Natural Rights from a different perspective

Have you ever had one of those "golden moments" where something just clicks in your mind, and everything begins making obvious sense for the first time? Last week, I had such a moment. The concept of Natural Rights all came together for me. Throughout college I've been trained to be a scientist, not a philosopher, and I happened to stumble upon a way of understanding and explaining natural rights that made some sense to me. I was thinking about how the laws of physics can be described as "properties of matter," and it dawned on me - could natural rights be thought of as "properties of people?"

In its modern usage, the word "rights" connotes an authoritative relationship between two parties (regardless of the term's original meaning), where one "grants" or at least "recognizes" the rights of the other. This connotation has been the root of my incorrect thinking.

If you take rights to be nothing more than a property of a person (not to be confused with the person's property and property rights), or rather, an "attribute" of a rational, sentient intelligence, then the rest seems to fall into place nicely. Man, being rational, is capable of sustaining his life ("life"), is capable of making choices of how to act and think ("liberty"), and is capable of ownership ("property"). All people have these abilities.

From a computational/object-oriented paradigm:
A man (an object) whom we'll call "Sam" has identity, state, and behavior. His identity is himself, individual, one. His state is rational, sentient, self-aware. His behaviors include taking actions to sustain his life, making rational choices, and acquiring property, in addition to taking actions to defend his rights if they are ever threatened. The invariant of the system is that all men have these rights, which means that infringing on another's rights is nearly impossible to do without invoking that person to exercise and defend their rights. If a second man, "James," were to threaten the Sam's life, Sam is capable of defending himself, either physically or by some other means (firearms, hired thugs). If James were to threaten Sam's property, Sam again is capable of defending his property.

Coercion is the act of infringing upon another's rights to the point where they can no longer defend them, i.e. if James were to subdue and restrain Sam so that he could no longer defend himself, or if James were to shoot Sam in the back. This sucks for Sam and seems good for James in the short run, but in a dynamic system, it's likely that Susan, Joe, and Buck will hear about James' unreasonable and murderous tendencies, and will want to take precautionary measures to isolate the unreasonable (and therefore "inhuman," at least temporarily) James from their community until it appears he will no longer practice coercion.

I know this is very foggy and not at all rigorous - I'm by no means a logician. However, I think the implication of conceptualizing rights this way is important: it is very difficult for somebody to violate your rights without you surrendering them first.

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Good Econ Student, Terrible Granddaughter?

Another Christmas has come and gone, and with it, another round of returns, exchanges, re-gifting, or in some cases, simply tossing our unwanted gifts on the trash heap. Although retailers in recent years have made things easier with the advent of the gift receipt, there still exists a large economic loss after every holiday season.

This crossed my mind the other day as I was wrapping presents. For my grandmother, I had gotten a $10 frame to hang on her wall, with a decorative engraving inside that read "Family Faith Friends" or something like that. Admittedly, it wasn't the most thoughtful gift I'd ever purchased for Grandma, and to be safe, I opted for a gift receipt. When I was wrapping the gift, I was about to get up to find the receipt, but then remembered every unwanted gift I'd ever received, and how many of those came with no option to return or exchange. I sat back down and thought to myself: screw it, let Grandma feel the dead-weight loss of Chrismas this year.

Terrible, I know.

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2 years have passed since my mother, Nancy, died of cancer. We had our differences, and we had a lot of distance between us for most of my life, but her death marked a profound change in my life that I've never really mentioned. My brother and I were there at her bedside many nights in the last few months of her life, talking, or reading, or watching TV together. Slowly, she lost her energy. She eventually would barely wake up, and when she did she couldn't make sense of what was going on around her anymore. People who haven't witnessed slow degenerative death seem to have a misconception that death from illness is peaceful and quiet and quick. It rarely is. Being 21 years old and caring for a parent while they slowly slip away is one of those things that just changes you. It forces you to grow up. Here I am, two short years later, living and working in Washington D.C., breaking out of my former shyness. My life has changed drastically from where I was. I kind of feel like the growing up experience was my mom's "final gift."

Thanks, mom.

Check out my eulogy, here.

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I Won!

Last week, there was an op-ed writing contest for the Cato interns. Long story short, I won! Here's my editorial:

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Twenty years ago, the internet was still called the Information Super Highway, satellite dishes were humongous backyard-eyesores, and cable television only had 36 channels. My, how times have changed.

This week, the FCC will hold a meeting to discuss a recent report that could lead to expanded regulation of cable television. A federal law passed in 1984 determined that if the cable industry ever grew "too dominant" and passed the 70/70 rule - that is, if cable services reached 70% of people and 70% of those people became subscribers - then the FCC would be given new powers to regulate the industry.

The FCC's recent figure of 71.4% cable-subscription rate has been contested by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Their estimates place that number at just below 60%. Also, cable providers have been losing subscribers over the years to satellite and phone companies that provide video services, and the industry as a whole has seen stock prices flat-line or decline in recent months.

The aim of the FCC's expanded regulatory powers, should the 71.4% figure be deemed accurate, would be to promote a competitive environment and "diverse information sources." This is roughly translates to ensuring that enough women and minorities get to own or lease cable channels, and requiring cable providers to carry those channels. Let's entertain this idea for a moment: if currently successful cable channels are dropped by broadcasters in order to carry channels that, diversity-friendly or not, previously had no market for them, what exactly is the benefit to the cable TV customers? Additionally, how will this increase competition for the "too-dominant" cable TV industry?

Competition for cable television providers already exists. Direct TV, Dish Network, and Verizon FIOS are the first three competitors that come to mind. The internet is quickly becoming a fierce competitor, too, with peer-to-peer video sites like Joost, and music and video marketplaces like iTunes providing everything that cable companies do, either for free in the case of Joost, or for a small per-download fee. The internet represents an unregulated gold mine for diverse information sources – Google news provides news from over 4,500 sources daily, and Youtube has become a cauldron for user-generated video entertainment.

It's unclear just exactly what cable regulation would accomplish – aside from more red tape. Television media is currently in a transitional stage, as video-on-demand and digital video recorders are giving consumers greater choices about what, when, and how they watch television. The freedom to choose what we watch and how we watch it will not be stopped by bureaucrats who purport to know what we ought to have access to. As consumers, we can be certain of one thing: as technology continues to evolve, our choices will continue to expand.




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If Cars Weren't Required to Have Seatbelts...

Wouldn't somebody go into business selling 3rd-party seatbelts to install in our cars?

A lot of commotion is made by statists about the government's responsibility to ensure our safety through regulations, consumer protections, etc. I consider myself a fairly death-averse person, at least as much as the next guy. I'm pretty sure that if my car didn't come with pre-installed seat belts, I would purchase them separately, even though seatbelts haven't yet saved my life in the nearly 24 years I've been driving or riding in cars.




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The borderline Anarchist.

The more I learn, the more of an anarchist I become. And I don't think I need to qualify that with "-capitalist" or "-socialist," as I think only one is representative of true back-to-nature anarchy.

Anyway, I've been thinking that in the future (post-singularity, when we're all either software entities on an information network or entirely comprised of nanoswarms) government as we know it won't exist. A new form of "market-government" (shout-out to Zhzi for the term) will emerge, where governments/constituencies will not be defined by their physical borders, but by their members. I haven't worked out many of the details, but I would think that being a "citizen" of a country would be much like being a member of a union, or any other club that charges fees in exchange for perks.



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My Formative Years

Taking a break from more serious(ish) topics, here's a list of things that I remember from my formative years (age 10 - 15)

-The State on MTV
-Green Day
-Chuck Taylors
-Beavis and Butthead
-Discovering Nirvana, then learning that Kurt Cobain was dead.
-Alicia Silverstone (my hero back then)
-Kate Libby from Hackers (my other hero)
-Wearing flannel long after it had become uncool
-Ripped, no, SHREDDED jeans
-Gavin Rossdale
-Marilyn Manson
-Trent Reznor
-The Maxx, an animated series on MTV
-The Head, same.
-Ace of Base
-Riding my bike through the muddy backwaters of the MN river
-Rolling Stone magazine
-Hit Parader magazine
-quoting The Simpsons line-for-line
-Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
-GX jeans
-Who sucked more: Backstreet Boys or N'Sync
-The Spice Girls, signaling the beginning of the end for popular music
-Fred Durst is a no-talent hack.
-Categorizing other teenagers by the kind of music they listened to
-WalMart was the best store ever.
-Using christmas lights as year-round bedroom decor
-Loveline w/Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew
-Incense, inflatable furniture
-Late summer nights spent writing poetry and playing the same five songs on guitar
-Hormones, gloominess, and teenaged angst.
-Truth or Dare
-Battling frizzy hair
-Orthodontics
-8th grade history report on Spartacus.
-Believe it or not, I still remember watching a movie in my 8th grade human heritage class about ancient human societies in the middle east, and learning about the story of the Tower of Babel. It moved me almost to the point of tears, I remember, thinking that something so mysterious and magnificent-if it ever existed in the first place-would have been destroyed. I remember that story affected me, it stayed with me for years afterward. Thinking about it again now...I consider it one of the most tragic stories I've ever heard.



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