Vick
I read an interesting post from Myrhaf, titled “Free Michael Vick.” I agree with most of what he wrote. Dog-fighting is a cruel, horrible, despicable act that is worth totally shunning anybody who does it. However, it’s not an act that violates anybody’s rights, and as such it is not an act that the government should prosecute. He wrote:
It comes down to property rights. If a person owns an animal, then he should have the right to dispose of his property as he wishes. Property rights are absolute; a free and just state should go out of its way not to violate them in any way. It should go so far to protect property rights that it errs on the side of going too far, if such is possible.
Men do not have property rights if they do not have the right to be immoral, stupid, unfair, whimsical and disgusting with their property. A proper government exists only to protect and defend individual rights, not to make sure people are fair, moral and intelligent. This is hard for many to accept in our age when the government routinely violates property rights in countless ways. This absolute, laissez-faire conception of rights is currently theoretical and unconnected to the reality of our mixed economy. It is, as Ayn Rand called capitalism, the unknown ideal.
Often when issues like these that involve government action come up, I think that that a lot of people approach the issue backwards. If the question is whether the government should do something, like send Michael Vick to jail for dog-fighting, I think the first step should be to define the proper role of government and then apply that definition to the question. What could be more important in determining whether government action is proper than to identify what a government should do at all? Instead of doing this, people take it for granted that the government should stop things that are “bad” and then only debate just how bad the action is. This turns the question “What should the government do with dog-fighters?” into “How bad is dog-fighting?” And since dog-fighting is incredibly bad, it’s easy for most people to just declare that it should be illegal.
I think it’s easy to see this approach applied in other issues. For example, take smoking bans in private restaurants. Instead of debating whether people should be free to congregate and work with others on terms they set themselves or whether people should be free to decide what is done on their own property without government coercion, a lot of people twist the debate into “How bad is second-hand smoking?” Or take socialized health care. Instead of debating whether the government is acting within its proper bounds to tell doctors what they can do and what they can charge, to tell patients what doctors they may see and when, and to tell all taxpayers that they have to pay for everybody’s health care, a lot of people twist the debate into “How bad is it that some people don’t have health insurance?” I could go on and on with issues like public education, Social Security, farm subsidies, mortgage lending, drug patents, relief efforts for catastrophes like Katrina, or even the current internet royalty rate. The proper way to approach these issues is to define the proper role of government (which is to protect individual rights) and then apply it. When I apply that to Vick’s case, I cannot see how his actions - no matter how reprehensible they are - violated another individual’s rights.
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