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.)

How Well-Intended Are the Well-Intended?

A familiar comment today runs like this: “X was done with the best of intentions, but unfortunately the consequences were otherwise.”

Bad consequences, then, are excused because of the good intentions.

The comment is heard especially in politics, such as, “The proposal was well-intended, as were the regulations and laws, but the policy did not help the poor, did not increase the nation’s wealth, or reduce crime,” etc.

Were the politicians well-intended, even when they failed to acknowledge a connection between their policies and the bad consequences? Were the politicians’ supporters and voters well-intended? And what about the theoreticians who wrote the fundamental ideas that influenced the politicians? Were they well-intended?

Good intentions, of course, can be found everywhere. Parents in particular are said to be well-intended when, for example, spanking a toddler by hand because the child would not crawl into the barber chair to have his hair cut. The dad, after all, was just trying to teach his son a lesson. What about the parent who does not give one swat by hand, but uses a belt or hair brush five or ten times? Well-intended?

How do we distinguish good intentions from bad? Answer: it’s not easy and we must be careful before asserting bad intentions.

This issue falls into the category of “how do we judge other people?” And the answer to that question is that it takes time. We must get to know someone well before drawing conclusions about his or her motivations. Which means we should not sign a business partnership agreement after one meeting or hop into bed after one date or get married after a one-month relationship.

The challenge is to get beneath surface appearances and not be swayed by looks, words, or demeanor. Yes, we can pick up clues from all three but that honest look, statements of happiness and independence, and sincere, confident behavior may be an act. Not necessarily a deceitful act at which criminals are expert, but role playing that derives from a subconsciously automatized psychology that may or may not be sincere.

The continuum of psychology is what makes judging others so difficult. The range of bad versus good intentions extends from the criminal personality, who by definition has bad intentions, to the totally trustworthy soulmate. In between is a wide variety of personalities, all of which we might allow the moniker “well-intended,” for a variety of reasons, including ignorance.

Our psychologies greatly influence our intentions. The many defensive habits we develop in childhood and adolescence—defense mechanisms, defense values, out-of-context emotions—can, on the surface, seem ill-intended, but because they are automated and subconscious, we may not be aware of their causes and often their presence.

Ignorance influences our intentions by causing us to talk and act seemingly confidently when in fact what we say and do may lead to bad, unintended consequences.

Politicians and talking heads on cable television might—might—get a pass because of their ignorance of economics, which today is extensive. And a friend who complains about overpopulation in the US but has seldom ventured beyond the metropolitan city limits to observe enormously unoccupied deserts, mountains, plains, and tree-laden forests should also probably be given the benefit of the doubt.

Behavior, on the other hand, can be controlled by us. This includes, as I have argued before (Applying Principles, pp. 232-34), the dad who swatted his toddler for not getting into the barber chair. Granted, for thousands of years, tradition has said it is okay to hit children, we know too much today about psychology to excuse the behavior. But as I wrote before, this does not mean we should throw the dad in the slammer; it means we should educate him.

Behavior that initiates the use of physical force against innocents cannot be well-intentioned, because it is criminal. This includes smashing plate glass windows and starting fires on college campuses, and blocking entry to venues to prevent the appearance of speakers. Ordering police to stand down in such instances is also not well-intentioned.

Nor can advocating, encouraging, or praising similar behavior through speech or writing. For example, cavalierly (if stupidly) urging the blowing up of the White House or applauding fist fights and egg-throwing in public as “righteous beatings.”

Now let me return to the politicians and talking heads. “Clacking the uppers” is how one wag has described the ways of politicians, but I would say, applying this to both politicians and the talking heads, that they preach the gospel, whatever that gospel may be, over and over and over ad nauseam, with little variation and even less independence or originality.

Stuck records need to be adjusted and if possible replaced. Are the stuck records well-intentioned? Today, it seems to have become sport to call anyone we disagree with an ill-motivated liar. And refusal to read, or acknowledge the existence of, well-argued opposing viewpoints runs rampant. The refusals are often wrapped in abundant ad hominem, argument from intimidation, and rationalization fallacies.

Grudgingly, I suppose I have to allow that such stuck records may be well-intentioned—because I don’t personally know any politicians or talking heads. Their ideas—socialism, progressivism, and mixed economy traditional “liberalism” and traditional “conservatism”—all contain large doses of initiated coercion. There is just no way for me to know their aims or goals or how sincere they are about them.

What I will not do is give politicians and talking heads the honorific that they speak and act “with the best of intentions.” That is a concession, a compromise of principle, that they do not deserve. They must prove their sincerity through personal contact and friendship.

The Two Liberalisms

Politics bores me. That’s why I have not written a blog on politics or on the upcoming election. Let this post suffice as my comment on today’s politics.

The Democrats’ loss in 2004 led to much soul-searching to define what the Democratic brand of liberalism should be or represent. Advice given focused on the usual concretes—guns, abortion, gay rights—the kinds of issues that would excite no one except conservatives. My advice is this. Reexamine the meaning of liberalism. Note its fundamental principles, especially as they evolved out of the Enlightenment. Then, in a radical departure from “politics as usual,” adopt those principles as vanguard for freedom worldwide.

The problem is that two liberalisms came out of the Enlightenment. The first was classical or market liberalism (today also called libertarianism). The second, developing in the latter part of the nineteenth century in England and the United States, is social liberalism, an amalgam of ideas ranging from mixed-economy features of part capitalism, part socialism, to Fabian or democratic socialism.

Market and social liberalism have the same genus, which means they share certain principles, and for advocates of market liberalism, this is an argument for possibly seeking common ground with some of their social counterparts. The common principles are these: emphasis on self-realization or self-actualization of the individual human mind as the essence of liberty, which translates to demands for the freedom of speech and press; strong value placed on reason, science, and technology as the source of modern material civilization; and the complete separation of church and state, with an emphasis on secular naturalism, including the naturalization of consciousness.

Where market and social liberalism differ is in their attitude toward business. Social liberalism holds that business, especially big business, is the new aristocracy that, through its positions of power and privilege, coerce the poor into remaining poor and generally disrupt the good taste of society. Hence, government might must be brought in to make right.

The history and theory of capitalism as understood by social liberals, of course, is patently false and has been demonstrated so by Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, among many others. And social liberals are mistaken to think that reason, science, and technology by themselves created modern material civilization. Without capitalism, at the end of the eighteenth century, reason, science, and technology would have remained, respectively, little more than a mental exercise, a curiosity, and a hobby. Instead, capitalism unleashed their creative and productive powers.

It is these errors of social liberals that market liberals must articulate in conversations. Reality exists in a continuum; so do people. Social liberals range in thought from those who are merely mistaken to those who are explicitly and rabidly socialist and are out to destroy business. It is the former with whom one can make common cause, because such social and market liberals share many of the same values, namely freedom of the individual human mind, reason, science, technology, separation of church and state, and naturalization of consciousness. It is a challenge to the market liberal, then, to convince the mistaken social liberal that true liberalism is the market or libertarian variety. If Democrats want to remain advocates of freedom, they should make their liberalism consistent and adopt market liberalism.

So what about religious conservatives and today’s Republicans? People exist in a continuum, so some conservatives do still understand capitalism and promote it correctly, but most pretend to advocate capitalism, while rushing to outdo the Democrats, and usually succeeding at the job, in expanding the welfare-warfare state.

Lew Rockwell, president of the Mises Institute, has this to say about conservatives:

The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one soul to heresy.

This is a good statement about conservatism, but one question remains: why does conservatism hate the left? The answer is the secular naturalism of liberalism; from its beginnings in the Enlightenment, liberalism has always seen religion and the church as enemies of individual rights and freedom. The phrase “pinko-commie atheists,” with emphasis on the last word, summarizes the motivation of conservatism. It is intolerant of irreligion. That identifies conservatism as a movement that is pre-Enlightenment.

Conservatism is not a friend of capitalism, nor is it a philosophy of liberalism.

The fundamental problem with both social liberalism and religious conservatism is that both identify morality with altruism. Social liberals may force their children to give all proceeds from a lemonade-stand sale to charity, but the religious conservatives force their children to give ten percent or more of their allowance to the church. Both advocate as gospel self-sacrifice in their personal, social, and political lives.

Eliminating the premise that government might makes right requires first that the premise of self-sacrifice be challenged and replaced by the right, whether child or adult, peaceably and cooperatively to pursue ones’ own values.