My Political Post for the Season
Originally published at The Mouse's Tale. You can comment here or there.
So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.
Thinking about the election tomorrow, this quote jumped into my head and won’t go away. From where things stand right now, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will be the next President of the United ( Read more... )
> Is a fetus legally considered human?
This isn't hard. In a total vacuum of abortion law, the second question doesn't matter (though the answer is "no"), and the answer to the first depends on the law.
In general, a fetus is not, and has never been, considered a person under the law. This is evidenced by the fact that, in the law, when protections are assigned to the fetus, the fetus is called out separately by name. This special handling is a strong indicator that the fetus is not included in the general definitions for the rights of and crimes against people.
As to whether or not killing a fetus is murder, well, Michigan's MCL 750.322 considers it manslaughter. That's technically different than murder (MCL 750.316, 317), but probably close enough.
> Because all of them were better than nothing
Is any decision made by a court better than no decision?
> Government doesn't have to be inefficient.
It doesn't have to be, but it is. It always is. It always has been. And the reason is fairly simple. The government has no incentive to be anything else. The government can't go out of business and it's hard to the point of absurdity to fire a government employee. Pay scales are stunningly mechanical. There are no rewards in government for innovative ideas. Any agency which spends under budget finds itself a target for budget cuts, rather than a bonus. And whenever anyone's tried to change these things, they've mostly found that their jobs don't last too long.
So tell me, how do you get performance out of a system which doesn't reward success?
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You use a system that doesn't suck. Yeah, sure, it would require a revamp on such a scale that would amount to taking everything apart and putting it back together, but government need not be inefficient.
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