Jerry Pournelle Spanks Thomas Frank
17th September 2009
Thomas Frank’s weekly “Tilting Yard” column in the Wall Street Journal is said to present the most persuasive arguments the liberal opposition can make to the Wall Street Journal’s generally conservative/libertarian editorial views. Alas, the arguments are often shallow, and there is no historical perspective at all. I show you as an example, today’s essay “The Left Should Reclaim ‘Freedom‘”.
That’s not the only problem with Thomas Frank’s essay. He has accepted without debate the Progressive notion of freedom. The traditional American view of freedom is that one will be left alone to do what one wants to do even if everyone else disapproves. (If that disapproval is because what you want to do restricts someone else’s freedom then there is something to discuss: e.g. your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.) If you want to slaughter and cook a goat in your front yard, I have to show that this does me some real harm before I can forbid you to do it. John Adams summed this up when he said that we in America believe that each man is the best judge of his own interest. The fact that you can show that some habits — smoking cigarettes, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, eating too much and becoming obese, swearing oaths to Odin and Thor, putting out bowls of milk for the night elves, denouncing my neighbor as a witch (but not building a bonfire to throw the neighbor in), not buying health insurance, not wearing socks, getting drunk in my own house and staying there, taking the Name of God in vain, myriads of consenting sexual practices, buying gold, buying stocks, giving my money to Bernie Madoff to invest, using Ubuntu rather than Windows, Firefox rather than Internet Explorer — well, you get the idea — may be bad for the user, and you know this, doesn’t give you an automatic right to prevent me from doing them. (And of course many including me might dispute the harm from the choice made.)