Ronald Bailey, over at Hit & Run, asks, “Should a person who is dying of an incurable illness be allowed to donate his organs before the disease kills him?” This strikes me as a very odd question to ask, especially given who is doing the asking. Hit & Run is the blog for Reason Magazine, a publication I have been led to believe has some libertarian bent. Yet, oddly, it seems they are still mulling over the most fundamental principle of libertarianism: self-ownership.
Once it is recognized that the fellow from the story, Gary Phebus, is a self-owner, the answer to Bailey’s initial question becomes blindingly obvious – a resounding yes. What would it mean to be a self-owner but be unable to use one’s body and its parts as one wished? Surely, any libertarian must recognize the right to commit suicide and the right to donate one’s organs after death, which is all this amounts to. Why the struggle?
In the middle of the Tripwires’ performance at the Sunset Tavern last October, guitarist Jim Sangster noticed his cocktail had gone missing. “I had a Makers Mark and a beer on a road case beside the stage; I turned around and they were gone.” Sangster’s drink had been confiscated by a representative of the Washington State Liquor Control Board. Sangster was in technical violation of a provisional rule, WAC 314-11-015, that forbids drinking by “any person performing services on a licensed premises for the benefit of the licensee.”
As nanny statists sink their hooks ever deeper into the still-twitching corpse of American individualism, their rules manifest themselves in increasingly ludicrous ways, with judicial commentary to match. Consider that last year, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the state’s smoking ban included on-stage actors, claiming that public health concerns trumped freedom of expression. The lone dissent opined that “character and plots would lack depth and expressive force without such effects as smoke hovering on stage or an actor’s poignant puff.” Hell, never mind mentioning property rights; now judges have to be theater critics, apparently.
Apparently 13.2% of you have some of these in your wallet.
Is it possible? Has free-market anarchist and Austrian School Economist Michael Barnett finally discovered a government program which appears to be achieving its stated goals? Yes, my friends, I think I actually may have done just that. Now look, I understand that correlation does not imply causation, but I think there’s a strong case to be made here. I’m talking, of course, about the multitude of state and federaloutreachefforts over the last two years to spread awareness of and encourage participation in Food Stamps Programs. Record numbers of Americans are receiving food stamp assistance now, more than ever before. Illinois, Oregon, Florida, and Idaho are just four of many US states which have never had so many people dependent on government to feed them. I wanted to make a play on the words “superpower” and “soup lines” (souperlines? souperpower?) to describe America’s new position in the world, but my joke writers aren’t as good as Jay Leno’s.
The world's only souperpower? See, it just doesn't work.
Specifically, according to the US Department of Agriculture40.8 million Americans are recipients of “supplemental nutrition assistance.” Subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April. Participation has set records for 18 straight months. Well, there’s an economy in recovery! I think a little perspective is in order.
Suppose we created a new country out of every recipient of government food assistance programs in the US and named it The Stiglitzian Commonwealth of Krugmania. This new Commonwealth would be tied with Kenya as the 32nd most populous country. It would have more citizens than (in no order) Argentina, Sudan, Poland, Iraq, Venezuela, and Malaysia, just to name a few. It would have twice or more as many citizens as Chile, Niger, Netherlands, Cameroon, Angola, Cambodia, and Kazakhstan just to name a handful of the more than 160 countries which would fall into this category. But what about America’s Neighbor-to-the North? The United States has 6.5 million more people relying on food stamps than Canada has people period. My first instinct is to call that hilarious, but as that comparison sinks in, it’s rather revolting. This must be the economic recovery I kept hearing about.
Don’t despair, people. Let’s not forget the silver lining I launched this post with: we may just have discovered a government program which achieves its stated goals. That’s something, I guess.
