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).

How to Eliminate Deep State Dictatorship

Why “deep state dictatorship”?

Let me start with the notion that most people would call the middle point between capitalism and socialism a “mixed economy,” which they also continue to say is a “mixture of freedom and controls.”

I’ll grant the “mixed economy” part but add also that the middle point is a “mixed society”—of freedom and dictatorship. When initiated coercion is used against citizens, it is a tactic of the dictator to control not just the economy but every citizen’s behavior. The mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

The more initiated coercion is instituted by a government, the more that country will move toward a totalitarian society.

Capitalism is a social system in which the government remains completely out of our personal and business lives. It requires a complete separation of church and state, and complete separation of business and state. Individual rights, especially property rights, are its supreme values and are inviolate. The only function of government is to protect those rights and the only justified use of force is self-defensive to retaliate against those who have initiated coercion. This means all businesses, including schools and highways, are privately owned and operated.*

The “deep state” is a relatively new term coming to us apparently from Turkey where it means a secretive, extralegal collection of military, bureaucrats, and politicians who seek to undermine and, in some cases, overthrow a government (1, 2). In the United States, the term refers primarily to the unelected federal bureaucracy, currently estimated to be about three million,** and occasionally to collaborators, such as lobbyists at the federal level (about 12,000), assorted think tanks, military leaders, and corrupt politicians, some (many?) of whom would gladly sell their souls to undermine an administration and, perhaps, overthrow it. The national media, who repeatedly print and broadcast leaked classified information and seem unable to use objective methods of reporting facts and truth, must be added as the deep state’s courtiers.

But what is the origin of the bureaucracy and how necessary is it? In the Roman Empire, there was a large bureaucracy built on patronage, appointed by the emperor in power. The form and purpose of our present system, however, stems from the Han Dynasty in China (206 BC – AD 220)—the “Mandarin system”—and came to us by way of Prussia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then, finally, by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service act in the United States (1, p. 157; 2; 3).

The significance of the Han system is that it established testing to determine who was “qualified” to serve in the government; it is actually a pretense at objectivity and is the system we have today. (See Megan McArdle on “America’s New Mandarins.”) The aim of the Pendleton Act was to eliminate the (unqualified) bureaucrats of the spoils system and give us supposedly highly qualified government workers. The difference between the two systems is that the spoils workers (a very small number in the US) were usually gone when the next president was elected. In modern systems, bureaucrats, which in numbers multiply like rabbits, may and often do spend their entire careers in the nation’s capital, outlasting many presidents.

This is our inheritance from the Progressives of the late nineteenth century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the Progressives who were trained in Germany by their democratic socialist professors. The deep state, encroaching more and more on the private sector and our rights, is rapidly moving us toward the giant post office that Lenin envisioned as the socialist state.

The deep state is dictatorial because nearly all of its rules, regulations, and laws are initiated coercion. The message to citizens is always some variation of “you must do this” or “you cannot do that.” These are not rules, regulations, and laws to protect individual rights against initiated coercion. They are themselves the initiation and are therefore dictatorial.***

How do we eliminate the deep state dictatorship? Going back to the spoils system would be a good start. Managing the police, military, or legal system, which is what bureaucratic management properly is (Applying Principles, pp. 31-33), does not require an Ivy League education. Reducing the bureaucracy’s size to a tiny percentage of what it is today and selling all business-like governmental assets, such as the post office and all of the federally owned land (28% of the total acreage in the US) would go a long way toward reducing the national debt.

Drastically reducing the unelected bureaucracy would quickly reduce or eliminate the need for lobbyists and think tanks and might even send away those courtiers in the national media to look for honest jobs where they must actually report news based on facts and truth.

For about 130 years, the Progressives—in the name of  “democracy,” “helping the poor,” and “protecting competition”—have been marching us closer and closer to that “heaven” on earth they call socialism. Their recent behavior indicates either that they are desperate and on the precipice of failure (one can only hope!) or that they see an opportunity to steamroll their ideas on the rest of the country.

Deep state dictatorship must be defeated and removed.


* And are profit-making. I take laissez-faire capitalism to mean that there would also be no nonprofit organizations, as they are creatures of the state, the tax laws in particular. (All nonprofits today, to remain viable, must show an excess of donations over expenditures. Some are highly “profitable.”)

** Add about 16 million state and local employees, including public school teachers.

*** How many rules, regulations, and laws? Estimates, of course, vary, but I would put the minimum around 200,000. (In 2016, there were 3853 regulatory rules and 214 Congressional bills added to the Federal Register.) See my post on the “administrative state” (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83), as Philip Hamburger calls the deep state.