My Body, My Choice—Her Body, Her Choice. Same Principle

Principles are universal and provide causal explanations and guidance to human action.

Examples from an earlier post, with appropriate qualifications, included water boiling at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, and never lying in human relationships. The former is a causal explanation with implicit guidance to adjust cooking temperatures at higher altitudes and the latter is moral guidance with a fundamental explanation of benevolent cooperation. Both principles are universal and apply to all instances of water boiling and cooperation.

Two disputed issues in today’s world are coerced vaccinations and coerced birthing of unwanted children. Both violate individual rights—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The premise underlying both types of coercion, which itself is presented as a universal principle, is the altruistic doctrine of self-sacrifice. As a universal, it justifies extending initiated coercion to other areas of our lives, such as coerced sterilization and coerced prevention of the use of birth control. The premise treats each of us as lambs to be sacrificed to the state. However, there is no right or duty to sacrifice ourselves to others, including the state, and certainly no right to sacrifice others to ourselves or the state.

Rights are freedoms of action, freedoms from any kind of initiated coercion, whether by another citizen or by the government, to choose the values we want to pursue and to take the actions necessary to acquire those values. Rights are moral guidance in a political context and causal explanation of peaceful social cooperation in a capitalist society.

Our only general obligation to others is to avoid initiating coercion against them.

Freedom of action in today’s world includes the freedom to refuse to get vaccinated or to have an unwanted baby. If anyone is afraid to get near the unvaccinated, it is that person’s prerogative to avoid them, not the responsibility of the government to punish or quarantine the unvaccinated. Private businesses can ask you to get vaccinated or stay home. The government cannot.

And the government is nearly everywhere in our lives in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, which means “follow and find the government intervention” before drawing conclusions about what should and should not be done in specific cases. Solution: get the government out of our lives, personal and professional.

Freedom of action also presupposes an actual, not potential, independent living human being who does the acting. Cells in a woman’s body is not an independent life and the woman has the right to decide what to do with her body and those cells. If a fetus develops, though not yet into an independent entity, and the woman’s life becomes threatened, terminating the pregnancy is her decision, no one else’s.*

Freedom of action is the legal issue. You can talk about ethical issues of recklessly refusing to take care of one’s health or of recklessly getting pregnant. But the government in a free society has no right to interfere in such a person’s life.

If I sneeze on you and you can prove my awareness of illness and my negligence or intent to harm, you might have a legal case against me. But if a woman gets pregnant to increase her welfare payments—the only thing morally or legally guilty here is the government welfare system, which should be cancelled.

In April 2020, I cited John Goodman of the Goodman Institute who projected what a truly free market in medicine might be like in a pandemic—meaning absent licensing monopolies and health or medical czars telling us what we can and cannot do. Such as, inexpensive testing kits rapidly produced and made available. Doctors or nurses (an abundance of both because there would be no artificial restriction of supply caused by the licensing) would be available immediately to talk to you via telephone or, more likely, the internet, or actually to make a house call. And if you had serious symptoms, you would be welcomed to the hospital emergency rooms (many more than today because of their built-in excess capacity) and treated promptly.

Quarantining (including “lockdowns”) of asymptomatic people is preventive law and, as Ayn Rand has said, preventive law “is the legal hallmark of dictatorship . . . the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent.”**

Emergency powers and martial law of any kind are violations of individual rights and should be banned in free societies.

Also in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, both left and right, that is, the pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates have much to clean up before they can talk about the issue of abortion. The welfare state and poverty programs that have given us welfare recipients, including pregnant teenagers, who refuse to get a job or a husband to father their children need to be opposed and repealed. And the adoption system, hopelessly mired in bureaucratic rules that prolong and extend the process, should not have any government involvement at all.

Needless to say, the government and its money should also not be involved in birth control or the actual medical procedure of abortion. Let the market decide and operate. It will do a far better job than any federal, state, or local government.

My body, my choice—her body, her choice. Both follow from the US Bill of Rights.


* The right to life, in other words, begins at birth and the abortion issue is nearly entirely about the first trimester, though the woman’s life, health, or future must never be sacrificed, whether to a rapist or to a healthy fetus, or to a severely disabled one.

** Typhoid Mary? Mary Mallon was the only one of over 400 carriers of salmonella typhi forcibly confined by the health czars of New York City. For a total of twenty-six years! The common cold is asymptomatic for one to four days. If we develop a test and find someone positive after two days, do we put that person in jail (quarantine)? Protect the vulnerable is the advice of rational scientists today. See Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta’s 2013 monograph Pandemics (Kindle, location 380), where she suggests that our “current patterns of international travel” have exposed us to all kinds of pathogens and likely given us a “global wall of immunity.” Lockdowns and other forms of confinement prevent our acquisition of such an immunity. And, as Gupta also points out, older people during the 1918 Spanish Flu seem not to have been affected because they likely had developed immunity during previous influenza outbreaks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Pandemics, Kindle, location 20).

“Rules Are Rules”—the Deep State and Left Are Responsible for Many Coronavirus Deaths

To be sure, many coronavirus deaths in 2020 are due to comorbidities of the elderly in the 80-plus age range. But the failure to test early and abundantly and to rapidly develop and deploy treatments for the virus, not to mention vaccines, falls on the “rules are rules” mentality and seemingly limitless red tape and foot-dragging of the government’s bureaucracy and politicians.

Then, the inherently risk-averse bureaucrats and politicians imposed oppressive measures shutting down the economy and giving leftists, who for decades have wanted and now have gotten, totalitarian control of our entire society.

Economists are too narrow in their description of socialism as “government ownership of the means of production.” The correct description, as we have all experienced recently, is “government ownership and control of us,” of every person, of every person’s desires and behavior.

And to blame our current president for coronavirus deaths is typical leftist, Orwellian propaganda, which by definition and built into their theory is disingenuous.

After enjoying two takeout meals that were in fact as good as their counterparts in the restaurants, I found myself longing for the opening of speakeasy restaurants—in the rebellious spirit Americans have always exhibited, going back to the era of Prohibition and the American Revolution.

I recall a classmate at my university in the late 1960s who stood up in front of a demonstration at the school’s administration building and pumped his fist, shouting leftist slogans for “power to the people” and “it’s time for revolution.” That event made think we were on the verge of a new Bolshevik Revolution.

Well it is time for revolution today—an intellectual revolution to throw off the chains of government and its deep state that enjoys controlling us.

Power to the people—to each one of us as individuals to make our own decisions about how to handle the present situation.

How would a free market in health care have handled this coronavirus “crisis”? John Goodman of the Goodman Institute has answered the question. With no government bureaucracy telling us what we can and cannot do, initial doctor/patient contact would likely be by telephone or internet to rule out serious symptoms.

“In the face of coronavirus indications,” continues Goodman, “a doctor or nurse would arrive at the home (within an hour), take a swab sample and perform a coronavirus test—with results in, say, 10 minutes.”

Patients with serious symptoms would be greeted at the emergency room (no wait, of course) by a team to escort them “to isolated rooms with appropriate equipment and safeguards to protect other patients and hospital personnel.” Personal protection equipment would be abundantly available, if not immediately, then within a matter of days, as entrepreneurs would work around the clock to meet demand, likely including innovative improvements. Panic buying by consumers or providers, assuming there would even be a panic like we are experiencing today, would be discouraged by increased prices.

And, I might add, anyone who wants to know on a regular basis whether or not they have the virus would have access to an inexpensive at-home test. In a free society, anyone who is afraid of being infected would not be prevented from staying home for an extended period.

Fantasy? Only to those who do not understand classical liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism. The projection gives us a goal to strive for and a standard by which to evaluate the present.

Today, we have a “mixed economy,” or rather, as we should more properly call it, a “mixed society of freedom and dictatorship.” The dictatorship part—the massive central planning and price controls—comes from deep state bureaucrats and politicians who mistakenly (or willingly) defer to the medical czars. And the czars think nothing of imprisoning an entire nation because it is, after all, “for our own good” even though the lockdowns impoverish everyone in the process.

Yet we have evidence from other countries—South Korea, Singapore, Honk Kong, and Taiwan—that the shotgun approach to contagion control is not the best path to take. Test and treat precisely, promptly, and extensively (“rifle style,” to complete the metaphor) is what is effective and saves lives. These four countries, it must be admitted, do have severe surveillance techniques in place to make sure the infected don’t wander far from home. Japan, on the other hand, seems to be doing well with face masks, according to Willis Eschenbach. See this on South Korea.

Who is at fault for our pathetic situation today? The deep state Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration, our alleged protectors, both of whom committed a not-at-all funny comedy of errors for six weeks delaying the development and approval of tests and treatments (1, 2, 3). And the pace now of testing and approval of treatments, in April 2020, is still deplorably slow.

And then there are the statistical models that have done as much as the less-than-honest press to fan the flames of panic and uncertainty.

Such models, like their climate cousins, are bundles of assumptions used for forecasting, and those assumptions may or may not be correct. Forecasting just means extrapolating from the recent past to predict the near future. We do it all the time, whether it’s company sales, the local weather next week, or what our spouse or children might do tomorrow and the day after that.*

Predictions of the future can be highly inaccurate. In the case of virus models, they have huge margins of error, which means their creators will be heroes wherever the final number falls. With coronavirus, we don’t even know the denominator, which will no doubt be extremely large, thus reducing the fatality rate  (deaths divided by total cases) possibly to the level of seasonal flu, or lower. (See interview with Jay Bhattacharya.)

Does the word “irresponsible” come to mind when medical czars and front page headlines blast “millions of deaths ahead”?

So how do we handle uncertainty? We each weigh the risks and decide for ourselves. Some of us may like to skydive three times a week. Others may prefer to stay home during a contagion. That is a decision that should be left to each one of us.

Cass Sunstein speaking as a believer in mixed-economy policy states that he has “long been a critic of the precautionary principle, which calls for potentially expensive precautions against bad outcomes in the face of scientific uncertainty.” The “potentially expensive precautions” that he is referring to? Our current bureaucratic decisions, made in a seemingly unaware and unacknowledged manner, of destroying lives and businesses, which the left, of course, viciously characterizes as “just dollars and cents.”

Sunstein’s “precautionary principle” goes by another name, argumentum ad ignorantiam, the logical fallacy called appeal to ignorance. “We don’t know what’s going to happen and you can’t prove that disaster won’t occur! It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

So what if some people get hurt in the process? It’s all for the good of “society.”

God forbid the bureaucrats and politicians would allow each one of us as individuals to decide for ourselves how to handle the uncertainty.

Power to the people! It is time to man the barricades of freedom.


* NOAA Scijinks, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a government agency, has substantial data on weather predictions: 90% accuracy for five days, 80% for seven, and 50% for ten or more days. How many millions of deaths are now being predicted by the climate models? And how soon will Florida be under water? Wasn’t that supposed to happen five years ago??


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