Jim Manzi Is Wrong, Americans Love to Tell Others How to Live
Americans have a healthy aversion to telling other people how to live.This is such total horseshit, I'm not sure where to begin.
Americans are utterly schizophrenic on this issue. Utterly.
On one hand, you'll hear us say things like "as long as I'm minding my own business," "it's their life and their choice," and "this is the land of the free."
On the other, you can grab any American newspaper and open the news section at random and find not just people telling others how to live, but advocating the use of police violence to enforce those orders. Go to any local news website and read the stories posted. It's absolutely sickening to see the flat drudgery of economic and social regulation taking its toll on individuals and their production of values. Smoking bans, socialized health care, and business licensing.
Oh, business licensing. Anyone who claims Americans are averse to telling others what to do ought to have this rubbed in their faces until they acknowledge reality. I posted that list of required Texas licenses, permits and registrations in 2005. It came to 437 entries. I just looked at the list again, and it's grown to 506 entries*
Excuse me while I gag on the hypocrisy and the lies. I could waste days demonstrating the concrete examples of Americans demanding other Americans how to live their lives. The same can be said about Americans demanding foreigners how to live their lives. There are whole industries focused on how to market and develop various plans to coercively order the lives of others. Manzi is wrong, and it in no small part stems from his assertion that "[u]ltimately, any view of morality must inevitably rely on axioms which are based on intuition, and not subject to rational debate." That's the fucking problem, accepted by nonthinkers all over the world. Manzi ends asking "[w]hy don’t we try letting people live how they want to live, and let others try to impose uniform national rules on a heterogeneous population of 300 million people?" I agree. Unfortunately for statists, that means dumping the entire federal government into the shitter where it belongs. Even more unfortunately for the statists, it also applies to the "lesser" levels of government as well. Are the differences between myself and the homeschooled 28 year old in Lubbock any less different than the that homeschooler and some random person on the street in San Francisco? What about the thugs who live a few blocks down from me? What about the weird bastards I call my friends? That last question of Manzi's, if answered honestly as he rhetorically wants, requires anarchism. But, then again, we're talking about schizophrenia here, so don't expect him to acknowledge the liberty principle's logical endpoint. Hardly anyone else does. UPDATED 6/18/2008 10:54am
It seems TexasOnline.com has changed their links. Go to get to the revamped Licenses, Permits, and Registrations page. They've made it far harder to count the total because the Excel spreadsheet doesn't have one line per discreet permit/license. However, this page says there are 506 in the "A-Z" category.