Politics & Rights

In “Terrorism, Altruism, and Moral Certainty,” the Afterward to my book Loving Life, I explain that “Islamic terrorists are religious altruists: They selflessly commit human sacrifices for the sake of a supernatural ‘other’—an alleged God.” A Muslim professor at the Islamic University in Gaza recently acknowledged this too.

Americans have been awash in a tsunami of anti-rights philosophy for more than 100 years, and the tsunami has taken its toll. Americans no longer have the conviction that we have rights and thus no longer have the conviction that the government must protect our rights. . . . Fortunately, we have a solution to this problem. . . .

A commission established to investigate “false” campaign statements—as evaluated by a group’s political enemies and by politicians and bureaucrats—is inherently biased, and its very existence violates people’s rights to free speech. With virtually every campaign message, one side claims it is the truth whereas the other side claims it is not.

Prior to the passage of ObamaCare, leftists selected Colorado, a bellwether state (among other places), to begin promoting their health “reforms” nationally, and many of their proposals eventually became part of ObamaCare. Apparently the left is now trying the same strategy to place retirement accounts substantially under government control.

Dave Brat—who recently upset Eric Cantor in a Virginia congressional primary—says he is heavily influenced by free-market thinkers, including Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, and (to a lesser degree) Ayn Rand. More encouraging, a paper that Brat wrote in 2011 indicates that he endorses the separation of church and state.

Although it is senseless to campaign against so-called “white privilege," one sort of pervasive privilege is real, it is evil, and it should be not only checked but ultimately abolished. It is the privilege government grants to some people to violate the rights of others. Call it “statist privilege.”

Although Brat largely supports free markets, he does not consistently support them, as Rand did; he disagrees with Rand on important philosophic issues; and he himself recognizes that his views are not Rand’s. As examples, Brat parts ways with Rand dramatically when it comes to immigration and the source of individual rights.

In the big picture, when government violates people’s rights in order to “run” libraries, rail transportation, and the like, it cannot do so without stealing money from the productive and thus precluding them from using that money productively; it cannot do so without destroying wealth and blocking or pushing out private alternatives.

When today’s leftists speak of “white privilege,” their goal is not to abolish overtly racist laws—those were abolished in part by Lincoln and his supporters in the Civil War and virtually in full within a century of the Civil War. Nor is the left’s goal to eradicate private bigotry—which today is big news precisely because it is rare (e.g., Donald Sterling).

Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly called on people to judge others not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Radersma is a racist, not because of the color of her skin, but because of the corrupt ideas she chooses to embrace and the malicious words she chooses to speak.