Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Ethics of Liberty
3. Rothbardianism
4. The Libertarian Position on Abortion
5. Negative Rights vs. Positive
Rights
6. The Baby Starving Principle
7. Morality in A Clockwork Orange
8. The Law, Taxes, and Alienation of the Will
9. Abortion, Baby Starving, and the Left
10. Abortion, Baby Starving, and the Right
11. I Hate My Dead Gay Son
12. Abortion and Baby Starving as Political Strategy
13. The Libertarian Position on Baby Starving
14. Parenting as Slavery
15. Hospitals!
16. Who Will Starve the Baby Starvers!?
17. Starvation and Natural Resources
18. Freedom for the Trolls
19. Babies Feed Themselves
20. Fuck Child Labor Laws
21. You Can Get a Lot of Money for a Baby
22. Conclusion
Content
1. Introduction
Over the last three decades, Murray Rothbard's position on whether
parents have a responsibility to feed their children has come under fire from
social democrats, “conservatarian” pro-lifers, and even fellow libertarians
alike.
The social democratic criticism can be found in the article “The
Horror of Rothbardian Natural Rights” at socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.
The conservatarian pro-life criticism can be found in the article “Children’s
Rights versus
Murray Rothbard’s The
Ethics of Liberty” by John Walker of Libertarians for Life, at l4l.org.
The libertarian criticism can be found in the article “Murray Rothbard,
Libertarianism, and Why Children Are Not Simply Houseguests” by KevinCK of edphilosopher.wordpress.com.
2. The Ethics of Liberty
In his 1982 book The Ethics of Liberty, Austrian School
economist Murray Newton Rothbard (1926-1995) wrote the following, in Chapter
14, entitled “Children and Rights”:
It must therefore be illegal and a violation of the child’s rights
for a parent to aggress against his person by mutilating, torturing, murdering
him, etc. On the other hand, the very concept of “rights” is a “negative” one,
demarcating the areas of a person’s action that no man may properly interfere
with. No man can therefore have a “right” to compel someone to do a positive
act, for in that case the compulsion violates the right of person or property
of the individual being coerced. Thus, we may say that a man has a right to his
property (i.e., a right not to have his property invaded), but we cannot say
that anyone has a “right” to a “living wage,” for that would mean that someone
would be coerced into providing him with such a wage, and that would violate
the property rights of the people being coerced. As a corollary this means
that, in the free society, no man may be saddled with the legal obligation to
do anything for another, since that would invade the former’s rights; the only
legal obligation one man has to another is to respect the other man’s rights.
Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a
parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that
the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his
children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the
parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not
murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing
so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to
allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed
a child or to keep it alive. (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather
than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely
separate question.)
As a popular libertarian internet meme, bearing
the image of Rothbard, reads, “If you've been called an anarchist, a racist, a
hippy, a fascist, a liberal, and a neocon all in the same day... you're
probably a libertarian.”
Anyone who is familiar with how libertarians are
perceived should not be shocked to find out that Rothbard has taken heat from
both liberals and conservatives on this topic, and these are the very groups
that libertarians have courted, and must continually court, if they want to
boost their appeal and grow their ranks.
3. Rothbardianism
Much like Barry Goldwater's once-speechwriter
Karl Hess, Rothbard was a libertarian who bounced between the New Left and the
Old Right. While Hess worked for Goldwater in the early 1960s, and then allied
himself with the New Left who protested the Vietnam War, Rothbard leaned left
in the 1960s, and in the 1980s and early 1990s found himself more often in
contact with paleolibertarians, paleoconservatives, nationalists, and
libertarian-conservatives; namely, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke.
Collectively, Rothbard's leftist writings of the
1960s constitute a milieu
of theoretical work, whose adherents have fashioned themselves as
“left-Rothbardians”; these include Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson, the
co-editors of the recent libertarian / anarchist historical compendium, and
subsequent audio-book, Markets Not Capitalism.
Philosophies which are sympathetic, and / or loosely related, to
left-Rothbardianism, include left-wing market-anarchists; libertarians who
explicitly reject the “Libertarian Brutalism” of Christopher Cantwell because
of its explicitly anti-Left and anti- political correctness stances; Agorists
who view anarcho-syndicalism and Mutualism favorably, yet do not view the
question of whether to attempt to reform the state as a point of contention
with other schools of activism and thought; and some libertarians who
self-describe as “left-libertarian”.
Although Murray Rothbard's baby starving position
has been criticized by both the left and the right, as I will show, the left
and right could, just as easily as one another, come to agree with Rothbard's
views on abortion and the responsibility to feed children.
4. The Libertarian Position on Abortion
According to iSideWith.com, between 2011
and 2014, on the issue of abortion, libertarians were more pro-choice than
pro-life, by slightly more than a 2-to-1 margin. Since leftists, liberals, and
conservatives are attracted to libertarianism to different degrees, and for
different reasons, it would be difficult and incorrect to say that there is one
single libertarian position on abortion. While pro-choice libertarians support
the woman's right to choose, pro-life libertarians support the fetus's liberty;
its right to be free from aggression in the form of its own murder.
This is relevant because Rothbard explains his
views on abortion and parental care for children in the same breath. In Chapter
14 of The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard states that abortion is
permissible, and that the proper demarcation of when abortion stops being
acceptable is the point of birth.
He also explains, immediately following the
preceding block-quote, that the reason that it is permissible to allow a
deformed baby to die, is because it is permissible to allow any baby to
die (Note: the term a
fortiori refers to an argument from a yet-stronger reason):
This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as; should a
parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e.g. by not feeding it)?
The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from
the larger right to allow any baby, whether
deformed or not, to die. (Though, as we shall see below, in a libertarian
society the existence of a free baby market will bring such “neglect” down to a
minimum.)
Not surprisingly, Rothbard's position on abortion
and (ahem) baby starving, have been strong points of contention between
libertarians and non-libertarians, especially in the last several years in the
blogosphere, and especially in the last several months (Note: this time period
refers to mid- to late- 2014 in popular discussion on the internet.
Naturally, any normal person would ask, 1) “Why
would Rothbard want us to think people don't have the responsibility to feed
their own children?”. Additionally, I would hope that some would look at the
last quote and ask 2) “Could it be that Rothbard simply supports both abortion
and negligent infanticide, and only says that abortion stops being permissible
at birth because he believes that birth is the point when the death of the
individual would stop being termed abortion, and instead be considered
infanticide?”
To these questions, I answer, to be as succinct
as possible: 1) “Because Rothbard is distinguishing a legal responsibility from
a moral responsibility, and besides that, there are lots of perfectly
reasonable moral reasons to refrain from feeding your children” and 2) “Quite
probably.”
5. Negative Rights vs. Positive
Rights
From what I can gather, Rothbard is defending the
idea that parents do not have any intrinsic responsibility to actively do
anything to ensure their children's survival, including by feeding them.
According to Rothbard, parents must not actively
hurt their children, and should be arrested and punished for doing so, but
parents have no positive
responsibility to ensure that their children are properly fed, clothed,
sheltered, et
cetera.
Such arrest and punishment of parents actively
harming their children, would not constitute
the initiation
of force (i.e., aggression)
because such actions would be a response to the
aggression initiated by the parents. I will note that to oppose Prior Restraint
of Action (as I discussed in “Baby Starving Rothbardians, Part 1: Ethos”) would
entail that no physical force ought to be visited upon the aggressing parent unless and until
the act of harm is committed.
Rothbard views parents feeding children as
something that occurs on a strictly voluntary basis on the part of the parent;
to Rothbard, a parent can only take on that responsibility by consenting to it
in the absence of coercion, in the absence of a chilling effect on free action.
To Rothbard, individuals have the responsibility to take care of nobody but
those they choose to take care of (if even themselves) because being coerced or
forced into caring for others alienates the will from the individual.
This is to say that to be required to engage in
positive action (which is to be distinguished from inaction) is to
be threatened into doing something that is contrary to your own will, and / or
desires, wants, and / or needs. This idea comes naturally to those who accept
the idea that our moral agency is negated when we “act” or “choose” under a
state of duress, coercion, compulsion, force, aggression, slavery, or involuntary
servitude.
If you help someone in need because someone
forces you to do so, that does not say anything about whether you are a good
person; it only confirms that you will do as you are told if and when you are
threatened. Furthermore, if you help someone who is in need, to your own
detriment, because you are forced to do so, this only confirms that you
will do as you are told if and when you are threatened, whether it is in the
interest of your own survival or not, and whether it is right or wrong from
your own personal subjective preferences, and in your assessment of your own
needs and preferences.
This principle is applicable to most if not all
questions of morality of behavior; not just abortion and baby starving, but
also drug use and other “vice” behaviors, which have no real victims in the corpus
delicti sense of the word “crime”. Ron Paul perhaps illustrated this idea
best when, in a 2012 Republican Party presidential debate appearance in South
Carolina, he stated his views on heroin: “How many people here would use heroin
if it were legal? I bet nobody would.” (Mocking such a hypothetical person:)
“'Oh yeah, I need the government to take care of me, I don't want to use
heroin, so I need these laws!’”
It may not make sense on the surface, and may not
appear to pertain to anything in particular, but this is the essence of the
libertarian argument against the system of compulsory taxation, which usually
occurs through passive, begrudging assent, although the state pretends that it
is voluntary.
Libertarians believe that no individual has any
particular responsibility to take care of or ensure the survival of any other
individual, unless they choose to attempt to take on that responsibility.
Especially because to assist someone who may be self-destructive or violent,
might have negative consequences for the helper, and / or for the person being
helped.
6. The Baby Starving Principle
To those libertarians to which this holds true
even when it comes to one's own child, we shall call the “Baby Starving
Rothbardians” (as I explained in Part 1 of this three-part “Baby Starving
Rothbardians” piece), for they strongly agree with Rothbard on the principles I
have articulated over the last several paragraphs.
I, myself, am prepared to support the Baby Starving
Rothbardian (B.S.R.) idea only on a purely philosophical level; also, in order
to exploit the idea for the potential it holds in the way of sarcastic “troll”
arguments; and, lastly, to win-over liberals and conservatives to
libertarianism under the banner of what shall hereafter be referred to as the
Baby Starving Principle (B.S.P.) or Axiom (B.S.A.):
Nobody has any positive responsibility to take
care of anybody else, nor save anyone's life, even if it is one's own starving
baby, unless that is their will and they have pledged to do so. This is because
to be forced, required, compelled, or otherwise coerced to give to others
(especially when it is to one's own detriment), is a violation of the right not
to be coerced, and alienates one's will from the individual rights and personal
responsibility entailed by one’s capacity for informed consent and moral
agency.
As Plato wrote, “Good people do not need laws to
tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the
laws.” As it says in 1 Timothy 1:9, “the law is made not for the righteous but
for lawbreakers and rebels”.
7. Morality in A Clockwork Orange
In Anthony Burgess's book A Clockwork Orange,
the character Alex, a reformed rapist, has been terrorized into revulsion at
violence to the point of becoming sick. As the prison priest says of the
results of Alex's “therapy” in the film version, directed by Stanley Kubrick:
“He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest,
fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its
insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also
to be a creature capable of moral choice.”
To this, behavioral scientist and psychotherapist
Dr. Brodsky answers:
“These are subtleties” … “We are not concerned
with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down
crime”.
Dr. Brodsky's response is a consequentialist
ethical standpoint; it is concerned more with the consequences of the arguably
torturous methods used to alter Alex's behavior, than it is with whether Alex
has really been emptied of any desire to harm others.
Arguably, Dr. Brodsky's view is also a
utilitarian one; it is more concerned with what is useful to a majority of the
people, than it is about duties to the self and to the individual. His view
lacks concern for Alex's freedom from having aggression initiated against him,
in a situation in which he presents no clear, present, immediate, credible,
specific danger, nor threat thereof, against anyone; this torturous “therapy”
occurring long after Alex committed the act of rape.
8. The Law, Taxes, and Alienation of the Will
To reiterate, threatening a person with arrest,
or inflicting trauma or physical aggression upon someone, for neglecting people
he has never met and has no particular reason to care for, even if it is his or
her own child, should not be morally permissible, because the legal prohibition
robs individuals of their personal moral agency and responsibility.
If you need a law to tell you
to feed a
starving child, or your starving child, then there is something wrong
with you. Furthermore, if you don't want to feed the child, you will
find a way around the law. If you want to obey the law, and
feed the child, then you will also do so. Parents, and people in general, only
care about what is right from their own personal subjective ethics, with some
deference to the needs and ethics of others, in proportion to the degree to
which they have committed to care for, and consider, other particular people.
If there were a law against feeding your own
child, most parents would try to feed their children anyway, and they would
not care what the law says. You might object, “But such a law would be
preposterous, and would never be passed or enforced.”
But I would respond that, first, this is an
Argument From Benevolence (a term which originally referred to the benevolence
of God, but here I am referring to benevolence of government), by
which I mean that it is a fallacy to suppose that government would not do
something bad because government is good, in the same way that it is misguided
to define God as infinitely just (omnibenevolent) and therefore God would not
do something evil.
I would also respond – to borrow a criticism of
economist Ronald Coase, which was leveled by Walter Block – by inviting you to
suppose that the government wanted to raise the estate tax (also known as the
death tax, and as the tax on inheritance) from the 20 to 40 percent range, up
to 100%, in order to insure society against “unearned wealth” and property
being passed down from parent to child, and to ensure that all wealth is earned
by its possessor during his or her lifetime.
As Block argues, for the government to confiscate
100% of inheritance, would be to confiscate the very food, and money for food,
being passed down from parent to child. Hence, full realization of the
government's authority to enforce the estate tax might have the same result as
endorsing Rothbard's idea that no parent ought to be obligated to feed his or
her child.
Furthermore, the estate tax often requires
taxpayers to sell-off their assets so that they can be mathematically
quantified for tax purposes; but priceless things like family heirlooms, and
gifts given to children, cannot be quantified.
I have written much on my views of Rothbard
(including in my article “Response to [‘]Exposing the Racism of Libertarianism
and Murray Rothbard[‘]”, which can be found in my book Civil Rights),
and my previous and following pieces on Baby Starving Rothbardians, constitute
much more in-depth expositions of my thoughts on contraception, abortion, and
infanticide, than I could possibly fit in this article.
But I will say what I have to say to liberals and
conservatives on the topics of abortion and baby starving, and I will do it
succinctly here, for the glory of the Baby Starving Rothbardians; for the sake
of the consistency of our principle; and for the sake of the cohesion of the
country and the liberal, conservative, and libertarian ideologies.
9. Abortion, Baby Starving, and the Left
While liberals and leftists may criticize
Rothbard's view on baby starving as a dereliction of the supposed duty which
each of us supposedly has to care for others. But Rothbard's views on abortion,
expressed elsewhere in Chapter 14 of The Ethics of Liberty, are pretty
on-par with the views on abortion that (the mostly pro-choice) liberals and
leftists possess; i.e., that an unwanted fetus should be treated as a
parasite, or as a “houseguest” that needs to be, as Rothbard put it, “evicted”.
Aside from their similar views on abortion, on
the topic of baby starving directly, I would ask liberals and leftists
the following questions: 1) How can you disagree with Rothbard's view that a
parent has no responsibility to feed his starving baby, when you support abortion
and adoption? How can you believe that a parent should always have to feed his
child, and also believe that adoption should stay legal; that a parent can
abandon custody of their child, and neglect the child from afar while someone else takes care
of it?”
Also, 2) Why is aborting a fetus – or inflicting
upon it a “partial-birth” or “post-birth” (so-called) “abortion”, a/k/a
infanticide – a morally superior action, when compared to starving a baby or
child to death?
Of course, it is debatable whether abortion or
starvation is a worse fate for a fetus, a baby, or an older child. Slow
starvation seems less preferable when compared to the quick death that comes
through abortion. However, some abortions can take weeks, and some women use
alternative methods of abortion which resemble starvation more than they
resemble the mayhem (i.e., physical violence) which abortion entails.
So why should liberals or libertarians
(whom are both, more often than not, socially liberal) discriminate
between baby starving and abortion, when it comes to which baby-murdering
tactic is the superior one? Isn't discrimination wrong, and racist? Huh,
leftists!? But I digress.
As for adoption, the belief that parents should
be free to choose either abortion or adoption as the solution to their problem
of needing to neglect their babies, simply tells us that the parental
responsibility to feed the child, if and when it is undertaken, is alienable.
Someone has the responsibility to feed a child, and if the parent takes
it up, then he or she can alienate that responsibility, by transferring it to
social workers and / or adoptive families. In some cases and locations, they
can even do so without having any negative consequences visited upon them.
Why should liberals and libertarians squabble
about whether abortion, starvation, or adoption are the best ways to cause
children to die?
Those who criticize Rothbard's position on baby
starving might fail to consider that, if and when parents attempt to undertake
the responsibility of feeding children, 1) that responsibility can be
permanent, impermanent and revocable, or sporadic / off-and-on, and 2) that
responsibility can be conditional or unconditional. This all depends on the
parent's choice; that is, whether, when, and for how long, a parent agrees to
feed their children, and agrees to have that responsibility enforced by some
third party.
Rothbard's critics might also fail to
consider that attempting to undertake the responsibility of feeding one's
children is an insecure
bet in the first place, given the scarcity of food in some places (whether
natural or artificial; materially, it doesn't matter), increasing costs of
certain foods, and varying nutritional content of given foods.
This is to say that, when a parent attempts to
undertake the responsibility to commit to feeding his children for several
years or decades, he does so hoping that he will be able to do so
long-term, but can only earn, plan, and buy (or grow) food a little bit at a
time. So, as a result, that responsibility usually comes to an end, or else
it becomes conditional and / or sporadic, according to what, and how much, the
parent is capable of providing at any given time.
To summarize my points criticizing those to
Rothbard's left:
1) a parent has no intrinsic, nor permanent, nor
unalienable responsibility to feed his or her own child, because you and
Rothbard agree that a parent can alienate that responsibility by giving their
child up for adoption;
2) a parent doesn't even have a responsibility to
refrain from actively murdering his own child (Rothbard didn't say this,
but he believes it, on the condition that the baby in question is deformed),
because you and Rothbard, and also Richard Dawkins, agree again that Sarah
Palin should have aborted her son Trig, who was born with Down's Syndrome;
3) there might not be enough food for the baby to
eat, because the baby might have to be what we're all eating if the potatoes
don't come in this harvest season;
and lastly,
4) if you're going to defend President Barack
Obama (whom, as a senator, fought to legalize partial-birth abortion) and
M.S.N.B.C. host Melissa Harris-Perry (who considers infanticide acceptable up
to age three, and says that children should be viewed as belonging to the
community), then you would excuse the negligent homicide – and even the intentional
homicide; i.e., murder – of babies born alive as the result of failed
abortions.
And in that case, you shouldn't care whether the
fetus or baby was starved to death, had its umbilical cord cut, had its brain
scrambled, had its head sucked flat with a vacuum, or was starved to death of
nutrients in the womb, in order for the abortion to occur, so you might as well stop pretending you're any more pro-fetus,
pro-baby, or pro-child than Rothbard.
If you agree with Melissa Harris-Perry that “When
does life begin? I submit the answer depends an awful lot on the feeling of the
parents. A powerful feeling, but not science”, and if you also agree with
Oxford University's Dr. Francisca Minerva that “if we consider it acceptable to
abort a baby up until birth then why not allow it to die afterwards? It is just
a difference in geography, within or outside the mother's body”, then you
support negligent infanticide. And this, as an alternative to abortion, is the
same thing as passively allowing a wanted infant to starve to death. So
why, then, should you care whether such a baby is starved to death
rather than somehow “medically aborted” by a doctor?
What this all goes to show is that liberals and
leftists, and most libertarians, support both abortion and adoption, and even a
little infanticide, especially if the baby is deformed, retarded, or has a
conservative mother who has governed a small state. Deal with it.
10. Abortion, Baby Starving, and the Right
Now, I'm sure that my readers are wondering, “how
are you going to win conservatives over to your side on the issues of abortion
and baby starving, when you've just defended abortion, baby starving, fetus
starving, infanticide, and fetus rape?” Well, that's a very good question.
Conservatives, I'm sure you believe that
you think it's wrong to starve, abort, murder, and kill-rape your own child,
and you believe that you would never do that, and that doing those things would
be wrong. But what if your child was gay? If you knew your child was gay, and
you had the power to murder him, then why would you care what age he was when
you actively murdered him, or, through your passive negligence, allowed him to
die? He would be dead, that's all you'd want. Right?
You wouldn't care if you aborted him, or her (say
it's a little lesbian fetus), nor would you care if you had to wait until
it had to be a partial-birth abortion or an infanticide, or a discrete murder
at the age of three (with the body in a shopping-mall trash receptacle, to
borrow an idea from comedian Louis CK). Remember patria potestas, the
right of fathers in Ancient Rome to govern family affairs? You brought them
into this world, you can take them out! What does it matter the age or the
means!? ...But that would be cruel.
So why not wait until your gay son or lesbian daughter grows up,
until they're in their teens, and then tell them that soon you'll begin
expecting them to get a job and pay for their own food, or else … they still have
to get a job, and they still have to pay for their own food, but they
have to start living somewhere else. That's not wrong whether your kid is
heterosexual or not.
You might ask, “How can you say that parents can starve or murder their child
at any age, and then say that parents should have the right to throw their gay
children out on the street?” I would say, and I'm sure that Rothbard would
agree; that comes from the larger right to
starve and evict any child at any age, regardless of
sexual orientation, from the house and / or the womb.
Just as in the example of Title II of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation and discrimination in places
of public accommodations, when businesses (at least, those not engaged in
interstate commerce) have the right to refuse service to anyone for any
reason, such businesses only incidentally
have the right to discriminate against anyone for any particular reason. The
particular right is only incidental to, but is derived from, the larger
right.
Everyone knows that libertarians love to
economize, but few know that they save a psychic bundle by adopting
these convenient philosophical belief-loopholes! Also, everyone knows that
black fetuses don't pay their womb-rent on time. But, of course, it's the
Jewish fetuses who keep them down.
Also, if you want to insist that a parent ought
to be obligated to care for his own child, then you might condemn a child to a
parent that will feed him foods that lack sufficient nutrition, and / or feed
him an insufficient amount of food. You would be forcing the child to
associate with the parent without the child’s consent, compelling him to become,
and / or remain,
party to an association which may become, or remain, harmful and abusive.
11. I Hate My Dead Gay Son
Anyway, there are plenty of reasons why it
would be in both a parent’s and a child’s interest for a parent to kick his gay
son out on the street. For example, what if the gay son is in-and-out of the
house at all hours of the night, using the house phone and internet to solicit gay
sex, attracting lots of people to the house to have orgies in the middle of the
night, disturbing his parents, and his neighbors, and their pets, with the loud
sounds of men entering and exiting both house doors and male orifices, while
techno music blares?
“How could anyone ever throw their gay son out on
the street?”, you ask. Give me a break! But anyway, the point is, babies.
Conservatives might say “but raping your fetus to
death is wrong.” But the same conservatives might also rape
their gay sons to make sure they aren't gay, or to punish them for being gay,
or whatever reason is necessary to justify the rape. And once a conservative
man rapes his son, the son will become gay, whether he was already gay
or whether the act of his father raping him made him gay, perhaps as a
corollary to becoming able to begin enjoying his own rape, as an act of
spiteful revenge against his perpetrator (very similar to the way you are
attempting to enjoy this article!).
This is because submitting to the rape –
your punishment of your son for suspecting he might be gay – is the only thing
that can make you mad (Note: I suspect that that's how B.D.S.M. developed,
prisoners who were getting sexually tortured simply decided to start liking the
punishment as revenge, to the dismay of their captors).
So of course your gay son is going to let
a bunch of other gay guys into your house, so naturally you would throw
him and his friends out, especially if they're eating you out of house and
home, on top of making a lot of noise, and possibly bringing drugs into
the house, and attracting the kind of people who are likely to burglarize your
valuables, in addition to burglarizing your son’s gay ass.
But, as I was saying, conservatives shouldn't and
don't care whether their gay baby was letting a bunch of gay men into his
mother's vagina and throwing wild parties, or whether their gay baby starved to
death in his own room (or cage) at the age of 15, they should just want their
gay children dead – as Malcolm X said, “by any means necessary” – at least,
they should if they want libertarians to consider them ideologically
consistent.
Also, what if your kid is a Communist? Then you'd
most assuredly want to reserve the right to abort, starve, murder, and
fetus-rape your own flesh and blood, no receipt necessary. It's cheap, and
they're sinners. “Shoot ‘em all” (or starve, as the case may be) “and let God
sort ‘em out”. If there's no reason you won't rape your children at 15 to make
sure they're not falling into a sinful, sexually deviant lifestyle – or, as
some morally upstanding, decent American folks call it, parenting – then
there's no reason you shouldn't want to rape them to death when they're just a
fetus, and don't even have the chance to come into this world and learn how to
move their hands, which, if left idle, just get possessed by the Devil. Andrea
Yates knew that and that's why she drowned her babies, praise the Lord.
Right?
...And they say libertarians don't criticize
conservatives enough.
12. Abortion and Baby Starving as Political Strategy
By now I think I've made “clear” my criticism of
liberals, leftists, and conservatives on the issues of abortion, infanticide,
baby starving, and throwing one's own flesh and blood out on the street.
I think I've also made it clear that what
liberals, conservatives, and libertarians can all agree on, is that it's
desirable and advantageous to oneself to murder those who do not think like us,
regardless of what their ideology is, or their age, race, et cetera, each
of which is only incidental to the larger right to refrain from caring for
anyone but oneself.
Hopefully, “modern” liberals and conservatives
can appreciate Plato's 4,500-year-old The Republic, in which it is
agreed upon by multiple interlocutors that “justice is the advantage of the
stronger”; that each political system only serves its own interests. Oligarchy
serves the oligarchs, timocracy serves the wealthy, aristocracy serves the
aristocrats, and so on. Political systems are much like individual human beings
in this regard; they are naturally self-serving. No effort nor expenditure has
to be made to force people to behave in their own interests.
I believe that wanting to kill other people because
they disagree with you and might steal your food, is a solid bedrock on which
to build unity between the liberal, conservative, and libertarian ideologies,
and ideological consistency in popular modern American political speech and
letters. It is truly the only thing we all have in common. And as a wise black
man once said, “we have to exalt what we all have in common”. It wasn't
President Obama, and I don't remember his name, but you should believe it
because a black man said it, or else you're a racist.
To repeat and expand upon an earlier point, why
should we cheapen our hatred of others by attaching qualifiers and conditions
like race, and age, and method of death, and gender (such as in the cases of
sex-selective abortion, and making your son wear a dress if he wants to eat, or
whatever)? That would be discrimination, and as Rand Paul clarified to us all
on M.S.N.B.C., discrimination is wrong. As comedian Emo Phillips said,
“Why hate someone for their race, or their creed, when there are so many real
reasons to hate others?”
So, liberals: please, starve and discriminate against conservatives and
fascists; and to conservatives: please starve and discriminate against
liberals, leftists, and Communists. As a libertarian, I say do what you want.
As long as everybody's trying to discriminate against everyone else, and starve
to death everyone who doesn't think like them. At least we'll be able to be
honest, and live honestly, and be open about what we want, and capable of being
responsible, and held responsible, for our actions.
Let's stop fooling ourselves into thinking that
we can live either together, or apart. As the Discordian anarchists will tell
us, strife and discord are inevitable; chaos reigns the most tyrannically when
it is not invited to the party.
13. The Libertarian Position on Baby Starving
As I said above, I maintain that there is no
single, especially no single consistent, libertarian position on
abortion and baby starving. As the above will confirm, libertarians choose what
they say based on two factors: 1) its ability to win people over to
libertarianism, and 2) how controversial it is (although perhaps the latter
applies more to trolls in general, and to libertarian trolls in particular).
Libertarians will say whatever they can get away
with saying, usually to justify non-aggression against individuals for
speaking, and non-violently recommending solutions through their speech, in the
first place.
So, “the libertarian position on abortion
and baby starving” is not one, but multiple. Its consistency is situational,
subjective, and subject to external conditions. The degree of the validity of
the position is in the eye of the beholder, i.e., the
interlocutor who is being urged to support a libertarian person or a libertarian-supported
position. This holds true whether libertarians are defending the proposition
that parents have no intrinsic responsibility to feed their children, or
whether they are defending the proposition that parents absolutely have
an intrinsic responsibility to feed their children.
This is because, even if most libertarians do not
believe that parents have that obligation, as libertarians they will still
defend the right to make such an argument (unless, perhaps, they are taking a
hard-core “argumentation ethics” / “estoppel discourse” stance, advocated by
the likes of Stefan Molyneux, Stephan Kinsella, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe), and
they will also defend the right of parents to choose to feed their children.
I'm certain that there are libertarians who would
jump at the chance to be simultaneously more pro-baby and more anti-baby than
liberals and leftists; even those who agree with Molyneux, Kinsella, and Hoppe,
that nobody should be estopped from articulating a position unless it poses a
clear and present danger of specific, immediate harm. I, of course, am one of
them, as I will illustrate in my next piece, “Baby Starving Rothbardians, Part
3: Abortion”, in which I will defend the assertion that I am “pro-choice, yet
pro-life”.
14. Parenting as Slavery
Those on the extreme Left might well argue that
“not only do parents have an obligation to feed their children, they also
have an obligation to feed all children, and all people in general”.
However, they may be likely to refrain from accepting the idea that the phrase
“their own children” denotes parental ownership of children, and
promotes what they see as a fabricated, socially-constructed nuclear family
that is authoritarian, propertarian, and the result of the modern production
system reproducing itself in social culture. To make this mistake, as well as
to advocate communal “ownership” of children, is to fall for the very same
patriarchal and capitalistic cultural and economic attitudes which they are
supposed to abhor.
I would even venture to surmise that, in the eyes
of at least some leftists, adults have an obligation to take care of everyone, except
for their own children. Specifically, those who would be likely to
believe such a thing, are those who have examined the consistency of “their
own” beliefs the least; especially those who view care for the remainder of
society as a sacrosanct positive imperative, but also that care for children
should be a communal responsibility, with no particular intrinsic relationship
between a child and his or her actual biological parents being necessary to
justify which adults feed and care for which children.
That is why, in my opinion, the idea that a
liberal or leftist position on feeding babies might be somehow both more humane
and more consistent than Rothbard's position, is profoundly ludicrous. I
imagine that liberals and leftists who find their conservative and fascist
children eating them out of house and home, and practicing non-leftist
lifestyles, may well find themselves in the position to decide for
themselves (individual decision-making, gasp!) whether they have any
particular obligation to feed “their own” children, and indeed to feed and care
for the children of anyone else with whom those children associate.
15. Hospitals!
The notions that we have an obligation to take
care of and feed our own children, that “we have the responsibility to feed other
people's children, as well as other adults”, and that “we become
obligated to feed our children once we've taken them home to the hospital”, are
both assumptions which simply do not stand up to scrutiny; from neither
conservative, liberal or far-leftist, or libertarian perspectives.
Take “we become obligated to feed our child once
we've taken it home to the hospital” for instance. Babies are not always born
at hospitals; they may be born in the home, or in a taxicab, or outdoors, the
childbirth monitored by cab drivers, unlicensed nurses, midwives, doulas, et
cetera.
Moreover, it is not a hospital's job to ensure
that you will feed your baby perfectly and forever; this is because, if and
when hard times occur (such as times marked by food shortages, famines,
droughts, and interruptions in the flow of goods in trade and commerce), the
hospital might not necessarily be better equipped to feed babies than any
particular parent or set of parents.
Hospitals may even, in fact, recommend extreme
treatments and “care” that would keep parents away from their children, and
even unfree and unable to take care of them, based on the idea that only
medical professionals are sufficiently well-equipped to take care of a child,
to the exclusion of the parents' visitation and to the isolation of the
patient. So if “society” has a responsibility to ensure that children are fed,
well-fed, and have every medical test and procedure available to them, then
hospitals might as well never allow us to leave, and health care and insurance
costs might as well be allowed to continue to spiral out of control.
There is no guarantee that hospitals, or the
community, or the government or state, will take better care of children than
their biological or adoptive parents. In today's America, babies are left to
die everywhere; they are left to starve to death in private homes, and left to
starve and bleed to death in hospitals (after they've become “patients” of
“post-birth abortion”).
16. Who Will Starve the Baby Starvers!?
But this does not mean that “we” “should” refrain
from attempting to punish a parent who knowingly allows his child to starve to
death, especially when he knew the child was incapable of feeding himself. As
long as “we” are not the state, the act of beating up a libertarian who starves
his baby would only inspire confused babbling in the libertarian; no action is
to be feared from such an individual.
Furthermore, the libertarian understands that –
as Michael Badnarik said, and as Jesus and Abbie Hoffman seemed to have understood
– “the threat of force is more effective than the actual use of force.”
Initiating physical aggression against such a person would only serve to
encourage him and cause him to believe that he is morally right to continue
neglecting his child, because now he is being oppressed.
For, to reiterate, as Rothbard said (italics
mine): “the parent should have the legal right not to feed the
child” ... “whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a
legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate
question.” Therefore, a libertarian may possess the right to
starve his children, but not to worry; all people still
possess the right to attempt to starve that person (that
is, the libertarian; the baby starver), as a form of punishment, ostracism, and
social boycott.
To neglect such a person – to refuse to help him,
and to withhold food from him – absolutely does not violate the libertarian
idea that nobody has any responsibility to take care of any other particular
person, outside of his own volition, as long as nobody undertakes any positive
action to prevent him from obtaining (growing, buying, trading, etc.)
food for himself. Moreover, the right to neglect such a person, and the right
to neglect a child, derive from the same liberty; the freedom from association.
17. Starvation and Natural Resources
“We” may well desire to, through our own
voluntary association, attempt to “enforce” an obligation to protect all viable
and potentially independent life, but we will soon remember that you cannot
guarantee a right which is subject to the external conditions imposed by
nature, such as uncertainty about the size of crop yields during harvests.
A positive right to food does not exist without
1) the complete elimination of food scarcities, both natural and unnatural; and
/ or 2) an untenable “right” or privilege to take food from others. To reject
these realities is to absurdly rebel against the conditions in which one finds
oneself, as well as against nature itself; it is to engage in what Albert Camus
calls “metaphysical rebellion”.
To those who support redistribution in order to
relieve the negative effects of scarcity, I would urge you to consider whether
it would constitute aggression or starvation to withhold food from people based
on the assumption that there is not enough to go around.
As Rothbard explained, when the legal obligation
to feed children is removed, the moral obligation to do so will still
exist in the mind of everyone who believes that such an obligation exists,
whether in the legal sense or not. People may choose to attempt to make verbal
and written argumentative appeals to others, in order to get them to believe
their own beliefs. But if you leave people unable to choose to do the wrong
thing, then you deprive them of the ability to take credit for feeding their
children, because they had no choice in the matter.
Behavior and action cannot be moral or immoral
without choice, without consciousness of one's own actions, and without at
least some ability and attempt to imagine the consequences.
So perhaps nobody can be trusted to take
care of children: no matter how much taxpayer money they control; no matter how
large a share of resources they control; no matter how, nor how well, they
apply the parenting skills they possess. Maybe it should be the responsibility
of the parents (whom, unlike their babies, can easily move around) to choose,
and make an educated guess on the behalf of their family, whether being
aborted, starved to death inside the womb or out, or being adopted, will
fuck-up their child's life the least.
18. Freedom for the Trolls
But one question remains: Why are we talking
about this? Is it because Rothbard's views are controversial? It would appear
so, but no; as I have shown, many liberals, leftists, libertarians, and
conservatives, have almost identical views on abortion and baby starving (or,
at least, have views which are identically worthy of ridicule).
We are talking about this, rather, because
libertarianism is becoming popular, and because many people are surprised that
not all libertarians are pro-life, and also because the issue of “what is the
libertarian position on abortion?" needs to be discussed, in order for
libertarianism to have a chance to be taken seriously by the two major
political parties (Democratic and Republican) and political ideological
tendencies (progressive / liberal, and conservative) in the United States.
But more to the point: “Why are we talking about
this; nobody is debating legalizing starving babies for real in
modern politics, nor even suggesting that juries should be more lenient towards
parents who allow their children to starve to death.”
Of course, I will make the argument
that allowing babies to starve is within our natural rights, and should not be
infringed. But I do so not for political nor legal reasons, only for the
purposes of ethical philosophy, entertainment, and expanding the libertarian
trolling repertoire.
Some day when people are not so irresponsible and
intellectually lazy that they become hypocritical, and afraid of free speech
and philosophy, maybe the Baby Starving Principle can be put into action and
become popularly accepted.
19. Babies Feed Themselves
Additionally, I must reiterate that Rothbard
explained that there is no natural, intrinsic, non-consensual obligation to
feed a baby, as long as one does not actively prevent the baby from accessing
and consuming food.
I mean, have you ever seen a baby pick up some
food and eat it? Why, yes, yes you have. And if the child is capable of
doing that, then eating is within his natural rights, and should not be
curtailed. And many libertarians would say, that right should not be actively
protected or enhanced by anyone else, certainly not the government, and
certainly not without the consent of the baby or child.
20. Fuck Child Labor Laws
Another point: Rothbard also accuses child labor
laws of giving adults an unfair advantage over children in the job market. Can
it not be said that the prohibition of child labor has prevented children from
working to earn and purchase their own food?
Can it not be said that the state enforces laws
which make it difficult for children of farmers to work the fields, harvesting
and butchering their own food, without getting paid some arguably arbitrary
minimum wage, and without being allowed to work more than some arguably equally
arbitrary maximum number of hours per day and / or per week?
“A parent ought to be obligated to feed his
child”, you might say, but what if the food is sitting out in the field right
in front of the house, and the child is sufficiently old, strong, and skilled
to harvest the food by himself if he wants to eat it? If the farmer's labor
alone is insufficient to provide all the food that his family needs, then
shouldn't he send his children to bed without dinner if they don't do enough
work to help him harvest and slaughter the crops and livestock in the fields?
Yes, he should! He should say “I don't have any responsibility to feed you! The
food is sitting right out there in the field! If you want to eat it, then go
get it!”
Furthermore, how many people who are currently in
their fifties and older, whom support child labor laws, but also
hypocritically boast that they started working menial jobs, and selling small
items for extraordinarily low prices, when they were well under the age of
fourteen (the current minimum age to work part-time jobs in the U.S.), and also
criticize young people for not having sufficient job experience to earn the
unpaid experience with which they want to pay such young people?
21. You Can Get a Lot of Money for a Baby
Finally, you might be wondering, in the absence
of a state – and, therefore, in the absence of a default party to prosecute on
behalf of the now-dead plaintiff (read: baby) – if a parent, or set of parents,
starves a baby, who brings the charges against the parents?
The answer is, of course, that the charges would
be filed by whomever agrees to sign a privately enforceable contract to buy,
kill, and eat the baby! It would be, as Rothbard said “a free baby market”,
after all.
And as Rothbard continues, this “will bring such
[']neglect['] down to a minimum”; we may infer that this means that whomever
buys the right to eat the baby, will have the incentive to keep the baby fat
and well-fed, and therefore at its most delicious, paradoxically solving the
problem of legally permitted baby starving, yet simultaneously making it worse.
There’s some food
for thought.
22. Conclusion
While leftists, liberals, and conservatives
struggle to contend with Rothbard's provocative views on abortion and
parenting, and as they try to take libertarians seriously, they should keep in
mind that libertarians are individualists who don't need other people to take
them seriously in order to feel self-assured.
They are true philosophers at heart, and devoted
defenders of free speech. They will not cower at the feet of the politically
correct, nor of the "moral majority", nor will they sacrifice their
freedoms and ideals at the altar of those who are so obsessed with compromise
that they stand for nothing and come to abhor the consistent, the original, and
the unique.
I hope this has been enlightening to libertarians
and non-libertarians alike.
Bibliography:
1. “The Horror of Rothbardian Natural Rights” at socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com;
socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.
com/2012/06/horror-of-rothbardian-natural-rights.html?m=1
3. “Murray Rothbard, Libertarianism, and Why
Children Are Not Simply Houseguests” by KevinCK of edphilosopher.wordpress.com;
edphilosopher.wordpress.com/
2010/02/01/murray-rothbard-libertarianism-and-why-children-are-not-simply-houseguests/
Originally Written between
Late September and October 14th, 2014
Expanded on November 9th, 2015
Edited on January 10th, 2015,
January 25th, 2016,
and October 6th, 2021
