Abridgment of liberty is not the price of safety; liberty is the fountainhead of all economic goods, including safety.
The price of safety is cold hard cash, as in you’ve got to pay for your locks, security systems, life insurance, password managers, bodyguards, and all the rest.
The First Amendment does not read “There shall be freedom of religion, speech, press, … throughout the realm” but “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
As in, the federal Congress.
State governments are not forbidden by either the First or Ninth Amendment to make such laws.
In fact, they are empowered to do just that by the Tenth.
“Jesus died for our sins” and “Jesus scratched his head for our sushi” are equally unintelligible. The “for” fails to connect the two parts of the sentence meaningfully.
Only on my understanding are the motivations of all actors clear.
Jesus can be said to have laid down His life, because He did not physically resist His murderers. The purpose of that was, again, to experience personally humanity at its worst, in order for Christ to decide its fate while well-informed.
Thus, St. Thomas writes that “Christ endured all suffering” and “the pain of Christ’s Passion was greater than all other pains.”
However, redemption was a contingent event in two senses:
first, Jesus did not have to incarnate at all; and
second, after being killed, He did not have to accept and bless the world.
But He did both through a freely made choice, and that is why we give glory to Him.
(Note that His killers do not include us all; if they did, then Christ would have observed nothing good in humanity, only evil, and no salvation would as a result have been achieved.)
It’s almost as if the devil spoke to the Son prior to the Incarnation and said:
“I’ll tell you two things. First is about humans. If you go to them, then they — the people whom I despise yet you claim to love — will kill you.
“Second is about you. After they kill you, you’ll hate them.”
God had to accept the challenge. In the end, one thing the devil said was true; the other, false.
An American does not have to like Putin or approve of his policies in order to aim at peace and free trade with Russia.
For example, strange as it might seem (apparently even to some libertarians), Americans can remain at peace with both Russia and Ukraine, despite whatever is happening between Russia and Ukraine.
Similarly, a Christian or atheist may think Islam is a subpar religion, but that is no reason not to restrain “his own” government in its attempts to wage war against the Muslims.
It is a crucial teaching of libertarianism, and especially of an-cap, that peaceful co-existence of numerous cultures is possible that serves everyone’s rightly understood selfish interests.
Again, the Muslims may want to stab us in the back, but it is more profitable for them to sell us rugs. In the meantime, we libertarians have our own savages to uplift.
India’s central plan gets slightly adjusted.
If a cop can kill you without suffering any real consequences, then even perfect submission to his will in an encounter does not guarantee safety from summary execution.
It’s like in Schindler’s List:
We were on the roof on Monday, young Lisiek and I, and we saw the Herr Kommandant come out of the house on the patio right there below us and he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing by.
Just a woman with a bundle, just shot her through the throat. She was just a woman on her way somewhere, she was no faster or slower or fatter or thinner than anyone else and I couldn’t guess what had she done.
The more you see of the Herr Kommandant the more you see there are no set rules you can live by, you cannot say to yourself, “If I follow these rules, I will be safe.”
Used to be, cops would do things “by the book.” They knew they were bureaucrats bound strictly by the rule of law. No longer. They’ve tasted arbitrary power and liked it.
Today, even perfect obedience to the police will not insure you against being murdered.
The crime of “structuring”:
Depositing more than $10k at a time triggers a government report to the IRS. Depositing less than $10k… uh… apparently also triggers a government report.
Of course, this doesn’t make sense even from the point of view of the IRS. If the bank reports possible “structuring,” and the IRS thinks the depositor is evading taxes, they have to audit him first. They can’t just seize the money.
It’s got to be the asset forfeiture regime enlisting the help of the IRS to plunder random people.
We cannot be content with a society in which the chief form that progress takes is evasion of (bad) law.
On this Independence Day, let up celebrate the absence of government in those areas of our lives it has failed to encroach on and ruin in so doing.