QotD: Judicial Activism

For the better part of six decades, in fact, judicial activism was associated almost exclusively with the protection of economic rights, while its counterpart, judicial restraint, was the rallying cry of liberal reformers. Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, as the states began legislating a variety of new "progressive" regulations, it was judges acting in the name of private property and "liberty of contract" that "usurped" the power of the people, "invented" new rights, and gave birth to judicial activism as we know it today.

This history suggests that a principled form of libertarian judicial activism — that is, one that consistently upholds individual rights while strictly limiting state power — is essential to the fight for a free society. In fact, a genuinely libertarian jurisprudence would, in the words of the legal scholar Randy Barnett, "requir[e] the state to justify its statute, whatever the status of the right at issue." The real legal challenge facing libertarians isn't judicial activism; it is defending individual rights from the liberals and conservatives who seek to take our liberties away.

Damon W. Root, "Unleash the Judges: The libertarian case for judicial activism", Reason, 2005-07

Meet the USLP candidates

David Weigel has a look at "wildest Libertarian Party nomination fight in decades". After the big names, he presents the usual list of names nobody should expect to see on the final ballot:

9. The others. There is absolutely zero chance that John Finan, Barry Hess, Dave Hollist, Daniel Imperato, Alden Link, or Robert Milnes will get the Libertarian Party’s nomination. They are occasionally entertaining, and they are harmless. Imperato, in particular, has run a campaign worthy of Max Headroom, bidding (with no success) for the Constitution and Green Party nominations, claiming to run a multi-billion-dollar international organization, to speak seven languages, and to be descended from Emperor Nero. (If that actually was true, why would anyone admit it?) "He is the most ridiculous candidate I have ever seen," says Starchild.

FLDS update

Jacob Sullum asks some pointed questions about the state's interest in removing several hundred children from their mothers:

I'm not quite as old-fashioned as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), which hews to the early-marriage customs of the 19th century and the polygamous practices of biblical times. But I'm old-fashioned enough to believe the government needs a good reason to pull a crying, clinging child away from her mother and hand her over to the care of strangers.

The possibility that the child might marry an older man 10 or 12 or 14 years from now does not cut it. Citing that long-term, speculative danger to justify the certain, immediate damage it has done by forcibly separating hundreds of children from their parents, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has violated its duty to take such extreme measures only when there's no other way to prevent imminent harm.

The department took custody of 463 minors who were living at the FLDS church's Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch in Eldorado after an April 3 raid that was based on an abuse report police believe was a hoax. On Monday state officials said the children, who are now living in group homes or shelters, include 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17, of whom 31 are pregnant or have children.

It's all very well to act on the basis of credible intelligence, which this case does not seem to have had, but it certainly appears as if the state is treating the FLDS children differently than they would if it had been a non-religious group (or [ahem] if it was another religion which also has a penchant for polygamy). Laws are created in order to apply equally . . . and that does not appear to be happening here.

Some ideas just won't go away

So it is with the idea of creating new states where existing ones are not meeting expectations. Katherine Mangu-Ward has more:

If Peter Thiel funds something, it's bound to be cutting-edge awesome.

He is a supporter of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which seeks to slow, stop, and eventually reverse aging. He was a producer of the film Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's charmingly ambiguous novel about a pro-tobacco lobbyist. An early investor in social networking, he was involved with Linked In and was the first investor in Facebook. He's big at the Singularity Institute (reason's Ronald Bailey caught up with him at the Singularity Summit earlier this year, check out the interview in the May print edition), which ponders and pushes artificial intelligence in preparation for a Vernor Vingeian "intelligence explosion." His first success was PayPal, which he originally hoped "would grow to become an extra-governmental system of currency, something reminiscent of the world described in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, in which programmers use encryption to create an offshore data haven free from government control."

And last week, Thiel announced a $500,000 investment — the same amount he put into Facebook in June 2004 — in the Seasteading Institute. Seasteading, or "homesteading on the high seas," is an idea that has long attracted libertarians and others who would like to see a little more competition between forms of government. The idea is to get out into international waters and set up a floating outpost (or 12, or 1,200) from which people can come and go, experimenting with different types of legal, social, and contractual arrangements.

Micronations have been discussed before.

Illegal in Montreal, too

A couple of days back, I made fun of my home town for their sudden attempt to create a crime of "taking photos of storefronts". Apparently, Montreal is feeling left out, so they're creating a new crime of illegal sitting in a park:

Most people who walk by Émilie Gamelin Park downtown see its many granite surfaces as an invitation to sit and relax.

Dozens were doing just that in the sun yesterday and ever since the park opened in 1992.

But as a Concordia University student found out Saturday, Montreal police, if they so choose, can hit you with a $628 ticket for nothing more menacing than sitting on a ledge.

The connection is, of course, attempting to suppress photography by "civilians".

Freezing assets without recourse to the law

As reported by the BBC, around 70 people in Britain have been, in effect, economically arrested without charge:

Mr Justice Collins said Orders in Council were not subject to the same Parliamentary scrutiny as normal legislation, each being laid before Parliament the day after it was made and coming into force the day after.

He said this was not the proper way to approach asset-freezing and that Parliament should step in.

He gave the Treasury leave to go to the Court of Appeal, delaying quashing the orders until then.

Jonathan Crow QC, for HM Treasury, had told him the UK government would be left in violation of a UN Security Council order were the orders to be quashed immediately.

The Treasury said the asset-freezing regime and individual asset freezes would remain in place pending the appeal.

A spokesman said the asset-freezing regime made an "important contribution" to national security by helping prevent funds being used for terrorism and was "central to our obligations under successive UN Security Council resolutions".

So it is possible to prevent someone from spending a penny of their own money, without charging them with a crime, and they have no recourse to law? Is this Britain or Soviet Russia during the purges? If the concern is that some of the money is going to be given to terrorists, then surely it would be enough to track the individuals' financial affairs without depriving them of their property? If they've committed no crime, the state should keep its grubby paws off!

Is this yet another move in the direction of enshrining precrime as the law of the land?

H/T to Guy Herbert writes:

The distinction between the legal order in Western democracies and the tyrannies of Stalinist Russia or modern China or the Arab gulf states, is often thought to be stark. In Britain in particular, we are complacent that 800 years of the common law will protect us against the overreaching power of state functionaries.

Today comes a case that shows this conceit to be ill-founded. It was already widely known that the Home Secretary would like the power to lock anyone up for seven weeks on her say-so. But it is not in effect yet, and is likely to be opposed in parliament. Who knew that the British state is already punishing 70 people with effective suspension of all their economic rights on mere accusation, by freezing their assets by Treasury order without any legal warrant or process?

More on the FDLS case

A few links on the recent FDLS situation:

• Jesse Walker's "First They Came for the Toddlers..."
• "Grits for Breakfast" roundup of posts
• "The Polygamy Files" from the Salt Lake Tribune

For those coming in late . . . there's plenty of paranoia flowing, even this long after the notorious raid on the Branch Davidiansin Waco turned into a prolonged siege, eventually costing the lives of 82 people.

QotD: Banning "evil-looking" guns

When a rash of gun murders takes place, it makes sense for the police to do one of two things: renew tactics that have been effective in the past at curbing homicides, or embrace ideas that have not been tried before.

But those options don't appeal to Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis. What he proposes is a crackdown on assault weapons.

I'm tempted to say this is the moral equivalent of a placebo—a sugar pill that is irrelevant to the malady at hand. But that would be unfair. Placebos, after all, sometimes have a positive effect. Assault weapons bans, not so much.

If there are too many guns in Chicago, it's not because of any statutory oversight. The city has long outlawed the sale and possession of handguns. It also forbids assault weapons. If prohibition were the answer, no one would be asking the question.

Steve Chapman, "The Cops That Couldn't Shoot Straight: Chicago police and their proposed, unworkable gun ban", Reason Online, 2008-04-24

QotD: Offensive Clothing

In the late 1990s era of no-logo vogue, cultural commentators fretted that the once-democratic medium of the T-shirt had been co-opted by corporations, and that T-shirt buyers were concerned only with raising the planet's Hilfiger consciousness and saving the FUBUs. "The slogans on contemporary T-shirts are increasingly meaningless," the novelist and columnist Russell Smith observed in The Globe and Mail in 2000. "Most of them are simply the brand name of the T-shirt itself."

Now that our T-shirts are so blithely outspoken — and deliberately offensive — on every issue from Medicare to Britney Spears, it sometimes seems as if we’d like to ban our way back to a more sartorially decorous era. Ultimately, however, the T-shirt skirmishes that continuously erupt are oddly reassuring. Can the public schools be as out of control as they're often alleged to be if all it takes to get suspended from one is an "I ♥ My Wiener" shirt? Has our public sphere grown as hopelessly coarse as our loudest cultural scrub maids insist if a shirt featuring a faux fishing theme and the phrase "Master Baiter" is enough to make Southwest Airlines ground you?

Shouldn't we take comfort in the fact that so many high school students are ready to fight for their right to champion the unborn, maternal hotties, and whatever else they can think of to test the limits of Tinker v. Des Moines? T-shirts may intrude upon our lives in the public sphere, but they're also our most vivid reminder that free speech is woven into the fabric of our culture.

Greg Beato, "I'm With Stupid: The perennially embattled free speech zone over our chests", Reason, 2008-04

QotD: The Ron Paul Campaign

To be sure, by every conventional measure Paul’s presidential bid has been an abject failure — not a single primary win and only 14 delegates as of press time. Yet Paul managed to raise more than $20 million, virtually all of it online, and inspire an army of hyper-devoted and mostly youthful followers using a pitch — and a style — that will have much more to do with 21st century politics than whatever models of Buick and Oldsmobile the Democrats and Republicans eventually crank out this year. That’s how Paul pulled together over 67,000 people at the social networking site MeetUp (a total that was more than 20 times the number who signed up for the next most popular candidate, Barack Obama). That’s why he won raves from quarters as disparate as conservative commentator George Will (who called Paul "my man" on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"), punk icon Johnny Rotten (who gave Congress' "Dr. No" a celebratory shout-out during a "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" episode), plus a self-explanatory group called "Strippers for Paul."

What explained the ability of this odd politician, with his inept campaign management team, to attract gobs of money, if not actual votes? Because it was only Ron Paul who said something truly distinct this campaign about the very nature of power. Namely, that government should have less of it on all levels and in every instance. "I don't want to run your life," Paul says. "I don't want to run the economy. ... I don't want to run the world." Such sentiment is simultaneously radical and fully in the Jeffersonian tradition of governing best while governing least. The right to be left alone, as Justice Louis Brandeis once put it, is at the very center of the American experiment because it allows individuals and the communities they form to pursue happiness in competing, peaceful ways. This is especially true in Long Tail America, where people are not only increasingly tolerant of alternative lifestyles but are constantly on the hunt for ways to individualize and personalize their own lives.

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, "Tuned Out (PDF download)", Politics, March 2008

Want to win? Go where the votes are

In an LA Times article, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch introduce the largest potential source of "new" votes for candidates willing to listen to what the voters want:

Since the 1970s, the Democrats and Republicans have been leaking market share like a Chevy Nova leaking oil. In 1970, the Harris Poll asked: "Regardless of how you may vote, what do you usually consider yourself — a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or some other party?" Fully 49% of respondents chose Democrat, and 31% called themselves Republicans. In 2006, the latest year for which data are available, those figures were 36% for Democrats and 27% for Republicans. With that gap closing, it's not surprising that presidential elections have become battles over voters who identify with neither party.

Libertarians, for instance. As David Boaz of the Cato Institute and David Kirby of America's Future Foundation note in a study of public opinion polls, roughly 15% of the electorate can be considered libertarian. Such folks are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. They like gays and guns, low taxes and free speech. They are pro-globalization and antiwar. They are at the center of American politics. Win them over and you'll win every national election for the next several decades. Here are some smart — and popular — policies that will appeal not only to libertarians but to other centrist voters fed up with budget-busting compassionate conservatives and nanny-state buttinsky liberals.

QotD: SWAT raids

Over the last quarter century, we've seen an astonishing rise in paramilitary police tactics by police departments across America. Peter Kraksa, professor of criminology at the University of Eastern Kentucky, ran a 20-year survey of SWAT team deployments and determined that they have increased 1,500 percent since the early 1980s — mostly to serve nonviolent drug warrants.

This is dangerous, senseless overkill. The margin of error is too thin, and the potential for tragedy too high to use these tactics unless they are in response to an already violent situation (think bank robberies, school shootings or hostage-takings). Breaking down doors to bust drug offenders creates violent situations; it doesn't defuse them.

Radley Balko, "Senseless Overkill", Fox News, 2008-03-12

Justifying the war on (some) drugs

Radley Balko has some thoughts on the current state of play in the war on (some) drugs:

As for Dunphy's strange appeal to a junkie's authority, there are several problems with the "if you legalize drugs, everyone will become an addict" argument. Among them:

1) It assumes that prohibition is actually preventing access to illegal drugs in any meaningful way today. It isn't. I could have a bag of marijuana in my hands in about five minutes. As fast or faster than I could get a sandwich. It would probably take me 20 minutes to a half hour hunt down a small bag of heroin, but it wouldn't be difficult. And I could get either without any real fear of arrest. And I'm not a drug user. If I had actual connections, it'd be even easier. Some survey data shows high school kids can get marijuana as easily or easier than they can get alcohol.

2) It wrongly assumes that the all of the problems we associate with drugs — the bloody turf wars, the presence of particularly potent drugs like meth, the lengths to which dealers will go to get their premium, etc. — are the product of the drugs themselves, and not the product of them being prohibited. This chart helps slay that argument.

3) It assumes that the laws against using and distributing drugs are the only thing preventing a huge portion of the population from trying them, and becoming addicted to them. Legalization may indeed increase the use of currently banned drugs. But I have my doubts about a massive increase in addicts. The social stigma would still be there, as it is with alcoholism. Perhaps more people would experiment. But it isn't clear that that's a bad thing. Use is not abuse, no matter what ONDCP says in its press releases. And the vast majority of drug users — even "hard" drug users — don't turn into addicts.

I've often argued for easing the restrictions on various drugs, not because I particularly want to use them myself, but because the costs of keeping them illegal far outweigh the benefits. It's not something Canada could do in isolation from the United States, as we are too vulnerable to trade sanctions which the current government would rush to put in place if we were seen to "weaken" in the war on drugs.

Drug prohibition is working just about as well as alcohol prohibition did in the 20th century. Believe it or not, that's seen as a positive comment in drug warrior circles.

QotD: Revisiting Salem

American history is littered with examples of puritanism deranging the law, from the Salem witch trials onwards. Anthony Comstock, a 19th-century anti-porn campaigner, used his position as a postal inspector to seize 50 tons of books and 4m pictures. He boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests during his career and 15 suicides. Under Prohibition people could be imprisoned for life for consuming alcohol.

Puritanism continues to stalk the country in new guises. The most dramatic example is America's new version of Prohibition — a "war on drugs" that helps explain why one in 100 American adults are in prison. But there are plenty of humbler examples. Schools impose zero-tolerance rules that result in expulsion for minor offences. The citizens of Texas may not buy dildos. Americans are banned from drinking until they are 21.

The combination of legalism and puritanism invariably produces the same dismal results. It creates expensive government bureaucracies that seize on any excuse — rules relating to inter-state commerce are a particular favourite — to extend their powers to boss people about or spy on them. It throws up swivel-eyed zealots who pursue their manias with little sense of proportion or decency (remember Kenneth Starr). And it ends by devouring its children. Mr Spitzer is only the latest in an endless line of self-righteous crusaders impaled on their own swords.

He certainly had no choice but to resign (as he did on March 12th) if, as it seems, he broke the law. But that still leaves the bigger question of whether the law is an ass. George Bernard Shaw once defined "Comstockery" as "the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States"; but it is hardly a joke for the people who are caught in its tentacles. There are enough real problems for America's law-enforcement officials to worry about.

"The hypocrites' club: Now with a new diamond-level member", The Economist, 2008-03-13

Finland leads the way . . . but the wrong way

It's hard to credit, but the Finnish government is so determined to punish racists that it will even try to block your internet access when you quote government statistics on race issues:

Quotes from official crime statistics published by the Ministry of Justice undoubtedly "help maintain an anti-immigrationist political climate" because they prove that e.g. the Somalis commit more than 100 times more (over one hundred times more, as in, over 10,000% more) robberies per capita than the Finns do.

Yup, he quoted official crime statistics. Given that Finland has one of the highest rates of internet usage in the world, I hope this provokes a powerful backlash against the control freaks who run the country.

And, in this sort of thing, where Finland leads, Canada (and other wannabe Scandinavian countries) will follow.

Spitzer's fall may help make the case to legalize prostitution

As amusing as it has been to watch a high-flying hypocrite brought down to earth for indulging his hypocrisy, there are actually some useful ideas being aired:

I understand why Spitzer's alleged hiring of a call girl was stupid, selfish, reckless, immoral and a betrayal of his family. What I don't understand is why it was illegal.

It's not as though sex is otherwise divorced from money. If it were, hot young women would be found on the arms of poor older men as often as they are seen with rich ones. Had the New York governor wanted to buy a $4,300 bauble to seduce someone of Kristen's age and pulchritude, only his wife and his financial adviser would have objected.

It was Spitzer's effort to hide this pastime that attracted law enforcement attention. Prosecutors investigated him not because he had lipstick on his collar, but because he took steps to conceal his patronage of Emperor's Club VIP. By transferring cash to accounts controlled by fake companies, he roused suspicions of political corruption. By now, he probably wishes he had only taken a gratuity to grease a contract.

It's hard to feel excessive sympathy when a colossal hypocrite is exposed. Recently, Spitzer signed a measure increasing penalties for men caught paying for sex, who can now go to jail for as long as a year. But schadenfreude is a weak justification for laws that intrude into the bedroom.

More here.

Update, 14 March: A bit more on this same topic at Samizdata:

Recent large stories in Britain and the US keep the issue of whether prostitution should be legalised in the public eye. I think it should. The resignation this week of Eliot Spitzer, a US politician and former state prosecutor who quit after allegations about his use of prostitutes' services — despite his prosecuting them in his day job — and the recent conviction of the British murderer of five Ipswich prostitutes, convince me we should legalise it. The benefits are many:

People like Eliot Spitzer and other vicious, corrupt state officials would have fewer ways of annoying the rest of us, which is unquestionably a public good. Pimps who control prostitutes, or who attempt to do so, would have fewer opportunities to prey on such women. The spread of sexually transmitted disease would be reduced, if not eliminated because a client could shop around to find brothels that enforce hygiene checks and advertised themselves accordingly. If he caught a STD, the client could sue the brothel, just like a client can now sue a pizza joint if he or she gets food poisoning. And finally, because if an adult woman or man wants to sell sexual favours, that is their business, and no-one else's, period.

QotD: Feministic re-evaluation of prostitution

I’m fascinated by the Spitzer-inspired discussion of prostitution on blogs that identify as feminist, most of which seem to be conflicted but marginally pro-decriminalization. It's a surprisingly utilitarian back-and-forth; few posters or commenters are arguing from self-autonomy (OK, none), and most are weighing the obvious harm of denying sex workers access to law enforcement (in the case of criminalization) against the desire not to reinforce patriarchy and/or heteronormativity (in the case of legalization). Everyone seems to assume that legalizing sex work will reinforce all sorts of ugly cultural phenomena women struggle against all the time. Writes one commenter at Feministing, "I'm politically liberal, openly feminist, and opposed to sex work precisely" because of "patriarchy" and "heterosexuality issues."

I find this incoherent precisely because I share all the poster's intuitions about problematic cultural norms. Of course sexism restricts autonomy in all sorts of ways that deserve consideration when discussing the prevalence of prostitution or the choice to enter sex work. Of course it's deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are "degrading themselves" by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition — the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to "ruin" themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by "giving it away" — restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can't even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form.

Kerry Howley, "Thoughts on Thoughts on Spitzer", Hit and Run, 2008-03-11

QotD: Boomer Entitlement Syndrome

Susan Callaway seems to be offended when I spoke ill of the Boomers. Well get over it. Yours is the generation that has whined and begged for every free lunch that they could get from the government. Saying you weren't one of the whiners or beggars is like saying "Don't blame me, I voted for Kerry". So what. Even if you don't cash your Social Security checks every politician will still be doing all they can to win your aging votes and figuring out ways to dump the bill onto the next few generations. So what if you are voting against your generations desires, the rest of them aren't and that's the problem.

Ron Paul resonates with the young for a good reason. They are the ones who will get screwed the worst by all that Boomer pandering. They are the ones who are going to have to pick up the tab for the party and they don't like it. Unfortunately they are greatly outnumbered by their Boomer parents who instead of having kids decided to have extended childhoods of their own. Unfortunately we Gen X and Gen Y types don't get to have the same extended childhoods your Boomers got, we have to grow up and pay the bills your generation racked up.

Scott Graves, Letter to the editor, Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-03-09

T.J. Rodgers interview

Declan McCullagh interviews Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers:

Why the antipathy toward McCain?

There's an article in Reason magazine about McCain. He's anti-free speech. He's a war guy. Those are about as bad as you can get from a libertarian perspective.

I got turned off by him in a personal meeting. I made a presentation to him that the government is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in (technology-related) pork barrel spending. I showed that the pork barrel spending is not only fundamentally bad, but also harmful to the people getting the money, the semiconductor industry. When I got done with the presentation, he labeled the pork barrel spending "peanuts." He poked his finger in my chest and said that he's "going to get rid of your big fat stock options."

He's in favor of stifling free speech. He's in favor of the war. He doesn't truly care about lean government. You'd have difficulty picking between him and George W. Bush.

[. . .]

You're making libertarian points. Why aren't there more libertarians, or at least out-of-the-closet libertarians, in Silicon Valley?

First of all, I think Silicon Valley people, if you gave them the world's smallest quiz, my belief is you'd find that people in Silicon Valley are highly libertarian but they don't even know what that phrase means. It's not part of their vernacular. Silicon Valley people are highly apolitical. They're worried about their businesses, they're worried about growth, they're worried about technology. Sometimes they get involved in politics. They get involved on both sides of the fence...

If you would look at the people in Silicon Valley who identify themselves as Republicans, you'll find that they're free-market Republicans. What I think you'd find is that Silicon Valley Democrats have an economic free market base to them, and therefore look a lot like libertarians. Silicon Valley Republicans... aren't restrictive on social issues. You're not going to find any anti-gay, redneck Republicans in Silicon Valley.

Because they don't care that much about politics, they don't get beyond the nuances. But if you took the next layer of detail, you'll find that regardless of how they identified themselves, both sides are libertarian-ish in their leanings.

Reviews of Playmobil's latest toy

You may have heard that Playmobil, the toy company, recently introduced a toy to help train children to become jackbooted thugs TSA workers. The reviews on Amazon.com are very interesting reading:

You can also read the Fark thread for more frothing-at-the-mouth goodness.

Propaganda re-purposed

There are some very amusing (and effective) re-touched WW1/WW2 propaganda posters at this Cafe Press page:

H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward.

QotD: Inside the mind of a Drug Warrior

In any case, [new versions of the drug naloxone] certainly seem like a good idea for private groups and non-profits. It's a cost-effective way of saving lives.

But not everyone is happy. Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, recently told National Public Radio she opposes the distribution programs because — and hold on to your hat for this one — she believes life-threatening overdoses are an important deterrent to drug use.

"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services," Madras said.

Madras' reaction offers a telling glimpse into the mind of a drug warrior.

We're told that certain drugs have to be prohibited because they're too dangerous. But we should also resist efforts to make them less dangerous because doing so might encourage drug use.

It's a bizarre argument until you consider the real motivation behind it: In truth, it's not so much about the harm some drugs do; it's about an absolute moral opposition to the use of some drugs.

Even if they were completely harmless, some people simply don't like the idea that we can ingest chemicals that make us feel good.

Radley Balko, "Better Dead than High", Reason Online, 2008-03-03

QotD: Concern for the poor

I became a libertarian, politically speaking because — and I know this is going to sound sanctimonious but it is literally true — if you are really concerned about the poor people then you have to pick the system that in fact helps poor people. And the only one that has done that is democratic capitalism, period.

Ron Bailey, interviewed by Sean Higgins in "I Want to Believe?", Doublethink, 2008-02-25

Bill Buckley

William F. Buckley, Jr. died yesterday at the age of 82. Love him or hate him, he was unique in American politics. Reason's former editor Robert Poole has a farewell column posted:

I received the news of Bill Buckley's death with a great sense of loss. No, he was not a major intellectual influence on my becoming a libertarian. I have to credit Robert Heinlein and Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand for that. But since for most of us libertarianism as an intellectual and political movement has been an offshoot of conservatism, Buckley in truth was a great enabler.

By creating National Review in 1955 as a serious, intellectually respectable conservative voice (challenging the New Deal consensus among thinking people), Buckley created space for the development of our movement. He kicked out the racists and conspiracy-mongers from conservatism and embraced Chicago and Austrian economists, introducing a new generation to Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. And thanks to the efforts of NR's Frank Meyer to promote a "fusion" between economic (free-market) conservatives and social conservatives, Buckley and National Review fostered the growth of a large enough conservative movement to nominate Goldwater for president and ultimately to elect Ronald Reagan.

There's also a PDF of Reason's 1983 interview with Buckely available for download here.

Update: Radley Balko has a few things to add:

The guy got some things wrong, but he got a lot right (in both senses of the word).

Buckley leaves an enormous legacy, but to the detriment everyone, the right left Buckley years ago. Where Buckley stood athwart the tide of history and beat it back with wit, sophistication, and argument, we today get best-selling Regnery screeds from lowest-common-denominator clowns like Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and Glenn Beck. Where Buckley mistrusted government and aimed to slow the world down, he's been usurped on the right by the likes of William Kristol and David Brooks, men who want to use government to remake the world in their own image. Where Buckley flourished in cosmopolitan Manhattan and took delight in life's finer things, modern conservatism has grown disdainful of the marketplace of culture, commerce, and ideas abundant in urban areas (witness the last election, where many on the right weirdly smeared John Kerry as a "latte-sipper"—real Americans apparently drink Maxwell House). In fact, today's Bush/neocon-right is often contemptuous of commerce itself, sometimes calling the voluntary, unchecked exchange of goods, labor, and services—a pure free market—"ugly" and "crude."

The essence of public health decision making

A couple of examples of the structural weaknesses inherent in allowing bureaucrats to make medical decisions:

Stationary ambulances: "Hospitals were last night accused of keeping thousands of seriously ill patients in ambulance 'holding patterns' outside accident and emergency units to meet a government pledge that all patients are treated within four hours of admission."

Some patients are more equal than others: "Officials said that allowing Mrs. Hirst and others like her to pay for extra drugs to supplement government care would violate the philosophy of the health service by giving richer patients an unfair advantage over poorer ones."

Both examples are from the British National Health Service, but they're matched by similar situations in Canada.

Update: the state of play since 9/11

Although I've been finding his occasional (and becoming-less-occasional) 9/11 conspiracy asides to be disturbing, L. Neil Smith's summary of the state of civil and economic liberty in the United States to be pretty on-target:

In the wake of whatever happened on September 11, 2001 (whether anybody likes it or not, the facts of that event, including who was responsible, are far from settled), a fat, lazy, corrupt, rubberstamp Congress passed the so-called "U.S.A. Patriot Act" apparently without even reading it (some politicians claim there were no copies available to read — which should have caused them to reject it on the spot) destroying financial, communications, and medical privacy in this country, and with them, the tattered remains of the fundamental human right to trade with anybody for anything. Among many other new lows, for the first time, the law restricted constitutional and other rights during the period of an undeclared (and therefore totally illegal) war.

In addition to creating a new category of crime called "domestic terrorism", the act allowed the indefinite detention of a steadily widening variety of individuals, secret, warrantless searches of people's homes and businesses, and other violations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. (Freedom to travel without harrassment or intrusion had already been obliterated more than a generation earlier.) In short, with one stroke of a President's pen, America completed what had been, until then, a slow, steady, gradual descent into police statism.

The act (and supporting legislation that came later, such as the deceptively-named "Military Commissions Act" and H.R.1955/S.B.1959) mandated "studies" of biometric identification systems — I recently wrote an article about the way "studies" rapidly become law — the early origins of the notorious "No-Fly list" at airports, and fat "security" contracts for fascistic corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, the latter of which has since become a worldwide military power with a greater armed presence in Iraq than the United States government.

Meanwhile, a brand new and overwhelmingly powerful secret police establishment with the Joseph Geobbelsian monicker "Department of Homeland Security", arose to prominence and has come to dominate all other American law enforcement organizations, Constitutional or otherwise.

But that was only the beginning. The Patriot Act, scheduled to sunset in 2005, was renewed with disgusting haste and followed by Patriot II, giving the government even more power at the expense of what had been unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights.

All in all, it has been a time of bitter disillusionment. The nation's courts, for example, particularly the United States Supreme Court, have revealed themselves to be fully as corrupt and unreliable in their stewardship of the Constitution, especially of the Bill of Rights, as Congress, or even the mass media Thomas Jefferson believed — falsely, as it turned out — would preserve them. If somebody set out from the beginning, with the deliberate intention of destroying American civilization, he would be following exactly the same policies — running the Abraham Lincoln playbook — that George W. Bush is following.

Regardless of who ends up occupying the White House after the November election, you'd have to be wilfully blind not to be disturbed at how far the government has managed to extend its tendrils into so many more aspects of daily life than it had before 9/11. The restrictions on civil and economic liberties are not accompanied by jackboots and stylish uniforms, nor are they heralded by demagogues and mobs, but they're real — and growing — nonetheless.

Charter of easily-revocable temporary privileges

What little actual use there is in the current Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is being steadily undermined by the courts. This is just the latest move to make the concept of "rights" a mockery in Canadian jurisprudence:

The Ontario Court of Appeal yesterday approved the use of evidence obtained through flagrant police misconduct, saying any black eye caused to the justice system is outweighed by public interest in prosecuting a serious crime.

In a decision that even one of their fellow judges finds intolerable, a majority of the court upheld a trial judge's decision to admit evidence of 35 kilos of cocaine found in Bradley Harrison's rented SUV – despite the judge's finding an OPP officer had no legal grounds to stop the vehicle, seriously infringed the Toronto man's Charter rights and misled a court while trying to justify his actions.

The 2-1 ruling is the latest in a line of recent decisions in which the court has been accused of weakening Charter protections by refusing to exclude evidence obtained unlawfully. In a case last fall involving a gun found in a backpack at Westview Centennial Secondary School, the court said throwing out reliable evidence because of Charter violations must be balanced against public concerns about escalating gun violence.

So the message is two-fold: first, that the courts will back the police in any blatant abuse so long as the perp can be convicted, and second, that there really isn't any protection of rights in the Canadian justice system anyway.

Sweet. If you're a cop looking to harass people, that is.

H/T to Jon, my virtual landlord, for the link.

It's the inevitable result of "no-knock" raids for non-violent offences

Radley Balko updates us on the most recent "no-knock raid goes horribly wrong" case:

Ryan Frederick was arraigned today. He was charged with first-degree murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, and . . . simple possession of marijuana.

That's right. Though police still haven't told us how much marijuana they found, it wasn't enough to charge Frederick with anything more than a misdemeanor. For a misdemeanor, they broke down his door, a cop is dead, and a 28-year-old guy's life is ruined. Looks like the informant mistook Frederick's gardening hobby for an elaborate marijuana growing operation, and those Japanese maple trees for marijuana plants.

The parallels to Cory Maye are pretty striking. You've got a young guy minding his own business, with no criminal record, whose worst transgression is that he smokes a little pot from time to time. A bad informant and bad police procedures then converge, resulting in police breaking down his door while he's sleeping. He fires a gun to defend himself, unwittingly kills a cop, and now faces murder charges.

It's the inevitable result of the militarization of the civilian police forces: give them military gear, (some) military assault training, and they're going to look for ways to justify all the expense. "SWAT teams" have gone from being held in reserve for serious situations where their extra firepower might actually be needed, through being moved to standby for almost any situation, to (now) conducting commando raids on family dwellings (with children inside) for minor — and sometimes non-existent — offenses.

Does this make anyone safer? I think quite the opposite: it makes everyone less safe, including the police themselves.

QotD: Save the HRCs!

Who will there be to read before we read, and tell us what is proper for us? Who will be there to edit the editors, to copy check the copy checkers? Who will shield our vulnerable law-students, and who will tend to the commission's most industrious serial complainant? There is one person, so eggshell brittle that he has drummed up a fierce amount of business for the HRCs. Is so loyal a customer now to be ignored because the Steyn-Levant tsunami is about to rumble mercilessly on shore?

[. . .]

Mostly I fear, if the HRCs are tied up, Canadians will be reading, unguided, what they choose to read, deciding for themselves what they like and what they don't, will discard a book or pass it to a friend, like a column or curse one - lit only by the light of their own reason.The horror! Before we know it, we'll have an unstoppable epidemic of free speech, free thought, and freedom of the press. And, surely, no one wants that. Otherwise, why would we have human rights commissions?

Rex Murphy, "Coming to a human rights commission near you", Globe and Mail, 2008-01-27

The anti-drug frenzy reaches new lows

In something that could only have been ripped from the pages of The Onion, yet was not, Radley Balko reports on the criminalization of sniffing hand sanitizer:

A 14-year-old boy in Lewisville, Texas was arrested, booked, and fingerprinted last October for sniffing his teacher's hand sanitizer.

Mr. Ortiz said the family's ordeal began Oct. 19, when his son picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from the desk of his fifth-period reading teacher at Killian Middle School in Lewisville. He rubbed the gel on his hands and smelled it.

In the view of school officials, the boy "inhaled heavily," according to Mr. Ortiz, who said his son sniffed the cleanser "because it smelled good."

The youth was sent to the principal's office, and the Lewisville police officer assigned to the school began investigating.

[. . .]

Mr. Ortiz said he believed the matter was over until Tuesday when he was served with a petition charging his son with delinquency for inhaling the hand sanitizer to "induce a condition of intoxication, hallucination and elation."

He said he couldn't believe that his son would have to go to court for smelling hand sanitizer. "I think it's ludicrous," said Mr. Ortiz, who blames overzealous police and prosecutors for initially pursuing the case.

Joni Eddy, assistant police chief in Lewisville, said Friday that hand sanitizer has become a popular inhalant. "That is the latest thing to huff," she said.

Let's re-read that. The kid was charged for smelling the scent of a commercially available hand sanitizer. In what world is it possible to consider this a crime? What the hell are these folks smoking?

QotD: Libertarianism, the scourge of the GOP

Without attempting to untangle the mess of that second graf — seriously, read it again — my question is this: Exactly where and how has libertarianism poisoned "public life"? Certainly not in the modern, Weekly Standard-approved national GOP, which has shot federal spending through the roof, created mammoth new entitlements, rammed through panicky regulatory nightmares, got the feds deep into local education, and lived out the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Of all the many, many things to complain about the party that has run most of the federal government for the past eight years, "dogmatic libertarianism" has to rank somewhere near the proliferation of Esperanto.

It's always flattering that libertarianism — almost uniquely among strains of modern political thought — is constantly challenged to defend itself against its most theoretical extremes.

Matt Welch, " 'The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life'", Hit and Run, 2008-01-25

Update on AHRC investigation

Jon (my virtual landlord) sent along this link to the progress report on the interrogation of noted hatemonger Ezra Levant:

CLERK OBSERVATIONS (use extra sheets if necessary)

Defendant acknowledges awareness of charges against him. He is represented by counsel but insists on opening statement and filming the hearing. Despite warnings and brochure on self incrimination he proceeds.

Defendant states he is attending under protest and would do crime again. States belief that AHRCC has no authority to prosecute. Under eye contact, defendent's counsel shrugs. Defendant says hearing in violation of "separation Mosque and State" (note: potential violation of Section 118-c(a) AHRCC Innuendo Act?). Claims "original intent" of Commission not to enforce Islamic law. Defendant apparently unfamiliar with AHRCC interoffice memo HVM-d11, "Koranic Compliance Guidelines for Non-Muslim Associates."

Calls Commission "dump for junk," cites previous cases. Calls AHRCC "joke," "pseudo court," "Judge Judy." Cites critical statements of Commission founder, even though he doesn't work here any more. Says authority unlawful, unconstitutional. Counsel seems oblivious to client's contempt, is seen reading "Highlights for Children" magazine from waiting room.

Starts yapping about British common law, Magna Carta, Canadian law, UN Declaration of Human Rights, other documents of white male privilege, etc. Subject seems agitated. Stuff about conscience, religion, expression blah blah blah. Seems to be stonewalling because none of this has any reference in my copy of Publication AHRCC-0503(k), "Hearing Guidelines for Human Rights Clerks." Long diatribe about Sharia Law, radical Islam.

It's not Bullshit, but it is more Penn

If you're a fan of Penn & Teller's Bullshit, you may want to direct your browser here, for a selection of uninhibited, unedited, unshaven Penn Jillette.

H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward for the link.

In other news, GPS receiver sales spike in Providence R.I.

Frequent commenter "Da Wife" sent along this link, which explains why sales of GPS units to sex offenders has skyrocketed in Providence:

A tech company with ties to a school district plans to test a tracking system by putting computer chips on grade-schoolers' backpacks, an experiment the ACLU ripped Monday as invasive and unnecessary.

The pilot program set to start next week in the Middletown school district would have about 80 children put tags containing radio frequency identification chips, or RFID chips, on their schoolbags. It would also equip two buses with global positioning systems, or GPS devices.

The school and parents will be able to track students on the bus, and the district hopes the program will improve busing efficiency, Superintendent Rosemarie Kraeger said. The devices are intended to record only when students enter and exit the bus, and the GPS would show where the bus was on it's route.

Because, of course, it's far too difficult to attach an RFID to a schoolbus . . . putting them on the kids is the obvious solution. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Calfornia temperature controls

Perry de Havilland finds that California is hoping to become even more intrusive into the lives of private individuals:

According to American Thinker, there is a move afoot to nationalise the ability of people to control the temperatures of their own homes (yes, really!) in, where else, the People's Republic of California:

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a "programmable communicating thermostat" or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes' central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a "non-removable " FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During "price events" those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During "emergency events" the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

Just remember . . . once you've accepted that government has a role in setting energy prices, they've got a foothold into controlling energy usage, too. And in this proposal, they're creating an even greater incentive for folks to go "off the grid". Wait and see how they choose to address that leak, should enough people attempt to take advantage of it.

QotD: Libertarian turncoats

One career strategy I considered during my happy time at Reason magazine was to become just enough of a bright boy of the libertarian movement to allow me to stage a very public falling out, write a tell-all book with a title like Ex-Friends or Movement Man or Up From Libertarianism or Whose Freedom?, then build a career as a David Horowitz/Michael Lind-style intellectual turncoat, getting paid to warn the masses about the dangers posed by my erstwhile allies. The strategy was unworkable for many reasons: It was a little too dishonest even for me; libertarianism doesn't generate enough public interest to support a longterm market in defection; and as it happens, defectors from and within libertarianism are a dime a dozen.

But the tactic I was planning to use would have been very effective: Simply collect story after story of the moonlight-and-magnolias Confederate nostalgists, stop-the-war-on-men misogynists, traditionalist homophobes, scientific racists and similar fringe characters who seemed to gravitate toward libertarianism, in numbers that I and others found remarkable.

Actually, I probably wouldn't have been very good at this tactic either: I don't do well with policing unacceptable commentary, "kicking" people "to the curb," writing colleagues out of polite society, defining away extremists and all those other things movement types (in all movements) love to do.

Tim Cavanaugh, "Paul vault opens can of worms", L.A. Times Blogs, 2008-01-09

Everyone weighs in with comments on the "Ron Paul" newsletters

Matt Welch rounds up the first batch of responses to the "Ron Paul" newsletter revelations:

David Harsanyi:

The end of Ron Paul? For me, it is. Not the principles, but the man. Sure, Paul has experienced tremendous grassroots support and I've been very sympathetic to a lot of his strong Constitution-based rhetoric. But if even a slither of the quotes in this New Republic article by James Kirchick are accurate, I'm not sure how mainstream libertarians can absolve him.

David Bernstein:

I give Paul the benefit of the doubt on this one, and assume that some right-wing cranks paid him to use him name on their newsletters, and he didn't actually read the newsletters carefully if at all, much less write them. That shows very poor judgment, but is a lot less damning than if he did read, write, or edit these newsletters.

[. . .]

Ryan Sager:

I truly don't understand the Paulites defense that Ron Paul bears no responsibility for any of this . . . just because. (Read the comments to the article — as usual for the Paul brigades, they're unhinged.)

At least Andrew Sullivan may be waking up to the fact that the Ron Paul "revolution" is a front for something much uglier than opposition to the Iraq war and defense of the Constitution.

[. . .]

Ann Althouse:

Look, I said it on Bloggingheads: The things Ron Paul has been saying made me suspect that his libertarianism was a cover for racism.

Much, much more in the original article, with links a-plenty. No matter how it turns out, this is an ugly development for the Paul campaign, and even more so for libertarians and classic liberals.

QotD: The Ron Paul newsletter

I'm disappointed in Paul and in his campaign.

First, a few caveats. I think Paul's prone to nutty conspiracy theories, but I don't think he's a racist, at least not today. Perhaps there was a time when he held views that I and many people reading this site would find repugnant. But I certainly don't think that's the case now. Paul's temperament and demeanor in public does not suggest he's the kind of person capable of writing the bile Kirchick quotes in his article. Paul's position on the drug war alone — which he has acknowledged disproportionately affects minorities — would do more for blacks in America than any proposal any of the other candidates currently has on the table. Paul has also recently rescinded his support for the federal death penalty, also due to its disproportionate impact on blacks. Those two positions alone certainly don't indicate a candidate who fears "animal" blacks from the urban jungle are coming to kill all the white people.

I also think the Paul phenomenon ought to be separated from any personal baggage Paul may have. Yes, there are some losers who support Paul's candidacy. Any time you're a fringe candidate cobbling together support from those who feel disaffected and left behind by the two-party system, you're going to end up bumping elbows with a few weirdos. But there's nothing bigoted about the thousands of college kids, mainstream libertarians, war opponents, drug war opponents, and hundreds-long threads on sites like Digg and Reddit where enthusiasm for Paul's candidacy is strong. This movement is about ideas. There's a vocal, enthusiastic minority of people out there, skewing young, that is excited about "the Constitution," limited government, and personal freedom. That's significant and heartening, and shouldn't be tainted by the fallout from Kirchick's article (though I fear it will [. . .]

Radley Balko, "Ron Paul", Hit and Run, 2008-01-08

The SWAT team "dynamic entry": it's not just for drug busts anymore

Radley Balko posted this little tidbit over at Hit and Run:

Sheriff: SWAT Team Necessary Because Man Is a "Self-Proclaimed Constitutionalist"

World Net Daily reports:

Nearly a dozen members of a police SWAT team in western Colorado punched a hole in the front door and invaded a family's home with guns drawn, demanding that an 11-year-old boy who had had an accidental fall accompany them to the hospital, on the order of Garfield County Magistrate Lain Leoniak.

The boy's parents and siblings were thrown to the floor at gunpoint and the parents were handcuffed in the weekend assault, and the boy's father told WND it was all because a paramedic was upset the family preferred to care for their son themselves.

The boy had apparently fallen and bumped his head. His father, who says he was a medic in Vietnam, says he examined the boy, determined he was fine, and saw no need to take him to the hospital. A paramedic called by neighbors forced his way into the home, then called police when the father refused to let the son go to thie hospital.

The police then sent social workers, who according to the Associated Press reported "a huge hematoma and a sluggish pupil." That night, they sent in the SWAT team.

As it turns out, the kid was fine. After the raid, a doctor examined him, and told him to drink some fluids and take a Tylenol.

No drugs involved in this little contretemps, however:

The sheriff said the decision to use SWAT team force was justified because the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

However, the sheriff declined to provide a single instance of the father's illegal behavior. "I can't tell you specifically," he said.

"He was refusing to provide medical care," the sheriff said.

QotD: Fascists will heart Huckabee

After a year of wringing their hands over their choices in the presidential race — a pro-choice mayor with an authoritarian streak, a serial flip-flopper, and a senator who is a dedicated opponent of free speech — the Republicans finally have a new front-runner.

Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses Thursday night with 34 percent (with 95 percent of precincts reporting) of the vote, handily defeating Mitt Romney, who came in second with 25 percent in spite of heavy stumping in the key Midwestern state.

Just what Republicans longing for a new Ronald Reagan needed: a religious-right candidate who is also a big-spending nanny statist.

Reporters have been quick to jump on Huckabee's comments in a 1992 Associated Press questionnaire that seemed to confirm their suspicions about a Baptist minister for Arkansas. Huckabee told the AP that "homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle," and called for isolating people with AIDS. That was a position, by the way, that the venerable Reagan had firmly rejected five years earlier. In 1997, then-Arkansas Gov. Huckabee pushed for a reaffirmation of the state's sodomy law, and in 1998 he compared homosexuality to necrophilia.

Huckabee says his rise in the polls can only be attributed to God's will. He endorsed the Southern Baptist Convention's declaration that "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." He says he entered politics to "take this nation back for Christ."

David Boaz, "Shakeup in Iowa changes the outlook for both parties:What fresh Hell is this?", San Francisco Chronicle, 2008-01-07

Don't read this if you're already depressed . . .

Radley Balko's predictions of which civil liberties will disappear in 2008:

As the end of the year approaches, it's time for another column of government overreach predictions for the New Year. What outrageous, beyond-parody grabs at power and erosions of civil liberties will transpire in 2008? My predictions:

— The Bush administration will claim it has the power to kidnap citizens of foreign countries for violating U.S. law, and extradite them to the U.S. for trial and imprisonment — even for white collar crimes unrelated to terrorism, and even for acts that aren't illegal in the countries where the target is a citizen.

— Police will take enforcement of prostitution laws to a new level, by arresting and seizing the cars of anyone who merely talks to an undercover cop posing as a sex worker. Good samaritans, beware.

— The war on prescription painkillers will also reach new absurdities, as people will begin to be arrested and convicted of possessing painkillers for which they have a prescription. Prosecutors will weirdly argue that there is no "prescription defense" to possessing prescribed medication.

— How about sex crimes laws? I predict that here too, prosecutors will overreach. Watch, as some overzealous district attorney will charge middle school kids with sex crimes for such childhood shenanigans as slapping fellow classmates on the buttocks.

It gets worse. Much, much worse.

QotD: Libertarianism is not an epiphenomenon of conservatism

I just don't get the controversy surrounding "the freedom to live however you want as long as you don't harm others." If you believe in a free society, what is the alternative precisely? Doesn't the freedom to argue — either through rhetoric or by example — for particular ways of living depend upon, I don't know, the ability to actually live different lives? And what exactly is the "conservative moral agenda"? Should we turn to Newt Gingrich for tips on that one? Or Mark Foley? Or D'Souza's "priest friend . . . [who] once observed that wine is evidence of how much God loves us." D'Souza's comments — and his inability to see libertarianism as anything but an epiphenomenon of conservativsm (whatever that is) — reminds me of the huge gulf between cons and libs, mostly revolving around the issue of pluralism.

I consider myself not an atheist but an apatheist — I just don't care very much about religion one way or the other. I can certainly appreciate the positive and negative roles that religion has played (and continues to play) in human history. And I can fully appreciate that irony that classical liberalism, a political philosophy that ultimately separated church from state (thank god!), has its roots in the English civil war of the 17th century, which was in many — maybe all — ways a religious war over the right to worship god in whatever way you saw fit.

But beyond the caricature of libertarians as, what, amyl-nitrate-huffing poufters (not that there's anything wrong with that — there we go again!), I just don't get the idea that what sometimes gets called the pursuit of happiness is in any way controversial. And if it is for conservatives, then it's a good thing they seem to be in the shitter politically.

Nick Gillespie, "D'Souza on Libertarians: Gay or Drugged-Out or Loose or All Three", Hit and Run, 2007-12-21

Mother Jones on the Ron Paul campaign

Another view of the insurgent Ron Paul presidential campaign:

Their candidate, a 72-year-old obstetrician from Lake Jackson, Texas — land of duck hunters, ranchers, and oilmen — has improbably become an Internet sensation. He counts more Facebook and MySpace supporters than any Republican; more Google searches, YouTube subscribers, and website hits than any presidential candidate; and more Meetup members than the front-runners of both parties combined. In recent months he was sought out on the blog search engine Technorati more often than anyone except a Puerto Rican singer with a sex tape on the loose; his November 5 Internet "Money Bomb" event pulled in $4 million from more than 35,000 individual donors, a single-day online-fundraising record in a primary. (The previous best was $3 million, by John Kerry.) "The campaign calls itself the Ron Paul Revolution," notes Republican Internet consultant David All. "And I don't think that's a far stretch."

Indeed, Paul's literature is dominated by the word "revolution," though with the middle letters inverted to make "love" — a hippie touch that would be countenanced by few Republicans other than the congressman, who has been elected 10 times on the GOP ticket (and who also ran as a Libertarian in the 1988 presidential election). The truth is, Paul's revolution is a conservative one, by his own account — and thus all the more noteworthy for Democrats, who until now comfortably assumed that progressive bloggers, YouTubers, and ex-Deaniacs would give them, and only them, an edge online. As it turns out, nobody has more Internet buzz than a pro-gun, pro-life, antitax, and antiwar Republican.

Chicago . . . home of "justice"

Radley Balko highlights how the Chicago police department continues to set standards for police everywhere:

Want to Get Away With Murder in Chicago?

Join the Chicago Police Department.

An eight-month Chicago Tribune investigation of 200+ police shootings going back 10 years found that within hours of a police shooting, the police department convenes hastily-assembled, wagon-circling "roundtables" of law enforcement officials where police and witnesses are questioned but not sworn or recorded, where the officers involved are allowed to confer to get their stories straight before being questioned, and where the inevitable conclusion is always that the shooting was justified. From there, broader, show-investigations begin. Key witnesses go uninterviewed. Forensic evidence is ignored. And the shooting officer is inevitably exonerated.

Clinton vs Giuliani? Yikes!

David Boaz explains why it may not matter (as far as civil liberties are concerned) who wins next November. If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, we can expect further expansion in the role of government in everyday life:

Clinton, always eager to wield power on behalf of her vision of the public good, has just endorsed new government mandates on health care and energy along with a $50 billion spending program for global AIDS. Meanwhile, revelations about Giuliani's secretive use of New York City police and his refusal to allow the city comptroller to audit his security spending reflect his lifelong affinity for using and abusing power.

Clinton calls herself a "government junkie." She says, "There is no such thing as other people's children" and promises to work on "redefining who we are as human beings in the post-modern age."

Running for President, she's full of ideas about how to use the power of the federal government. Indeed, she says, "I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all." That's good to hear. But the ones she apparently thinks we can afford still include a national health care plan, a $50 billion program of energy subsidies, more money for local schools and local roads and bridges, a bailout fund for mortgage borrowers, $25 billion for "American Retirement Accounts," and more. She still has the government junkie's love for a nurturing and nannying government.

On the other hand, if Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, we can expect even more authoritarian measures, more government secrecy, and more intrusions into the lives of ordinary people:

Giuliani seems much less committed to any particular vision of government's role. Rather, throughout his career Giuliani has displayed an authoritarian streak that is deeply troubling in a potential President who would assume executive powers vastly expanded by President Bush. As U.S. attorney, he pioneered the use of the midday, televised "perp walk" for white-collar defendants who posed no threat to the community. It was a brutal way to treat people who were, after all, innocent until proven guilty.

As mayor he was so keen to "clean up the city" and crack down on dissent that he lost 35 First Amendment lawsuits. He fought against any oversight of his activities; he resisted investigations and audits by the Independent Budget Office and the New York State Comptroller. As Rachel Morris reported in the Washington Monthly, "Over the past 40 years, only two commissions had been held to revise New York's governing document. During his time in office, Giuliani convened three." And he stacked the commissions with close allies and pressed them to eliminate the IBO and the city ombudsman.

He released details from the sealed criminal records of police critics, in clear defiance of state law. But he did manage to seal the records of his own administration by transferring them to a private foundation, even though mayoral records are legally city property.

Not much to be said for either candidate as far as limiting the scope of government, or rolling back some of the powers that Bush has claimed during his administration. Both candidates are clearly inclined to be even more likely to attempt to centralize power in their own hands.

Attempting to excuse the inexcusable

Nick Packwood writes on the recent "honour slaying" in Toronto:

A father who murders his daughter with the connivance of other family members may justify his acts as the defense of the family's honour in upholding traditions and — grotesquely — of acting morally. I imagine the experience is one of horror as his daughter transforms into something non-human that he must kill if he is to defend his own authority. I can only pray that men who do this have some love of their own children and some horror at themselves for what they do; I am not convinced this is the case.

But this is only to consider such murders as individual tragedies and at the level of "the family", the primary social unit in the minds of many religious fundamentalists. At a wider level, such acts serve to terrorize society as a whole and as a warning to other girls lest they consider disobeying familial authority. Young Muslim girls are taught from the day they are born that women have a particular place in the world and must yield to familial authority or bring down upon themselves the wrath of God and an unforgiving, homicidal malice from those closest to them in all the world.

This is true not only for medieval backwaters without the law in the "tribal areas" of north-western Pakistan or ten minute's drive beyond the Kabul city limits. This is true of suburban Toronto with its shopping malls and multi-lane highways and CNN; its parliamentary democracy, Charter of Rights and Freedoms and countless titled faculty at women's studies and sociology departments. What lesson can Muslim girls take from this but that tribal law applies to them here as surely as it is does for hundreds of millions of other girls around the world? Their own fathers will not protect them; their fathers may be their murderers. Worse yet, their friends, their teachers and a small army of police will not anticipate such crimes, perhaps because none can imagine a father strangling his own daughter to death over a supposed religious edict.

Nick is quite correct. Locally, after the shock of the act wears off, it will continue to work as a compelling argument to every Canadian Muslim girl that despite living in a Western society, the tribe still has the final say over her fate. It will encourage submission to standards and mores of societies where women are considered little more than property . . . to be disposed of at the whim of the "owner" — their fathers, brothers, or even sons — with no hope of achieving self-ownership.

If you don't think this is utterly wrong, there is something seriously wrong with your world.

Update: Damian Penny has more.

QotD: The evolution of gender equality

That tells me that you are younger than I. Consider the time/culture that Elena was raised in. "Exploring the possibilties of boyfriends" was not an option. Any more than it was when I was 18.

I went from being the property of my father to being the property of my husband. Literally.

If I had been injured and compensation was awarded in a Personal Injury case, the Plaintiff would have been my father/husband. And the judgement (money) would have been payable to him, not me. And, if he had chosen to spend the money not "for my benefit", I would have had no recourse.

I had absolutely no legal rights separate from my father/husband.

"Moving out" and living on your own was no remedy. A woman was legally incapable of signing a contract. Want to lease an apartment? Buy a car? Open a bank account? Your "responsible male", i.e., father or husband, needed to sign for you.

Fortunately, times and laws changed.

Sharon Kutzschbach, posting to the Bujold Mailing List, 2007-12-12

Freedom of speech? In Canada, not so much . . .

Not having the financial resources to fight* a defamation case, I'm being extremely careful not to comment on this situation in a way that could come to the attention of the Canadian Human Rights Commission**.

So I won't make any comment about the serious erosion of the right to freedom of speech that this situation represents. But you might freely infer that I'm not happy with the direction things are headed. I didn't say that, and you are — at least for the time being — still free to draw your own conclusions about the facts as presented in that article.

     * Based on the most recent decisions, it'd be a hopeless fight: calling someone a censor is now legally punishable as defamation under Canadian law.

     ** In fact, you'll notice, I'm also being careful not to quote from that article. There are statements made in the article which would be actionable if they were published in a Canadian blog, although not in an American one.

H/T to Jon (my virtual landlord) for the link.

Update: Jon also sent along a link to Eugene Volokh's post on this topic, which I also don't feel safe in quoting here.

Regulating small businesses to death

Radley Balko visits "Old Town Alexandria", which is struggling to maintain its historical look:

People who decry the Wal-Mart-ification and Gap-ificaiton of America need to realize that regulation often does more harm to local businesses than predatory pricing, loss-leader business models, or some other imagined corporate evil.

I've lived in or near Old Town for most of the last 10 years. It's not [un]common to see an independently-owned antique shop or art gallery get boarded over, only to be replaced in ensuing months by a franchise. It's not difficult to see why. Franchise operators can tap the resources of the parent company, particularly when it comes to accessing legal help with experience navigating through and working with local zoning laws and business regulations.

Local officials who simultaneously decry big box stores and national chains while doling out burdensome regulatory structures and complicated permit processes should understand that regulatory burdens hit the smaller, independent places hardest, because they're the places that have the smallest amount of discretionary cash to hire legal aid (or, if you're really cynical, to make the appropriate campaign contributions). They're on a tighter budget and, therefore, have a smaller margin of error when it comes to hassles like delaying an opening because some bureaucrat determined their signage is a couple of inches out of compliance.

There's a larger lesson in all of this, too. Those who push for federal regulations to rein in "big business" often don't realize that the biggest of big businesses don't mind heavy federal regulation at all. They have the resources to comply with them, not to mention the clout in Washington to get the regulations written in a way that most hurts upstarts and competitors.

Big businesses know that a heavy regulatory burden is the best way to make sure small- and medium-sized businesses never rise up to challenge them.

We need more micronations

An amusing review of Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations by Jesse Walker:

Lonely Planet [. . .] deals mainly with charming, tongue-in-cheek projects like Molossia. There are a few purely virtual countries here, but in general, it doesn't make sense to give space in a travel guide to places you can only visit with an Internet connection. There are a few "real" countries as well, but again, not too many. There is Sealand, a decommissioned sea fort in the North Sea that has been ruled and defended by Prince Paddy Roy Bates since 1967. There is Christiania, a hippie squatter district in Denmark — sorry, adjacent to Denmark — that has maintained its autonomy since 1971. (Officially, Christiania is anarchist, so it might be inaccurate to describe it as a state. But a friend who has visited the place tells me that in practice it's run by a benign oligarchy of drug dealers, so anarchist might not be the best label for it either.) And there are the Knights of Malta, who used to control a rather large swath of territory, but today hold just two buildings in Rome. They have diplomatic relations with 98 other countries, and Italy recognizes their sovereign status, so who am I to argue?

But most of the micronations here are less ambitious about asserting their autonomy. Instead, we have entities such as the mobile Copeman Empire (territory: a trailer), the tourist-friendly kingdom of Romkerhall (territory: a hotel), and the libertarian principality of Freedonia (territory: none, but they're looking). "Many find it a rewarding hobby to run a model railroad, or operate model airplanes," Strauss wrote in his 1979 book. "These model enterprises have all the trappings of the real thing, in miniature. Similarly, it's possible to run a 'model country.' You need only declare your home to be an independent nation, and proceed from there."

The patron saint of such projects is Joshua Norton I, the San Francisco eccentric who in 1859 declared himself the emperor of the United States. He issued his own currency, which local businesses honored; he made royal proclamations, which the local newspapers printed; according to legend, he once managed to stop an anti-Chinese riot merely by standing in front of the mob and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I can’t endorse all of his policies — the fines he levied on anyone he overheard calling the city "Frisco" were an unconscionable interference with freedom of speech — but his reign was altogether far less bloody than that of his two rival emperors in the east, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. When he died in 1880, tens of thousands of people attended his royal funeral.

Honest fear

Brian Micklethwait finds an honest expression of pants-wetting fear to be more honest than shameful:

Grayson Perry [. . .] a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:

"I’ve censored myself," Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. "The reason I haven't gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat."

This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of 'betraying' it by . . . doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.

Is this one of those "Freedom from" issues? Freedom from fear of having your throat cut for drawing, painting, sculpting, filming, or writing something that someone feels is offensive to their religion? Hard to put on a button or T-shirt, but valid nonetheless.

The real reason Ron Paul's message is becoming popular

Brian Doherty puts his finger on the real reason for Ron Paul's rising stock in the polls:

The real lesson of the Ron Paul phenomenon might be not, as standard right wingers now seem to think as they rise to attack him, that the country is unexpectedly full of dangerous freaks who are being arbitrarily ordered by the voices they hear in their fillings to venerate this out-of-nowhere madman Ron Paul, but rather that the "smaller government" stuff isn't as unpopular as Goldberg thinks, especially when it is surgically detached from the endless international policing and adventurism that, alas, Goldberg's institutional home of National Review has tried to link with small government rhetoric for the past half century.

It must have been tough to be a genuine Republican over the last few years . . . while the talk has still been vaguely market-friendly and constitution-observant, the practice has been corporatist and constitutional-abusive. And let's face it, even the talk hasn't been particularly inspiring. And the Democratic party certainly wouldn't welcome small-government fans, so more and more of them have become alienated from both major parties. Ron Paul is talking to a group of voters who clearly feel that neither party represents them at all. It's going to be interesting to see how many of them go back to the Republican party due to Paul's campaign . . . and whether they stay if Paul falls by the wayside.

You could say that he's providing (temporary) shelter for the politically homeless.

The Nation's take on Ron Paul

Friendly words from an unlikely source:

It's Romney at 33 percent, McCain at 18 percent, Giuliani at 16 percent, Paul at 8 percent, former Arkansas Governor Huckabee at 5 percent, former Tennessee Senator Thompson at 4 percent — with Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo taking one percent and California Congressman Duncan Hunter at his usual zero.

Paul doubled his support from September to November.

During the same period, Paul's sparring partner on foreign affairs issues, Giuliani, lost fully one-third of his support. And Thompson lost a remarkable two thirds of his support.

So here's a question: When is the Washington press corps going to start treating Ron Paul as seriously as it does Fred Thompson?

The likely answer is "not soon." And that's the most frustrating thing about the way in which the GOP race is being covered by major media. After all, Ron Paul has more to say — and says it better — than any of the other Republicans. With a fair shake from the media, he'd be rising even faster in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

Of course, one of the reasons Paul's on the rise now is the fact that he is not the kind of contender who tailors his message or his campaign to meet media expectations. And in this volatile year, that may yet prove to be a smart strategy. At the very least, it is starting to pay off in the "Live Free or Die" state of New Hampshire.

Of course, the obvious rejoinder to "Paul doubled his support from September to November" is that he started from such a low base of support to start with that doubling still doesn't make much of a dent in the other candidates.

Tarantino pulls no punches

Bob Tarantino has the best coverage of the hideous clusterfuck at Vancouver airport:

Having watched the long version of the Robert Dziekanski video (that's a six-minute version - there's also an approximately nine-minute version here), I'm not sure how anyone can come to a conclusion other than that the police conduct on there is utterly . . . appalling. That's the most docile "violent" person I think I've ever seen — how it is that what he was doing warranted two Taser shots is beyond me. What you see on that video is homicide — and now it'll be up to the courts to decide what type of homicide, and the punishment (if any) to be handed down for it.

Those four officers aren't solely to blame, of course. That the staff at an international airport in Canada were apparently befuddled by a traveller who didn't speak English shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone who has travelled extensively, but it is no less absurd for that. That the security personnel evidently weren't quite up to handling a non-violent, frustrated man who was acting erratically is unlikely to qualify as breaking news either. Finally, that the bureaucrats have conducted their own review of their own conduct and found . . . wait for it . . . nothing culpable about it whatsoever, is also about par for the course (my favourite quote is that "airport staff are not responsible for that area" — meaning, as near as I can tell, that there is a no-man's land inside the airport where the writ of the airport does not run — or something).

Go, as they say, and read the whole thing.

This nicely explains it

A post at Samizdata exactly captures my own feelings:

In recent times I have attacked the Economist for pretending to be pro free market whilst, when one reads it closely, not really being so. Articles like the one on the Australian elections mean I can no longer fairly make this charge. The Economist having now 'come out' as an openly leftist publication.

I've subscribed to The Economist for over 20 years, but I'm letting my current subscription lapse unrenewed. For the last few years, I've been less and less happy with both the editorial and news reporting aspects of the newspaper. They still pretend to support free markets, but so many of their articles in recent years have been apologies for more state involvement in the economy, more state control of private areas of endeavour, and generally more statism than laissez faire.

I'm going to miss reading it, but . . . I'm really missing The Economist of several years ago . . . not what they're currently publishing under that name.

Property rights? Temporary privileges, to be withdrawn at a whim

Jon, my virtual landlord, passed along this story about the continuing erosion of the right to property:

Despite owning the land, despite living only 200 yards from the property, despite hiking past it every week with their three dogs, despite spraying for weeds and fixing fences, despite paying homeowner association dues and property taxes each year, someone else had taken a shine to it. Someone powerful.

Former Boulder District Judge, Boulder Mayor, RTD board member — among other elected positions — Richard McLean and his wife, attorney Edith Stevens, used an arcane common law called "adverse possession" to claim the land for their own.

All McLean needed was to develop an "attachment" to it.

Undoubtedly, his city connections couldn't have hurt, either.

In the court papers, McLean and his family admit to regularly trespassing on the Kirlins' property.

They created paths. They said they put on a political fundraiser and parties on it (though not a single photograph of these events surfaced in court documents).

This habit of trespassing developed into an affection.

If we take McLean at his word, he should have been treated appropriately: like a common criminal. Instead, the former judge demanded a chunk of the land for himself — and implausibly he got it.

Where does tolerance end?

A quote at Samizdata from this article by Steve Edwards gets to the heart of the problem:

A Muslim is somebody who believes that a man called Muhammad [. . .] passed on certain revelations and instructions directly from God Himself. By logic, a non-Muslim is somebody who does not accept that Muhammad was any such prophet, and thereby rejects his teachings as not having come from God [. . .] If, contrary to Muhammad's claims (assuming he has been represented correctly), we do not believe that he was any such prophet from God, what do we truly think of the man?

The answer must be one of three possibilities: either Muhammad was a liar, or he was deluded (that is to say, he was deeply mistaken), or he was mad. These are the only possible conclusions of the intellectually honest non-Muslim. Let us ponder one of the three possibilities—that Mohammad was a liar. Would it be unreasonable then to posit that a man willing to deceive many thousands of people, perhaps out of hunger for power or self-aggrandisement, could be labelled as 'evil'? If so, on what basis do we object to an extremely negative portrayal (either graphic or prose) of such an 'evildoer'? Whether or not such a portrayal may appear 'gratuitous' or provoke widespread anger, it would nonetheless be a justifiable expression of dissent. Therefore, to place legal sanctions on any such piece of literature is to necessarily outlaw opposition to, and disagreement with, Islam to a logical denouement; this suggests we are implicitly calling for the abolition of the right to proclaim oneself a non-Muslim in clear and in certain terms. That is, one may still be a nominal 'non-Muslim' free of harassment, but one cannot explain and defend one's position in any significant detail without committing the now-proscribed act of blasphemy. In short, we have apparently repealed centuries of intellectual progress in the hopeless pursuit of 'social harmony'.

LFB rises from the ashes

I'd reported earlier that Laissez Faire Books had announced it was shutting down, but apparently plans have changed:

Although its owners had announced plans to lay the venerable mail order libertarian book seller to rest last month (see my earlier Hit and Run post eulogizing it), the International Society for Individual Liberty is going to take Laissez Faire Books on and keep it alive.

How big government influences big business

Radley Balko shows why telephone companies doing the federal government's bidding isn't necessarily the fault of big business:

You can inveigh all you like against corporate power. But corporations by themselves can't force us to do anything we don't want to do. Only the government has the power to do that — or corporations with power on loan from the government.

The federal government is enormous. It has a massive and growing influence over what happens in the private sector. Witness (as I've pointed out many times before) the fact that the richest counties in America today aren't near the country's entrepreneurial epicenters, but in the D.C. suburbs, home to most of the country's federal employees and government contractors. Now as lefties, you may find all of this to be sweet potato pie. But know that a federal government of today's size and scope also gives whoever is controlling it enormous leverage to bend the private sector to his liking. That's great when your party is holding the reins. Not so good when it isn't.

Sure, in an ideal world, all the telecos would've consulted their lawyers, realized that what the Bush administration was asking was illegal, and boldly told the White House where to stick its nosy information requests. But come on. Incentives matter. Such a move may have been principled, but it would have been foolish. Corporations are obligated to their shareholders to protect their bottom lines. Pissing off the people in power who with a swipe of the pen can swing hundreds of millions of dollars, either to you or to your competitor — well, that's just not good for the bottom line.

In a truly free economy, this obligation to shareholders is a good thing. Because in a free market, shareholder interests are generally in line with customers' interests. Piss off your customers, they take their business elsewhere, and you're shareholders are angry.

Unfortunately, in a market where the government is likely to be one of a particular industy's biggest customers, shareholder and (non-government) customer interests start to clash. You see, the telecos made a calculated decision. Billions of dollars in federal contracts over the long-term, combined with the other value they saw in in winning favor with the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress (a favorable turn of phrase in the Federal Register, for example, can mean millions) was in their estimation more lucrative than protecting the privacy of their non-government customers in the short-term.

Shouldn't that tell you something about just how frighteningly large and influential the federal government has become? The telecos concluded it's better for their collective bottom lines to risk pissing off all of their other customers than to risk p