| | This is a fine article and as Professor Machan points out, the right to privacy, if properly understood, can only come from individualism.
It made me think about the legal beginnings of the right to privacy - it too has a checkered past. In Griswold V. Connecticut, Justice Brennan, one of the Supreme Court's leading progressives, "discovered" rights to privacy hiding as "penumbras, formed by emanations" from his reading of the wording in some of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights. Brennan was a strong proponent of the "living constitution" and of the Supreme Court's duty was to reinterpret it in light of modern community needs.
Going back in history, there was a fierce argument preceding the ratification of the constitution over whether or not including the Bill of Rights would create the impression that people only had those rights that were enumerated, or put another way, that government was only limited by those things it was explicitly prohibited from doing. The heart of minarchy is a government that can only act in defense of individual rights and that it is implemented by a constitution that creates an organization that can do nothing but what is explicitly permitted.
Those who argued on both sides of the bill of rights argument agreed on one thing: that the danger they wished to prevent was a government that wasn't strictly limited in its power by the constitution. In the end, it appears that they were both right. Without the bill of rights it is easy to argue with hind sight that gun control, censorship of the press, and any number of rights violations would probably have occurred sooner. But that same hind sight shows us that the basic view of the relationship of government and our rights has been perverted by the left and by the right, using the bill of rights to imply that government can do anything that isn't explicitly prohibited.
We, who understand individual rights, need to be aware of the danger in attempting to defend against government's intrusions by pointing at this or that right. The danger is that it leaves open an implication that government is able to do anything it wishes, or that democratic votes directs it to do, so long as a successful rights argument isn't made. It is the bill of rights argument writ large. Instead, when the intrusion is from government, our argument must be that it has no such right because it is limited to explicitly defined powers and no more. It is always a good thing to assert our moral right, but it isn't enough in this day when the prevailing view is that government can and should do anything that warms a liberal or social conservative's tiny heart. In a more reasonable society, we'd only need to justify our rights when the argument is between two sovereigns - i.e., two individuals - in which case we'd need to sort out which individual in a conflict is violating a right held by the other.
Brennan's creation of rights to privacy was made out of clever wordsmithing to support his desire to promote progressive ends and that left it without the solid foundation it deserves while furthering the concept that the federal government had powers not explicitly granted. Connecticut's law prohibiting the sale of birth control should have been struck down, but not in that fashion. The problem with the bill of rights is that it does not explicitly state that neither state nor federal government shall have any law that prohibits or hampers the free interaction between any private individuals or private organizations where that interaction does not involve the initiation force, or the threat to initiate force, or fraud or theft.
The bottom line is that sometimes when we argue a specific issue that government shouldn't be doing, we leave standing the idea that goverment can do other things that aren't in the constitution or that aren't related to the defense of individual rights. It makes political discourse too much like some kind of game of Whack-a-Mole. The right or the left pop up one proposed government intrusion after another which get to stay up unless you are successful in whacking it.
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