Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Why I Self-Identify As a Libertarian

This is taken from Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Boumediene v. Bush:

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today.


And this is from the NY Times editorial on Heller vs. DC:

Thirty-thousand Americans are killed by guns every year — on the job, walking to school, at the shopping mall. The Supreme Court on Thursday all but ensured that even more Americans will die senselessly with its wrongheaded and dangerous ruling striking down key parts of the District of Columbia’s gun-control law.


It seems to me that either you uphold that individual freedoms have value in-and-of-themselves, value apart from their social utility, or you believe that it is perfectly fine to constrict individual behavior in the pursuit of social aims. You cannot, however, have your cake and eat it as well.

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