The Most Private of Property

As a small 'l' libertarian I am philosophically "pro-choice" in terms of the ever-controversial issue of abortion.  The great Murray N. Rothbard lays it down clearly in this passage from his book, The Ethics of Liberty:
                   
   The proper groundwork for analysis of abortion is in every man’s absolute right of self-ownership. This implies immediately that every woman has the absolute right to her own body, that she has absolute dominion over her body and everything within it. This includes the fetus. Most fetuses are in the mother’s womb because the mother consents to this situation, but the fetus is there by the mother’s freely-granted consent. But should the mother decide that she does not want the fetus there any longer, then the fetus becomes a parasitic “invader” of her person, and the mother has the perfect right to expel this invader from her domain. Abortion should be looked upon, not as “murder” of a living person, but as the expulsion of an unwanted invader from the mother’s body.[2] Any laws restricting or prohibiting abortion are therefore invasions of the rights of mothers.

Many readers of this blog will agree with me on this one topic. I see abortion as an issue for a woman to decide - not for a lawmaker to decide for her. Abortion, because it involves the most private of property, is one of the most fundamental issues of property rights; I wonder, then, why many of the same people who feel that a woman's "right to choose" is protected through property rights do not apply this same principle to other complex matters such as drug use, foreign policy, and health care.

The fascist health care bill that just passed the House is a clear violation of natural human rights. Contained in this bill is law requiring every person in America to purchase from a private company health insurance. (By the way, 16,500 new IRS agents need to be hired to enforce this heinous law.) If I, for whatever reason, choose not to purchase health insurance, I will be fined - and ultimately jailed - by armed thugs. This is wrong for so many reasons, but it is most dubious in terms of my ownership of my own body: being forced, by penalty of jail, to do something to protect myself from harm is the true crime. It is not the job of elected officials to legislate what I do with my body.  Their job is to legislate what other people do with my body!  If someone hits me in the head with a bat because they want my wallet, then it's punishment time.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, laws prohibiting the use of drugs are equally wrong, for the express reason that they allow the government to tell you what you can and cannot due with your most private of property - yourself.  The list goes on and on: prostitution, laws prohibiting the sale of your organs, gambling laws, and America's foreign policy. (Talk about property theft! State-sponsored murder is the most egregious form of property rights infringement.) What's more, all of these unjust infringements are funded by  the theft of your private property - your money - through taxation.

Many see the crime in laws that prohibit a woman's natural right to choose what she does with her reproductive organs - yet refuse to recognize the crimes of a similar nature that are committed against us all on a daily basis, through innumerable laws dictating even the most mundane aspects of our lives. Am I overlooking some obvious explanation for this apparent hypocrisy?