Eugenics and central-planner hubris

Anti-Statism, Nanny Statism, Racism, Totalitarianism
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Forced eugenics programs where “sub-standard” humans are involuntarily sterilized are evil. You don’t have to be a libertarian to agree with that. But leaving aside the fundamental objection to the injustice of such programs, the most notable case upholding an involuntary negative eugenics policy in the United States reveals something else troubling about proponents of the command-and-control state.

Carrie Buck

In his Buck v. Bell decision, that titan of modern American “legal realismOliver Wendall Homes, Jr. famously justified his decision to allow the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck by stating “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” The 1927 ruling inspired a blossoming of eugenics laws across the United States targeting not only the mentally handicapped, but also petty criminals and social undesirables like the poor, women who were sexually promiscuous, and others who happened to be of a different ethnicity than the eugenicists.

But poor Carrie Buck wasn’t even really retarded. She was a troublemaker or a rape victim, depending on who you believe. Her daughter (the third generation to which Holmes referred) wasn’t an imbecile either. She was actually on her school’s honor roll the year before she died of measles. If Paul Lombardo’s version of the story is correct, that case is a terrible, terrible example of the trauma of a woman’s victimization in rape and subsequent pregnancy being compounded by central planners. Holmes the eugenicist was too concerned with aggrandizing the power of the state at the expense of the individual to be concerned with whether the woman to be sterilized in the case before him was even “unfit.”

[Note: For more on the Progressive historical context in which Buck v. Bell was decided, see Michael Giuliano’s September 2008 article in The Freeman.]

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Sour Grapes: Politicians launch scorched earth campaign against own city in bid to raise taxes

Democracy, Taxation
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It turns our that after the voters of Colorado Springs rejected a tax increase for the city, the city’s politicians ordered their public relations staffers to bad mouth the city and to cast a negative light on the city in national media. Basically, since they didn’t get their tax increase, the politicians were determined to make the city look as lousy as possible in a sort of I-told-you-so campaign that would make the voters sorry for not submitting to their betters.

According to the Colorado Springs Gazette:

After much probing by us, it became clear that [PR Director] Skiffington-Blumberg was given direct orders, after the defeat of the proposed tax increase, to tell the outside media about the most negative aspects of Colorado Springs. The campaign may have cost our city countless tourists and jobs. The Gazette was unable to reach [City Manager] Culbreth-Graft for comment.

“Our strategic plan was to paint a picture of the dire straits of our city budget. If we could not do so locally, we would do so in the regional and national press — though I’d have preferred that it not play out with Diane Sawyer,” Skiffington-Blumberg said, referring to one of several media giants who blasted Colorado Springs.

After she admitted the existence of this scorched earth campaign against the city, by the way, Skiffington-Blumberg was forced to resign by the City Manager.

In the past I’ve noted that Colorado’s constitutional requirements for popular votes approving tax increases have created a sort of local cottage industry in which politicians and their agents manufacture hysterical little narratives in which Colorado is the worst in the nation on everything ranging from education to city parks to traffic. “We’re worse than Mississippi” is a sort of local mantra of the local pro-tax crowd. The voters haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid on this of course, and neither has most of the country’s population since demographic data shows sizable net population gains for Colorado in recent years.

But if this latest story is clear, politicians will say just about anything to get a tax increase, even it it means waging a PR campaign against their own city.

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Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand and the Classical Liberal Tradition

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Business, Pop Culture, Statism, The Right
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With the recent release of the first part of the film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged (see Matthew Alexander’s review on Prometheus Unbound), the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) — via LearnLiberty.org — brings us this interview with Professor Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, on how Ayn Rand fits into the classical liberal tradition.

In this video, Prof. Burns explains three classical liberal themes in Ayn Rand’s masterpiece Atlas Shrugged: individualism, suspicion of centralized power, and free markets. These themes come to life through the novel’s plot and characters and give the reader an opportunity to imagine a world where entrepreneurship has been stifled by regulations and where liberty has been traded for security. Burns ends by reviving Rand’s critical question: do you want to live in this kind of world?

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