Are sugary-drink-guzzling New Yorkers getting a reprieve from Big Brother?

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s looming law to ban Big Soda is vicious in all kinds of ways.

The idea is to stop an individual from drinking “too much” sugary drink during a snack or meal. Under the ban, sometimes you’d be able to buy more than 16 ounces of soda in a single container, sometimes not.

Bloomberg has touted the ease of evading the regulation as a reason not to be disturbed by it. Settle down, doomsayers! If you’re so thirsty, just buy a more expensive multiple of small servings! Meanwhile, he’s saving us from the plight of obesity, or so he pretends to think. People are dying, Bloomberg reminds us. True enough, we’re all mortal. And we all take various risks in the process of living our lives. Sometimes in relation to the food and drink we ingest! Ergo, why not make the time we have left as uncomfortable and tyranny-ridden as possible? (Hmm…mightn’t the oppression itself, though, serve to abbreviate our life spans–or anyway chip away at the quality of our lives–by thwarting our ability to judge for ourselves how to sustain our lives, including how to apportion what we ingest, as well as by depressing our spirits vis-a-vis how hard it has become to escape the mandates and rhetoric of the gun-toting nannies of the world? It might!)

Whether the ban is futile or one more step toward telescreens in every room to monitor our every nutritional move, or both, New Yorkers who reject this immoral violation of their rights now have a friend in Justice Milton Tingling, who has blocked implementation of the ban in part on the grounds of its “uneven enforcement.”

“Uneven enforcement” is the least of the problem. I’m sure you can imagine that if the law were allowed to stand, Bloomberg and other government functionaries bloated with statist inclinations would have no problem saying “hey, sure, let’s harden the prohibition to make it more consistent.” Next he’d be soliciting bids from telescreen companies.

To be sure, Justice Tingling also decries the blubbery “administrative Leviathan” that would be spawned by the ban.

The city is appealing the ruling. Who will win? Bloomberg, arch enemy of adipose and individual rights, or the rights of liquid-drinking New Yorkers?

After Obama’s reelection, give up or give clarity?

The only chance to achieve major progress toward a fundamental alternative to Obama’s socialism and dictats is to offer a fundamental alternative to these. Never mind about ground game, polling methodologies, tactical blips and blunders. Suppose Romney had managed to eke out a narrow victory. How then could he have proceeded to repeal Obamacare and lead the way to the massive spending and tax cuts that are needed? Would he have even been inclined to fight for them?

Of course Obama is hard-core leftie and vicious, much worse than Romney; so we would have had a better chance to expand our freedom and improve our economy with Romney than with Obama. But Romney is muddled at best. In Massachusetts, he signed off on Romneycare, the proto-clone of Obamacare. Romney would most likely have sought to entrench aspects of Obamacare he “could agree with,” and otherwise fecklessly prepared the way for the next Democratic incursions. It may well be true, as Romney infamously speculated, that 47%+ of voters “can’t” be–or, at least in the short term, won’t allow themselves to be–reached by any appeal to values of freedom and self-reliance and non-robbery-of-thy-neighbors. But let’s find that out instead of trying to guess at it by offering only a muddled and self-contradictory alternative to full-throttle Obama-style statism. Alleged friends of freedom who divine from this defeat that the best way to proceed is to give up for lost even more of our rights and freedoms so as to avoid alienating the most recalcitrant Obama supporters are following the same failed strategy that has so often served to entrench and expand the welfare state since at least the New Deal. You don’t win battles you don’t fight.

What should Republicans in Congress do now? For one, obstruct. Don’t, for example, raise the debt ceiling–i.e., act instead as if the ceiling is a ceiling. Offer, at the very least, a balanced budget. Why not? And push for it. Don’t give up when demonized by the lib-dems. Expose their obfuscations and lies. Etc.

For two, explain–clearly, simply, repeatedly–what is at stake, what will happen to our wealth and freedom if the looters of our wealth and freedom are allowed to keep on stealing them and eroding our ability to foster our own well-being. Explain how our wealth and freedom will decline, ever more precipitously. And how it will then be harder not only for the productive people, but for everybody, to survive. Europe is the preview. Explain also that stealing stuff is wrong.

Did Roy A. Childs Jr. suffer from ‘Archist Illusions’?

Two distinguished libertarian and anarchist friends of the late, great Roy A. Childs Jr. (1949-1992) suppose that Roy likely had suspect motives for his change of mind about anarchism later in life, and perhaps also for his failure to explain his reasons for his change of mind in print during the years of his declining health before he died in 1992.

In a recent post at Cato’s libertarianism.org in which he endorses psycho-speculations of Roy’s motives offered by Ron Neff, George H. Smith reports that Roy toward the end of his life told him that he believed that anarchism is impractical. But a sarcastic remark by Smith, which he recalls now with regret, unfortunately ended the conversation before Roy could elaborate. Ron Neff, for his part, cites Roy’s earlier reference to the messy situation in Lebanon. “He referred to the condition into which Lebanon had fallen after the shelling of Beirut by Israel in September of [1982], and he said that that was what anarchism would produce.” For Neff, the import of this example is somehow unlikely to represent what he calls “the whole story” of Roy’s rejection of his famously influential anarchist views. Another old friend of Roy’s, Jeff Riggenbach, offers a fine profile of Roy for Riggenbach’s Libertarian Tradition podcast that stresses the influence of Roy’s early anarchism but also scrupulously neglects to mention his eventual repudiation of that anarchism.

That anarchism or anarcho-capitalism can’t coherently function to objectively protect individual rights doesn’t seem a bad reason for believing that anarchism is impractical from the perspective of someone who values life, justice, rights, liberty. In the anarcho-capitalist society, what indeed is to be done about competing gangs—oops, competing “defense agencies”? Would a government concerned about (actual) rights and (actual) freedom and (actual) justice be justified in outlawing fundamentally competing brands of physically-enforced justice? Would a genuinely just, libertarian “defense agency” be justified in “competing with”—i.e., using force to stop—a “defense agency” determined to impose reparations for slavery, to impose reparations for the taking of Indian land, to stop abortions by force, or to extract the “surplus labor value” that the rich capitalists “steal” from their employees?

That anarchism is incompatible with the protection of individual rights is obvious from reading the news. Look at what the Mafia Defense Agency does. Look at what the PLO Defense Agency does. Look at what the Al Qaeda Defense Agency does. Such annoyingly obtrusive facts as the chronic conduct of these defense agencies are meaningless, though, we’re told. Anarchists tend to reply, “There you go again. That kind of bloody conflict among power-lusting gangs is not what we mean by defense agencies or an anarcho-capitalist society. What we mean is the smoothly functioning rights-respecting ‘defense agencies’ of our disconnected-from-facts-on-the-ground theoretical books and journal papers, a society in which everybody is always carrying around a copy of the Libertarian Law Code and has sworn to it eternal fealty, ever ready to submit to arbitration in case of a dispute the defense agencies can’t resolve amongst themselves as if the last three thousand years of human history had never happened. Human beings aren’t evil by nature, after all.”

In other words, anarchists merely assume that none of the proposed defense agencies would in fact actually be competing at the most fundamental level—i.e., at the level of what vision and package of justice, rights, and proper use of coercion they would be promoting in the brochure—a level at which they would not be inclined in good faith to accept binding adjudication of disputes if they happen to hold the exact opposite view of rights and justice as the party doing the adjudicating.

What happens, according to the anarcho-capitalists, in the anarcho-capitalist society with respect to fundamentally different uses of coercion? Is it that the defense agencies will be free to compete at the very most fundamental level, but that they simply won’t want to, all criminal, leftie and jihadic motivations for violating actual rights having evaporated as soon as the anarcho-capitalist program gets the go-ahead? Or would there, after all, be some kind of mutually accepted and enforced ban on the wrongful use of force? If the latter, would there or would there not be enforceable mechanisms in place for adjudicating disputes among the defense agencies, and for declining to renew the license of a defense agency that tries to blow up World Trade Centers in the name of the Allah Defense Code?

Problem, though: as soon as any such reasonable, enforceable constraints are imposed on the defense agencies independently of their preferences in a particular dispute, we are talking about an apparatus of limited government, not about anarchism or anarcho-capitalism. The defense agencies would be governed by this government. They wouldn’t be allowed to secede to institute a contrary program of justice, rights and coercion.

To be sure, unfettered government is also misbegotten with respect to the purpose of safeguarding genuine rights. So what, then, would be a practical means of protecting life, liberty and property in a society? We the people would have to institute a government restricted to the defense and enforcement of individual rights, an institution the attaining and maintaining of which depends a lot on education, ideas and culture. (Which means that anarchists are wrong to suggest, as some do, that governments virtually automatically devolve into tyrannies—ideas and culture being potent in their view except when they matter not at all.) Such a limited government could accept a lot more competition in means of protecting rights than we see today; but it could not permit citizens to protect their rights anywhichway whatever, especially when there is no immediate threat to life and limb.

According to Neff, it’s unlikely that Roy Childs could have honestly come to the view that his youthful and rationalistic arguments for anarchism were mistaken. (By rationalism, here, I mean theoretical web-spinning that may be very smart and persuasive on its own self-contained terms but which inadequately takes into account critical facts on which the theory should be based.) For Neff, Roy’s change of mind was more likely strategic than genuine, a product of short-term political calculation. “I do not think he meant by [his claim that anarchism is not practical] that anarchism was an ideal that could never be achieved, or that competing defense agencies could not behave justly. I think he meant that anarchism merely exacerbated the alienation from American culture its adherents already felt, especially adherents who came from an Objectivist background,” Neff contends, as if Roy hadn’t pointed to Lebanon. (Only Roy’s every explicit reference to the question of anarchism versus limited government in his later years would tend to suggest that he meant what he said.)

Says Smith: “Though speculative, Neff’s explanation of what was really going on with Roy’s refutation of anarchism is, in my judgment, exactly on point, so I refer readers to his account for additional details.” In the same article, Smith also suggests that Roy’s employment of Objectivistic arguments in certain essays defending anarchism was mediated primarily by his desire to appeal rhetorically to Objectivist readers rather than by his own sympathy with Objectivist ideas.

All this strained imputation of merely strategic profession of conviction strikes me as gratuitous at best, a smear at worst. If Smith and Neff are right, Roy, dead at 43, was one of the most disingenuous severely-ailing non-writers of an essay he never got around to that ever bestrode lower Manhattan. But is it really so implausible to suppose that their good friend changed his mind about anarchism because Roy was a good thinker and a man of integrity who concluded that anarcho-capitalism is incoherent as a means of instituting a free society in large part due to the hardly irrelevant fact that it is?

New York Times reporter writes as if a property owner altering house is hypocritical because he fought eminent domain

The issue is property rights.

Ms. Frost, who sold earlier this year, said she was especially perplexed by Mr. Goldstein’s construction project since he had spent so many years agitating on behalf of his neighbors and their property rights as the Atlantic Yards developer, Forest City Ratner, muscled in. (Forest City Ratner also was the development partner for the headquarters of The New York Times Company.)

¶Mr. Goldstein called the comparison “laughable and offensive.”

¶“Are you kidding me?” he said by e-mail when first asked to comment on his neighbors’ displeasure.

¶In his calmer moments…

Why is the article writer or any reader treating as even vaguely equivalent the following: 1) coercively throwing a person off of property he owns and 2) a person’s developing his own property? The property owner discussed here has been adding an extension to his home on his own property. He has not been using eminent domain to take over neighboring plots owned by somebody else. Goldstein is consistent if in the one case he fought a developer using eminent domain to steal properties and in the other fought neighbors attempting to forcibly stop him from developing his own property. In each case, he defended property rights against those seeking to violate property rights.

“I don’t like how X is exercising his rights” is no argument for violating the rights of property owner who develops his own property. Lots of people dislike lots of things that other people do. If we could exercise the power of law to prevent others from doing anything we happen to dislike, there would be little or nothing that any of us could freely do by right. Our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, including the right to the use and control of property we honestly acquire, should be protected precisely so that we can act to sustain and improve our lives as we see fit despite the desire some others may have to interfere.

Get ready for still more tightening of the leash, O holy socialists

Some devout Catholics who have supported Obamafascistcare but who oppose contraception and who especially oppose the use of abortifacients, i.e., the kind of contraception that kills incipient fetuses, are upset by the Obama administration’s recent decision to compel church-run institutions to provide contraceptives free of charge to their charges and employees.

What did religious socialists expect? That only their own judgment and conscience in matters directly and indirectly medical was not to be downtrodden by the rulers and regulators imposing the million and one rules authorized by Obamafascistcare?

If one awards a government dictatorial new powers, as Congress did when it passed Obamafascistcare over the objections of the merely sane and informed, those dictatorial powers will be used to–guess what–dictate. Persons will be given orders about how they must spend their time and money. And if, today, in response to widespread uproar, the Obamafascistcarers deign to compromise or to pretend to compromise on the exact terms of the latest dictat, one must not be surprised if, tomorrow, the Obamafascistcarers coyly roll back the rollback, i.e., JustMoveOn now that everybody has had a chance to become accustomed to their new roles as meekly subservient thralls to Obamafascistcaring.

The most fundamental objection to government’s compelling anybody to provide anybody In Need with anything other than redress of a demonstrated violation of the recipient’s actual rights is that such compulsion is itself a violation of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the person being thus unjustifiably compelled. Yes, if you are religious and are opposed to the use of contraception, you will object to being compelled to provide your employees or students with free contraceptives on the grounds that being forced to aid and abet the use of contraception is against your religious precepts and conscience. But there are a great many things that individuals will be forced to do under Obamafascistcare which they would not have done were they not being compelled and to which they might object; and these objections will be informed by many different personal concerns.

The objection to Obamafascistcare that everybody should share is that being compelled by government to live one’s life in a way other than that which is in accordance with one’s own judgment and values is an immoral violation of the rights of the individual. To flourish as human beings in society, we must all seek to disseminate our values by persuasion and voluntary cooperation, not by force. We need to leave other people alone and we need other people to leave us alone; we should not, directly or by proxy, be ordering each other around at the point of a gun.

Is the only way to build a “lasting” economy to destroy what remains of the freedom of this one?

The Times reporter quotes a sacred new Obama Administration budget document that the reporter says is “permeated by” the language of the President’s State of the Union address. In the words of the budget plan, it is time to “construct an economy that is built to last.” Why didn’t we think of this 223 years ago?

Time for whom to construct it? Central planners in Washington DC–or individual planners making decisions alone or in voluntary cooperation with other individuals about how to spend their own resources and how to advance their own businesses and futures? What happens if a part of the Obama-plan-built economy, say a major company, threatens to go out of business? Will it be enabled to “last” anyway? From whom will the funds needed to prop up failing companies be extracted? From those capable of running more successful companies and who need the resources to expand on their own successes rather than to subsidize and perpetuate the failures of others?

According to Obama’s budget document, “We must transform our economy from one focused on speculating, spending and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating, and building.” 

It’s as if the President of the United States has no idea that his socialist plans are based on wishful thinking of the most logic-defying, experience-defying, facilely speculative sort–and on the power of government guns to overcome any cogent objections which our rulers cannot refute. It’s as if he has no idea that he himself has been an avid supporter of trillion-plus budget deficits every year so far of his administration, an avid supporter of untrammeled spending of other people’s money and of untrammeled borrowing and untrammeled inflation.

It’s as if the President has no idea that the government’s growing power to tax, regulate, and destroy the true educators, the true innovators and the true builders of the country can tend only to impede or kill learning, innovation and building. It’s as if he has no idea that the innovators who deserve our most heartfelt thanks are the ones who give us the most powerful and efficient ways to escape the government’s slithering and strangling tendrils.

It’s as if the President has no idea that his administration’s fuzzy and contradictory incantations about how we must “win the future” (by destroying the futures of those who know how to win it)–the incantations which pass for bright, noble and self-evidently true economic, political or social insight–can serve only to further clog the ability to think of anyone who cons himself into believing that this stuff makes sense. It’s as if he has no idea that one does not by such anti-educative means “educate” persons whose capacity for rational thought has so often been assailed rather than nurtured by the curriculum and principles of public schooling. Unless we take “education” to be a mere synonym for “brainwashing.”

You don’t build by destroying. You don’t unleash innovation by shackling and punishing those best at innovating. You don’t teach or inspire people to learn or to gather and assess evidence or to logically analyze patently fatuous claims by peddling bullshit as if it were the aromatic and incontrovertible distilled wisdom of the ages.

Mark Levin shreds, smashes, pulverizes and otherwise annihilates Ann Coulter’s evil column “Three Cheers for Romneycare”

Go listen. A blog called The Right Scoop is hosting the audio file of commentator Mark Levin’s 30-minute line-by-line demolition of the omissions, diversions, bad logic and lies of Anne Coulter’s column “Three Cheers for Romneycare.”

“Romneycare is not so bad as socialist progenitors of Obamacare go; and besides, Romney just couldn’t help it” is the essence of Coulter’s deliberately fact-light, fallacy-heavy exoneration of the ex-governor.

Anne Coulter can be fun to read or watch in carefully curated instances; for example, when taking on the left in blunt face-to-face confrontations, she often seems fearless in expressing what she really really thinks, both gutsy and honest in slamming noxious but fashionable nonsense.

But Coulter has also often been dishonest in the service of a partisan or religio-philosophical agenda. The fact that her leftist antagonists like to strain so hard to misread her has obscured the pragmatism of her own until-now often more sophisticated rhetorical lashes. (As an example of the religio-philosophical agenda, see Coulter’s 2006 credo Godless: The Church of Liberalism, with its deliberate misrepresentations of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Dogmatic faith in ineffable and imponderable unknowables is indeed a religionistic feature of secular leftism and other secular and oppressive isms. So why not advocate and practice an alternative to both: reason?) Despite the disconcerting rapidity of Coulter’s shameless embrace of lefty rationalizations and shibboleths for the sake of advancing her preferred candidate, then, the latest brouhaha is nothing new. The column rebutted by Levin is merely more of the same, only faster and harder and more unalloyed, and therefore more difficult to ignore or find excuses for.

Coulter’s conduct in writing “Three Cheers for Romneycare” does seem to represent a new low. Passing itself off as an act of needle-threading bold defiance, it is really one of slovenly and craven appeasement. Maybe that’s why Levin seems so upset, so sad as well as so angry. Mark Levin calls Anne Coulter a friend, and has presumably regarded her as a valiant comrade in arms in the battle for liberty. It must be distressing to see her pimping for pinko-ism.

All the fake news that’s fit to fatuously print

The New York Times has a headline and blurb on its home page that goes a little bit like this:

Opening Day for Shoppers Shows Divide
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

When stores open for Black Friday sales late Thursday night, budget-minded shoppers will be racing for bargains while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home.

Oh–my–God. Omigod. So…the bargain hunters will be hunting for bargains Friday, and those not hunting for bargains will not be hunting for bargains? Or is it that all the budget-minded people are continuing to be budget-minded and all the not-budget-minded people are continuing to not be budget-minded? Or is it that all–or most–or just some but a lot–of the budget-minded people will race for the bargains?

Since there are many ways to group people into two more-or-less mutually exclusive sets, the world is full of “divides.” The members of one half of a divide don’t necessarily take up arms against members of the other half or even necessarily sulk about their respective statuses as they enact their different divide-specific roles. Of course, some persons do resent others who fare better than themselves economically, regardless of merits and causes; and some persons do look down on others who fare worse than themselves economically, regardless of merits and causes. This is why Marx and similar conceptually constipated agitators are able to write their unintelligible tripe and get people to listen to them, including many lower-tier intellectuals also eager to foster counterproductive social resentments.

That some persons are better off than others is never per se “news.” Nevertheless, whenever the persons who are better off do something that the persons less well off would be unlikely to do, perhaps ride in limos or lear jets, it seems that there’s ample warrant for some reporter to yamble about the arrival of yet another moldy tranche of proof of The Great Divide.

But is it true? Are the bargain-hunters really not taking limos to the 99-cent stores? Let’s investigate this….

Oh geez, I almost forgot. This is Thanksgiving, so let us give thanks. Thank you, New York Times, for nothing.

Contra Sam Adams’s uber-alliancing, pretending the commies aren’t attacking won’t make them go away

Would the original Sam Adams have bought the “let’s-be-gaze-averting-friends-with-our-enemies” approach to fighting for freedom against those who would destroy it? At the Sam Adams Alliance blog, we learn:

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd and the tea party movement really have a lot in common. They might not realize this yet—the most “respected” and “responsible” political observers certainly do not—but they are really allies.

Both groups are responding, in their different ways, to the same problems. They not might agree totally on the solutions, but if they only gave each other half a chance, they could work together. And if they did, there’s no telling what effect they might have on American politics.

This kind of blog post unnecessarily downplays or glosses over the rabidly something-for-nothing, socialistic and anti-capitalist mentality of much of the squat-on-Wall-Street movement, features that have been well documented. Of course, many involved are simply ignorant or confused. That has always been true of anti-capitalist movements.

Yes, activists who value freedom, capitalism and profit-making, on the one hand, and activists who want to destroy these, on the other, may have much in common. They’re human beings. They may adopt some of the same message-spreading techniques (although one side seems a lot more prone to window-smashing, setting up indefinite residency in property than does not belong to them and which they are not renting, and other manifestations of contempt for property rights and other human beings). Many on both sides may oppose bailouts of large firms. Many on both sides may like coffee, iPads, sex. Etc.

But it does a disservice to the cause of freedom to treat real and stark differences in ideology, temperament and goals as if they were subsidiary matters or readily resolvable with a little stress on commonalities and communication. Capitalists can’t win battles against adamant socialists and looters by pretending that the war against capitalism, economic success and individual rights is not being waged, that we’re really all on the “same” side…and so why don’t we all get along? Defenders of freedom, capitalism and civilization can’t “work together” with those bent on destroying these. Certainly ad hoc, temporary and narrow cooperation with certain political adversaries is possible on specific political questions where there happens to be agreement (bailouts, draft, drug legalization, perhaps) and where such cooperation does not imply a relinquishing of fundamental principles. But no such ad-hoc alliances should be allowed to blur the reality of the fundamental clash, what Sowell called the “conflict of visions”; the conflict between the basic values that are at stake. You can’t “work with” someone toward goals that are the opposite of the goals of the person with whom you would supposedly be working.

In a society with any classical liberal heritage, in the interests of the destroyers of civilization to hide their true goals, both from foes and from ignorant collaborators. It’s not in the interests of the defenders of civilization, not even for the sake of a superficial comity. We can persuade some of the more open-minded denizens of the left to come over to the side of freedom, but not by disguising the depth of our disagreements with them.

Do you consent to whatever just by walking around?

I wrote this post in response to one written by my brother Alan over at his The Answer Is Liberty blog. Alan was responding to a commentary in the New York Times about the validity of the concept of natural rights, which I looked at only after drafting my comments below.

The idea of “consent” to government or governance is often a muddled one. For instance, just what is a person consenting to by declining to resist someone seeking to conquer him? He may merely be submitting to sufficiently effective force. He and his compatriots resisted the invaders as well as he could, let’s say, but now the Romans have prevailed. So he lays down his arms. That’s surrender, not consent (except not to fight); declining to oppose, not accepting the legitimacy of the conquerors’ rule. Likewise, crossing the street or mailing a letter does not imply consent to government-run roads or government-run postal delivery.

Commenters on democracy often misinterpret participation in it. They claim that casting a vote constitutes a consent to the democratic process or even “consent,” in some contorted respect, to whatever the voter’s preferred candidate may do. Anarchists and authoritarians alike are often eager to promote this reading.

Yet on its face, all that a vote implies consent-wise is a preference for one candidate over others, and a preference for casting a vote to staying home. Going to the polls suggests the voter’s acceptance of the value of voting under current circumstances. More information about what a person agrees to, consents to, endorses or is super-enthusiastic about requires an interview, which may reveal consent but may not. (On the other hand, we’re sometimes told that if you don’t vote [don't "consent"] you can’t complain…the abstention is glossectomizing, somehow. Either that, or the very fact that you object to participating in an exercise of democracy proves that you oughtn’t or mayn’t object to the consequences of the participation of others; you may object only to malefaction-yielding processes that you do abet, or something. One implication of this view is that ideas and suasion are trivial means of nurturing a free society in comparison to politician-empowerment, in addition to being immoral means if unattended by politician-empowerment. I’ve never heard iterators of the claim add, as a corollary, “And if you don’t complain, you can’t vote.”)

If a reasonably limited government does emerge in a society, it is thanks to the active work of some in spreading the ideas and values of a free society and in fostering the institutions and customs required to sustain a free society. Many others do not actively “consent” to the framework but only passively benefit from it—decline to seek to undermine the constituents of a free society. I would say that a person consents to being a peaceful and productive person by being such a person, just as a person consents to being a robber by robbing whether directly or by enlisting government as heavily weaponized agent.

The idea of a “social contract” is a loose and sometimes misleading metaphor for the process of free-society-building and its variegated social manifestations. We don’t need the myth of a universally-consented-to social contract to define a clear conception of rights or characterize the protection and wide respect for the rights of others in a free society. The contracts sustaining a free or somewhat free society are many, not one, and are continually being signed and/or agreed to anew. Those are what one identifiably consents to; and, if one thinks about, one may also self-consciously consent to the principles of the free society and limited government that all these separate acts of consent both depend upon and reinforce.

It is not a very far cry from being peaceful and productive to consenting to the kind of governance appropriate for preserving rights and freedom. But that consent is not a foregone conclusion. The peacefulness and productivity of a principled anarchist living in a free society is no conclusive evidence that he consents to limited government. He may nevertheless cooperate with that government to the extent of not attempting to overthrow it, and also cooperate with and respect the rights of other peaceful citizens in the society. All we need from him is respect for rights, not consent to every means employed to defend rights.

Thug-rulers would love it if everyone consented to the notion that merely remaining within the borders of a country implies consent to their rule in its every baleful aspect. Qadafi/Gadaffi/Kadaphee seemed to rely on this assumption quite desperately as his power eroded to try to con himself and the world that his countrymen weren’t really trying to topple him. Consent may be implicit, but, as Alan suggests, it can’t be only implicit (or only theoretically imputed), without detectable foundation. Inferring what a person specifically consents to must be based on facts, which include an individual’s actual values and actions, not just an elastic theory or mythology of politics and society.