How so, you say? Are not Libertarians opposed to coercive government control and opposed to forcing people to violate their personal ethics? Well, yes, that would ordinarily be the case, but Glenn Reynolds supports birth control and abortion. He also appears to support euthanasia – having supported the government enforced death by starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo. So Glenn’s Libertarian principles are often guided by his personal preferences. They are malleable.
On his web site “Instapundit” he identifies himself thus: I'm interested in everything, but my chief interest is in the intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberty. The vast majority of my writing touches on this in one way or another.
He comments on an issue on TNR’s Corner in which there is a discussion of pharmacists and the dispensing of birth control.
I HAVE A LIBERTARIAN SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM: Over at The Corner we're seeing a rather large number of abortion-related posts today. In this one (which really goes beyond the abortion issue) Kathryn Jean Lopez decries a poll showing that 80% of Americans think that pharmacists ought to have to fill prescriptions for contraceptives even if they're personally opposed to birth control.
Of course, this only matters because pharmacists enjoy a government-created monopoly on the dispensing of prescription drugs. Just take that away, and the problem disappears, too. In the meantime, like others who enjoy government monopolies, they are forced to make some concessions to public convenience. That doesn't strike me as an overwhelming imposition, but if the pharmacy profession feels otherwise, I'll be the first to support a move to eliminate its privileged position.
The problem for Professor Reynolds is that reality intrudes into theory. If there were ONE government licensed pharmacist dispensing drugs, it would seem that a case could be made that the scarcity of pharmacists would create a problem for people looking for birth control or the morning after pill. But, for example, the environs of Knoxville have a plentiful supply of pharmacies. Knoxville, the home of the University of Tennessee where Glenn Reynolds is a law professor, has a population (2000 census) of 173,890. The Knoxville area has 5 Kroger stores with pharmacies, 20 CVS pharmacies, 9 Walgreen’s, 17 Wal-Mart Pharmacies and this only counts the pharmacies associated with some the major national chains. To suggest that we must force the few pharmacists who have moral objections to providing either birth control or abortificants appears to be both illiberal and coercive. There is no scarcity of pharmacists or pharmacies so convenience is a smokescreen.
So we have a case where technology – in this case the technology of birth control and abortion – touches on individual liberty. And Professor Reynolds comes out against … individual liberty … for the sake of (wait for it) … convenience!
Glen then goes on to make a snarky comment about removing the special licensing requirements of pharmacists if they wish to follow their own consciences. There is a case to be made for that – on Libertarian grounds - just as there is a case for breaking up the legal monopoly and removing the privileges of university faculty, especially tenured faculty. Given the animosity generated among the non-tenured portion of the population by Ward Churchill and his ilk, I’m all in favor of that.
What I found most interesting in Professor Reynolds’s argument is the means by which the law can be molded to achieve the desired result. The tools are there: Interstate commerce, emanations and penumbras, convenience; all ways of imposing judicial preferences. Makes you ponder.
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