Henry Haller wrote: HH> In the case of abortion, it is impossible to deduce from libertarian principles whether the unborn child has status as a human being. Therefore, a neutral stance would be appropriate. <HH
Neutral if we can get away with it, moderate if we can't. HH> The issue of immigration is different. Here the object of the force is a peaceful person (one who has not aggressed against others), and clearly has status as a human being. The immigration laws authorize force to prohibit such a peaceful person from migrating from point A to point B. This clearly violates the non-aggression principle <HH Only if he doesn't have to trespass to get from A to B. When you succeed in privatizing the last government-owned road in America, I'll be happy to support unrestricted immigration. :-) Seriously, economic considerations related to public goods, natural resources, and natural monopolies can combine to provide reasonable grounds for a libertarian to oppose unrestricted immigration even in abstract ethical terms. We don't need to debate it here, but more details are at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1397. Howard Pearce wrote: HP> Does a pregnant woman have the right to commit suicide? <HP Guy is correct to point out that this is not the forum to debate abortion. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate for a good survey of the frontiers of the abortion debate. Nothing Howard wrote isn't already addressed there. Kevin Bjornson wrote: KB> Is the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles an aggression? [...] Are vouchers or competing government schools steps in the right direction? [...] what privacy rights may we rightfully expect? <KB Excellent points. I agree that the Platform should not pretend to resolve all gray areas and all questions of incremental improvement and all questions of reasonable expectations. Political institutions inevitably require human judgment. If anyone knows of some algorithm for mechanistically determining the One True Libertarian Answer to any arbitrary case of fact or law, then I volunteer to help program it into a race of libertarian robot overlords. :-) I suspect that the naive or intellectually lazy hope for such an algorithm is what attracts a lot of people to the simpler flavors of libertarianism. They want their ethical system to fit on a bumper sticker, but there are just too many free variables in libertarian theory for this to be possible. The rights (if any) of the unborn are just one such variable. I list 16 more at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=371. Henry Haller wrote: HH> If we allow candidates to take contradictory positions on a wide range of issues and still call themselves "Libertarians," then how are we any different from Republicans or Democrats? <HH It depends on what you mean by "wide". These 17 free variables in libertarian theory fall into just three categories: the definition of franchise, and gray areas at the edges of the definitions of property and aggression. There is no amount of disagreement on any these franchise issues and edge cases that can blur the distinction between libertarians and non-libertarians. Guy McLendon wrote: GM> Issue advocates are not doing Liberty a favor by running the entire LP into the ditch merely to further their one pet issue. <GM Amen. The silent majority of Libertarians needs to stand up against the SingleIssueTarians and the LitmusTestItarians. But out of respect for forum charter, any future responses by me on the substance of the Big Three Franchise Schisms (abortion, immigration, libervention) will be off-list and cc'd to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal.
