But Zucker is not the only target of CPSC’s rights-violating actions. In Denver, Zen Magnets, a small (four person) firm, continues to sell such magnets to adults and continues to fight CPSC’s efforts to drive these fun and intellectually stimulating products off the market.

In a recent post for SaveMagnets.com, the founder of Zen Magnets—Shihan Qu—explained his legal fight against CPSC:

Supporters of the ban claim the products pose a “hidden hazard,” and that increased incidents of magnet ingestion show consumers cannot reliably heed warnings, and a nation-wide all-ages ban is the only solution. . . .

If the CPSC succeeds in its gamble, magnet sphere companies such as ZenMagnets.com will fall. . . . Future small business will be intimidated and less likely to stand up. The agency’s power will be expanded and the legal landscape will shift along with expectations set by multiple disturbing precedents: the precedent to ignore [the] record [of] magnitude public objection, the precedent to punish companies [with] no record of injury [as is the case with Zen Magnets], the precedent to argue that warnings don’t work, and the precedents to ignore prior internal policies on a dime. If CPSC’s effort to hold Craig Zucker . . . personally liable succeeds, add also the precedent to sue individual corporate officers for refusing voluntary action.

The upshot of CPSC’s position is that, because some people (mostly children) have ingested the magnets when they were used inappropriately, the government must force the magnets off the market for everyone, including for responsible adults. Never mind that countless other products—from bicycles to balloons to ladders to pencils—can be harmful to children when used inappropriately.

Qu aptly described CPSC’s position with a quote from Robert Heinlein: “It’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.”

Entrepreneurs such as Qu have a right to produce and sell their products of choice on a free market (so long as they do not use force or fraud). And consumers have a right to buy the products they want from willing suppliers. CPSC has violated and continues to violate the rights of individuals in both groups (not to mention everyone else it forces to act against his judgment).

Kudos to Qu for standing up to this tyrannical government agency. Let’s hope, for the sake of liberty, that he wins his related legal battles.

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Related:

• Former Buckyballs CEO Zucker Files Suit against Abusive Agency
• Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice

Image: MasterVolume11 (See details.)

I’m delighted to announce that in response to TOS’s end-of-year fundraising appeal, I just received the following letter from our generous supporters Chris and Lydia Ash, which I share with their permission:

Mr. Biddle,

The Objective Standard is deeply valuable to my wife and me. The writing is always compelling, crystal clear, and serves as a constant reminder that reason has not been completely abandoned, despite all of the absurdities we witness in our daily lives. We are also encouraged by the increases in TOS distribution and are looking forward to more blog postings and—most especially—more YouTube videos in the upcoming year.

If you think it might help encourage others to contribute, we would like to offer a matching funds challenge to your readers in response to your latest request for donations. We are willing to match dollar-for-dollar all donations up to a total of $10,000.

Sincerely,

Chris and Lydia Ash

The offer is on! If you have not yet contributed to TOS’s end-of-year fundraiser, now is the time to do so.

A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed so far and to Chris and Lydia for their generous offer and added incentive.

The future is ours—if we fight for it with objectivity and clarity today. Let’s own it!

Best regards,

Craig Biddle, Editor

The Objective Standard

www.TheObjectiveStandard.com

949-485-1840

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This productive achievement is all the more impressive considering that it took place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. While the federal government spent billions on bailouts and boondoggles, private companies and investors dramatically expanded energy production. Not coincidentally, the federal government controls only 2.7 percent of the 168.22 million acres of land and mineral property in Texas, so frackers are relatively free to operate there.

Left relatively free to innovate and produce, frackers did just that in spectacular fashion. Theirs is a success story that deserves to be told and retold.

Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.

Related:

• Energy at the Speed of Thought: The Original Alternative Energy Market
• Thank You, Frackers, For Keeping Me from Freezing

Over at Cato, Matt Zwolinski of Bleeding Heart Libertarians is arguing—with help from other libertarians, including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek—for a “Basic Income Guarantee” (yep: BIG).

As Zwolinski explains, the BIG program “involves something like an unconditional grant of income to every citizen. . . . ‘Unconditional’ here means mostly that the check is not conditional on one’s wealth or poverty or willingness to work.” So “everybody gets a check each month . . . [and] income earned on top of the grant is subject to taxation at progressive rates, but the grant itself is not.”

Converting Zwolinski’s passive formulations to active formulations, and filling in the unmentioned agents involved in this scheme, we get this (these are my words, making clear the meaning of Zwolinski’s proposal):

Government forcibly takes money from those who have earned it, gives some of that money back to the people from whom it seized the money, and gives some of the money to other people, who did not earn the money. If a person earns money on top of the money the government gives him, the government will forcibly take some of that earned money too; the more he earns, the more the government will take. But the government will not take back any of the money that it initially took from someone by force and then gave back to that person or to someone else.

Zwolinski attempts to justify this scheme in part as follows (his words here):

Current federal social welfare programs in the United States are an expensive, complicated mess. . . . the federal government spent more than $668 billion on over one hundred and twenty-six anti-poverty programs in 2012. When you add in the $284 billion spent by state and local governments, that amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America.

Wouldn’t it be better just to write the poor a check? . . . Eliminating bloated bureaucracies means more money in the hands of the poor and lower costs to the taxpayer. Win/Win.

The assumption here is that our alternatives are either to continue with the existing coercive-wealth-redistribution state as it is, or to make it more efficient. But why is a libertarian intellectual asserting these as the alternatives from which to choose? If liberty is good—if people have moral rights to think and act on their judgment and to keep and use the product of their effort—then why move from the current way of violating these rights to a new, more efficient way of doing so? Why not name the rights violations as rights violations (A being A) and begin repealing the policies that violate rights?

Well, to do that, one has to accept the idea that rights exist and are inalienable. Bleeding Heart Libertarians, such as Zwolinski, do not accept this.

Whereas many libertarians ignore philosophy altogether, some libertarians deny the objective, demonstrably true philosophic foundations for liberty but embrace false philosophies and attempt to apply them to political policy. Bleeding Heart Libertarians do the latter, and the philosophy they embrace and aim to put into practice is egalitarianism. Egalitarianism was most difinitively elaborated by John Rawls, whom Zwolinski cites favorably in his post. In “Libertarianism vs. Radical Capitalism,” I provide a concise summary of this philosophy:

[E]galitarianism . . . holds—not that people should be treated equally before the law (that is a policy of laissez-faire capitalism)—but, rather, that the standard of morality is, as egalitarian philosopher John Rawls puts it, “equality of opportunity” for all members of society, with exceptions permitted only when they are “to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society.” Clearly, if that is the standard of morality, then rights cannot exist—at least not for anyone but “the least-advantaged.” As Rawls explains, on this standard, “it is incorrect that individuals with greater natural endowments and the superior character that has made their development possible have a right to a cooperative scheme [i.e., a legal system] that enables them to obtain even further benefits in ways that do not contribute to the advantages of others.” On the egalitarian standard, Rawls continues, certain actions in the “social, economic, and technological” spheres must be forbidden. “No basic liberty is absolute”—not even “freedom of thought and liberty of conscience, or political liberty and the guarantees of the rule of law, is absolute.” And, “of course,” Rawls emphasizes, individuals do not have “the right to own certain kinds of property (e.g., means of production) and freedom of contract as understood by the doctrine of laissez-faire,” because “the distribution of wealth and income, and positions of authority and responsibility, are to be consistent with . . . equality of opportunity.”

Egalitarianism is patently incompatible with individual rights and therefore with liberty. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Zwolinski’s BIG proposal involves further entrenching the violation of rights.

In addition to using the above efficiency argument in an attempt to justify this rights-violating scheme, Zwolinski makes arbitrary, unsupported claims about “past injustices” that allegedly “justify” coercive wealth redistribution today. But I will not address arbitrary claims beyond pointing out that they are arbitrary.

Zwolinski also claims that if government didn’t coercively redistribute wealth, there would not be enough charity for the poor. In addition to being irelevent to the question of whether the government has a right to coercively redistribute wealth—it objectively does not; a right to violate a right is a contradiction in terms—this claim is absurd. In 2012, Americans donated $316.23 billion to charity, and huge percentages of that sum went in various ways to low-income people. Americans give this much to charity in the mixed economy of the United States today, in which producers are heavily taxed. Imagine how much more charity Americans would give if they were not being forced to “give.”

Why do we see an article at the leading libertarian think tank (Cato) advocating legalized plunder on the basis of a philosophy that denies the possibility of rights? Because other libertarians characteristically ignore or deny the need to focus on philosophy at all—and, because, in philosophy, as in physics, nature abhors a vacuum.

When people fail to undergird political policy with morality and deeper philosophy, other people fill in the void with some philosophy or another. And if the basic premise of that fill-in philosophy is widely accepted or goes intellectually unchallenged—as egalitarianism is and does today—then the policies that follow from that philosophy will seem viscerally reasonable and, over time, will affect political policy.

In the final section of his article, addressing objections to the BIG program, Zwolinski mentions three pressing problems regarding the scheme: “disincentives to employment,” “effects on migration,” and “effects on economic growth.” In each case, Zwolinski leaves the problem unsolved. More importantly, though, he does not even raise the objection that the BIG program violates rights. Apparently, he senses no need to address this objection at all for his libertarian readers.

Will other libertarian intellectuals raise this objection to the BIG program? If so, will they be able to explain what rights are, where they come from, why they are inalienable, why the government morally may not violate rights, and how we know all of this? Or will they say something about the need for ideological inclusiveness and watch Zwolinski and company continue advocating tyranny in the name of liberty?

Stay tuned. We will see.

Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.

Related:

• Libertarianism vs. Radical Capitalism
• Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights: The Moral Foundation of a Free Society
• Libertarians Fiddle while Rome Burns

I’m writing to ask for your support in defense of your values.

As TOS wraps up its eighth year of fighting for a culture of reason and freedom, we are proud to reflect on our accomplishments—and eager to dwarf them in the months and years to come. Let me begin with an indication of what we have done.

In the first eight years of publishing our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard, we’ve produced and disseminated more than 330 in-depth articles and reviews from an Objectivist perspective. Our journal articles include such vital themes as:

• Ayn Rand: America’s comeback philosopher;
• Individualism vs. collectivism;
• The nature and need of a self-interested foreign policy;
• Why and how to end central banking;
• How to maximize enjoyment from art you love;
• The heroism of Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, John D. Rockefeller, James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, and other great thinkers and producers;
• The evil of government-run schools and the need to abolish them;
• The morality and practicality of a fully free market in education;
• The principles and methods of proper education;
• The creed of sacrifice vs. the Land of Liberty;
• Moral health care vs. “universal health care”;
• The mystical ethics of the “New Atheists”;
• Ayn Rand’s theory of rights;
• The impossibility of defending liberty while ignoring or denying its philosophic underpinnings;
• Capitalism and the moral high ground;
• The moral root of the financial crises;
• And much, much more.

Our book and film reviews have analyzed important works—some popular, some practically unknown—in a wide variety of fields. And our interviews with various scholars, artists, activists, and politicians have offered fascinating perspectives on important subjects.

In one form or another (via subscription or periodical index), we’ve gotten The Objective Standard into more than 800 college libraries, including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and many other top universities.

On TOS Blog, we’ve published more than 900 blog posts about important cultural and political issues. In 2013, we expanded our blog output dramatically, averaging 31 posts per month.

As for readership, in the past two years we’ve nearly tripled traffic to TOS’s website. In 2011, unique visitors averaged fewer than 18,000 per month; today they exceed 53,000 per month. And, importantly, when people visit our website, they find not just a disparate article from an Objectivist perspective, but a vast trove of articles, reviews, blog posts, and videos—all integrated by the fact that each upholds and applies Ayn Rand’s philosophy for living on earth.

In addition, in the past two years, TOS has seen a 1,000 percent increase in Facebook followers, from 3,000 in 2011 to more than 31,000 today. According to Facebook, these followers are predominantly eighteen to twenty-four years old, and the most popular city of residence is New York. This is the perfect demographic for reaching active minds, improving lives, and affecting cultural change.

Further, in the past two years, we’ve increased our newsstand distribution by 20 percent, from 1,500 per issue to 1,800 per issue—and we’ve done so while most magazines have suffered declines in distribution.

Finally, whereas two years ago TOS had virtually no YouTube presence, now our YouTube channel has 26 videos, which have been viewed more than 48,000 times, and we’re producing more videos every month.

There is more. But the foregoing is an indication of some of TOS’s accomplishments to date—which, again, we aim to surpass by orders of magnitude.

Toward that end, we are producing (among other things) an all-new TOS website, which is almost complete and will be rolled out in January 2014 (about six weeks later than initially anticipated). The new site will better integrate with social media, YouTube, and mobile devices; and it will be more visible to Web crawlers and search engine bots. It will also require much less maintenance than our current site does, enabling TOS staff and me to put substantially more time into writing, editing, lecturing, filming, and marketing. Once we’ve launched the new website, we will quickly triple our blog output to ninety posts per month, increase our video production to four per month, and significantly expand our social media participation and content dissemination efforts.

All of this will increase TOS’s output and visibility, expand our reach, and show more and more people the life-serving power of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

As much change as we anticipate in the coming months, however, one thing will remain constant: our commitment to objectivity and clarity.

From the beginning, TOS’s mission has been to spread the ideas on which human life and civilized society depend—and to do so by meeting people at their values and showing them, in clear, highly concretized terms, how rational principles enable them to understand the world, pursue their goals, and protect their rights. Toward this end, the three most important elements in communication are, as Ayn Rand put it, “clarity, clarity, and clarity.”

Clarity is our focus in all that we do at TOS. Every article, review, blog post, and video we create is intended to clarify the subject at hand, to foster genuine understanding, and thereby to help people see the truth and value of rational principles. “Make clarity a fetish, an absolute, a dogma, a god,” Ayn Rand advised. We have done so.

Read any TOS article, review, or blog post. Watch any TOS video. What you will find is unmatched clarity. This is a consequence of enormous effort on the part of our thinkers, writers, and editors. It takes a lot of time and perseverance to achieve the clarity we achieve. But we know it is vital to reaching and changing minds, so we exert the effort, spend the time, and make it so.

The result? Here are a few unsolicited testimonials from our readers and viewers:

“I found The Objective Standard at Barnes & Noble, and I can’t say enough about the value of this publication. It goes past the words I have, and I have a good lexicon. Thank you!” —Lishka M.

“TOS is the only publication I am aware of that discusses important philosophical issues with such depth and clarity. I am really grateful for your work!” —Boris T.

“I have read many of the Objectivist publications over the years and although they all were of high quality, yours is clearly the best. Keep up the great work, and I will do whatever I can to spread the word about your fabulous publication.” —Mike G.

“The Objective Standard is a wonderful magazine, very approachable for the average person who is interested in a deeper understanding of Objectivist philosophy. The clarity of writing is superb.” —Vicki M.

“I would like to take a moment to express my appreciation for your publication. I have found literally every article be a compelling read. I love the way the format is that of an academic publication, which keeps the focus squarely on the content. The content is rich and varied and weighty, but it is also readable by anyone who is intellectually curious, whether Objectivist or non-Objectivist. Bringing these elements together so well is a great accomplishment. I think your publication is helping to energize the whole Objectivist movement. More importantly, it is energizing me.” —David L.

“Thank you for creating the journal and for all the great articles. Ayn Rand was right, and if more people can come to understand her ideas, the world will be a much better place to live. I reference articles from the journal when trying to introduce her ideas to people I know and meet.” —Dave G.

“Thank you for everything that you all do at The Objective Standard. The video shorts TOS has posted to YouTube are excellent. Especially the ones where you answer questions from individuals. These have been very helpful to me, and I hope you continue to produce them.” —R. Lee

“I appreciate your relentless commitment to reason and excellence. I don’t know of an equivalent publication anywhere. Not only are the articles (subject matter and content) first rate, but the format and editing are outstanding as well. You have taken Objectivist publishing to the next level.” —Brent A.

We receive such feedback regularly. TOS is reaching, moving, and energizing minds. But to continue doing so, we need your help.

Like most intellectual media outlets—Reason, Commentary, National Review, The American Spectator, and the like—TOS’s sales revenues do not cover its expenses, so we must rely on additional support from people who value what we do and want us to continue.

Our annual expenses are $215,000, and our annual sales revenues are $174,000, rendering a deficit of $41,000. With the completion of our new website over the next few weeks, we will have additional expenses of $10,000, rendering a deficit of $51,000. To date in 2013, we have raised just over $30,000 in donations, so we need to raise $21,000 more by the end of the year.

If you value the work we do—if you see the importance of a multimedia outlet that consistently applies the principles of Objectivism with crystal clarity—please make a donation to help us continue our work and achieve our mission. With sufficient funding, we can make everything we’ve done to date look like a pittance. And, with sufficient funding, that is what we will do.

Donations of any amount are helpful, whether single contributions or recurring monthly contributions. In return for your investment, we promise to continue fighting for your values with everything we have. I hope we can count on your support.

Thank you for your consideration. Warmest wishes to you and your loved ones for the holidays.

Sincerely,

Craig Biddle, Editor
The Objective Standard

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Although there is objectively nothing morally wrong with homosexuality—and those who claim otherwise are objectively wrong—this fact does not negate a person’s right of association. People have a right to act on their own judgment—so long as they do not violate the rights of others—even if their judgment is wrong or flawed. (To protest Phillips’s actions, I certainly plan to exercise my right of association and refuse to do business with Phillips’s shop.)

Does refusing to bake a cake for a gay couple violate the rights of that couple? No. Phillips’s refusal in no way subjects the couple to force, fraud, or the like—which is the only way rights can be violated. They remain free to hire any other cake maker willing to serve them. Phillips’s shop is his business and his property, and he has a moral right to decide how to run it.

Logically, there can be no “right” to a good or service produced by someone else (outside of a preexisting contractual commitment to provide it). If a gay couple has a “right” to force Phillips to bake them a cake, then what becomes of Phillips’s right to act on his judgment? A “right” that violates another person’s rights is a contradiction in terms.

Although Phillips deserves moral censure and boycotts of his business, he does not deserve to have the government threaten to confiscate his wealth for declining to bake a cake. The right to gay marriage rests on the freedom to contract—and that is precisely the freedom the court seeks to deny Phillips. If gay couples have the right to freedom of contract—and they do—then so does Phillips. Those who wish to have their own rights respected must respect the rights of others—even when others exercise their rights poorly.

Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.

Related:

• Homosexuality: Moral or Immoral?
• New Jersey Court Rightly Overturns Ban on Gay Marriage

Nurse Cathy Wagner “championed Obamacare, until she received a letter from her insurance company saying it was canceling her policy,” Denver’s CBS affiliate reports. “I was really shocked. . . . all of my hopes were sort of dashed,” she said.

Sue Klinkhamer, a former employee of Congressman Bill Foster, writes that she “defended Obamacare because it would make health care available to everyone at, what I assumed, would be an affordable price. I have now learned that I was wrong. Very wrong.”

Matthew Fleischer found his rates going up under ObamaCare as well: “I’m staring in the face of a 43 percent cost increase, for less comprehensive coverage than I have now.” He regards as scandalous the high “cost of the program to young, healthy middle class people.”

Fleischer, however, does not call for the repeal of ObamaCare in favor of a free market in medicine. Instead, he believes the law can be “tweaked to provide better, more progressive care.” He suggests the government should force the “wealthy” rather than the “middle class” to subsidize other people’s health care.

Why does Fleischer continue to support ObamaCare despite its obvious failures? He writes:

The Affordable Care Act has already done a lot to ensure that many of the poorest Americans have access to health care. Which is something most individuals of conscience can agree is essential in a civilized society.

In other words, Fleischer believes that in a “civilized society” government forces some people (particularly the “wealthy”) to pay for the goods and services consumed by others. But there is nothing civilized about effectively holding a gun to someone’s head and forcing him to hand over his hard-earned wealth to those who did not earn it.

Rather, in a fully civilized society, the government acts solely to protect people’s rights—including their rights to control their wealth, to contract freely with others, and, in general, to act according to their own judgment. ObamaCare is uncivilized because it violates people’s rights, and that is why it produces disastrous consequences.

To protect their lives, their liberties, and their health, Americans must demand that their representatives act in a civilized manner and repeal this uncivilized law.

Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.

Related:

• Dr. Josh Umbehr Explains How to Get Quality, Economical Health Care and Undermine ObamaCare
• ObamaCare Surprises and Brother’s Keepers

Creative Commons Image: Austen Hufford

The energy company EOG Resources recently announced daily production rates of 4,510 barrels of oil, 715 barrels of natural gas liquids, and 4.2 million cubic feet of natural gas out of a single well. In 2007—prior to horizontal drilling and fracking at the location—Eagle Ford “total liquids production (crude oil and condensate) was less than 21 thousand barrels” for the year. In other words, EOG Resources now produces more energy in five days from one well than all the energy produced in the Eagle Ford in 2007.

That is the kind of difference these technologies make. More precisely, that is is the kind of difference the scientists, engineers, and businessmen who develop and apply these technologies make. Heroes one and all.

Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.

Related:

• Energy at the Speed of Thought: The Original Alternative Energy Market
• Voters Have No Right to Violate Right to Frack

In a recent blog post, Bryan Caplan, a libertarian anarchist and an economist at George Mason University (GMU), discusses a recent study linking gun ownership to suicide rates.

In that study, Justin Briggs and Alex Tabarrok (both of GMU) find:

Using a variety of techniques and data we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in the household gun ownership rate leads to a .5 to .9% increase in suicides.

The researchers claim to have factored in the ability of people to substitute other methods of killing themselves. Whether they have adequately accounted for the fact that people serious about committing suicide (as opposed to making a “cry for help” or the like) tend to acquire guns for the purpose—as opposed to cutting themselves, taking pills, or doing other things less likely to result in death—I do not know.

As Caplan explains, a writer for Think Progress seized on the results to argue for more restrictive gun laws.

How, in light of this, does Caplan attempt to defend gun ownership? He pursues two lines of argument, one based on utilitarianism—the theory that the proper moral standard is “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”—the other on subjectivism—the idea that moral truths are matters or personal opinion or social convention.

Caplan’s utilitarian argument runs as follows:

[T]he Briggs-Tabarrok effect says that depriving 3,100,000 people of their guns (a 1 percentage-point decrease in the gun ownership rate) would save about 200-360 lives. . . . In ratio form, the Briggs-Tabarrok effect says that to prevent a single suicide, 8,600 to 15,500 people—the vast majority of whom are not suicidal—must lose their guns.

Is that a good deal? A standard $7M value of life [!] implies a critical value of gun ownership between $452 and $814 per person per year. If the marginal person’s value of gun ownership is less than that, gun deprivation passes the cost-benefit test.

Soak that in.

Caplan offers various data suggesting that American gun owners value their guns more than the dollar figures mentioned. But, sensing the deficiencies of the utilitarian case for gun ownership, Caplan turns to a second argument:

But is a pure cost-benefit approach to gun suicides even appropriate? Probably not. Everyone makes fun-but-risky choices—on diet, lifestyle, and sex for starters. The risks you take affect not only you, but the people who care about you. Many are far riskier than the Briggs-Tabarrok Effect. Yet almost [everyone] thinks it’s wrong to use cost-benefit analysis to veto these personal decisions. . . .

Here Caplan attempts to use moral subjectivism to bolster his utilitarian case. His idea is that to find out what is right we must find out what people subjectively want—even if they don’t yet know it. His argument is essentially that because most people oppose paternalistic government controls in most areas, so too, by implication, they should oppose such controls in this area as well. In other words, people’s desires are to set the standard of proper policy. His argument runs no deeper than that.

Leaving aside the fact that gun ownership is not merely about making a “fun-but-risky” choice (it is fundamentally about self defense and helping to maintain a free society) Caplan’s arguments utterly fail to make the case for gun ownership.

Why should an individual’s or a group’s desires be the standard for political policy? And on what basis does anyone value other people’s lives at $7 million or any other figure? Caplan offers no answers to such questions—and no objective answers are possible.

The approach Caplan takes here is common among libertarians, in that it fails to offer a philosophic grounding for political liberty. (For details, see Craig Biddle’s article, “Libertarianism vs. Radical Capitalism.”)

A person’s rights—to act on his own judgment, to own a gun or other property, to speak his mind, etc.—depend on and arise from a philosophic foundation of reason and egoism: To live, man must use reason to pursue life-promoting values—and he can do so only to the extent that he is free to do so.

Caplan seeks to make the case for liberty while avoiding such fundamentals—which is why, as interesting as some of his discussion is, his case ultimately fails. To effectively advocate liberty, activists must embrace and clearly articulate the philosophic basis of liberty. Let’s encourage each other to do so.

Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.

Related:

• Libertarianism vs. Radical Capitalism
• Libertarians Fiddle while Rome Burns