Category: Uncategorized

The phrase “property rights” appears to refer to the rights of property. That of course is meaningless because property aren’t people, and therefore property cannot have rights. Property rights refers to the notion that humans have the right to their private property. Therefore to place property rights in some form of opposition to human rights — as I did in the previous post — is silly. The two essentially mean and amount to the same basic idea. Human rights are property rights, and vice versa.

It all begins with the axiom of self-ownership. To quote Murray Rothbard, the brilliant libertarian economist, from an April 1959 article:

. . . each individual, according to our understanding of the natural order of things, is the owner of himself, the ruler of his own person. Preservation of this self-ownership is essential for the proper development and well-being of man. The human rights of the person are, in effect, a recognition of each man’s inalienable property right over his own being; and from this property right stems his right to the material goods that he has produced. A man’s right to personal freedom, then, is his property right in himself. Continue reading “Human Rights are Property Rights”

Should society (through its institutions such as the government) defend property rights or human rights? That question is of course meaningless if one of the sets includes the other as a proper subset. But let’s assume for the moment that they are indeed distinct, and therefore the question makes sense.

I believe I have an answer to that but I will not go into it. For now, I’d like to pose a related question. Should society (through its institutions such as the military) commit resources to defending its weapons prior to defending the lives of its citizens? To put it more concretely, should society choose to build bomb-proof missile silos or build excellent bomb-proof shelters for its citizens, assuming that the society does not have the resources to build both?

Feel free to leave your answer in the comments.

{Followup to this post Human Rights are Property Rights.}

What are the chances that two of the greatest figures of history would be born on the same day? I would leave that to the statisticians and only remark on the fact that in 1809 on this day, February 12th, Abraham Lincoln was born in Hodgenvill, Kentuky in the United States, and Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire in England.

Who would have predicted that those two babies — remember we all were babies at some point — would have an enormous impact on the world as they eventually did? Continue reading “Happy Birthday Darwin & Lincoln”

Labels are useful. They indicate the content of objects which could be anything — from cans and bottles to people and institutions.

But labels can also be confusing if they are not properly defined before they are used. I think it is always prudent to define labels before using them. I agree with Confucius that definitions matter above all else. Confucius say[2]:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

I identify as a classical liberal, aka an Old World liberal. I believe in individual freedom, and equality of all persons.  So what exactly is a old world (or classical) liberal? Part of my ideology is described by Murray Rothbard thusly:

Continue reading “Defining Classical Liberals”

A few things that I recently found on the web that especially caught my attention. I will lead with the cute.

Meerkats

All young animals are shy. Here’s a shy baby meerkat by Japanese photographer Mamekoro (@mamekoro51). No different from a human baby tentatively peeking to see what’s out there.

Continue reading “Saturday Special”

I have a lot of work piled up. I usually deal with piles of work by entertaining myself watching TV and YouTube. It’s more fun than doing serious stuff. However one topic is both serious and fun. It’s the climate change hysteria. It’s fun to watch the Chicken Littles running around clucking “the sky is falling.” But it is seriously disturbing that governments would grab more power to “address” climate change, and in that process deal a body blow to any hopes of the poor escaping the poverty that has been imposed on them by governments.

Anyhow, here’s an episode of The Mark Steyn Show that is both fun and serious. Enjoy.

 

Although the start of a year is an arbitrarily chosen day, sufficient number of people pay attention to the change in the least significant digit of the year that it is best to go along with the hoopla and join in wishing people “A Happy New Year.” Continue reading “New Year 2020”

I have to admit that If by Rudyard Kipling is one of my favorite English language poems, the last two verses of which appear on the left. The full poem appears at the end of this post.

The reason for this post? Because Kipling was born on this day, Dec 30th, in 1865 in Mumbai, and died in London in 1936.

Of course, when I read If in school, I had no idea of who Kipling was. I liked the poem, and that was it. Later I learned that Khushwant Singh had said that the poem was essentially a condensation of some of the messages of the Bhagavad Gita. Perhaps that’s why I had that intuitive liking for it.

Much later I realized that Kipling was not a nice man. He was, in the words of George Orwell, a “jingoist imperialist.” Here’s an excerpt from an essay Orwell wrote (I believe in 1945) on Kipling: Continue reading “George Orwell on Rudyard Kipling”

January is around the corner, the month named after the Roman god Janus who had two faces — one looking forward to the future and the other backward to the past. He is the god of “beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings” says the wiki.

It was the Roman emperor Julius Caesar (100 BCE – 44 BCE) who decided that the first day of January will mark the start of a new year in 45 BCE. Thus was born the Julian calendar that is almost universally used today (with notable exceptions like in Ethiopia.) How’s that for power and influence?

Time to look back. Continue reading “The Summing Up”