Think of it this way. Suppose your friend needed a car and you took it upon yourself to provide one for him. Would you:

1. Give your friend some money and tell them to improve their life
2. Give your friend some money on the condition they spend it on a car. Assume that this is enforced, perhaps by an escrow agency.
3. Buy a car on the open market, then sign the title over to your friend.
4. Hire some engineers to design a car, then buy a car factory and hire the staff to work it, and then give a car to your friend. Would this car be as good as a Honda, or would it be more like the East German Trabant?

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For a brief overview of the Pro-Life position, read this article first.

Defending abortion from the standpoint of protecting a woman’s right to choose has advantages over denying the personhood of the fetus. You do not have to relinquish support for unalienable rights for all humans, and you can protect wanted babies with the full spectrum of human rights while still granting women freedom to abort the unwanted.

It might seem obvious that the fetus’s right to life trumps the woman’s right to liberty, but that has not been conceded by abortion supporters. Their case was most powerfully advanced by ethicist Judith Jarvis Thompson in her famous 1971 essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” But as we shall see, that argument is fatally flawed.
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For a brief overview of the Pro-Life position, read this article first.

The Moral Basis for Rights

Thomas Jefferson eloquently described the moral basis for human rights in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Jefferson’s answer to the question of where rights come from is clear: we are created with rights and they are intrinsic to our nature. It is a matter of biological fact that a fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens, and therefore human. This means that a fetus must also have an unalienable right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. If it did not then our rights would no longer be unalienable; age, functional abilities, or degree of development becomes a means of alienating our rights.
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Miss Aponte separated out two bottles, the only items in the pile that could be recycled. She asked what lesson the students had learned. The class sentiment was summarized by Lily Finn, the student who had been so determined to save the half folder: “People shouldn’t throw away paper or anything. They should recycle it. And they shouldn’t eat candy in school.”

Lily’s judgment about candy sounded reasonable, but the conclusion about recycling seemed to be contradicted by the data on the floor. The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a landfill than the two bottles. Without realizing it, the third graders had beautifully reproduced the results of a grand national experiment begun in 1987

Recycling Is Garbage

Pork is like pollution; the polluter makes the money and everyone else pays the cost. Politicians logroll for pork to bring money to their state and everyone else pays the taxes. This dynamic forces even well-meaning politicians to logroll out of self defense. They don’t want their state pay more than it brings in. But pork is not a zero sum game; everyone loses because pork is a waste of money (unless you believe that projects like the Inner Harmony Foundation are the best use of taxpayer money). The basic nature of our political system creates this losing dynamic. To quote the computer in the 1983 movie War Games “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
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Most Americans recognize that politics has a lot to do with the pursuit of power, privilege, and special interests; however, there is a general presumption that environmental politics is somehow different. We take for granted that environmental laws are what they seem; that the legislators who enact those laws and the bureaucrats who implement them are earnestly struggling to protect public interests; and, that these laws will be enforced in a fair and sensible manner. All too often, however, environmental regulations are designed to serve narrow political and economic interests, not the public interest.

Read the rest of the article here.