Laugh, cry, and turn away in shame for that biological wonder which lies between his two ears also lies betwixt yours dear reader.

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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The book started out solidly, but I noticed Ridley dropping a hint every so often that there’s a big logical conclusion looming on the horizon. In the last four chapters or so, it broke: if virtue is precipitated evolutionarily (which all the evidence seems to suggest) then governments are, in a sense, superfluous. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, I had never guessed that I would be seeing a solid chunk of my anarcho-capitalism theory before my very eyes with oodles and oodles of science to prove it. (Then again, for the longest time, I didn’t know Thomas Sowell [another favorite author of mine] was black.) I was so happy upon reading this, that I looked for other things written by Ridley in a similar vein. What follows is from Ridley’s answer to “What’s your dangerous idea?”

Government is the Problem not the Solution

In all times and in all places there has been too much government. We now know what prosperity is: it is the gradual extension of the division of labour through the free exchange of goods and ideas, and the consequent introduction of efficiencies by the invention of new technologies. This is the process that has given us health, wealth and wisdom on a scale unimagined by our ancestors. It not only raises material standards of living, it also fuels social integration, fairness and charity. It has never failed yet. No society has grown poorer or more unequal through trade, exchange and invention. Think of pre-Ming as opposed to Ming China, seventeenth century Holland as opposed to imperial Spain, eighteenth century England as opposed to Louis XIV’s France, twentieth century America as opposed to Stalin’s Russia, or post-war Japan, Hong Kong and Korea as opposed to Ghana, Cuba and Argentina. Think of the Phoenicians as opposed to the Egyptians, Athens as opposed to Sparta, the Hanseatic League as opposed to the Roman Empire. In every case, weak or decentralised government, but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all, whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic decline and usually war.

Take Rome. It prospered because it was a free trade zone. But it repeatedly invested the proceeds of that prosperity in too much government and so wasted it in luxury, war, gladiators and public monuments. The Roman empire’s list of innovations is derisory, even compared with that of the ‘dark ages’ that followed.

In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it. Self-policing standards and rules were developed by free-trading merchants in medieval Europe long before they were taken over and codified as laws (and often corrupted) by monarchs and governments.

Sometimes, they say we need it to protect the weak, the victims of technological change or trade flows. But throughout history such intervention, though well meant, has usually proved misguided — because its progenitors refuse to believe in (or find out about) David Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage: even if China is better at making everything than France, there will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say, luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import luxury goods and insurance.

Government is a very dangerous toy. It is used to fight wars, impose ideologies and enrich rulers. True, nowadays, our leaders do not enrich themselves (at least not on the scale of the Sun King), but they enrich their clients: they preside over vast and insatiable parasitic bureaucracies that grow by Parkinson’s Law and live off true wealth creators such as traders and inventors.

Sure, it is possible to have too little government. Only, that has not been the world’s problem for millennia. After the century of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, can anybody really say that the risk of too little government is greater than the risk of too much? The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be.

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2009.
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It is, in fact, a violation of the First Amendment.

To force a doctor to say “that the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being,” is not only unconstitutional and immoral, but wrong in just about every sense of the word.

It is, in fact, a violation of a doctor’s right to practice medicine.

If a doctor does not believe this to be true, if he does not believe that removing a fertilized embryo from a woman is not the terminiation of life of a “living human being” then he cannot be forced to say so. Even if he did believe this to be true, that abotion = murder, a law cannot compell him to say so to a patient. The government has no right to interfere in the doctor-patient relationship.

It is, in fact, a violation of the right for consenting adults to partake in a capitalistic act.

If patients wanted to hear that abortion was murder, they would go to doctors who believed so and said so and those doctors who did not believe this to be true and did not tell their patients would have less patients, thus less customers, and thus less of the market. Thus the population of doctors would be slowly but surely replaced by those that believed abortion is killing rather than the those that did not. And all of this would be accomplished without the intervention of the State.

It is, in fact, up to the patients and the doctors to decide what they want to discuss, not the State, nor any other third party.

© Barry Belmont for UNR Students for Liberty, 2008.
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