A vice is a personal bad habit, it's something you inflict on yourself. Smoking cigarettes, watching Shortland Street, and listening to Country music are bad habits. All of these things are distinguished by the fact that any harm is self-inflicted, there are no victims here. Liberty means, amoung other things, the freedom to be the master of your own habits- be they good or bad habits- and nobody, no government, can force you to follow their standards against your will. In libertarian society there are no victimless crimes.

And it goes to show, doesn't it, how far short we are of the full liberty
we deserve when it's the Beehive that gets the final say about where and
when you can buy and sell and smoke and eat and grow and wear and throw and chop down and read and say and play and watch. If the Beehive didn't choose to police our private lives in so many ways I'd be far less pissed off.

But still I wouldn't be satisfied! Because what REALLY makes me red-hot angry is the way the haughty self-assured bossy-booted self-appointed dictators of my habits (and yours!) conduct themselves. The self-rightious conceit of socialist films like
The Corporation put Rick-sized holes in the roof, and me into orbit.

Even though the fascist bastard is ramming his standards down our throats he dresses it up with out-of context statistical manipulations ("12 Kiwis prematurely die a day from smoking") and the pretense of jurisdiction. Those in the media cooperate by clothing the will to enslave and dominate our every-day lives by whipping us with sober voices, biased camera angles, selective research, and carefully placed melodramatic music! Do they really think they can fool us into believing anything they like by wrapping it in these airs and graces?

That's why watching what this New Zealand short film exposes is such a relief to me.
click on picture-link above

posted by Rick  # 2:52:00 PM