As ya'll may know, Libertarian Sci-Fi author L.Neil Smith is "a guy whose
friends are trying to convince him to run for President".
Lately, he's been forwarding some of the questions he gets from
cyberspace and his answers to several of us...and, by request, has now
added a page to his website with some of the Q&A...
If YOU'd like to know El Neil's "position" on your favorite burning issue...
just ask him at
http://www.lns2000.org/ask.html
Here are some recent examples:
Added February 22, 2000:
http://www.lns2000.org/faq.html
QUESTION: I am a Registered Voter and Divorced Father. I vote
accordingly. I would like to know your position on the current state of
California's Family Law System.
ANSWER: I don't know anything about California's family law system. In
the context I believe you're asking me to deal with, I believe that if there's
a dispute over child custody, the winner cannot demand financial support
from the loser. He/she wanted and won the kids, let him/her pay for
them.
I think that would encourage more equitable settlements. I also think that
forcible child support is slavery and that it's better for a kid never to hear
from a parent who doesn't want to support him than to know all his life
that the parent only anted up because he/she was compelled at gunpoint
to do so.
I also believe that the establishment of any kind of special court -- traffic,
IRS, family -- violates several laws including the 14th Amendment and a
stop should be put to it.
QUESTION: Mr. Smith: Are you for or against: Legalized abortion (Roe
vs. Wade)? The death penalty? Prisoner rights? (esp. for non-violent &
drug-related convicts). Prison reform?
ANSWER: I'm not "Mr. Smith", I'm Neil. Mr. Smith was my dad.
The term "legalized abortion" is argumentative. Are you for or against
"legalized breathing"? Or is it nobody's frigging business but your own?
I'm for a woman's ownership and control of her own existence, and that
certainly includes terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Think for only a
minute about the kind of gynecological police state it would require to
properly enforce anti-abortion laws today -- mandatorily registered
pregnancies, weekly forcible checkups, custody and restraint for women
who don't meet prenatal care standards -- and you'll see that the whole
idea is insane.
But the principle involved is self-ownership. (And no, a non-sapient fetus
doesn't own itself.)
Capital punishment: not wishing to give the government the right to take
an individual life or to preempt the individual's right to self-defense, I
oppose the death penalty as a socialist substitute for self-defense,
except at the scene and moment of the crime, at the hands of the
intended victim.
Exception: any public official, elected or appointed, who violates
anybody's rights under the first 10 amendments of the Constitution in a
way that results in a death -- even of one of the government perpetrators
-- should be publicly hanged and the execution shown on television.
Prisoners' rights: around three quarters of the 2,000,000 Americans in
prison right now never hurt anybody. As I've said before, I'd like to turn
the White House into an executive clemency _factory_, get those people
out of jail, and restore them to their rights and property. I'd also like to
repeal the evil doctrine of Sovereign Immunity so they can sue everybody
who helped put them in jail in the first place.
Starting with Nancy Reagan and William Bennett.
I have a lot of ideas about prison reform -- it's a subject all libertarians
should be deeply concerned with, just in case ...
QUESTION: Do I take it then that you're in favor of infanticide on demand
as well? I mean, if the newborn proves inconvenient or or too much of a
burden or you realize you're just not emotionally or careerwise ready for
a child at this time?
ANSWER: Don't make it harder than it has to be. I'm a child of my culture
just as you are, and I would not personally care to associate with anyone
I knew for sure had committed infanticide any more than you would.
Equally, however, I am not the source of the facts of objective reality, or
of the logic that follows from those facts. I am simply as honest as I can
possibly be about them -- to you and to myself -- given my all-too-human
and all-too-20th-century-American proclivities to the contrary.
Rights derive from sapience (and I can demonstrate that for you if you
want to spend the time at it). Therefore things without sapience have no
rights. That's probably why we've evolved to go all mushy over babies,
especially our own, so that we'll nurture them until they are sapient and
do have rights. These are not my opinions, they are hard-won facts,
personally very difficult for me to have recognized and acknowleged.
I also have a 10-year-old daughter I adore who wasn't sapient until some
point we might argue about, and therefore had no rights. My position is
that before that, she was my property, mine and Cathy's, and that we
loved and protected that property as the most precious thing we had until
it became an entity that isn't anybody's property but its own.
And that's about the best I can do with the universe as it was presented
to me.
QUESTION: Can you tell me a good book to read how slavery would
have been ended without the war or give me your opinion?
ANSWER: England ended slavery without war. So did Brazil. If they
could, so could we. The war between the states had nothing to do with
slavery, that was just the propaganda device by which the North justified
destroying the South. Sort of like everything gets blamed on guns or
drugs today.
I think the most telling fact here is the desperate way (and you can see
this clearly in almost any comprehensive treatment of the War between
the States) that Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists struggled --
well after the shooting had actually begun -- to try to make the war
become about slavery. They even say so clearly themselves, and it's
impossible to miss.
Not that they weren't working in the noblest of causes, the same cause
we labor in today -- unlike the northern politicos who were busily
enhancing the power of the state by enslaving and slaughtering black and
white people alike.
QUESTION: As a Libertarian, I resent your illegitimate representation of
my beliefs
ANSWER: My dear sir, legitimately or otherwise, I represent no "beliefs"
other than my own, and "as a libertarian", you should understand that
without having it explained to you. Moreover, where these issues involving
the War between the States are concerned, I am not expressing beliefs,
but facts.
Let me add that I have been a libertarian for 38 years, have writted 24
extremely polemic books, and countless essays and speeches in that
cause. I think I'm in a reasonably authoritative position to represent
libertarian ideas accurately, don't you, especially since I helped to create
them in the first place?
QUESTION: Our party platform, needless to say, is silent on the matter
of Abraham Lincoln
ANSWER: Having twice served on the national platform committee, I can
confirm that. The platform is properly concerned only with policy matters.
Why you think that I should limit my writings to what appears in the
platform is a complete mystery to me, however, especially since, for
every member of the LP, there are at least 10 non-party libertarians, and
perhaps more.
QUESTION: It also explicitly denounces initiation of violent force against
the federal government, which implies a lack of support for the firing on
Fort Sumter.
ANSWER: I haven't seen the more recent "Nerf" LP platforms, but I
believe you. However, the firing on Fort Sumter was in retaliation and
defense against force the federal government had initiated. Unless the
feebs at the Watergate have managed to write pacifism into the platform
(which wouldn't surprise me, really), what the south did was
understandable and perfectly moral ... if a trifle illegal.
But then so was the American revolution, wasn't it?
You also request more information. You might start with Freeing Slaves,
Enslaving Free Men by my friend Jeffrey Rodgers Hummell, which is
available at Laissez Faire Books
http://www.laissezfaire.org or
Amazon.com.
QUESTION: I suspect that libertarian ideas were created long before
you were born
ANSWER: Not all of them.
==========================================================
Mary Lou Seymour
Liberty Activists
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/1797
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