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The denigration of the Canadian trucker protest convoy exemplifies how freedom is now the biggest villain of the covid-19 pandemic. A Washington Post cartoonist portrayed the trucker convoy as “fascism” incarnate while another Post column derided the “toxic ‘Freedom Convoy.’” Anyone who resists any government command is apparently now a public enemy.

The trucker protest was spurred by the Canadian government’s sweeping covid vaccine mandate. Many truckers believe the risks of the vaccine outweigh the benefit and, more importantly, that they have the right to control their own bodies. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau declared on Monday, “There is no place in our country for threats, violence or hatred.” Except for the hatred Trudeau whips up by denouncing vaccine mandate opponents as “racist” and “misogynistic.” And except for the “threats” and “violence” used by government enforcement agents to compel submission to any pandemic decree issued by Trudeau or other politicians.

Since the start of this pandemic, many people who boasted of their trust in “science and data” also believed that absolute power would keep them safe. According to their scorecard, anyone who objected to government commands was the equivalent of a heretic who must be condemned if not banished from every place except the cemetery. North of the border, Quebec epitomizes this intolerance with its new edict prohibiting unvaccinated individuals from shopping at Costco or Walmart.

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Preventing politicians from obliterating freedom is now the worst form of tyranny. On Thanksgiving eve 2020, the Supreme Court struck down Governor Andrew Cuomo’s edict that limited religious gatherings in New York to ten or fewer people while permitting far more leeway for businesses to operate. The court declared that Cuomo’s rules were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court … and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.” An American Civil Liberties Union official fretted that “the freedom to worship … does not include a license to harm others or endanger public health.” Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe and Cornell professor Michael Dorf warned that the Supreme Court was becoming “a place like Gilead—the theocratic and misogynist country in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”

Many progressives talk as if America faces a choice between reckless freedom and paternalism—i.e., submission to a benevolent elite. But regardless of Anthony Fauci’s boundless conceit, omniscient officials have yet to come to the rescue. Government agencies have blundered catastrophically since the start of the pandemic.

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MISES INSTITUTE

As with inflation and any other redistributive policy, the principal effect on the economy of a tariff is nothing other than a redirection of resources from more to less productive activities. It is the attempt of the central planner to replace the economic judgment of millions of consumers (in his own country and around the world) with a preconceived idea of how he would like those consumers to act -- whether for or against their own best interests. -- CL2.0

As quoted in the Mises.org article:

Thus the new tariff law has resulted in this: The protected industry now makes a high profit to which it is not justly entitled. The average French citizen has been duped out of five francs by his government, and must therefore do without the article or service he would have bought with it. One segment of the economy has profited at the expense of many others. True enough, because of the artificial price increases, new jobs have been created in the protected industry. But what is not seen is the fact that the extra money now spent for iron must necessarily result in reduced spending for other products and services, and thus fewer jobs in those industries. And worst of all, the people have been encouraged to think that robbery is moral if it is legal.

What should politically vanquished people do? Should they resist the political status quo no matter what, or accept it in the spirit of civil comity and bide their time for the next election? What if their political fortunes are waning, and they are ever less likely to prevail politically? What rights and powers do seemingly permanent political minorities (e.g. libertarians) possess? At what point is open rebellion permitted in a supposed democracy, and how do we judge principled resistance as opposed to sour grapes from political losers?

Furthermore, what can political majorities rightfully do-- in spite of a minority's strident opposition-- and what policies cannot be altered regardless of majority consensus? What spoils rightfully belong to political victors, and what longstanding rules should not be upended?

These are uneasy questions in the Age of Trump, especially since western governments long ago abandoned constitutional restraints and the cliched "rule of law" in favor or administrative governance by bureaucratic managers. Democracy, at least the mass variety practiced in modern western welfare states, provides no satisfactory answers. Are those unelected managers bound by popular will, or much of anything? What restrains the state?

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The almost unbelievable rancor surrounding the Trump administration demonstrates precisely how little even rich westerners really revere democracy when they don't like its results. Anti-Trump forces indeed consider themselves conquered, feeling suddenly like second-class citizens in a country they thought they knew (one where an inevitable "progressive" arc would of course elect Ms. Clinton). They don't accept Trump any more than they would accept the head of a hostile and occupying foreign power. But rejecting the outcome of elections is strange position for Clinton supporters, a candidate who frequently gushed about "our sacred democracy."

The same can be said for the Brexit referendum in the UK and rising anti-immigration sentiment across continental Europe-- both pilloried as sinister and ill-intentioned populism as opposed to noble expressions of "the people" exercising their democratic rights. But populism is just democracy delivered good and hard, and technocratic administrators are correctly portrayed as gross hypocrites who use the veneer of democratic support only when it bolsters what they plan to do anyway.

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The history of liberty and prosperity is inseparable from the practice of free enterprise and respect for the rule of law. Both are products of the spirit of classical liberalism. But a correct understanding of free enterprise, the rule of law, and liberalism (rightly understood) is greatly lacking in the world today.

Historically, liberalism is the political philosophy of individual liberty. It proclaims and insists that the individual is to be free to think, speak, and write as he wishes; to believe and worship as he wishes; and to peacefully live his life as he wishes. Another way of saying this is to quote from Lord Acton’s definition: “By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and custom, and opinion.” For this reason, he declared that the securing of liberty “is the highest political end.”

Sometimes you encounter a proposal that is so daft that you think to yourself, “The author can’t be serious!” In today’s column, I’d like to discuss an example of this sort that comes from one of the world’s most eminent moral philosophers, Martha C. Nussbaum. In her article, “A Peopled Wilderness,” appearing in the New York Review of Books, December 8, 2022, Nussbaum suggests that we need to think seriously about curbing predation in nature. It disturbs her that animals eat other animals: this is not how things ought to be. We must be careful in what we try to do to correct this morally bad state of affairs, since through lack of knowledge, we may worsen things; but this is no excuse to let matters slide.

To be clear, she is not just proposing that we should make sure that lions can’t get into the deer cage at the zoo; she is talking about the possibility of getting animals in the wild to cease to kill and eat each other. Her idea illustrates and extends a besetting sin of contemporary moral and political philosophy, its idle utopianism. The ordinary circumstances of the human condition are rejected, and philosophers devise fantastic schemes to remake the social and political world to their own liking. As Thomas Sowell says:

What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.

Nussbaum illustrates Sowell’s insight in a ludicrously extreme fashion.

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Nussbaum maintains that people have failed to recognize the need for reform of the natural world because of a false idealization of nature in the wild, and she has insightful comments on the prevalence of this idealization in the Romantic Movement. But her picture of the Romantics is one-sided: Tennyson famously wrote in In Memoriam of “Nature, red in tooth and claw/ With ravine” which “shrieked” against the creed that God is love.

I would say, rather, the reason that people have not in general attended to what Nussbaum deems a grave moral issue is that predation is part of the way the natural world exists, and it is not the business of ethics to endeavor to reconstruct nature.

Nussbaum has two arguments against this response, neither of which is adequate. First, she says “nature” can’t be considered apart from human beings: we now dominate the world and are thus responsible for what takes place within it:

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The principal argument against her isn’t that nature in the wild is a normative ideal but rather that it isn’t a human responsibility to reform it. Ethics, at least if we confine ourselves to the secular realm, is about how human beings can best lead their lives, and to demand that we alter the way animals lead their lives is a foolish and presumptuous error.

Much of the political thinking about violence in the United States comes from unfavorable comparisons between the United States and a series of cherry-picked countries with lower murder rates and with fewer guns per capita. We’ve all seen it many times. The United States, with a murder rate of approximately 5 per 100,000 is compared to a variety of Western and Central European countries (also sometimes Japan) with murder rates often below 1 per 100,000. This is, in turn, supposed to fill Americans with a sense of shame and illustrate that the United States should be regarded as some sort of pariah nation because of its murder rate.

Note, however, that these comparisons always employ a carefully selected list of countries, most of which are very unlike the United States. They are  countries that were settled long ago by the dominant ethnic group, they are ethnically non-diverse today, they are frequently very small countries (such as Norway, with a population of 5 million) with very locally based democracies (again, unlike the US with an immense population and far fewer representatives in government per voter). Politically, historically, and demographically, the US has little in common with Europe or Japan.

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But these are the only countries the US shall be compared to, we are told, because the US shall only be compared to “developed” countries when analyzing its murder rate and gun ownership.And yet, no reason for this is ever given. What is the criteria for deciding that the United States shall be compared to Luxembourg but not to Mexico, which has far more in common with the US than Luxembourg in terms of size, history, ethnic diversity, and geography? Much of this stems from outdated preconceived and evidence-free notions about the "third world." As Hans Rosling has shown, there is this idea of "we" vs. "them." "We" are the special "developed" countries where people are happy healthy, and live long lives. "Them" is the third world where people live in war-torn squalor and lives there are nasty, brutish, and short. In this mode of thinking there is a bright shiny line between the "developed" world and everyone else, who might as well be considered as a different species. In truth, there is no dividing line between the alleged "developed" world and everyone else. There is, in fact, only gradual change that takes place as one looks at Belgium, then the US, then Chile, and Turkey, and China, and Mexico. Most countries, as Rosling illustrates here, are in the middle, and this is freely exhibited by a variety of metrics including the UN's human development index. Once we understand these facts, and do not cling to bizarre xenophobic views about how everyone outside the "developed" world is too dysfunctional and/or subhuman (although few gun control advocates would ever admit to the thought) to bear comparison to the US, we immediately see that the mantra "worst in the developed world" offers an immensely skewed, unrealistic, and even bigoted view of the world and how countries compare to each other.

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But, we are never allowed to compare the US to middle income countries like Uruguay, Russia, or Mexico because that would show that the US is actually a remarkably safe place in global terms on top of having many more legally owned guns than those countries.

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Few people who repeat this mantra have any standard in their heads of what exactly is the "developed" world. They just repeat the phrase because they have learned to do so. They never acknowledge that when factors beyond per capita GDP are considered, it makes little sense to claim Sweden should be compared to the US, but not Argentina.  Such assertions ignore immense differences in culture, size, politics, history, demographics, or ethnic diversity. Comparisons with mono-ethnic Asian countries like Japan and Korea make even less sense.

But for an illustration of where this sort of thinking leads, let's look at this Washington Post article titled  “The U.S. has far more gun-related killings than any other developed country.” After mistakenly using the "gun related" killings rate instead of the murder rate (see below) the author, Max Fisher, carefully constructs his comparisons so as to emphasize the gun deaths rate (which is implied to be as good as the murder rate) in the US. 

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Fisher adds Bulgaria, Turkey, and Chile, which are middle-income countries. And that lets him make this graph: 

Why Turkey and Chile and Bulgaria? Well, those countries are OECD members, and many who use the "developed country" moniker often use the OECD members countries as a de facto list of the "true" developed countries. Of course, membership in the OECD is highly political and hardly based on any objective economic or cultural criteria. But if you're familiar with the OECD, you'll immediately notice a problem with the list Fisher uses. Mexico is an OECD country. So why is Mexico not in this graph? Well, it's pretty apparent that Mexico was left off the list because to do so would interfere with the point Fisher is trying to make. After all, Mexico — in spite of much more restrictive gun laws — has a murder rate many times larger than the US. But Fisher has what he thinks is a good excuse for his manipulation here.  According to Fisher, the omission is because Mexico “has about triple the U.S. rate due in large part to the ongoing drug war.” Oh, so every country that has drug war deaths is exempt? Well, then I guess we have to remove the US from the list. But, of course, the US for some mysterious reason must remain on the list, so, by “developed” country, Fisher really means “ a country that’s on the OECD list minus any country with a higher murder rate than the US.”

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Why not use the UN’s human development index instead? That would seem to make at least as much sense if we’re devoted to looking at “developed countries.”

So, let’s do that. Here we see that the OECD’s list contains Turkey, Bulgaria, Mexico, and Chile. So, if we're honest with ourselves, that must mean that other countries with similar human development rankings are also suitable for comparisons to the US. 

Well, Turkey and Mexico have HDI numbers at .75. So, let’s include other countries with HDI numbers either similar or higher. That means we should include The Bahamas, Argentina, Costa Rica, Cuba, Panama, Uruguay, Venezuela, Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Estonia, and Latvia.

You can see where this is going. If we include countries that have HDI numbers similar to — or at least as high as — OECD members Turkey and Mexico, we find that the picture for the United States murder rate looks very different (correctly using murder rates and not gun-deaths rates):

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And why not include data from individual states? It has always been extremely imprecise and lazy to talk about the “US murder rate” The US is an immense country with a lot of variety in laws and demographics. (Mexico deserves the same analysis, by the way.) Many states have murder rates that place them on the short list of low-crime places in the world. Why do we conveniently ignore them? The US murder rate is being driven up by a few high-murder states such as Maryland, Louisiana, South Carolina, Delaware, and Tennessee. In the spirit of selective use of data, let's just leave those states out of it, and look at some of the low-crime ones: 

We see that OECD members Chile and Turkey have murder rates higher than Colorado. Perhaps they should try adopting Colorado’s laws and allow sale of handguns and semi-automatic rifles to all non-felon adults. That might help them bring their murder rates down a little.

But you know that’s not the conclusion we're supposed to come to. Comparisons can never work in that direction. The comparisons should only be used to compare the US to countries with restrictive gun laws and low murder rates. Comparisons with countries that have restrictive gun laws (and/or few private guns) and murder rates similar to or higher than US rates (i.e., Latin America, the Caribbean and the Baltic States.)

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But before we wrap up, let’s look at the murder rates in all these countries alongside the number of civilian guns per 100 residents. (The x axis is civilian guns per 100 residents, and the y axis is murder rates in x per 100,000.)

Here’s the scatter plot:

Obviously, the US is big outlier in terms of guns per capita. But in terms of murder rate, it’s very much in the middle of these countries.

Things look even better for some areas of the US. If I include low-crime states, we get this (The x axis is civilian guns per 100 residents and y axis is murder rate in x per 100,000):

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But as no reason has ever been given as to why we should only compare to Western Europe,. Let’s compare the US to the rest of the Americas for a more realistic picture of the world beyond the OECD. When we do that, we get:

By comparison, the US look downright pacific. And why should not this comparison be made?Indeed, it makes more sense to compare the US to other states in the  Americas than to Europe or Japan. The US and most Latin American countries were settled in similar time periods. They are frontier countries settled mostly by European immigrants that displaced a native population (to varying degrees), and most of them gained independence from European imperial nations in a similar time period. They tend to have ethnically diverse populations, and many have been impacted by the slave trade that ended in the 19th century.

European countries share very few of these qualities in common with the US.

So, it would seem that the old diktat of “thou shalt only compare US murder rates to the approved 'developed' countries" is based on really no objective standard at all. And we should stop doing it.

If we’re honestly trying to evaluate the nature of crime and violence in a comparative atmosphere, we cannot limit ourselves to a handful of countries that have very little in common with the US beyond a handful of economic indicators.

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The United Kingdom's Supreme Court ruled "illegal" a parliamentary tactic used by PM Boris Johnson to ensure Brexit would be carried out on October 31, more than six months after Brexit was supposed to take effect.

While the court wasn't ruling on Brexit, per se, the context of the situation makes it clear the ruling is really just the latest move from the UK's political class designed to postpone Brexit yet again.

Given the history of EU-related referenda in Europe, we can already guess how the situation will play out. British voters will either be asked to vote again on Brexit — so that this time, they can get it "right" — or the Brexit agreement will be constructed in such a way that Brexit will be a British exit in name only.

At the same time, bizarrely, Johnson's moves in parliament have been credited as being "undemocratic" or even a "coup." This charge comes even though Johnson had attempted to call an early election, but was denied.

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By now, this is a tried and true tactic in European politics. Only votes that help the pro-EU position are allowed. Everything else is declared "undemocratic" or is simply ignored.

In 2001, Irish voters rejected the Nice Treaty in a referendum (or, to be more accurate, rejected proposed amendments to the Irish Constitution, that would have made ratification of the Nice Treaty possible).

Ireland's political class quickly went to work declaring that the Irish voters had made a mistake and didn't really understand the importance of ratifying the treaty.

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The second time, the majority voted "correctly" and demands for additional referenda, of course, ended.

Another tactic was used on the continent when the French and the Dutch were allowed to vote on the ratification of a new EU constitution. The voters rejected it.

But it naturally didn't end there. French and Dutch politicians simply ignored the results of the referenda and devised an alternative strategy. They slightly revised the text of the constitution, called it the "Lisbon Treaty" and then ratified that without asking the voters.

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Here, O'Neill gets it slightly wrong. The "upper echelons of the EU" know exactly how democracy works. It is only to be tolerated if it leads to the outcomes preferred by the ruling classes. If not, then something must be done to correct the situation.

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In the US, of course, we don't bother having additional elections out of the usual schedule. We just have judges overrule the voters whenever the voters get uppity.

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In more recent years, the courts have wised up and no longer allow the voters to even have a say. In 2018, a measure to split California into three smaller states was successfully placed on the ballot after gaining the required number of signatures from voters and jumping through the usual hoops required of such measures.

But before a vote could occur, the California Supreme Court deleted the measure from the ballot, ruling:

"We conclude that the potential harm in permitting the measure to remain on the ballot outweighs the potential harm in delaying the proposition to a future election," the justices wrote.

In other words, allowing the voters to have a say on the matter is too risky. Thus, a tiny number of wealthy California judges instead decided for the voters that the only acceptable vote is "no."

And who needs voting when you have government judges, anyway? Once upon a time, it was widely accepted that significant changes to the federal constitution required a vote, in the manner prescribed by the Constitution itself.

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By the 1960s, however, voting on constitutional amendments was passé. It became far more convenient to go to federal judges instead, and have them simply invent a new version of the constitution.

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Want to declare a war on drugs? An amednment is no longer required, as it was in the days of Prohibition. Now, federal judges can grant us feds any power we want!