David McElroy

Thomas wasn’t supposed to come live with me. He was supposed to go live on a farm. If a woman had done what she had said she was going to do, he never would have come home with me. He would have spent time chasing bugs and mice on a farm. Who knows? All I know is I’m glad it worked out as it did.

I first saw a little kitten hanging around outside a hair salon a few blocks from my house. I assumed he belonged to someone, but I didn’t see anyone to ask. The place where he stayed was right next to a busy road and it was a block away from a busy highway. So it wasn’t a safe place for a kitten.

I finally got the chance to ask someone after a few days. The salon was closed, but one of the haircutters was there and happened to step outside as I was passing by. She said he had been there for a couple of weeks, but nobody knew anything about him other than that he was skinny and reasonably friendly. We talked about it for a little while and she decided she was going to take him to live at someone’s farm. She seemed sincere, so I assumed he was going to have a home. She said she was going to take him the next day.

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For too long, many who believe in individual freedom have been intimidated about asserting the morality of one simple truth: Nobody has the right to forcibly take things from another person — even if the majority decide it’s a good idea.

For centuries, slavery has existed in this world. Ever since one man discovered the ability to force other men and women to do his will, people have been enslaving each other. It wasn’t an issue that affected just one race or nationality or religion. At one time or another, people of every group have tried to enslave people who they deemed unworthy of being free.

For most of human history, nobody much questioned this barbaric practice. Even in the Bible, it was routinely accepted as the natural course of life. The practice wasn’t condemned or praised. It was merely a natural fact of nature, as far as anyone seemed to understand.

It wasn’t really until the 19th century that things started changing. Until that time, a few slaves had escaped, of course. Brief (and largely unsuccessful) slave rebellions weren’t terribly uncommon. What happened to change everything, so much that there are remarkably few people today who would defend the practice?

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The great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein was one of my first favorite writers, back when I started reading his juvenile fiction when I was about 12 or 13. I had no idea that he had already arrived at some of the conclusions it would take me decades to find.

There’s a widely held belief that Heinlein was a libertarian, but that’s much more complicated than most people think. He was pretty much an outright socialist in the early decades of his life, then a hardcore cold warrior after that. Still, libertarian themes emerged, most famously in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”

Whatever he was in the early parts of his life, he gave us some of the best literary efforts on ideas related to freedom. I was reminded of that earlier this week when I saw this quoted, which comes from “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long“:

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