Freedom

My past few posts cover how I work with less electrical power and less consistent supply. I know that nearly everyone interprets my situation as deprivation, sacrifice, extreme, and other legitimizing myths, as people viewed those who freed slaves. If it was legal, why work hard when you can force someone else to work for you? Or today: why work hard when you can plug something in that can do it for you (unstated: despite contributing to far more death and suffering than slavery caused)? I know most people act as if the legitimizing myths that without polluting and depleting we'll revert to the Stone Age, die at 30, be invaded, etc, but life does not require pollution or depletion. It doesn't require fossil fuels or…

Pollution and depletion deprive people of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. The Constitution doesn't define property, but all the founders, including those who wrote and ratified the Constitution, understood it as John Locke wrote, including that you can not allow people to make property---that is, to appropriate---from nature without leaving enough as good in common for others. In other words, bringing fossil fuels and uranium into the biosphere violate constitutional property rights. Those rights are defined not for the fun of it or arbitrarily. They are there to protect liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security from tyranny, civil war, and invasion from disunity, preceded by civic breakdown. You may like the perks you get from activities that violate these protections.…

I've written plenty about a person who has become one of my great role models, whose actions are poignant today. He freed the most number of slaves of any American before the Civil War. He didn't ask to be born into a culture in which slavery was legal and financially rewarded. Yet he acted. We didn't ask to be born into a culture in which polluting and depleting, which cause death and suffering orders of magnitude greater than US slavery did. Most of us don't act. It's tempting to say we aren't holding whips, a red herring. Few people held whips then. They bought cotton, tobacco, and other slave-produced products and services. They paid for others to whip and enslave, just as we pay people…

People call pollution an externality---that is, a cost imposed on someone who wasn't part of the choice. It may be an externality, but that identification misses a bigger point. It also violates the consent of the governed, deprives people of life, liberty, and property, and violates the Declaration and Constitution in other ways. Pollution is not just an economic issue. It's also political and the political ramifications are much greater. Violating the Constitution is important, especially when everyone in the nation does it, the government profits from it, politicians become corrupted by it, and more. If you don't fix the economic problem, money gets distributed not to those who solve problems best but to those who coerce the most. You distort the economy and inhibit…

This post is about my home being disconnected from the electric grid. Everyone misunderstands why I disconnected, so first a few words for context. I'm not an environmentalist. Environmentalists make my skin crawl. I disconnected for a few reasons. First, I don't want to hurt people without their consent. Polluting and depleting hurt people without their consent, therefore I try to avoid polluting and depleting. Second, polluting and depleting violate the Constitution by depriving people of life, liberty, and property without due process of law, as well as the Declaration, which says that for a government to be just requires the consent of the governed. This nation has a cancer alley, death mile, and other sacrifice zones, as well as many other ways people are…

Do you want to live in a society where you can deprive others of free speech or freedom of the press? I wouldn't. I presume you value that your government protects your freedom of speech and the freedom of the press for that media you agree with. Can you imagine living under a government that didn't? I'm in the middle of The Gulag Archipelago. It gives some of the picture and it doesn't like desirable. It's tempting, is it not, to think sometimes, "As much as I value my freedom of speech, sometimes people say things I dislike so much that I'd like to be able to restrict theirs. Not always, of course, but sometimes." Or you learn what the other side's media tells them:…