Tom, and you can bet certain Claremontista faux-libertarian popinjays would say this was a price “worth paying”–the same type of person who would say that “slavery is so evil that it was worth all the awful depredations of the Civil War to end it, and would have been worth more”. To paraphrase Joe Sobran’s sarcastic response to this kind of nonsense, “I’ll raise you–I’ll stipulate that a billion rapes would have been a cheap price to free a single slave” (only to re-enslave them under different form). (See also this post for more on Sobran’s reply to such nonsense.)
[LRC cross-post]
