The Freedom Bulletin

Figure skating is not something I usually write about on this blog. But when I was watching and reading about this past week’s World Championships, I noticed a lot of people were criticizing (unjustly, in my opinion) the choice of the three American skaters in the men’s competition.

Back in January, Ryan Bradley, Ricky Dornbush, and Ross Miner won the gold, silver, and bronze medals in the U.S. National Championships. All of them were considered underdogs, who ended up skating extremely well while the favorites messed up. Dornbush and Miner are newbies to senior-level skating, and Bradley, who is known for his showmanship and quad jumps but often accused of lacking transitions and artistry, was almost going to retire but decided at the last minute to compete at the urging of his fans.

As one would expect since they were the top finishers, the U.S. Figure Skating Association decided to send them as its three representatives at Worlds. Technically, they could have sent anyone they wanted. There is no rule requiring countries to send their top finishers, and many bloggers and commentators said that they shouldn’t have, primarily because the number of slots each country gets is determined by how well its skaters place in the previous year’s Worlds. Bradley, Dornbush, and Miner ended up finishing 9th, 11th, and 13th, which means that we will only have two spots next year.

But I believe the U.S. did the right thing. Our three representatives deserved their spots. Although their records and reputations over the course of their entire careers may not be the most impressive of all of America’s skaters, they did the best in the event that counted, and it would be unfair to give their spots to someone else. I am a deontologist; I believe that the right decision is the one that respects what people deserve, not the one with the best consequences. Sending the skaters that most people consider “better” to Worlds might have been better for U.S. figure skating as a whole, but Ryan, Ricky, and Ross earned the right to go, and I am glad that they got to.

Chris Matthews was on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Thursday, and one of the topics of discussion was Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning Republican who just won the primary in the Kentucky Senate race. Matthews made the following comment about Paul:

“He’s a philosopher, and philosophers shouldn’t run for office. He’s an absolute purist.”

The comment was a reference to Rand’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a federal law that prohibits private businesses from racial discrimination. Rand believes that private companies should be able to decide for themselves who to do business with, and the national government should not have the power to force them to accept customers if they don’t want to.

Although I don’t completely agree with him on this issue, I admire Rand’s opinions and his philosophy. Why does Matthews say that philosophers shouldn’t run for office? By “philosopher” and “absolute purist,” Matthews seems to mean someone who has a consistent set of beliefs, based on reason instead of conformity to popular opinion. At least that’s what Matthews is criticizing Rand Paul for. I don’t see why you wouldn’t want someone like that to run for office. Would you rather have a politician who stands for nothing and cares about nothing but getting elected? In my opinion, only philosophers and purists should run for office.

Rand Paul does not have any campaign experience, so he is still learning how to balance being true to his own beliefs with trying to get elected. It’s not surprising that he is already getting criticized in the press, since he actually stands up for liberty, and there are bound to be many people who oppose that.

I like to think that I have a consistent set of beliefs that I stick to. My philosophy is different in some respects from Rand Paul’s philosophy of libertarianism (or paleoconservatism, depending on who you ask) but there are also lots of similarities. In general, I admire people who have unpopular views and stand up for what they believe in, and Rand Paul, unlike the majority of politicians, is such a person. He is criticized for being radical, on the fringe, outside the mainstream, et cetera. But in a society where the mainstream consists of nearly unanimous support for income taxes, the Durham-Humphrey Amendment, and degrading airport security measures, I fail to see how being outside the mainstream is a bad thing. I hope that Rand sticks to what he believes in and resists the pressure to move toward the center. It reflects badly on our society that believing in liberty makes someone part of the “fringe.” A Senator with a consistent, pro-liberty world view and the courage to act on it would be one of the best things to happen to America in many years.

…is more taxes. But guess what the state legislature just did? Voted to raise the sales tax!

This is absolutely ridiculous. Legislators passed the tax increase to avoid the horror of having to pass a budget that was slightly smaller than last year’s and makes small cuts in programs that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. How terrible that would have been. NOT!

I have never heard of a tax being lowered in Massachusetts. All that happens is taxes keep going up and up and up, and so does the state budget. Now that we have a 6.25% sales tax, unless a revolution occurs, you can bet the sales tax is never going back down to 5%. Voting no on Question 1 was an incredibly dumb decision. Foes of the question argued that there would be huge sales tax increases if the income tax was repealed. Well, the income tax sure wasn’t repealed, and there is now a huge sales tax increase anyway!

The state government needs to do what is morally right: stop stealing people’s money and redistributing it to other people who don’t deserve it. This Globe editorial bemoans the fact that the budget would have cut $4 million from food banks, $21 in home care for the elderly, $2.4 million for homeless mentally ill people, $15 million in emergency rental assistance, $4 million for students who are flunking the MCAS exam, and $22 million for drug and alcohol recovery programs. But what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with people having to (gasp!) pay for their own food, their own home care, mental health, and addiction services, and their own housing, or to study for the MCAS themselves using books or the Internet? Liberals might respond that people simply cannot pay for these things. Well, if you don’t pay for something, you shouldn’t get it. If private charities want to operate food banks, fine. But it is simply wrong for people to have their money forcibly taken from them and given to those who have less.

The Globe makes one interesting point. “Those who think they don’t need government services should thank their stars, and dig a little deeper,” the editorial reads. First of all, it is probably not true, as the Globe suggests, that success or failure in life is entirely due to luck. But perhaps it is to some extent – for example, maybe people get jobs because of their looks, the employer’s bias, or random chance, instead of their merit. That would mean that society is sometimes unjust in distributing wealth, and that some of the poor deserve to be rich and vice versa. But this is where liberals and libertarians disagree. As a libertarian, I believe that the way to solve this problem is to change the rules for how society distributes wealth, to ensure that wealth is being distributed justly. Liberals, on the other hand, have no problem with the unjust rules, but then once the wealth is distributed they want to take money from people simply because they have a lot and give services to people merely because they don’t have much. This is never the right thing to do, since it does not take into account whether the wealthy people justly earned their money, or whether the poor people actually deserve more than they are getting. Disparities in wealth are not a bad thing. What is bad is for people to get what they don’t deserve, and taxes and social programs don’t do anything to fix that.

Hopefully that long rant gave you an idea of why I philosophically oppose government-funded social programs. It’s also worth adding that in addition to being morally wrong, tax increases are bad for the economy. We need people to buy more stuff to get us out of the recession, and raising the sales tax is certain to cause the exact opposite to happen.

Thanks, Speaker DeLeo! Your budget proposal almost gave me hope for Massachusetts, but now you took that hope away. It’ll just be another year of exorbitant taxes, socialist redistribution of wealth, intrusive and oppressive government, and a ballooning budget. Hooray!

NOT!!!!

After my (appropriately) depressing post about the election yesterday, I thought I’d recap the few good decisions voters made. Yes, I said that America did the wrong thing on almost every choice, but “almost” is the key word. Here are the few things voters did right:

• It looks like Proposition 8 is going to pass in California! I’m very pleasantly surprised that a state with such a liberal reputation is actually trying to put an end to gay marriage. Marriage is not a right, and the voters have every right to ban it. I hope the state government doesn’t somehow try to overrule the people’s decision like Massachusetts did.
• Arizona and Florida approved resolutions to ban gay marriage, too.
• Nebraska voted to end affirmative action. This discriminatory practice is insulting and unfair to people of all races and genders.
• Washington voted to allow doctor-assisted suicide. Committing suicide does not hurt anyone and is not immoral, so there is no reason why people shouldn’t be allowed to do it if they choose to.
• Colorado rejected an amendment that would define “person” as “any human being from the moment of fertilization.” In philosophy, a person is defined as a rational, autonomous being. Fetuses (and babies, by the way) are therefore not persons, and to define them as such would be contrary to the rules of the English language.