On Abortion and Cake-Baking

What do you not get, dear conservatives and dear leftists, in the expression “Stay out of our bedrooms and board rooms?”

The expression, of course, is metaphor, but it’s not too far from the literal truth. Individual rights means everyone, but especially the government, should stay out of our personal lives and our business and professional lives. It means what we do in our personal and business and professional lives—between consenting adults, which means we don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights—is none of your business.

The result of this principle is, or would be, if implemented consistently, laissez-faire capitalism.

Dear conservatives and dear leftists, you both conflate legal and moral issues. You both agree that what you consider immoral should be illegal and therefore moral transgressors must be punished.

If abortion is murder, for example, why not execute the aborters? Something similar can be said about small business people who refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings. No, you conservatives and leftists have not gone so far as to recommend execution—yet—but both of you have no qualms about putting victims of your legal shenanigans in that modern version of the dungeon called solitary confinement, “for their own protection,” as you put it. (Think Jerry Sandusky and Paul Manafort.)

In an earlier post, I quoted Ludwig von Mises, who said, “Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. . . . He refuses to convince his fellow citizens. He prefers to ‘liquidate’ them. . . . [He] worships violence and bloodshed.”

Are we there yet? You both preach self-sacrifice, otherwise known as altruism. According to both of you, we should all be sacrificing ourselves to some “higher good,” whether God or “society” (which means the state) . . . or you.

Suffering is supposedly our natural fate and you intend to make us suffer. Individual rights? That’s selfish!

Let us now take these self-sacrificial issues one at a time.

Abortion is not murder, nor does our soul begin at conception, or even at birth. At twelve weeks, the fetus is a couple of inches of cells in the woman’s body. Let’s emphasize that: in the woman’s body, not in your body. Each woman owns her body and, as does every adult individual, has the right to do with her body whatever she wants. (Suicide laws in most states have been properly abolished.)

We are, after all, overwhelmingly talking about the first trimester (91.1% of abortions performed) and we are talking about ending a potential, not actual, human life. Beyond the first thirteen weeks, each woman still has a legal right to abort, especially if her life is at risk due to a difficult pregnancy. This is what the “right to life” means! It begins at birth. This is the legal issue.

The moral issue is narrower.

Is it really the moral duty of a young woman to become enslaved to a child she does not want?  I’m not just talking about malformed children. What about the psychology of physically healthy children who have been raised by a mother (and father) who did not want them?

As for the soul . . . the soul is our consciousness and fundamental motivating values, our core and mid-level evaluations, as psychologist Edith Packer (chap. 1) identifies them, that give us a personal identity. The soul-making process takes many years, with development beginning most likely in toddlerhood, though infants, through the treatment of their caregivers and their experiences of pleasureful satisfactions and painful frustrations, may begin to develop a potential soul.

Conception and the months of pregnancy give us genes that determine our skin and eye color, not our souls.

Suffering, I guess you conservatives would say, is the plight of both children and parents, but especially parents, because they are the ones who chose to have sex. And this is where we have arrived in the discussion. It is sex that must be controlled, by the government, and you are the ones who want to be in charge.*

Now dear leftists, there’s nothing subtle about you and your recycled Marxism and collectivist clichés. Your issues are blatant power grabs. Ultimately, you or your followers or descendants, if current trends continue, will soon start worshiping violence and bloodshed, if it hasn’t already begun. As did Robespierre, you are already dressing up violence as virtue.

Sacrificing a baker to an alleged “public good,” coercing him to make a cake for someone he does not want to serve, is only the beginning. As your policies dictate, the dungeon, or rather, solitary confinement (and, of course, eventually the guillotine), is where hinderers of your march to power, whom you propagandize as violators of morality, should go.

The issue is the primacy of property rights and you know it. Capitalism is a system of private property, private ownership of the means of production, which includes the baking of cakes. I can do whatever I want to on my property (and say anything, if we are talking about free speech), provided, again, that I’m not violating other peoples’ rights who are residents or guests. So you, dear leftists, get out!

But that is precisely what you cannot tolerate—being unable to control other people on their own property—so you brandish your government guns like any other petty or psychopathic criminal.

“Without property rights,” as Ayn Rand says, “no other rights are possible.” Property rights are sacrosanct and should be untouchable. They are the implementation of the rights to life and liberty.

The destruction of capitalism has always begun with the destruction of property rights. It continues to be a fundamental part of your campaign.

Dear leftists, I sympathize in today’s intellectual climate with conservatives and side with them in their war against you and your medievalist friends who want to reinstitute a modern version of serfdom with you in charge of the fiefdom. Most conservatives seem to understand your envy and hatred of the good, the capitalist good, that has brought us out of the abject poverty you want to send us back to.

Abortion is not an insignificant issue, but you leftists have no principles with which to argue your case—“pro-choice” or not. You so obviously want power.


*This is not an endorsement of every abortion. The moral decisions of getting pregnant and raising children, as well as aborting a fetus, are serious and must be carefully thought out ahead of time. It is decidedly immoral to get pregnant just to collect welfare or because one feels like it; it is also decidedly immoral to abort based on whim. Parents must provide information and support to their children about sex, birth control, and abortion, including information about abortion’s potential for physical and emotional pain,. But this means the government on both sides of the political aisle must get out of the abortion business. This means in particular no tax-payer funds or regulations to or for either side, and especially it means no tax-payer funds to “nonprofits” like Planned Parenthood and the various conservative counterparts! (Scare quotes intended, as many so-called nonprofits are highly profitable.) And, as I have written before, both sides have the moral obligation of removing legal and regulatory obstacles to adoption and the legal and regulatory encouragements of unwed teenage pregnancies. (On this last, see Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.)

Insight and Eloquence in Thomas Sowell’s A Man of Letters

Awhile back I ordered economist Thomas Sowell’s book A Man of Letters. I seldom read entire books of letters, but Sowell’s was quite enjoyable, both insightful and eloquent.

The book consists of Sowell’s letters from 1960 to 2006 with emails intermixed in the later years, along with editorial comments between the letters.

Sowell is known for his strict adherence to facts through the extensive research he has conducted over the decades. Let me cite several examples that shine through his letters and comments.

On IQ and other forms of assessment testing, Sowell offers data that show race does not explain differences, as white groups both in the US and abroad have similar IQ scores as blacks. In the US, some black schools have IQ’s equal to or better than the national average and black women outscore black men (p. 110).

Commenting on his Harlem high school classmates, Sowell writes, “The kids I had trouble keeping up with had an average IQ of 84. . . . A few years later I was able to hold my own in a class where the average IQ was over 120.” Sowell says he is “appalled at some of the questions [test makers] ask to test ‘intelligence.’” His conclusion: nearly all mass assessment testing is “biased against the poor and the disadvantaged” (pp. 154-55).

On the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Sowell was not a huge fan of, he points out the steady improvements in the standard of living of blacks as well as their increased success at securing higher-level employment throughout the 1940s and ‘50s. In the 1960s, however, after passage of the bill, improvements slowed with new trends of increased crime, unemployment, and unwed motherhood taking over (p. 44).

In his younger years, Sowell’s research convinced him that minimum wage laws increased unemployment, especially among poor blacks. In a letter to a black mayor in Alabama who wanted to relax the wage laws, Sowell of course praised the mayor but went on to emphasize how necessary it is for young blacks to obtain work experience, no matter how “menial” it may be. “They need the work experience even more than they need the money,” he writes. Work experience of any kind teaches young people the meaning and value of work.

“In my research on racial and ethnic groups around the world,” says Sowell, “I discovered again and again that groups who are hung up over ‘menial’ work get overtaken and left behind by groups who consider a job a job” (pp. 204-205).

And as for “preferential treatment”—his preferred term instead of “affirmative action”—his letter from 1972 to the economics department chairman at Swarthmore College may sum up his attitude. The letter to Sowell said the college is “actively looking for a black economist.” Sowell’s reply: “Many a self-respecting black scholar would never accept an offer like this. . . . You and I know that many of these special recruiting efforts are not aimed at helping black faculty members or black or white students, but rather at hanging on to the school’s federal money.”

The result of “quotas” and “affirmative action,” says Sowell in his editorial transition, is “the ‘new racism’—that is, more racial polarization than had existed on those same campuses decades earlier" (pp. 97-99).

Numerous letters are to his longtime friends economist Walter Williams and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In a 1991 letter to Williams, about the contentious nomination hearings of Thomas, Sowell writes, “Clarence is still young enough to be shocked at being knifed in the back by someone he went out of his way to help . . . My theory is that Clarence’s problem arose precisely because he did not sexually harass Anita Hill. . . . As for Clarence, he has done himself proud in the way he has handled this thing (pp. 232-33).” [That is, his righteous moral indignation at the falsehoods hurled at him, falsehoods not unlike those slung at a recent Supreme Court nominee who also dared to defend himself with equally righteous moral indignation.]

In an editorial comment, Sowell tells this anecdote about Clarence Thomas’s “human touch” and “respect for other people” (something the press did not grant him). When Thomas in 1982 became chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he was entitled to a chauffeur, an elderly man referred to by everyone at the time by his first name. Thomas immediately addressed him “Mr. Randall,” with the staffers subsequently following suit. Writes Sowell, “When riding in the car with the two of them, I was struck by their considerate politeness toward each other.” It was difficult to tell “who was the chauffeur and who was the head of the agency” (p. 234).

In response to a 1981 letter inviting Sowell to write a bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, he submitted two on a topic he said “needs to be confronted clearly.” After their publication, the columns “sparked the bitterest attacks” on him “before or since.” The columns are reprinted following the invitation letter.

“Blacker Than Thou” and “Blacker Than Thou (II)” are the columns. The bitter attacks stem from his revealing “the dirty little secret of internal color discrimination among blacks in a white newspaper.” The discrimination derives from the differences—physical, cultural, and educational—between lighter skinned blacks and the darker ones. In the days of slavery, the lighter skinned tended to be slaves who were freed or who worked as house servants. The darker skinned blacks were field slaves.

Over the last century and a half the lighter skinned and their descendants were more privileged than the darker ones, absorbing the dominant culture and attending school, including college. Many subsequently adopted “holier than thou” condescension toward their darker brothers. Not coincidentally, the lighter skinned blacks have tended to become “the militant black leader[s] not only distant from but snobbish toward the people in whose name [they speak].”

Sowell does not hesitate to name names. Patricia Roberts Harris, cabinet secretary in Jimmy Carter’s administration, is quoted as saying that people like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell “don’t know what poverty is.” Harris and Sowell attended Howard University at the same time, but, as Sowell says, “under entirely different conditions.” Sowell worked full time and attended school at night. Harris, on the other hand, attended school full time, was a “campus social leader,” and also a member of “an ‘exclusive’ sorority” (pp. 166-76).

As for Sowell and Williams? Both were raised in fatherless homes. Thomas Sowell lived initially in North Carolina without hot running water or electricity, then moved to Harlem where he had to quit high school to make money. Williams grew up in the projects of Philadelphia.

I believe Sowell has insightfully and eloquently made his point.

Crybullies, Non-Negotiable Demands, Micro-Totalitarianisms, Academic Fascism . . . and Cabaret

“It is nothing! Children on their way to school. Mischievous children! Nothing more!”—from the Broadway musical Cabaret.

The words are spoken by Herr Schultz, the Jewish fruit shop owner whose window has been smashed by a brick. The setting of the story is the eve of Hitler’s rise, 1931 Weimar Germany.

Too strong a comparison to make to the “children” on today’s college campuses?

Is it?

Roger Kimball, author of the 1990 book Tenured Radicals (2nd ed. 2008) has called protesting students crybullies. Those are the ones making non-negotiable demands for trigger warnings lest certain words or ideas they disagree with hurt their feelings.

The mothers of present-day crybullies apparently did not teach their children the familiar rhyme about sticks and stones . . . versus words.

Thomas Sowell prefers to call the new “micro-aggression” buzzword micro-totalitarianism. “Macro-aggression” supposedly means blatant physical force, including the battery of unwanted touching. But hurtful, offensive words are said to be small coercions that, if allowed, can accumulate to become just as bad as the macro ones.

More correctly, Sowell argues, the micro-censorships that the Marxist left is pushing are moving us “even if by small steps” more and more toward the macro silencing of dissent. This is the last step to dictatorship and total control.

The list of the left’s no-no’s that must be censored has now climbed to at least 80 and were it not such a serious issue would qualify for theater of the absurd. For example, “American is the land of opportunity,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” and “Where are you from or where were you born?” are said to be racist micro-aggressions that should be banned from the home of academic freedom.

Violators of these prescriptions, the protesters demand, must be reprimanded, suspended, required to attend sensitivity training classes, or, preferably, forced to resign. Students at Emory University are demanding that course evaluations rate professorial micro-aggressions—the predictable ones that might offend (Marxist) class identities.

Walter Williams calls the current atmosphere on college campuses academic fascism.

From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. Free speech is a basic tool for indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses.

Williams cites one English professor who in the process of expressing his opposition to what the left calls Israeli Apartheid (compare 1, 2) said we must “not be guided by cardboard notions of civility.”

The phrase means what it sounds like. Says Williams: “That professor's vision differs little from Adolf Hitler's brown-shirted thugs of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party in their effort to crush dissent.”

The resurrection of 1960s-style intolerance is not lost on older professors, including Sowell: “Storm trooper tactics by bands of college students making ideological demands across the country, and immediate preemptive surrender by college administrators — such as at the University of Missouri recently—bring back memories of the 1960s . . . .”

That is to say, non-negotiable demands followed by administrator capitulation are not new.

Not every university administration from the 1960s era, however, gave in. The University of Chicago (and my alma mater, the University of Denver) expelled and suspended numerous students who staged sit-ins at campus buildings.

Just mischievous children?

Some are ignorant, but the leaders are neither ignorant nor mischievous.

One classmate circa 1968-69 gave an impromptu speech at a protest crowd on the steps of my alma mater’s administration building. His voice boomed about struggle and revolution and his fist pumped.

The chilling thought that went through my mind was this: in 1917 St. Petersburg this classmate would have been on the front lines of Bolshevism.

Today, please, let us not stick our heads in the sand as did Weimar culture in interwar Germany.

Not seeing, or wanting to see, what was on the horizon of Germany’s future is the theme of Cabaret. Go see it, or if you have seen it, see it again.