Real rights for a truly just world

Hi all, it's me Dewey. I'll be popping in now and again to shed some progressive light on these dark corners. With luck, soon all the doubters will come to their senses and we can realize a true progressive utopia right here in the good old, benighted USA!

At any rate, here's my first...

In light of the Supreme Court's decision to review the McDonald's v. Chicago gun rights case, Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle asks "is the second amendement is a real amendment?"

The answer, of course, is that the second is clearly not a "real" amendment in the sense that it does not protect a real right -- nor, I hasten to add, do many of the others in the supremely over-hyped "bill of rights".

Real rights are more solid and lasting. They are granted by well-intentioned progressive overlords and include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:
- The right to effective, extensive, up-to-date medical care
- The right to nutritious, environmentally-sustainable, delicious food
- The right to clean, attractive, well-designed, modern housing situated in easily-walkable, vibrantly-diverse, multi-use communities
- The right to meaningful, sustainable, socially-responsible employment
- The right to societally-approved free expression of sexual preference with other consenting beings

The provision of these rights should be society's top -- indeed, perhaps only -- goal. Protecting supposed "rights" like "free speech" or "freedom of religion" or "free assembly" or "the right to bear arms" or whatever else is beyond outmoded.

In a society as rich as ours, every single person's "freedom" should be utterly trammeled if that is what is necessary to provide everyone with an equitable, meaningful, environmentally-sustainable, socially-reponsible existence.

Sure, we have this atavistic desire to cling to these archaic concepts, and that is largely understandable b/c they are familiar and comfortable. But we will not be living in a just, progressive world until we throw them on the dustbin of history as they deserve and allow our betters to redesign our society in a more perfect form.

Naturally, the evil Republicans will try to frighten us with their soceror's talk of "negative rights" and "limited government". Hopefully, the Supreme Court will make the right decision and end our country's sad devotion to this ancient religion of so-called "rights" and help us to conjure up a new progressive age and discover a base for meaningful growth. Then we can be proud of the technological progressive achievements we have constructed.

New Guns for Criminals Program

Caught a story on NY1 last night about the expansion to Manhattan of a gun buyback program that has apparently been running in Brooklyn for a little while.

I'd just like to point out that gun buyback programs are indisputably stupid. They are a classic example of having good intentions and designing a government program that seems to straightforwardly advance those intentions but actually works precisely to undermine them.

When you buy guns you are enlarging the demand for guns. This increases the value of guns. This will increase the amount of guns supplied. Period.

Imagine it for any other non-gun thing and you will immediately see that it's true. In this excellent post an economist makes exactly this point using sneakers as the example. If the government decided to buy back sneakers, would we expect to see fewer people wearing sneakers afterwards? Or would we expect people to take the chance to sell their old, crappy sneakers and use the money to buy new, nice sneakers?

Why would we expect the same program targeting guns to have any different result?

The best part is that the success of this lunacy is judged based on how many guns they manage to buy. Awesome. You are tallying up the number of people who like to buy guns to whom you have given money to upgrade their gun. Well done.