Now up at Cato Unbound: my latest response to Yglesias and Baker, Horwitz’s latest response to Yglesias, and most recently my response to Peter Klein, Will Wilkinson, and J. H. Huebert and Walter Block.
Charles Johnson also has a reply to Walter and Huebert up; I sent in my response before I saw Charles’s, but we ended up making similar points.
I hope Yglesias responds before things wind up; he’s only spoken twice so far.
9 Comments
Speaking of state barriers to small business, check this out:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3017870
Apparently selling raw milk or transporting it across state lines for selling is illegal in half the 50 states!
We can’t have people transporting raw milk across state lines for immoral purposes. Otherwise there would be anarchy.
Actually some of the people in that thread made some vague references to typhoid and disease. Have you written anywhere about the rights of people with contagious diseases? (A man was briefly imprisoned a few years ago for having antibiotic-resistant TB I believe.)
Charles also has a post on (inter alia) Yglesias.
Have you written anywhere about the rights of people with contagious diseases?
I can’t recall whether I have. But I suppose the short version would be a) people do have the right to defend themselves against innocent threats, but b) the defense must not be disproportionate to the severity of the threat (where severity includes both badness of outcome and likelihood of outcome).
How to apply that test in any specific case? Easy, just ask the phronimos.
You did.
http://praxeology.net/blog/2007/03/02/isolation-as-self-defense/
Good response to the Walter/Huebert piece.
Their article was very bizarre.
I remembered this interesting piece from Robert Murphy about quarantines that suddenly seems relevant:
How the Free Market Would Handle Quarantines
http://mises.org/story/2635
Mike — thanks for reminding me.