You Can’t Make an Omelette without Breaking a Few Eggs

by on April 6, 2008 · 6 comments

…or in this case, you can’t stop the terrorists without occasionally letting a baby die while customs officials inspect his paperwork. I hope the people responsible for this spend some time in prison.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • Sarah

    Very sad.

  • Sarah

    Very sad.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/ enigma_foundry

    The other point here is: if we had spent the money we are spending on the “War on Terror” what else could we have done with that money?

    Paid for a national health insurance program (not a favorite thing here in libertarian land) of of course. So in addition to to wrongs committed (angering the rest of the world at USA, killing this baby, among the thousands more killed (for example, by the pollution from depleted uranium bullets) there is also the lost opportunity–what we could have done with that money which has now been squandered, for no good reason.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/ enigma_foundry

    The other point here is: if we had spent the money we are spending on the “War on Terror” what else could we have done with that money?

    Paid for a national health insurance program (not a favorite thing here in libertarian land) of of course. So in addition to to wrongs committed (angering the rest of the world at USA, killing this baby, among the thousands more killed (for example, by the pollution from depleted uranium bullets) there is also the lost opportunity–what we could have done with that money which has now been squandered, for no good reason.

  • http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com MikeT

    I would rather see them hang for murder, rather than get a few years in prison. This is no less morally negligent than a police officer stopping someone carrying someone who is having a heart attack to the hospital, and insisting on writing them a parking ticket right now as opposed to after the operation. I don’t think it matters that they didn’t intend to kill this child–any reasonable human being would have seen at that time that such a course of action might kill the child, therefore they are utterly responsible for that child’s death in every meaningful sense as a murderer on the street would be.

  • http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com MikeT

    I would rather see them hang for murder, rather than get a few years in prison. This is no less morally negligent than a police officer stopping someone carrying someone who is having a heart attack to the hospital, and insisting on writing them a parking ticket right now as opposed to after the operation. I don’t think it matters that they didn’t intend to kill this child–any reasonable human being would have seen at that time that such a course of action might kill the child, therefore they are utterly responsible for that child’s death in every meaningful sense as a murderer on the street would be.

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