::Freespace::

Libertarian Bookworm: Busy today. The Bookworm is postponed till tomorrow.

Another day, another dollar: One of those exhausting Fridays. All day with has-to-be-done-now stuff, and trying to help decent people who are being screwed by abusive bureaucrats. One day I will write an autobiography and I will title it, The Government Can�t Really Do That To Me, Can They?

Islam slur: Wow. That�s pretty interesting; if it�s not intended as an anti-Islamic slur, it doesn�t make much sense as a joke. But I�m inclined to believe Hart�s sincere-sounding denials. I wonder what Prof. Hewitt has to say.

Picture of Everything: Now that is cool! (Thanks to Erik for the pointer.)

Simon & Garfunkel: A brief review of my S&G concert.

Great stuff I don�t get: I agree almost entirely with Scipio�s list. (The only exception being Leaves of Grass, which I very much enjoy. And I kinda like Mahler, too.) Oh, and I would add The Godfather.

Seuss Unparadis�d: Yet another article on the subversiveness of Dr. Seuss. But I think Cat In The Hat is actually about the Garden of Eden. Boy and girl alone in the house; the Cat is Lucifer�you get the picture.

Simon & Garfunkel: Went to the concert last night. They started late, enough to annoy the audience a bit. Then the lights went out and the show began with film clips�a historical montage that was pretty touching. Then the two came out singing �Old Friends/Bookends Theme��and it was almost a disaster.

Garfunkel had a throat infection last week, which caused the show to be delayed, and it was clear immediately that he hadn�t quite recovered. His voice sounded raspy, and he flubbed some of the harmonies right off the bat. They didn�t come in at the same time in some parts, and finally Garfunkel started using his hand to keep time so that they would come in together. I immediately feared that the show would be a failure�well, sort of. The audience (a packed house of 16,000), would have roared with glee if they had come out and belched for two hours.

Then they began to sing �Hazy Shade of Winter,� and things started to perk up. Although Garfunkel�s voice never stopped having a touch of raspyness about it, he improved enough to be really impressive. By the time he sang �Kathy�s Song,� solo, with just Paul Simon playing the guitar, he was good enough to be extremely impressive. Their harmonies in �Scarborough Fair� were as good as ever, and �American Song,� which I had never heard before, brought tears to my eyes. My only disappointment was that they did not perform �Song for the Asking,� one of my very favorites. But they played every other song on this set list.

Of course, the audience worshipped them, and was almost deafening in its cheers. At the end, when they sang �Bridge over Troubled Water,� and Art Garfunkel, a man in his sixties, managed to hit that awesome high note at the end, we were all on our feet.

I paid almost $500 for seats right next to the stage�and it was worth every penny. My recommendation is: do what you have to to get tickets!

More on bad amendments: Nick Morgan originally asked �can the Judiciary do anything if a very foolish or dangerous federal Constitutional amendment is ratified?� I think I�ve mentioned it before, but here�s what I think the Supreme Court should do if the proposed flag-burning amendment is ratified.

The Amendment says �The Congress and the States shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.� It says nothing about repealing the First Amendment. You�re never supposed to infer a repeal without explicit language to that effect. And you�re supposed to adopt a reading that is consistent with both provisions whenever possible. So how do you do that? Only one way: by interpreting the Amendment as allowing Congress and the States to prohibit desecration of the flag, except in cases where such desecration is intended as speech!

Wouldn�t that be great? It would mean that the only time they could ban flag-burning would be in those situations in which burning the flag is considered respectful, and it wouldn�t prohibit the kind of flag burning that the Amendment�s backers are really targeting. That would be so sweet.

(I once proposed this to Prof. Volokh, by the way. He said he didn�t think it would happen. Yeah, but�it would be so cool!)

Originalism and gay marriage: But Sandefur, you say, I thought you were committed to originalism. You�re always quoting Madison and Jefferson and whatnot. Surely you don�t think John Adams would have thought that gay men could be married to each other under his Constitution.

No, certainly he didn�t. But that�s not the question. We all make statements without realizing all the logical consequences that flow from those statements. But it�s a court�s job to discover those logical consequences, not to trace the confusion or contradiction that might inhabit a man�s mind when drafting a piece of legislation. If John Adams had said �2 + 2 =� and thought the answer was 5, it would nevertheless be the court�s job to say, no, it�s 4. The question isn�t to get into the heads of great men who came before us, but to understand the principles they put into the Constitution, and to derive from those the necessary consequences. We say, yes, slavery violates the fundamental principle of equality, even if the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence themselves owned slaves. (Prof. Barnett has a fantastic law review article about that here.) Likewise, if they say that nobody may be denied equal protection of the laws, that means that nobody may be denied the equal protection of the laws, even if the drafters of that clause lived with contradictions of that principle, and even if the drafters of the clause thought such contradictions were acceptable�or even imperceptible.

If �originalism� is construed to mean getting into the head of John Adams or James Madison, I�m not an originalist. If originalism means (as I think it does) understanding the framers� philosophy by studying their works closely, and recognizing that they were great geniuses in the work of political philosophy and practical government, then yes, I�m an originalist.

Silly protectionism: Great news, reported at Hit & Run.

I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down: Prof. Volokh�s post about the �offensiveness� of labeling a computer system as �master� and �slave� reminds me, tangentially, of the case of In Re Bobrowich, which I blogged about back in May, a case in which a man was denied permission to legally change his name to �Steffi Owned Slave.�

Okay, maybe just one little blog: Nick Morgan should check out Jeff Rosen, Was The Flag Burning Amendment Unconstitutional, 100 Yale L.J. 1073 (1991).

Blogging will be light: Because I have no light. Transformer exploded (again!) this morning, plunging the Unabomber Shack into darkness at about 6am. Well...it was already dark. Anyway, so no blogging. Plus, my mother�s coming into town this evening so�s we can try (again!) to go to the Simon & Garfunkel concert tomorrow.

Massachusetts gay marriage case: I�ve read the majority opinion, not the dissent yet. It reads like it would have had I written it; I agree with everything....except....

The court says �We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.� (p. 36) But why the exclusion of all others? If people are free to define themselves through gay marriages under the court�s ruling, why not polygamous marriages? The court might answer that �[t]he exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support...brings stability to our society...provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits...[and] imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations.� (pp. 2-3) But these are precisely the rationales the court rejects as being sufficient to allow the state to distinguish between gay marriages and heterosexual marriages. Why is it enough to allow the state to distinguish between monogamous marriages and polygamous marriages?

Update: Oops. Looks like Prof. Volokh beat me to it.

Fame!: Thanks to Prof. Volokh for the link. I suppose my mother, Julie, is also named for the Imperator.

Regulatory takings and priorities: Prof. Marston has phrased his recent post in the form of �a friendly letter addressed to my interlocutor, rather than as a post addressed to imagined readers....� I prefer the old style, though. It reminds me of the Parliamentary style of referring questions to the speaker, which avoids the gradual slide into personal debate. But it�s true, my readers could, for all I know, be imaginary; I don�t even have a hit counter.

Prof. Marston writes that his �(not so secret) hope is that I might actually learn something about libertarian views on regulatory takings, as well as learn something about the soundness of my own views. So, thanks for devoting some of your limited time to this common enterprise.� I appreciate that; I tend to sound more heated than I mean to in my posts, sometimes. (Sarah said I was ferocious, for instance. God forbid! It was not my intention.)

First, Marston disagrees with my characterization of his views as saying that the Pacific Legal Foundation and allied organizations �are attempting ��to constitutionalize� protection for property rights....� I contended that PLF and IJ and others have developed an account of takings that would increase the protection of property rights beyond the point currently recognized in U.S. constitutional law....� Yes, I know that my phrasing was slightly altered. This was a rhetorical point on my part, intended to emphasize that, rather than trying to �create� any �new� protections for property rights, what I would actually like to do is to restore the protections for the rights of people to own and use property, which were part of the original Constitution, the erosion of which began in the Progressive era and ">culminated in the 1930s (or, in the case of eminent domain, in the 1950s). Libertarians are not the innovators; the left is, as their predecessors acknowledged. Indeed, a contemporary of Justice Holmes wrote that he

came to the bench in 1882, when the transition from individualism to collectivism in England was in progress.... [He] was too learned in the history of the law to be blind to the fact that the socialistic trend in American political thought would finally demand extensive paternal legislation in no uncertain terms; and that when this demand became strong enough serious consequences might follow the failure of the courts to acquiesce.... [T]he necessity for the establishment of a benevolent attitude towards social reform was apparent...[yet] the Constitution was regarded as almost immutable.... [N]o further [Amendment] might be looked for short of a popular upheaval. Next to amendment of the Constitution, the most feasible means of giving validity to new principles was to change the interpretation of the provisions under which the inevitable social legislation would be held invalid.

Dorsey Richardson, Constitutional Doctrines of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes 41 (1924) (quoted in Timothy Sandefur, The Right to Earn A Living, 6 Chap. L. Rev. 207, 245-46 (2003)).

Again, it is not that we are trying to �create� anything: we are trying to restore an interpretation of the Constitution faithful to its text and intent, rather than created by fiat to serve the needs of the Regulatory Welfare State. It�s true that that is �pushing the law in one direction.� I�ve always acknowledged that I am an activist, as Clint Bolick and Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and Robert J. Ingersoll and Charles Sumner.

But allow me to emphasize that I don�t see it as the goal of my career to �attack[ ]...government power in the name of dismantling the welfare state....� I don�t speak for PLF, but it is my goal to protect individual freedom. Among the greatest threats to freedom is the Regulatory Welfare State. Therefore I attack it.

Prof. Marston writes that I �have a developed account of property rights, one that is, in a cultural sense, not the accepted or consensus meaning in U.S. constitutional law, in high-level theoretical discourse on law, or in ordinary conversation.� Well, let me again emphasize that I have not developed it. James Madison, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith�these men developed it. Some of them wrote them into the Supreme Law of the Land. I seek merely to protect or to restore it. It is true that the legal academy, stocked with New Dealers and their descendants, are quite hostile to the political philosophy these men espoused. That doesn�t change the fact that they were right. As for ordinary conversation, however, I beg to differ. I believe most people think it is ridiculous that Mississippi would try to take someone�s land to give to the Nissan Corporation, or that the Nollans should be forced to pay an extortionate fee to the Coastal Commission to develop land that belongs to them. If most people really believed that property rights don�t matter so much, why would it be necessary to use judicial tricks like �rational basis scrutiny� to erode property rights? Why not repeal the Fifth Amendment outright?

Prof. Marston writes that �Where [I] see an un-American, collectivist welfare state leviathan, [he] see[s] the sum total of reasonable government regulation under modern economic and environmental conditions.� But that�s just the problem. We cannot discuss the question of reasonableness of these regulations without first settling the question of whether the government has the right to create these regulations to begin with. If we are to settle �the main question around which our short conversation has circled,� we must answer this question: what does the government have the right to do to us? To quote the great libertarian Algernon Sidney, �the question is not whether that which is Caesar's should be rendered to him, for that is to be done to all men; but who is Caesar, and what doth of right belong to him....?�

The answer to this question can only be found in political philosophy, and the Court has been reluctant to get into the issue. Indeed, as I wrote earlier this year, today�s lawyers and law professors avoid these subjects due to

a characteristically modern retreat from troublesome questions that the 1787 and 1878 founders faced squarely: what are the legitimate limitations of government? What may the state rightfully do? What is just? Although these questions are difficult ones (and �conceptual� rather than �pragmatic�) they are at the root of decisions affecting the lives of millions of Americans. When the Olympic games came to Atlanta in 1996, thousands of people lost their homes and businesses through eminent domain. They may not have phrased it this way themselves, but the question on the minds of many of these people was, �is this just?� Indeed, only a few years later, China was condemned by some human rights groups for doing exactly the same thing to attract the Olympics to Beijing.... [L]andowners will not be safe from expropriation by Costco, Nissan, or other politically powerful parties, until society solves the problem the Progressives left unsolved: delineating the boundary between public and private. Fortunately, the American founders left us the theoretical tools....

Timothy Sandefur, A Natural Rights Perspective on Eminent Domain in California: A Rationale for Meaningful Judicial Scrutiny of �Public Use,� 32 Sw. U. L. Rev. 569, 670-71 (2003). Likewise, we cannot address the alleged �reasonableness� of an �attempt to hold to the status quo,� unless we first address what gives government that power.

(But I deny that anyone has a right to hold anyone else�s status quo! If you want to hold a status quo, buy your own!)

Only after we�ve settled that question, can we ask questions about the methods by which government engages in such undertakings�e.g., whether the city of New York has any right to �engage in historical preservation� by forcing only a few people to pay the bill, rather than paying just compensation for taking someone�s property for public use.

If we start in political philosophy, we will have to get to the question of why property rights are to be treated as poor relations to other rights. (Cf. Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 US 374, 392 (1994)). I don�t have the energy to write yet another libertarian essay on why property rights are fundamental. I assume Prof. Marston knows where to find such explanations. I�ll just say this. Some months ago I went to a party held by some property owners down south of here. Not very attractive land; about two miles from the beach, but you couldn�t see the beach�land was typical of northern California: some oak trees, some underbrush like poison oak and grass, some rocks. Nevertheless, the county had imposed ridiculous permitting burdens on these people; ordered them to plant various shrubs around the property (a fire hazard), ordered them to move their fire tanks one hundred feet over�at a cost of about $7,000. Delay after delay in permits.... These people were upset at having their property interfered with in this manner. Why were they upset? Could it be that to them, property represents their labor, their future, their investment, their time, their dreams? It�s easy to see property as just a political abstraction, or to say that the Regulatory Welfare State just imposes �messy and time-consuming� delays that don�t really matter all that much.... But these delays cost someone money�i.e., property. The Constitution says that life liberty and property cannot be taken without due process of law, and that when they are taken, people will be paid just compensation. We can use all our expertise to weasel out of those requirements, but that�s all we�re doing. I would prefer to be faithful to the Constitution.

Why do we insist on the importance of property rights? Well, Justice Blackmun wrote (in my favorite Supreme Court opinion of all time), �We protect those rights not because they contribute, in some direct and material way, to the general public welfare, but because they form so central a part of an individual�s life. [T]he concept of privacy embodies the moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole.� Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 204 (1986) (Blackmun, J., dissenting) (citations omitted). The right to sexual privacy is essential because it is a natural right of all human beings which nobody else has any right to interfere with. The same is true of property. Just as �we protect the family because it contributes so powerfully to the happiness of individuals, not because of a preference for stereotypical households,� id., just as �the ability independently to define one's identity...is central to any concept of liberty� id.,�so, too, people express or discover themselves through their investment in and their use of property. They even call it The American Dream.

It is sometimes said, �Yes, but one person�s use of property affects other people. So other people should have some control over that use.� I�ve already said that nuisance law takes care of that. But also it must be noted that this is just the claim that conservatives make when saying they should control your sexual conduct: why, it affects the children, so we should all be subject to government control over our sex lives. If we have the right to �autonomy of self� which includes ��the right to define one�s own concept of existence,�� Lawrence v. Texas, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 2475, 2481 (2003) (quoting Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992)), then why do we not have the right to define our own lives by owning and using property, by running a business, by building a house, by choosing where to plant our trees? Prof. Epstein has noted that �[t]he desire to make one�s own choices about employment may be as strong as it is with respect to marriage or participation in religious activities, and it is doubtless more pervasive than the desire to participate in political activity.� Richard A. Epstein, In Defense of The Contract At-Will, 51 U. Chi. L. Rev. 947, 953-54 (1984). Why is that not also true of the right to own and use property? The fact that such use might affect others cannot be enough to make such a distinction, because, as the conservatives point out, there are just as many, if not more, social consequences from private sexual behavior as from private property. Why is it okay for government to tell me I may not build a home on my own land�but not okay for the government to tell me whom I may kiss in that home, once it�s built? It would seem that who says A must say B. If there is a �meaningful distinction� here, I�d like to know it. As Laurence Tribe, that fanatic radical defender of big business, says, �[a]part from its analytic weakness, the distinction between economic and non-economic rights overlooks the importance of property and contract in protecting the dispossessed no less than the established; it forgets the political impotence of the isolated job-seeker who has been fenced out of an occupation; and in no event could it justify more than a modest difference in degree between the judicial roles in the two areas.� American Constitutional Law 1374 (2d ed. 1988).

I appreciate Prof. Marston�s kindness and his suggestion that we discuss the matter over bourbon. But I don�t drink, so it�ll have to be Diet Pepsi.

Modern problems: Sarah Hempel has a response to my post responding to her thoughts about isolation. She writes �I meet so many people who are desperately lonesome. Oh, you wouldn�t recognize it as they often seem cheery and happy, but I watch them fill their lives with activities and such to avoid the pain of an empty, lonely home.� Now, I find that second sentence very important. It�s not that the people tell Sarah that they�re lonely; in fact, by every measurable indicator of happiness�wealth, health, success, and so on�they�re just fine. But Sarah thinks they�re lonely. (I wonder if she stops these allegedly lonely people on the street and asks them if they�re lonely, or whether she just assumes they are?) They may be. Perhaps their wealth, health, and success don�t actually make them happy. I certainly won�t deny that people are often lulled by various opiates into thinking they�re happy when they actually are not. But the only real expert on whether a person is happy is that person himself, and we must take care not to assume that everyone else is unhappy when they may not be. Indeed, the assumption that we know better than the person himself whether he is �really� happy can lead to disastrous consequences: we may assume that it is up to us to secure a person�s real happiness by controlling his life. In some cases�like interceding to stop a drunk�that may be the right thing to do. But there are many more cases when that can be a terrible mistake.

Sarah writes �We are destroying our earth, our bodies and our souls. We are poisoning our water, air and soil. It is dangerous to eat too much fish now because of heavy metal toxic buildup from human pollution. How many Americans are taking anti-depressants? I have taken them. Most people I know either have, are, or know someone close to them who are.� But weren�t things much worse when we had the need for anti-depressants, but didn�t have them? We can diagnose things now that we didn�t in the past�we must take care not to confuse that with an increase in the disease itself. And while pollution is a serious problem, most of us live in a far cleaner world than we did a century ago, with dead horses lying in the streets and sewage spilled in the gutters. We are able now to concern ourselves with the �metals� in fish because we have alternatives�you think people in North Korea care whether there�s a part-per-million of mercury in their fish?

I don�t think it�s balance we need, so much as a recognition that all things in life come with both good things and bad things�that there is no �way it�s supposed to be.� We must abandon the idea that we can ever arrive at some golden land where there is no illness and no suffering and the streets are paved with penny rolls, the houses tiled with pancakes, and chickens ready roasted cry, come eat me! Yes, we have problems�the problems our ancestors could only have dreamed to have. And I dream that some day we will have the following problems:

I hope someday people can say �you know, that cancer cure is just too expensive.�

�Hey, that pill that keeps me from going bald is making me fat!�

�Toys �R� Us Chairman John Smith reported today that the company�s three Kabul stores are laying off��

�Senator Ted Kennedy celebrated his 126th birthday at a Senate party today�.�

Britney: Scipio�s trying to build readership by getting links from me; it might be better if he found his own subjects to blog about. Hey, no offense�just sayin�.

Anyway, he writes that �The merciless hatred that Britney Spears inspires is to me more a signal of how pathetic her critics are. Her vapid brand of so-called �pop� music is an affront to humanity�.� Now, obviously Scipio is using hyperbole. It is not an �affront to humanity,� even if one finds it offensive, let alone �vapid.� But that�s just my point. It�s okay to have �merciless hatred� for her and call her an �affront to humanity� because you don�t like her music? Again, it�s just hyperbole�but why is that sort of hyperbole considered amusing or acceptable? If it�s not okay to wish for the death of your political opponents, why is it all-in-good-fun to have �merciless hatred� for Britney Spears?

�[H]er ridiculous �dancing� is essentially aerobic exercises laced with fornicatory gestures,� writes Scipio. Okay. So? The same could be said of many dancers, and the same has been said of many dancers and dancing styles, such as the waltz, which is said to have scandalized nineteenth century society. This makes it okay to hate Britney Spears and wish her dead and laugh at her when she cries over a broken heart?

��and her voice is not particularly fine, and certainly less vibrant than Christina Aguilera�s.� As I said, I wouldn�t know. But I�m no Pavarotti myself, and I�m a much more ridiculous dancer than Britney Spears. So if my cat got hit by a car, it would be okay to laugh at me?

So she�s good at �self-promotion.� What�s wrong with that? We want people to be self-promoting. That�s how society gains wealth. And what�s blogging if not the ultimate form of self-promotion? Why is it okay to hate a person�or jokingly hate a person�just because she promotes herself? Even if you don�t like her singing? Hell, the cover of Esquire is reason enough to admire Spears. Why is it acceptable to respond to that with contempt for her? Scipio concludes that �part of the reason people are enjoying this misery of Britney�s so much is because it brings them closer to her, and is more empathetic than you realise [sic].� I did realize this, and if that were all, I don�t think I would be so troubled by this. But there�s more to it than that�or less. It�s not that people are sharing her heartbreak; it�s that they think it�s okay to laugh at her for crying. She�s not a contemptible person; I mean, if Bill Clinton cried, I might laugh. But this is a beautiful, undeniably talented, hardworking, inexperienced young woman, who has done none of us any harm, who feels very lonely, and may be trying to cure that feeling through self-destructive behavior. That people could laugh at that�and yes, I know they always have�is really upsetting.

Who saved civilization?: Good for Christopher Orlet. I read How The Irish Saved Civilization some time ago, also. I didn�t dislike it, although it would have been nice if Cahill had bothered citing his sources. But it�s important to emphasize that the rise of Western Civilization has, step-by-step, accompanied its secularization.

You can�t say that!: An excellent article by Prof. Bernstein.

Turner Prize: A late entry?

Alienation: Sarah keeps going on and on and on about �modern man�s loneliness and isolation.� But I don�t feel particularly lonely, and neither do most of the folks I know. They have lots of friends�even ones they�ve never met. I�m very close to my friend Courtney, for instance, whom I�ve known for five years, and yet I�ve never met her. Never heard her voice. Don�t even know her last name. I know her through the miracle of computer technology. Every day I get in touch with folks like Will Baude or annika, or the folks at En Banc�never met any of them. I have plenty of old-fashioned style friends, but I also have these new personalities in my life who enrich my days in ways my ancestors could never have dreamed of. In fact, I even met the lovely Erin on the computer, like a real nerd ought to.

I keep in touch with Sarah herself through email and telephone technology that would never have existed a century ago; we�d have to write letters by pen and ink. (I did write her pen and ink letters, by the way, and she would often fail to reply until I called her on the phone.) I saw her back in September due to the miracle of transcontinental air travel. I have a photograph of us, due to that nasty old modernity.

I don�t feel particularly isolated. Ever hear of cabin fever? It was something folks in my area of the country used to get a lot, back in the days of the Donner Party and whatnot. We don�t get it so much now because we always have something to do�I have access on my computer to the great works of literature. I can watch DVDs of Shakespeare plays, and often do. I can listen to the greatest works of music ever composed, like those Miles Davis CDs that Sarah�s fond of.

Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are terrible things. But the reason we get them today is because we don�t get smallpox and leprosy and childbed fever and cholera and consumption and bilious fever. We don�t usually die of food poisoning, and we never die of starvation. Indeed, heart disease and diabetes and cancer are diseases we get from overconsumption�that is to say, one of the greatest obstacles our nation faces is that we may be too happy! Oh! The horror!

Reminds me of a Chris Rock routine, which I can only paraphrase: only in America would we say some bullshit like �Red meat will kill you.� No, no. Green meat will kill you. If you�re lucky enough in this world to get your hands on a steak, bite the shit out of it!

Our nation is happier, warmer, healthier, fatter, and sexier than ever. We are so incredibly spoiled. We get rich-people diseases. We have rich-people problems. We are rich enough to care about things like the ambiance at the grocery stores where we shop, or the �isolation of modern man.� You think the people of North Korea stay up at night thinking about the isolation of modern man? We are fortunate indeed to worry about such silly things. Alienation is another one of those rich-people diseases.

And that�s another thing: it�s time to stop knocking isolation. Isolation is an immense blessing that many people pay a great deal of money and time to obtain. When I go home to the Unabomber Shack where I live, I close the door and I�m isolated�snug and isolated and happy as a jaybird. The people of North Korea wish with all their souls that they could be as isolated as I. As Jacob Bronowski used to say, there isn�t a nation on earth that�s ever died of noncomformity, but plenty have died of conformity in our lifetimes. Well, the same is true of �community.� As my tag-line this week says, there are some things that are wonderful precisely because they cannot be shared with anyone else�precisely because they are something that we have in isolation. Civilization means setting people free from each other�s interference. The society that has no isolation is the society of the slave. Maybe that�s why Sarah thought that �all that space� in North Dakota was so nice. Nobody around to intrude their community on you without your consent. That�s called freedom.

What you missed over the weekend: The Libertarian Bookworm featured Karl Popper. Plus, my long-promised post on regulatory takings, thoughts on libertarianism and morality, and sympathy for Britney Spears.

Aeschylus: Via No Left Turns, this story about the new re-discovery of a play by Aeschylus. It�ll be performed soon for the first time in over two thousand years. Maybe someday they�ll find the lost two plays completing the cycle of my favorite Aeschylus play, Prometheus Bound.

Cheer!: Some great cheerleading tips at Rule of Reason.

Scriabin: Hey, there�s a complete piano works of Scriabin CD set! Who knew? His Etude in D sharp minor, Opus 8 No. 12 is my favorite piece of music in the world. I recommend Chitose Okashiro, however, the best performer of Scriabin I�ve ever heard. A close second is Vladimir Horowitz�s Horowitz Plays Scriabin. And pick up the Preludes as well�just unbelievably beautiful music.

Pleased to see: That The Politburo is back up and running.

It�s happened: The future has arrived. Beauty contests with digitally-produced women.

Apologies?: So the Tate Gallery will apologize for this painting offending Muslims, but it continues to display Turner Prize entrants, without a word of apology to the Christians (or just regular decent folk) whom those offend.

Libertinism: Conservatives routinely slander libertarians as libertines�they say that we don�t believe in moral standards and don�t care about the good life, and just want to let everyone do their own thing. For some libertarians this is doubtless true, but it�s also doubtless true of many conservatives. Libertarian theory, rightly understood, does contain moral premises. We oppose the initiation of force because it is immoral. This article has a good pr�cis of the libertarian view of political morality, but it is important to yet again emphasize that we are not asserting that morality is subjective, or that values are a matter of personal preference or taste. As Douglas Rasmussen writes,

There are many forms of human flourishing, but there is no single best form of human flourishing period. Rather, there is only the best form of human flourishing for an individual. Thus, there are many summa bona. Nonetheless, this does not require that human flourishing be subjective. Human flourishing neither consists in merely having favorable feelings nor in having value conferred upon it simply by one�s preference. This individualized account of human flourishing offers diversity without subjectivism..... Since there are no a priori, universal rules that dictate the proper weighting of the goods and virtues of human flourishing, a proper weighting is only achieved by individuals having practical insight at the time of action. They need to discover the proper balance for themselves.

Douglas Rasmussen, Why Individual Rights? in Individual Rights Reconsidered 113, 119-126 (T. Machan ed., 2001).

Of course, there are those who think that they (or �the people�) know what values we ought to pursue, and what sort of life is The Right Way To Live. They believe they have the right to tell us whom we may sleep with and what we may ingest and what we may read�and what we may do with our land. They are the ones Popper was speaking of when he described those who think the state should be run like a work of art; to them, society has to be designed from the top down. We, on the other hand, say that society is supposed to be for people, and they should be free to design it from the bottom up, without using force, through mechanisms of toleration, respect, and just compensation!

�Sex in the soil�: A cool story about the genetics of C. elegans.

Speaking of genetics�. The lovely Erin is a TA for a genetics professor at UC Davis, a university from which she obtained a BS in genetics. She also would like to be a vet, and she recently called the necessary state licensing boards to enquire as to the processes. �Well,� the woman on the other end told her, �first, you need a bachelor�s degree in biology.�

�I have a degree in genetics.�

�No, no,� the woman said. �It has to be in biology.�

�Um�genetics is biology.�

�No, you have to have a degree in biology.�

�Uh�may I speak to your supervisor?�

�I am the supervisor.�

This matter is still being worked on.

(Oh, and check it out: Erin, who is � Cherokee, is just following in the footsteps of her ancestors.)