Rights? What rights?

When I finished my second post about abortion, I promised two more on the subject.

Libertarians won’t like this, but I must declare that I do not believe in natural rights. There is absolutely nothing “natural” about rights. What we get from nature is an imperative, a drive to survive. Since we are both social and thinking animals, over a very, very long time of social and intellectual evolution we rose above the biological imperative and came to a general agreement on some basic rules to help the survival of our species.

Justice health

I was asked to edit this post on this day of 2012-09-28.  I will comment on the request and its implications later, once I finished my series of posts on Islam. [xxxx] denotes the change

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I am not an anarcho-capitalist libertarian.  I would define myself as a culturalist social-libertarian.

I will explain at some point what I mean by that and I would love to debate the nuances with a true anarcho-capitalist libertarian such as Stefan Molyneux but the point that matters here is the answer to the question: where do you draw the line? What are the legitimate functions of the state?

For a true anarcho-capitalist the answer is none. The state is by definition a monopolistic and therefore coercive entity and has no legitimate function in a free society. Next step from that view is the one saying that the three legitimate function of the state are the military, the justice system and the police, basically protecting society from violence from the outside, from the inside and arbitration of conflicts.

I more or less subscribe to this view, but today I have to argue against it.

What prisons should be about

I spent 3 months and 20 days in police custody and jail, 5 months and 10 days in a real prison. The ‘big-timers’ said I only went in to look around. They were right. I am not a criminologist, I only glimpsed into the system, but seen enough to have clear ideas about it.

My story. Finally.

I had no compelling reason to tell this story before, but I got to a point now, when there are several things I cannot appropriately address in this blog without referring to it. Most of what I think about criminal justice and law enforcement is influenced by my own jail experience.

On March 15^th 1972 when I was 19 years old, I was arrested, charged and convicted of the crime of “continuously and publicly perpetrated sedition against the established order of the Hungarian People’s Republic.” I was sentenced to one year in a maximum security prison; I was paroled after serving nine months.