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Son of a gun.

No sooner had I posted my “elevator pitch” for liberty, but Billy Beck points me to Wendy McElroy’s excellent expansion of the idea, “A Legal Presumption of Competence.”

A core principle of the Nanny State is that people do not know their best interests and must be treated like children with the State acting as guardian. Indeed, that’s where the word “nanny” comes from. The Nanny State proceeds from the presumption that you are incompetent to administer your own life. Even fully-functioning adults are deemed unable or unwilling to make wise decisions and, so, the state rushes in to fill the void with extensive regulation of every individual’s personal health and safety.

How much transfat or salt can be in your fast food burger? You are too obese, too nutritionally ignorant, too addicted to McDonalds to be trusted. Should you smoke, drink, or chow down on sweets? Of course not! But if you do, then, like a good parent, the State will force you to bear the cost of irresponsibility by uber-taxing your minor vices and imprisoning you for the major ones.

The “wise parent” list scrolls on and on: wear a helmet while bicycling, don’t use saccharine, no public nudity, don’t loiter in parks, monitor your words to coworkers, don’t download porn, take a urine test at work, don’t drive too fast, take only approved drugs and only in the prescribed fashion, strap on your safety belt, pay a tax for the error of fast food, no smoking in public places, register your handgun, don’t use incandescent bulbs, recycle, homogenize all milk, buy health insurance. . . . And, recently, Maine was pushing to eliminate sex-specific bathrooms because separate “men’s” and women’s” rooms discriminate against your gender rights. Yes, where you take a piss is now a matter of state to be debated by legislatures, and all because they want to protect you. Happily, Maine has backed away from politicizing toilets.

It gets better. Read it all.

But especially read this:

There is a word to describes the situation in which another party claims ownership over the body of another: it is “slavery.” As such, the Nanny State is misnamed. Although it would like to project the image of a wise guardianship of children — a sort of stern Mary Poppins who uses a “spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down” — a more accurate image is that of a slave owner. One hand of the Nanny State may be wagging an admonishing finger at you but the other hand is holding a whip at-the-ready.

Slavery. That’s really what we’re talking about here.

Oh, and that’s not all from Beck:

The entire effect — if not the purpose — of a jaywalking statute is to strip the individual of that which he is born with: the principal device with which humans are able and naturally authorized to make their ways through the world.
…
Me? I know how to get across a street. My parents saw to that at an early age.

As usual, Beck gets right to core of the thing, and you should read every golden word.

This was his comment over at Radley’s Agitator article concerning a woman who got punched in the face by a cop over a jaywalking ticket.

John Venlet was talking about “Fort Sumters”, and I was talking about small individual actions, “candles not forest fires”.

This, folks, is what candles look like.

Also notice in the video that damn near every person in the crowd had a phonecam out. No effort to arrest the guy making this video, it would have been futile.

Imagine the woman quoting the Constitution, the law, the Declaration, Locke, Paine, Henry, Jefferson, or, hell, Beck, making a principled stand against a minor tyranny.

Now imagine everybody in that crowd with a gun on their hip, nodding their heads at every word she says and scowling at the cops.

Imagine that freedom, liberty itself, was politically correct.

Hahahaha! What a ridiculous idea! I slay myself sometimes.