Letters for November 29, 2012

Only if she be defiled

Re “Just be consistent” (Editor’s note, Nov. 22):

As I opened the RN&R and saw you starting along the road of attempting to argue with an intractable anti-abortion type, I presumed you couldn’t possibly complete your argument in the paragraphs I counted ahead. But you did a fair job of it in the space allotted. I always like to include a review of the Bible book of Numbers, the fifth chapter, which includes step-by-step instructions for preparing an abortion potion, but I understand if you don’t want to go all scriptural. However, since you very correctly raised the issue of consistency, I long to see you dive in far more: Both the titles “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are too easy to wear and herald, but both titles are more difficult to earn than I’ve ever seen any individual or organization acknowledge.

Really being pro-life should mean committing to and embracing all life issues; and pro-choice should mean the same regarding all reproductive choice issues. The continuum of life issues includes the right of an adult to decide when, how and why one’s life will end; the right to one’s own body, including when, why and what drugs one can take, the right of an adult to sell or rent out for profit any part of one’s own body, including prostitution and organ donation; and, regarding reproductive issues, the right to an abortion even late term (according to the Bible, one is not a living being unless one is breathing through the nostrils), ready access to abortions including location of state-of-the-art clinic and affordability, pre-decision counseling, and post-decision aftercare, and the right to accessible contraception, as well as the right to get pregnant and carry a pregnancy to term, including the rights of people who require fertility assistance who don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to be able to afford such assistance.

So-called pro-lifers will never admit what they know about the continuum of life issues, including the fact that if any government can tell you that you can’t have an abortion, that government can make any other reproductive choice for you, including ordering you to have an abortion or ordering you not to get pregnant. Regarding those who call themselves pro-choice, see all the life issues above. So compatible are all real pro-life and pro-choice issues, that I dream of a clinic within 50 miles of any populated area, where so-called pro-lifers and so-called pro-choicers staff an office that includes a medical department, an adoption department, a fertility clinic, a chaplain’s office, a social worker’s office like they have in hospitals, and room for any well-behaved factions to set up shop and entice anyone entering the clinic who wants to listen to them, to come over and listen to them preach or shame or sloganeer, so they don’t have to stand outside the clinic carrying signs and harassing women.

R.A. Drew
Reno

Women’s work

Re “Just be consistent” (Editor’s note, Nov. 22):

Your attitude about women’s rights written in this piece reflects the reasoning of the men who helped women gain human rights.

I was around during the 1960s women’s rights movement, and there were and still are, some hardcore radicals among them that I am not in league with, just as there are hard core radicals on both sides of every issue. So, while I did not want my rights shoved down my throat to the extent that some radicals seemed to want, I did want choices, period.

The choice to study and work hard to earn the same wage as a man, the choice to vote, own property and basically be in charge of my own business … including my own body. Women did not gain rights all by themselves. There were men who helped. Most of us like men, so the majority didn’t want to alienate males or dominate them—we just wanted the same human rights and choices they had. Bless you, men with the attitudes you expressed are helping us keep those human rights.

For me, being pro-choice, does not mean that I am pro-abortion. But I am also not against abortion. Pro-choice to me, means just that—choice.

Unwanted children come into the world with so many strikes against them from day one, that many end up a burden to society and have deep emotional problems. It would be interesting to have a study on how many of the death row inmates were unwanted pregnancies—the irony being that radicals who demand the mother give birth—are the same radicals who demand the death penalty later on when that child has grown up and not turned out well.

The one and only person who knows if the pregnancy will result in an unwanted child is the mother.

Martha Liou
Reedsport, Ore.

Jake’s ludicrous

“That’s capitalism, folks!” (Feature story, Nov. 15)

The article you printed by Professor Jake Highton contained numerous conceptual and factual errors.

A laundry list of platitudes does not negate the actual conditions of existence. “Socialism means Social Justice” is a meaningless term because “social justice” is nowhere defined, and is in fact indefinable.

The idea that Karl Marx is a great economist is ludicrous. The key elements of his economic doctrines, the labor theory of value and the exploitation of workers’ “surplus value” were refuted in the late 19th century, decades before his deluded followers established communism.

And deluded they were. Actual communism was never established, even in the Soviet Union, because of the impossibility of central planners to duplicate the millions of decisions that are made in the production process by decentralized actors. Socialism can’t calculate, because socialism would be devoid of price signals, which are absolutely necessary to allocate production and distribution of all goods and services. Pure socialism lasted for a few years as Lenin’s “War Socialism,” and then was abandoned due to the impossibility of making it work to satisfy the most basic human needs.

Economists far superior to Marx, such as Ludwig von Mises and Freiderich Hayek, debunked the entire notion of socialist production, and the dangers of totalitarianism that come from adherence to its principles.

Highton showers accolades on the socialist societies of the world for their enlightened policies regarding women, workers, etc. Yet he glosses over the horrors of the socialist regimes. Would he advise anyone to move to North Korea? How about Cuba where people drive 1950’s automobiles, where doctors in their wonderful health care system are forbidden to emigrate. By the way, the health care system in Cuba is a two-tiered, not egalitarian system. Party bosses and international heads of state like the Venezuelan strong man Chavez get access to the best care. Ordinary workers have to bring their own bedclothes to crowded hospitals devoid of supplies. Old age homes have been photographed in European magazines as filthy and covered with cockroaches.

A self-styled intellectual, Professor Highton would be surprised to know that others know exactly why “intellectuals” favor big government—because government provides them with a tax-funded platform to present their bizarre views, which would have a much harder time being heard in the real world without government subsidies.

Like all socialists, he professes to abhor war, while refusing to acknowledge it is the state, not the capitalist system of production and distribution, that wages war. He rejects war, but embraces the coercion and inhumane bureaucracy that accompanies big government. His class war is simply misguided: it is not the wealthy who are the enemy of the people, but the bureaucrats, politicians and crony capitalists who form around the slimy coercion of state power.

Brendan Trainor
Reno

Yes

“That’s capitalism, folks!” (Feature story, Nov. 15)

Ummm, isn’t it a bit early for the April Fools’ Day edition?

Dave Abeloe
Reno