry-picked as slam-dunk winners before they are referred to the Tribunal for a hearing.

The whittling-down does not end there. Of the 115 that were referred, only 70 resulted in the opening of a file at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (see the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s 2006 Annual Report).

Of the files that are opened by the Tribunal (after being referred to it by the Commission), a high percentage are typically settled without a hearing (approximately 64-87% were settled without a hearing in 2003-5). This contributed to the fact that, in 2006, the tribunal issued only 13 decisions. In other words, the Commission and the Tribunal had the benefit of giving a hearing to only 13 of 1,074 complaints (here, I am using 1,074 as a stand-in figure, because it is not clear when the Complaints were made for the 13 matters heard in 2006).

It should be amazing that, even then, the Commission can lose. In fact, though it is not far-off, the “100 per cent conviction rate” line is actually a falsehood: the Commission has not been successful in 100% of Tribunal hearings. For example, of the 13 decisions issued in 2006, 1.5 of the complaints were dismissed (again, see the Tribunal’s 2006 Annual Report).

The remaining 12 cases were not necessarily complaints commenced in 2006, but 12 is not a greatly abnormal number of cases for the Human Rights Tribunal of Canada to hear in a typical year. Using that figure, therefore, we have a substantiation (“conviction”) rate of 12 out of 1,074: 0.01. In other words: based on 2006 data, approximately one percent of all claims filed result in a substantiation (“conviction”).

If there are any biased or dishonest members on the Tribunal – and I have no evidence that any of them are biased or dishonest – the “conviction” rate is hardly compelling evidence of it. Instead, the “100 per cent conviction rate” is a false and misleading line which unjustly implies dishonesty on the part of those who hear human rights cases: those who weigh the evidence in accordance with the procedures and laws of evidence that they are required to use, and issue decisions about whether or not a violation of a human rights law has occurred.

Those who seek to defend their freedom to speak and to write do themselves a disservice by making judges their targets. The problem is the law, not those who apply it, and the use of misleading statistics like the one used by Steyn makes free speech advocates themselves look dishonest. When advocates for free speech (or anything else) appear dishonest, onlookers may question the wisdom of having that which the advocates are advocating.

No amount of honest, even-handed judging can make an unjust law just. I would encourage those who are advocates of free speech to keep their eye on the ball: the law itself. Those who are looking for someone to blame should look no further than their Member of Parliament, who should be working with other Members of Parliament to repeal the legislation in question.

"If you want freedom…" Q&A: Freedom Party on "Hate Speech" Regulations

BlawBlaw wrote:

Does the Freedom Party have a position on “hate speech” and its regulation?

We oppose Canada’s hate literature laws. Here’s why.

Reason is man’s only means of obtaining knowledge. Accordingly, rationality is required for human survival and happiness. For that reason, it is right to use force to ensure that ensure that every individual is free to make and act upon rational decisions. The duty of exercising such force on our behalf falls to the government.

Rationality cannot be produced by force. In contrast, irrational conduct that interferes with rational conduct can be prevented, punished, and discouraged with force.

One can make and act upon rational decisions only if one cannot legally be deprived of ones own life, liberty or property without ones consent. Therefore, to ensure freedom of rational thought and action – i.e., of thought and action upon which life and happiness depend – government, properly constituted, uses force to require that all relations among individuals are consensual (whether or not they are rational).

Relating this to freedom of speech: when a speaker’s words are not calculated to deprive another person of his life, liberty or property without his consent, it is not proper for the government to respond to the speaker’s expression of those words. If the government does respond by taking the speaker’s life, liberty or property without his consent, the government is doing that which it is supposed to be preventing.

So it is in Ezra Levant’s case, in my view.

Mocking religious beliefs – or stating that some of a religion’s beliefs threaten to subject people to non-consensual deprivations of their lives, liberty or property – is no doubt offensive to those who hold said beliefs. Such statements may very well cause great numbers of people to fear, condemn or hate the religion, or those who advocate or promote such beliefs. However, none of these consequences (offence, fear, condemnation, hatred) constitute a non-consensual deprivation of life, liberty or property. Accordingly, the government has no legitimate role in outlawing such statements.

Some beliefs are false and evil. Some are contrary to individual freedom, contrary to individuals pursuing their own happiness, contrary to reason, or contrary to the facts of reality. When it is illegal verbally to condemn false and evil beliefs, reality, reason, happiness, freedom and capitalism are themselves condemned.

That some people hold such false or evil beliefs as religious beliefs does not rationally imply that such beliefs, or such believers, should be protected from criticism or emotional discomfort. In my view, those who believe that the earth is flat should not be surprised at the laughter and ridicule they receive from others, and the fact that one holds such beliefs as a matter of religious faith, or drunken stupor, or brain damage, or cultural norm, does not change the fact that said laughter and ridicule does not comprise non-consensual deprivation of anyone’s life, liberty or property. Those who believe that non-believers, or adulterous women, or homosexuals etc. should, as such, be murdered must not only be ridiculed, but verbally condemned in the most vocal and appropriately blunt manner (along with the source of their belief, whether religious or non-religious). Such verbal condemnation, similarly, does not comprise non-consensual deprivation of anyone’s life, liberty or property. The government ought not to intervene.

Ezra should not be involved in this legal proceeding for the following reason: the law in question should not exist. It is anti-rationality, hence anti-happiness and anti-survival. It is a law founded on, and serving, the hatred of what makes man man: reason.

« Previous Page — Next Page »