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Yet another weird SF fan
 

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Rite-Aid Shrugged

After reading The Accidental Jedi's comments and, especially, both of the Balloon-Juice rants on the bill to draft pharmacists into the War on the Unborn, I decided to take anarchocapitalism more seriously.

I was already starting to take anarchocapitalism more seriously, partly because of abortion. After all, many of the arguments for legalized abortion will, if taken seriously, lead to repealing all government-enforced laws. For example:

if the state can mandate that you give birth, it can also mandate that you do not.
Couldn't similar reasoning apply to any other law?

I suspect that allowing “Plan B” to be sold over the counter will not cause that many people suddenly start using it. Today, it requires a prescription. That enables the fiction that abortion is a medical procedure. The doctor's authority absolves patients of any responsibility. If patients aren't given permission by a man in a white coat, they may become more reluctant.

The need for permission may explain why we see very little anti-abortion terrorism and no anti-abortion suicide bombings. Nobody is giving permission.

To return to the topic of anarchism, there is a little problem with anarchy: How do you run a War on Terror in an anarchist society that doesn't involve George Soros with The Bomb?

1 Comments:

Blogger Francis W. Porretto said...

Every right to do X implies a converse right not to do X. However, it's possible that when we change the subject from rights to delegated powers, the argument might fail.

One thing we can say with assurance, as Neil Schulman noted in The Rainbow Cadenza, is that an institution powerful enough to compel you to do X is also powerful enough to prevent you from doing X, and vice-versa. Thus, a State that can effectively forbid abortions is also powerful enough to compel them. While this argument cannot be proved in a rigorous way, I have yet to encounter a sound objection or counterexample to it.

5:02 AM  

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