Rephrasing Ben Franklin's old aphorism

Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as having said "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". Here's a modern rephrasing, "The more you cede your own well-being to an 800-pound gorilla, the more that 800-pound gorilla is going to act like a thin-skinned asshole.".

Maybe photographers in the UK actually do have rights

Clive sent me this update from The Register:

The Metropolitan Police has issued guidance to its officers to remind them that using a camera in public is not in itself a terrorist offence.

There has been increasing concern in recent months that police have been over-using terrorism laws and public order legislation to harass professional and amateur photographers. The issue was raised in Parliament and the Home Office agreed to look at the rules.

The guidance reminds officers that the public do not need a licence to take photographs in the street and the police have no power to stop people taking pictures of anything they like, including police officers.

The over-used Terrorism Act of 2000 does not ban photography either, although it does allow police to look at images on phones or cameras during a search to see if they could be useful to a terrorist.

This is a belated follow-up to incidents like this one (oh, and this one, too). It's refreshing to see that at least one government recognizes that recent police enforcement of a non-existant law must be curtailed. It's also sad that this sort of thing is still so rare as to be noteworthy.

Oh, and Canadians shouldn't try to be smug about this . . . we have over-enthusiastic police enforcement of mythical laws as well.

The illustrated "Snitchtown"

Emma Byrne has taken a 2007 essay by Cory Doctorow and illustrated it with photos of some of the disturbingly large number of CCTV installations in Britain today. Download the PDF here.

"Snitchtown: the photo essay" is a book of photographs of a (very small) subset of the 4.2 million CCTV in Britain. These have been put together with Cory Doctorow's essay on ubiquitous CCTV coverage, "Snitchtown" as part of the SoFoBoMo event, in which photographers work to put together a solo project in book form in one month.

I was inspired by some of the things that Cory said at an Open Rights Group debate. Not least of these was the fact that his daughter's pocket money was tied, in part, to her spotting the CCTV cameras on the way to school. This sounded so damned transgressive, and I realised how much we've been trained to pay no attention to the cameras that record our daily lives (I counted 21 on my exit from the tube station this evening alone.)

Cory's response: "This is, I believe, my absolute favorite CC adaptation of my work to date; in that it's the first adaptation that I prefer to my original. Great work, Emma! "

Losing comforting myths of the past

Ta-Nehisi Coates looks at some of the lost myths of his childhood:

I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles — in fact and in spirit.

I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth — but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.

In no way does this excuse the whites who were the sea-going transporters and final auctioneers/owners of the enslaved blacks, but it does help to put a bit of perspective on an issue that for too many people is starkly black=good/white=bad. There's lots of historical blame to be shared, and it doesn't break down conveniently on racial lines.

" . . . a few common errors are occurring here"

Ryan Sager has some interesting thoughts on the western reaction to the Iranian election and its aftermath:

I believe the Iranian election was stolen. Millions of Americans believe the same. Millions of Iranians believe the same.

But how, exactly, have we come to hold this opinion?

[. . .]

Now, the strongest evidence that the election was stolen comes from the behavior of the regime since the voting took place. A ridiculous figure was apparently assigned to Ahmadinejad (upward of 60%), the votes were “counted” before any such thing could have taken place, and the vote totals by province are ridiculously fishy.

[. . .]

It seems a few common errors are occurring here (many familiar from our look at The Roots of Anti-Vaccine Insanity):

* Projection: Americans are projecting their hatred of Ahmadinejad onto the mass of the Iranian people.

* Confirmation bias: People, on both sides, filter all the information they take in through their own preconceptions — particularly easy to do when all the information coming out of Iran is a mishmash of rumor and propaganda.

* Halo effect: Thinking only bad (or good) things about the Iranian regime makes one think all of its characteristics and actions must be bad (or good).

While these are all good points, we should also keep in mind what Christopher Hitchens said yesterday: "any voting exercise is, by definition, over before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council determines well in advance who may or may not "run." Any newspaper referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts, and all the rest of it, is the cause of helpless laughter among the ayatollahs."

Secret evidence means denial of fair trial

On first blush, this appears to be a setback to the kind of devious and wide-open-to-abuse way that many western governments have been treating terror suspects:

The law lords have dealt a major blow to the government's controversial use of control orders on terror suspects, saying that reliance on secret evidence denies them a fair trial.

The nine-judge panel led by Lord Philips of Worth Matravers, the senior law lord, upheld a challenge on behalf of three men on control orders who cannot be named.

The orders have not been quashed but the law lords have ordered that the cases be heard again.

The three had argued that the refusal to disclose even the "gist" of the evidence against them denied them a fair trial under the Human Rights Act.

Given the presumption of innocence (and if we lose that, we've pretty much given up on two thousand years of jurisprudence), it's incredibly difficult to present a defence when you are not allowed to know what evidence is being used against you. It makes a mockery of the very notion of a fair trial, and it is especially important in cases like these, where governments have been pantingly eager to avoid treating the suspects normally.

The umbrellas of remembrance

The BBC's James Reynolds tries to get himself and a cameraman into Tiananmen Square on June 4th:

Bizarre. But still an improvement over tanks and rubber bullets.

H/T to Michael O'CC for the Twitter update.

June 6th is Canadian Tax Freedom Day

20 years on

Steve Chapman looks at the progress in China since the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests 20 years ago:

It was an intoxicating moment that didn't last. By the morning of June 4, the government had reversed course, sending the army to crush the long-running student demonstration in the capital's Tiananmen Square, leaving hundreds dead, and the Beijing Spring was over.

Since that day, China has undergone such a broad transformation that it is almost unrecognizable. The economy has opened up to markets, private property, and foreign trade. Living standards have soared. The government that once preached world revolution now provides credit to sustain American consumption. Chinese students go abroad to attend universities in bastions of capitalism.

China has indeed come a long, long way from 1989, and it's difficult to put it into perspective: few other countries could have changed that much without a bloody and destructive revolution or six. I may still have my issues about China's official statistics, but I do acknowledge and applaud the progress toward greater freedom for ordinary Chinese people:

By now, [the Communist Party] has had to abandon its own ideology and invoke Western principles. In his 2007 speech to the national party congress, President Hu Jintao used the term "democracy" some 60 times, while calling for the government to be more open, accountable and limited.

This declaration should not be taken on faith, but it's not just lip service. Democratic elections have become common at the village level. The government clearly strives to take public sentiment into account in making policy. When an earthquake devastated Sichuan province a year ago, foreign reporters were allowed unprecedented freedom to cover the aftermath. A system of law is emerging.

Democracy is better than dictatorship, but it's not a panacea. The rule of law, protection of the person and of property, and ease of redress are all more significant to the individual, and they are still not up to western standards. It does, however, make it much harder for governments to go back to older, more tyrannical practices. This is all to the good.

Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow on digital privacy

A very long panel discussion, but well worth watching (or, given the relative lack of visual action, listening to). Charlie gives an excellent potted history of privacy in the first few minutes: this is an artifact of the modern age. That is, until the modern era, there was no privacy as we now understand it. The poor lived cheek-by-jowl in 20-to-a-hovel misery, while the rich lived with 24/7 presence of servants, hangers-on, and other humans. In the same sense that the "nuclear family" is a very recent sociological phenomenon, personal privacy is something we think of as "normal", but it's only become possible in the last hundred years or so.

I think it'd be safe to say Radley isn't a Michael Savage fan

I don't listen to much radio at all (unless I'm caught in traffic and need to find out how bad the situation is), so I hadn't heard of Michael Savage until quite recently when he was banned from entering Britain. I disagree with this sort of thing, as it provides the banned person or group with a free shot of publicity and a brief frisson of victimization (which is catnip to certain parts of the media).

Radley Balko has concerns that certain Libertarians are lending credibility to Savage and this this is a terrible idea.

I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party, so perhaps my advice doesn't mean much to them. But I'm going to give it, anyway:

Stop this, now. Either persuade [former LP vice-presidential candidate Wayne Allen] Root to stop going on Savage's show, or show Root the door. I'm all about building coalitions where appropriate. But there's nothing remotely appropriate about Michael Savage.

Michael Savage is a raving bigot. He regularly uses phrases like "turd-world countries" and "ghetto slime." He once wished rape on a group of high school girls who make trips into San Francisco to feed the homeless. He's a blood-thirsty warmonger, and a feverish culture warrior. He once said on the air that, "When I hear someone’s in the civil rights business, I oil up my AR-15!" On social issues, he's far to the right of just about every elected Republican official I can think of. He has wished AIDS and death on homosexuals. He regularly denigrates drug users. He is virulently anti-immigration. In short, there's nothing remotely libertarian about him.

If Root's aim is to take the LP in the direction of Michael Savage, the LP should distance themselves from Root right now.

Fate of the G.O.P.

Shikha Dalmia, of Reason, is now doing a biweekly column for Forbes. In this initial entry, she outlines what is wrong with the Republican Party and what might be their best bet to re-attaining relevance:

If Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic side of the aisle affected only the fortunes of the Republican Party, it would be no cause for concern for non-Republicans like me. But America's democratic scheme depends on a robust opposition to check the government's tendency to grow — especially now that the White House is occupied by Barack Lyndon Roosevelt. Yet Republicans are as far from serving that role as the Detroit Lions are from winning the Super Bowl.

So what should the Grand Old Party do to resurrect itself enough to mount some semblance of resistance to the advancing Democratic juggernaut? The answer is that it needs intellectual coherence around a powerful idea, and that idea should be liberty. This is a principle that is both strong enough to intellectually moor the party in the way that those who want a "purer" GOP desire — and grand enough to appeal to a broad swath of the population, as those who advocate a more Big Tent approach recommend.

This would be the exact opposite of what Bush did. He, remarkably enough, managed to combine every anti-individual liberty idea from the right with every pro-big government policy from the left. From the right, Bush acquired: a super-hawkish foreign policy; contempt for civil liberties; and religiously informed positions on gay marriage, abortion and end-of-life issues. And from the left he got: high-spending ways, including the massive drug entitlement for seniors; expansive ideas about the federal government's role in education policy; and the chutzpah, just before leaving, to engineer a massive government bailout of banks and auto companies.

Update, 22 May: Tom Kelly asks if I've considered awarding a "Quote of the Year" accolade, and offers these two quotations from Shikha's article as nominees:

1 - "especially now that the White House is occupied by Barack Lyndon Roosevelt"
2 - "Yet Republicans are as far from serving that role as the Detroit Lions are from winning the Super Bowl."

I hadn't considered such a thing (and I'm perhaps not well-enough organized to do it properly), but I have to agree that these two selections are worthy contenders.

Get your "official" photography license

After a rising tide of idiocy among police, security guards, and miscellaneous wannabe fascists (examples here, here, and here), here's a brilliant response:

All around the world, cops and rent-a-cops are vigorously enforcing nonexistent anti-terrorist bans on photography in public places. If you're worried about being busted under an imaginary law, why not download these templates and print yourself an imaginary "Photography license" from the DHS? Who knows if it's legal to carry one of these — probably about as legal as taking away your camera and erasing your memory card for snapping a pic on the subway.

H/T to Dave Owens for the link.

QotD: The stupidity of an Anti-Flag-Burning Amendment

As a veteran, I love my Constitution too much to cheapen it by using it as a tool to restrict people's rights. It is, and always has been, a restriction on the GOVERNMENT. It's but a step from banning flag desecration to banning alcohol (we tried that, if you recall) to regulating relationships (also proposed) to seizing people's assets for the good of society.

I refuse to cross that line.

Norm Eadie says: Patriotism gives symbols meaning. Enslaving people to symbols destroys patriotism.

The Flag is a symbol of our greatness. Do not make it a symbol of our shame.

I will not destroy the Constitution for a mere symbol. To do so over a symbol that represents it would be a sick irony.

I expect to receive a donation envelope from you today — one of your fundraisers called me late Sunday night.

You can expect to receive it back, minus a check, with a paper copy of this comment. I will not pay to support fascism, no matter how noble it pretends to be.

I am saddened that so many veterans' organizations are disgracing themselves, and willing to destroy the Constitution, over a matter of free expression, one of America's founding principles.

If this filthy travesty of a proposal gets added to the Constitution, I expect to personally desecrate a great many flags, because at that point, it will represent nothing, and be a symbol of all we have lost.

Michael Z. Williamson, "So Furious I Could Start A Revolution Single Handedly", mzmadmike.livejournal.com, 2009-05-12

Focus on the wrong things, and invent new categories of "terrorist"

Nick Gillespie finds things to critique in the performance of Janet Napolitano's DHS:

On the one hand, you've got the former governor of Arizona who manages to keep talking no matter how many of her own feet she's got stuck in her mouth. Janet Napolitano's agency released a report implying that if you think Ron Paul is onto something or that state governments should ever challenge federal ones, you're a terrorist [. . .] Even more recently, she fretted and then apologized for worrying that some of our boys coming home from Iraq might be anti-government. Imagine.

On the other hand, she's starting an Obama-sanctioned jihad against illegal immigrants who work in America and the "evil-doers" who hire undocumented workers to cut your grass and clean your sheets. From an appearance on State of Our Union:

What we have to do is target the real evil-doers in this business, the employers who consistently hire illegal labor, the human traffickers who are exploiting human misery.

In what alternate universe is the secretary living where it's evil (E-VIL!) to hire immigrants who are willing to work? Napolitano is also in favor of the idiotic border wall and "boots on the ground," meaning an unending harassment of all residents within Fortress America (after all, if you aggressively pursue illegals and their employers, it means you have to check everybody's papers and payrolls.)

The popularity of "getting tough on illegal immigrants" is bound to wane, as part of the "getting tough" will be much more vigorous enforcement of employment laws . . . which will require everyone at a targetted business to prove that they have the right to live and work in the country. It will literally mean having to show "your papers" to every jumped-up Jack-in-office who takes a notion that you might not be "legal".

As long as this sort of thing is conducted largely out of sight of most people, it's tolerated. They've already been moving to make this sort of enforcement effort much more visible.

Nobody (well, damned few people) argue that the border needs to be monitored, but the over-expansion of the definition of what constitutes the border is a very bad thing. 100 miles is an arbitrary number . . . who can object if the government decides it javascript:editPlacements()should be 200 or 300 miles? At what point can anyone say "this far, but no further"? If you've already conceded 100 miles, there's no logical stopping point, is there?

TSA detains highly suspicious character

Yet another indication that airport security is far less concerned with threats to travellers and aircraft and much more concerned with things outside their sphere of interest:

H/T to Radley Balko:

[. . .] a director of Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty is detained by TSA at the St. Louis airport because when asked to explain why he’s carrying $4,700 in cash (it was proceeds from book and ticket sales at the conference), he asks the agents to tell him what law requires him to do so. He managed to surreptitiously record his conversations with TSA officers on a cell phone. The audio is infuriating.

Update, 7 April: Radley Balko has some additional information on the TSA response:

The response raises a number of questions. How does carrying a large amount of cash impair the safety of air travel? Weapons I could see. But cash?

Also, merely carrying even large sums of cash is not enough in itself for someone to be legally detained. There needs to be some other sign of illegal activity. What else about Bierfeldt made the TSA agents suspect him of criminal activity? What is the minimum amount of cash you can carry in an airport without being expected to explain to TSA agents why you’re carrying it?

Will the public be told what disciplinary action is taken against the agents who acted inappropriately? Will Bierfeldt?

Fake charities

Johnathan Pearce looks at a useful new site for monitoring charitable organizations:

The blogger at Devil's Kitchen has been doing fine work, as have others, in exposing "fake charities" — those organisations that while claiming to be autonomous, voluntary organisations, receive a substantial amount of funding from the taxpayer via grants and as a result, frequently take positions in terms of public policy that, unsurprisingly, fit in with the fashionable bromides of transnational progressivism, health fascism and environmentalism. The Fake Charities website does sterling work in listing those organisations that should be closely watched. The site is a great resource and well worth bookmarking.

Charities are a valuable part of our social fabric, but those which operate like the ones identified in that post are not really charities at all . . . they're actually not-quite-arms-length creatures of the state. They enable more intrusion of bureaucrats into areas best served by genuine charities, bringing along with them the coercive powers of the state by slow degrees.

I object to these fake charities for exactly the same reason I object to mandatory so-called volunteer work by students: they pervert the underlying good intentions of real volunteers and taint the whole notion of voluntary effort.

Update: A comment on Johnathan's post by "Kevin B." is worth quoting also:

The trouble is that 'charities' are such useful tools for the state that cutting them off from the statists is nigh on impossible.

For a start, many of them are there to do 'research' or 'studies' that they then use to 'pressure' the government to do what the government wanted to do in the first place.

So when the elite want to do something 'for the children' for instance, you will find one 'charity' producing the research to justify it, another to applaud the government for accepting it, and a third bemoaning the fact that the government hasn't gone far enough.

Do no some evil?

Some people are starting to ask if Google has gone too far in trying to adjust its way of doing business in order to get access to the Chinese market. L. Neil Smith has this to say in the current issue of Libertarian Enterprise:

Somewhere on this page, you'll find an unusual logo for Google, created for us by the fabulous artist Scott Bieser. The pair of Os in the middle are handcuffs. This was inspired by two events.

The first, of course, is that company's continued willingness to "embed" itself with repressive governments like that of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese mistakenly believe that they can enjoy the benefits of economic freedom, while stifling personal and political freedom. Google is enabling them in this delusion by censoring what the Chinese people can connect to on the Internet. We thought it was shameful and disgusting when it first happened, a few years ago, and we still think it's shameful and disgusting.

Now we're told that Google is manufacturing "smart monitors" for the Obama regime, devices that will spy on you and your home and tattle on you when you're using more energy — energy that you paid for — than the God King and his flying monkeys think you should.

Harper distances himself from libertarians

The prime minister has decided that the "libertarian" tag is a disadvantage, so he's made some explicit remarks to distance himself from the philosophy:

Harper vigorously defended his policies, arguing that compromises had to be made to face the economic reality.

"I'm talking about compromises that address the reality of the lives of real people."

He went on to deride the spendthrift culture in the United States and the recklessness of Wall Street. Harper, who has been described as a libertarian in the past, surprised some in the audience by critiquing those same ideals.

"The libertarian says, 'Let individuals exercise full freedom and take full responsibility for their actions.' The problem with this notion is that people who act irresponsibly in the name of freedom are almost never willing to take responsibility for their actions."

Mike Brock, a Conservative blogger who attended the conference, called the speech bewildering.

"The treatment to classical liberals and libertarians — of which I consider myself — was nothing short of stunning," he wrote.

"The condescension was literally dripping from his mouth. Was this his response to the disillusionment that libertarians across the country have had to his government and its policies of late?

"If it was, it did not build any bridges. Rather, it burnt them right down."

Of course, there have been so few libertarian moves on the part of the federal government that this isn't really that much of a surprise.

John Stossel interviewed by Reason.tv

A different kind of agony aunt

Don Childers indulges in a bit of "Dear Babby":

Dear Babby,

A dear friend of mine has been married to the same worthless lout forever. She's miserable in the relationship, and of course that means I hear all the messy details.

To begin with, he doesn't work, so he takes half of every paycheck, right off the top. He gives some of it back to her to help with the kids and such, but most simply gets spent for this and that. When she asks where it went, he just gives her some lame excuse and holds out his hand for more.

He also doesn't leave her much privacy. She knows that sometimes he listens in to her telephone conversations and reads her email and mail. There are some places she's not allowed to go at all, and he insists on inspecting her before she goes to some others. [. . .]

Read the whole thing.

What Slumdog Millionaire can teach

Penn on "Is Dissent Still Patriotic?"

David Harsanyi's article, which is what Penn is addressing, is here.

Home invaders become "Runaway!" specialists

Stuart Vernon sent this link from KVOA TV in Tucson, including video footage of an attempted home invasion by four armed men:

A homeowner, alerted of an impending home invasion by his security cameras, arms himself and takes matters into his hands last Thursday when four armed suspects attempt to break into his home.

The video the owner caught is incredible, and you can see it by watching the video link to the left. You see a vehicle pull up, and four men run out. One of them is carrying what appears to be an AR-15 or M-16, a weapon which could be fully automatic.

The robbery happened last Thursday in broad daylight at a home on West Vande Loo Street. All the action was caught by the homeowners outdoor surveillance system.

In Canada, of course, it'd be the homeowner on the run from the police, and the attempted invaders being treated like heroes . . .

Who foresaw the economic meltdown? Adam Smith, that's who

P.J. O'Rourke cribs from his own research notes to point out that Adam Smith was way ahead of his time:

The free market is dead. It was killed by the Bolshevik Revolution, fascist dirigisme, Keynesianism, the Great Depression, the second world war economic controls, the Labour party victory of 1945, Keynesianism again, the Arab oil embargo, Anthony Giddens's "third way" and the current financial crisis. The free market has died at least 10 times in the past century. And whenever the market expires people want to know what Adam Smith would say. It is a moment of, "Hello, God, how’s my atheism going?"

Adam Smith would be laughing too hard to say anything. Smith spotted the precise cause of our economic calamity not just before it happened but 232 years before — probably a record for going short.

[. . .]

One simple idea allows an over-trading folly to turn into a speculative disaster — whether it involves ocean commerce, land in Louisiana, stocks, bonds, tulip bulbs or home mortgages. The idea is that unlimited prosperity can be created by the unlimited expansion of credit.

Such wild flights of borrowing can be effected only with what Smith called "the Daedalian wings of paper money". [321] To produce enough of this paper requires either a government or something the size of a government, which modern merchant banks have become. As Smith pointed out: "The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments." [570]

The idea that The Wealth of Nations puts forth for creating prosperity is more complex. It involves all the baffling intricacies of human liberty. Smith proposed that everyone be free — free of bondage and of political, economic and regulatory oppression (Smith's principle of "self-interest"), free in choice of employment (Smith's principle of "division of labour"), and free to own and exchange the products of that labour (Smith's principle of "free trade"). "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence," Smith told a learned society in Edinburgh (with what degree of sarcasm we can imagine), "but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice."

How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess? Sorry, but it is fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done.

P.J O'Rourke on what to expect from the Obama administration

P.J. O'Rourke may be recovering from the malaise of the Bush years (where he seemed to have difficulty being as funny as he was in the Clinton era), as evidenced by his introduction to the Obama years:

The killjoys are back in charge — the mopes, the fusstails, the glum pots. Their wet blanket has been thrown over the White House and Congress. They're worrying up a storm. (Good thing that George W. Bush is no longer in charge of the weather and FEMA the way he was during Hurricane Katrina.) America is experiencing a polar ice cap and financial meltdown, causing sea levels to rise and sending cold water flooding into Wall Street where the rapidly acidifying ocean is corroding our 401(k)s and releasing mortgage securities full of hot air into the atmosphere until our every breath is full of CO2 especially when we exhale, which should be banned when children are present lest their uninsured health care be harmed by second-hand greenhouse gases that are causing endangerment of plant and animal species (Republicans are extinct already), leading to a shortage of green, leafy vegetables vital to the fight against America's growing epidemics of obese hunger and housing foreclosures on the homeless.

You remember the killjoys. They've been all over liberal Democratic politics like ugly on an ape since the Carter administration. They are the people who conceived the late, little-mourned, double-nickel speed limit, which is doubtless now rising undead from its grave to turn us all into road zombies dragging ourselves down I-70 numbed to a state of murderous catatonia by our 55-mile-per-hour rate of travel.

You'd almost think he's been holding back on criticizing his own team during the last eight years, wouldn't you? Perhaps the muted criticism also muted the humour?

He's clearly on happier terms slashing away at Democrats than Republicans:

Being a poke-nose, a nanny-pants, and a wowser satisfies the pathetic need of the political class to feel self-important and powerful. Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.

Not that Pecksniff Buttinskiism is a strictly partisan matter. Long-lipped howler Republican Drys teamed up with spigot-bigot William Jennings Bryan to enact Prohibition. The GOP is home to blue noses of a size as if room had been made on Mt. Rushmore for a bust of Andrew Volstead. Meanwhile Democrats do have their pleasures — drinking bong water at gay weddings and so forth. Plus there is the Kennedy family to be considered, with their penchant for exciting risk — skiing into trees, sleeping with the babysitter, and claiming entitlement to New York Senate seats.

See! It is possible to poke fun at the Kennedy family without making jokes about bridges!

Republicans stick their schnozollas into other people's underpants and stashes (but not gun cabinets). In the matter of scolding foreigners and muscling in on the governance of lesser breeds without the law, Republicans are a regular pain in the atlas. But it is the Democrats who've learned to make political honey out of minding other people's beeswax. Not satisfied with mere bossy irritation of the public, Democrats have created whole branches of government — the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Tofu and Sprouts. Democrats have opened barrels of (USDA inspected!) pork sufficient to feed all of their high-binding and wire-pulling friends, relatives, cronies, and the state government of Illinois. Democratic wisenheimers have managed to get themselves elected Big Chief Itch-and-Rub of every worry and to be appointed Pharaoh of Fret for every concern. They are the Party of Eliot Spitzer. And we the citizenry are Eliot Spitzer's wife.

Welcome back, Mr. O'Rourke.

Condell says "Shame on the Netherlands"

The French view of The Prisoner

Emmanuelle Richard looks at the profound cultural influence Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner had in France:

"Patrick McGoohan finally escaped," a reader of the French newspaper Le Monde noted with loving tenderness yesterday in an online forum dedicated to the late visionary behind the cult TV series The Prisoner. The sentiment came just short of asserting that the actor, writer, and director was better off dead, but then, the French have had a distinctly existential relationship with their revered secret agent man for 40 years now.

The Prisoner was arguably the most popular vehicle of libertarian ideas in socialist France over the past half-century. Ask a Parisian to name an Ayn Rand book and he'll give you a blank stare; mention The Prisoner and you'll likely hear back the French version of the series' catch-phrase, "Be seeing you" — Bonjour chez vous! Unveiled just months before the May '68 riots, this philosophical and rebellious series struck a nerve in an overwhelmingly Catholic country at a time when its long-haired youth were loudly questioning authority.

[. . .] For young French people to watch the Village community hound and almost lynch Number 6 in this episode for the sin of being "unmutual" (that is, for insisting on his privacy instead of happily joining the collective), was to turn a cherished French ideal on its head. In the episode, those who refuse to conform are subjected to "instant social conversion" via frontal lobotomy. When French fans felt outrage at this brain-deadening cure to "individualism" — a word almost always used as a pejorative in France — they were unwittingly swallowing a libertarian message without ever having heard the word.

Making a hash of drug policy, UK style

There's an interesting — and lengthy — post at Ministry of Truth about the complete failure of British drug policy. Well worth a read:

[. . .] this is hardly an innovative story, as the reference to last year's row over the classification of cannabis indicates. Most of what passes for official policy on drugs, not just in the UK but globally, bears little or no relationship to the actual health risks associated with particular drugs, which is why supplying adults with the two drugs which play some part in the largest number of deaths on a year-in, year-out basis, tobacco (an estimated 500,000+ deaths annually) and alcohol (200,000+ deaths), is perfectly legal, while supplying ecstasy, which is implicated in less than 50 deaths a year carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. When you put in those terms and compare the annual number of deaths associated with particular drug (legal and non-legal) its impossible not to think that there's something altogether a bit perverse about a system which generates billions of pounds in sales (and tax) revenues from the use of drugs which actively contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year while, at the same time, outlawing other drugs which, at most, account for 30-50 deaths a year. It just doesn't seem rational — and it isn't.

[. . .]

By the early years of this century, a mere twenty years after joining the 'War on Drugs', the UK's original black market of a few hundred London-based registered addicts had turned into a market of 300,000 'chaotic' heroin users with a battery of associated health problems, including HIV, hepatitis, septicaemia, etc., some of whom had become heavily involved in crime and prostitution to finance their habit to the extent that an internal Downing Street report, leaked in 2005, estimated that black market drug users were responsible for 85% of shoplifting, 70-80% of burglaries and 54% of robberies.

There's a pretty obvious lesson here. Prohibition not only doesn't work but under the right (wrong?) conditions it can actually turn a relatively minor social issue into a major problem of near epidemic proportions, and this really shouldn't come as any real surprise to anyone. In fact, pretty much everything you need to know about prohibition and its impact on society was neatly encapsulated in a single paragraph, written by the wealthy industrialist (and support[er] of prohibition) John D Rockefeller in a letter reflecting on the failure of alcohol prohibition in the US.

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.

H/T to Francis Turner.

The origin of the state: livestock management

H/T to Paul Bonneau.

Libertarian beliefs

L. Neil Smith is working with his daughter Rylla to produce a new book on how libertarian philosophy applies to policy. Of course, before you can get to the application, you have to clear up misconceptions about the philosophy itself:

Scott Adams, for example, creator of the famous Dilbert cartoons, proclaims himself "a libertarian minus the crazy stuff" which makes us wonder just what "crazy stuff" he means. Not destroying people's lives because they smoke the wrong vegetable? Not persecuting them for doing ordinary things — like draining a pond on their own land — that were perfectly legal 50 years ago? Not stealing half of everything people work hard for, in order to spend it violating their rights, spying on them, interfering with their lives, or starving millions of children overseas?

Many in government today appear to regard the right of Habeus corpus as "the crazy stuff". And our confidence in Adams' claim that he's a libertarian isn't exactly strengthened by his bizarre support — as reported in Wikipedia — of New York's fascistic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, for President in 2008. Clearly, there is a need for some objective criterion — a definition — regarding what it means to be a libertarian.

Happily, such a definition already exists.

If there is a central tenet, or key belief that all libertarians share, it is that each and every individual is the owner — the "sole proprietor" — of his or her own life and of "all the products of that life".

Historically, people have come to the libertarians movement from many different directions. In any given group of them, you are likely to encounter atheists (many of them readers and students of Ayn Rand), Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, pagans, and Wiccans. The all important concept of self-ownership that they share can be logically derived from more basic principles, or accepted as an axiom — a self-evident truth.

Most libertarians agree that all rights are, in effect, property rights, beginning with this fundamental right to self-ownership and control of one's own life. As owners of their own lives, individuals are completely free to do absolutely anything they wish with them — provided, of course, that it doesn't violate the identical right of others — whether the people around them approve of what they do or not.

QotD: How to make a law

The British Government plans to make it illegal to have sex with a prostitute if said tart has been trafficked, or is being controlled. Nor will this crime will be limited to offences committed in the UK — it will apply to what British men get up to wherever in the world they may be.

Now I'm a classically liberal type, and I'm naturally against the criminalisation of something that no society has ever managed to extinguish. But leaving that aside, I think this is a great example of how law is now made. Stir up a fuss, lie repeatedly, change the definitions and then do what you wanted to in the first place anyway. Just as they did with passive smoking and pubs.

Tim Worstall, "Spinning the war on the UK's sex trade: Step one, inflate the size of the problem", The Register 2009-01-04

QotD: Che Chic

Being a sunny-side-up kinda guy, the sight of college students, protesters, and/or retarded celebrities consuming Che Guevara-branded merchandise [. . .] makes me laugh more than seethe, not least because of what Cuban jazz great Paquito D'Rivera observes [. . .] There's something hilariously perverse about a violent anti-capitalist becoming a Western marketing icon. With rare exception, I don't expect much in the way of historical knowledge from Che-shirters, not least because few have been to the island-prison themselves.

Ah, but some have, and still retain their jock-sniffing totalitarian apologia, and this is what makes my brown eyes blue. A decade ago I went to a secretive gathering at a house in Havana, where rebellious youth sat around indulging in the disapproved and even dangerous behavior of . . . listening to the Beatles. It was an underground society of sorts, where the kids danced, sang, and gaped at the wonders of the G-sixth chord. None of them could understand what kind of evil, micro-managing jerkoff would criminalize "She Loves You" . . . well, except for the American woman who was nice enough to bring me there, a graying hippie named Karen Wald. Yeah, Castro might have gone a bit too far, she said, but it was an "understandable" defense in the face of "Western cultural imperialism."

Matt Welch, "But if You Go Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao", Hit and Run, 2008-12-11

QotD: The long, slow, lingering death of science fiction

Since its inception around the mid-19th century, SF had always been the literature of promise. It told stories of a universe that was knowable and lawful, in which rational human beings were capable of applying what they learned from it to make life better for everyone. For the most part, the central element was the advance of technology. But the driving ideology was almost always some form or another of socialism.

As we all know, socialism failed. At the height of its popularity it caused widespread starvation and deprivation, wrecking whole economies wherever it was applied. It inspired childish, petulant dictators — idealogues who were eager to do anything except give up an idea that didn't work — to put millions against the wall and send millions more to places like Siberia because the people couldn't (the dictators said "wouldn't") gladly transmogrify themselves into New Collectivist Mankind, or whatever the slogan was at the time. In the end, it finally destroyed the most enormous empire history had ever known.

With every failure of socialism, the promises made by socialist- inspired SF rang more hollow until, sometime in the late 1950s, the genre tried to turn itself inside-out, becoming skeptical of science and technology — instead of junking its broken ideology — becoming increasingly inner-directed and "psychological" as the real world grew more unbearable for disappointed leftists to look upon. Sliding into something resembling nihilism, SF writers lost interest in a future that — however else it might turn out — would not be socialist. And as SF writers lost interest in the future, readers lost interest in SF.

The sweeping nature of this change may have been difficult for the average consumer to notice at first. As literary SF was dying a slow, agonized death on the racks, SF in the movies and on TV appeared to flourish. But it was a narrowly-defined kind of SF, wedged between the anachronistic feudalism of Star Wars and the paramilitary fascism of Star Trek without any room remaining for individuality, let alone individualism.

Exactly like the dictators who were willing to sacrifice millions, rather than give up their precious but unworkable ideology, America's northeastern publishing establishment was willing to let SF die out, rather than give up the socialism of its youth and embrace a new philosophical and political viewpoint that offered real hope for the future.

L. Neil Smith, "New Maps of Bulgaria", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-11-23

QotD: Toxic fans

Excessive praise is even worse when it is unwanted praise, or what specialists refer to as dissonant encomium. James B. Stewart, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about Mike Milken and Ivan Boesky led to his 1992 best seller "Den of Thieves," said in an e-mail message that he once upset his publisher by refusing to go on Rush Limbaugh's show after the talk-show host heaped praise on "Blood Sport," his 1996 book about Bill Clinton. This is like having Phil Gramm describe you as being even zanier than Al Gore.

The dark side of flattery, according to P. J. O'Rourke, is attracting a fan base you may not want. Once described as "the funniest writer in America" by Time and The Wall Street Journal, O'Rourke suspects that this raised his profile among libertarians, who for some reason think of themselves as a pack of wild cutups.

"There's a nutty side to libertarians, starting with the Big Girl, Ayn Rand, and going straight through Alan Greenspan," O'Rourke told me over the phone. "When I go to Cato Institute functions, there's always a group of guys who look like they cut their own hair and get their mothers to dress them, with lots of buttons about legalizing heroin and demanding a return to the gold standard. The institute has tried to weed them out over the years, but they still turn up at the bigger events. As soon as I see them coming toward me, my heart sinks."

Joe Queenan, "Enough With the Sweet Talk", New York Times, 2008-11-14

Where SF and Libertarianism meet

Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at Tor Books, a publishing house known for printing science fiction books with strong libertarian themes:

Science fiction has long served as a kind of mad scientist's basement lab for testing out different political,economic, and social arrangements. Tor's success suggests that science fiction's commitment to meditations on the importance of human freedom remains strong, as mainstream writers borrow more freely from the once-ghettoized genre, indulging in science fiction–style hypotheticals that probe both the outer limits of and existential threats to liberty.

"Libertarianism is very much part of the intellectual argument of science fiction," says longtime Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. "It's impossible to be a part of the argument of science fiction without engaging both broad libertarian ideas and also specifically the whole American free market intellectual tradition."

Science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow, a self-described civil libertarian whose Tor titles include the brilliantly paranoid young adult novel Little Brother, suggests why science fiction writers think so much about alternative worlds. "It's completely unsurprising that people who, you can imagine, aren't at the top of the pecking order in high school would turn to science fiction," says Doctorow, who is also co-author of the wildly popular geek blog Boing Boing. "The people who write it have often not been beneficiaries of the authoritarian system. They're the people who don't fit in exactly, and if you always rub up against social constraints, you're the kind of person who's willing to sit down and have a good hard think about whether this is the best way to do things."

Two decades after the death of the trailblazing author Robert Heinlein, the connection between science fiction and libertarianism remains strong, continuing to yield fascinating results. Some of the most interesting are coming out of Tor Books.

QotD: The Presidential power-grab

If there’s one thing defenders of civil liberties know, it's that assaults on constitutional freedoms are bipartisan. Just as constitutional darkness didn't first fall with the arrival in the Oval Office of George W. Bush, the shroud will not lift with his departure and the entry of President Barack Obama.

As atrocious as the Bush record on civil liberties has been, there's no more eager and self-righteous hand reaching out to the Bill of Rights to drop it into the shredder than that of a liberal intent on legislating freedom. Witness the great liberal drive to criminalize expressions of hate and impose fierce punitive enhancements if the criminal has been imprudent enough to perpetrate verbal breaches of sexual or ethnic etiquette while bludgeoning his victim to death.

No doubt the conservatives who cheered Bush on as he abrogated ancient rights and stretched the powers of his office to unseen limits would have shrieked if a Democrat had taken such liberties. But now Obama will be entitled to the lordly prerogatives Bush established.

Alexander Cockburn, "A Long Train of Abuses", The American Conservative, 2008-11-17

Who has used marijuana?

Radley Balko's original post from last week (linked from here), turned into a video.

Update, 11 November: This embedded video seems to create issues for Firefox users (it's fine in IE and Opera). I've moved it below the fold to see if this addresses the format problem.

Refuting the drug warriors

Radley Balko looks at the latest lame attempt to dissuade people from using drugs ("Hey, not trying to be your mom, but there aren't many jobs out there for potheads.").

In a five-minute perusal of the Google search results, he found the following individuals who could (but probably won't) argue against it:

Barack Obama, president-elect. Bill Clinton, 42nd president of the U.S. John Kerry, U.S. Senator and 2004 Democratic nominee for president. John Edwards, multi-millionaire, former U.S. Senator, and 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president. Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, 2008 Republican nominee for vice president. British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, and and Chancellor Alistair Darling. Josh Howard, NBA all-star. New York Governor David Paterson. Former Vice President, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Oscar winner Al Gore. Former Sen. Bill Bradley, who smoked while playing professional basketball. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and former New York Governor George Pataki. Billionaire and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Rather interesting, no? "The presence of so many high-ranking politicians so early in the search results puts the lie to the ONDCP’s ridiculous ad campaign, and shows that to the extent that marijuana is harmful, the harm lies mostly in what the government will do to you to you if it catches you. "

Libertarians (both large "L" and small) discuss Barack Obama

In a piece from the November issue of Reason magazine, several libertarians look at what an Obama administration might encounter:

[Virginia Postrel] "The president's power has a face, and Obama's most fervent supporters believe he can repair the world with his face alone. Perhaps they're right, at least for the first month or two. We can only hope that he will respect the multiplicity of American dreams and the unpredictable ways in which their pursuit provides the basis for a better future."

[. . .]

[Brink Lindsay] "Obama, to his great credit, resisted the urge to panic all along. After eight years of George W. Bush and all the damage he has done to American interests and influence in the world, it is vitally important for the next occupant of the White House to be able to face a messy and dangerous world with a clear head. Only Barack Obama is equipped to do that."

[. . .]

[Richard A. Epstein] "Unfortunately, on the full range of economic issues, both large and small, I fear that [Obama's] policies, earnestly advanced, are a throwback to the worst of the Depression-era, big-government policies. Libertarians in general favor flat and low taxes, free trade, and unregulated labor markets. Obama is on the wrong side of all these issues. He adopts a warmed-over vision of the New Deal corporatist state with high taxation, major trade barriers, and massive interference in labor markets. He is also unrepentant in his support of farm subsidies and a vast expansion of the government role in health care. Each of these reforms, taken separately, expands the power of government over our lives. Their cumulative impact could be devastating."

[. . .]

[Jonathan Rauch] "Barack Obama? Not a chance," I said last year, when he announced his candidacy. "Too inexperienced." The last time I was so wrong about a politician was in 1980, when I had the excuse of being 20 years old. "Ronald Reagan? No way. A simpleton."

What I misjudged about Reagan was that he was a deeply substantive man. His ideas were the most important aspect of him. With my record on Obama predictions, I hesitate to try again, but the editors of this fine publication have offered me the price of lunch chez Denny's, so here goes: Obama is the un-Reagan, inasmuch as his ideas are the least important aspect of him.

When the lesser of two evils is still too evil

Jacob Sullum tries to determine which of the two major party candidates qualifies as the "lesser evil":

As we saw during the first six years of the Bush administration, which featured profligate spending and unchecked executive power, the White House and Congress tend to enable each other's excesses when they are controlled by the same party. Since the Democrats are expected not only to retain but to strengthen their grip on the legislative branch, this consideration counts in favor of the Republican nominee.

Another important advantage of a McCain presidency is that he would be more likely than Barack Obama to appoint judges who see their job as interpreting and applying the Constitution, rather than rewriting it to fit their policy preferences. Since the two oldest members of the Supreme Court tend toward the latter approach, McCain could have a chance to make the Court more faithful to the original understanding of the Constitution.

While McCain would be better than Obama in this respect, it's not because he cares much about legal philosophy but because the people advising him would. Likewise on economic issues, where the people McCain consults seem less interventionist and more market-oriented than Obama's advisers. Then again, McCain has cast doubt on the superiority of his economic instincts by condemning "reckless conduct" and "unbridled greed" on Wall Street while backing taxpayer-funded bailouts of reckless and greedy lenders, investors, and borrowers.

So, hold your nose and vote Republican? Maybe not:

With the glaring exception of the Second Amendment, which Obama supports in theory but not in practice, he has a substantially stronger record on civil liberties than McCain does.

Obama is also superior on the related issue of executive power, rejecting Bush's contention that the president may do as he pleases in matters related to terrorism or national security. McCain initially sounded better than Bush on this question, agreeing that the president is obligated to obey the law and renouncing the use of signing statements to evade that obligation. More recently, however, his campaign has indicated that McCain's view of the president's authority is broad enough to permit violation of statutes governing surveillance of people in the United States.

The extent of the president's powers, although hardly mentioned during the general election campaign, is probably the most important consideration in choosing between McCain and Obama.

Either way, it's still an unpalatable choice for limited government fans.

John McCain . . . Karl Rove's instrument?

Ryan Sager examines the hard-to-imagine transition of John McCain from Rove victim to intellectual heir:

Back in 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush's political savior, Karl Rove, was performing nothing short of an electoral resurrection, running around South Carolina calling Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) an unpatriotic, illegitimate-black-baby-fathering Manchurian Candidate.

Who could have guessed that eight years later, the senator from Arizona would be dedicating the remainder of his political life to finishing Karl Rove's good works on Earth?

And yet, as McCain runs around the country this fall, calling Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) an unpatriotic, socialistic terrorist-paller-around-with, it seems he's taken it upon himself to complete what should be called the Rove Realignment.

No, not the once-envisioned "rolling realignment," under which the Republican Party would add to its base of white Evangelical Protestants, bringing in Hispanics, culturally conservative African Americans, and economically vulnerable whites — those who supported Medicare Part D and opposed gay marriage in equal measure — to create a "permanent" Republican majority that would last at least a generation.

McCain's working on the other realignment: The one where eight years of fiscal recklessness and cultural warfare alienates swing voters and withers the Republican Party until the very base of the conservative movement cracks in half — splitting a coalition that has endured since the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964.

Of course, the libertarian wing of the Republican Pary has grown smaller and less influential . . . to the point that most Republicans see them as gadflies or worse. Kicking them out of the GOP must seem like a good idea to those currently running the party.

When border security goes too far

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has posted a fact sheet on the US Constitution Free Zone, where the normal protections of the 4th Amendment don't apply:

* Normally under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the American people are not generally subject to random and arbitrary stops and searches.

* The border, however, has always been an exception. There, the longstanding view is that the normal rules do not apply. For example the authorities do not need a warrant or probable cause to conduct a "routine search."

* But what is “the border”? According to the government, it is a 100-mile wide strip that wraps around the "external boundary" of the United States.

* As a result of this claimed authority, individuals who are far away from the border, American citizens traveling from one place in America to another, are being stopped and harassed in ways that our Constitution does not permit.

* Border Patrol has been setting up checkpoints inland — on highways in states such as California, Texas and Arizona, and at ferry terminals in Washington State. Typically, the agents ask drivers and passengers about their citizenship. Unfortunately, our courts so far have permitted these kinds of checkpoints — legally speaking, they are "administrative" stops that are permitted only for the specific purpose of protecting the nation's borders. They cannot become general drug-search or other law enforcement efforts.

* However, these stops by Border Patrol agents are not remaining confined to that border security purpose. On the roads of California and elsewhere in the nation — places far removed from the actual border — agents are stopping, interrogating, and searching Americans on an everyday basis with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing.

* The bottom line is that the extraordinary authorities that the government possesses at the border are spilling into regular American streets.

As Radley Balko says, "we're not exactly to the point of 'Ihre Papiere, bitte' Berlin yet, but the ACLU does warn that the area of the country 100 miles from every border and coastline would include about 190 million people, or nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population (see map below)."

Nobody (well, damned few people) argue that the border needs to be monitored, but the over-expansion of the definition of what constitutes the border is a very bad thing. 100 miles is an arbitrary number . . . who can object if the government decides it should be 200 or 300 miles? At what point can anyone say "this far, but no further"? If you've already conceded 100 miles, there's no logical stopping point, is there?

The strange, unlamented death of libertarianism

Jacob Weisberg says the final rites over the corpse of libertarian theory, based on how badly the situation has become due to the Bush administration's total devotion to radical libertarianism:

A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little. One line of argument casts as villain the Community Reinvestment Act, which prevents banks from "redlining" minority neighborhoods as not creditworthy. Another theory blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the trouble by subsidizing and securitizing mortgages with an implicit government guarantee. An alternative thesis is that past bailouts encouraged investors to behave recklessly in anticipation of a taxpayer rescue.

There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.

To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already? We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by libertarian ideas. I don't have much patience with the notion that trying to figure out how we got into this mess is somehow unacceptably vicious and pointless — Sarah Palin's view of global warming. As with any failure, inquest is central to improvement. And any competent forensic work has to put the libertarian theory of self-regulating financial markets at the scene of the crime.

Remember all those Bush appointees waving their copies of Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, while abolishing vast chunks of the federal government, ordering the mass withdrawals of American troops from all foreign lands, and selling off millions and millions of federal properties? Yeah, me neither.

How did those long-standing bastions of New Deal-era socialism, Fannie and Freddie, survive the gutting of all government involvement in the economy?

The answer is, of course, that George Bush is about as far away from a libertarian true believer as you could be without requiring people to refer to you as "Der Führer" or "Dear Leader" or "Big Brother". Big government projects? Check. Massive military spending? Check. Meddling in the free markets? Check. Vast increases in all kinds of regulation? Check. Imposition of further restrictions on individual freedom? Check.

Jeffrey Miron does the heavy lifting to refute Weisberg's bizzare notion that libertarians had anything to do with the current financial mess:

Whatever one's views of libertarian policies, the incontrovertible fact is that the U.S. has not pursued such policies. Not in the past 10 years. Not in the past century. Indeed, except for a brief moment before Alexander Hamilton engineered the first U.S. bailout of financial markets, not ever. If the U.S. had truly been the "Libertarian Land" that Weisberg alleges, a huge range of policies that have helped fuel the current situation would have been radically different.

In Libertarian Land, banks would not be chartered, defined, and regulated by government, as they have been in the U.S. for over 150 years. In particular, banks would have the right to "suspend convertibility," meaning they could tell depositors, "Sorry, you can't have all your money back right now," during banks runs that threatened bank solvency. This is precisely what banks did in key financial panics during the pre-Fed period, when suspension was illegal but tolerated or encouraged by regulators. By so doing, banks reduced the spread of panics and solvent but illiquid banks did not fail in large numbers.

In Libertarian Land, the Federal Reserve would never have been created. This means the Fed could not have turned a normal recession into the Great Depression by failing to stem a huge decline in the money supply. This decline and the related bank failures occurred because the Fed's existence was taken as indication that banks could not, or should not, suspend convertibility, as they had done successfully in the past. Thus in Libertarian Land, the Great Depression would probably not have occurred.

Update: I should also have linked to Matt Welch's round-up of reactions to Weisberg's article.

QotD: Libertarians are not Conservatives

I think libertarians must come out directly, staunchly, entirely, and frequently against racism, sexism, gay bashing, immigrant bashing, and all the other tawdry aspects of the so-called conservative movement. I think we have to stand up and say that if you are a racist, you are not a libertarian, if you are a sexist, you are not a libertarian, if you are against equal freedom for gays, the transgendered, the polyamorous, you are not a libertarian, if you discriminate against people because of their choice of religion, you are not a libertarian, if you think people from other countries should be rejected because of their choices in clothing, culture, religion, or behavior, you are not a libertarian.

I don't mind saying that I can work with conservatives on common causes. I don't mind saying that I have met, gotten to know, and worked with some racists. I am exceedingly uncomfortable with people who are racist, sexist, religious bigots, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, or homophobic. But I can work while uncomfortable, whether it is sawing a tree branch while forty feet in the air, eating goat eyeball stew because I was in Yemen and it was "what's for dinner," or finishing a writing project on time with a 54-hour "all nighter." I can be uncomfortable and get the job done. And if finding extremely bizarre people and working with them is the only way to obtain smaller government and more freedom, now, I'm willing to do it.

But I won't ever make the mistake of considering conservatives to be libertarians. They are not. They can talk a game about freedom for white people, they can make a pretense about constitutional government for the Christians, and they can mount a patrol against swarthy-complected persons coming across the border and claim it is all about property rights for ranchers along the border, but I don't have to choose to believe it.

Jim Davidson, "Why I Am Not a Conservative", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-10-12

Pat Condell is back on YouTube

The Schroer case, finally decided

It's nice to see that even though the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow, they sometimes come up with the correct answer. Diane Schroer has won her discrimination case against the Library of Congress:

A former Army Special Forces commander passed over for a job as a terrorism analyst at the Library of Congress because he was in the process of becoming a she won a discrimination lawsuit Friday.

U.S. District Judge James Robinson ruled that the Library of Congress discriminated against Diane Schroer of Alexandria, Va., by not giving her the job after the former David Schroer disclosed he would start becoming Diane before beginning the new job.

"The evidence establishes that the Library was enthusiastic about hiring David Schroer — until she disclosed her transsexuality," Robinson wrote in his decision. "The Library revoked the offer when it learned that a man named David intended to become, legally, culturally, and physically, a woman named Diane. This was discrimination 'because of . . . sex.'"

I first heard about this case over three years ago.

Vote for Chester Brown in Trinity-Spadina!

Graphic novelist Chester Brown is running as a Libertarian in the Trinity-Spadina riding, against incumbent Olivia Chow (NDP):

What changed 48-year-old Brown's beliefs from passive anarchist to active Libertarian was how the issue of property rights factored into the tale of Riel's legendary resistances. While starting work on the script in 1998, he picked up The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages by John Bethell, and was further influenced by the argument that the institution of private property was the biggest factor in the improvement of Western civilization.

"I realized there was a need for an agency that would protect those rights," says Brown. "And that agency would be the federal government."

Otherwise, the Libertarian philosophy would rather keep politicians as far out of people’s lives — only defining crime as a situation where somebody else was affected. For an artist like Brown, working full-time for the past 22 years in an illustrative medium that is all about being an outsider, the party turned out to be the one that suited his outlook.

"Politically, maybe I'd have considered myself among the NDP types, although I wasn't really all that interested," he says. "Yes, it was a nice thing that there's money distributed to poor people. Their stance on social issues or drug laws is something that generally fit my own.

"Becoming a Libertarian wasn't the easiest thing for me. At first, I thought, aren't those just a bunch of right-wing assholes? But when I met other party members I discovered there was a lot for me to agree with."

It must be said that Brown has a realistic view of his chances: "I'm pretty sure my political career will be coming to an end on October 15."

A libertarian case for McCain?

Matt Welch, author of the anti-McCain tome McCain: Myth of a Maverick (now out in paperback), tries to find the glimmerings of libertarian hopes if McCain is elected:

Lord knows, there is a libertarian case to be made against John McCain. Whether it's his hyper-interventionist foreign policy, disregard for constitutional liberties and individualism, or his up-front opposition to "the 'leave us alone' libertarian philosophy that dominated Republican debates in the 1990s," the 2008 Republican nominee has drawn fire from many free-marketeers through (as the Club for Growth has put it), his "philosophical ambivalence, if not hostility, about limited government and personal freedom."

But it would be inaccurate at best to claim that a McCain presidency offers zero potential upside for libertarians. After two years of studying the Arizona senator's habits (and coming to mostly critical conclusions), I can identify seven plausible reasons why a limited-government type might consider voting for the guy, even if I for one won't. Each reason, as you'll see, has as least one serious caveat.

Update, 20 September: Terry Michael tries to make the libertarian case for Barack Obama:

For those who recognize that "libertarian Democrat" is no more oxymoronic than "libertarian Republican," a solid case can be made for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as a Leader of the Free World who won't take that American Exceptionalism conceit as seriously as "Country First" Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Sure, we'll have to endure four or even eight years of warbling by Barbra Streisand at White House dinners. And I am under no illusions: Obama has more Populist-Progressive than Madisonian inclinations. But, guys and gals, Ms. Wasilla is no less stomach-churning than Babs. And the actual Republican presidential candidate is even more authoritarian than his Progressive hero, Teddy Roosevelt. John McCain is no friend of Friedman.

Thus, seven reasons libertarians can hope for the best from Obama.

Pat Condell on the UN Human Rights mess

Perry de Havilland has Pat Condell's most recent video on the UN Human Rights farce, with a surprising shout-out to Canada (of all nations) for opting out.

QotD: The Bill of Rights

I don't think many people realize it any more — many of those who do are inclined to lie about it and attempt to cover it up — but the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were written not just to protect us from the would-be kings and dictators in government, but to protect us, as well, from democracy.

On both sides of the Federalist-Antifederalist split, most of the Founding Fathers expressed hatred and fear of the notion of "absolute democracy" in which the highest law was "vox populi, vox dei" ("The voice of the people is the voice of God."), an ancient proverb that novelist Robert A. Heinlein, an unusually astute observer of history and human nature, translated as "How the hell did we get into this mess?"

The rights that the Founders chose to enumerate were meant never to be decreed, legislated, adjudicated — or voted — away. They had been placed (or at least the Founders believed) beyond the reach of politicians, bureaucrats, and the people, themselves. While they were inclined to celebrate the mind and spirit of the individual human being, the Founders knew that our species doesn't play particularly well in groups, and that the collective intelligence of a mob is that of its brightest member — divided by the number of people in the group.

L. Neil Smith, "Click, Clickity-Click", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-09-07

QotD: Non-mainstream candidates

I doubt anything concrete will come out of this press conference (other than the damage to Bob Barr among what ought to be his strongest supporters). But the event reflects something interesting and valuable that's happening out there in the ideological long tail, a collection of conversations that cross the ordinary political lines. In essence, two leftists and a paleocon just held a press conference to say, "We're listening to the libertarian." They did this because actual leftists and actual paleocons are listening to libertarians. And even third-party candidates — or some of them, anyway — have sharp enough political instincts to respond to their constituencies.

Jesse Walker, "The Radical Center", Hit and Run, 2008-09-10

Profile of Bob Barr, Onion-style

The Onion includes a "profile" of Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr:

Views:
Pretty much the same as Ron Paul's, but without the avuncular charm

Issues:
(1995–2007) Trying to control the faith, sexuality, reproduction, drug use, and national allegiance of every single American.
(2007–) Aw, Fuck it.

Looks Like:
Effeminate maître d'

Role In Clinton Impeachment:
Finger-pointer

Average Time To Summarize Libertarian Philosophy To Stranger:
4 hours, 16 minutes

As President, He Pledges To:
Use his platform to apologize for things he supported as a Republican

H/T to Radley Balko.

I owe Victor an apology

Last night, over dinner, Victor was asking me about a police [SWAT] raid in St. Paul, Minnesota, which apparently targeted a protestor or would-be protestor who hadn't actually done any protesting yet. I foolishly said something like "Oh, I'm sure the police couldn't get a warrant for that kind of assault unless they had very solid evidence of a major crime."

Victor, I'm sorry. I don't know why I'd have made such an assumption, especially given the number of times I've linked to Radley Balko articles on over-aggressive police activities.

Based on this post by Glenn Greenwald, the raid in question — and several others as well — were nothing more than deliberate intimidation attempts by the police in advance of the Republican convention:

Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a "hippie house," where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with "peaceful kids" who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on here.

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.

At least one result of this should be the striking down of an unconstitutional-sounding crime called "conspiracy to commit riot", which is what several of the arrested people have been charged with:

Nestor, who has practiced law in Minnesota for many years, said that he had never before heard of that statute being used for anything, and that its parameters are so self-evidently vague, designed to allow pre-emeptive arrests of those who are peacefully protesting, that it is almost certainly unconstitutional, though because it had never been invoked (until now), its constitutionality had not been tested.

What about McCain's VP selection?

I'd never paid any attention to the obscure governor of Alaska (if quizzed, I certainly would not have been able to name her a week ago), but David Harsanyi thinks rather well of her:

The libertarian VP candidate

. . . or, rather, as libertarian as you can hope for on a major ticket.

For Republican nominee John McCain, there are a numerous potential political downsides and upsides to choosing a relative unknown for VP. But stepping outside the horserace aspects of 2008, Palin is the most libertarian Republican that's been on a major ticket for a long time. This ideological storyline should appeal to many Western voters.

Yes, Palin is pro-life and yes, she's made a huge mistake by supporting windfall taxes on oil companies. But she was a tireless reformer against government waste in a state that is famous for it. She, after all, shut down the Bridge to Nowhere.

Palin sued the Federal government over its outrageous listing of the polar bear as a threatened species. She is an ardent supporter of the Second Amendment. Her views on the Drug War are more reasonable than most in Washington. Her framing of cultural issues is far less divisive and strident than some of what we hear coming from the hard social right.

She was certainly a better pick for McCain than Biden was for Obama. More than that will remain to be seen.

As for McCain himself, Matt Welch (a noted critic of McCain) says that "the Sarah Palin choice epitomizes [how] John McCain has been willing to sacrifice any principle to become president."

Update: Mark Steyn posts from an undisclosed location:

First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

The spoiler?

David Weigel looks at the number three guy in the race for the presidency:

Never in the history of the Libertarian Party has an idea been executed so smoothly as the nomination of Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman — and former drug warrior — from Georgia. True, it took six ballots at the party’s national convention in Denver to nominate the man. True, the weekend before that vote was a marathon of rumors, threats, and twisted arms, with younger, more radical party members pitted against an old guard that included party founder David Nolan. But the ruckus culminated in the nomination of the most well-known and politically astute presidential candidate in party history. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the only other former congressman to run for president on the Libertarian ticket (in 1988), had already made 2008 a banner year for libertarian politics by launching a limited-government revolt in the Republican primaries. The question: whether Barr is poised to continue what Paul began.

Barr's campaign — and the possibility of a revitalized national Libertarian Party — will likely have more of an immediate electoral impact than Paul's did. The Republican Party, after all, is teeming with antibodies that have been able to fight off the diminishing libertarian virus within. Unless lightning struck, the heavens opened, and he stumbled upon the Ark of the Covenant, Paul was never going to win the GOP nomination. It wouldn't take much, though, for Barr's popularity to force John McCain to campaign in states he thought he had wrapped up, or even to swing one of those states into the Democratic column. The Libertarian Party has its greatest chance to affect a presidential election in 28 years.

Of course, should that happen to McCain's detriment, the few remaining libertarian-leaning Republicans should expect show trials (at the minimum) or death threats from their less principled co-religionists.

QotD: Futility, overlaid with hypocrisy

There is something wrong with our political system, don't you think, when policy is determined by people who know that it is wrong, and know that their colleagues also know that it is wrong, but all are compelled by personal interest to rehearse the same orthodoxies? The propaganda of received wisdom has its own momentum, and no one person changing their mind will have much effect. Critchley will be ignored. His colleagues will be silent. And next autumn we will have a new moral panic about some drug-related social phenomenon, real or imaginary, justifying some extended power.

There have of course been other systems that worked this way. But the official Marxism-Lenninism of the Soviet Communist Party or the irrelevant doctrinal minutiae of theocracies had or have at least a clear purpose in maintaining the power of institutions. In our mediated ochlocracy policy is a peacock's tail in which random illusions of public opinion power political and bureaucratic machines, that then feedback more of the same, regardless of reason or utility.

Guy Herbert, "Not about drugs", Samizdata, 2008-08-15

Cathy Young on Solzhenitsyn's paradox

Cathy Young discusses the complex of beliefs that kept Alexander Solzhenitsyn from embracing the west even as he decried the excesses of Stalinism:

. . . Solzhenitsyn pointedly refused to criticize Putin's assertion that Russia should not dwell on the horrors of the Stalinist past; instead, he complained that both the West and the former Eastern-bloc Soviet satellites were using Stalin-era atrocities as a moral bludgeon against Russia.

Putin's Russia was hardly Solzhenitsyn's ideal; its rampant consumerism and kitschy pop culture far exceeded the Western materialism that he deplored. And yet Putin's authoritarian regime, with its emphasis on national unity, its ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, and its assertiveness in foreign affairs appealed strongly to the writer.

This was the sad paradox of Solzhenitsyn's final years. The man who once wrote to Soviet leaders demanding the abolition of censorship never protested the revival of censorship. The man who used his Nobel Prize to start a fund for political prisoners kept quiet about the new political prisoners of Putin's regime. The man who coined the slogan "To live not by the lie" had a cozy relationship with a government that rigged elections and filled the media with lies big and small. The man who had once asked the West for "more interference in our internal affairs" joined the chorus of anti-Western agitprop.

It's important to keep Solzhenitsyn's worldview clear: he was never a libertarian or even really a liberal in the western sense. He chronicled the horrors of the gulag system within Stalinist Russia, but he didn't object to the idea of authoritarian government itself. His personal preference was clearly illustrated by his rejection of the west and his acceptance of Vladimir Putin's government with all its political repression and economic corruption.

Galloping paternalism

Steve Chapman looks at the growing urge on the part of governments to force people to do things "for their own good":

Until he brings about complete prohibition [of tobacco products], the ban will have perverse consequences. The most obvious is to deprive one type of retail establishment of revenue and divert the dollars to other businesses. Marginal neighborhoods will become less attractive sites for pharmacies but more appealing to liquor stores, which is a novel approach to urban renewal.

In Los Angeles, driving out certain businesses is not a potential side effect—it's a conscious policy. The city council recently prohibited the opening of fast-food outlets in the poor, 32-square-mile area known as South Los Angeles. If you're a global corporation selling inexpensive meals to go, Los Angeles has a message for you: Invest anywhere but here. Apparently a vacant lot is better than a Burger King.

Councilwoman Jan Perry believes the measure will assure the locals "greater food options." The Los Angeles Times reports she "said the initiative would give the city time to craft measures to lure sit-down restaurants serving healthier food to a part of the city that desperately wants more of them."

This is one of the oddest things about the new paternalism: the proponents of nanny state measure "A" may even acknowledge that there are other ways to accomplish their stated goals, but that people can't be trusted to do the right thing, so the government must force them to do it. For example, it's not that long a step from passing measures that (in theory) will encourage people to get more exercise to mandating exercise sessions.

Who could object? It's for everyone's health, right?

A "Grotesque Miscarriage of Justice"

Charles Lynch, proprietor of a legal-under-California-law marijuana dispensary, has been convicted under Federal laws of distributing drugs. Nick Gillespie has more:

Lynch is one of the countless casualties of an idiotic and tragically long-running war on drugs. His shop scrupulously followed Golden State laws and when he opened his shop in Morro Bay, local officials attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony. And that kid he provided medical marijuana to? A high school athlete who had lost a leg to cancer and had a prescription from a Stanford-trained doctor (and in any case, Lynch only dealt with the boy's parents). Yes, a common drug dealer.

There's only one good possibility to come out of this verdict: That its manifest injustice and stupidity and inhumanity (to Lynch and his customers) will help spark a long overdue reaction to the drug war and its punishing toll on individuals and basic Constitutional rights.

QotD: Guarding the border from data

If someone develops a practical mind-reading device, you can expect the Department of Homeland Security to argue that skulls are merely another "closed container" that officers guarding the border may search at will. After all, government agents have long been allowed to read documents in briefcases carried by Americans returning from abroad. Why should the medium in which information is stored make a constitutional difference?

That argument is only slightly more far-fetched than the one DHS uses to justify its policy regarding border searches of laptop computers. Given the nature and quantity of the data they contain, portable computers are in many ways extensions of our brains. Yet DHS is treating them as if they were no different from purses or fruitcake tins.

Jacob Sullum, "File Keepers: The government wants to sit on your laptop", Reason, 2008-08-06

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead at age 89. Here's part of the BBC account:

The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.

The Nobel laureate had suffered from high blood pressure in recent years.

After returning to Russia, Solzhenitsyn wrote several polemics on Russian history and identity.

His son Stepan was quoted by one Russian news agency as saying his father died of heart failure, while another agency quoted literary sources as saying he had suffered a stroke.

Although he was clearly never happy in the West (where he lived in exile until 1994), his published works (especially Denisovitch and the Gulag Archipelago) opened many eyes to what the Soviet empire was like. I remember how horrified I felt when reading the books (I was about 15 when I started on the first volume of Gulag Archipelago), and some of that chill stays with me even now.

Update: James Lileks pays his respects:

I got all three volumes from the drugstore — which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore — and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

The great brooding man is dead — all those years of trial and disappointment done, his country no closer than before to manifesting the spirit he believed was within it. We wouldn't have liked his Russia — autocratic, mystical, cold and apart from the outside world, unwilling to grant Ukraine the national identity he cherished for his own land — but we are in his debt for decades of revelations. If the translations I read accurately rendered his style, he wrote with a bitter sarcasm that flayed nearly every commissar who blundered into the narrative. It's a difficult thing to maintain over the course of several thousand pages, but he managed. And then some.

The police state on the roadside

Steve Chapman looks at the massive invasion of privacy represented by so-called "consent searches":

The other day, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois issued a report on "consent searches" that sometimes accompany traffic stops. Relying on data provided by local and state law enforcement agencies, the report documented that black and Hispanic drivers are much more likely than whites to suffer such invasions — even though the cars of minorities are far less likely to yield contraband.

These treasure hunts are called "consent searches" because they require the motorist to give permission. They take place only when the police officer has no grounds for suspicion. If he has probable cause, he doesn't have to ask. Only when he's acting out of a vague hunch, racial prejudice, or simple malice does he need the driver's consent.

But the term is fantastical in these instances. Stopped on a lonesome stretch of highway, at the mercy of an armed man who has the power to arrest, very few citizens feel free to refuse. The Illinois State Police report that 94 percent of white motorists and 96 percent of minority ones "consent" to such searches.

Is that because they have nowhere else they'd rather be? Is it because they get a kick from watching a cop take apart their cars in an effort to put them behind bars? Or could it be because they suspect that refusing a cop is far too dangerous?

Fishing expeditions should not be part of a police officer's daily routine . . . they don't usually turn up anything, they're far too easy to abuse, and (minor point) the 4th Amendment to the Constitution kinda implies that they're . . . oh, what's the term . . . unreasonable searches. But the courts have not consulted that particular obscure document very often in this kind of case. A few states have acted to clarify the situation (New Jersey, Rhode Island, Texas, and Minnesota are mentioned in the article), but it shouldn't need special action on the part of state legislatures.

On the face of it, they're illegal, and the US Supreme Court should find a way to point that out. As Chapman says:

In a nation founded on respect for the rights of every person, these searches give all priority to the power and convenience of the government, while mocking the liberties we are supposed to have. Why would we consent to that?

Conscription by another name

Radley Balko summarizes the most recent moves towards some new form of civil conscription in the United States:

The Service Nation Summit kickoff event is getting promotional help from Time magazine, whose Managing Editor Rick Stengel is a co-chair. Seems like an odd undertaking for a newsweekly, doesn't it? But then, Time has an annoying habit of crossing over into advocacy on issues its editors have deemed too important to leave to impartial reportage.

Lindgren points out that though the campaign is couched in terms that make it appear oriented toward merely encouraging volunteerism, some of its top officials have a history of supporting a more coercive definition "service," including support for Rep. Charlie Rengel's (D-N.Y.) bill to bring back conscription. Most ominously, one of the group's stated goals is to "[l]aunch a debate about why and how America should become a nation of universal national service by 2020."

Note the absence of the word "if."

Military conscription is indentured servitude. Civilian forms of conscription will be exactly as bad. This follows a discussion the other day where the term "generational welfare" was accurately used to describe most of these farcical initiatives.

QotD: Is Barack Obama "black enough"?

The issue of Mr. Obama's blackness has come up. The Reverend Jackson has made it clear he doesn't feel Mr. Obama is black enough, apparently he seems to be disregarding "black issues." While I do not support Mr. Obama I have to call the good Reverend on this one. Barack Obama is not running for President of Black America. He is running for President of all America. If he intends to push the interest of one ethnic group over any others than he has no business running for President of a nation that is about eighty eight percent white, Asian, Dine, and other races.

Sooner or later a Latino will run for President and I damn well expect him to run as an American who happens to have Latino roots, not a Latino who happens to be an American.

Back in the Fifties segregationists didn't get it, their way of doing business violated both the written Constitution and the spirit of freedom and justice it upon which it was based. Nowadays the debate is on what methodology is needed to achieve desegregation, not it's desirability [. . .] The Segregationists of old have become obsolete.

A. X. Perez, "Getting It", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-07-20

". . . they're all worthless young punks . . ."

South Bend Seven is bothered by the groundswell of "compulsory volunteer" programs many politicians seem to be hankering for:

[. . .] these plans all amount to what Paul Thornton wisely labeled "generational welfare." Such plans are based on requiring service by teenagers or college students, presumably because they're all worthless young punks who wear baggy pants and listen to loud music all day, instead of pulling their weight (uphill both ways) like youngsters did back in the good old days.

I'm still waiting for the plan that requires volunteering* from able bodied retirees as a condition of receiving their social security checks, or requires a few hours a week of service from anyone getting unemployment benefits. This will never happen, of course, because it's clearly those rascally youths — who, by the way, probably need a hair cut and should definitely get off of our lawns — who are best suited for work without pay. Let them make the world a better place. We have better things to be doing.

I went to three different schools with some community service requirements, and there were some common themes amongst all three programs. One common occurrence is that people just found a sympathetic authority figure to sign off on wildly inflated numbers of hours served. This happened for almost everybody, even the people who did orders of magnitude more service than needed, because it's easier to get one person to sign one letter stating that you've put in 50 hours under their watchful eye, then get four different letters from four people each attesting to the 15 hours you actually did with each of them. At one school it was common to see fliers in the hallway promising multiple hours of service credits for less than an hour of time served.

The long-term result of all this mandatory "volunteer" programs is to devalue and discourage actual voluntary efforts, not to mention entrenching another Orwellian word-that-means-exactly-the-opposite-of-its-original-meaning.

Kerry Howley dissects Grand New Party

Kerry Howley views with disdain the recent book Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam:

My friends Reihan and Ross have written an extremely savvy book about how to reinvigorate the GOP with a new narrative and a new coalition. Because I like the Republican party flaccid and moribund (all parties, actually), I hope their book is celebrated, widely reviewed, and ultimately ignored. And because I find most of their social policy troubling, I hope that even those dipping into the book for some new ideas take time to question the assumptions within it.

I don't think I am overstating the R&R position when I say that my friends would like to return us to a more traditional and less pluralistic concept of family life. Through social and tax policy, they would privilege heterosexual two-parent families, fund marriage promotion programs, encourage the stigmatization of single parenthood, subsidize motherhood among married women, increase taxes on the childless, and so on. In short, they would structure incentives to encourage women to use their bodies in the one way most appealing to social conservatives.

[. . .]

Privileging one, dominant idea of the family comes with costs that R&R never really grapple with in their breezy book, and those costs fall almost exclusively on one gender. Through the tax code, R&R wish to change the relative prices of women's options, rendering childlessness more costly and early motherhood less so. They want the federal government to stake a position on the proper role of women, and that role involves a heterosexual marriage with children. While conceding that this is politically infeasible at the moment, R&R write that "we should be willing to stigmatize illegitimacy by tying a tax relief to responsible parenting." (Responsible parenting=parenting by legally married couples.) This is a policy that punishes poor women unable to find marriageable men, gay and lesbian partners unable to access legal marriage, and any other number of people who are responding rationally to their environment, doing the best they know how for the kids they have.

Banned by the Nanny State

Scalzi supports Barr for President . . . a little bit

John Scalzi finds a perfect use for his less-than-stellar "stimulus" cheque:

So what do you do with a stupid, frivolous amount of stimulus money? Well, you spend it on something stupid and frivolous, of course!

Bob Barr has about as much chance of being president as I have in getting a tomato plant to spontaneously erupt out of my forehead, but he does have a teeniest bit of a chance of peeling off just enough disgruntled GOPers to be a pain in John McCain's ass come the general election, which at this point works for me as an ersatz protest vote and the GOP economic stewardship of the country (note that this statement will undoubtedly cause some delusional conservative/Republican to opine in the comments that it will be Obama whom Barr will peel voters off of, not McCain. Dear delusional conservative/Republican commenter: Just because you're apparently huffing acetone from the inside of a paper bag doesn't mean the rest of us are). That said, I don't actually want to spend real money on Bob Barr; I don't want anyone to get the idea he's actually my guy, presidentially speaking. I mean, really. Speaking of huffing acetone. For what I want to do here, six dollars and ten cents is almost exactly the right amount to send the dude. So that's what I sent . . .

L. Neil Smith looks back at Independence Day

A bit late for the US holiday weekend, but still worth reading . . . L. Neil Smith:

Thirty-one years ago, in 1977, in what turned out to be my first novel, The Probability Broach, I asked a rhetorical question about the nation's Independence day, the Fourth of July: "What was left to celebrate?"

Even then, long before September 1, 2001, Homeland Security, Abu Graib, and Guantanamo (in those days, it was just a navy base), it was clear to me that what America's Founding Fathers had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to create was being destroyed, at a faster and faster rate each year, by those to whom the very notion of individuals at liberty to control their own lives is a nightmare straight out of hell.

The holiday itself presents all the evidence one needs to reach a conclusion like that. Then, as now, if you attempt to enjoy it in the manner traditional to our ancestors, heavily-armed uniformed thugs will show up on your doorstep, steal your fireworks (which they'll shoot off later, behind the station house, when they think nobody is looking), and if you tell them to go where they belong, they'll smash down your door, Taser you into convulsions, beat you up, and haul you away.

Or kill you.

For your own safety.

Happy Independence Day.

If you were to "shoot the anvil" — by placing a charge of black gunpowder beneath it and setting it off, sending the anvil a dozen or more feet into the air — they'd soil themselves, and then call in an airstrike.

You are perfectly welcome to celebrate freedom, as long as you do it in chains. TV and radio nags, most of them government-empowered one way or another, spoil the day for weeks in advance by preaching over and over that "you'll shoot your eye out" if you try to enjoy your own fireworks, and that everything else you might happen to love about the day — especially your Fourth of July barbecue — will give you a heart attack, cancer, or (despite the First Amendment's guarantee to freedom from religion) somehow despoil and offend the Earth Mother Goddess.

Further fallout from Guantanamo

Steve Chapman points out that the "sky is falling" rhetoric about the Guantanamo inmates is seriously overdone:

"Islamic terrorists have constitutional rights," lamented one conservative blog when the Supreme Court said Guantanamo inmates can challenge their detention in court. "These are enemy combatants," railed John McCain. The court, charged former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review, sided with foreigners "whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans."

The operating assumption here is that the prisoners are terrorists who were captured while fighting a vicious war against the United States. But can the critics be sure? All they really know about the Guantanamo detainees is that they are Guantanamo detainees. To conclude that they are all bloodthirsty jihadists requires believing that the U.S. government is infallible.

But how sensible is that approach? Judging from a little-noticed federal appeals court decision that came down after the Supreme Court ruling, not very.

It's mighty convenient to have a place where normal laws don't run and where you can dump prisoners, suspects, and those unfortunates who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mere convenience is no where near enough justification for ignoring the legal framework under which you're supposed to operate . . . and that's exactly what the US military has been doing right up until the recent Supreme Court decision.

Even if the highest public estimates are correct (that is, that 73% of the detainees represent a real threat) the rest — against whom the government may have no more than a verbal assurance from an Afghan warlord that they are enemies — should never have been detained and should be set free as soon as possible. Basic western standards of justice demand no less

QotD: Free Society or Drug-Free Society — Pick One

Getting back to the WHO study, it's striking that the lifetime marijuana use rate in the U.S. (42.4 percent) is more than twice as high as the rate in the Netherlands (19.8 percent), despite the latter country's famously (or notoriously, depending on your perspective) tolerant cannabis policies. The difference for lifetime cocaine use is even bigger: The U.S. rate (16.2 percent) is eight times the Dutch rate (1.9 percet). Do these results mean that draconian drug laws promote drug use, while a relatively laid-back approach discourages it? Not necessarily; that would be a hell of a "forbidden fruit" effect. But one thing that's clear is the point made by the WHO researchers: Drug use "is not simply related to drug policy." If tinkering with drug policy (within the context of prohibition) has an impact, it is hard to discern, and it's small compared to the influence of culture and economics.

Jacob Sullum, "What's the Opposite of a Drug-Free Society?", Hit and Run, 2008-07-04

QotD: The Pursuit of Happiness

Some science suggests that happiness is essentially a fixed commodity. It may rise or fall sharply because of events — getting a raise, breaking a leg — but over the long run, people adapt to those experiences and revert to their natural level of satisfaction (or melancholy).

Scratch that theory. According to a recent global survey, happiness is not only variable but on the rise in most of the world.

Two things, it appears, are needed to increase the supply of happiness: freedom and money. As it happens, a substantial amount of freedom is crucial to the creation of wealth. There is no such thing as a rich totalitarian country, as even the onetime totalitarians in Beijing finally realized. So in a very real sense, freedom is the key to happiness.

Steve Chapman, "The Pursuit of Happiness: How economic liberty creates personal fulfillment", Reason Online, 2008-07-03

Revisiting the history of feminism

Camille Paglia looks back at the origins of the feminist movement and the current state of play in the gender wars:

In conclusion, my proposals for reform are as follows. First of all, science must be made a fundamental component of all women's or gender studies programs. Second, every such program must be assessed by qualified faculty (not administrators or politicians) for ideological bias. The writings of conservative opponents of feminism, as well as of dissident feminists, must be included. Without such diversity, students are getting indoctrination, not education. Certainly among current dissident points of view is the abstinence movement, as an evangelical Protestant phenomenon and also as an argument set forth in Wendy Shalit's first book, A Return to Modesty, which created a storm when it was published nine years ago but whose influence can be detected in today's campus chastity clubs, including here at Harvard. As a veteran of pro-sex feminism who still endorses pornography and prostitution, I say more power to all these chaste young women who are defending their individuality and defying groupthink and social convention. That is true feminism!

My final recommendation for reform is a massive rollback of the paternalistic system of grievance committees and other meddlesome bureaucratic contrivances which have turned American college campuses into womblike customer-service resorts. The feminists of my baby-boom generation fought to tear down the intrusive in loco parentis rules that insultingly confined women in their dormitories at night. College administrators and academic committees have no competence whatever to investigate crimes, including sexual assault. If an offense has been committed, it should be reported to the police, so that the civil liberties of both the accuser and the accused can be protected. This is not to absolve young men from their duty to behave honorably. Hooliganism cannot be tolerated. But we must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility.

Question [dubious] Authority, before THEY question you

I try to avoid this sort of "Oh my GOD! We're moving towards a fascist state!" rhetoric, but when you read about cases like this, where a deluded whackjob is able to ruin peoples' lives for several months, you have to start asking when people are going to tell self-proclaimed "authorities" to go f*ck themselves:

Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, "a meth capital of the United States," the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood, from television mainly, to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as "Sergeant Bill," boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald's anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

Okay, read that part again. Slowly.

Someone shows up in town who "went to great lengths to make police officers think he was a federal agent", and was eagerly given effective proconsular powers to crush the evildoers in this methamphetamine capital of the United States . . . Gerald, MO. I'm not the greatest geography whiz about the US, but I had to zoom out five times on Google Maps before I found a town in the area I'd ever heard of before¹. We're talking "BF Nowhere" here.

That a place like that can be subject to the kind of mass delusion that allows "Witchsmellers" to arise and be given power is very disheartening. How many others have played this part for credulous audiences? I'd bet there are many, most of whom won't ever be forced to admit that they were fooled by con-artists.

¹ For the record, it was Fulton, Mo., and I'd only ever heard of it because that was where Churchill made his famous reference to the "Iron Curtain" in a speech there in 1946.

Feminist dilemma

Megan McArdle supports some of the aims of feminists, despite being labelled as an enemy of the movement:

For all that Feministe, in particular, is fond of labelling me "anti-feminist", I think the feminist movement is doing something important. Society treats men and women differently in ways that it shouldn't. I'm glad that there are people who focus their lives on changing that — even when I disagree with them; even when I think many of the battles they have chosen can't be won.

There are three things I really dislike about the feminist movement, all of them sadly reinforcing stereotypes about women.

1) The way that thinking women should be equal is assumed to be necessarily equated with a left economic agenda, and disagreement is treated as a betrayal.

2) The practice of labelling anyone who doesn't share their agenda as an "anti-feminist". [. . .]

3) The practice of handing around bad statistics like Grade Z Oaxaca Ditch Weed on the last night of Senior Week. It's bad enough in itself, but it also hideously supports stereotypes that women can't cope with real math. This is certainly not a practice limited to feminism — any political movement does a lot of it. But many of the worst statistics come out of women's study and feminist advocacy.

Opinions on D.C. v. Heller

Reason magazine has a round-table of informed civil libertarians to discuss the decision and possible ramifications:

For the past three decades, Washington, D.C. has enforced one of America's most draconian gun control laws — a total ban on the possession of handguns, not to mention strict gun lock provisions for rifles and shotguns, that has left law-abiding citizens unable to legally defend themselves and their homes. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, in which seven D.C. residents challenged the constitutionality of the ban. At the center of the case is the question of whether the Second Amendment protects an individual or collective right to keep and bear arms.

Yesterday, the Court issued its long-awaited opinion, ruling 5-4 in favor of an individual right to own guns. reason assembled a panel of 7 leading civil libertarians to help make sense of what the Court said, what it means, and what's likely to come next.

If you guessed that they're happy with the decision, award yourself five points. Of course, nothing pleases everyone . . . Radley Balko has some reservations:

I hate to pee in the pool, here, but I'm having a hard time getting too excited about today’s decision.

Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion avoids any decision on incorporating the Second Amendment to the states, and his history suggests a strong reluctance to incorporate individual rights. Scalia's opinion does interpret the Second Amendment as an individual right, but only for self-protection, and only in the home. The concept of the Second Amendment as a bulwark against an overly oppressive government seems dead.

In the past, when Scalia's limited government principles have conflicted with his law-and-order instincts, law and order has won handily. He's been a happy federalist when it comes to allowing states to infringe on individual rights, but will bring down the hammer of the federal government on states that defy the feds by giving their citizens a bit more freedom.

DMP is really Selective Device Jamming

Bruce Schneier looks at the innocuous-sounding "Digital Manners Policy" that Microsoft is attempting to patent:

According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast "orders" limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices — computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders — with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

Once we go down this path — giving one device authority over other devices — the security problems start piling up. Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? What prevents them from abusing that power? Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? Can they override my override?

It can be remarkably irritating to have some idiot's high-decibel custom ring go off at the theatre, or to be constantly interrupted by ignorami who can't turn off their Blackberries for half an hour during a meeting, but this proposed policy is overkill. Giving anyone the power to disable your cell phone would be troubling enough, and as Schneier points out in this article, the opportunities for abuse would be very tempting.

This, like over-enthusiastic copy protection schemes, should be fought as hard as possible.

An excellent example of Republican thought

I've often said that I couldn't be a Republican (assuming that I lived in the United States, of course). Senator Kit Bond (R-Missouri) explains exactly why:

I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.

From a brief squib by David Weigel.

Photographers: generic terror suspects

What do you know? Another topic I've posted about in the last few months.

John Ozimek looks at the ongoing plight of casual photographers in Britain:

When you hear the phrase "helping police with their inquiries", does an image of dedicated selfless citizenry instantly spring to mind? Or do you wonder whether the reality is not slightly more sinister?

How about "voluntarily handing over film to the police"?

[. . .]

According to Mr Carroll, the police subsequently amended their story to say they had stopped him because of concerns that he was photographing young people. They did not mention this at the time because they were worried he might be embarrassed.

They also told him that, contrary to what was said at the time, they had received no complaint from any member of the public. Nor had he been subject to a "stop and search" — merely a "stop and talk".

This is seriously alarming stuff. It is bad enough on its own — but coupled with a long catalogue of other incidents that have been reported recently, it begins to look like a pattern.

The various police departments involved all seem to be operating on the basis that the law is what they say it is, when they say it, and that John & Jane Public had better just obey without question. They're introducing their new policy directly to "middle England", rather than just oppressing the anonymous, the poor, and the downtrodden. Now the middle classes are getting a taste of what the "dregs of society" have always experienced.

Update: More from The Economist:

[. . .] civil liberties are much in the news these days. Mr Brown's speech came in the wake of the surprise resignation on June 12th of David Davis, the Conservative shadow home secretary. Mr Davis quit the House of Commons after it voted to allow terrorist suspects to be detained without charge for up to 42 days (the bill now looks set for a rocky ride in the House of Lords). From the steps of the Palace of Westminster, Mr Davis accused the government of presiding over the "slow strangulation" of freedoms and the "ceaseless encroachment of the state" into daily life. He hopes to use the resulting by-election in his Yorkshire constituency as a referendum on Labour's liberal credentials, and on the growth of the nanny state in general.

The charge sheet against the government is long and damning. Besides its 42-day detention proposals (and earlier, failed plans to imprison suspects for 90 days), it is accused of colluding with America to transport terrorist suspects to secret prisons abroad. It has created new crimes, such as glorifying terrorism or inciting religious hatred, that, say critics, dampen freedom of speech. Those who breach one of its Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, introduced in 1998, can be jailed for things that are not illegal in themselves (such as visiting a forbidden part of town or talking to certain people). In 2005 the prohibition on double jeopardy — trying a person twice for the same offence — was removed for serious offences. The government has tried to cut back the scope of trial by jury.

Along with the new crimes have come new ways of detecting them. Millions of publicly and privately owned closed-circuit television cameras (no one is sure precisely how many) monitor town centres. The latest innovation is unmanned, miniature aircraft (adapted from army models) that can loiter over trouble spots, feeding images to police on the ground.

The backlash to Boumediene

Steve Chapman looks at the rhetorical pants-wetting by various pro-war commentators after the recent Supreme Court decision that Guantanamo detainees have habeus corpus rights:

A lot of people who strongly believe in the war on terror are not above sowing a little terror of their own. From the reaction to last week's Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo, you would think the detainees were all going to be trained, armed and set free at Ground Zero, with free shuttle service to the nearest airport.

John McCain denounced the ruling, which said inmates may ask for federal court review under a procedure known as habeas corpus, as "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo warned that henceforth, captured enemy fighters will be read their Miranda rights. The irrepressible Wall Street Journal had a cartoon with a judge atop a cage labeled "Gitmo" watching masked inmates stream out wearing suicide vests and lugging AK-47s.

All this outrage builds on the dissent registered by Justice Antonin Scalia. The court's decision "will make the war harder on us," he thundered. "It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Well, it won't have that effect unless it leads to inmates being released—which it has not, will not anytime soon, and may not ever. If and when it does, he may have a point, though not necessarily a powerful one.

"One of the worst decisions in the history of this country"

Damon Root points out that John McCain's over-the-top expostulation (quoted in the title of this post) doesn't even come close to being accurate:

Could that possibly be true? As a measuring stick, I'd suggest using The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom, a new book by the Cato Institute's Robert Levy and the Institute for Justice's Chip Mellor.

On issues ranging from eminent domain abuse to the restriction of civil liberties during wartime, Levy and Mellor paint a consistent — and consistently depressing — picture of the Court upholding and enhancing government actions at the expense of individual rights. That's as good a definition of a "worst decision" as you'll ever get: state power trumping individual liberty.

Where does Boumediene fall on that scale? Even if you accept Chief Justice John Roberts' dissent, which argues that the Court permanently weakened the separation of powers by substituting its judgment for that of "the people's representatives," the decision hardly sinks to the depths of, say, Korematsu v. United States, where the majority upheld Franklin Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

It's exactly the same as the need to defend unpopular speech to protect freedom of speech for all . . . you need to defend the right of habeus corpus even for people you deeply suspect of being terrorists or supporters of terrorism. Giving wide-ranging powers to suspend civil liberties for certain individuals or groups inevitably means weaker protections of civil liberties for everyone else, too.

Regardless of the party affiliation of the current president, any powers granted in this administration will almost certainly be accepted, used, and expanded by the following administration. If you think George Bush can't be trusted with that kind of power (and I'd strongly agree with you if you do think that), why do you think Barack Obama or John McCain would be any more trustworthy?

Eugene Debs: poster child for the right to dissent

Damon Root posted this yesterday at Hit and Run:

On this day in 1918, Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio denouncing America's participation in what we now call World War I. For this "crime," Debs would spend nearly three years rotting in prison, convicted of violating Woodrow Wilson's vile Espionage Act, which essentially made it illegal to criticize the government during wartime (Wilson later refused to pardon Debs, leaving that act of basic human decency to the criminally underrated Warren G. Harding). That's the story told in Ernest Freeberg's new Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent, which received a big thumb's up from Peter Richardson in yesterday's Los Angeles Times.

Brilliant summation of philosophy

John Scalzi does a great job of summing up his political philosophy here:

I don't want my political proclivities to be in doubt, so let me be absolutely crystal clear where I stand:

I support the right of same-sex married couples to carry concealed weapons.

I hope this explains everything.

I could sign on to that.

It's a nicely judged example of what Michael Emerling used to call "Political Cross-dressing": presenting right-wing ideas in left-wing rhetoric or vice-versa. Confuses the heck out of the knee-jerk dogmatists and ignorant slogan-repeaters.

Habeus too important to be set aside

Steve Chapman provides more information on the recent US Supreme Court decision on the habeus corpus rights of Guantanamo detainees:

From the beginning of the war on terror, the Bush administration has had two central objectives. The first is protecting the nation against its enemies. The second is asserting the president's near-absolute authority to wage this war. That approach involved a crucial error: It couldn't advance the second goal without undermining the first.

That's because ours is not a system designed to unleash the power of the government. It's a system designed to control it. By conceiving the president as a virtual monarch in national security matters, George W. Bush and his subordinates have provoked active resistance from both Congress and the courts — which might have been avoided with a more cooperative and pragmatic approach.

The latest illustration came Thursday, when the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 vote that the administration overstepped lawful bounds in its treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo. For the first time, the justices said foreign enemy combatants held outside our borders may appeal to the federal courts.

This is a welcome development because it upholds certain basic rights and safeguards that are due even to suspected terrorists. It's a worrisome development, on the other hand, because it requires the judiciary to assume grave responsibilities in a realm where it has no special competence.

The ideal is not for the courts to step into these matters. The ideal is for the elected branches to act with enough respect for constitutional values that the courts would see no need to step in.

Update: Radley Balko has an eye-opener:

So the really alarming thing about this is not that John McCain objects to the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene. It’s not even that he breathlessly (and rather shamefully) lumps the decision in with cases like Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson.

No, the truly frightening thing about McCain's response to Boumediene is that the Republican nominee for president doesn’t know what "habeas corpus" means.

Good God, man.

Happy Tax Freedom Day, Canada

It's four days earlier this year:

Effectively, "every dollar they earn before June 14 would be required to pay the taxes owing to all levels of government."

The computation of tax freedom day includes income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, profit taxes, health, social security and employment taxes, import duties, licence fees, taxes on alcohol and tobacco, natural resource fees, fuel taxes, hospital taxes and an array of other levies.

Thanks to the reduction of the goods and services tax and trimming of various provincial taxes, this year's tax freedom day falls four days earlier than in 2007.

That in turn was five days sooner than in 2006, which followed a two-day gain from the latest-ever tax freedom day - June 25 in 2005.

"Even with the recent improvements, tax freedom day still falls 40 days later than in 1961, the earliest year for which we have calculations," Veldhuis said.

"Given the number of different taxes imposed on Canadians, it is virtually impossible to know exactly how much tax we pay," he added.

"The point of tax freedom day is to give people a comprehensive and easy-to-understand indicator of the total amount of taxes paid to all three levels of government."

More on the "Canadian DMCA"

Bob Kopman sent me another link decrying the recently proposed bill C-61:

Canada, one of the shining lights in the copyright and intellectual property world, has a shadow approaching that may dim that for all. The name of that shadow? Bill c-61, which was formally introduced by Industry minister Jim Prentice an hour or two ago. One of the 'highlights' is the abolition of court's flexibility in statutory damages, fixing it at $500 (CAD)

The bill, dubbed the 'Canadian DMCA' has not been popular with many of those it will effect. Over 40,000 have joined a facebook group, run by Michael Geist opposing it. Geist, a law professor at University of Ottawa, has been fighting to oppose these laws for some time now. On the tabling of the bill, he writes "The government plans for second reading at the next sitting of the house, effectively removing the ability to send it to committee after first reading (and therefore be more open to change)"

The bill is controversial in many ways. Whilst supporters of the bill will point to the allowances for time shifting, format shifting, and the ability to 'private copy' (moving a song from CD to an mp3 player for instance). It will, however, prevent that activity, though criminalization, if there is any sort of technological restriction on it. Anti-copy flags on TV shows, DRM on music, or rootkits on CDs would mean that any attempt to make a fair use, would be subject to prosecution and heavy fines.

I guess it's time to lobby the MP . . . before we get to third reading.

Republican senator wants to scrap outdated concepts like habeus corpus

I usually discount this sort of thing, but according to this article, Senator Lindsey Graham is clearly unstable and probably unfit for office:

In response to today's landmark Supreme Court decision granting habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees, Lindsey Graham has decided he wants to amend the United State Constitution to strip it of any pesky kinds of civil rights protections that have existed since the Magna Carta.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) vowed Thursday to do everything in his power to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision on Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying that "if necessary," he would push for a constitutional amendment to modify the decision.

Graham blasted the decision as "irresponsible and outrageous," echoing the sentiments of many congressional Republicans and President Bush.

There's being wrong, and then there's being so determined to be wrong that you enter a parallel universe. Senator Graham appears to have been inhabiting that other universe for quite some time.

Guantanamo inmates do have rights, says SCOTUS

Good news for fans of the rule of law: the detainees at Guantanamo do have habeus corpus rights, according to a 5-4 Supreme Court decision today:

In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion.

The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released — that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that "we do not address whether the President has authority to detain" individuals during the war on terrorism, and hold them at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered first by the District judges.

This is an important — and long overdue — slap in the face to the US government in regard to their cavalier disregard of one of the fundamentals of common law. The detainees (I think they should have been categorized as prisoners of war, right from the start, and treated as such) have the right to be informed of the charges under which they're being held, and to challenge those charges in court.

The only remaining question is whether the Bush White House still feels any need to pay attention to those bothersome gadflies on the Supreme Court . . .

Give me a break . . .

By way of Radley Balko's site comes this link to a month-old story about a distressing development:

The federal government is secretly negotiating an agreement to revamp international copyright laws which could make the information on Canadian iPods, laptop computers or other personal electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of travelling with such devices.

The deal could also impose strict regulations on Internet service providers, forcing those companies to hand over customer information without a court order.

Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the new plan would see Canada join other countries, including the United States and members of the European Union, to form an international coalition against copyright infringement. [. . .]

The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that "infringes" on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.

The agreement proposes any content that may have been copied from a DVD or digital video recorder would be open for scrutiny by officials - even if the content was copied legally.

First Goldwater, then Paul?

David Weigel looks at the ongoing ripples in the Republican party from Ron Paul's candidacy race:

"We've seen how the politics of fear chip away at freedom at home," he declares, sounding suddenly sure of himself. "Where are the defenders of freedom today? Where are our Thomas Jeffersons? Where are our Barry Goldwaters? There are a few defenders of freedom, but they are outnumbered, and they need our help."

Singh has one particular defender of freedom in mind: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). It was Paul's libertarian-minded presidential campaign that got Singh into politics, first as a donor, then as a Virginia volunteer, and now as a candidate for Congress. A month after watching Paul score 4.5 percent of the vote in the Virginia primary, Singh threw his hat into the ring for the 8th District congressional seat.

By the end of the 2008 elections, as many as 40 self-proclaimed Ron Paul Republicans will have run for national office. The reception they are getting from their state parties ranges from warm embraces to Terminator-like efforts to destroy them. After a year of supporting a presidential candidate the party's gatekeepers treated like a radioactive performance artist, the Paulites are used to ridicule. They want to carve out a permanent place in Republican politics, regardless of whether the party wants them to be there.

It's difficult to predict just how much influence Ron Paul's revolutionaries can have — even if they manage to get elected — but it's a positive sign for American politics as a whole. The permanent two-party system prevents viable third parties from arising (by legal obstruction, ballot access restrictions, and just about anything else you can think of), so would-be reformers have only two choices: work within one of the existing parties or work completely outside the political sphere.

This will be a live experiment for small-L libertarians on how viable the "work within" model can be for advancing their aims.

Places where "feminism" isn't even in the dictionary

Foreign Policy lists the worst of the worst: the places in each region where women are the furthest from equality:

YEMEN
Worst in the Middle East
Share of women in Assembly of Representatives: Less than 1 percent
Female-to-male income ratio: 30:100
Female literacy rate: 35 percent

Early marriage is commonplace in Yemen, with 48 percent of girls married by the time they are 18 and some brides as young as 12. The result: poor health for mothers and babies. One in 39 women die during pregnancy or childbirth, and 1 in 10 children doesn't make it to a fifth birthday. Yemeni women live particularly restricted lives; for example, getting a passport and traveling abroad requires a husband's or father's permission.

SIERRA LEONE
Worst in Africa
Share of women in Parliament: 13 percent
Female-to-male income ratio: 45:100
Female literacy rate: 24 percent

Sierra Leone has the unfortunate distinction of having the worst gender inequality in the world, according to the U.N. Human Development Report's gender index, which scores countries on health, education, and economic indicators for women. One in 8 women dies during pregnancy or childbirth, and women have an abysmal life expectancy of just 43 years, one of the lowest in the world. Girls can expect to receive only six years of schooling. On top of it all, the horrors of Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war, in which perhaps a third of the country's women and girls suffered sexual violence, haunt women today. Widows struggle to get by, survivors of wartime rape face stigma and discrimination, and men continue to assault women with impunity. The country's Parliament enacted laws last June that criminalize wife-beating and allow women to inherit property, but how well those measures will be enforced remains to be seen.

Drug War "highlights"

Nick Gillespie gathers together some of the more memorable moments of the War on [Some] Drugs:

If the recently concluded HBO series The Wire is arguably the most aesthetically accomplished fictional indictment of the decades-long war on drugs, there is no shortage of contenders for the most absurd bit of prohibitionist agitprop, from the unintentionally hilarious 1936 movie Tell Your Children (better known as Reefer Madness) to the widely parodied 1987 public service announcement in which the role of "your brain on drugs" is played by an egg frying in a skillet to an early 1990s TV ad in which the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles counsel a grammar school kid offered a fistful of joints ("Get a teacher," advise the Turtles, "get a pizza, get real").

Then there's the latest offering sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy's National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a mockumentary called Stoners in the Mist, featuring a pith-helmet-wearing narrator explaining the strange customs of the slack-jawed, amotivational, Lava lamp-loving inhabitants of "Cannabis Isle." Online at abovetheinfluence.com and featuring squirrely navigation and a rhythmic drum track more stupefying than anything produced by Cheech & Chong, Stoners underscores what most Americans already knew: Real winners don't do anti-drug websites.

Here's a short magical mystery tour, culled from the foggy memories of reason's editors, of decades of advertising and small-screen messages that inadvertently made childhood just a little more bearable. And drugs — even NoDoz — just a little cooler.

A forensic evaulation of the Ron Paul campaign

A scathing summary of what went wrong for the Ron Paul presidential campaign. In short: just about everything:

No organization: the campaign he ran was a completely disorganized mess, a shambolic fuck-up of such monumental proportions I'm frankly astounded you Libertarians haven't lynched his campaign staff for treason. I've seen better efforts by my city councilmen. The only real traction ever made in the campaign was by the grass-roots element. Fundraising? Grassroots. Internet viral message? Grassroots. Precinct level organization? Grassroots. Certainly, the grassroots deserves a commendation for one of the best efforts in history . . . but the grassroots cannot get your canidate ACCESS. That's the campaign's job, and they failed, leading to . . .

Locked out of the Media: As a result of the campaign's ignorance of how to handle the media, Ron Paul started out crippled. When the money bombs brought in millions, the campaign did not take out nationwide ads, it didn't take out a flood of interviews, it didn't agitate to get him on as many places as possible. Even some writers on this website tried to get him on radioshows and the like and were ignored. And that you cannot do. If you ignore the MSM, it locks you out. Dennis Kunich felt that people should judge him on how he spoke, not the media spin, and he was locked out even more totally than Ron Paul.

There's more. Much, much more.

FLDS children to be returned to parents

The Texas Supreme Court has confirmed the ruling of the appeal court last week. The children must be returned to their parents:

In a crushing blow to the state's massive seizure of children from a polygamist sect's ranch, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that child welfare officials overstepped their authority and the children should go back to their parents.

The high court affirmed a decision by an appellate court last week, saying Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago.

"On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted," the justices said in their ruling issued in Austin.

The high court let stand the appellate court's order that Texas District Judge Barbara Walther return the children from foster care to their parents. It's not clear how soon that may happen, but the appellate court ordered her to do it within a reasonable time period.

It's not enough that you disapprove of someone else's lifestyle . . . they have to have actually endangered their children before the state can step in and take the children away. The FLDS may not be a particularly enlightened religious group, and some of their teachings are clearly unpopular with mainstream opinions, but that does not equate with child abuse.

The state clearly over-reached, and the courts are taking the appropriate action to rein in the minions of the state.

QotD: "Government is complete bullshit"

Now, this strikes me as one of those incidents — like a lot of the cases of intrusive government noted in the old-fashioned anarchist magazine The Match — that should just cut across ideological divides and unite everyone not simply in thinking "That sounds excessive" but in thinking "Government is complete bullshit, and we were not born to be slaves to these uniform-wearing goons."

Todd Seavey, "Wine and Cheese Anarchy", ToddSeavey.com, 2008-05-28

Miller moves to make Toronto safe . . . for criminals

In a classic display of misguided enthusiasm, Toronto's mayor moves to punish the law-abiding:

Mayor David Miller announced a plan today that would make all handguns illegal in Toronto, a series of measures that will effectively shut down gun ranges and make it all but impossible to manufacture, assemble or store firearms within city limits.

But critics, including one Olympic target shooter, labeled the mayor’s program window-dressing, saying it will penalize law-abiding gun owners while doing nothing to curb criminal gun violence.

"This is not going to have any impact whatsoever on gun crimes in the city of Toronto,' said Larry Whitmore, of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, which says it has a membership of 15,000 across Canada.

The measures are contained in a report prepared by city staff that is to be presented to the executive committee next week. The report, "City-Based Measures to Address Gun Violence," must still be approved by city council but Mr. Miller wasted no time in signaling his approval of its recommendations.

"I want a safe city," the mayor told reporters. "The truth is, guns are too easily available and if you talk to some kids in some neighbourhoods they tell you they want a gun to protect themselves."

He's right, you know: guns are too easily available.

Unless you want to actually obey the law.

You can't legally buy a handgun in Toronto (or anywhere else in Canada, for that matter) without going through a prolonged bureaucratic process. You cannot get a permit to carry a handgun unless you are employed in law enforcement or a small number of other very specific cases. You have to belong to a gun club, and you have to get specific permission to move your handgun from your secure storage location (which the police have the right to inspect, without advance notice, at pretty much any time) to your gun club.

Even people who are interested in doing so often cannot, because the memberships at many gun clubs are strictly limited and there can be a years-long waiting list.

On the other hand, folks who just want to get themselves a 9mm pistol for "busting caps" can get them on very short notice . . . and Mayor Miller's proposed changes will make no difference to them at all.

The Presidency

George Will reviews a new book by Gene Healy:

Healy's dissection of the delusions of "redemption through presidential politics" comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d'être, "agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility." Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls "Caesaropapism" as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.

War is, as Randolph Bourne said, "the health of the state." And as James Madison said, war is the "true nurse of executive aggrandizement." Today's president has claimed the power to be the "decider," deciding on his own to start preventive wars, order torture prohibited by treaty and statute, and arrest American terrorist suspects on American soil and hold them indefinitely without legal process. But Healy's critique of the heroic presidency ranges far beyond national-security matters.

"Tell me your troubles," said FDR, Consoler in Chief, in a fireside chat with a radio audience. In 1960, the year the nation elected a charismatic (a term drawn from religion) president who regarded the office as "the center of moral leadership," an eminent political scientist called the presidency "the incarnation of the American people in a sacrament resembling that in which the wafer and the wine are seen to be the body and blood of Christ." In 1992, Gov. Bill Clinton promised a "New Covenant" between government and the governed. That, Healy dryly notes, was "a metaphor that had the state stepping in for Yahweh."

From merely the head of the executive branch of government to combined lightning-brandishing demi-god and wish-granting genie . . . it's a hell of an evolution for a mundane political job.

Opposition to Barr/Root in the Libertarian Party

David Weigel reports on some of the remaining nay-sayers within the Libertarian Party after the Bob Barr nomination over the weekend:

On the way out of the Denver convention, defeated candidate and Massachusetts party chair George Phillies pulled me aside to express how worried he was about the Barr/Root ticket. "This is a train wreck," he said. "My delegation is majority pagan. Nominating this man is the equivalent of nominating an Imperial Wizard of the KKK to lead a party of African Americans." Phillies raised the possibility of a Massachusetts LP convention that would nominate a new candidate at the top of the ticket, like author L. Neil Smith. And as I left, I heard a rumor that Arizona might do the same thing.

I think this would amount to local party suicide. The only thing all LPers agree on right now is that Barr, by dint of his fame and national media pull, could get more votes than any previous candidate. In most states, a certain vote total will get a party guaranteed ballot access. Nominating an unkown, especially when low-information voters will head to the polls expecting to see Barr, would drive down vote totals.

This really gets to the heart of the matter: why is the Libertarian Party running candidates for the presidency? Is it with any serious intent to win (mathematically unlikely as that may be) or is it to try to raise the public profile of small-L libertarian philosophy and free market economics? In either case, a better-known candidate is going to perform the task more easily than an unknown one.

It could be argued that any principled libertarian could do the job, but the media are the gatekeepers for access to that proportion of the voting public who still pay any attention to TV, and they're not going to provide J. Random Libertarian with any notice at all, unless JRL happens to be "famous" (for some values of "famous). Even a loose-cannon candidate — the more off-the-wall, the better — will get more media exposure than a highly competent, philosophically "pure" JRL.

Does raising the profile of libertarianism make any difference to the philosophy's acceptability to the general public . . . well, that's a completely different question.

QotD: Same-sex marriage

We introduced same sex marriage up here after conservatives assured us this would result in wall to wall orgies. This promise was a lie, just like the one about how if we legalized upper body nudity for women in Ontario, Ontario would become a sea of naked boobs despite the climate. And the mosquitos and the blackflies. Conservatives are always promising promiscuity and licentiousness if only we will liberalize our laws and they never deliver.

On the plus side, the initial divorce rate was extremely low for SSM because we didn't think to change the explicitly "one male one female" language in the Divorce Act.

James Nicoll, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2008-05-26

The Barr nomination

Bob Barr, former Republican congressman, has taken the Libertarian Party nomination for 2008, with his running mate Wayne Allyn Root. David Weigel was there:

The timing was perfect. Presidential candidate Mary Ruwart, a favorite among the Libertarian Party's Radical Caucus, was 15 minutes into a hard-hitting speech and Q&A with delegates at the contested LP convention in Denver, and she'd just finished enumerating what it is she couldn't stomach in a prospective running mate. In short, she couldn't stomach Bob Barr. As if on cue, Barr's twang exploded over a next-door soundsystem.

"All right!" he said, whooping up dozens of his cowboy-hatted delegates. "Are we ready to go?"

Ruwart's face froze into a devious, oh please kind of smile as Barr briefly addressed his throng. Fired up and ready to go, he marched them past the exhibit area and over into the main convention hall to deliver delegate tokens guaranteeing Barr a place in the Saturday night debate and a nominating speech at the Sunday presidential contest. As the procession went past, Neal Stephenson, a supporter of longshot candidate Christine Smith, loudly sang John Williams' "Imperial March," the song playing when Darth Vader enters the room in Star Wars.

Jim Peron, working the Laissez Faire Books table, opted for less subtlety. "Fuckin' traitors!" Peron yelled. "Go back to the GOP!" As Barr's crowd entered the hall, Peron joined in a burst of sarcastic applause and cheers. "Hooray!" yelled a phalanx of delegates. "They're leaving the convention!"

QotD: Secret laws

Like most of Bush's executive power grabs, he relies on findings from the Office of Legal Counsel to give him cover. The OLC's opinions are considered binding on the executive branch. If you work in the executive branch, you're essentially immune from prosecution if the OLC has signed off on whatever you're doing. Which is why John Yoo's OLC memos on torture and detainment are so devastating.

Thing is, over the years Bush (actually, Cheney) has staffed the OLC with lackeys like Yoo and Jay Bybee (now a federal judge). The Bush administration has treated the OLC not as an office from which to get a considered, scholarly opinion on the constitutionality of some power they'd like to claim; rather, they tell the office the power they plan to claim, and ask the OLC to come up with a way to justify it. Yoo's memos would frequently contain footnotes supporting his theories of executive power and secrecy. Unfortunately, those footnotes frequently would refer to previous writings by John Yoo.

Radley Balko, "Now: Secret Laws", The Agitator, 2008-05-22

"Looking Backwards" from the year 2058

A most depressing read:

As we consider the current condition of libertarianism, here in the middle of the 21st century, we might pause to reflect upon the bleak fate that befell the last flowering of personal freedom. That period of liberalism and liberation blossomed in the late 20th century, before coming to a disastrous end in the first decade of this new millennium. We can call that happy period the Rand Era, in honor of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a book still intensely and tragically relevant 101 years after its publication.

But let's look back before we look to the present—and to the future. The Randian libertarianism that emerged in the 1950s was a fierce critique of planning and centralization, manifested in its minor (New Deal), major (Swedish), and malignant (Soviet) forms. The school of anti-statist criticism, reinforced by émigré economists, was further strengthened by the obvious failures of American "Big Government" in the 1960s, from the war in Vietnam to the "War on Poverty." Interestingly, during that same decade of the '60s, libertarianism received a major boost from the so-called New Left. These leftists were ostensibly socialist, or even communist, but, in fact, they were more typically, in practice, anarchists and libertarians. Indeed, by the decade of the 1970s, it became clear that radicals and counter-culturalists were mostly interested in "doing their own thing," an attitude leading them toward an insistence on personal freedom-or, as they put it, not being hassled in their "personal space." Thus the New Left helped spawn the New Age, producing a generation of intensely capitalist music producers, natural food entrepreneurs, and then, most portentously, computer geeks and software developers. But of course, in their private moments, these folks retained their youthful predilections for drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

If, as James Pinkerton writes, McCain does win the presidency in November, I fear that it will play out very much as he predicts. I think the Republican brand is so badly damaged that only a very severe beating by the Democrats will force them to abandon their love for big government and re-embrace their libertarian wing. Of course, that means at least four years of economic turmoil . . . but that is preferable to four years of military adventurism.

QotD: They are "rational individuals", not "a nebulous glop of misery"

In 1990, the Burmese were asked to choose between a viable pro-democracy party and the status quo. (There were many pro-democracy parties but none with the national appeal of Suu Kyi's NLD.) Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won a significant majority of seats, which indicates that the significant majority of Burmese were tired of living under a military dictatorship. The U.S. had not yet imposed comprehensive sanctions at this point. But even if they had been a prominent topic of debate, it would be strange to assume that a vote for Suu Kyi's party were a vote for sanctions rather than a vote for regime change. It's as if Americans were asked to choose between McCain and Kim Jong-il, and every voter who went for McCain was then assumed to support a gas-tax holiday.

I don't want to make too much of my personal experience, but I found that near-universal admiration for Suu Kyi in Rangoon existed alongside some gentle criticism of the NLD's disorganization and general ineffectiveness. You might, in conversations with actual Burmese people, find that they are capable of both supporting Suu Kyi and disagreeing with her on various things. But that would require envisioning them as rational individuals rather than as a nebulous glop of misery.

Kerry Howley, "Do the Burmese Support Sanctions?", Hit and Run, 2008-05-20

The world needs more Orwell

Jon sent me a link to this post by Nick Packwood, which serves to remind me that I still need to get caught up on my Orwell readings. (And to think that I wouldn't go near the man's work when I was in school . . . ah, the idiocies of youth.)

Decades later, George Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" includes a little something to annoy everyone [. . .] So much to consider — including a precursor to that famous boot "stamping in a human face — forever" — and I am tempted to put quotation marks around the whole book. I will limit myself to one quote. This passage was written in 1941 but could have been written yesterday.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia — their severance from the common culture of the country.

Update: When I originally posted this, a couple of minutes ago, I omitted a link that Nick included in the original. Now that I've read the article, I'd have to say that this sounds like a must-read book:

The first in a projected multivolume chronicle of the years from 1945 to 1979 called Tales of a New Jerusalem, this sparkling book — deeply and imaginatively researched, written with bounce, and informed by the wryest sensibility — charts the evolution of British society during the depleted and dingy years 1945–1951. As Britain shifted from desperate war to bankrupt peace, its Labour government set about building the first welfare state and attempting in myriad ways to uplift the country and its people, a project fraught with the painful collisions between political idealism and people’s daily lives and aspirations.

"Austerity" — a condition and set of policies dictated by the government’s need, owing to a gigantic balance-of-payments deficit with the United States, to limit consumption to wartime levels and divert labor and material to the export trade — meant a home front without a war. Food, clothing, and coal would now in some cases be even more sparingly apportioned than they had been when the war was on; the British would not go completely "off ration" until 1954. With wit and ingenuity, Kynaston mines opinion surveys, radio shows, advertising slogans, parliamentary reports, and above all letters, diaries, and memoirs to evoke the gray tinge that permeated postwar life — the shabby frocks, the sallow faces, the grubby train compartments, the dreary meals ("all winter greens and root vegetables and hamburgers made of grated potato and oatmeal and just a little meat," the food writer Marguerite Patten recalled).

Vote McCain to continue paramilitary raids

If your one-issue hot button is the continuing militarization of police work, Radley Balko tells you how you should vote:

As Jacob Sullum pointed out yesterday, Barack Obama hasn't exactly made crystal clear his position on medical marijuana.

Fortunately, the Republican National Committee has stepped forward to clear up any confusion. If you support ending the federal SWAT raids on cannabis stores and taking a federalist approach to medical marijuana, the RNC says Obama's your man.

If you think the president must continue paramilitary raids on convalescent centers in states that have approved medical marijuana, and that anything less wouldn't be keeping with his oath to uphold and protect the Constitution, well, then you should vote Republican.

Steyn and the sock puppets

Mark Steyn recounts his discussions with the "sock puppets" both on the air and after the show. The core of the problem (aside from having extra-legal "courts" at all) is this:

I believe these Canadian Islamic Congress lawsuits — and, yes, I can hear the Socks yelling "That's a lie! They're not 'suits', they're 'complaints'," but that's a distinction without a difference if you're paying lawyers' bills and you regard, as I do, the Human Rights Commissions as a parallel legal system that tramples over all the traditional safeguards of Common Law, not least the presumption of innocence. Where was I? Oh, yeah. I believe these lawsuits are deeply damaging to freedom of expression. If they win (when they win) and the verdicts withstand Supreme Court scrutiny, Canada will no longer be a free country. It will be a country whose citizens are on a leash whose length is determined by the hack bureaucrats of state agencies.

And that leash will shrivel, remorselessly. One of the better points Khurrum made off-air was that this is the first (federal) "human rights" complaint by a Muslim group, and that when it was just the Jews and gays milking this racket we didn't have any of this talk about scrapping Section 13 and abolishing the commissions. And he's right. Which is why the Canadian Jewish Congress position is untenable. As I said in my speech to the "legal jihad" conference in New York a couple of weeks back:

Canada and much of Europe have statutes prohibiting Holocaust denial. Muslim scholars are not impressed by these laws. "Nobody can say even one word about the number in the alleged Holocaust," says Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the favourite Islamic scholar of many Euroleftists, "even if he is writing an MA or PhD thesis, and discussing it scientifically. Such claims are not acceptable." But a savvy imam knows an opening when he sees one. "The Jews are protected by laws," notes Mr Qaradawi. "We want laws protecting the holy places, the prophets, and Allah's messengers." In other words, he wants to use the constraints on free speech imposed by Europe and Canada to protect Jews in order to put much of Islam beyond political debate. The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. The British "historian" David Irving wound up in an Austrian jail, having been convicted of Holocaust denial. It's not unreasonable for Muslims to conclude that, if gays and Jews and other approved identities are to be protected groups who can't be offended, why shouldn't they be also?

They have a point. How many roads of inquiry are we prepared to block off in order to be "sensitive"?

It was wrong to create a special category of speech that was protected under Canadian law: holocaust denial is pure, distilled idiocy, but the best way to refute it is to let it be spoken and ridiculed. Forbidding it to be spoken created the worst possible precedent . . . and that precedent is being used now by the "sock puppets" and their controllers to create more restrictions on freedom of speech. It's no longer a question of "whether", it's just a question of "how much more?".

Remember folks, "just because Pierre Trudeau cooked it up" doesn't mean "it's chiseled in granite".

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 pissing off this one.

QotD: The attempt to justify torture

[. . .] any discussion of torture for the sake of the GWOT is bound to be misleading if it does not take account of the hyperbolic, wolf-crying tropes that government officials employ every time a suspected terrorist is apprehended or a plot foiled. (Gregory Djerejian has a good summary with commentary of one instance of the sort of thin gruel we're talking about.) Whether it's a small group of Cherry Hill, NJ poseurs diabolically scheming to attack a heavily armed and armored US military base with weapons they didn't have, or a lunatic who hoped to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch, or UK-based terrorist scoundrels who might have succeeded in hijacking planes to the US if wishes were ponies, or that weirdo who packed his shoes with C4 but didn't have the means to detonate it, the US (and UK) government(s) have consistently, deliberately, shamefacedly overhyped, oversold, and outright lied about all these and many other purported existential crises. (DHS might admit, sotto voce, that a particular plot "was not technically feasible," but why should nuances such as these stop a hack like Murdock when he's on a roll.)

Just a sprinkle of induction should get us from the premise that the administration and its defenders will trumpet the best examples of the utility of torture they've got, to the conclusion that this sad assortment is the best they've got, so forgive me if I'm not quivering in my boots.

Daniel Koffler, "The National Review's Stupid Defense of Torture", Jewcy.com, 2007-11-07

QotD: Tyrants left and right

Preventing global warming will become our new orthodoxy, anyone who questions its wisdom must be silenced. Better million starve than more greenhouse gasses be emitted. And as for trying to engage in upward social mobility, forget it!! everything will be rationed, and don't you dare complain we must save Mother Earth.

Which is hogwash. Mother Earth can save herself, thank you very much, that's if she needed saving. Earth has been warmer, we're just now reaching the temperatures the earth enjoyed just before the Little Ice Age.

Man made global warming may be happening, but it is within the range of temperature changes over geological history. With or without human activity the environmental will change creating new niches and destroying old ones and sooner or later species specialized for current conditions in the Arctic will die out anyhow, While we should show a decent concern for not trashing the World we live in, neither should we deny that we are part of that World and have a right to be in it and change it to suit our needs and as we harvest the things we need to survive.

Religious tyrants on the Right try to claim evolution and natural selection are not realities.

Tyrants on the left try to prevent natural selection and the environmental change that causes it from happening.

Perhaps this is simply a reflection of the fact that they are in so many ways living fossils, bearers of memes (cultural equivalent of genes) that are not appropriate for a world that has left them behind. Which is okay, if they'd leave the rest of us alone to evolve and enjoy our freedom.

A.X. Perez, "Ecotyranny", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-11-04

QotD: The net

What's happening here? What is it about the network that makes it so potent? Simply this: the network, in every form, is anathema to hierarchy. The network represents the other form of organization, not a contradiction of hierarchy, but, rather, a counterpoint to it. I've rewritten Gilmore's Law to reflect this:

"The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it."

For the fifty-five hundred years of human civilization, hierarchy has always had the upper hand. Now the network, amplified by all those wires and routers, is stronger than hierarchy, and battle has been joined. But this isn't going to be some full-on Armageddon, a battle between the Empire and the Alliance; this is the Death of a Thousand Cuts. The network is simply kicking the legs out from under hierarchies, everywhere they exist, for as long as they exist, until they find themselves unable to rise again. What it really come down to is this: we are assuming management of our own affairs, because we are now empowered to do so. It doesn't matter if you're a maize farmer in Kenya or a video producer in Queensland; these mob rules apply to us mob.

Mark Pesce, "Mob Rules (The Law of Fives)", hyperpeople, 2007-09-28

Sad, but not surprising

I thought it'd been a long time since I received a catalog from Laissez Faire Books . . . they're shutting down operations:

The catalog has for decades been the best way to keep up on the thankfully ever-growing flood of books of interest to libertarians. While in an Amazon and abebooks age, the need for one special place to go to to obtain sometimes obscure books may be smaller, LFB and its catalog editors' ability (special hat tip to libertarian legend Roy Childs, who edited the catalog in the late '80s and early '90s and read and understood more libertariana than any random 20 ordinary libertarians) find and compile in one place and intelligently review and contextualize,books for the libertarian community will be sorely missed.

As one of the comments said (I hope tongue-in-cheek): "SamB: Goddam big business book sellers running out these small mom and pop laissez faire book stores! The government should do something about this!"

QotD: Prices

Price is the single most important item of information that's necessary for individuals to act effectively within that part of our civilization we call the market. Price tells every market participant what to offer, how much of it to offer, and at what level of quality. Yet orthodox Marxism forbids the very activities that generate that all-important information.

The idea, of course, is that the benevolent State should establish "fair" prices, so the lovely Proletariat won't get screwed by evil capitalist pigs. But no single individual or institution can establish price (although that never keeps them from trying), it is established by facts of objective reality, playing against an aggregate of all the economic decisions each of us makes every day, practically every hour, in the process of living and working, buying and selling, bidding in the market for what we need or want, accepting bids on what we make or do.

This doesn't require any sort of formal auction process. If, for instance, something about the idea of high-quality gourmet earthworms in marinara sauce is unappealing, people simply won't buy them — no matter how little you charge — the message conveyed by price is that you should stop making the stuff and leave the poor little earthworms alone.

L. Neil Smith, "The End", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-10-14

Why Ron Paul's campaign bothers Republicans

David Weigel tries to explain to Guardian readers in the UK why Ron Paul's campaign upsets mainstream Republicans:

And all of this is happening in the context of a larger crisis in the Republican Party. The party of Gingrich and Reagan is arguably weaker than it has been at any time since the 1970s. Four years ago, when campaigns were tallying up their July through September fundraising totals, George Bush's campaign had raised almost $50m. This year the top four Republicans — Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain — raised a combined $35m. Giuliani led the pack with $11m, only a little more than twice as much as Paul. All of this while the top four Democrats — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson — raised $59m.

Put in that perspective, Paul's graduation from the fringes to a serious presidential campaign says as much about his party as it does about him. The old party of "small government" now supports enhancing the state's power to spy or detain prisoners indefinitely. A party with a long-running isolationist streak is becoming inhospitable for war doves — every Republican who votes against funding the Iraq war, Paul included, has a pro-war candidate challenging him for re-election in 2008. In this climate, with the party so fraught and fractured, a colorful libertarian is starting to gain some steam. Why is Washington so surprised?

QotD: Freedom of Speech

Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn't sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to one's opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people think they're entitled to the right not just to ignore or disapprove, but to veto and banish. And the craven fear of triggering tantrums leads the responsible authorities — university administrators, politicians, corporate executives — into humiliating, flip-floppy contortions of appeasement.

[. . .]

When it comes to free speech, we need to let a hundred flowers bloom. We need to chill. We need to stop being pussies.

Kurt Andersen, "The Age of Apoplexy", New York Magazine, 2007-10-07

QotD: Men and Women

I can't remember whether it was Robert Ardrey or Desmond Morris who observed that, unlike men, who've evolved complex patterns of threat display, rules of war, and other behaviors to avoid a fight unless it's absolutely necessary, women have none of these things. Most of the time, they're not called upon to fight, but when they are, because they're smaller and weaker than any likely aggressor, and because they're the absolute last line of defense for their homes and babies, they are natural berserkers who won't fight fair or pull their punches.

Robert Heinlein famously said that the moral range of women is broader than the moral range of men, that the best among them are better than the best men, and the worst among them are worse. Women often display the tenacity of a little cat fighting a great big dog. They don't know or acknowledge any limit until the enemy is dead or they are. That's commendable in everyday life. I have been careful to marry just such a female, and we have made sure our daughter is the same.

But there are those — and yes, say what you will or flounce off in a snit, I am among them — who believe that those traits disqualify women for certain occupations in which rituals to avoid violence and customs to limit it are everything. Police work comes immediately to mind. I have never seen a policewoman I thought was fit for the job, and I came close to being shot by one, once, over the height of my lawn.

On the other hand, it's fair to ask, is there any man who's fit for telling other people what to do with their lives, liberty and property, for beating them up and killing them, or threatening to do so?

L. Neil Smith, "Evil Women", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-09-30

QotD: Burma and Buddhism

The State Peace and Development Council derives its legitimacy from public support for Buddhism, and in recent years has leaned even more heavily on approving pronouncements from prominent religious officials. Theravada Buddhism is the establishment religion under a repressive military regime. No actual Burma scholars dispute this, as far as I know. Anyone with doubts should check out the military’s propaganda paper, which is a dual attempt to showcase the devotion of military officials and advocate peaceful, Buddhist complacency on the part of the Burmese. It adopts the tone of an authoritarian yoga instructor for a reason.

The monks, known as the sangha, regularly accept extravagant and highly publicized gifts from well placed military officials; this is a desperately poor country filled with solid gold pagodas. The rebuilding of Buddhist shrines can be a public project, with villagers force to participate. Monks have in the past refused to perform ceremonies for NLD members. It's difficult to define complicity when everyone may be acting out of fear, but you can't call a religion that confers legitimacy on a bunch of thugs (and advocates passivism in response) entirely helpful.

Yes, the Burmese monks have a history of peaceful protest, as in 1990 and 1962. But you wouldn't want to define the monks by these protests any more than you would a pope by his opposition to communism. It's rather more complicated than that.

Kerry Howley, "Buddhism Is Not a Democracy Movement", Hit and Run, 2007-10-01

Nanny State of the Union

Nick Gillespie sits down (virtually) with the author of Nanny State:

In a world where foie gras is outlawed, only outlaws will munch on goose liver fatted by gavage.

In his new book Nanny State, Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi documents in appalling and encylcopedic detail exactly "how food fascists, teetotaling do-gooders, priggish moralists, and other boneheaded bureaucrats are turning America into a nation of children." If there's a smoking ban, a mandatory exercise program, or censorious city government out there, it's pilloried in Nanny State.

In wide-ranging and engagingly written chapters, the 37-year-old Harsanyi argues that preserving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means giving individuals more choices in how to live, not fewer. "We've built the freest and most dynamic society the world has ever seen," writes Harsanyi. "To let these lightweight babysitters take over would be absurd, self-destructive, and categorically un-American.

QotD: British Fascism

Regular readers will be familiar with my theory that Britain's current system of government is 'soft fascism'. The Labour Party conference has been providing lots more support for the idea.

There on the front of the podium for every speech, in stark red letters, is the slogan for the event, "Strength to change Britain." Four words, capturing the key fascist notions of power, forward movement, and national identity. Because it is a slogan, we know that an offer is being made to us; but the content of the offer is naked power, not what will be done with it. It is not for us to evaluate whether the change will be for the better. Impressive concision.

Guy Herbert, "Some striking phrases", Samizdata, 2007-09-26

QotD: The Ron Paul Candidacy

I would certainly be contradicting myself if I believed that Ron Paul was going to win the 2008 election—the guy's against abortion and for closing the border, after all—but I don't. I regard his candidacy, like that of Barry Goldwater before him, to be a nice sharp cattle-prod applied to the system's tenderest parts, worth doing for that reason alone. And, exactly like Eugene McCarthy's candidacy, the main reason for supporting Ron, of course, is to end the insane War on Everything.

L. Neil Smith, Letter to Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-09-23

This'll turn out well, I'm sure

New technology always seems to have impact outside the area its' inventors or popularizers envisage. This one, for example, is being introduced as a tool for quickly and remotely telling "whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield." It also has other potentialities:

Figuring out whether detected heart rates give a reasonable cop excuse for coming in shooting is one of those legal and strategic conundrums we'll be sweating over in the magically transparent world of tomorrow.

Oh yeah, this is gonna go just great . . .

QotD: Miscarriage of Justice

Now, I can think of some reasons why a prosecutor would want to destroy a piece of physical evidence that could prove that the state executed an innocent man. But none of them are compatible with . . . um . . . being a human being.

Perhaps, for example, the prosecutor was one of the prosecutors who worked on the case, and doesn't want the stain on his career that might come with a wrongful execution. Perhaps he wants to avoid the inevitable stain on Texas' already execution-happy reputation that would come with proof that the state executed an innocent man. Perhaps he knows that proof of a wrongful execution will make it much more difficult for him to win death penalty cases in the future.

But here's the thing: While I can perhaps see a prosecutor harboring such sentiment deep down inside, I can't possibly conceive of anyone actually making these sorts of arguments publicly. Or with a straight face.

Because, you see, if Texas did execute an innocent man, all of those things should happen. Because . . . well . . . because Texas . . . would have executed an innocent man.

And if Texas did execute an innocent man, that Texans might find out about it — and subsequently raise understandable questions about the morality and efficacy of the death penalty — isn't something to be avoided, it's something that damned-well ought to happen. Because — at risk of repeating myself — Texas would have executed an innocent man.

Radley Balko, "Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man? Who Cares!", Hit and Run, 2007-09-14

Dick Wetherbee likes tax

. . . well, he likes one particular tax:

Congress is debating whether it should tax cigarettes more in order to help children's health care. This child would love it. Tax 'em to the moon.

Right this minute I can buy cigarettes for 30 pesos a carton in Merida. A tad less than 30 US cents a pack at today's exchange rate.

There is a beach bar in Chelem where you can lie in a hammock, drink rum and coconut water and wait for a flat calm day. A moderately powered 18 footer on such a day can make the run to Cockroach Bay in less than 12 hours. An 18-foot fiberglass boat is practically invisible to radar. Only the motor makes a blip. The wake shows up on satellite but, generally, no one checks it in real time.

Right now, I know where you can get two 225 mercs for $1500. Solid (used) 18 ft center console hulls go for $2-3k all over Florida.

At present, few people go to prison for smuggling cigarettes. That will change. The bad guys will discover there is money to be made and it will be time for little guys to get out of the business. I figure about a 2-year window for those who love adventure and like to make a few bucks but would prefer to stay out of prison.

Why BMI is Bloody Mindless Idiocy

I've posted the odd critique of the obsession on the part of public health officials with BMI (here, here, and here for example), but in case you're not persuaded, here's Paul Campos to set you straight:

A particularly clear example of this is provided by the Harvard School of Public Health, which for many years has been pushing a phony claim with great success. The story is simple: That it's well-established scientific fact that being "overweight" — that is, having a body mass index figure of between 25 and 30 — is, in the words of Harvard professors Walter Willett and Meir Stampfer, "a major contributor to morbidity and mortality." This claim has been put forward over and over again by various members of the School of Public Health's faculty, with little or no qualification. According to this line of argument, there's simply no real scientific dispute about the "fact" that average-height women who weigh between 146 and a 174 pounds, and average-height men who weigh between 175 and 209 pounds, are putting their lives and health at risk. Furthermore, according to Willett, such people should try to reduce their weights toward the low end of the government-approved "normal" BMI range of 18.5 to 24.9 (the low end of the range is 108 and 129 pounds for women and men respectively).

It's difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the actual scientific evidence fails to support any of this. In fact, the current evidence suggests that what the Harvard crew is saying is not merely false, but closer to the precise opposite of the truth. For the most part, the so-called "overweight" BMI range doesn't even correlate with overall increased health risk. Indeed "overweight," so-called, often correlates with the lowest mortality rates. (This has led to much chin-scratching over the "paradox" of why "overweight" people often have better average life expectancy and overall health than "normal weight" people. The solution suggested by Occam's Razor — that these definitions make no sense — rarely occurs to those who puzzle over this conundrum). Furthermore, it's simply not known if high weight increases overall health risk, or is merely a marker for factors, most notably low socio-economic status, which clearly do cause ill health.

QotD: Immigration

America could not survive without immigration. Even the undocumented immigrants are contributing to our economy. That's the country my parents came to. That's the image we have to portray to the rest of the world: kind, generous, a nation of nations, touched by every nation, and we touch every nation in return. That's what people still want to believe about us. They still want to come here. We've lost a bit of the image, but we haven't lost the reality yet. And we can fix the image by reflecting a welcoming attitude — and by not taking counsel of our fears and scaring ourselves to death that everybody coming in is going to blow up something. It ain't the case.

Colin Powell, interviewed by GQ, quoted in Hit and Run, 2007-09-11

A call for an end to the "War on Drugs"

Ronald Bailey quotes at length from a new article at Foreign Policy by Ethan Nadelman:

Global drug prohibition is clearly a costly disaster. The United Nations has estimated the value of the global market in illicit drugs at $400 billion, or 6 percent of global trade. The extraordinary profits available to those willing to assume the risks enrich criminals, terrorists, violent political insurgents, and corrupt politicians and governments. Many cities, states, and even countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia are reminiscent of Chicago under Al Capone — times 50. By bringing the market for drugs out into the open, legalization would radically change all that for the better.

More importantly, legalization would strip addiction down to what it really is: a health issue. Most people who use drugs are like the responsible alcohol consumer, causing no harm to themselves or anyone else. They would no longer be the state’s business. But legalization would also benefit those who struggle with drugs by reducing the risks of overdose and disease associated with unregulated products, eliminating the need to obtain drugs from dangerous criminal markets, and allowing addiction problems to be treated as medical rather than criminal problems.

No one knows how much governments spend collectively on failing drug war policies, but it’s probably at least $100 billion a year, with federal, state, and local governments in the United States accounting for almost half the total. Add to that the tens of billions of dollars to be gained annually in tax revenues from the sale of legalized drugs. Now imagine if just a third of that total were committed to reducing drug-related disease and addiction. Virtually everyone, except those who profit or gain politically from the current system, would benefit.

The amount of harm done in the pursuit of this nonsensical war is far in excess of the harm done (generally to themselves) by drug users. The restrictions on individual liberty required in this "war" are more far-reaching than anything governments inflicted on their people during actual shooting wars, and the benefits are hard to identify . . . but the costs are astronomical.

Update: Of course, the situation in some countries doesn't seem to change, even with western troops on the ground:

According to a recent report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, 19,047 hectares of poppies were eradicated in Afghanistan this year, 24 percent more than in 2006. Meanwhile, the number of opium-free provinces more than doubled, from six to 13.

Those victories were somewhat overshadowed by the news that the total amount of land devoted to opium poppies in Afghanistan rose from 165,000 to 193,000 hectares, an increase of 17 percent. Due to "favorable weather conditions," estimated opium production rose even more, hitting an all-time high of 8,200 metric tons, 34 percent more than the previous record, set last year.

If even thousands of highly trained soldiers are unable to stem the tide in just one country, what chance do the other "drug warrior" forces have to restrict the supply of drugs to western markets?

Bruce Schneier on "Security Theatre"

Bruce Schneier is the one who coined the brilliantly apt description of ludicrously ineffective, but highly visible security precautions as "Security Theatre". He was recently, albeit probably inadvertently, honoured for that when the Transportation Security Administration head, Kip Hawley, used the term to explain why it's no longer forbidden to take cigarette lighters on board aircraft:

"There have been exactly two things since 9/11 that have made air travel safer," Schneier said recently over spring rolls at a favorite Vietnamese restaurant on Nicollet Avenue. "Reinforcing the cockpit door and telling people to fight back in the event of an attack." After a brief pause, half-devoured roll in hand, he reconsidered. "Well, maybe three," he said. "I'm on the fence about sky marshals."

One thing Schneier isn't on the fence about is the billions of dollars that the TSA has spent making air travelers pour out their water, take off their shoes, and until recently, throw out their cigarette lighters. All of this, Schneier argues, might make people feel safer, but it does little to actually improve security.

H/T to Jesse Walker.

Update: More on the uses and misuses of security theatre from Wired.

QotD: The defining myth of patriotism

The notion that our lives lack meaning unless the collective unites us all in service of a higher calling and that mass murder can provide that happy occasion is as old and atavistic as the first cave painting. It's also as natural, human, and evil as all the faults to which flesh is heir.

Gene Healy, "The Force That Gives Us Meaning", Punditry by the Pound, 2007-08-17

Rome, as a vehicle to explore the role of hierarchy

Adriana Lukas finds some interesting ideas illustrated in the recent HBO series, Rome:

Hierarchical systems and institutions take over people and hollow out anything that is individual to replace it with their own trinkets - position, status, power, money, influence, resources. People are defined by what position they hold, by the family they are born into, by people with greater power than them and finally, if they are lucky, by their decisions. Such systems with centralised or unchecked power attract people who wield it enthusiastically and ruthlessly. Using that power, in exchange for perpetuating the system, they shape others to its rules. Nasty things become possible in the name of the system . . . It’s one of the ways power corrupts.

Institutions and systems go through life cycles, often imploding by themselves or getting overthrown by new, more eager ones. If they survive it is by striking a precarious balance, by giving people just enough freedom to prevent rebellion. Judging from history, it doesn't seem that much is needed. Fortunately, there are always individuals who push for more autonomy and so the struggle continues.

Top down hierarchies are mechanisms for implementing centralised power. Their rules are a shorthand for the power structure and a substitute for knowledge of how things work, understanding of consequences of people's actions and impact of their decisions. How many times have you heard — well, if I let you do this, then everyone would want to do that and where would that lead? This is an admission of suppressed individuality. It is disguised as respect for others, when it fact it is merely 'respect' for the ways things are within the system.

QotD: Taxation and Regulation

To begin with, you must understand clearly that all taxation is regressive. It's all about proportion. Just as, say, a nickel sales tax on hamburger bites deeper into the economic flesh of the poor than into the relative adipose of the rich, so smaller companies are always hit harder by taxes than big companies with a better-padded bottom line.

Moreover (and this is a very important key to understanding what happened and why) big companies can afford bigger, slicker legal and accounting departments to save the corporation tax money or get them out of tax trouble if necessary. If government decides to go after a big corporation, its officers are far likelier to get their backsides forcibly removed and handed to them in court. (Or said officers may just be offered lucrative salaries to leave government and join the corporation.) Simply from an institutional standpoint, then, it's easier and safer to go after Mom and Pop, who are likely to be stuck with their brother-in-law accountant and the lawyer who drew up their wills.

Possibly even more important, all regulation is regressive, too. It costs a small company a much greater fraction of its assets to comply with government's dictates — most of them unconstitutional — than it does a big corporation with its teeming hordes of office drones.

I saw a dramatic display once of a quarter's worth of paperwork that the government required of the 3M corporation. The cardboard boxes it filled formed a sort of meandering garden wall about hip high and fifty or sixty feet long. It was truly horrific, and fundamentally wrong.

But my point here is that 3M could afford the resources (about a third of their overhead, they estimated) to deal with this kind and degree of asininity, whereas similar requirements, loaded onto the already breaking backs of small or even middle-sized companies could easily crush or kill them. At about the same time (the late 1960s), it was noted that four out of five new businesses go belly-up within a year.

And who, we may now ask rhetorically, do we thank for that? The same "progressives" today who shake their little Marxoid fistlets at Wal-Mart and bemoan the passing of the neighborhood grocery store. The same wasters who polluted the economic environment with regulatory toxins until the smaller denizens of the market were unable to survive and the only organisms left were the dinosauroid giants they love to hate.

L. Neil Smith, "'Progressives' or 'Regressives'?", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-08-19

QotD: Political Prisoners

That [this] position should be cavalierly propounded and thinly defended is not surprising, because the position is cavalier and indefensible. The notion that the chief executive can clap anyone in prison forever with only nominal court review was one the Founders had something to say about, in a document called the Declaration of Independence. In any case, maximalism has already crumbled in court.

Jonathan Rauch, "The Candidates' Four Detention Camps: What will the next president do about war on terror prisoners?", Reason, 2007-08-14

QotD: Operation Keelhaul

I remember [when I lost faith in government] quite clearly. It was the summer of 1972 (I could probably find the month and day if I did some shovelling). I had already been a libertarian for ten years, but still thought minimal government was the only choice. Then I attended a seminar in Wichita, conducted by Robert LeFevre and underwritten by the Love Box Company and the local Seven-Up bottlers every year.

Bob maintained that "government is a disease masquerading as its own cure", and as evidence, he presented, among other things, Operation Keelhaul. (Warning: the Wikipedia entry on this travesty is woefully inadequate.) Bob said that a drunken FDR and his equally drunken buddy Winston Churchill—deliberately kept that way by Stalin—had agreed at the Yalta conference to use their troops to round up everybody in western Europe who'd found the war a handy way to refugee the hell out of Russia.

The story is also told in George N. Crocker's Roosevelt's Road to Russia.

Also rounded up were Russian expatriates who had left before, during, and after World War I, and others, their children, maybe, who had never even seen Russia. The Wiki piece emphasizes Austria as the place this was done. Bob talked about France and I have since met the son of a US Army officer who helped carry the program out there. He died feeling ashamed of having obeyed those orders.

They were all put in the same kind of cattle cars that had taken Jews to the concentration camps, shipped back to the Motherland (couple of syllables missing in that term, I think), and shot to death within hours. Estimates of their number vary. The governments involved will admit to a couple hundred thousand. A couple hundred thousand! Bob, who was in Europe at the time, said it was more like two million.

That was it for me and government. Any government, all government. And it's why I don't give a rusty fuck, to quote Rod Steiger, what we replace it with. Especially given the events of the past six years, what could be worse?

L. Neil Smith, "Letter from L. Neil Smith", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-08-12

Cross-posted from the backup site.

QotD: MADD

What in the world is a MADD rep doing in an article about free booze on trains?

I believe it was a Hit & Run commenter who wrote a few months ago that MADD is no longer just "mothers" — its current president is a man. Nor is it any longer just about "drunk," they [are] generally opposed to drinking, too. Nor, as this article indicates, are they merely concerned about driving anymore. In the MADD acronym, that leaves only the word "against." Whatever it is, if it's related to alcohol, they're against it. Which sounds about right.

Radley Balko, "Mothers Against Buzzed Trainriding", Hit and Run, 2007-08-02

QotD: Productivity and Freedom

What is productivity? Simply getting more output from the same or less input. Dahl showed in his talk the institutional context in which productivity improvement flourishes. His findings will gladden the heart of any libertarian, and anyone else who wants a prosperous future for the billions of people on this planet who are mired in poverty. He began by asking why South Asians and Cubans are more productive outside of India and Cuba? Why do Russians have the highest per capita income of any ethnic group in the U.S., but very low per capita income in Russia? Why are Mexicans five times more productive in the U.S. than in Mexico?

The answer is that productivity flourishes when people are free, safe, and justly treated. Dahl calls this the framework for prosperity. "This principle holds not only for nations, but for any organization or institution that seeks to unleash its potential to achieve improvement and growth," declared Dahl.

Ronald Bailey, "Peace and Prosperity Through Productivity: Can economic growth solve all the problems in the world?", Reason, 2007-08-02

Colby Cosh shouts "Fire!" in the theatre

Colby Cosh has some fun batting around the restrictions on freedom of speech:

On Wednesday, Marni Soupcoff, our much-missed editorial board colleague who is on maternity leave, popped in at the paper's Full Comment weblog to discuss the fine recently levied by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal against an Internet goofball who had created a dreck-filled homepage for an imaginary "Canadian Nazi Party." She was there to express the timely if unpopular view, which I share, that even scumbags have sacred free speech rights and that they should, in ordinary discourse, be resisted by argument and not by means of hate laws. An interlocutor in the comment thread disagreed on behalf of "smart people," offering a familiar reminder: that freedom of speech "does not give anyone the right to shout 'fire' in a theatre."

For 20 years I've been arguing with Canadians against our impoverished accepted doctrine of expressive freedom, and in favour of the strong First Amendment-style approach implied in the actual language of the Charter of Rights. Ordinarily I am told that in arguing for near-absolute free speech I am reciting a blind, unreasoning formula that is ill-adapted to contemporary times. It is never more than two minutes before the person arguing against stale old-fashioned ideas is trotting out the 88-year-old "fire in a theatre" cliche. You could set your watch by it.

Cosh does a good job of pointing out the nincompoopery (if that's a word) of the argument.

More on framing the war on terror

Yesterday's link to the Radley Balko article got a thoughtful response from Chris Taylor (pulled from the comments to that post):

Balko is in error, though — he makes the assumption that today's jihadis are motivated to seek political change via terror. This is only true in a very limited sense. If the United States were to void its collective security arrangements with the Arab world, Israel, and formerly-Muslim parts of Europe, I am sure there would be a temporary downtick in terror attempts within the United States.

Eventually, though, we would be right back at the status quo because the primary animating force is religious and not political. No amount of political change would ever bring about the adoption of sharia and the absorption of the United States into the ummah. Even in nominally radical-dominated Muslim lands there is plenty of disagreement about what are and are not legitimate interpretations of the Qur'an, sunnah and hadith. Those disputes can never be resolved by political means. The only way to truly insulate a society is to become one of Islamic radicals, and even then we would be fighting with other radicals, whose interpretations our sect would find heretical. It simply does not end.

I responded in a flippant manner in that comment thread, but I thought Chris made some good points and that they should see the light of day (I know not everyone follows the comment threads). The instinct in the western media seems to be to attribute every terrorist act to the issues of the day in the west, not to the actual causes the terrorists themselves say are the reasons for their attacks. This bombing, despite the claims of the group that made the attack, is "really" because the Senate failed to pass that bill. Or this beheading is "really" caused by the US government failing to sign the Kyoto treaty.

Related thoughts from Steve Chapman:

By framing the fight as a global war, we have helped Osama bin Laden and hurt ourselves. Had we treated him and his confederates as the moral equivalent of international drug lords or sex traffickers, the organization might not have the romantic image it has acquired. By exaggerating the potential impact, we also magnified the disruptive effect of any plots, which is just what the terrorists seek.

We do further harm to ourselves by accepting government actions we would never tolerate except in the context of war.

The cack-handed "security" measures western governments have implemented in response to terror threats have done far more to further terrorist goals than the actual murders, bombings, and general mayhem actually committed by terrorist organizations. This should come as no surprise: in any period of stress, it is the deepest urge of any government to attempt to take greater control of anything within their grasp. It's one of the few things governments do well. (Grabbing control, that is, not actually exercising that control in an intelligent manner.)

QotD: Libertarians

Libertarians: Never got over the fact they weren't the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that's never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board. All for legalized drugs and prostitution but probably wouldn't want their kids blowing strangers for crack; all for slashing taxes for nearly every social service but don't seem to understand why most people aren't at all keen to trade in even the minimal safety net the US provides for 55-gallon barrels of beans and rice, a crossbow and a first-aid kit in the basement. Blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn't actually involve real live humans.

Libertarians blog with a frequency that makes one wonder if they're actually employed somewhere or if they have loved ones that miss them. Libertarian blogs even more snide than conservative blogs, if that's possible. Socially slow — will assume other people actually want to talk about legalizing hemp and the benefits of a polyamorous ethos when all these other folks really want is to drink beer and play Grand Theft Auto 3. Libertarianism the official political system of science fiction authors, which explains why science fiction is in such a rut these days. Libertarians often polyamorous (and hope you are too) but also somewhat out of shape, which takes a lot of the fun out of it.

Easily offended; Libertarians most likely to respond to this column. The author will attempt to engage subtle wit but will actually come across as a geeky whiner (Conservatives, more schooled in the art of poisonous replies, may actually achieve wit; liberals will reply that they don't find any of this humorous at all). Libertarians secretly worried that ultimately someone will figure out the whole of their political philosophy boils down to "Get Off My Property." News flash: This is not really a big secret to the rest of us.

John Scalzi, "I Hate Your Politics", Whatever, 2002-03-22

QotD: Government Assistance

[I]n both England and the U.S. there is no quicker route to hating the government than dealing with the various bureaucracies that handle public assistance.

Benjamin Barton, "Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy", 2005

J.K. Rowling: Libertarian Propagandist?

University of Tennessee law professor Benjamin Barton sees Rowling's series of Harry Potter novels as libertarian propaganda:

In Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy, Barton details the political messages he's discovered in the Potter books:

"What would you think of a government that engaged in this list of tyrannical activities: tortured children for lying; designed its prison specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; placed citizens in that prison without a hearing; ordered the death penalty without a trial; allowed the powerful, rich or famous to control policy; selectively prosecuted crimes (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); conducted criminal trials without defense counsel; used truth serum to force confessions; maintained constant surveillance over all citizens; offered no elections and no democratic lawmaking process; and controlled the press?

"You might assume that the above list is the work of some despotic central African nation, but it is actually the product of the Ministry of Magic, the magician's government in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series."

Barton said he thinks the anti-government thread that runs through the Potter novels is significant because the books have great potential to sway public opinion.

"It would be difficult to overstate the influence and market penetration of the Harry Potter series," Barton contends. "Somewhere over the last few years the Harry Potter novels passed from a children's literature sensation to a bona fide international happening."

H/T to Brian Doherty.

Daycare and the public interest

Nicholas Rosen has some interesting things to say, in partial response to a discussion on the Bujold mailing list:

Then there was a case I read about some years ago in Reason magazine. It seems someone wanted to open a childcare center, and some kooky neighbor objected to her getting a license. The neighbor didn't want another child-molestation horror in her neighborhood, and a city councilman went along with her, so the would-be childcare provider couldn't get a license. (It later emerged that many of the cases of alleged child molestation at daycare centers were utterly bogus, and even if some were not, the immense majority of daycare centers are not fronts for gangs of child molesters.) Here was a city government preventing a willing provider from offering child care to parents who wanted to hire her, all for no good reason, while politicians and others were complaining about the lack of affordable child care, and the Need for Government to Do Something.

There may be a case to be made for having government provide welfare, especially to children, who are not at fault for their parents' laziness or incompetence or bad luck. The trouble is that when government undertakes to do too much for people, people often lose their sense of responsibility and determination to provide for themselves and their families, leading to increased levels of social pathology and family breakdown. You can, for example, try reading Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom for an account of this.

Daycare is one of those discussions that can't help but move into politically dangerous ground: there's never enough quality care available to meet the need, and what there is is often too expensive for those in greatest need of it. It regularly becomes an issue in Canadian elections, although the proposed changes or new programs would far too often make the situation worse (the good news is that they are rarely implemented once the election is over: costs and complexity trump the "we must do something" urge very quickly).

Many children are cared for during the working day (and often well beyond the usual working hours) in informal daycare with friends and neighbours. At least three families on my street provide this kind of service on a full or part-time basis, for example. It may not be perfect, but it meets the needs of the parents, and clearly is beneficial to the providers (or they wouldn't do it). Yet these unlicensed operations are the ones most likely to be shut down by regulation or government mandates.

Some people — both in and out of government — pretty clearly feel that parents are the worst people to be put in charge of any one else's children, and many of the proposed reforms would put additional barriers in the way of this kind of service. It may sound great to a ministerial committee to mandate that only adults holding a post-secondary certification in child care should be allowed to take care of children they are not related to, but there are not (and will not be) enough holders of ECE certificates or equivalents to cope with the children who would need to be taken in if such a rule was put into place.

Similar things would happen if rules which are designed for commercial daycare facilities were also mandated for home daycares. The cost to retrofit would be far in excess of the perceived benefit, and in many cases would not be allowed under municipal building codes. (Of course, under some municipal rules, informal daycare is already wandering into regulatory gray areas.)

Wired on the Ron Paul phenomenon

Wired looks at the online presence of the Ron Paul presidential campaign:

When Texas Congressman Ron Paul entered the race for next year's Republican presidential nomination, few political analysts paid much notice.

Paul has no backing from political bigwigs or any campaign war chest to speak of. As the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988 he won less than one-half of 1 percent of the national vote.

Yet despite his status among the longest of the long shots, the 71-year-old has become one of the internet's most omnipresent — and some say most irritating — subjects.

According to Technorati, "Ron Paul" is one of the web's most searched-for terms. News about Paul has an outsize presence on Digg and reddit, two sites that allow users to highlight their preferred content. Paul's YouTube channel has been viewed over one million times, dwarfing efforts from competitors like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. The Ron Paul internet boom has born everything from Belgians for Ron Paul to a reggae music video promoting Paul's views on monetary policy and habeas corpus.

Who else do anti-war Republicans have to support? Who else do small-government Republicans have to support? Those two views alone would make Paul a factor.

QotD: Public Education and Kieran King

What fascinates me about the case of Kieran King, the Saskatchewan high school student who was threatened, punished and slandered by various officials over the past three weeks for talking with some pals about the health effects of marijuana, is that it explodes almost every single utopian cliche about public schools that has been ever propounded by their employees and admirers. It's almost glorious, in a way. Ever heard an educator say "We're not here to teach students what to think — we're here to teach them how to think"? BLAMMO! "We encourage children to make learning a lifelong process." KAPOW! Poor Kieran didn't even make it to age 16 before someone called the cops.

"Diversity is one of our most cherished values." But express a factually true opinion that diverges from what you've been taught and — WHOOMP! "Public schools aren't crude instruments of social control, they're places where we lay the foundation for an informed citizenry." BOOM!

I could go on, but I'm running out of sound effects and I really don't have time to fire up an old Batman episode on You-Tube to gather more.

Colby Cosh, "Put Kieran on a poster", National Post, 2007-06-22

Free speech versus the school authorities

Well, this isn't surprising, but it is rather depressing to read:

Kieran King, a Canadian 10th-grader, did some research and discovered that marijuana is not as bad as his government makes it out to be. When he shared this information with his friends at the Wawota Parkland School in Saskatchewan, King says, the school's principal, Susan Wilson, accused him of selling pot and threatened to call the cops. Outraged at the principal's intimidation, King organized a student walkout to protest what he saw as a violation of his right to free speech. Wilson responded by locking down the school and suspending the 15-year-old for three days, which will force him to miss his final exams. Not your average pothead, King says he's never seen marijuana, let alone smoked or sold it. "The main purpose [of the protest] wasn't cannabis," he told the Regina Leader-Post. "It was the defense of the freedom of speech. I believe we have a right to freedom of expression."

Call me pessimistic, but I don't see this ending well.

Ron Paul in the Washington Post

Rick Sincere highlights yesterday's article on the front page of the Washington Post:

For a so-called "second tier" (or sometimes, more derisively, "third tier") candidate, Representative Ron Paul of Texas gets some pretty good publicity, as well as serious attention, with regard to his quest for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination.

Take Saturday's Washington Post, which put Ron Paul on the front page — admittedly below the fold, but next to a big story about how the Jefferson Memorial may be sinking into Washington's primordial ooze, which is open to much symbolic interpretation in itself — that highlights his campaign's dominance of the Internet . . .

Perhaps Paul's omnipresent internet fans are starting to have some effect on the MSM after all.

Hurrah for the 4th Circuit Court

Jacob Sullum wraps up the news about the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit decision which strikes down the government's claim to have the power to detain suspects and hold them without charges indefinitely:

By the administration's account, the president already had the authority to detain not just aliens but citizens, not just for a week but for life, based on his own determination that they qualify as "enemy combatants." Rejecting this theory, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has struck a blow for due process and the rule of law, both of which are threatened by President Bush's assertion of the king-like power to lock people up at his discretion and throw away the key.

[. . .]

In deciding that al-Marri can likewise be tried in a criminal court but cannot legally be kept in military detention, the 4th Circuit distinguished his case from those of Hamdi and Padilla, noting that he has not been accused of taking up arms with the Taliban. "The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention," the court ruled, adding that such a power "would effectively undermine all of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution."

With the Bush administration winding down and the strong possibility of a Democrat in the White House come January 2009, perhaps Republicans will begin to see the wisdom of this warning.

The power to hold someone in custody for an indefinite period of time without ever charging them with a crime is too much power to grant to any government. As Blackstone wrote, "The King is at all times entitled to have an account, why the liberty of any of his subjects is restrained, wherever that restraint may be inflicted." (Quoted here.) The US Constitution is pretty clear on this, too: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it." Neither of those two cases apply to the current situation.

Julie Amaro wins a new trial

There's still hope for common sense and justice to prevail in the strange case of Julie Amaro. (See here for earlier reports on this case). According to a link posted at Slashdot, the judge has granted the defence request for a new trial:

A New London Superior court judge this morning granted a defense request seeking a new trial for Julie Amero, the former Norwich middle school substitute teacher convicted of exposing her middle school students to Internet porn. Acting on a motion by Amero's attorney, William Dow III, Judge Hillary Strackbein placed the case back on a trial list. Amero had faced 40 years on the conviction of four counts of risk of injury to a minor. State prosecutor David Smith confirmed that further forensic examination at the state crime lab of Amero's classroom computer revealed "some erroneous information was presented during the trial. Amero and her defense team claimed she was the victim of pop-up ads — something that was out of her control. Judge Strackbein said because of the possibility of inaccurate facts, Amero was "entitles to a new trial in the interest of justice."

Real justice would entail giving Ms. Amaro her life back, but that's not likely to happen. Judicial over-reach and media feeding frenzy between them have destroyed any chance of her being able to resume her teaching career, even when (not if) she is completely exonerated. But at least she shouldn't have to be further abused by serving a term in prison.

QotD: The evolution of equality

Back Then, for many reasons including muscle-powered weapons, biology was seen as destiny and women as property. Note that upper-class women in a world where the labor was done by the slaves and the protection by the Legions had the most freedom of any in the ancient world except perhaps Egypt, where the labor was done by slaves and the protection by Pharoah's Armies.

Now, when knowledge trumps muscle mass, women's equality is coming on apace, and certainly women's status as human beings is established by all above the feral-narcissist level.

You know what I mean by feral-narcissist. "What I want, I'm entitled to get. Woman! Rape! Convenience store! Rob! Enemy! Kill! Cop! Run! Why am I behind bars for the rest of my life? Not fair!"

Pat Mathews, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2007-06-03

QotD: The Ron Paul Candidacy

First, let's agree that there is no observer of the political scene wiser or righter than the embittered libertarian. He has witnessed the grandest of his dreams sputter out on the launchpad; he has watched his mildest expectations take flight and then explode into a thousand irregular chunks that melt the tarmac. He has watched the Libertarian Party splinter over that epoch-shifting question: Dave Bergland or Earl Ravenal? He has winced as the LP nominated, as its 2004 presidential candidate, the only man in America who could win even fewer popular votes than Ralph Nader in the late, brain-jellying stages of his dementia.

It was an embittered libertarian who told me to fear the Ron Paul 2008 campaign. Early in February, a few short weeks after Paul confirmed he'd be making the run, my source shelled peanuts and slugged beers and waved the red flag of doom.

"It's going to get ugly," he said.

David Weigel, "The Paul Paradox: Can a libertarian only win by losing?", Reason, 2007-05-25

QotD: Womb Envy

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I'm sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they're also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they've also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, "If all we do is hunt and gather, let's make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let's make childbirth kinda weak and shameful." It's a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it's entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women's behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

It's safe to say that I've snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I've looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I've shorted out. I don't pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I'm not for a second going down the "women are saints" route — that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart?

Joss Whedon, "Let's Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death", Whedonesque, 2007-05-20

QotD: Risk and perception of risk

I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that you should start worrying.

But that's not the way we think. Psychologist Scott Plous said it well in The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making: "In very general terms: (1) The more available an event is, the more frequent or probable it will seem; (2) the more vivid a piece of information is, the more easily recalled and convincing it will be; and (3) the more salient something is, the more likely it will be to appear causal."

So, when faced with a very available and highly vivid event like 9/11 or the Virginia Tech shootings, we overreact. And when faced with all the salient related events, we assume causality. We pass the Patriot Act. We think if we give guns out to students, or maybe make it harder for students to get guns, we'll have solved the problem. We don't let our children go to playgrounds unsupervised. We stay out of the ocean because we read about a shark attack somewhere.

It's our brains again. We need to "do something," even if that something doesn't make sense; even if it is ineffective. And we need to do something directly related to the details of the actual event. So instead of implementing effective, but more general, security measures to reduce the risk of terrorism, we ban box cutters on airplanes. And we look back on the Virginia Tech massacre with 20-20 hindsight and recriminate ourselves about the things we should have done. In fact, the incident has been used as evidence both for and against gun control.

Bruce Schneier, "Virginia Tech Lesson: Rare Risks Breed Irrational Responses", Wired, 2007-05-17

QotD: The value of online polls

This is why, despite all the emails I've received urging me to write about Ron Paul's strong performance in the Internet polls, I haven't been covering it. I like Paul, but Internet polls are meaningless as a measurement of anything but the enthusiasm of a candidate's supporters. I don't think, as some do, that Paul's performance is purely a product of cheaters spamming sites with multiple votes. There has been some of that, but the congressman does well even when the multi-voters are ferreted out and their ballots removed from the results. I just don't think it means a lot to win one of these contests.

But I have to laugh when the creators of these unscientific surveys try to find ways to discount Paul's wins without admitting the polls themselves are near-useless. When it became clear that Paul was doing well in Fox's text-messaging poll after the debate Tuesday night, for example, Fox host Carl Cameron suggested the congressman's supporters were gaming the system. He did not pause to ponder the point of offering a system so easily gamed. Nor did he admit that if the votes for Paul didn't mean much, the same was true of the remainder of the results.

Jesse Walker, "What Internet Polls Are Good For", Hit and Run, 2007-05-17

Modern China

Guy Sorman talks about the state of China:

The Western press is full of stories these days on China's arrival as a superpower, some even heralding, or warning, that the future may belong to her. Western political and business delegations stream into Beijing, confident of China's economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Investment pours in. Crowning China's new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

But China's success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining 1 billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. China's economic "miracle" is rotting from within.

I've had my own concerns about the real issues of the new Chinese economy.

Sullivan sums up the GOP debaters

I didn't watch the most recent US Republican candidates debate . . . but that should come as no surprise, because I can just barely muster enough patience to watch our own politicians debate during an election. The non-stop, never-ending campaign for President must be an extra circle of hell — at least, it would be for me. Others, however, with rather more at stake (i.e., American voters) must suffer along regardless.

Among the coverage of the debate, Andrew Sullivan had the most interesting thing to say:

It's also clear that compassionate conservatism is dead. Every single candidate favors reduced taxes and big spending cuts. None, however, is prepared to say that Medicare and Social Security must be on the chopping block. The grand experiment in big-government Republicanism is therefore rhetorically over. Sorry, Mr Gerson — but only one Republican is dumb enough to embrace the bromides of government spending as the cure for all our woes. And he's got a limit of two terms. That's a victory of sorts for those of us urging conservatives to abandon their big spending ways. I say "of sorts" because in practice, there's no sign that any of them, except Paul and possibly McCain, mean a scintilla of what they are saying.

The final clarifier for me was, yes, torture . . .

Some issues really are paramount moral ones. Two candidates opposed it clearly and honorably: McCain and Paul. All the others gleefully supported it - including Brownback. He's a born-again Christian for torture. Giuliani revealed himself as someone we already know. He would have no qualms in exercising executive power brutally, no scruples or restraints. Romney would double the size and scope of Gitmo, to ensure that none of the detainees have lawyers, regardless of their innocence or guilt. That is in itself a disqualification for the presidency of the United States. A man who has open contempt for the most basic rules of Western justice has no business being president.

Couldn't have put that last sentence any better.

Update: David Weigel thinks that Ron Paul's efforts are being wasted:

But did Paul win the debate? As Mitt Romney might say: Golly oh-gosh, heavens no! If it wasn't for the reanimated corpse of Tommy Thompson or Jim Gilmore, the clown costume that walks like a man, Paul would been the obvious loser of the debate. As is, he merely tied for 8th place and will be remembered as "Rudy's pinata." He has less chance of winning the GOP nom now than ever, which is really something. If the other 9 candidates plus Fred Thompson died in a horrific baking accident, the GOP would draft Lyndon Larouche before nominating this guy.

Ouch.

The attempt to squelch Ron Paul's supporters

Paul Levinson sent an open letter to ABC.com about the allegations that the site removed pro-Paul comments left on their site:

If this is true, the only justification ABC could have for doing that would be if they have proof positive that the comments were bogus — all or most originating from the same IP or same small group of IP addresses, for example.

Otherwise, ABC.com is guilty of an outrageous, heavy-handed administration of its comment section — so much so that, if the charges are true, ABC owes not only Ron Paul's supporters but the American people an explanation.

I hereby call upon ABC to explain exactly what happened with those comments — if they were indeed removed, why?

When that generated no response, he posted another one:

News media — whether tv networks or their message boards, or search engines like Yahoo which perform like news media, or smaller operations like Pajamas Media — have a responsibility to the American people. Unlike someone who sells shoes or pretzels, who can set store hours, open and close online message boards and blogs — pretty much do whatever they please under the law, as is their right — news media have a special, additional responsibility.

Especially in times of elections, news media must err on the side of being open to all candidates and their supporters. Yes, you must tolerate even an abusive e-mail, for the greater good of keeping your system open to all points of view.

That's why Jefferson and Madison in their wisdom insisted on protecting you under our First Amendment.

While I don't concur with Mr. Levinson's belief that the non-commercial media (like Pajamas Media) are in any way bound to the same criteria as the mainstream media, it's disturbing that PJM, of all groups, is indulging in the sort of strong-arm tactics they rightly condemn when done by the mainstream media.

It's my personal view that Ron Paul is one of the best presidential candidates fielded by either of the major parties over the last 40 years, and I would like to see him treated fairly (or at least as fairly as other declared candidates). He may not win — he's the definition of a long-shot candidate — but he does represent a wider swathe of opinion than other candidates who enjoy much better media access and friendlier coverage.

El Neil recommends endorsing Ron Paul

L. Neil Smith suggests the unthinkable: that the US Libertarian Party boost a Republican candidate:

Ron Paul is — or could be — the Eugene McCarthy of the 21st century.

It is for those reasons that I suggest that delegates to the 2008 Libertarian Party national convention should at least contemplate doing something unprecedentedly decent, courageous, and intelligent, even for them. They should nominate "None of the Above" for President on our own ticket, and then immediately vote to cross-endorse Ron Paul. The endorsement could even state the reservations I mentioned above.

But the point is that it would help put the LP on the map in a very big way, it would help the campaign of the only man (apparently) in a position to salvage the dream of what America was supposed to be, and it would help America and the world by thoroughly repudiating the evil beat-up-and-kill policies of the two-headed Boot On Your Neck party.

You don't get that kind of chance very often.

QotD: Peace, Order, and Liberty

I was surprised that my colleagues on the panel seemed less alarmed by the steady concentration of more and more power in fewer and fewer hands. In my view, the greatest guarantor of liberty and good government is an engaged and sceptical populace standing between its leaders and the levers of power, but this is clearly not a universal sentiment.

Akaash Maharaj, "The Friendly Dictatorship Revisited", Akaash Maharaj: Practical Idealism, 2007-05-07

The Food Police

Frequent comment writer, "Da Wife", has been having issues with the staff at her son's school. She asked if I'd let her rant about it . . . and I was happy to give her some space for it:

Our son is in Junior Kindergarten. Until he started school most of his food knowledge has been from us, his parents. Since he started school, when we serve certain foods, they have been increasingly accompanied by little commentaries from him such as "Cheerios are bad for you" (carbs). "Apples are good for you and make you big and strong". "Peanuts can make you die" (I guess a kid in his class is allergic). These comments are not something he would think of himself.

He has been coming home with many comments specifically about his lunch and snack contents. His lunch and snacks are balanced but do contain little treats such as Rice Crispy Squares. At home we offer good food and some treats too, and in general we do not preach about food causing death. Some gentle inquiries let us know that his teacher and the lunch helpers (from now on referred to as the Food Police) are indoctrinating our son and the other children in his class with the official Food Police views on food. Now remember that these are 4- and 5-year-olds who probably have very limited influence on what is put in their lunch. Aside from making them feel bad, how much good is the lecturing doing? Well it is doing a great job of undermining the parents' authority.

There is nothing quite as successful as undermining the influence of parents to make the children more susceptible to suggestion from other sources, such as the school system.

In February the school board conducted a month-long tally of all students’ morning snacks to see if the snacks are balanced and contain the major food groups. Yes, the official government-sanctioned Food Police were out to make sure that the children are eating properly. Yes, our tax dollars are now being spent on digging through kindergarteners’ snacks.

In March, I was unpacking my son's lunchbag and saw his sandwich was uneaten. His answer was that his teacher said it was too sweet so he did not eat it. I go to great pains to ensure that my very picky son will eat his sandwiches every day and at the same time ensure they are healthy. The sandwich in question contained 100% whole wheat bread. The margarine was non-hydrogenated 0mg cholesterol and 0mg trans fat with Omega-3. The jam was actually apple butter which — wait for it — is puréed apples and nothing else. But yes, to the eye it did appear that it was a sandwich with butter and jam. Maybe if the teacher actually spoke to me instead of making snide comments she would find out otherwise. This prompted a very angry phone call to the school office and a chat with the teacher the next day. She of course, not wishing to admit that she basically bullied a 4-year-old, said it was all in my son's head and he misunderstood. I left fuming after explaining to her the contents of his lunch and getting it across that her comments are not appreciated. The comments from the teacher seem to have lessened but I still hear that the other kids are still receiving them.

At the beginning of May, we received a "Healthy Eating Newsletter". This is from the same school that has not exactly been stellar on the province-wide standardized testing; maybe they should concentrate their energies elsewhere.

In another neighborhood school, if a child brings something the Food Police consider bad, the child has to take it to the office and trade it in for a piece of fruit. So nice of the school to take away a food that the parents spent their hard earned money on. I do wonder what happens to all these confiscated snacks. The office staff should have regular weigh-ins.

Up until about two weeks ago, we just simply attempted to deprogram our son whenever the need arose, aside from the one sandwich incident. Then came the final blow: after all the lectures, letters home about good eating, and the government-sanctioned snackbag inspections, then came the fundraiser. What do you ask was involved in the fundraiser? Selling apples for a dollar? Selling stuffed animals? Oh no: selling very large chocolate bars! Given out on behalf of the school by none other than Ms. Food Police herself, the classroom teacher!

Obviously the health of our children and our society is only important when money is not involved. The principal boasted about the good cause the money would go to. I was going to have a chat with the principal but then I remembered that he actually believes the themes of the month that involve teaching children about courage, empathy, sharing, etc. instead of the three Rs. As parents are no longer equipped to teach these themes at home, the school system has taken upon themselves the arduous task of teaching these qualities. After all, you hand in a report to your boss; he will not care if you cannot spell. As long as you do it with courage and are munching on a carrot stick.

And I used to think it was bad ten years ago, when we were getting the gears from Victor's school about "acceptable" foods . . .

Neoprohibitionists

Perry de Havilland takes a strong position against nanny state would-be meddling by a group called Alcohol Concern:

Parents who give alcohol to children under the age of 15 — even with a meal at home — should face prosecution, a charity says today. Parents who let children drink should face prosecution, says Alcohol Concern. [...] A charity spokesman said: "It is legal to provide children as young as five with alcohol in a private home. Raising the age limit to 15 would send a stronger message to parents of the risks associated with letting very young people consume alcohol." It is illegal to buy a drink in a pub under 18, but a 16- or 17-year-old can drink wine or beer if having a meal with parents.

You know what I would like to see? Whenever someone threatens me with force if I do not modify my social behaviour more to their liking in my own damn home, I would like them get arrested and thrown in jail. And I would like to see them beaten with truncheons if they do not comply with the cops just like they want for others who do not comply with their wishes. Such people are addicted to using force to impose their will on others and so why not "send a stronger message" that threatening people via the political system is really no different to threatening them with violence via some other institution, like the Mafia, for example.

QotD: Holocaust Denial and Free Speech

With regard to the holocaust, I have — broadly speaking — two options. I can believe that it did happen roughly as claimed. Or I can believe that it is a gigantic conspiracy of lies maintained since the 1940s in the face of all evidence. Since debate remains free in the English-speaking world, it should be obvious what I am to believe. I believe in the central fact of the holocaust. On the secondary issues mentioned above, where my authorities do not agree, I suspend judgment.

Take away the freedom to argue with or against these authorities, though, and my assurance that they are right must be weakened.

Sean Gabb, "Defending the Right to Deny the Holocaust" Free Life Commentary, 2007-04-24

QotD: Principles

[P]rinciples mean nothing — in fact, they mean less than nothing — when adhering to them is easy. Adhering to them when it's hard is what principles are all about, and the determination to do so is called integrity.

L. Neil Smith, "Immigration and Integrity", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-04-15

QotD: Orwellian April

Finally, in a story so bewildering it may retire the entire concept of "Orwellian" once and for all, the company that owns the copyright to Orwell's 1984 recently sent a chill letter to YouTube over the now-famous anti-Hillary "Vote Different" video because, at the end, it makes a reference to the Orwell's novel, the implication being that copyright law prevents anyone from citing 1984 in a work attempting to warn us that the state is ascending to 1984-like proportions. Which probably means this entire post is illegal, too.

Unfortunately, there isn't an April Fool's joke anywhere in this post.

Radley Balko, "Reality Nudges Ahead of Dystopia", Hit and Run, 2007-04-01

QotD: The Uses of War

I am no more anti- or pro-war than I am anti- or pro-knife. It rather depends what it is used for. There are justified wars and there are unjustified wars and in this imperfect world in which we live there are wars which are shades of both.

I am not a neo-con who supports anything the US or UK state does overseas because it is the US or UK state doing it. I spent a considerable time in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990's observing the war there at very close quarters indeed. That experience well and truly cured me of any residual pacifism or squeamishness about the fact there are many truly evil people in this world who need to be confronted with violence. In fact there are some people with whom the only reasonable form of interaction is to put 8 grams of copper jacketed metal through their skulls at 710 metres per second.

Perry de Havilland, "Murray Rothbard has his uses", Samizdata, 2007-03-22

QotD: Homeland Insanity

I don't know about this whole Sudafed issue. My example of clueless governmental overregulation would be the confiscation of a tin of boot polish from my carry-on bag on a recent Ottawa-Toronto flight of mine. I should probably mention I was in uniform at the time.

I do think it's reasonable to assume that the threat of a uniformed, accredited Canadian soldier threatening the safety of a Canadian plane with his can of black polish is even theoretically nil. Anyway, I decided to take another look at the current official list of prohibited flight items for Canadian airlines, figuring I'd missed the relevant regulation. I can't help noticing that boot polish is not on the list.

Bruce Ralston, "Airline travails", Flit, 2007-03-01

Drug raid gone awry . . . in Montreal

Jay Jardine reports on a recent botched police raid in Montreal:

When this story broke last week, I cringed at having to endure yet another round of politically charged nonsense surrounding drugs and guns. Today's developments put the case in a whole new light. Radley Balko (who has researched American SWAT raids extensively) has often noted that after a police shooting, usually the first thing the cops do is point out the amount of drugs that were seized in the raid. I haven't read anything yet pertaining to seizures. One Post story notes that of the six people arrested in the raids one had already been released without charges. The Globe notes that neither Parasiris nor his wife (who was presumably shot by officers returning fire?) have criminal records. At this point, all we have are the comments of his lawyer — take that as you will, and the rather exceptional details coming out of the raid (a fairly traditional family arrangement, with no criminal record and a legally registered firearm doesn't sound like a typical crackhouse to me), but rest assured I'll be paying close attention to this case as details emerge.

Proving yet again — as if it needed more proof — that the militarization of the drug war is an almost unmitigated bad idea. In this case, unlike too many others, the innocent victim survived the initial onslaught of battering-ram-equipped paramilitaries breaking down his door.

QotD: Ron Paul

It's odd to see [Republican Presidential candidate Ron] Paul in this format. He really doesn't get the language of these cable appearences; he couldn't dodge a question if it was tossed 100 feet over his head.

David Weigel, "Ron Paul Exists!", Hit and Run, 2007-02-27

QotD: Proportionality

Under Arizona law, each "visual depiction in which a minor [under 15] is engaged in exploitive exhibition or other sexual conduct" is a separate offense, triggering a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, and the sentences must be served consecutively. The upshot is that a defendant who has a few of these pictures on his computer can easily serve a longer sentence than a bank robber, arsonist, rapist, or murderer. By what peverted standard of justice does that make any kind of sense?

Jacob Sullum, "Arizona's Perverted Sense of Justice", Hit and Run, 2007-02-28

Sullum on Vancouver's latest "free" drug program

Reason's Jacob Sullum has some thoughts on the most recent innovation in Vancouver's ongoing attempt to socialize drug abuse:

Vancouver, which already has "a free needle exchange, a methadone maintenance program, a drug injection site where nurses supervise as heroin addicts shoot up, and a clinical trial testing whether chronic opiate addicts can be helped with prescribed heroin," is now experimenting with "maintenance treatment" for stimulant addicts. Under the new program, reports The Globe and Mail, heavy users of cocaine and methamphetamine will receive oral doses of legally prescribed stimulants in the hope that they "might decrease their use of illegal drugs and improve their social and physical health." Both of those outcomes are plausible, assuming the "patients" stop injecting, snorting, or smoking black-market drugs and start swallowing legal, quality-controlled pills instead.

[. . .] More troubling is the Vancouver model of free needles, free methadone, free heroin, and free amphetamines, all courtesy of the taxpayers. This strikes me as exactly the wrong way to achieve drug policy reform, guaranteed to alienate people who might be willing to let others use drugs but don't want to pick up the tab for it. The message should be freedom coupled with responsibility, not government-subsidized drug addiction.

It's certainly better than treating all drug users with penalties and punishments prescribed by the full majesty of law, but he's quite correct that it's shifting the burden from the drug users to the non-drug using through redistributive taxation. Surely it's immoral to require radical anti-drug warriors to pay taxes which support something completely opposed to their own beliefs?

QotD: Guns

Following the recent election, and the well-deserved humiliating repudiation suffered by the right, television writers — no doubt anticipating even more Democratic victories — have begun interpreting the Constitution for those (their entire audience, they assume) too illiterate or stupid to read it for themselves. A recent episode of Criminal Minds, for example, had one of its FBI agents lecturing a character to the effect that a group he belonged to had more guns (three per person, as I recall) than the law gave them a right to possess.

Let's see. . . if you happen to own a rifle, a pistol, and, say, a shotgun — as different in their individual functions as a Beetle, a Vespa, and a Hummer, but who would expect a TV writer to know that? — and you decide to add a .22 of some kind to your "battery", then, according to the undercover Supreme Court justices who hack out this program anonymously in their spare time, you've exceeded a secret quota the Founding Fathers somehow wrote into the Second Amendment in microscopic, invisible Sanskrit along the raw edges of the original parchment.

Naughty, naughty.

We have to do something, and do it now, before it gets as bad again as it was in the bad old 60s, when every network "entertainment" show (we're talking Barnaby Jones, here, and Hawaii 5-0) had its obligatory "Guns Are Nasty" moment every week, and you could always tell who the badguy was gonna be, in advance, because he had weapons — and, gasp!, big game trophies — hanging on the wall behind his desk.

L. Neil Smith, "CSI, Retired?", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-02-25

QotD: Pornography

To the libertarian, the arguments between conservatives and liberals over laws prohibiting pornography are distressingly beside the point. The conservative position tends to hold that pornography is debasing and immoral and therefore should be outlawed. Liberals tend to counter that sex is good and healthy and that therefore pornography will only have good effects, and that depictions of violence — say on television, in movies, or in comic books — should be outlawed instead. Neither side deals with the crucial point: that the good, bad, or indifferent consequences of pornography, while perhaps an interesting problem in its own right, is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not it should be outlawed. The libertarian holds that it is not the business of the law — the use of retaliatory violence — to enforce anyone's concep­tion of morality. It is not the business of the law — even if this were practically possible, which is, of course, most unlikely — to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright. This is for each individual to decide for himself. It is only the business of legal violence to defend people against the use of violence, to defend them from violent invasions of their person or property. But if the government presumes to outlaw pornography, it itself becomes the genuine outlaw — for it is invading the property rights of people to produce, sell, buy, or possess pornographic material.

We do not pass laws to make people upright; we do not pass laws to force people to be kind to their neighbors or not to yell at the bus driver; we do not pass laws to force people to be honest with their loved ones. We do not pass laws to force them to eat X amount of vitamins per day. Neither is it the business of government, nor of any legal agency, to pass laws against the voluntary production or sale of pornography. Whether pornography is good, bad, or indifferent should be of no interest to the legal authorities.

Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, 1978.

QotD: Experts

Experts can be and frequently are wrong. An expert working for the government is no less susceptible to bias or ill motivation as one working for a corporation. Which is why it's foolhardy to rely on their expertise when making top-down policies that affect everyone. In fact, the main difference between the two is that when a private corporation's experts are wrong, the consequences are generally limited to the corporation, its employees, and its investors (there are hard cases, of course. Pollution comes to mind. But hard cases make for bad policy.). When the government's experts are wrong, we all get to suffer the consequences. Which is a good reason to have government making as few one-size-fits-all policies as possible.

There was a time when government experts told us to eat lots of pasta. Not so much anymore. The "experts" at CSPI (who aren't the government, but are far too influential on it) once told us trans-fats were hunky-dory, and encourage restaurants to use them instead of butter and other animal fats. Now they say trans-fats are gelatinous death, and they're urging governments to ban them. Right now, government experts are generally lying to us about secondhand smoke, and using that "expertise" to call for public smoking bans. Same for medical marijuana. Government experts now tell us we're going to die if we don't lose a few pounds. But there's some evidence that dieting may be worse for you than carrying extra weight. There's now overwhelming scientific evidence that daily, moderate consumption of alcohol could add years to your life. Yet government experts continue to advocate top-down policies aimed at reducing alcohol consumption, because for whatever reason, they're more worried about the small percentage of people who abuse alcohol than the exponentially [higher] number of people who could benefit from it.

(It's also interesting how the government's preferred experts so often come to carefully-researched conclusions that call for giving more power to the government.)

Radley Balko, "Experts", TheAgitator.com, 2007-02-18

QotD: Crime and Punishment

I do not believe the state is morally allowed to do that which individuals are not morally allowed to do; I do not believe that prison sentences should have "off label" uses; and I think that if you are willing for the state to impose a sentence in your name, you should be willing to carry it out. I am not willing to execute a prisoner, or to rape one. Therefore, I don't authorise the state to do things for me. Nor do I want those tasks delegated to some fiendish thug in order to give myself plausible moral deniability.

If you do think that rape is an appropriate punishment for securities law violations, then you should say so. You should pressure your representatives to write these penalties into law. And when volunteers are needed to carry out the sentence, you should be willing to put your name in the hat.

Jane Galt, "Do it yourself", Asymmetrical Information, 2006-09-26

QotD: Legislating behaviour

Some people are perfectly capable of talking on a cell phone, drinking coffee, or having a dog in the backseat without endangering themselves or anyone else on the road. Others can have eyes on the road, hand in the 10-2 position, and seatbelt securely fastened — and still drive like a drunk 12-year-old.

So here's a novel idea: Why not ignore what's going on inside the car, and just pull people over and fine them when they drive recklessly?

Radley Balko, "Vermont Ups the Nanny Ante", Hit and Run, 2007-02-09

QotD: Back-to-Nature

My own observation is that most of the bellyachers about the ugliness of our cities and singers of paeans to the unspoiled wilderness stubbornly remain ensconced in these very cities. Why don't they leave? There are, even today, plenty of rural and even wilderness areas for them to live in and enjoy. Why don't they go there and leave those of us who like and enjoy the cities in peace. Furthermore, if they got out, it would help relieve the urban 'overcrowding' which they also complain about.

Murray Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays, 1974

QotD: Free Will

For millennia the question of free will was the province of philosophers and theologians, but it actually turns on how the brain works. Only in the past decade and a half, however, has it been possible to watch the living human brain in action in a way that begins to show in detail what happens while it is happening. This ability is doing more than merely adding to science's knowledge of the brain's mechanism. It is also emphasising to a wider public that the brain really is just a mechanism, rather than a magician's box that is somehow outside the normal laws of cause and effect.

Science is not yet threatening free will's existence: for the moment there seems little prospect of anybody being able to answer definitively the question of whether it really exists or not. But science will shrink the space in which free will can operate by slowly exposing the mechanism of decision making.

At that point, the old French proverb "to understand all is to forgive all" will start to have a new resonance, though forgiveness may not always be the consequence. Indeed, that may already be happening. At the moment, the criminal law — in the West, at least — is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal.

"Free to choose?", The Economist, 2006-12-19

QotD: Statement of Principle

Though I am greatly sympathetic to the libertarian cause, I can't allow any group or movement to control my intellect (such as it is), my free will, or my family's checkbook. Or my ass-crack, for that matter.

This blog is mostly about not letting other people decide for you, about extending a bit fat middle finger to the meddlers and the smug-faced moralists and the self-professed paragons of virtue.

Rogier van Bakel, "May Libertarians Drive SUVs?", Nobody's Business, 2007-01-11

QotD: A.A.

A.A. takes individual human strengths and [attributes] the strength to quit to something else. It's this collectivist thing. It's God. It's your "higher power".

Penn Jillette, interviewed by Nick Gillespie in "Love and Memory and Humanity", Reason 2004-12

Inflight meals might be a challenge

Yes, I've filed this under "Liberty." What would you file it under?

Most depressing predictions for 2007

Radley Balko indulges in the traditional predictions column for the coming year, here. It's as dispiriting as could be, until you get to the end of the column, where it gets worse than that.

A very Kelo Christmas

Reason's Jacob Sullum brings us the latest from the nice folks at the New London Development Corporation — the ones who used Eminent Domain provisions to take away the homes of many folks in New London, including Susette Kelo:

Has Susette Kelo "gone around the bend"? That's the diagnosis of New London Development Corporation (NLDC) board member Reid Burdick, one recipient of a very special greeting card that Kelo sent to the officials she blames for using eminent domain to drive her from her home in the name of progress. On the front of the card is a picture of the house she struggled for years to save from the economic development bulldozers, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 decision siding with the city — and with central planners throughout the country who are busy thinking of better uses for other people's property. Inside the card are these verses:

Here is my house that you did take
From me to you, this spell I make
Your houses, your homes
Your family, your friends
May they live in misery
That never ends.
I curse you all
May you rot in hell
To each of you
I send this spell
For the rest of your lives
I wish you ill
I send this now
By the power of will

Whole article here.

QotD: Collectivism

Every form of collectivism creates its own distinct false danger out of thin air that it can then pretend to save us from. Socialism will save us from evil capitalists. Fascism will save us from evil communists — and those whose evil skin color or accent is somehow undesirable.

Environmentalism will save us from evil industrialists — or from our evil selves, if absolutely needful, whether we want to be saved or not.

It will also keep the sky from falling.

None of this is new, of course. It all goes back to the same scam ancient religions used: the gods are angry! Only a coterie of well-fed (well-dressed, well-housed, and especially, well-laid) priests can save you! It's a simple evolutionary fact, taken advantage of, even by those who profess not to believe in evolution: to any set of genes that wishes to beget more genes like it, fear trumps joy every single time.

Leave joy — and all the good drugs — to the priests.

L. Neil Smith, "Back to Basics: Part Four", Libertarian Enterprise, 2006-12-17

Homeland Stupidity, Oz style

Roger Henry posted some interesting tidbits to a railway-related mailing list, in response to a comment about the difficulties some rail photographers have had lately:

Things are, sometimes, a bit more relaxed here. If someone — or something — is in a public space then it can be photographed. Likewise if it can be seen from a public space. (This is why someone can photograph the front of your house but not climb on a step ladder and look over the fence). [. . .]

Photographing trains, unless you are trespassing, is unlikely to attract any concern here. The general population, apart from those trapped in commuter hell, are barely aware there is a rail network and, with some justification, couldn't imagine why anyone would bother attacking it, or defending it.

What can be seen from the street can be surreptitiously photographed so it seems bizarre that "Authority" would waste time and resources hassling someone openly taking pictures. (I've always thought that it was a bad mistake to allow the population access to cell phones with camera facilities).

Where you will get lynched here is taking a camera/cell phone/artist's easel anywhere near a beach/playground/swimming pool. A leading photographer has found himself being detained (illegally) and generally hassled by lifeguards (lifesavers) when taking his camera to a public beach. His latest confrontation had him being questioned, for 25 minutes, by no less than four, Fascist coppers. The gormless wallopers wanted to dismantle his $8,000 Hasselblad looking for the concealed, digital, display. But, for $160 per hour, the controlling Council will issue him with a 'permit' allowing him to do what he likes on the beach.

When I emailed him (off-list) to ask his permission to quote from his original email, he sent me even more material:

The beach photography episode is lifted from the Weekend Australian for 9 December. The photographer's nane is Rex Dupain. His dad, Max Dupain, in 1937 took a pic of a bronzed lifesaver at Bondi Beach that became an iconic picture worldwide, the Melbourne incidents date back a few months.

The national security slogan here is "Be alert but not alarmed" and has a free call number for people to report "suspicious" activities. This gets some 30 to 100 calls a day! It has not been revealed if any of these calls have made the country safer.

What is slowly coming out is anecdotal evidence of the outcomes of some of these calls. Swarthy, dark haired, people attract the most suspicion. No surprise there. The ineptness of the police and internal security people in dealing with some of these calls is alarming. For example, a woman, Sophie Panapalous, was walking on a beach with her 14-year-old son. Someone called the hot line and reported that a woman with a head scarf was "acting suspiciously". She was detained by two uniformed coppers and a suit who demanded she account for her actions and what she thought she was doing wearing a Christian cross (!) and wearing a head scarf. That she had arrived by train was also suspicious. She explained that her son liked riding the trains and that she was a Greek Orthodox member. "Exactly" replied the suit "Why are you trying to hide behind a cross?" He went on that it was well known that Greeks were Moslem!?! Sigh. They tried to confiscate her cell phone and threatened her with arrest when she refused to take off her scarf. She was then ordered off the beach because "Her behavior was disorderly". (Now, if you were her son, what would your attitude be to Authority and the country in general?)

A second episode, that hit the evening TV, concerned a Lebanese, Moslem, family that was applying a concoction called "Dynamic Lawn Lifter" to their back yard (A brew that does NOT contain go-bang). An hysterical neighbour rang the "hot line" and this drew three police cars and two lots of suits. The family was berated, the Lawn Lifter confiscated along with a spare bag in the garden shed. Protestations that this was the amount required for the lawn area in question were ignored. The family had their house searched — sans search warrant — and were instructed not to put any more chemicals on their lawn or they would be arrested.

There are more. Sadly, much, much more. In no case has "Authority" apologized even though it makes them look incompetent and stupid and it is alarmingly obvious that huge resources are achieving nothing but aggravating a certain ethnic portion of the population.

Creepiest image I've seen in years . . .

Radley Balko runs the risk of posting a picture that could get him arrested. He cross-posted to Hit and Run where there are lots of comments.

QotD: The Nature of Government

It has been said that politicians are in the business of bribing people with their own money. That is, at their direction, government at various levels employs physical force or the threat of force — exactly like any other bandit — to take away about half of what the average individual earns, and then doles it back out in niggling bits and pieces, while extracting an enormous middleman's fee for the "service".

Unlike a decent, honest bandit, however, government does the same thing with people's freedom, employing its "monopoly of force" to suppress individual liberty, and then "generously" allowing people to get little bits of it back, in return for their compliance with its edicts.

The middleman's fee in this case is the erection of a vast and powerful police state whose Mussolinoid minions strut about in body armor, displaying — and often using — weapons illegally forbidden to everybody else, pushing people around, violating their rights, spying on them, listening to their conversations, reading their mail, and denying them the most intimate physical privacy, examining their body fluids and probing their anatomical cavities as if they were merely livestock.

L. Neil Smith, "Back to Basics, Part Two", Libertarian Enterprise, 2006-12-03

Free vote in commons

The free vote on same-sex marriage was held today, and the majority of MPs voted against re-opening the debate:

The last major threat to same-sex marriage rights in Canada was soundly defeated in the House of Commons on Thursday, with MPs sending the message they don't want to revisit the emotional, divisive debate.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he heard the message and will respect it. "We made a promise to have a free vote on this issue, we kept that promise, and obviously the vote was decisive and obviously we'll accept the democratic result of the people's representatives," Harper said. "I don't see reopening this question in the future."

The question put to MPs was whether they wanted to see legislation drafted to reinstate the traditional definition of marriage, while respecting the existing marriages of gays and lesbians.

That Conservative motion failed 175-123.

I'm glad that issue is off the table for the mid-term future at any rate.

I really did wonder why Harper wanted a vote on this, as the population is probably even more in favour of the current situation than they were at this time last year. Perhaps he had to show support for his more traditional supporters, and a free vote in the house is sufficient for that purpose.

The Minority Report world comes closer

Another link from Slashdot: software to predict how likely a person is to commit murder. Because, of course, you can't let the actual facts stand in the way of a good computer-based prediction:

"The tool works by plugging 30 to 40 variables into a computerized checklist, which in turn produces a score associated with future lethality. 'You can imagine the indicators that might incline someone toward violence: youth; having committed a serious crime at an early age; being a man rather than a woman, and so on. Each, by itself, probably isn't going to make a person pull the trigger. But put them all together and you've got a perfect storm of forces for violence,' Berk said. Asked which, if any, indicators stood out as reliable predicators of homicide, Berk pointed to one in particular: youthful exposure to violence."

That last item will be like catnip for law enforcement types, because those four final words will almost instantly bond with the concept of "violent computer games". There you have it, a perfect reason to lock up anyone you don't like . . . and you've got a computer prediction to back up your prejudices. Not to imply that law enforcement officials would misuse such a tool — perish the thought — just that it's inevitable a possibility.

QotD: Resource scarcity

We make ourselves better off, then, not by increasing the amount of resources on planet earth — that is, of course, fixed — but by rearranging resources we already have available so that they provide us with more of what we want. This process of improvement has been going on ever since the first members of our species walked the earth. We have moved from heavy earthenware pots to ultrathin plastics and lightweight aluminum cans. To cook our food we have shifted from wood-intensive campfires to clean, efficient natural gas. By using constantly improving recipes, humanity has avoided the Malthusian trap while at the same time making the world safer and more comfortable for an ever larger portion of the world’s population.

In fact, increasing, rather than diminishing, returns characterize many economic activities. For example, it may cost $150 million to develop the first vial of a new vaccine to prevent Lyme disease. Yet every vial after that is essentially free. The same is true for computer programs: it may cost Microsoft $500 million for the first copy of Windows 98, but each subsequent copy is merely the cost of the disk on which it is stored. Or in the case of telecommunications, laying a fiber optic network may cost billions of dollars, but once operational it can transmit millions of messages at virtually no added cost. And the low costs of each of these inventions make it possible for the people who buy them to be even more productive in their own activities — by avoiding illness, expediting word processing, and drastically increasing the tempo of information exchanges.

What modern Malthusians who fret about the depletion of resources miss is that it is not oil that people want; they want to cool and heat their homes. It is not copper telephone lines that people want; they want to communicate quickly and easily with friends, family and businesses. They do not want paper; they want a convenient and cheap way to store written information. In short, what is important is not the physical resource but the function to be performed; and for that, ideas are the crucial input.

Ronald Bailey, "The Law of Increasing Returns", Cato Institute, 2000-03-18

QotD: Robbing Peter to pay Paul

[. . .] this brings me back to the recurring theme of people (on the "right" as much as the "left") who ignore empirical evidence of many decades, even centuries, that government is not our friend. It is seldom that any one entity, person or corporation gets to be "Paul" all the time. Sooner or later, you are forced to be "Peter." And sometimes you get Petered good and hard, if you catch my drift.

However, through the magic of tax withholding, most people seem to have no idea how much the government is Petering them. Nor do they understand how much the hundreds of thousands of government regulations bleed them almost as much. And most of them think that corporate income taxes are a good idea, making sure they "pay their fair share." This is another of the great mysteries of our current condition: how can people be so ignorant of economics and the world around them that they don't realize that if the government places a more-or-less uniform burden upon businesses, said businesses will pass that cost along to the consumers! We all know that shit flows downhill, and that money talks. This point is easily as obvious, so why is it that people seem oblivious to it?

Chris Claypoole, "Taking from Peter to pay Paul", Libertarian Enterprise, 2006-11-26

QotD: The War on Drugs

Longtime drug reformer Eric Sterling (a guy I generally admire), for example, said at the conference that his first step toward a post-prohibition America would be "universal health care," accompanied by comprehensive treatment that addicts could obtain rather easily — in Sterling's words, free treatment should be"as easy as ordering a pizza."

Terrific. If there's one surefire way to make sure America never reforms its drug laws, it's telling the public that step one in "drug reform" would be to have taxpayers foot the bill for morphine clinics, needles, and the local addict's relapses.

This would all still be quite a bit better than today's approach of kicking down doors and filling the prisons with pot smokers, of course (treating drug addiction like a public health problem, I mean — universal health care is another animal entirely). But it's a far cry from treating American citizens as actual adults, capable not only of making their own decisions about what they put into their bodies, but also of assuming full responsibility for those decisions.

Radley Balko, "Holiday Row", Hit and Run, 2006-11-20