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The average person tends to discount or ignore the ridiculous in life. Day-to-day problems are sufficiently troublesome to occupy his attention and efforts. He has no time to waste on nonsense. Americans are, in general, very practical people, at least in the short-run.
Unfortunately, many things that once seemed so outlandish as not to be worth the effort to consider seriously now constitute current realities. Not only did the fringe flavor of various proposals not prevent their fulfillment, the seemingly low probability of their successful implementation helped divert individuals from focusing on them when it would have been so much easier to halt them in their tracks.
Frog-in-the-pot fashion, though, various statist and collectivist ideas that initially appeared to be the stuff of fantasy gathered momentum. Each board slipped into the edifice, each concession to what sounded "reasonable," each compromise in the name of going-along-to-get-along leads to a structure almost too strong to assault. The bizarre becomes the accepted. The ludicrous warps into part of the background, not to be questioned because "that's the way things are."
In 1913, anyone who had suggested that the establishment of the Federal Reserve Board would lead to the repudiation of the gold standard, a worldwide depression, and an inflation that eventually turned a dollar into a nickel would have been ejected from polite company.
Who in that same year would have believed any Cassandras who warned that a 2% income tax on a few wealthy individuals would result in 90% rates for some people three decades later or an average of nearly 50% of everyone's income at the close of the century?
Few in 1934 would have believed that a "tax" on machine guns would one day lead to bans on revolvers and rifles, to restrictions on the number of bullets a clip could hold, to de facto national registration, to outright confiscation and total bans on guns in various cities, and to serious discussions of total prohibitions on private ownership of weapons throughout the country.
When Social Security was established by FDR, few accepted the logic of such a Ponzi scheme: that forced charity would lead to a sense of entitlement, to groups that had little in common with widows and orphans qualifying for coverage, to a burgeoning welfare system threatening to bankrupt the country and pitting generation against generation while providing founts of power to the politicians controlling the benefits. Many would also have laughed at the silly notion that a card that directly stated on its front that the number imprinted there was "not to be used for identification purposes" would someday lead to national identification cards starting at birth.
How many people predicted that when the government mandated medical licenses for doctors, when they imposed wage controls after World War II that led to unregulated "fringe benefits" as a way to pay workers more and that created a third-party payer system, when they established Medicare for the indigent elderly, who knew how medical costs would rocket out of control, leading to government control of virtually the entire medical field and to the intersection of those controls with a national identification number?
Who could have foreseen that passing laws "protecting" white women from Negroes, Chinese, and Hispanics who used cocaine, opium, and marijuana or that establishing "prescriptions" for drugs would indirectly create the largest prison population on the planet, would contribute to the destruction of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, would help provide a ready source of cash for terrorists and criminal thugs, and aid the loss of banking privacy, and perhaps someday, the abandonment of cash in our economy?
Many people denied that providing "nonsmoking" sections on airplanes would lead to prohibitions of smoking on all flights, in offices, in restaurants, in bars (!), and in your own home.
Very few people take discussions of Twinkie/fat taxes seriously. They should.
Only a minority of folks have been concerned that animal "rights" groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) encourage domestic terrorism and that their efforts are weakening property rights and blurring the distinctions between animals and people or that such crazy talk seriously threats the freedom of all of us.
Such groups have destroyed research labs that use animals for testing. They promote hysterical reactions to hoof-and-mouth and Mad Cow disease. They oppose eating meat and like to frighten children at McDonald's restaurants. They interfere with hunters and toss blood on fur coats. They want to close down hog farms and liken the poultry industry to the Holocaust.
Hitler told us in Mein Kampf what his intentions were. The animal "rights" fanatics are equally candid. We ignore their words at our own peril.
The most recent salvo in this battle for freedom was described on abcnews.com. In "Fighting for Moe," Amanda Onion details a fight over what should happen to a 36 year-old chimpanzee named Moe.
In 1998, Moe "allegedly bit two people" and was taken from his owners, St. James and LaDonna Davis, by the city of West Covina, California. The Davises wanted their animal back. They eventually agreed, however, to have Moe taken from the Wildlife Waystation Sanctuary -- his current home -- and placed in a building in Baldwin Park, CA. But that city doesn't want him and the sanctuary folks believe Moe would be better off staying where he is.
The sanctuary director, Martine Colette, at least accepts the reality of what Moe is: "He's a chimp, regardless of what people say... Chimps are chimps, they're never going to be anything else."
Not everyone agrees.
In words that sound like fodder for a bad science fiction story or a modern day farce, the animal "rights" folks are gearing up for the coming war.
Professor Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago wants animals to have legal guardians. He compares them to "African-Americans and women and handicapped people and homosexuals..." The main distinction between these people and animals -- the power of speech -- is, for him, primarily a superficial, not a fundamental, difference. While Sunstein favors animal-cruelty laws and lawsuits in the names of animals -- including rodents and birds -- he says he finds talk of treating animals as persons "odd-sounding." The strangeness of anti-freedom proposals, however, has never stopped advocates from pushing hard to achieve their goals.
Author Steven Wise, who lectures at the Vermont Law School and Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, believes that, "Any animal -- at least one with a sense of self -- should become eligible for legal rights." Presumably, this includes any creature that is perceptually able to distinguish itself from the food it eats.
In a direct assault on our freedom and our rights, Wise does not want animals to be "regarded as property," according to Onion. They should legally be treated in a fashion similar to that of "abused children"! Lawsuits in the names of animals should be permitted. Begin with chimps, Wise says, then move on to other animals. He is also seeking an international "declaration of rights for apes."
Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard University says that we treat "corporations and ships and buildings" as legal persons; animals should be treated similarly. "I can't see why chimpanzees and dolphins, to name just two extremely intelligent examples, should be deemed any less worthy of such classification."
He conveniently overlooks the fact that the behind the legal fiction of treating inanimate objects and organizations as "legal persons" are people who own those things. That is a far cry from having an animal sue its owner.
Tribe lamely attempts to ignore the implications of such a move and to hold illogically to the belief that his position would not "suggest any animal is the legal equal of humans."
Animal Industry Foundation president, Steve Kopperud, nailed the problem when he said, "If your political belief is that no animal should be exploited for any purposes, then no amount of care would be sufficient. It would be completely overwhelming [for our court system]."
The folks at the Animal Legal Defense Fund were not happy when Moe's owners informed them that "...this animal is property -- our property -- and we don't want you coming in and telling the court what's best for him."
Imagine that: someone in this country still believes that one can do as one likes with one's own property...
The end game for the animal rights folks is "toward gaining legal rights for animals." Animal Legal Defense Fund executive director, Joyce Tischler, is not shy in espousing that ultimate goal: "It's like pushing a peanut forward... One has to go step by step by step."
As in the past, we face a clear choice: we can pretend they "don't really mean it" and ignore these people and their wacky ideas. Or...
...we can throw down the gauntlet and declare, "This far and no farther," and squash this threat to our rights and our liberty while we still can.
