My response to Walter Block
Is online here at Cosmos and Taxis.
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
I think Walter Block is just a lost cause at this point. He has sailed beyond the event horizon of insanity.
ReplyDeleteBlock's own view doesn't fare much better than Rothbard's concerning the "right to abandon." What Block does (according to his 2004 paper) is merely narrow down the cases in which a parent can starve their child to death "justly" (in accordance with libertarianism). The parent would have to make known the fact they were giving up their ownership of the child and would not legitimately be able to use their property (such as the boundaries of their home) to block a path to reaching the child. However, if no adult was willing to take in the child, for whatever reason (lack of information, immoral character, impracticality, etc.), then we are still left with the absurd consequence of the child's death.
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