So this judge in Tennessee got in big trouble last year for offering inmates in his county a 30 day reduction in their jail sentence if they volunteered for a sterilization procedure:

“When Judge Sam Benningfield of White County, Tenn., offered to shave off jail time for inmates who volunteered for sterilization, a chorus of attorneys, advocates and public officials reacted with horror.”

Horror? Why?

“Benningfield said his goal was to break a ‘vicious cycle’ of repeat drug offenders with children. But many argued that the proposal, outlined in a May order, was nothing short of eugenics.”

Psssh. What’s so horrible about eugenics?

Having more physically and mentally healthy people?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not supporting forced sterilization of anyone, which would be an intolerable violation of their life and liberty, but this program was completely voluntary.

No one was being threatened with 30 additional days in confinement if they didn’t comply.

They were already sentenced to those 30 days for a crime they had committed. These inmates were being offered 30 days off their sentence and a free contraceptive procedure if they wanted it. They were free to say no and serve out the sentence they were already sentenced to serve out regardless.

This judge just gave inmates more options.

“Civil rights lawyers brought legal actions and a local prosecutor told his staff to avoid the judge’s program at all costs.

Now, after the wave of backlash and amid multiple lawsuits, state judicial regulators have formally reprimanded Benningfield for promising 30-day sentence reductions to inmates who agreed to receive vasectomies or birth control implants.”

Everybody was worried that offering a 30 day reduction in their sentence would be unduly coercing them, but it’s not coercion.

It’s offering an additional incentive to get a free health care procedure that most people have to pay good money for and that Sandra Fluke wishes she could have gotten as a student at Georgetown University Law School.

Democrats mobilized to ThreatCon1 over Sandra Fluke’s right to get a private university to cover her contraceptive costs, then a judge in Tennessee offers it to prison inmates for free plus reducing their sentences and everybody loses their minds.

This guy should have been like the Bernie Sanders style socialism movement’s hero or something.

Maybe some of those inmates actually don’t want to have any kids in the future, and would have been happy to have their sentence reduced plus free permanent contraption.

Any of them who do want to have kids were free to decline and serve out their sentence, not as a punishment for declining the sterilization procedure, but because they were already sentenced to serve those days in confinement anyway.

That doesn’t look like coercion to me.

There is a clear distinction between coercive, tyrannical eugenics that violates people’s liberty, and a libertarian eugenics that would actually decrease the amount of coercion and tyranny in our society while also promoting a more healthy population.

An example of the latter kind would be making voluntary sterilization a requirement to receive welfare benefits.

My argument is simple:

Read the rest at The Humble Libertarian.

By KOOK for Left Coast Rebel

Cross Posted at Allied Liberty News

 Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority – NYTimes.com

The above linked article from the NYT discusses how support for the plan to close the prison at Gitmo went from having a slight majority of support on inauguration day, to nearly 60% majority for keeping it open by March.  Certainly the failed bombing attempt in Times Square has increased the support for keeping terrorists off our soil and stirring up the anger levels again.  But I believe there is more to it than that.

The Moonbat plan was to close camp Xray and move all the prisoners to some civilian prison on US soil.  Several Liberal Lawmakers made political hay out of the plan by saying that they would be glad to house the terrorists in their states.

I think that is where things began to falter for the hope’n’change crowd.  It went from theory to reality.

“close gitmo!, no military tribunals!, civil rights!”  “close gitmo!, no military tribunals!, civil rights!” “Bush  Lied, people died!”

 

  “We are bringing them to your city”

 

 

“close gitmo!, no military trib….no…wait, what?  near my home and my children? In my community?  No, I want Gitmo closed but I don’t want them in my backyard.”

There is the real break in the mental processes that separates logical, pragmatic, realistic, liberty loving, constitutional libertarian thought from  impassioned, emotional, irrational, illogical moonbat ‘thought’. 

When the argument for closing Xray went from some theoretical exercise where the terrorists would be housed out of sight and out of mind, and the libtards could feel that they were being morally superior and all goody- goody, safe in the knowledge that Khaled Sheikh Muhammed was being treated with Kid gloves, but far far away from them; to theoretically being held within 30 miles of their homes with underpaid and undermotivated civilian guards the whole thought experiment was made real.

This is something I have expressed before.  When any of the Liberals pet issues is put into a perspective where it would actually affect them, the tune suddenly changes.  They move from Sympathy to Empathy.   Sympathy for the perceived situation, to empathy with how actually being in the situation feels.

Other cases in point:  Many are against hunting, feeling as though it is animal cruelty.  In several cities suburban hunting permits for deer are issued to well qualified archers.  There is usually the obligatory protest of people wanting to “live with Nature” until a deer runs into the side of their Hummer H3 and dents it all up.  Then there is the chorus of “kill bambi” which reinforces what farmers and ranchers have known all along, Man and Animal can coexist, as long as both sides are controlled.  Fact: Deer are hard on crops, fences, and automobiles and until the Sympathy for Deer becomes Empathy with someone who has had the beejesus scared out of them and cost them a few thousand bucks in auto repairs by a suicidal deer, it is not “real” to some people.   

Take Arizona and the illegal immigration debate as an example; it is very easy for a senator from a northeastern state, or someone who lives in a gated community far removed from the border to denounce what the citizens of Arizona have been clamoring to have for years.  Arizona needs to secure the border it shares with a foreign country because there is a serious crime wave going on down there and no one but Arizonans are going to do anything about it.  Arizona has no hope to stop the crime wave if they cannot control the free movement of foreigners back and forth across their border.   Now, if one of Nancy Pelosi’s grandkids was kidnapped by a foreign invader from mexico, do you not think that immigration reform would suddenly find its way onto the House Calendar?  It is like the old west in southern Arizona now, with the criminal element coming into the state to commit its’ crimes and then hightailing it back across the border, like Pancho Villa or something.

I remember when I was younger there was a huge debate in Missouri regarding “bussing”.  Many rural and suburban schools were predominately White, and many inner city schools were predominately Black.  This was obviously (to democrats) a problem.  In support of this was the fact that inner city schools performed more poorly than those of the suburbs.  Now, I firmly believe that the real source of the problem is not Race, but one of culture. There is nothing inherently inferior about anyone’s skin color or ethnicity. 

But I can take any child and ignore them, never teach them right from wrong, show them that might always makes right, that society “owes them something”, and turn them into the perfect weapon of self destruction. 

The solution was to spend huge amounts of taxpayer money on “bus-ing”  white kids to inner city schools and black kids to Suburban schools.  I would have argued that the lower test scores and higher dropout rates in the cities was not related to race at all and would have probably spent the money on some sort of job creation, community outreach, and parenting classes for families in those areas where performance was suffering.  But that is not what happened, does anyone care to guess or remember the result?  Performance of both types of schools went down, violence went up, and parents got angry.   Once the feral kids who were (un)raised by people succored from the government teat were introduced into schools where more parents took an active role in their children’s education everyone suffered.  The issue was not because some kids were black and some were white,  it was because a majority in one group were effectively tutored in how to be a productive member of society, and a majority of the other group were raised as though in the wild.  This whole issue went from being a sympathetic thought experiment in forced diversity, to an empathetic real world experience of what happens when children who have never been taught how to behave in society mix with less violent ones who were raised by people who believe that you can socially engineer the demographics of a city. 

One more short example:  Two years ago there was a huge sympathetic outpouring of support for a little known Freshman Senator from Illinois to become The President of the United States.  He promised Hope, and Change.  People said, “just give him a chance.”  The sentiment was one of sympathy for his message, and the historic nature of  half black man as president.  Now that we have moved into an empathetic situation of dealing with he and his friends’ policies more and more people agree with those of us who said that he had no executive experience, had questionable judgment in choosing friends and associates, and no more cared about the rights of  the oppressed or the economic opportunities of the poor than any other Despotic ruler throughout history, irrespective of his genetics.  Popular sentiment is now changing.  But that is ok, society forgets these lessons every two generations or so.

-KOOK

by the Left Coast Rebel

A great, sweeping piece from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit today in the Washington Examiner. Reynolds relates the Declaration of Indpendence to the fact that the ruling class elite simply do not govern by the will of the governed:

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is boilerplate American history, and something that Americans — and, in particular, America’s political class — have long taken for granted.

But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the “political class” believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.

The ruling class vision of government and the public’s belief of a traditional, Constitutionally restrained government as envisioned by the Founders and explicitly stated in the Declaration of Indpendence is an irreconcilable dichotomy. Of this I have been aware for quite some time as well. Again, Reynolds:

But forget the views of America — where, it seems likely, more people believe in alien abductions than in the legitimacy of our rulers — and look just at the more cheerful view of the political class.

Even among the rulers, only 63 percent — triple the fraction of the general populace but still less than two-thirds of the political class — regard the federal government as legitimate by the standards of America’s founding document. The remainder, presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.

These numbers should raise deep worries about the future of our republic. A nation whose government does not rest on the consent of the governed is a nation whose government holds sway only by inertia, or by force.

And of that beer, of that Schlitz (an interesting analogy):

In fact, when I think of the federal government’s brand now, I think of Schlitz beer. Schlitz was once a top national brew. But, in search of short-term gains, it began gradually reducing its quality in tiny increments to save money, substituting cheaper malt, fewer hops and “accelerated” brewing for its traditional approach.

Each incremental decline was imperceptible to consumers, but after a few years, people suddenly noticed that the beer was no good anymore. Sales collapsed, and a “Taste My Schlitz” campaign designed to lure beer drinkers back failed when the “improved” brew turned out not to be any better. A brand image that had been accumulated over decades was lost in a few years, and it has never recovered.

The federal government, alas, finds itself in much the same position. The political class sold its legitimacy off in drips and drabs. As “smart politics” has come over the past decades to mean not persuasion but the practice of legerdemain, the use of political deals, cover from a friendly press apparat and taking advantage of voters’ rational ignorance, the governing classes have managed to achieve things that would surely have failed had the people known what was going on.

Again, back to the founding:

Well, the Declaration of Independence allows for the prospect of altering or abolishing the government we have in order to get a government that’s closer to what we want. That needn’t involve anything as violent as the American Revolution or the Civil War, but the need for change — real, structural change as opposed to campaign-slogan “change” — is becoming more obvious.

I like the closing excerpt that I have here for you. Glenn Reynolds points to the need for true ‘structural’ change to remain faithful to the Declaration. I agree. When I think of the structural change necessary, I envision a dismantling of much of the leviathan-machine put in place by the ruling class while Americas were simply too busy, too distracted or too trusting to notice. Perhaps that can be the only thing to save this nation from the precipice of bankruptcy of economics and government. My question to you — where are the leaders that we can support to do this from the ground up?

Via BlogProg: A republic, Ma’am, can we keep it?

Via Memeorandum