Really, if The Economist is going to opine on this sort of thing, its writers need to know something on the subject.
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Another quote of the day:
“Who doesn’t get this? Who has the audacity to demand unarmed helplessness? Who likes dead good guys?
I’ll tell you who. People who tramp on the Second Amendment, that’s who. People who refuse to accept the self-evident truth that free people have the God-given right to keep and bear arms, to defend themselves and their loved ones. People who are so desperate in their drive to control others, so mindless in their denial that they pretend access to gas causes arson, Ryder trucks and fertilizer cause terrorism, water causes drowning, forks and spoons cause obesity, dialing 911 will somehow save your life, and that their greedy clamoring to “feel good” is more important than admitting that armed citizens are much better equipped to stop evil than unarmed, helpless ones.”
Ted Nugent
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/19/commentary.nugent/index.html
That’s an odd one: the Second Amendment held up as the expressing a God given right, the reason people ought to be permitted arms; rather than protecting a particular liberty against government encroachment.
I’m not happy with the idea that freedoms are created by either deities or documents. It implies we are naturally unfree otherwise.
All I generally care about is who is on my side and who is not. Although I am personally happily ‘God Free’, I really do not give a damn if Ted Nuggent is on my side because “God told him to be”.
If you are a believer, saying something is ‘God given’ is tantamount to saying it is a natural right, so if Ted says owning the means to defend yourself is a God given right, my response is ‘Hallelujah’. After all, if people tell themselves something is God given, I very much doubt the Deity is going to appear in their bedroom and contradict them.
Likewise although I agree it is an intellectual mistake to think rights come from constitutions, rights that are not secured are worthless and constitutional government is a useful tool to secure those rights. If people want to treat the US constitution as another sacred document that actually magically creates rights, they may be mistaken but again, as long as they are on my side and the tool works as advertised, I am not going to waste too much time arguing them out of their underpinning intellectual position if they are on my side for whatever reason politically.
Natural law is God’s law, and if God did not exist natural law would be just the same.
The Schoolmen (the Aristotelian Scholastics).
Perry is correct, saying something is a right given by God is (to most people who say it) not the same thing as saying that a being called “God” declares what is “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “evil” on the basis of whim (the so called “voluntarist” position – which, it is claimed, is held by both extreme Calvinists and by some Muslims).
For example, if a being claiming to be God told you to rape, murder (and so on) it would prove that this being (if it existed at all – i.e. if it was not a delusion) was not God.
“God is good” is not a tautology (with whatever a being called “God” does being “good” because he does it). “Good” and “right” have meanings not dictated by arbitrary whim.
As for the “Economist”:
It pretends to be a free market magazine (sorry “newspaper”), but all too often it argues for more government spending in various countries (especially on building projects and on various Welfare State schemes) and it has no consistent line on regulations (sometimes it is favour of more, sometimes less – there is logical line of principle in its arguments).
Broadly speaking the “Economist” represents what some Marxists use to call “finance capital” – i.e. credit money bubble financial industry types and the big corporations connected to them (of course Marxists are mistaken in implying that all people in this line of work have similar political opinions – but there is an interest group here with a “mainstream” opinion). The “Econonmist” tends to represent “hedge fund” people and the like (especially politically connected ones, who always seem to get a bail out when they need it) rather than manufacturers.
Still at least the “Economist” is not as bad the “Financial Times” (a newspaper in the same group) which for many years represented an unholy alliance between various “finance capital” interests and such Marxist powers as the Soviet Union. These days the “F.T.” is basically “New Labour” (although, of course, there are many exMarxists involved in New Labour and they are not “ex” for any moral reason).
On firearms:
I read the “Economist” article concerned (at the local supermarket where I am good customer, so they do not mind me looking at an article or two in various publications) and, almost needless to say, it did not mention that Virginia Tech already had “gun control”. Indeed the administration at Virginia Tech went so far as to lobby against a measure before the legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia that would have allowed people to take their firearms on to the property of State colleges.
All this “gun free zone” did was to disarm honest people (the only people who will obey “gun control” regulations) and turn them into helpless victims.
Someone who is prepared to murder people is not going to be above breaking “gun control regulations”, the whole idea that they would not break them is absurd. The “gun control” crusade is really a crusade against self defence and the defence of other people (not a crusade against murderers – who will carry on regardless).
To be fair, the “Economist” does sometimes have interesting articles on various nations in the world. But its coverage of the United States (not just on firearms, on just about everything) is very poor indeed.
On the “Economist” line on regulations (sometimes being in favour of more, sometimes of less), I meant to say that there is “no logical line of principle” it its line (typically for the word blind waste of skin that I am, I missed out a vital word – “no”).
For example, the “Economist” might consider an individual “anti trust case” to be silly, but it does not understand the falseness (in principle) of the idea of “anti trust” or “competition policy”.
Indeed it may sometimes say that a government has not gone far enough with this stuff.
In short the “Economist” does not understand economics (not even the basic principles of political economy).
Despite its policy of having everything unsigned as part of its attempt to make its articles all sound like pronouncements from the top of Mt Sinai, the Economist is written by many different people. Some of them do understand economics, and some of them don’t. The best thing about the magazine is that it covers the entire world, which is something few political or news magazines or news magazines do. (If you read it thoroughly, you at least have a rough idea what is going on in Africa and South America. When the 1994 Rwandan genocide occurred, The Economist explained in a timely and pretty accurate fashion what was going on, which is one reason I have so little sympathy for the “We didn’t know what was going on until it was too late” line you hear from so many people who had power at the time. If I knew, then surely they did, or if they didn’t they had no excuse).
However, the worst thing about The Economist is that the more you know about the subject being written about, the less impressive it often becomes. A lot of it is written by generalists for whom rhetorical skills are rather more important than facts. Who really cares if you know something about the subject if you can sound sufficiently like you do that you can win an Oxford Union debate about it? The Economist is written by Oxbridge educated Englishmen who are brought up with the biases of a certain type of well off English Conservative. A typical misunderstanding (and at times dislike of) American does come through, particularly in the editorial pages. This bias comes through less in the news pages about America – instead there is a certain shallowness.
“To be fair, the “Economist” does sometimes have interesting articles on various nations in the world.”
Since they are nations you know little about, you don’t catch the errors, and it sounds “interesting”. My guess is they are not any more “interesting” (i.e. accurate) than article on America.
After 5 years as a subscriber, I’ve let my subscription to The Economist lapse. Either my political views changed, or it went downhill. Its coverage on the Israeli-Lebanon conflict last year was terrible, to name but one example.
hey Paul, have you been reading Aquinas?
I can’t say much about the Economist as I’m a poor worker, but I do get the FT for free whenever I do a night shift, and while I wouldn’t necessarily classify it as Nulabor, it is woolly and a bit Camden-town attic-hunting “Which was nice” in outlook, ie fat, self-satisfied and in with the current master demographic.
Always check the share prices and Krugerrands however.
I’ve not read the economist article.
But from the links I can’t see what people are complaining about.
I used to help the Economist cover articles on my country and did research for the Economist Intelligence Unit. My main complain is that they are not very selective of who they hire and do not see if that person have an ax to grind. Sometimes even a left wing ax, in a suposely pro free market magazine.
Regarding the subjet of guns, the Economist for some reasons fails to see that they are avocating the same policies that they with reason oppose on drugs for example. Most glaringly they have totally failed to see the correlation between gun violence and ilegal drugs traffiking. This is obviously a voluntary blindness. There is no other reason for it.
I rarely buy The Economist these days, and when I do, I skim through the political pages and focus on the business section.
The political section reads too much like a shallow mainstream newspaper: much arrogant posturing and little real knowledge of the subject at hand.
I suspect I’ll stop reading it entirely soon.
The writers at The Economist barely understand economics. Why should we expect them to know anything about guns?
I also let my subscription to the Economist lapse about five years back. I tired of throwing it across the room after reading yet another left-wing, EU-praising, America-bashing article. For people who claim to be in favor of free-market capitalism, they do a damned poor job of supporting and promoting it.
Come to think of it, that’s about the same time I quit reading the Spectator, too, and for roughly the same reasons.
A comment of mine seems to have gone walk-about, so I will try and repeat it (from memory).
Jacob – yes I quite accept that when I do know something about a subject (Britain, the E.U., Latin America) I do see lots of errors in Economist articles. So it is quite possible that articles I do find interesting, are full of errors as well (I just do not know enough to notice them).
Zimon – what people are complaining about is that the Economist used the Virginia Tech murders to push ahead with its “gun control” agenda, both ignoring the facts (such as the fact that Virginia Tech would not allow people to have their firearms on the property of this state college, thus turning honest people [the only sort of people who would obey such regulations] into defenceless victims) and being dishonest.
The article was dishonest because it pretended to respect the Second Amendment – whilst really what the Economist was up to was trying to push “gun control” (i.e. a monopoly of firearms for the state and for private criminals – after all someone who is prepared to break the law on murder is not going to respect “gun control” regulations) by the installment plan (Fabian style salame tactics).
The Economist has “form” in this area. Some time ago it pushed a book (by saying nice things about it in various articles – not just as a book review) that claimed that Americans did not have many firearms till after the Civil War – and that, therefore, private firearm ownership was not an old tradition of the Republic and could be got rid of.
The book was a fraud (not just mistaken – a fraud). The author had made up “evidence” and ignored real evidence.
Yet it took a long time (and a hard struggle) to get the Economist to admit that the book was a fraud – and they never used the word “fraud”.