I’d like to break down that “letting die” category further into two sub-categories: letting someone die by failing to save them from a rights violation versus failing to save them from other causes.

An example of the first would be when you allow someone to be murdered. An example of the second would be when you fail to provide them with food or medical care.

Are those two kinds of letting die equally bad? What about if the entity doing the letting is the government?

Suppose the government rearranged its budget so that it stopped putting any money into anti-terrorism efforts and instead sought to eliminate malaria from the world. Is such a move justified as long as we prevent more malaria-related deaths than terrorism-related deaths?

I get the sense that most people think that letting a murder happen is worse than letting someone die of disease, but I don’t know if I share this view.

Notice that nearly all governments in the world have such paternalistic policies. Notice that nearly all such governments allow emigration to other countries that do not ban drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc. That leaves us with a mystery to solve. Why would the government allow people to leave the country if doing so allowed them to engage in all these sinful activities?

You might say that preventing emigration would be too intrusive into the person’s life. But the government is already intruding into their lives by putting them in jail for doing some of these activities (namely drugs), so it’s hard to believe that it’s freedom we’re worried about.

I suspect that the motivation behind these laws is not a desire to help people but rather a desire to signal the society’s values. If an American wants to use drugs in Amsterdam, that doesn’t bother us so much since we’re not really worried about the drug user but the shame the drug user brings on the rest of us. To legalize drugs, prostitution or gay marriage here would signal that our society approves of such behavior, and we don’t want to think that about our society, and especially ourselves.

The fact that some immigrants would impose costs on others through welfare is an argument for excluding them, but not a very good one, for the following reasons: If our goal is to reduce the level of coercion in society, giving welfare to immigrants frustrates that goal, but so does controlling immigration. Even if reducing coercion were all we cared about, the answer to the problem of immigrants on welfare is not straightforward since the solution, restriction, is itself coercive.

Immigrants are not the only people who receive money from the government. Old people, disabled people, young people and just about everyone else receives money from the government, sometimes much more than they pay in taxes. If the political climate does not permit us to cut these benefits, what more can we do to prevent these people from receiving them? Can we prevent a poor woman from having kids so we don’t have to subsidize her children’s education? Can we deport old people before they wrack up expensive medical bills? I would think not.

The fact is that not all forms of coercion are created equal. When someone goes on disability insurance, it does indeed cost someone else money. That doesn’t justify deporting them. Deporting them interferes with their freedom much more than taxing another person to pay for their insurance. That’s what proponents of immigration control should understand. Preventing immigrants from coming to the U.S. to lower taxes replaces a minor injustice with a major one.

What are some defensible beliefs that the general public finds unpalatable? For me, it would be legalizing all drugs, eliminating licensures, opening the borders, withdrawing all military bases around the world and prosecuting members of the Bush and Obama Administrations for war crimes.

What about you?

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may be held personally responsible in a civil lawsuit for the alleged torture of two American citizens held without charge in a US military prison in Iraq in 2006, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday.

That sounds like a positive development.

Government lawyers argued that the suit must be dismissed based on rulings in earlier cases by appeals courts in New York and Washington, D.C. The Chicago-based appeals court panel said the Vance/Ertel lawsuit was different because the two earlier decisions involved noncitizens.

Why does that matter?

[Judge Hamilton] added: “The wrongdoing alleged here violates the most basic terms of the constitutional compact(Ed. note: WTF?) between our government and the citizens of this country…. There can be no doubt that the deliberate infliction of such treatment on US citizens, even in a war zone, is unconstitutional.”

That’s funny, I don’t remember signing that compact.

While I whole-heartedly agree that the plaintiffs should have the right to sue Rumsfeld for their torture, I’m at a loss as to why that right is not extended to non-citizens. Can someone help me out?

These Italians appear to be imitating Bob Dylan’s style of singing. Does he sing like a typical American?

By the way, a few years ago I saw a video on youtube of a man faking several foreign languages such as Spanish, French, German, Italian and Russian. He’s just speaking gibberish, but if you don’t know the language it sounds like he’s really speaking that language. I cannot find the video on youtube. Has anyone seen the video I’m talking about?