“Anyone boarding an aircraft should feel maybe only a teeny tiny bit safer than if there were no TSA at all.”

The author of those words should know: He (or she) used to be a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey. An article by this anonymous former screener in the New York Post paints a devastating portrait of an agency that employs incompetents, enforces arbitrary regulations, and engages in what security expert Bruce Schneier calls “security theater”: public actions taken in the name of security that actually do nothing to make people safer.

Government officials often call TSA screeners “a first-class line of defense in the war on terror,” observes the author. In fact, the author points out, one needn’t even have a high school diploma or GED to get a job as a screener. “These are the employees who could never keep a job in the private sector. I wouldn’t trust them to walk my dog.”

Most screeners aren’t really concerned with airport security, the author says. They are there for the paycheck – $15 an hour to start, plus “tons of overtime” filling in for no-shows – and the benefits, including generous amounts of vacation and sick time and a near impossibility of being fired unless they get caught stealing from passengers. Supervisors, it seems, care little about what screeners do – as long as they don’t chew gum on duty.

Another benefit (for male screeners): “a lot of ogling of female passengers.” The author advises women to “cover up when you get to the airport. These guys are checking you out constantly.” Of course, covering up won’t do you much good when you go through the scanners that show your naked body to the screeners anyway.

The former screener states that there are a few “delusional zealots who believe they’re keeping America safe by taking your snow globe, your 2-inch pocket knife, your 4-ounce bottle of shampoo and performing invasive pat-downs on your kids.” The rest “know their job is a complete joke.”

The rules are arbitrary, he argues, and the pat-downs are “ridiculous.” “As invasive as it is, you still can’t find anything using the back of your hand on certain areas.” Some screeners, embarrassed to be patting down children or wheelchair-bound seniors, just give them a quick once-over to make it look like they’re doing something; otherwise, the entire terminal would have to be shut down until the individual who wasn’t groped was located.

Then there are the stories of TSA screeners’ strip searching grandmas, examining (and sometimes breaking) passengers’ urostomy and colostomy bags, and exposing the breasts of teenage girls, just to name a few outrages. Whenever one of these incidents occurs, the TSA’s first defense is usually to claim that proper procedures were followed; later, when the affront to human decency becomes so obvious it cannot be denied, the agency blames the screeners for not following procedures. This is nonsense, writes the ex-screener: “Every time you read about a TSA horror story, it’s usually about a screener doing what he or she is instructed to do.”

In what his attorney called “a huge victory for food freedom,” a Minnesota farmer was acquitted by a jury of the “crime” of distributing unpasteurized milk to members of a food cooperative.

On September 20, “after a three-day trial and more than four hours of deliberation,” reported the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “a Hennepin County jury found Alvin Schlangen not guilty of three misdemeanor counts of selling unpasteurized milk, operating without a food license and handling adulterated or misbranded food.” Each count carried a maximum sentence of three months’ imprisonment.

“Schlangen, an organic egg farmer from Freeport, Minn., doesn’t produce milk himself but operates Freedom Farms Co-op, a private club with roughly 130 members who buy various farm products, including raw milk,” the paper explained. “Schlangen picks up the milk products from an Amish farm and delivers them to members.”

“The charges are based on commerce and there’s no commerce here,” the 54-year-old Schlangen told the Star Tribune. “It’s a completely different food system than what we are accustomed to.”

Two co-op members testified to the private nature of their arrangements with Schlangen. One, Kathryn Niflis Johnson, told the court, “As a member we lease/own the animals. We place an order and food products are delivered by Alvin. We pay the proportional amount for labor and overhead it takes to produce the food.” Asked by prosecutor Michelle Doffing Baynes if she had “bought” other products from Schlangen, Johnson replied, “I don’t know if ‘bought’ is the right word, but I usually get eggs and milk and maybe other things in the past… You have to understand that this is a whole new model and that we don’t necessarily have the right words to describe what we are doing.”

The reason Minnesotans must make such complicated arrangements to obtain certain fresh farm products is that state law restricts the sale of these products – raw-milk products in particular – to the farms where they are produced. “Schlangen,” noted the Star Tribune, “called the law ‘absurd,’ since it implies the same batch of raw milk is safe at the farm, but not if sold in the Twin Cities.” James Roettger, a senior inspector for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA), actually testified that raw milk “should be consumed on the same day it is produced, suggesting that raw milk kept any longer could become dangerous,” according to raw-milk advocate David Gumpert.

Minnesota is “the most oppressive state in terms of freedom of food choice,” Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund president Peter Kennedy told the Star Tribune. (Kennedy’s organization paid for Schlangen’s defense.) Schlangen found that out firsthand, telling Gumpert that on March 9, 2011:

The MDA stopped and illegally seized, searched and confiscated the property carried in the private delivery truck belonging to the Schlangen family farm. This action occurred at the foot of a sports stadium at St[.] Paul Macalester College, where a group of students were able to connect with the Schlangen farm for their choice of local sustainable eggs. I was not allowed to deliver the product of my farm to the college group that day. In fact, those very eggs were confiscated, along with fresh farm dairy food that belonged to the members of newly formed Freedom Farms Coop.

The same day, the (food club’s leased warehouse space) was raided, food was seized as well as packaging material including empty milk crates, even several gallons of used veggie oil that was potential fuel for the delivery rig. With a wholesale value of more than $5,000, this was in fact grand larceny, aggravated and pre-meditated, by MDA officers.

Read the rest of the article

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

Amid all the cheers and jeers for the 2012 Republican Party platform, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) let slip the truth about that document: He hasn’t read it, and he doesn’t know anyone who’s ever read it or any other platform.

At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast August 27, Human Events’ John Gizzi asked Boehner about his comfort level with the recently drafted GOP platform.

“The Republican platform is circulating about in different copies, online, in print,” said Gizzi. “Based on the reports you’ve seen, is this a good document to run on fully, and in particular, the parts about auditing the Federal Reserve, number one, and the review of government agencies as to their efficiency without calling for shutting them down. Are those things you feel that Republican House members can run on comfortably?”

Boehner’s response: “Well, I have not seen the platform, but from every indication that I’ve heard I don’t see any major changes in this platform from what we have had in the past. And if it were up to me I would have the platform on one sheet of paper. Have you ever met anybody who read the party platform? I’ve not met ever anybody.”

This, to use Michael Kinsley’s definition of the word, is a gaffe: when a politician inadvertently speaks the truth. For all the haggling over the details of the Republican platform – CNSNews.com writes that “some activists work for months just to win the right to attend the convention” and influence the platform – the fact is that no one of any consequence in the party reads, much less adheres to, the party’s statement of principles. It exists to convince the grassroots that the party leadership is listening to their concerns and intends to use them as a guide for formulating policy. In practice, however, it is largely ignored.

For example, every GOP platform since 1980 has called for the passage of a human life amendment to the Constitution and the restriction of taxpayer funding of abortion. Yet no such amendment has ever come close to passing Congress in the last 32 years; and Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, continues to receive generous federal subsidies, including $2.5 billion during the presidency of “pro-life” Republican George W. Bush, six years of which coincided with GOP control of one or both houses of Congress.

Read the rest of the article

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

Seen any walnuts in your medicine cabinet lately? According to the Food and Drug Administration, that is precisely where you should find them. Because Diamond Foods made truthful claims about the health benefits of consuming walnuts that the FDA didn’t approve, it sent the company a letter declaring, “Your walnut products are drugs” – and “new drugs” at that – and, therefore, “they may not legally be marketed … in the United States without an approved new drug application.” The agency even threatened Diamond with “seizure” if it failed to comply.

Diamond’s transgression was to make “financial investments to educate the public and supply them with walnuts,” as William Faloon of Life Extension magazine put it. On its website and packaging, the company stated that the omega-3 fatty acids found in walnuts have been shown to have certain health benefits, including reduced risk of heart disease and some types of cancer. These claims, Faloon notes, are well supported by scientific research: “Life Extension has published 57 articles that describe the health benefits of walnuts”; and “The US National Library of Medicine database contains no fewer than 35 peer-reviewed published papers supporting a claim that ingesting walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce heart attack risk.”

This evidence was apparently not good enough for the FDA, which told Diamond that its walnuts were “misbranded” because the “product bears health claims that are not authorized by the FDA.”

The FDA’s letter continues: “We have determined that your walnut products are promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs because these products are intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.” Furthermore, the products are also “misbranded” because they “are offered for conditions that are not amenable to self-diagnosis and treatment by individuals who are not medical practitioners; therefore, adequate directions for use cannot be written so that a layperson can use these drugs safely for their intended purposes.” Who knew you had to have directions to eat walnuts?

“The FDA’s language,” Faloon writes, “resembles that of an out-of-control police state where tyranny [reigns] over rationality.” He adds:

This kind of bureaucratic tyranny sends a strong signal to the food industry not to innovate in a way that informs the public about foods that protect against disease. While consumers increasingly reach for healthier dietary choices, the federal government wants to deny food companies the ability to convey findings from scientific studies about their products.

Walnuts aren’t the only food whose health benefits the FDA has tried to suppress. Producers of pomegranate juice and green tea, among others, have felt the bureaucrats’ wrath whenever they have suggested that their products are good for people.

Read the rest of the article

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

Don’t count Ron Paul out yet. The Texas Congressman may not have secured any headline-grabbing victories in state primaries and caucuses. He may be trailing in the unofficial delegate counts based on these contests. But he is cheerfully pressing onward, confident that he can keep right on going all the way to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa and possibly even come out of the convention the GOP’s nominee for President.

Even among Paul’s most ardent supporters, few would now argue that the 76-year-old physician is anything but a long shot for the nomination. Long shots, however, occasionally pay off. And Paul has a strategy that he believes just might produce one of the most unexpected come-from-behind victories in U.S. political history.

The Paul campaign understands what few observers of the political scene – and even many players within it – realize: A significant number of the state primaries and caucuses covered by the national media as if they determined the Republican nominee are, as the Paul campaign likes to put it, “beauty contests” that make for an exciting horse race but may have little to do with who ultimately gets the nomination. The media report the popular vote results from a particular state and, unless it is a winner-take-all state, assume that each candidate will receive delegates to the RNC in roughly equal proportion to his share of the popular vote. Thus, reports typically state that Paul has only a tiny fraction of the delegates that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has and that therefore he has no chance of being the GOP nominee.

In fact, says Thomas Mullen of the Washington Times’ Communities website, “no one knows” how many delegates any of the candidates has – not even the Republican Party itself. We know that the delegates from winner-take-all states such as Florida will be bound to vote for the winners of their respective states’ primaries during the first round of voting at the convention. Likewise, in some states (Nevada, for instance), during the first round delegates will be bound to certain candidates on the basis of the popular vote. Beyond that, Mullen writes, very little is certain:

In other states, the process is not that simple. A popular vote is held, but it’s really no more than a preference poll or “straw poll.” After the straw poll is closed, a series of meetings commence in which delegates are elected from a precinct, district or county, which then elect delegates to a state convention, which then elect the delegates to represent that state at the RNC. This process typically takes months after the straw poll is over and the resulting delegates for each candidate may bear little resemblance to the vote percentage that candidate won in the straw poll.

Paul’s campaign believes that his supporters, typically more enthusiastic and devoted to his candidacy, are more likely to remain after the straw poll and participate in the delegate selection process. There is some evidence that they are correct. For example, the Iowa Republican Party confirms that delegate assignment has nothing to do with the straw poll and that Paul may secure the most delegates from Iowa.

Missouri provides additional evidence that Paul’s delegate strategy could succeed. While former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum swept the state in the nonbinding presidential primary in February, he did not perform as well during the later caucuses.

The local caucuses chose over 2,000 delegates to regional conventions, which will then send people on to the state convention, where delegates to the RNC will be bound to vote for certain candidates. In several local caucuses Paul and Romney supporters teamed up to deny most or all of the delegates to Santorum. In at least three counties Santorum didn’t get a single delegate while Paul got a majority of the delegates. In Greene County Paul got 65 delegates; Romney, 40; and Santorum, just six.

“We are focusing on caucus states, just like we always have,” Paul Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton told U.S. News & World Report. “It puts us in the driver’s seat to easily win many. There is still work to be done, and we understand that we are going to have to stay on our game to maintain our position.”

Read the rest of the article

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

Another day, another sticky-fingered Transportation Security Administration agent caught stealing from airline passengers: According to the Associated Press, 31-year-old Alexandra Schmid, a TSA screener at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, allegedly helped herself to a cool $5,000 from a passenger’s jacket as it passed along an X-ray conveyor belt on February 1. The passenger, a native of Bangladesh, noticed the money was missing as soon as he retrieved his jacket, at which point he reported the theft.

According to Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and the New Jersey police force, “surveillance video showed Schmid taking the money from a jacket pocket, wrapping the cash in a plastic glove and taking it to a bathroom,” the AP writes. The money has not yet been recovered; Schmid is suspected of having passed it on to someone else in the bathroom.

Brooklyn resident Schmid was arrested on a charge of grand larceny. She has been suspended from her job with the TSA, which she had held down for four-and-a-half years, while an investigation takes place.

With any luck, Schmid, if found guilty, will get the same favorable treatment meted out to two other JFK screeners who were caught red-handed. Those men, Coumar Persad and Davon Webb, pleaded guilty to stealing $40,000 from a passenger’s checked luggage and on January 10 were sentenced to six months in jail and five years’ probation – “a sentence that falls on the border with a misdemeanor,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley observed in astonishment.

Following Schmid’s arrest, TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein hastened to assure concerned travelers: “The actions of a few individuals in no way reflect on the outstanding job our 50,000 security officers do every day.”

Read the rest of the article

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

Do you think anthropogenic global warming is a hoax? Are you unconvinced that your ancestors had more in common with Cheetah than with Tarzan? Have you any doubts about the official version of how 9/11 went down? Then you, according to Evgeny Morozov, are part of a “kooky” “fringe movement” whose growth must be checked by forcing you to read “authoritative” content whenever you go looking for information on such topics on the Internet.

Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine, and a former fellow at George Soros’ Open Society Institute – in other words, a reliable bellwether of globalist establishment thinking. His musings in Slate – in which he argues that while outright censorship of the web may not be possible, getting browsers and search engines to direct people to establishment-approved opinions would be an excellent idea – offer “proof of how worried the bad guys are about popular disbelief in State pieties, and about sites … that stoke it,” Lew Rockwell averred, citing his own website as an example. The New American undoubtedly would fall under that rubric as well.

The problem, as Morozov sees it, is that people who “deny” global warming or think vaccines may cause autism – opinions that conflict with those proffered by governments, the United Nations, and other globalist organizations – can post anything they want on the Internet with “little or no quality control” over it. As a result, he says, there are “thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories.”

In addition, Morozov worries that those searching for information on a disputed topic will, because of the way search engines are structured, tend to find sites giving the politically incorrect version of events first and may never get around to reading the “authoritative” sources on the subject. “Meanwhile,” he argues, “the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.”

Then comes the big question with the foreordained answer: “Is it time for some kind of a quality control system?” Morozov, not surprisingly, replies strongly in the affirmative. Since dissuading those already committed to these outré views may be impossible, he thinks “resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential – rather than existent – members.” “Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option” – note that he doesn’t say he opposes censorship per se – Morozov argues for changes to browsers and search engines that would notify users that they are about to see something that the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable opinion have deemed unfit for human consumption and, if possible, direct them elsewhere.

He suggests two approaches to ensuring that web searchers are not exposed to unapproved thoughts:

One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like “vaccination leads to autism” appears in our browser, that sentence would be marked in red – perhaps, also accompanied by a pop-up window advising us to check a more authoritative source. The trick here is to come up with a database of disputed claims that itself would correspond to the latest consensus in modern science – a challenging goal that projects like “Dispute Finder” are tackling head on.

The second – and not necessarily mutually exclusive – option is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like “global warming” or “vaccination.” Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.

Read the rest of the article

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

In the 111th Congress Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) introduced legislation to perform a wide-ranging audit of the Federal Reserve. That bill was, in Paul’s words, “gutted” before it came to the floor for a vote. Ultimately only a few very weak provisions of Paul’s original bill became law.

With Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives in January, however, Paul is likely to get another crack at the Fed, and he doesn’t intend to waste the opportunity. Paul is currently the ranking member of the House Subcommittee for Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology and is, therefore, in line to become chairman of the subcommittee when the 112th Congress commences. If he does indeed assume the chairmanship, “Paul said his first priority will be to open up the books of the Federal Reserve to the American people,” according to CNBC.com senior editor John Carney. “We need to create transparency there. To see what it is they are buying and lending, and who it is they are dealing with,” Paul said.

Auditing the Fed is only the beginning, as one might expect from the author of End the Fed. Carney writes that Paul told NetNet, “I will approach that committee like no one has ever approached it because we’re living in times like no one has ever seen.” Among his other objectives: using subcommittee hearings to educate the public about Austrian economists’ view of the business cycle, namely that it is a result of central banks’ shenanigans rather than something inherent in the free market, and auditing the U.S. gold reserves in preparation for monetary reform, either by legalizing competing currencies or by returning to the gold standard (or both). Also on his agenda, says Reuters, is scrutiny of the International Monetary Fund and other global financial institutions, probably as part of monetary reform. These institutions, as The New American has reported on multiple occasions, are pushing for a global currency, which may explain Paul’s comments, as reported by Carney: “We will have to have monetary reform. I think those on the other side of this issue are already planning. They are going to try to replace a bad system with an equally bad system.”

Read the rest of the article

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

On September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a national emergency with respect to the terrorist attacks of three days earlier. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 requires the President to renew this state of emergency on an annual basis if he wishes it to remain in effect. Bush renewed it every year he was in office, and now President Barack Obama has extended it for the second time during his term.

The United States of America, therefore, is now entering its 10th year under a continual state of emergency — on the basis of a small number of (admittedly spectacular) terrorist attacks that took place in the space of a few hours back in 2001 and a handful of failed attempts since.

So-called national emergencies are a boon for governments, and particularly for heads of state. The “national emergency” in 1933 Germany occasioned by the firebombing of the Reichstag spurred the German parliament to grant Chancellor Adolf Hitler supposedly temporary dictatorial powers; we all know how that turned out. Egypt has been operating under a state of emergency since 1967 (except for a brief period in 1980 and ’81). Its government has taken advantage of its emergency declaration to lock up thousands of political prisoners indefinitely, to create a kangaroo court system for those it bothers to try, to prevent criticism of the regime, and to suspend other constitutional rights.

Many of the Egyptian government’s abuses have occurred in the United States on a smaller scale, justified by such personages as Bush Justice Department official John Yoo on the basis of the ongoing national emergency. If our national emergency is allowed to stand for another 30-plus years, imagine how entrenched and expanded these policies would become.

When the President declares a national emergency, wrote Harold C. Relyea, specialist in American national government with the Congressional Research Service, he “may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”

Not all of these powers are exercised in every emergency. The 1976 law, intended to prevent abuses of the President’s power to declare national emergencies, requires the President to state the emergency statutes he wishes to invoke “either in the declaration of a national emergency, or by one or more contemporaneous or subsequent Executive orders.” Jason Ditz of Antiwar.com notes that “the current state of emergency empowers the president in a number of manners, including allowing him to suspend officer personnel laws related to the US military, suspending all legal limits on the number of commissioned officers, authorizations to grow the size of the military beyond the legal appropriations, waive limits on reserves, and the right to recall retirees to active duty.” This does not, however, prevent Obama or a future President from choosing to invoke more statutes under the same declaration of national emergency.

Read the rest of the article

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

This past Tuesday I had my first experience with jury duty in nearly 20 years of eligibility, almost 15 of them spent in the same county. Had I any doubts about the viability or necessity of private courts before this week, that experience has surely banished them forever. In fact, the entire day I kept saying to myself, "No private court would ever operate like this. It would go bankrupt in no time flat." I even managed to convince a fellow prospective juror over lunch that private courts would be superior to government courts; our shared experience, however, did most of the convincing.

I was summoned to serve as a juror for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which includes the city of Pittsburgh, where the courthouse is located. I received the summons several weeks prior to my mandated appearance. The summons, though, did not specify that I would definitely have to appear on September 8, only that I must appear if so ordered. I had to wait until after 4:00 PM on the business day prior to my scheduled appearance to find out if I actually had to show up. Unfortunately, I did.

On the morning of September 8 I had to leave my productive employment behind and make my way to a parking garage in downtown Pittsburgh during rush hour, then walk from there to the courthouse.

Upon arrival at 8:30 I had to turn in my summons and listen to the woman in charge drone through a long list of instructions and explanations. Among the explanations was the fact that when we arrived she had no idea how many cases requiring a jury would come up that day, or even if any would. Furthermore, some cases on the day’s docket that at first had requested a jury might turn out not to need one after all. In other words, we could potentially have been sitting there all day for absolutely nothing.

We were then given a "diversity" survey to complete so that the court could make sure they didn’t get too many white males — er, so that they could ensure a fair distribution of various ethnicities among the jury pool. We were also given another questionnaire to complete and retain until such time as we were selected for a jury. It contained questions about whether we had been convicted of crimes or victimized by crime (the state’s daily crimes against us not included, of course), whether we knew any victims of crime, etc. Two of my answers were most likely guaranteed to get me thrown off any jury: (1) that I would not be more likely to accept a police officer’s word because of his or her job, and (2) that I would be less likely to accept a police officer’s word because of his or her job (reading Will Grigg’s columns will do that to a person). The defense attorney would probably have loved those answers, but no district attorney worth his salt would let a state-hater such as I on a jury.

A judge entered the room and read through another list of instructions.

For the rest of the morning we just sat there in a hot room. Some people read; some chatted with their neighbors; other stared at the walls until they fell asleep. I read Jim Powell’s excellent book Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy.

Around 11:50, the woman returned and told us there was a case coming up at 1:30, so we should leave for lunch and return by then. When we returned from lunch, having already wasted five hours of the day, we resumed our morning activities.

Finally, around 2:30, they began selection of the first jury. Thirty-five people were randomly selected and moved to chairs in the front of the room. The case was reviewed, and the 35 selected jurors were asked a series of questions to determine if they would bring any biases to the case. Then each juror was questioned individually by the prosecutor and the defense attorney. Ultimately 14 people — 12 regular jurors plus 2 alternates — would be selected from the 35.

While the attorneys were interviewing the prospective jurors, another group of those who hadn’t been selected for the first jury were called to another room. I couldn’t determine whether they were being sent home for the day or called for another jury, but the number seemed about right for another jury. The rest of us, a dozen or so, were sent down to the county treasurer’s office to pick up our pay — nine dollars plus mileage — and dismissed shortly after 3:00.

Even the casual observer can spot all the waste and inefficiency in such a process.

Begin with the monetary cost. First there’s the cost of administration, always high when run by the government. The visible costs, however, include the cost of mailing every summons, the pay for each juror, and the cost of mailing thank-you letters from the judge (yes, I got one a couple days later) to everyone who shows up. (Those who don’t show up get a much less friendly notice.)

There were about 80 to 85 prospective jurors on September 8; let’s use 85 as our average daily attendance. Let’s assume that on an average day two juries are selected, each consisting of 14 people. That leaves 57 people who are not needed. Those 57 still get paid, however; it probably averages to $10 per person, and quite possibly higher. That means on an average day the county is paying out $570 for exactly nothing. Multiply that by 5 days a week and 52 weeks in a year (we’ll ignore all the government’s holidays), and that means the county is disbursing a whopping $148,200 a year for people to sit around all day.

Now imagine how long a private court would last if it poured money down the drain like that! Its owners, after all, would not have the luxury of simply extorting more money from people in the surrounding area to cover those costs.

In fact, in a system of private courts, there would likely be a variety of approaches taken to settling disputes. Some courts might have each case heard by a single judge; others might have a small panel; still others might opt for a full jury. Those that opted for jury trials would then have more than one way of selecting jurors. Some might rely on volunteers, while others might have paid, professional jurors on staff or call upon a pool of jurors acting as independent contractors. Not one, I think it safe to say, would herd 100 or so people into a room every day without first knowing whether those people would be needed.

Would a private court force prospective jurors to wait until the day before their scheduled appearance to find out if they were actually needed? Some might, but prospective jurors would know that and agree to that condition in advance; such on-call jurors might well command a higher wage than those on a regular schedule.

Would a private court be so completely in the dark about how many juries it would need to select on a given day at the beginning of that very day? One suspects not. More likely the court would have settled on the need for a jury ahead of time and would have scheduled the necessary jurors for the date when they would be needed. It certainly couldn’t afford to pay so many people to twiddle their thumbs all day, especially at market rates, with the strong potential of their not being needed at all. Trials might even be scheduled around when jurors were available, rather than the reverse, as is the case with government courts.

Furthermore, would a private court really want rank amateurs, who don’t understand the intricacies of law and court precedents, to act as jurors? The current system tends to select the most uninformed individuals, those who have no knowledge of what’s going on in the world and have no opinions on anything of significance. Professional jurors would have to be knowledgeable and, probably, opinionated. This does not mean that they would let their biases influence their judgment — on the contrary, a biased juror would soon find himself out of work — but that they would have definite opinions about justice and apply those opinions to the cases they decide. We would not find many professional jurors who use their positions to "send a message" to people they dislike, as jurors did in the Martha Stewart case, for example. They would be hired and retained on the basis of their evenhandedness.

Neither can one imagine a private court hiring security guards who treat visitors as unkindly as the cops at government courts. I had to pass through a metal detector to enter the courthouse, of course. In the morning the cop didn’t really say anything; she just waited for me to empty my pockets and put my belongings on the conveyor belt. When I returned from lunch and entered through a different door, the cop at that door asked, "Are you wearing a belt?" I very politely replied, "Yes, but I went through this morning with it on." I should say I tried to reply that way, for the state’s minion cut me off in midsentence and barked, "I said, u2018Are you wearing a belt?!’" The implication was clear: submit or be cited for "disorderly conduct" or, worse, be electrocuted by a "non-lethal" weapon. No private court would treat its customers as bugs to be squashed.

Finally, there’s the perennial issue of the seen versus the unseen. The average American, having read this, might say, "At least the current system does provide us with jurors to conduct trials, even if it does waste a lot of time and money doing so. What’s the big deal of having to take a day off work for such an important duty?" This ignores the fact that every day all across the country thousands of people are forced to spend all day more or less locked in a room on the off chance that they might be selected for a jury, and of those thousands probably two thirds or more will have spent the entire day in that room in vain. While we can see the people who were selected for juries, we cannot see all the productivity lost to the private sector because so many people were compelled to waste a whole day in a courthouse; and those who are selected will lose even more productive time.

Few object to the idea of trial by jury, and no one, to my knowledge, objects to having some system for arbitrating disputes. The question is, should this function be handled by the government, which will invariably perform it in the most costly, wasteful, inefficient manner and almost certainly fail to accomplish the objective of administering true justice; or should it be handled by private courts, which will perform it much more cheaply and efficiently and must administer true justice or go out of business? After one day of jury duty, my verdict is clear: get the government out of the justice business.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

Unable to budge the clog, my wife called a plumber, who replaced both the seal and some of the inner workings of the toilet. Let’s say, just for the sake of this example, that the plumber charged us $200 for the repair.

Now suppose the next day the downstairs toilet had needed the same work, and suppose further that the plumber who did the job the first day was unavailable, so we called another plumber, who charged us only $100 for the repair.

Is there any injustice in the fact that the second plumber was paid less than the first, given that both agreed to do the job for the amounts they were paid? Common sense says that the compensation was perfectly just because the payer and the payee had mutually agreed on the terms.

Ah, but common sense and politics seldom mix. Thus it was with great fanfare that President Obama signed his first bill into law, vastly extending the statute of limitations for filing legal claims of pay discrimination.

Of course, it should go without saying that the federal government has no constitutional authority to involve itself in setting wage rates for private-sector employees, and therefore that federal laws prohibiting wage discrimination should not even exist in the first place. That such laws exist is bad enough, but Obama has significantly exacerbated the havoc that these statutes can wreak. According to the Associated Press, the Supreme Court had previously ruled “that a person must file a claim of discrimination within 180 days of a company’s initial decision to pay a worker less than it pays another worker doing the same job. Under the new bill, given final passage in Congress this week, every new discriminatory paycheck would extend the statute of limitations for another 180 days.” Clearly the trial lawyers who contributed to Obama’s campaign made a wise investment.

The law, known as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, is being touted as a law that guarantees equal pay for equal work. Now who could be against that? Anyone who cares about liberty should be, and here’s why.

First of all, it is exceedingly rare to find two people who are doing precisely the same work. Perhaps only two workers doing the same job at the same rate on the same assembly line would qualify. Two secretaries in an office, who in theory probably have the same duties, might still find that one of them ends up typing twice as many letters as the other. And this second secretary may in turn do three times as much filing as the first. One might take half again as many phone calls as the other yet do so in the same amount of time because she is able to get to the nub of the conversation more quickly. Even in the plumbing example I cited at the outset, the two toilets were different models, so plumber number two may have had an easier time of it or found cheaper parts than plumber number one. Productivity, proficiency, and even a certain amount of chance play huge roles in determining exactly what, and how much, work each person does. It is next to impossible to say that any two people have done “equal” work.

Even if it could be shown beyond all doubt that employee A and employee B were doing exactly the same work, there would still remain the problem illustrated by the plumbing story. If A and B each agreed to work at the wages they were being paid, then there is no injustice in paying A more than B for equal work. In the case of Lilly Ledbetter, who sued Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. for alleged pay discrimination, the fact that Ledbetter continued to work for Goodyear for 19 years and, presumably, to cash her paychecks indicates that she was satisfied with her compensation during that time. Had she at any time disagreed that she was being compensated fairly for the work she was doing, she had only to request an increase in pay and then, if the company declined her request, to quit. By remaining in Goodyear’s employ for nearly two decades, she gave assent to the wages she was receiving. As long as a person accepts the pay he is receiving and is not the victim of either force or fraud by his employer — and paying a person the wage to which he agreed, even if it differs from others’ wages, in no way constitutes fraud — the government has absolutely no business punishing the employer. It’s a simple matter of property rights.

Parable of the Vineyard Workers

In case I have still failed to convince you, allow me to call as my expert witness, Jesus Christ, who endorsed precisely this line of reasoning in a parable recorded in Matthew 20. In the parable the owner of a vineyard hired some men to work in the vineyard at the beginning of the day at the wage of one denarius for the entire day. Throughout the day he continued to hire workers for his vineyard. At the end of the day he paid every one of them the same wage, one denarius, he had offered to the men who had started working at daybreak. These men, too, complained of wage discrimination, to which the employer replied, “Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” Now Jesus was trying to make a spiritual point with this story, but the fact remains that he did not dispute the vineyard owner’s claims, nor did he suggest that Caesar ought to intervene and force him to pay the workers on the basis of how much time they had worked. The money was, as the man said, his own, and he had a right to dispose of it as he pleased.

It comes as no surprise that Obama, as much a believer in the all-powerful state as anyone else in Washington, thinks it is the business of the federal government to regulate every aspect of our lives. He probably even thinks he was doing women and minorities a good turn by signing the Ledbetter Act. What he is really doing, however, is making it that much less likely that employers will want to hire them for fear that they will be sued for paying them exactly what these employees agreed to be paid.

It used to be said that a man’s word is his bond, but in employer-employee relations in the age of Sugar Daddy Sam, that is strictly a one-sided proposition. Employers must live up to their word, and then some, but employees are free to disregard theirs and then pillage their employers for failing to discern exactly how much money the employees thought they should have been paid.

What we really need are some plumbers to drain the cesspool that is the District of Columbia. I’d happily pay them all the same exorbitant fee to flush the whole malodorous system down the toilet.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

Despite the tone of my interlocutor’s correspondence, he did ask a valid question, the answer to which deserves some consideration. Here is the reply I sent him:

Dear Sir,

Why do you read LRC if not to find out the latest depredations of the state? Why do people read any news, the overwhelming majority of which is out of their control? Sometimes we just like to know what’s going on so we can at least be prepared for what’s coming down the pike.

Furthermore, I dispute the notion that our efforts are fruitless. LRC played a large part in building up support for Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy, a run that brought ideas of liberty, nonintervention, and sound money into the public eye and possibly even into the mainstream of thought. Would Paul be called upon by major news organizations today if not for his candidacy last year? Would his "Audit the Fed" bill even be close to passage without it?

Also, sometimes people who spread ideas don’t live to see the results of their work, but that doesn’t make it worthless. Many of the thinkers whose works inspired the Founding Fathers were dead long before the American Revolution. Neither Moses nor the Apostle Paul nor Mohammed could possibly have had any inkling how many people would be attracted to the faiths they helped to found, but that didn’t stop them from producing the works that still draw people to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Even though freedom appears to be on the ropes everywhere, as Anthony Gregory recently pointed out, in some areas we are markedly more free than our ancestors were. Anthony wrote: "If these ideas of liberty can win out, then others can too. And only when the ideas win will we get our freedom." LRC is in the business of ideas. We demonstrate in a positive way what can happen when people are free, and we demonstrate in a negative way what happens when the state restricts their freedom. Both types of demonstrations are necessary.

What website, by the way, has been among the most outspoken in favor of the right of secession? It might seem a lost cause, but it is catching on, as evidenced by the fact that I just received an online Zogby poll with this question: "Do you agree or disagree that any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic?" Without people spreading the idea of secession, would it even be on the radar?

Thanks for writing. It made me think, and in fact I’ll probably turn this into an inspiring column for LRC.

Well, at least I hope that’s what I’ve done here. Sometimes it does seem as if our efforts are in vain, and it’s easy to become fatalistic about the prospects for liberty, especially in the age of Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama (and Clinton again!). Yet who would have thought that chattel slavery, an institution that had existed from time immemorial, would be (at least in the West) effectively wiped out, and mostly in a peaceful manner, within the span of a century? Though abolition took place via state action, it would not have happened if not for philosophers, ministers, and others who laid the foundation for it in the minds and hearts of ordinary people, who then brought pressure to bear on their political leaders, who had themselves been prepared by the very same thinkers to do the heretofore unthinkable. Much of the preparation for slavery’s abolition involved describing its horrors to those who either were unaware of them or had deliberately chosen to ignore them — most of whom, in view of the fact that they did not own slaves, were largely incapable of affecting the way slaves were treated, let alone their condition of servitude. Nevertheless, they needed to be made aware of the evils of the institution so that they might conclude its abolition was necessary.

In the same way, while libertarians’ continual drawing attention to the evils perpetrated by the state may seem at times to be a waste of effort given that the state in general continues to grow apace, the suspicion of the state that we are sowing in people’s hearts and minds may someday ultimately flower into a movement to abolish the state or at least severely restrain it. None of us writing for LRC today may live to see it. Mises and Rothbard, both great critics of central banking, didn’t live to see the day when the Federal Reserve would become increasingly an object of scorn rather than reverence among the general population and its abolition a somewhat remote but nevertheless real possibility; yet it is undeniable that the ideas that they promoted, carried forward and built on by Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, and others, have brought us to this very point in history. The unthinkable during the early Austrians’ lifetimes has become the thinkable and the possible during ours. Similarly, while those of us writing for LRC today may never witness the downfall of the state, by providing example after example of its depredations and supplying an alternative view of society without the heavy hand of government we are performing the groundwork for just such an eventuality. We’ll leave it to future historians to give us our due; and even if they don’t, the important thing is that liberty was extended, regardless of who gets the credit for it.

Well, I may not have inspired you, dear reader, but I’ve inspired myself pretty well — and coming from a natural pessimist, that’s really saying something. To borrow from the entrepreneur Bob the Builder rather than some hack politician: Can we fix it (i.e., lead the way to liberty)? Yes, we can!

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Best of Michael Tennant

While it’s good to see some actual GOP opposition to government growth again, it’s very difficult to take it seriously. Here, for example, is just a sampling of the socialist programs and policies instituted and/or supported by a significant number of Republicans, with Ron Paul frequently being the lone exception:

Social Security. Republicans may not have started this program, and occasionally they will speak of its insolvency, but they seem to have no real problem with its continuation. The best we get out of them is Bush’s stillborn plan to give those of us forced into Social Security the option of diverting a small portion of the loot stolen from us into various government-approved investments. Given the current state of the stock market, we should be grateful that this plan never got off the ground. Imagine the bailouts to all the individual Social Security "investors" who expected to get ever-increasing returns on their investments! Name the last Republican who spoke of abolishing, rather than "shoring up" or "reforming" Social Security.

Medicare. Not only does the GOP not suggest ridding us of this blatantly socialist takeover of the health care system; but George W. Bush, with the support of many members of his own party, pushed through Medicare prescription drug coverage, the largest new entitlement program in four decades. Again there is talk of "fixing" or "saving" Medicare but none of ending it — all while Republicans try to convince us that they, and they alone, are standing between us and the Democrats’ plans to nationalize health care.

Welfare. Yes, we have welfare "reform," but where is welfare repeal? Add a few mild work requirements to the program, and the GOP is on board.

Faith-Based Initiatives. Getting religious charities on the government dole was another Bush policy that seemed to please much of his base as long as their preferred charities were the ones robbing the rest of us. Sure, it meant that those charities had to water down their messages, but it was worth it to see that "liberal" charities didn’t get their hands in the till. Proof of the socialist nature of these programs is that Obama intends to retain and expand them, in the process forcing charities to distance themselves even further from their religious underpinnings.

Public Education. In 1994 the GOP promised to rid us of the Department of Education. Instead we got Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, greatly increasing control of the education system from Washington. Every once in a while some Republican will timidly suggest school vouchers or tuition tax credits to allow parents to send their children to the schools of their choice, but in these programs (especially vouchers) lie the same dangers for private elementary and secondary schools that private colleges and universities whose students accept federal money already have experienced. (See my alma mater, Grove City College, for a prime example.) In any event, Republicans seem uninterested in reducing federal control over the education system. For that matter, when was the last time you heard a Republican suggest curtailing or eliminating state control of any level of schooling?

Infrastructure. Where are the Republicans demanding that Uncle Sam get out of the road- and bridge-building business? Where are those demanding even a cutback in such spending? Republican President Dwight Eisenhower gave us the Interstate Highway System, a fact to which most GOP stalwarts point with pride. Even scarcer is the Republican at the state or local level voicing the opinion that perhaps the government of which he is a part is doing us all a disservice by continuing to maintain socialist infrastructure to the exclusion of all competitors.

Law Enforcement. Republicans are always the first to defend the police, the FBI, and other government agencies whenever any allegations of abuse or wrongdoing are lodged against them. They have shown great eagerness to increase local, state, and federal cops’ powers and immunities, especially if they can use the excuse of fighting wars on drugs or terrorism. They passed the PATRIOT Act with alacrity when the opportunity presented itself; and Bush aggrandized, with his fellow Republicans’ approval, much unconstitutional power to the executive branch, including the ability to imprison people indefinitely on the president’s say-so. They even granted retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had assisted the Bush administration in violating the Constitution by eavesdropping on Americans’ telephone calls — with the assistance of noted socialist Obama. Give even the slightest hint that you think law enforcement agencies should be curtailed or certain criminal statutes repealed, and Republicans will be the first to denounce you as "soft on crime" or "with the terrorists." And don’t even suggest that private security could do a better job than government "security."

Financial Bailouts. Republicans maintained that the abuses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could have been prevented by better oversight, which the Democrats opposed. They did not say that these abuses could have been prevented by abolishing Fannie and Freddie and various other government loan programs. Bush had, in fact, exacerbated the problem with his now laughably named American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003, which allowed people to obtain mortgages with no down payment and even without mortgage payments for the first two years. Bush, of course, also stumped for and signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which gave the Secretary of the Treasury $700 billion to hand out at will. Even Obama’s latest outrage on this front, yet another mortgage bailout, "originated with a Republican," writes Ilana Mercer. "Only a week or two back," she explains, "minority whip Sen. Mitch McConnell proposed a similar scheme whereby the government would lower home-loan interest rates and guarantee the loans." One doubts that Republicans would be crying "Socialism!" had McConnell’s plan come up for a vote.

The Military. This undoubtedly is the socialist program most beloved of Republicans. They may be willing to admit that in all other instances government is wasteful, inefficient, and bungling and that it usually fails to solve the problems it sets out to solve while simultaneously creating new ones; but when it comes to the armed forces, suddenly all that skepticism melts away into an infatuation worthy of Romeo and Juliet. Maybe the Pentagon does spend a wee bit too much on screwdrivers and toilet seats, and perhaps even certain actions taken by the boys in uniform (such as Abu Ghraib) have negative effects, but those are aberrations in an otherwise stellar record. Every good Republican knows that the U.S. military always acts in the best interest not just of America but of the entire world. As far as the GOP is concerned, "defense" spending must never be cut, no matter how out of proportion it is to the actual threats our country faces or to the spending of the rest of the world; and one must never, ever criticize the military. To cut the military’s budget or suggest that it might be just as wasteful, inefficient, and bungling as the rest of the government is to "hate the troops" and to "blame America first." One wouldn’t expect private defense to enter these people’s minds, but few Republicans are even willing to consider constraining either the Pentagon’s spending or its adventurism. All other government programs are fair game for cutting and criticism, but the military is sacrosanct.

One could probably make a list ten times as long of all the socialist institutions supported by the very same Republicans who now pose as defenders of capitalism. They are correct that Obama’s plans are socialist in nature, but they fail to see — or conveniently forget — that they, too, are guilty of giving America a huge push down the slope of socialism. While their opposition to the "stimulus" is welcome, it’s a bit like Bugs Moran’s criticizing Al Capone for bumping off his enemies. Unfortunately, we the taxpayers are the ones who were massacred on this St. Valentine’s Day.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Michael Tennant Archives

DIGG THIS

It’s 2:00 AM. You are aroused from your slumber by the sound of someone’s pounding on your front door. You stumble to the door and open it to find three men in expensive, pin-striped suits who haul you off to a warehouse and, under the threat of "sleeping with the fishes," force you to fork over thousands of dollars to purchase food, clothing, medicine, and other necessities that they promise to donate to the less fortunate — although at that moment you wonder if anyone could possibly be less fortunate than you. The thugs then return you to your humble abode, warning you that they will return to "help" you engage in further "charity" in the future.

The next night, at about the same time, you are again awakened by knocking on the door. This time you find three men in cheap blue vests who march you off to Wal-Mart and force you to purchase food, clothing, medicine, and other items that you need. They then return you home along with your purchases and promise to return to "help" you obtain necessities in the future.

Question: Which of these acts is a crime?

The answer, of course, is that they both are criminal acts. In both cases you were forced to give up your property, which is to say, a theft occurred. That in one case the result was to provide for the poor and in the other the result was to provide for you is entirely irrelevant. You were coerced into handing over your rightful possessions against your wishes, and no amount of good intentions on the part of the coercer can alter that.

Now let us stipulate that those interrupting your blissful nocturnal rest are government agents. Threatening you with fines and imprisonment for failing to cooperate, they take 50 percent of your income, promising to spend it first to assist the poor and second to provide you with necessities such as roads, bridges, schools, police protection, and defense against foreign invasion. Is there any difference between this scenario and the ones I originally proposed?

If you’re like most people, you almost instinctively believe there is some difference, but you can’t quite put it into words.

Conservatives and libertarians can generally agree that wealth-transfer programs, even when allegedly undertaken to help the less fortunate, are morally wrong — legalized theft, as it were. Liberals, while likely disagreeing with this line of reasoning — unless the wealth is being transferred from the poor to the rich — can at least understand it and may even argue that while it’s a small wrong to rob Peter to pay Paul, the "greater good" provided to Paul outweighs the offense committed against Peter.

But what of the case in which the state is providing genuine necessities, so that Peter is being robbed but getting something he needs in return? Isn’t that a different matter entirely? As most would have it, it’s not theft then but merely "the price we pay for civilization." Peter is not being stripped of his possessions so much as being asked to pay his "fair share," much as a group of friends might divide a restaurant tab evenly among themselves. It’s not as if his money is just being transferred to someone else with no benefit to Peter.

This is, of course, the direct analogy to my second scenario, in which the blue-vested thugs forced you to purchase all your necessities at Wal-Mart regardless of your desires. Perhaps you did need that loaf of bread they foisted upon you; but maybe you didn’t want that particular brand, or didn’t like the price, or just plain hate Wal-Mart. Even if you love Wal-Mart and wanted that brand at that price, you’d still resent being strong-armed into buying it. (At least Wal-Mart would let you return it and get your money back if you didn’t want it, which is more than can be said for the state.)

If it’s theft for private individuals to force people to buy particular goods from particular suppliers, isn’t it also theft for government officials to do the same? Arguing that the goods the government forces us to buy are necessities which the market cannot supply — a seeming truism mostly because the government outlaws or greatly impedes any serious competitors — is begging the question. Joe’s Paving can’t build a private road to my house and then charge me for it if I haven’t agreed to it in advance, nor can Barney Fife Security post a guard on my property at my expense without my consent. Why, then, should the government be able to build roads and operate police departments and then bill me for the cost of doing so without my specifically having agreed to each charge?

The burden of proof lies with those who favor any state whatsoever to demonstrate that an institution whose very existence is predicated on larceny ought to be permitted to exist and to command our willing obedience and respect. We have no respect for private gangsters, though we sometimes obey them out of fear. We ought to have no respect for public gangsters either, and we certainly should not pretend that we are obeying them out of any loftier sentiment than fear for our own safety.

I can already hear the next question from the statists, in response to which I quote the magnificent Joseph Sobran: "u2018But what would you replace the state with?’ The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be u2018replaced.’" Would you replace La Cosa Nostra if it suddenly ceased to exist?

Theft is still theft even when the government sanctions it and even when its proceeds are put to supposedly beneficent uses, be they "necessities" for those robbed or "charity" for others. Every theft results in a diminution of freedom, for no one knows to what ends those resources might have been put had they been left in the possession of their rightful owners. Taxation, with or without representation, is merely robbery under an assumed name. Indeed, as John Marshall wrote, "the power to tax involves the power to destroy." It is long past time to put an end to the state, the one institution dedicated to our destruction.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Michael Tennant Archives

DIGG THIS

Election season is upon us, and that means it’s time for the candidates to duke it out on the campaign trail, vying for victory via votes. While the candidates figuratively engage in fisticuffs, some of their supporters inevitably end up slugging it out for real. This year’s latest episodes involve (1) septuagenarian poll workers in Ohio who had to be separated when the female Democrat allegedly leapt onto the male Republican’s back and began buffeting him with her fists after he had accused her of ballot tampering and (2) two men arguing over the election in a Florida restaurant, one of whom took it seriously enough to slam the other’s head into the wall, "causing a minor laceration and bleeding to the back of the victim’s head," according to the police report.

Meanwhile, millions of people disagree with each other over whether Coke is better than Pepsi, whether the Beatles are better than the Rolling Stones, and whether Ginger is better than Mary Ann; yet, oddly enough, one never hears of Stones supporters getting satisfaction from making Fab Four fans see Starrs. Give those same people a political disagreement, however, and at least a handful of them will find it necessary not merely to argue the point with each other but to use physical force to drive home their arguments. Why? What explains the difference between Coke versus Pepsi and John McCain versus Barack Obama?

The answer is that the soft drink (or music or actress) debate is resolved in the marketplace while the political debate is resolved by coercion. Coke drinker John Smith can peacefully coexist with Pepsi drinker Jane Jones because each one voluntarily purchases and consumes the product that he prefers, and neither is forced to imbibe the other’s beverage of choice. Beatles fans can choose to buy only Beatles recordings while shunning Stones songs, and likewise Stones fans can buy only merchandise bearing the image of Mick Jagger’s tongue — and those who happen to like both can buy some of each. Ginger partisans can turn off the TV if a Gilligan’s Island rerun doesn’t feature enough Tina Louise, while Mary Ann lovers can stay glued to the set for every bit of Dawn Wells footage. (For those with more sophisticated tastes, there’s always Mrs. Howell.) More importantly, the alternatives themselves are not mutually exclusive. Both Coke and Pepsi can exist and be made available to the consumer simultaneously; he is not forced to accept one or the other.

Politics, by contrast, is an all-or-nothing proposition. If, for example, McCain wins, Obama loses, and all those who voted for Obama (or any other candidate besides McCain) are forced to live under McCain’s rule for the next four years. Furthermore, if someone who voted for McCain changes his mind a year from now, he’s still stuck with McCain for another three years, whereas if John Smith decides he no longer prefers Coke, he can simply switch to Pepsi or even choose not to drink cola at all. The only alternative is for those who prefer the rule of a particular candidate to secede and form their own country, installing their preferred leader, and we all know how kindly Uncle Sam looks upon such things. Remember Jefferson Davis?

In short, politics is about power: who gets to wield it, how much he gets to wield, and over whom he gets to wield it. This is only natural since the state itself is nothing but organized, self-legalized violence. Governments come into existence via violent means, they claim a monopoly on violence in their respective domains, and they retain their power through violence or the threat of violence. (If you don’t think the U.S. government stays in power through violence, try not paying your income tax.) The government outlaws its competition, whereas the Coca-Cola Company, much as it might like to do so, cannot force PepsiCo out of business; it can only attempt to defeat it in the marketplace by satisfying more consumers. No one living within the geographic area claimed by a government has any choice about obeying that particular government, no matter how much he may detest it, while his neighbor, who is happy with the government, frequently uses state power to enrich himself at the expense of the government-hater.

Suppose, however, that instead of the monopoly government we have in the form of the state, various institutions were allowed to spring up in the marketplace to perform the same functions as the state. Of several things we can be certain: (1) There would be a great variety of such institutions rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of the state. (2) These institutions would be cost-effective because they would be forced to compete for business and would go under if they failed to turn a profit, which they could only do if they satisfied consumers’ wants. (3) Individuals would be able to choose which means of protecting property and resolving differences they wanted and for which they were willing and able to pay. (4) No one would be forced to fund any particular institution. (5) These institutions would not likely engage in warfare or in violations of individuals’ property rights, for as private institutions dependent on voluntary payment they would truly be our servants rather than our masters, unlike the tyrants who claim to be "public servants" today.

With individuals free to choose how they will be governed — genuinely free, not simply permitted to vote for a candidate who will rule everyone regardless of his wishes — disputes about politics would go by the wayside. While differences regarding property rights would still be more significant than differences regarding soft drinks, rock groups, or TV shows, they could be resolved in a similar fashion. There would be no cause for people to come to blows over issues of power since person A could not rule over person B without B’s consent, unlike the current system in which McCain, Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, Chuck Baldwin, and Cynthia McKinney voters — not to mention all those who stayed home or wrote in another candidate’s name — may be forced to submit to the will of Obama voters come next January.

Would this be a perfect world? Of course not. No such thing exists this side of heaven. But it would be a far, far better world if most of our differences could be resolved in a peaceful fashion rather than by state coercion. Which argument would you rather have: McCain versus Obama or Coke versus Pepsi? One thing is for sure: You won’t end up with a fat lip for telling a member of the Pepsi Generation that Coca-Cola is the Real Thing. Who knows? If we got rid of the state, the cause of most of the intractable conflicts on this planet, we might even teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Michael Tennant Archives

DIGG THIS

Peter and the other apostles replied: "We ought to obey God rather than men!" (Acts 5:29)

Should government abide by the same rules as the rest of us? Ask any random sample of the human race, and you’re likely to get 100 percent agreement with the proposition that it should. Even politicians who so obviously don’t believe it — witness their eagerness to fleece taxpayers to protect their pals on Wall Street from the consequences of their own bad business decisions, many of which were encouraged or even demanded by those same politicians — still give lip service to it, knowing that it’s the required answer.

When it comes time actually to apply this belief, however, it rapidly becomes apparent that very few people truly believe that all governments, and all persons in those governments, at all times must be subject to the same laws as the people they rule. Democrats will excoriate Republicans for minor infractions while excusing vast crimes by members of their own party, and vice versa. Individuals will gripe about Congress’s pork-barrel spending but reelect their own congressman on the basis that he brought home the bacon. Americans will mercilessly berate foreign governments for their transgressions while excusing, and sometimes even praising, their own government for doing the same or worse. Practically everyone is willing to permit the government to engage in all kinds of practices that he would never accept from a private individual, organization, or business.

This is nothing new, of course, but it was brought home to me recently after a column was posted here at LRC in which I criticized Christians for lionizing Lt. Col. Oliver North and, by extension, the U.S. military and the federal government. It seemed obvious to me that a man who has voluntarily murdered innocent people in horrific ways, violated constitutional laws, participated in a cover-up of his and others’ crimes, armed both sides of a war, and supported aggressive wars against other countries should be a pariah. Apparently it seemed obvious to most LRC readers, too, because the response was overwhelmingly positive.

However, two people, both acquaintances of mine and both Christians, took umbrage at my assertions. Their criticisms were not that I had the facts wrong or even that I had interpreted them incorrectly. They were angry because I had indirectly insulted their idol, Ronald Reagan, and directly condemned two more idols, North and the U.S. military. Thus, though I repeatedly requested substantive points of disagreement rather than invective, I received none. I was simply told that I shouldn’t shoot the messenger (North) because he was just following orders — one told me this after I had just replied that it was an unacceptable defense — and that I shouldn’t criticize a veteran because of the great debt I supposedly owe to the American soldier. Also, so I was told, U.S. intervention in Vietnam, no matter how brutal and lethal toward civilians, was justified because the communists killed lots of people there, too.

Clearly these individuals do not apply the same rules to government as they do to everyone else. They would never accept such justifications for a private citizen to engage in the same practices. If an accountant lied on a client’s financial report and was later tried for fraud, would this be excusable on the basis that his client had ordered him to do it? If the same accountant shredded the books and lied about his actions, would this be excusable on the same basis? If I drove a tank into South Central Los Angeles and started blasting away indiscriminately, would that be acceptable since I’m certain to kill a few gang members who probably have committed or will commit crimes? If I sold machine guns to both the Crips and the Bloods but did so in order to make money to send to alleged freedom fighters in Georgia, would that make everything okay?

That the government should be bound by the same laws — immutable laws of God (or nature, for the irreligious among us), not the made-up "laws" of the state — as the rest of us is the central libertarian insight, which is why those of us who take libertarianism to its logical conclusion reject the state completely. It is an institution founded on violence and owes its very existence to theft, which it euphemistically calls taxation.

Christians should thus be among the most vocal opponents of the state because we believe that God makes the rules and that no one, regardless of his exalted position by virtue of birth or of hoodwinking enough people into voting for him, has the authority to modify, abolish, or flout those rules. The Bible makes no distinction between the ruler and the ruled, and neither should we.

The prime example of this is the case of David and Bathsheba (II Samuel 11, 12). King David committed adultery with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. When she informed him that the act had resulted in pregnancy, David had Uriah sent to the front lines of a battle so that he would be killed and David’s sin would go undetected.

In any other culture of the day, or throughout most of human history for that matter, David’s actions would have been considered unremarkable. Kings, often considered gods themselves, took whatever they wanted and bumped off whichever citizens they wanted, and that was that. In Israel, however, the king was considered a servant of God and therefore answerable to Him. Thus, God first prodded David into condemning himself through the prophet Nathan and then punished him for his sins. Now this was something different: a king judged by the same laws as the people he rules!

Even foreign kings were not exempt, as demonstrated when God removed Nebuchadnezzar from power in Babylon and drove him into the wilderness, where he lived with the animals and "ate grass like cattle" until he acknowledged the Lord’s dominion over the whole earth (Daniel 4).

Think of the Ten Commandments or any other laws in the Old Testament. Do any of these feature exceptions for rulers? Is it "You shall not murder" or "You shall not murder unless ordered to do so by your government"? Is it "You shall not steal" or "You shall not steal unless you dub it taxation"? Clearly God did not consider there to be any exceptions to His laws, and neither should Christians today.

The New Testament makes no distinction between the rulers and the ruled either. All have sinned, writes the Apostle Paul (Romans 3:23), and are in need of God’s grace. The path to salvation through faith in Jesus Christ is the same for all: "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Officials such as Nicodemus (John 3), the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8), and the jailer of Paul and Silas (Acts 16) must come to God through His Son just the same as ordinary people. Even Romans 13, much abused by conservative Christians during the George W. Bush presidency (though, strangely, they hardly mentioned it at all during the previous eight years), establishes that rulers exist to serve God, not to be gods.

The state, however, invariably sets itself up in opposition to God, sometimes blatantly as when emperors claim to be gods or when governments persecute Christians, but often more subtly. Perhaps the state’s greatest conceit is that it makes laws rather than simply codifying preexisting notions of right and wrong. Any entity that creates law is, by definition, a god; and since there is only one God, all the other "little gods" known as governments are false gods who become idols when people grant that these gods can expiate sins — or, worse, redefine sins as patriotic duties — by fiat.

Hence, while everyone would agree that lying is sinful (it’s right there in Exodus 20), when the president lies to us about the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein and is plainly demonstrated to have fabricated the entire scenario, there are those who will blame it on an "intelligence failure" or claim that it’s not a lie since other governments believed it, too — or perhaps they agree with Richard Nixon that "when the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal" or unethical, at least as long at the president is a member of their preferred political party. "You shall not covet" is plainly stated in that same chapter; yet the state thrives on covetousness, promising to rob Peter to pay Paul, in turn violating the commandment against theft. How many Christians participate in this, whether they’re on the left, represented by the likes of Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo, or the right, which supports President Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative? Worst of all, how many can be suckered into cheerleading for the murder of innocent people under the guise of liberation (Iraq), stopping genocide (Serbia), or preventing the spread of godless communism (Korea, Vietnam, and various lesser interventions) despite the fact that murder is explicitly prohibited (Exodus 20:13) while making peace (Matthew 5:9, James 3:18) and loving your neighbor (Mark 12:31) are explicitly praised?

Embracing the state’s commandments when they directly conflict with God’s commandments is idolatry, pure and simple. Claiming that sin isn’t sin if the government, or a member of one’s political party, commits or orders it is merely a manifestation of this idolatry. Ultimately the problem boils down to the acceptance of, and desire for, a visible ruler, just as the Israelites’ waywardness in the Old Testament was frequently attributable to their desire to have gods they could see. In fact, their demand for a human king "like all the other nations" (I Samuel 8:20) was bluntly condemned by God as a rejection of Him (I Samuel 8:7) and, therefore, idolatry. Once a person has rejected God as his king, redefining sin to accommodate the state’s priorities is simply a natural consequence.

So which is it, Christian friend? Do you stand with the prophets of the Old Testament and the martyrs of the New Testament, including our Savior, in affirming that "as for me and my household, we will worship the Lord" (Joshua 24:15) and "serve Him only" (Luke 4:8)? Or do you stand with those who used the government to violate Scripture by putting to death the blameless King of Kings as they affirmed their loyalty to "no king but Caesar" (John 19:15)? There is no middle ground, for you cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). Choose wisely.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Michael Tennant Archives

DIGG THIS

Over one month ago I sent the following letter via snail mail to the pastor of a nearby church in response to a widespread, and obviously quite expensive, multimedia advertising campaign touting an upcoming appearance by Lt. Col. Oliver North. To date I have not received a response; and since the event has already taken place as scheduled, I do not expect to receive one.

Dear Dr. _____:

As a fellow Christian, I was greatly dismayed to see billboards around the area proudly advertising an upcoming appearance by Lt. Col. Oliver North at [your church]. Lt. Col. North has participated in or supported many great evils and continues to do so to this day.

Yes, I am aware that North professes to be a Christian. So do former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, yet somehow I get the strong suspicion that neither would be welcome at your church — nor should he be, for each has committed grievous evils for which neither has, to my knowledge, repented. The same goes for North.

For starters, North voluntarily participated, as a platoon leader, in the United States’ unconstitutional war against North Vietnam, a country that had not attacked or even threatened us in the slightest. (The Gulf of Tonkin incident, not surprisingly, never occurred, as an NSA report declassified in 2005 established. Governments routinely lie their populations into supporting wars, the ease of which Hermann Goering famously recounted while awaiting trial at Nuremberg in part for having participated in an aggressive, rather than defensive, war.) In that horrific conflict our government employed absolutely unconscionable tactics against civilian populations, including the use of napalm and Agent Orange; massacres of entire villages; and bombing and strafing. Estimates of civilian deaths in North Vietnam range from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands. Not all of those deaths were at the hands of the U.S. military — Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong were no angels — but certainly a sizable percentage was. At least 5,000, for example, were killed by the American military in Operation Speedy Express. Then there are the 58,217 needless and senseless deaths of American military personnel, along with over 300,000 wounded and nearly 2,000 missing in action, for which our government and its enablers such as North bear sole responsibility.

As with all military personnel, North took an oath to defend the Constitution. The Constitution, however, demands that Congress declare war before troops can be committed to action. Since Congress never declared war against North Vietnam, North, and all other U.S. military personnel, should have refused to participate in attacking it. Thus, North’s first public lie was to swear fealty to the Constitution.

Of course, North is most infamous for his participation in, and attempted cover-up of, the Iran-Contra scandal. Here the U.S. Congress passed a perfectly constitutional series of laws, which President Reagan signed, specifically to restrain the Executive Branch from providing support to the Contras in Nicaragua, in a conflict that was none of our business anyway. The Republicans, who had in 1946 correctly excoriated FDR for his one-man foreign policy that he employed to provoke the Japanese into striking Pearl Harbor and thus to ensure U.S. entry into World War II (remember what I said about governments’ deceiving their populations into wars?), turned on a dime and became the most ardent defenders of Executive Branch exclusivity in foreign policy, despite the fact that Congress constitutionally has the power of the purse and other powers to restrict the Executive’s exercise of foreign policy. North, not surprisingly, was one of the chief defenders of a foreign-policy dictatorship in the person of the President, again in contravention of his oath to uphold the Constitution.

In the course of violating the law, North, via deceptive means, sold arms to the government of Iran, which at that time was an enemy of the U.S. (mostly as a backlash against earlier U.S. meddling in Iran, in which our government overthrew their democratically elected prime minister and replaced him with the brutal Shah). These arms were surely used against both Iranian citizens and Iraqis, with whom Iran was at war at the time. The U.S. was also supplying arms to Saddam Hussein during this time period, so North, along with the rest of those in power during this era, bears significant responsibility for the estimated one million deaths on both sides of the war. In addition, the Nicaraguan Contras have been credibly charged with numerous atrocities — as were the Sandinistas, but as the old saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right — for which North again bears some responsibility.

As if these crimes were not bad enough, North then actively participated in a cover-up of his, and others’, misdeeds, including destroying relevant documents and repeatedly lying to Congress. Now Congress has done nothing over the years to earn the right to be dealt with honestly, for its members lie to us on a daily basis; but nevertheless a Christian ought not lie to anyone, regardless of the honesty of his interlocutor. North was convicted on three felony counts and only escaped punishment on a technicality, with the assistance of every Christian’s friend (please note sarcasm), the American Civil Liberties Union.

Furthermore, North has been implicated in drug running in the course of supplying arms to the Contras. While the CIA and other government officials, including North, did not necessarily participate in the actual drug sales, they were not averse to using drug runners for their own nefarious purposes, probably figuring that one crook was not likely to squeal on another. As a result of these activities, North has been barred from ever entering Costa Rica by its democratically elected government.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God," said Jesus. North, however, has been anything but a peacemaker for his entire career, from Vietnam to the present day, where he currently supports the unconstitutional, aggressive war against Iraq, another country that had neither harmed nor threatened us. The Iraq war — yet another war sold to the American people under false pretenses — to date has resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 Americans and a credibly estimated 100,000-plus Iraqis, according to the Lancet. In addition, it has caused the destruction of the world’s oldest Christian community, which had previously been protected and allowed to worship freely under former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein. Most Iraqi Christians have fled to neighboring countries, while those who have remained behind have been subject to violence. North has also made clear that he supports aggression against Iran, which also has done us no harm. In fact, it would be hard to find a U.S. military operation that North has not supported (perhaps one under a Democratic president?). This is hardly the mark of a peacemaker.

I also note that your church has the unmitigated gall to charge people $10 admission to attend North’s appearance. North has lived at our expense for his whole career and continues to receive a military pension, also at our expense. This, of course, is nothing but legalized theft, for taxpayers have no choice but to pay under the threat of force. North ought to be paying us to come see him rather than the other way around — and even then I wouldn’t set foot in the same building as this so-called Christian.

North is thus known to have violated innumerable biblical injunctions, including, but not limited to, prohibitions against lying, stealing, and murder. To my knowledge he has never publicly repented of any of these sins and has, in fact, taken pride in them and continues to do so. Unless you would care to argue that being ordered to perpetrate evil by the State somehow sanctifies these actions — and it certainly didn’t get the Nazis or King David very far — I fail to see how you can, in good conscience, not only permit North to speak at [your church] but also proudly advertise this fact. What message does this convey to nonbelievers other than that Christians can be suborned into celebrating sin if it is sanctioned by the government, and even more so when that government is controlled by members of a particular political party? What message, for that matter, does it convey to believers?

I ask that you prayerfully reconsider your invitation to Lt. Col. North. Consider whose interests you are furthering by allowing him to appear at your church: God’s or the State’s. The State has ever been God’s enemy, either persecuting his people or leading them into idolatry, and the United States government is no exception. "No man can serve two masters," said our Lord. Which one are you serving?

In Christ,
Michael Tennant

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Michael Tennant Archives

DIGG THIS

Dr. Walter E. Williams is an excellent economist. He’s fairly libertarian when it comes to domestic policy in general. But turn him loose on foreign policy, at least in the post-9/11 era, and suddenly all that skepticism about government goes out the window.

Case in point: his recent column arguing for all-out war against the Muslim world. Williams argues that since some Muslims are terrorists, the West is justified in bombing, shooting, torturing, and otherwise employing its "full might" against all Muslims.

He likens this to the total war in which the Allies engaged in World War II:

Think back to the 1930s when the Japanese murdered an estimated 3 million to 10 million people in China, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines and Indochina; and on December 7, 1941 when they attacked Pearl Harbor, killing over 2,400 Americans. I’m betting that most of Japan’s at-the-time 60 million population were peace-loving people and would have wanted nothing to do with the brutal slaughter in China and the attack on the U.S. In formulating our response to the attack, should President Roosevelt have taken into account the fact that most Japanese are peace-loving people ruled by fanatics? Should our military have only gone after the Japanese pilots and their naval armada? I’d also wager that most Germans were peace-loving people and not part of the Nazi sadists wanting to wage war on their neighbors and exterminate the Jews. Again, should Roosevelt and Churchill have taken that into account in their response to German militarism? My answer is no and thank God it was their answer as well. Whether most Germans, Italians or Japanese were peace-loving or not was entirely irrelevant in formulating the Allied response to their militarism.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the prevailing attitude among Americans, perhaps in part because no American cities were firebombed or nuked by the Axis powers. It is also a horrific attitude to maintain for it makes no distinction between the guilty and the innocent. Would Williams think the police justified in coming into his neighborhood and machine-gunning all its residents because one suspected murderer happened to reside there?

Clearly Williams does not subscribe to Just War theory, which requires that (1) noncombatants be excluded from attacks; (2) the force used be proportional to the wrong which the war is attempting to right; and (3) only attacks with military objectives be undertaken, with care taken to minimize the harm visited upon noncombatants. There are good arguments to be made that Just War theory has been used more often to justify unjust wars than to prevent them, but it nevertheless remains true that the U.S. attempted to follow these principles to some extent prior to the Civil War — a war which Williams has more than once denounced.

Total war is, in fact, no more American than apple pie. The authors of the Declaration of Independence, in their litany of charges against King George, found it outrageous that he was employing total war against them both directly, having "plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people," and by inciting the "merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Even the atomic bombing of Japan, so beloved of today’s conservatives, was not universally admired in its immediate aftermath any more than it is now. Among its detractors were General Dwight Eisenhower, who tried to persuade Truman not to drop the bomb and later said, "It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. . . . to use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime"; and Admiral William Leahy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Truman, who told his secretary on that fateful day, "[W]e will regret this day. The United States will suffer, for war is not to be waged on women and children." Williams may be glad that the Allies treated all citizens of Axis countries, whether civilians or military personnel, alike, but his is clearly not the sole American, let alone civilized, position on the subject.

Next Williams takes a leap of logic that can only be described as bizarre:

Horrible acts can be committed in countries where most of the people are peace-loving and simply want to be left alone to attend to their affairs. I imagine that described most of the people in the former Soviet Union; however, that did not stop the killing of an estimated 62 million people between 1917 and 1987. The same can be said of the Chinese people, but it didn’t stop the killing of 35 million of their countrymen during Mao Zedong’s reign. Whether most people of a country are peace-loving or not is not nearly as important as who’s calling the shots.

Williams is arguing, in essence, that since the peace-loving people of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were mercilessly slaughtered by their own governments, that somehow justifies the merciless slaughtering of Germans and Japanese by the Allies because what’s important is "who’s calling the shots," not the peace-loving people forced to live under that tyranny. According to Williams’s logic, then, if I beat my wife, it is therefore okay for my neighbor Smith to go beat our mutual neighbor Jones’s wife if he doesn’t like the way Jones is behaving. Wonderland, here we come!

"At this particular time," continues Williams, "fanatical jihadists are calling the terrorism shots in many Muslim countries. Their success in committing terrorist acts is in no small part the result of the actions by the millions of peace-loving fellow Muslims." What actions are these? Either Muslims fail to condemn terrorism sufficiently or they are silent about terrorists’ activities among them, says Williams, adding: "There is no way terrorists can carry on their operations, obtain explosive materials, run terrorist training camps, raise money without the knowledge of other Muslims, whether they’re government officials, bankers, family members, friends or neighbors."

Let’s do the math on this. Williams says that of 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, "[w]e’re told it’s only that 1 percent . . . are fanatical jihadists." That means there are 12 million potential Islamic terrorists in the world, a number that seems extraordinarily high, but we’ll take Williams at his word for the purposes of this exercise. Now those 12 million jihadists may know quite a few people, but let’s say that on average no more than 10 of their acquaintances have any inkling of their clandestine activities. (It’s in their interest to keep the circle of knowledge small to prevent leaks.) Let us further stipulate that no terrorists share acquaintances with knowledge of their activities with other terrorists. That means that at most we have 12 million terrorists plus 120 million "enablers," giving us 132 million non-innocent Muslims, which still amounts to only 11 percent of the entire Muslim population. Williams, however, is proposing that the other 89 percent of Muslims be treated as enemies just the same.

Even if half of all Muslims are complicit in terrorism to one degree or another, is Williams justified in threatening all of them with annihilation? The obvious answer is no. Individuals commit crimes, sometimes in concert with other individuals. The individuals involved deserve to be brought to justice; all others ought to be left alone. Threatening all Muslims with death because some of them are terrorists is akin to threatening all African-Americans with death because some of them are murderers, and somehow I don’t think Williams would go for that.

Williams will have none of this bleeding-heart liberal nonsense about proportionality, however. As far as he’s concerned, President Bush had it right when he divided the world into those "with us" and those "against us", and any Muslim who isn’t actively working with the West is, by definition, working against it. He writes: "Because those millions of peace-loving Muslims do not speak out and expose terrorists and don’t more fully cooperate with domestic and international authorities trying to stop terrorists, they become enemies of the West just as the peace-loving people in Germany, Italy and Japan became enemies of the Allied powers during World War II. Like them, Muslims should be prepared to suffer the full might of the West in its efforts to fight terrorism."

Has it ever occurred to Williams that the vast majority of Muslims probably have no way of cooperating with anti-terrorism efforts for the simple reason that they don’t know any terrorists or aren’t aware that they do? Furthermore, those who do know terrorists may very well fear for their lives should they dare to expose them or cooperate with efforts to do so. In America we protect witnesses against organized crime; we don’t threaten them with the electric chair for refusing to testify out of fear. Why, then, should we threaten Muslims with "the full might of the West" for not helping Western governments root out terrorists? Wouldn’t offering rewards and protection be a more humane and productive approach?

Dr. Williams appears to have a blind spot when it comes to foreign policy. Whereas in domestic policy he insists on individuals’ being treated as individuals and given the maximum liberty possible, in foreign policy he insists on treating people as members of groups — and woe to him who, even by accident of birth, falls into a group designated "the enemy." When that happens, all moral scruples, in Williams’s view, can be tossed aside in favor of collective punishment with no limits. Furthermore, anyone who happens to reside in a country whose government has been designated an enemy is also targeted for death in Williams’s world. Ironically, this is precisely the opinion of the very terrorists Williams wishes to eradicate.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

Tony Campolo is a Christian pastor, author, and speaker who also happens to be rather liberal when it comes to certain theological points and most political issues. As such, he is concerned that all Evangelicals have been stereotyped as members of the Religious Right, to which he most definitely does not belong. In order to distinguish themselves from the Religious Right, Campolo and other liberal Christians have dubbed themselves "Red Letter Christians," by which they intend to indicate that they are the ones who are taking Jesus’ words — the ones that are printed in red ink in many Bibles — seriously while the Pat Robertsons and James Dobsons of the world are not.

Now Campolo — whom I have met and heard speak on two occasions, and whose faith in Christ I do not doubt for a moment even though I have my disagreements with him on other issues — is at pains to convince the reader of his book, Red Letter Christians, a portion of which was recently reprinted at the Huffington Post, that he does not believe that Christians who disagree with him are disobeying the teachings of Christ. He writes that the Red Letter Christians "did not want to call ourselves u2018progressive Evangelicals,’ because that might imply a value judgment on those who do not share our views." That sounds quite magnanimous, yet the tone of the rest of the piece is such that one can come to no other conclusion but that Campolo is indeed making a value judgment against those who disagree that more and bigger government is the solution to the social ills of the world. In fact, he bluntly states that "Red Letter Christians consider ignoring the necessity of legislation to address such careless disregard [for the environment, but he could fairly well be speaking of poverty or any of the other issues he raises] as more than a disgrace: We call it sinful." Thank goodness he’s not passing value judgments on anyone!

This is not to say that the Red Letter Christians are unique in passing judgment on other Christians who disagree with their politics; try opposing the Iraq war or supporting drug decriminalization in your average Southern Baptist church. It is to say, however, that Campolo is being disingenuous when he suggests that, on the one hand, he can assert that he is following Jesus’ words and others are not while, on the other hand, he claims not to be passing judgment on those who disagree with him.

The fact is that neither the Religious Right nor the Red Letter Christians have a lock on following Christ’s teachings. In many cases they read the same passages but interpret them differently. For example, it is not arguable that Jesus called on His followers to take care of the poor; it is arguable whether He meant that to take place under the auspices of the church or under the auspices of government (or, as some members of the Religious Right would have it, via "faith-based initiatives" whereby government gives money to religious organizations to undertake charitable endeavors).

Even where the two camps seem to be inalterably opposed at a fundamental level, things tend to fall less along theological lines than along partisan ones. Campolo wants "us to examine our attitudes about war," and as a liberal one would expect him to be antiwar. Meanwhile, Jim Wallis, another of the Red Letter Christians, has opposed the Iraq war but supports all kinds of actions against Sudan, including "a no-fly zone over Darfur [presumably enforced by military means] and a possible naval blockade," not to mention "a large and strong multinational peacekeeping force, with the authority to use u2018all necessary means,’ . . . to end the genocide in Darfur." Apparently the attitude we are to have about war, according to the Red Letter folks, is that it’s bad when Republicans engage the U.S. government in it but good when the United Nations engages various governments in it.

"Whereas some leading Evangelical spokespersons focus almost all their attention on preventing gay marriages and overturning past Supreme Court rulings on abortion," writes Campolo, "Red Letter Christians . . . embrace a broad range of social concerns, giving special attention to legislation that provides help for the poor and hope for the oppressed."

The question is: How can one promote legislation that "provides help for the poor" without at the same time violating his pledge to promote legislation that offers "hope for the oppressed"? The only way for government to give money or services to the poor is first to take the necessary funds from other citizens, i.e., to steal from them, which surely qualifies as oppression. Furthermore, if Campolo purposes to "promote legislation that turns biblical imperatives into social policy," how can he support laws that blatantly violate Exodus 20:15 ("You shall not steal")?

Apparently the answer lies in stealing from the "right" people. Campolo writes: "We find it significant that in Christ’s story of the rich man and Lazarus, as recorded in Luke 16:19—31, the sin that warrants the rich man’s condemnation is that he u2018feasted sumptuously’ while remaining indifferent to the poor man at his gate. Given such biblical illustrations of God’s concerns, we contend that we have a God-given responsibility to share with the poor and to be a voice for the voiceless oppressed." Amen, Brother Campolo. The problem is that you are making an unwarranted leap of logic from "God commands His followers to share with the poor" to "we must therefore force people to share with the poor, whether they like it or not." Sharing your own money with others is one thing; holding up someone else and giving his money away to others is quite another. Does anyone really think that God would somehow have been more accepting of the rich man in the parable if, say, the king had taxed away 50 percent of the man’s income and given it to Lazarus?

From a biblical perspective, helping the poor is not an end in itself. It is a means of demonstrating God’s love, both to the poor and to others who witness our acts of charity, in the hope that they will come to a saving knowledge of Him. Campolo, however, treats charity as the end; as long as we can get the government to rob from the rich and give to the poor, we have fulfilled our responsibility to help the poor. How many poor people are going to recognize the love of God in a welfare check? How can they when the check is provided not out of love but out of fear? They will view their benefactors with contempt, demanding ever more money with ever less responsibility. Indeed, this has been the universal experience with government anti-poverty programs over the last century, yet Campolo seems to think that we need more of it.

Campolo does not limit his desire for increased legalized theft merely to domestic concerns. He contends that "there is something terribly amiss when our national budget ranks second to last of the 22 industrialized nations for assistance to the world’s poor." Spending "less than four-tenths of 1 percent (0.4%) of [the U.S.] federal budget to address world poverty" is simply unacceptable, as far as he is concerned. Besides being unconstitutional, it is as plain as the nose on Campolo’s face — and Tony would be the first to admit that his proboscis is quite prominent — that foreign aid programs serve only to increase oppression and prolong poverty in Third World countries. Money sent to foreign countries invariably ends up in the hands of the ruling class, who use it to buy both luxuries for their own comfort and weapons with which to keep the ruled class under their thumbs. No country in the world has emerged from poverty via foreign aid; many have emerged via the free market. Besides, sending money abroad means collecting it at home, and that means additional taxation, which brings us right to back to that business about stealing.

Next Campolo describes the myriad problems of Camden, New Jersey: rampant divorce and illegitimacy; lack of emergency rooms; out-of-control crime, including murder; steep incarceration rates for young males; corruption in city government; disastrous public schooling; and high unemployment. Look at that list and name one of those problems that isn’t directly related to government policies. Welfare and the war on drugs have destroyed black families and led to much violent crime and the imprisonment of so many young black men. Government control and regulation of the health care industry have resulted in high prices and shortages of service. Public schools are, of course, wholly owned and operated by the government, the consequences of which are, as Campolo describes them, "inefficiency and corruption," a graduation rate under 50 percent among high school students, and many "functionally illiterate" graduates. High unemployment is largely a symptom of all the other problems but is exacerbated by the exorbitant taxes and numerous regulations that Campolo’s preferred method of ending poverty necessarily entails.

Yet with all this evidence of government failure staring him in the face, Campolo says that "[t]hose who say that the problems of Camden can be resolved in a libertarian fashion — with churches and other voluntary organizations meeting the needs of the city without government programs and dollars — have a hard time convincing people like me." It’s as if the fire department has been trying for years to put out a blaze by pouring gasoline on it, and when someone else comes along and says that maybe water would work better, Campolo is standing there yelling, "No! More unleaded!"

"I strongly believe," continues Campolo, "that while churches and charities have done incredible work to alleviate the suffering of the needy, they cannot provide universal health care or guarantee a minimum wage. These fall under the province of government." Of course, government cannot do those things either. Has Campolo ever noticed that, even with our highly regulated health care system, Canadians routinely cross the border to get health care that their "universal" system has denied them or delayed for years? Does he not know that they are turning to the free market, even when it is of questionable legality, to obtain the care they so desperately need? Has he no inkling of the disasters befalling the British National Health Service? Does he not possess even the most basic grasp of economics that would enable him to recognize that in "guarantee[ing] a minimum wage," government is also guaranteeing unemployment for some of the poorest people, the very ones Campolo claims to want to help by such policies?

Campolo rightly decries the plummeting purchasing power of the dollar owing to inflation, but every one of the anti-poverty programs he proposes is a surefire way to increase inflation. In order to pay for its spending, the government can only tax people so much before they rebel, but it can inflate the currency for much longer. With our government already vastly in debt, every penny spent is either borrowed or made up out of thin air. Either way the poorest people are hit the hardest, while the well-connected wealthy make out like bandits.

He decries the increase in home foreclosures without, again, making the connection that government spending and regulations allegedly designed to help the poor are largely at the root of it.

Being a good statist, Campolo is stunned that some Evangelicals think "that global warming is a myth (or at least grossly exaggerated)." Well, yes, we do, considering that (a) many of the same people who today are telling us we’re going to burn up were, 30 years ago, telling us we were headed for a new ice age, and (b) the global warming proponents’ every solution to the alleged problem is for us all to become more poor and give up more freedom to the government. Maybe global warming is happening, and maybe it isn’t (though I’m inclined to believe the latter). If it is happening, maybe humans are the cause of it, and maybe we aren’t. With so much uncertainty surrounding the whole theory, why are the skeptics the ones who are considered outré rather than those who believe it wholeheartedly despite the lack of conclusive evidence?

Finally, Campolo is outraged that some "Evangelicals argue against environmentalism" and "don’t understand that environmental degradation in the developing world is a major contributor to extreme poverty." I rather think that most Christians would agree with Campolo that God calls us "to be stewards of the natural world, not just for our own sakes, but also for the good of others." The question, again, is how to go about preserving the environment for future generations; and again, Campolo’s answer is more government. Apparently it has not occurred to him that the freest societies on earth also have the cleanest environments. There are two reasons for this. One is that free societies tend to be more prosperous, and more prosperous people have the leisure time to be concerned with preserving the environment, whereas the poor are just concerned with surviving from one day to the next by any means possible. The other is that free societies protect private property, and property rights are the surest way to prevent environmental degradation. No one has the right to pollute another’s property; but if property is largely held by the government or can easily be taken from its rightful owner, then no one really owns it and, thus, no one has any real incentive to keep it clean. This is why government-owned forests tend to be clear-cut when loggers are given the opportunity to harvest trees in them while privately owned forests are maintained for long-term profitability. Most developing countries are in dire poverty and have socialist or communist governments under which property rights are practically nonexistent. It’s not hard to see why environmental concerns rank low on their priority lists. Protect property rights and you’ll see both increasing prosperity and a cleaner environment.

When it comes right down to it, the Religious Right and the Red Letter Christians have much in common. Both believe in the power of government to stamp out evil by spending more money. The Religious Right thinks it can stamp out poverty by spending more money on faith-based initiatives, end promiscuity by spending more money on abstinence programs, and defeat "Islamofascism" by spending more money on killing Muslims. The Red Letter Christians think it can stamp out poverty throughout the world by spending more money, end crime and illegitimacy by spending more money, and stop "global warming" and clean up the environment by spending more money. Neither side seems to care that spending this money requires first taking it from someone by force, the very definition of theft, which is clearly prohibited in the Bible; nor does either side appreciate that Jesus never called for coercing people into following His commands.

Campolo concludes: "We Red Letter Christians consider ignoring the necessity of legislation to address such careless disregard as more than a disgrace: We call it sinful. And if some of those old Hebrew prophets were around today, they would have a lot to say about it." Campolo’s last sentence is correct, but I doubt that he had Psalm 118:9 in mind: "It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes."

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

Would you trust an authorized biography or an autobiography to give you the whole truth about a person’s life? It would be foolish to do so because the subject has every incentive to emphasize the positive things he has done and to deemphasize or even exclude the negative ones.

Most mainstream history texts are nothing more than authorized biographies of government. They overemphasize government’s achievements and downplay its failures, which makes sense when you consider that a sizable percentage of historians are employed by publicly funded colleges and universities and thus are naturally sympathetic to government activism and, in addition, have no desire to play a tune that fails to please the one who is paying the piper.

Since the state runs almost all the schools and thus purchases the overwhelming majority of textbooks, textbook publishers have little incentive to produce texts critical of the government for there would be no profit in doing so. Hence, while history texts may criticize certain individual politicians or programs, they dare not call the entire enterprise of the state into question.

It therefore comes as no surprise that the latest history textbook being approved for use in Russia celebrates the centralization of power in Moscow, the destruction of liberty in the name of security, and the rule of authoritarian leaders who strengthened the Kremlin’s hold on society. The only surprising thing is that anyone is really caught off guard by this, as blogger Yasha Levine appears to be. A study of the history textbooks used in other Western countries would surely have led one to expect precisely such a result.

Levine summarizes what he considers some of the most outrageous assertions and themes of this new textbook.

First, writes Levine, the book argues that "[t]he abolition of directly elected regional governors was a good thing because u2018regional governments could not effectively function during a crisis-type situation’ (e.g. responding terrorist attacks) [sic]. The implication here is that rigid, top-down vertical political structures are a necessity in Russia’s democracy."

Isn’t this what we’re told here in the good old U. S. of A.? Lincoln’s crushing of state sovereignty and centralization of power in Washington, D.C., were good things, we are led to believe, and necessary to move America into the modern, egalitarian era. Local governments and private organizations cannot be trusted to deal with disasters — hence FEMA, with its bang-up job of recovery from Hurricane Katrina and its fake news conferences — or terrorism — hence the Department of Homeland Security, ridiculous and invasive security procedures at airports, and ever more militarized state and local police forces.

Levine later argues that the book states or strongly implies the following: "Some countries give up sovereign rule to other more powerful countries in exchange for security. Case in point: Georgia after Saakashvili was elected in 2004. Countries such as these are puppets and do not represent their people’s will. As such, they are illegitimate."

Again, how different is this from what our historians tell us about practically every foreign intervention by the U.S. government? When Uncle Sam invades, topples the government of, or otherwise interferes in a foreign country, even if it’s a democracy, it is always for the good of the citizens of those countries and for the safety and security of Americans.

Even now we are being prepared for war with Iran, which the Bush administration and all its allies in the media portray as an Islamic dictatorship run with an iron fist by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Ahmedinejad, however, was democratically elected and has little real power; most power is in the hands of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni. Furthermore, Bush himself, by labeling Iran part of the "axis of evil" and continuing to harp on Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, weakened the previous, reform-minded president, Mohammed Khatami, and strengthened anti-American sentiment in Iran, paving the way for Ahmedinejad. Then, before the first round of the elections that brought Ahmedinejad to power had even taken place, Bush was already describing the elections — and, by implication, the winner of those elections — as illegitimate. In other words, as Levine put it, the Ahmedinejad government is a "[puppet] and do[es] not represent [the] people’s will." Therefore, it needs to be toppled by the U.S. government in order to liberate the Iranian people and provide more security for both them and us. Now how much different from former KGB agent Putin is Bush? How far apart are each country’s court historians?

Levine next describes the textbook’s take on Josef Stalin: "Stalin was an u2018effective manager,’ taking Russia from the plow to the atomic bomb in just a few years. His repressions were necessary to mobilize for war and industrialize Russia so quickly."

Does this not sound like most historians’ hagiographies of Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR? Sure, they violated civil liberties and other constitutional restraints repeatedly, but such violations were necessary to drag a backward country, kicking and screaming, into the modern era. FDR, in particular, is praised for maneuvering the country into war by the back door of Pearl Harbor despite the overwhelmingly noninterventionist tendencies of the American people at the time and for enacting so many welfare-state programs, effectively managing the entire country from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe he didn’t get us out of the Depression too quickly, and maybe he did lock up 100,000 or so innocent Japanese-Americans, but it was all for our own good. He even got us the bomb (with a slight assist from Truman, another lauded president) before his buddy, "Uncle Joe" Stalin, did. What a heroic leader!

Finally, Levine could be describing practically any American history book (substituting appropriate presidents’ names for the Soviet premiers’ names, of course) with this characterization of the new Russian textbook: "In general, the ratings of past leaders goes [sic] like this: Khrushchev is bad because he weakened the government; Brezhnev is good because he restored it; Gorbachev and Yeltsin are both bad because they let the Soviet Union fall apart; Putin has been Russia’s best leader because he restored strong u2018vertical’ power (which was established by Stalin)."

Sound familiar? Take a look at any mainstream "greatest presidents" list, and you’re sure to find the presidents who increased federal power the most at the top of the list, with Lincoln leading the pack. (Credit is due to the person who edited that Wikipedia article to include libertarian dissent on these presidential rankings, citing numerous LRC and Mises Institute writers.) Historian Eric Foner, as Tom DiLorenzo has pointed out more than once, considers Lincoln far greater than Gorbachev and Yeltsin precisely because Lincoln kept the American Union together at the point of a gun while Gorbachev and Yeltsin allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve peacefully.

Levine is right to be angry about the authoritarian bent of the new Russian history text, but he surely should not be surprised by it. When the state authorizes its own biography, one can hardly expect the ghostwriters to portray the subject in a negative light.

Perhaps the real problem is that history is almost invariably written as the story of government, which explains why it’s often boring and seemingly irrelevant to the average person and why it can frequently be downright depressing. Perhaps it will always be thus, but wouldn’t it be nice for historians to start treating human history as the story of individuals and private institutions instead of the state collective? Since every last bit of progress has been made by the private sector, it would surely be a far more uplifting, interesting, and relevant approach than the constant drumbeat and cheering on of institutionalized force that passes for history in most quarters.

Until such time as history becomes an account of peaceful interchange between individuals, though, Levine asks if there might not be a "Russian Howard Zinn" to correct the state worship of the new textbook. Levine clearly lacks vision. What Russia needs is not a Howard Zinn equivalent but a Tom Woods equivalent. Why, the Stalin era alone could yield a good 33,000 questions Russians aren’t supposed to ask — or at least were shot for asking before the weak-kneed Gorbachev and Yeltsin let Uncle Joe’s grand project go to seed.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

I love eBay. It’s about as close to unfettered capitalism as you can get under the present circumstances. Buyers offer what they have to sell; sellers offer the prices they’re willing to pay. When supply and demand meet, a sale is made. Caveat emptor is the rule, but eBay’s feedback and complaint processes are a relatively efficient way of weeding out the frauds.

I’ve bought and sold items on eBay for years. Buying is much easier (except on the pocketbook) than selling, which can be time consuming. As easy as it is to list an item for sale, it still takes a certain amount of time. In addition, it is usually a good idea to shoot and upload one or more photographs of the item, and then there is time spent answering inquiries from prospective buyers and packing and shipping the item if it sells. If you only sell a handful of items a year, it’s not a big deal; but if you frequently have things to hawk, you’re going to put in a considerable amount of time creating listings on eBay and packing and shipping the sold items.

Fortunately, the market has come to the rescue in the form of third-party sellers who will do all the hard work of photographing, listing, packing, and shipping your wares — for a fee, of course.

Unfortunately, wherever the market succeeds, you can rest assured that the state is not far behind to stifle this success or at least to get a significant cut of it. Thus it transpires that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is now threatening third-party eBay sellers with fines of $1,000 (or possibly $1,000 per item sold) for the horrific crime of selling merchandise at auction without an auctioneer’s license, issuance of which is, conveniently, the exclusive domain of the bureaucrats in Harrisburg.

How does one go about acquiring one of these licenses? According to the state’s website, the prospective auctioneer must:

• "Serve an apprenticeship as a licensed apprentice auctioneer for a period of not less than two years in the employ of a qualified auctioneer and participate for compensation in no less than 30 auctions; OR
• "Successfully complete a prescribed course of study in auctioneering of at least 20 credit hours at a school approved by the board. A credit hour of instruction is defined as 15 standard hours of instruction, each of which is composed of 50 minutes. . . . ; OR
• "Apply through reciprocity from a state in which we have a reciprocal agreement . . . ; OR
• "Apply through a Non-Resident Exam Application . . . ."

Once one of the above is completed, the prospective auctioneer must take an auctioneer’s examination; and once he has passed that, he can apply for a license. Naturally, there are fees for the exam and the license, and the person wishing to obtain a license must post $5,000 bond with the state. In addition, the license expires every two years and must be renewed at additional cost.

The commonwealth, of course, claims that this is all done to protect consumers. Think of the dangers inherent in letting just any old Joe Schmoe auction off other people’s goods when Mr. Schmoe has not spent 2 years as an apprentice (under someone else who has paid his dues to the state) or 250 hours sitting in class (at a school which has groveled sufficiently before the government, and probably paid up, to earn its approval) learning how to talk really fast! Why, bidders might actually understand what he’s saying! We can’t have that.

As if it weren’t ridiculous enough that someone would have to go through all of this just to auction off pigs at the county fair, the law is stretched to the point of absurdity to demand that people submit to this kind of lengthy training in techniques that are clearly useless on the internet. How on earth are consumers protected by forcing third-party internet sellers to learn how to rattle off bids a mile a minute in front of a live crowd?

At least one third-party seller whom the state has (or is trying to) run out of business understands exactly what’s going on. As the AP report linked above says:

Barry Fallon, who ran a business called iSold It on eBay in Lower Paxton Township, has been summoned to appear before the state Board of Auctioneer Examiners. He said the board is dominated by traditional auctioneers who fear competition.

“(It’s) kind of like having the buggy whip manufacturers decide whether to allow new automobiles to be sold,” Fallon said.

Not only are existing auctioneers trying to keep competition down by forcing online third-party sellers to pay up or pack up, but I’d lay odds that the auctioneering licensing law itself was originally written and passed at the behest of already successful auctioneers for precisely the same reason. Find me a licensing law that wasn’t created to stifle competition for those already established in the profession, and I’ll find you a living, breathing unicorn.

As always, the "consumer protection" laws end up hurting the very people they’re allegedly designed to help. Again from the AP story:

Mary Jo Pletz of Walnutport, about 20 miles north of Allentown, quit her job to stay home when her young daughter was diagnosed with an illness.

She started selling other people’s furniture, clothing and antiques on eBay, and went on to sell more than 10,000 items online. But a few days after Christmas last year, she got a visit from the Department of State and has since shut down her business.

Neither she nor her attorney can determine if her potential fine is a flat $1,000, or $1,000 per item sold, she said.

Now there’s a good law for you — so convoluted that even a lawyer can’t make sense of it. But that’s just the point: Make enough laws and make them impossible to decipher, and you can send anyone up the river for something as long as you get an unscrupulous enough prosecutor and a pliable enough judge.

Let’s just go right to the fundamental issue here. Any two people ought to be permitted to come to a voluntary agreement whereby one sells certain items belonging to the other at mutually agreeable terms. The state ought to have no say in it whatsoever, whether the items are being sold out of a barn or on eBay. It’s a simple matter of property rights, the very bedrock of freedom.

On the other hand, since all property owned by the state has been stolen from the citizens therein, I propose an online auction of all government property, with the proceeds divided equally among the taxpayers. I know how to sell things on eBay, and I’d even do it on a no-commission basis as a service to my fellow man. That would at least provide us with a measure of restitution. If the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania wants to prosecute me for doing this without a license, well, good luck stringing me up, fellas, once you own no guns, courtrooms, or prisons.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

The Ten Commandments begin thus: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them . . ." (Exodus 20:2—5a).

How I wish that Christians who are outraged over the removal of a monument of the Ten Commandments from a courthouse would instead concern themselves with their own fealty to the commandments! If they did, these same conservative Christians would realize that they do indeed worship another god — one that they put on an equal footing with, if not above, the God of the Bible. That god, of course, is the United States government; and the idol of many of these Christians is George W. Bush.

How else can one explain the willingness — even eagerness — of so many Christians to accept the mass murder of their fellow human beings by their own government while harshly criticizing foreign governments or terrorist organizations for doing, or even contemplating, the same thing on a much smaller scale?

For example, Joseph Farah, a professed Christian, recently endorsed Congressman Tom Tancredo’s suggestion that terrorist attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaeda be met with nuclear attacks on Muslim cities from Mecca to Damascus, thus consigning millions to certain death as a result of the actions of a few who may or may not even reside in the cities which Farah wishes to bomb. Farah rightly condemns the murder of innocent civilians by Muslim terrorists but then turns right around and proposes that the U.S. government murder many times more innocent civilians in retaliation for terrorist attacks. If Farah is willing to allow his own government to play God with the lives of people in other countries, then he must consider that government to be the equal of God. Talk about bowing down to idols!

The Catholic Sean Hannity, for his part, has expressed dismay that Michael Vick might serve only a year in prison for torturing dogs yet continues wholeheartedly to stand behind the U.S. government’s policy of torturing human beings. One suspects that Hannity would not condone the torture of dogs even if the government repealed the laws under which Vick is being prosecuted or, worse, actually encouraged or paid Vick to torture dogs. Somehow, though, when the government says that torturing certain human beings is permissible and possibly even a patriotic duty, Hannity suddenly drops all his objections to the practice and excoriates those who continue to object.

The Bible clearly holds governments to the same standards as it does individuals (see the story of David and Bathsheba in II Samuel 11 and 12), but the alleged Christian Hannity does not. The only explanation is that Hannity considers the U.S. government the equal of God, possessing the authority to make its own rules of conduct. (Needless to say, Hannity is also in favor of our government’s continued occupation of Iraq and its impending military actions against Iran.)

The agenda-driven pundits are, unfortunately, not the only ones who have conflated Uncle Sam and Father God. I recently received an email from an acquaintance which requested that I say the following prayer: "Lord, hold our troops in your loving hands. Protect them as they protect us. Bless them and their families for the selfless acts they perform for us in our time of need. Amen." It’s misguided and sickening. The troops are not protecting us from anything; they are invading and occupying foreign countries that have done us no harm. We are in far more danger from the regime in Washington, D.C., which controls the troops and could easily use them against us, than we are from the regimes in Tehran, Damascus, or Pyongyang. Why should God bless invaders who have brought death and destruction to millions of innocent people?

Even worse than the prayer were the accompanying images. Take this one (right), for example.

The clear implication is that God is the power behind the U.S. military, which is doing his work throughout the world — you know, bombing, killing, maiming, and all those other wonderful things that the God who is described as the embodiment of love (I John 4:8) would be doing if he weren’t so busy doing bleeding-heart liberal things like showing mercy and forgiveness.

Furthermore, the Ephesians passage is blatantly misapplied to a flesh-and-blood struggle for power in the physical world. The passage is, in fact, part of the Apostle Paul’s description of the "full armor of God" (Ephesians 6:11), which he clearly states is not for use "against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 6:12). Turning that passage into an endorsement of the U.S. military’s imperial adventures is to make a liar of Paul and, by extension, God.

Even more egregious than that picture, however, is this one (left).

Here we have the cross, the very symbol of love, redemption, and forgiveness through Jesus Christ, juxtaposed with the flag, the symbol of the U.S. government and its world-girdling empire built on violence and bloodshed. Without doubt, the irony of the association of an implement of state-sanctioned torture and execution with Old Glory is lost on the person who came up with this piece of blasphemy. The federal government, like all governments, subsists on theft and retains and expands its power through force and the threat of force. Jesus, on other hand, forces himself on no one and, as Joseph Sobran recently noted, rejected the kind of power we now invest in our presidents and, I add, which so many Christians worship as long as it is in the hands of George W. Bush.

Further proof of the complete lack of a sense of irony on the part of these worshipers of Uncle Sam’s "benevolent global hegemony" comes in the form of this last image from the email (right).

A boy attends the funeral of his father, a U.S. Marine, and struggles to hold back the tears. Now if that doesn’t make you reconsider the whole imperial project, which is directly responsible for thousands of such scenes across America, then you either have a heart of stone or are so blinded by state worship that you consider the death of a father and resulting instability in his family a sacrifice worth making to your god. If the latter is the case, you’re in good company: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright considered the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of U.S. bombings and sanctions to be a worthy sacrifice to Moloch, too.

So, dear Christian brother or sister, which is it? Do you genuinely try to obey the Ten Commandments; or are you merely concerned that they be displayed somewhere, preferably on government property where, perhaps, they will add a sense of legitimacy to the state? Does God make rules that apply to both individuals and governments, or are governments free to write their own rules if doing so makes you feel safer? Is it the crime of the century for Osama bin Laden to engineer the deaths of 3,000 Americans but a boon to humanity for George W. Bush to take actions that have resulted in the deaths of another 3,000 Americans (and counting) and untold thousands of Iraqis and Afghans?

Be careful how you answer those questions. You may find that you do have another god, the U.S. government, before the one you claim to worship "with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37).

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

The great H. L. Mencken once observed, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Nowhere is this more evident than in the federal government’s continual attempts to assure us that (a) we are in grave danger of being killed by terrorists and (b) the government — the same government that failed so spectacularly to protect us on 9/11 — is here to keep us safe.

(As with any habitual liar, the government begins to contradict itself after a while. If U.S. troops are fighting the terrorists "over there" in Iraq so that we won’t have to fight them "over here" in America, how come the FBI keeps uncovering more alleged terrorist plots here in the U.S. of A.?)

The latest alleged evil plot "busted" by the FBI was announced to great fanfare this past weekend: Crazed towelheads were going to blow up the jet fuel storage tanks and pipelines at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, destroying not just the airport and the people therein but, depending on which account you read, half of New York and New Jersey as well. Whew! Thank goodness the G-men are looking out for us!

Or are they? The New York Times reports that the suspects were "longer on evil intent than on operational capability." In other words, they wanted to wreak havoc with jet fuel but probably couldn’t even light a gas grill.

Continues the Times:

At [the alleged terrorist plot's] heart was a 63-year-old retired airport cargo worker, Russell M. Defreitas, who the complaint says talked of his dreams of inflicting massive harm, but who appeared to possess little money, uncertain training and no known background in planning a terror attack. . . .

Some law enforcement officials and engineers also dismissed the notion that the planned attack could have resulted in a catastrophic chain reaction; system safeguards, they said, would have stopped explosions from spreading. [The Los Angeles Times agrees, saying that the plot "would have faced many hurdles," not least of which is that jet fuel is not highly susceptible to exploding.]

On top of that, writes the Times, the court papers "tend to suggest a distance between Mr. Defreitas’s dream and any nightmarish reality." For example, nobody involved had any relevant military training, none had participated in any previous attacks, and they had obtained their top-secret satellite photographs of JFK from Google Earth. Ultimately, the Times concludes, "[m]any of the plot’s larger details are left to the imagination." In short, there were a bunch of guys who may have wanted, at some indefinite point in the future, to carry out a terrorist attack; but they were a long way from plotting it in any great detail, and there was no way they could have executed it.

This brings us to the question of the FBI informant involved. We know that in the recent Fort Dix case and last year’s Miami case, the FBI informant seems to have been the driving force behind the plots, suggesting ways they could be carried out and providing technical and material support. In this latest alleged plot, according to the Newspaper of Record, the "informant is a convicted drug trafficker, and his sentence is part of his cooperation agreement with the federal government." What better way to cooperate than to hatch a terrorist plot and then get credit for helping to bust it? (See Nora Ephron on "How to Foil a Terrorist Plot in Seven Simple Steps.")

Given all of this, and given that, as Scott Horton points out, "there has not been a single case where they have actually busted domestic terrorists since 9/11" (or before 9/11, for that matter), one might think that some skepticism about this latest alleged bust would be in order.

I expressed said skepticism to a coworker who was telling me about having been waiting to board a plane at JFK during the time the feds were holding their press conference to announce their big catch. (She noted that the televisions in the airport had all been switched from news to cartoons and that she didn’t find out about the story until she got on the plane.) I later e-mailed her links to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times articles, plus some of the others I’ve included in this column, to back up my contention that there was probably less to this alleged plot than meets the eye.

However, this coworker having been thoroughly Hannitized, she shot back an angry missive telling me, essentially, that only left-wing nuts believe this stuff and don’t trust the government, at least when it’s run by Republicans, to protect us. She, for one, is extremely grateful that they’re out there busting these terrorist plots early, no matter what illegal or unethical steps they have to take in order to do so, and keeping us all safe every day. (Apparently 9/11 is the exception that proves the rule, but then that can be blamed on the Clinton administration, as all "great Americans" see it.)

Apparently we are not to be in the least bit skeptical when the government holds press conferences to announce with great fanfare that it has foiled terrorist plots that were likely years from ever occurring and probably couldn’t have been pulled off anyway. We are never to question whether the government’s informants had any hand in instigating or egging on the alleged plots. We are not to ask if, perhaps, the FBI is creating terrorist plots so it can "bust" them and blow its own horn on national TV, thus obtaining a bigger budget next year and making certain politicians look good as they crusade for ever more tax dollars and police powers to protect us from these horrific terrorist plots.

Clearly only an inveterate cynic or a left-wing extremist could imagine the federal government’s inventing terrorist threats for its own benefit. I mean, maybe evil Democrats like the New York airport’s namesake would consider that, as in Operation Northwoods; but surely no patriotic, salt-of-the-earth Republican would ever wish harm on Americans for political advantage — right?

What, then, are we to make of these comments from Dennis Milligan, chairman of the Republican Party of Arkansas, in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country."

If that isn’t hoping for disaster to befall Americans in order to score political points, I don’t know what is.

Furthermore, the illogic of the comments is typical of someone who is, as Milligan said of himself, “u2018150 percent’ behind Bush on the war in Iraq." If one or more terrorist attacks do occur in the U.S., how does that vindicate Bush and his war "to protect this country"? Doesn’t it, instead, suggest that he’s been approaching the fight against terrorism in the wrong way? Alas, Milligan is probably right that attacks would, at the very least, cause the American people to rally around their Dear Leader, which is what makes his comments so heinous.

Is it reasonable, then, to doubt that we were in any real danger from the alleged JFK terrorist plot and, indeed, all the other alleged terrorist plots the feds tell us, via well-staged press conferences, they’ve busted? (Heck, even the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn said, according to the Times, that as far as the supposed JFK plot goes, the "public was never at risk"!) Is it reasonable to ask whether or not the government’s informants are playing a bigger role in these alleged plots than the people the feds are charging? Is it reasonable to suggest that, since the government benefits from the good publicity of having "saved" us from these purported terrorists, the feds might have a hand in dreaming up the plots they’re busting in the first place?

Put another way, is it reasonable to assume that if you see smoke, there’s probably a fire nearby?

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

By now everyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the news from Tuesday night’s GOP presidential debate knows that the big moment of the evening occurred when Ron Paul finally got the chance to talk for more than 30 seconds. Paul gave a thorough explanation of why a noninterventionist foreign policy is the proper American foreign policy. When asked by one of the moderators if 9/11 hadn’t changed his mind about that, he replied that, no, U.S. intervention "was a major contributing factor" to the cause of the attacks. He went on to cite 10 years of bombing and sanctions against Iraq as one of the grievances of al-Qaeda that led to their attacking innocent Americans.

At this point Rudy Giuliani, who is running for president primarily on his alleged expertise in security (because, apparently, being mayor of a city that is attacked to great effect makes one a security expert much as being the captain of the Titanic makes one an iceberg expert), broke the rules of the debate to denounce Paul for this perfectly reasonable opinion, claiming that he’d never heard it before and demanding a retraction. Paul has repeatedly refused to do so and has challenged Giuliani to apologize to him since the very sentiments Paul expressed about blowback from U.S. intervention are expressed in the 9/11 Commission Report, which Giuliani the "security expert" has apparently not read.

For all this Paul has been denounced by various blowhards on the right as a "blame America first" type who claimed that the 9/11 terrorists were justified in their actions because of U.S. foreign policy. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

First let’s set one thing straight: America and its federal government are two completely different entities. Was America, the conglomeration of its individual citizens, responsible for provoking the 9/11 attacks? Of course not. Was the U.S. government, the world’s largest organized crime ring, responsible for provoking the attacks? Absolutely. Unfortunately, innocent Americans were made to suffer for their government’s attempts to run the world.

What Ron Paul was trying to convey in the limited amount of time he had was that actions have consequences, and the actions of the U.S. government can have extremely negative consequences, as one would expect all the conservatives who are denouncing him to recognize.

For example, while not all conservatives oppose the welfare state on principle (i.e., that it’s nothing but legalized plunder), they all oppose it because of its negative consequences. By paying women to have children out of wedlock, it has fostered an underclass of angry, indolent males with no fathers to provide them with either discipline or example. As a result, many of them become criminals.

One might correctly say, then, that the policies of the federal government have had a direct bearing on the criminal behavior of these individuals. Is this "blaming America first"? Are those who agree with this blaming the victims of the crimes committed by the underclass? Are they justifying the crimes because they were the result of government policy? The obvious answer to all of these is no. The crimes of the underclass are indeed a direct result of bad government policy, and part of the solution is to change that policy. Nevertheless, the individuals who committed the crimes ought still to be brought to justice because they are responsible for their own actions.

Let’s consider something even closer to the 9/11 situation. Timothy McVeigh, a U.S. government-trained killer, was justifiably angry at the federal government’s murder of innocent Americans (allegedly to protect other Americans from dangerous people) at Waco and Ruby Ridge. In response, McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and wounding 850. (Change a few details here and you have the Osama bin Laden story.)

Again the policies of the federal government had a direct bearing on the actions of a criminal. Again those policies were very bad, and conservatives generally recognized them as such. Were they then "blaming America first" for suggesting that these bad policies ought not to be repeated? Were they blaming the victims of McVeigh’s crime? Were they justifying the crime because they, too, believed the policies were bad and believed that justice should be done?

Once again the obvious answer is no. McVeigh’s crimes were indeed the result of bad government policy, and one way to prevent such crimes in the future is to change that policy. At the same time, McVeigh was fully responsible for having murdered innocent people in response to a government injustice and was rightly punished (leaving aside for now the debate over capital punishment) for his mass-murdering ways.

Now the next line of defense for the blame-the-U.S.-government-last crowd will be that our government hasn’t done anything to cause Muslims to hate us. The same federal government that conservatives are correctly convinced does so much harm domestically, even when its policies are ostensibly for our benefit, could not possibly do any harm internationally. When people in other countries hate our government for its policies, it is simply because they don’t understand that Uncle Sam’s killing their families, neighbors, and friends is for their own good. As far as conservatives are concerned today, we are free to examine the rightness and the results of liberals’ domestic programs regardless of their original intentions, but we are not to question the rightness and results of U.S. foreign policy because the intentions of its originators are allegedly righteous.

If you really believe that our government’s foreign policy has given Muslims no reason to hate our government and to wish to exact revenge on us, I suggest for starters the 12-point list of U.S. depredations against the Iraqi people presented here by Jacob Hornberger.

Now given that (a) the U.S. government has indeed visited numerous evil acts upon innocent people in other countries, acts that are both unconstitutional and unwise; (b) bin Laden and other terrorists have repeatedly stated that their attacks are motivated by anger at these acts; and (c) the results of (a) and (b) were seen in horrific, deadly color on September 11, 2001, is it wrong to suggest that the federal government bears some responsibility for the deaths of innocent Americans in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington and that these very bad policies ought to be changed while at the same time insisting that the perpetrators of the attack and their accomplices be brought to justice? Is this "blaming America first"?

America is a wonderful country populated by varied and interesting individuals, most of whom go about their daily lives in exactly the manner that Ron Paul is suggesting the federal government go about its business both at home and abroad (i.e., minding its own business). America’s government, on the other hand, is a gang of looters, busybodies, and egomaniacs that wants to micromanage not only the lives of Americans but the lives of everyone else in the world as well.

The trouble is that when people get fed up with the depredations of Rome-on-the-Potomac, they tend to take it out on innocent Americans. Then when those of us not enthralled with the emperor’s new clothes dare to point this out, we are accused of blaming the victims. In fact, we have nothing but the deepest sympathy for the victims and the deepest contempt for both the terrorists and the imperial thugs who by their own evil actions provoke such despicable acts.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

Page B1 of Saturday’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review offers a window into the mindset of average Americans and their leaders, demonstrating that neither cares a whit about the property rights of others.

First off is a story about the Allegheny County Health Department’s fining the Lithuanian Citizens’ Society of Western Pennsylvania $16,250 for violating the county’s new ban on smoking in "public places," which are not defined as places owned by the public (i.e., government buildings) but as places open to the public (i.e., stores, restaurants, social clubs, etc.). Somehow by opening his establishment’s doors to the public the owner magically forfeits his property rights and is no longer allowed to determine who may partake of a perfectly legal substance within the confines of that property. Furthermore, he may not even permit people to smoke on his own property in the great outdoors if they are smoking "within five feet of doorways."

The bureaucrats of the county health department were kind enough to issue a warning to the Lithuanian Society before slapping on them fines of $250 per lit cigarette, plus "an additional $250 for failing to have a workplace smoking policy." The society, some of whose members probably thought they had escaped to freedom from Soviet and Nazi occupation of their home country, apparently believed that, as owners of the property, they had the right to determine whether or not their patrons could inhale tobacco smoke. In addition, they believed that they were exempted from the county’s smoking ban because "bingos and other charitable events [that] are entirely staffed by volunteers over 18" are indeed exempt (the regulations, as always, are complex and open to a wide variety of interpretations, depending on the bureaucrats enforcing them and the political power of the particular establishment being warned or fined), but since they pay their twice-a-week bingo staff, the health department ruled otherwise.

For politicians, of course, there are three benefits to signing these kinds of laws into effect. First, they get to pose as caring leaders, trying to protect people from the dangers of, in this instance, smoking. Second, having a bureaucracy levy fines on specific, and not always sympathetic, individuals and organizations is much less politically risky than raising taxes on wide swaths of the public. Third, politicians get the opportunity to "stick up for the little guy" when the bureaucrats "go too far."

All three apply here in spades. Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato, who signed the ban into law last October, is now charging that the fine against the Lithuanian Society is "excessive." It’s not inherently wrong, you see, for the society’s property rights to be violated. He just doesn’t want the health department’s enforcers to go too far, which is to say, beyond the point which is politically damaging to those who enacted the anti-smoking ordinance. Onorato agrees with the health department’s assessment that the law applies to social clubs; he just wants the department and the society to come to a "compromise" — that is, a reduced penalty that will bring a sizable enough amount of money into the county treasury, thus satisfying the health department Nazis, without unduly endangering Onorato’s political future. Thus does Onorato attempt to create the appearance of being the friend of the common man while actively engaging in multiple violations of the common man’s property rights. Nice work if you can get it.

Directly below this story of big, bad government’s taking things out on a poor charitable organization is this story of big, bad government’s taking things out on poor people who use mass transit, except the latter story is not quite the same. It’s more the story of big, bad government’s taking things out on the taxpayers who are forced to fund a chronically debt-ridden mass transit system. As so often is the case, however, the debate is not framed to reflect that.

The Port Authority of Allegheny County, which is in charge of bus and train services, is projecting a deficit of $80 million for the next fiscal year. This being a government agency, of course, year after year of huge losses can easily be sustained, but eventually even the government has to face up to reality. The Port Authority is therefore proposing to raise fares and reduce service, a move which makes fiscal sense but will surely still fail to resolve the underlying problem, which is the lack of a profit incentive. As long as taxpayers have to foot the bill, there is no reason for the Port Authority ever to get itself into sound financial shape.

Nevertheless, even these reasonable steps, which are projected to bring the deficit down to a mere $45 million, are being resisted by those who, though not officially part of the political class, share its contempt for others’ property rights. As far as these people are concerned, they have an inherent right to the property of others, i.e., to the money stolen from other taxpayers to subsidize the greenback-hemorrhaging proposition known as mass transit. Those who ride the bus or train ought not to be expected to pay the entire cost of their own transportation; nor should the transit authority be expected to live within its means. Other people should be robbed at gunpoint so that these parasites can continue to ride mass transit for next to nothing.

These holdup artists are shameless! They even staged an all-night vigil near the Port Authority’s headquarters, hoisting signs with slogans such as "We weep for our public transit" and "Less transit means less opportunity." I suppose that’s easier — and safer — than breaking into their neighbors’ houses during the night and stealing the money they believe is rightfully theirs. One doubts that their photograph would have appeared in the newspaper in quite the same fashion had they done that, but there’s no denying that the reality of the act is precisely the same.

Neither politicians nor ordinary citizens in America have any concern for the property rights of others. Oh, they’ll howl in protest if their own rights (even imagined ones, like the "right" to mass transit) are violated, but they won’t give a second thought to their own violations of others’ rights. Politicians will tell you what you may or may not do with your own property and then snatch it from you if you fail to obey their edicts — edicts from which they generally exempt themselves. Non-politicians will demand that you hand over your hard-earned money so that they can get whatever they happen to want at the moment — and then scream bloody murder if their victims balk at even a small portion of their demands.

Property rights are the bedrock of civilization and prosperity. Isn’t it ironic that here in the alleged land of the free Americans and their elected officials are busily engaged in destroying private property rights, while the still officially Communist Chinese government has just passed its first law protecting them? If the Chinese leave us in the dust economically in coming decades, don’t say you weren’t warned. They’re beginning to come to terms with the importance of private property just as we in the West are fast denying it.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

Christopher Montalbano recently directed LRC readers to Benjamin Franklin’s famous letter to The Journal of Paris in which he satirically suggested numerous remedies to the problem of daylight that was being "wasted" because not all people rose with the sun.

Franklin calculated how much wax was being inefficiently used to light homes in the evening when there was clearly enough sunlight to do the job if only the sun would rise at the same time as the people. He then proposed, among other things, to remedy this as follows: "let guards be placed in the shops of the wax and tallow chandlers, and no family be permitted to be supplied with more than one pound of candles per week."

Franklin recognized that the people might at first rebel against this and his other suggested intrusions into their lives, but he correctly reasoned that they would quickly adapt to the new laws. Furthermore, he hoped to assist in their acceptance of these laws by explaining to them that the proposed regulations were for their own good: "I say it is impossible that so sensible a people, under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known, that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing."

Now old Ben obviously made his proposals in jest, and it is clear that at least part of his motivation was to demonstrate the absurdity of the French government’s firewood rationing of the prior winter. It is doubtful that he really expected the government to be so concerned with the minutest details of its subjects’ lives that it would stoop to regulating the lighting of their homes. Franklin, wise though he was, could not possibly have anticipated that the very government in whose founding he was playing such a significant role would, 223 years later, attempt to do precisely that.

Nevertheless, that is exactly what is happening today. Not content to let a Left Coast Democrat outlaw incandescent light bulbs in California alone, two United States legislators have joined forces to ban those horrific globes throughout the land.

One of them is another Democrat, Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Pryor, who is part of what he calls the "Lighting Efficiency Coalition," is pushing for "legislation that would mandate efficiency standards for light bulbs, effectively banning the production of traditional incandescent bulbs," reports CNSNews.com.

The other miscreant is a Republican Congressman from Illinois, Don Manzullo. Naturally, being a Republican, he’s in favor of the same thing as the Democrat, with just a slight difference: Manzullo wants legislation as a "last choice" to solve this great crisis of incandescent light bulb usage. In fact, he is so opposed to "forc[ing] legislation down people’s throats" on this issue that "what [he] would like to see done" is to come up with "legislation that would pass under unanimous consent of both houses" of Congress. Gee, I feel so much better knowing that this guy will only force a law down my throat if he can get all the ghouls in both chambers of horrors to agree on it! (Methinks he will have to ram this through on a day when Ron Paul is out on the campaign trail if he wants that.)

Now, of course, this is all being done for our own good, to save energy and money. Supposedly one of the new light bulbs that we will be compelled to purchase under this legislation will last for 6 years and save the purchaser $22 over its lifetime (or so says the manufacturer, who would never, ever exaggerate the alleged benefits of his product). Thus, in order to save a person possibly $3.67 a year per light bulb, the federal government is going to force companies that produce incandescent light bulbs either to go out of business or to switch over to producing fluorescent bulbs, meanwhile forcing all of us to purchase more expensive light bulbs that will result in a fairly negligible amount of cost savings.

In addition, since this will allegedly produce a great energy savings, we’ll also be doing our part to halt global warming, which is why Kathleen Rogers, president of the Earth Day Network, is wholeheartedly in favor of this legislation, saying that "[i]t takes a combination of courage and leadership from the state and federal government to make things happen." Gosh, I don’t know how we all manage to dress ourselves every morning without the government’s being there to "make things happen"!

Needless to say, this is all a violation of both our property rights and the U.S. Constitution, but since when has that ever mattered to Congress?

What does matter to Congress is that all the big guns in the lighting industry are behind this legislation, sending hefty contributions to politicians in exchange for politicians’ regulating their competitors out of business. The biggest promoter of the ban-the-bulb bill is Philips Electronics, which just so happens to be planning on phasing out production of incandescent bulbs by 2016. By forcing its competitors to do the same thing, Philips need not fear a loss of revenue to producers of cheaper incandescent bulbs.

"All human situations have their inconveniences," wrote Ben Franklin. "We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse." Perhaps if Franklin had heeded these words he would have opposed, rather than abetted, the creation of the federal government, the very monster that today puts into practice the suggestions Franklin made jokingly so long ago, to the benefit of a select few and the great detriment of the many.

It’s time to discard the dimbulbs in Congress.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

"Father Abraham" Lincoln may be the patron saint of today’s federal officials, but his descendants have come a long way from sending the U.S. military to suppress brutally any thoughts of independence on the part of the states.

Within the last month or so we here at LRC have celebrated the fact that Maine has flatly refused to comply with Washington’s dictates in the REAL ID Act, which mandates that state driver’s licenses comply with federal standards, the effect of which would be to create a de facto national identification card. Several other states are threatening to follow suit. Thomas Andrew Olson even posited that state rebellions against REAL ID could portend a revival of genuine federalism.

The recalcitrant states have argued that, in addition to violating citizens’ and states’ rights, the cost of implementing the REAL ID requirements is prohibitive, and the federal government is not providing the money to accomplish this. Of course, the only way for the feds to do this is to steal money from the citizens of the states and then turn around and give it back to the states, minus a hefty cut for D.C.

Uncle Sam, having since the days of Lincoln perfected the art of enveloping the iron fist in velvet, has responded to these upstart states (Who do they think they are, anyway?) by extending the deadline for implementing REAL ID until 2009 and permitting states to use up to 20 percent of their federal homeland security grants to cover the cost of implementation. This will surely quell most of the restiveness among Washington’s vassals in the state capitals. The rest can be brought into line with the next phase, which will probably be a threat to withhold homeland security funds from states that refuse to comply.

Thus, by 2009 we will all be forced to obtain federally mandated identification cards, "so that no one [can] buy or sell unless he [has] the mark" (Revelation 13:17), i.e., the national ID card. Think about it. Is there any commercial transaction you can undertake even today without at some point having to show some identification? Try opening a bank account, applying for a job, buying a house, going to the doctor, or flying commercial airlines without being asked to show your ID.

It’s bad enough having state identification cards. However, under REAL ID, your personal information will be kept in a nationwide database, and you will not be able to enter a federal building (no great loss there) or travel by air without the card — and that’s just the beginning. Over time expect greater and greater restrictions on those who refuse to show their papers and more and more requirements, such as biometric identifiers. Congressman Ron Paul has pointed out that there are essentially no restrictions on what the Secretary of Homeland Security can require states to include in driver’s licenses and on what information may be stored in the database. The threat to our freedoms from REAL ID vastly outweighs the threat to our lives from terrorism.

It will surprise no regular LRC reader to learn that the allegedly conservative editors of National Review are entirely in favor of REAL ID and entirely in disdain of its opponents, to whom they refer as the "ACLU and its fellow-travelers on the right [who] have denounced the law as creating a national identification card, with the usual sophomoric references to the Gestapo." They applaud the mild compromise outlined above despite the fact that "[a]ny delay in improving the integrity of identification documents is potentially dangerous."

How do the NR editors answer the charge that REAL ID creates a national ID card? Simply put, they don’t. They merely declare that "[t]he act simply does not create a national ID card," quote Phyllis Schlafly’s absurd statement that REAL ID actually prevents the establishment of a national ID card, and move on to their next point in defense of the government. Well, I guess that’s settled. How could anyone have thought otherwise?

As to the fiscal issues, the supposedly limited-government, budget-cutting conservatives at NR say that if the states need more money to implement REAL ID, well, then, the feds should just dish it out to them. "This would be somewhat unfair to taxpayers in states such as Colorado, New York, and Virginia, which have already come into nearly full compliance," they aver. "But the government’s interest in protecting national security is compelling enough to justify further federal assistance."

Ah, yes. As long as it’s for "protecting national security," any power aggrandizement by the feds is justified, and anyone who raises even the most reasonable of concerns about it is "unpatriotic." As the editors tell us, since the 9/11 hijackers had numerous state ID cards, some of them obtained fraudulently, one of the best ways to prevent future terrorism is to implement a national — er, REAL — ID card. You see, it’s all about protecting us from terrorists! How dare anyone suggest otherwise?

As usual, one prominent individual does suggest otherwise. Here’s Ron Paul on the notion that REAL ID will protect us from terrorists:

One overriding point has been forgotten: Criminals don’t obey laws! As with gun control, national ID cards will only affect law-abiding citizens. Do we really believe a terrorist bent on murder is going to dutifully obtain a federal ID card? Do we believe that people who openly flout our immigration laws will nonetheless respect our ID requirements? Any ID card can be forged; any federal agency or state DMV is susceptible to corruption. Criminals can and will obtain national ID cards, or operate without them. National ID cards will be used to track the law-abiding masses, not criminals.

It would be falsifying history to suggest that today’s editors of National Review are in any way betraying the vision of the magazine’s founder, for it was William F. Buckley, Jr., who called for "a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores" to protect us from the last bogeyman, the Soviet Union. It would, however, be a welcome change if they would stop referring to themselves as conservatives. Real conservatives, who worry about constantly encroaching federal power, are to be found at such publications as Chronicles and The American Conservative.

Meanwhile, all those of us who value liberty, whether we call ourselves conservatives, classical liberals, or libertarians, need to continue to sound the alarm about REAL ID and other assorted infringements on our freedom under the guise of national security. Let us not be concerned that we may at times sound alarmist, for those on the forefront of defending against encroaching tyranny are usually considered extreme. As Dr. Clyde Wilson, a genuine conservative, put it, "[Tyranny] should always be guarded against and opposed at the threshold. If our forefathers had not observed this rule, there would have been no American War of Independence."

Don’t tread on me, Uncle Sam.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

You know the routine: Suggest that the War on Poverty should be ended because it has utterly failed to achieve its objectives while being extremely costly and infringing on our freedom, and the nearest liberal will accuse you of being a shortsighted ideologue who hates the poor and wants to see their lives destroyed.

Now suggest that the War on Drugs should be ended because it has utterly failed to achieve its objectives while being extremely costly and infringing on our freedom, and the nearest conservative, in this case one John Hawkins, will accuse you of succumbing to "misguided thinking that comes from trying to apply unworkable theoretical concepts in the real world." In other words, stop whining about high taxes and constitutional violations! Don’t you know there’s a war going on? We must all be prepared to make some sacrifices in order to achieve victory. In short, we must destroy the village in order to save it, in the infamous phrase from another costly, failed war.

Actually, in this Human Events column Hawkins barely even touches on the issues of the costs of the drug war, whether monetary or constitutional. Never does he go into detail on the billions upon billions that the "war" has cost, and is costing, Americans, beginning with the $12.7 billion budget for the White House Office of Drug Control Policy and continuing through all the state and local government expenditures, plus the cost of trying and incarcerating all those victims of the war, not to mention the lost productivity from the many nonviolent offenders, a sizable percentage of whom were productive members of society who happened to partake of a substance that some holier-than-thou politicians and bureaucrats decided were forbidden. (Meanwhile, alcohol and many other psychoactive substances known as prescription drugs remain perfectly legal and are even, in the case of prescription drugs, subsidized by the government.) Nowhere does Hawkins discuss the troubling constitutional and legal issues of asset forfeiture, no-knock raids, paid informants, militarized and corrupted law enforcement, and so on. To him all of these concerns are merely "unworkable theoretical concepts" that have no place "in the real world."

After the first, brief paragraph in which Hawkins dismisses any and all gripes about high taxes and lost liberties, he then launches into a paragraph that contains a partial truth:

For example, you often hear advocates of drug legalization say that we’re never going to win the war on drugs and that it would free up space in our prisons if we simply legalized drugs. While it’s true that we may not ever win the war against drugs — i.e. never entirely eradicate the use of illegal drugs — we’re not ever going to win the war against murder, robbery and rape either. But our moral code rejects each of them, so none — including drugs — can be legalized if we still adhere to that code.

Hawkins is correct that we would not suggest giving up the fight against crimes such as "murder, robbery and rape" simply because they will always be with us, no matter how tough the laws, the police, and the courts. He is incorrect, however, when he implies that anything "our moral code rejects" must be criminalized. There are dozens of vices that, while offensive to "our moral code," are nevertheless permitted by the criminal code. Cheating at Monopoly may be morally wrong, but Joe Friday isn’t going to come knocking on my door if I engage in it.

The question to be asked when deciding whether something should be criminalized is "Does this action infringe upon someone else’s rights to life, liberty, and property?" If the answer is no — and if the question is asked about drug production, possession, sale, or use, it is — then the correct response is not to criminalize the activity, or, if it is already criminalized, to decriminalize it. Otherwise the law becomes a bludgeon with which the powerful attempt to control every aspect of the lives of the powerless.

Hawkins then elides from the mention of libertarians in his first paragraph to attacking a rather non-libertarian argument, which is that the drug war should be ended so that the government can tax and regulate drugs. This is a popular line of reasoning among the National Review coterie, and Hawkins attacks it fairly effectively, pointing out that one reason the government won’t prohibit alcohol and tobacco outright, despite the fact that alcohol was once prohibited, is that it makes too much money from their sale. (His implication that tobacco ought to be banned because its users are cutting their lives short by 14 years is far less convincing and even a bit ominous, cluing us in to just what kind of "conservative" Hawkins really is.) Thus, even if it were later decided that decriminalizing heroin, for example, had very bad results, it would be difficult to get the government to make it illegal again because of the revenue that taxes on heroin would be generating.

From a libertarian perspective, the fact that a previously criminalized non-crime would be made harder to re-criminalize is all to the good. However, I can’t imagine very many libertarians who would argue in favor of exchanging one form of government control over the drug market for another. Certainly, ensuring the government a steady influx of cash via taxes on formerly illegal drugs is not much of an improvement; it’s just that much more money they can use to try to control our behavior in other ways. Still, if I had to choose between the current War on Drugs and a tax-and-regulate drug control scheme, I’d definitely choose the latter.

The next line of defense from Hawkins is to argue that since alcohol prohibition drove down alcohol consumption and its attendant ills, drug prohibition does the same thing with regard to illegal substances. Of course, what Hawkins fails to mention in his depiction of a booze-free Roaring Twenties is that (a) the statistics do not necessarily bear out his contention (which is actually a quote from Ann Coulter) and (b) even if alcohol consumption was indeed reduced, crime, and especially violent crime, rose dramatically. One need only refer to the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which seven people were killed in a shootout between the Al Capone and Bugs Moran gangs, for a case in point. Absent the incentives of a black market, there would have been no cause for either gang to form in the first place or to shoot it out for control of the Chicago liquor market. When was the last time, for example, you saw Anheuser-Busch sending thugs to knock off Coors employees?

Given Hawkins’s premise that drug prohibition is currently inhibiting drug consumption, it then follows that, as Hawkins says, "there would almost have to be an enormous spike in usage" if drugs were decriminalized. Hawkins backs this up with exactly one statistic: the rate of cannabis use in the Netherlands rose from 15 percent to 44 percent among 18-to-20-year-olds when the Dutch legalized marijuana. If that one number doesn’t convince all of you drug war naysayers, nothing will.

In rebuttal, consider that probably a significant portion of that increase came simply from people’s newfound willingness to admit that they were smoking dope once it became legal. Then consider that there was likely a spike in use owing to the new and exciting opportunity to get stoned with impunity. Furthermore, consider some other hard statistics which Hawkins fails to mention. As of 2001, 25 years after the Netherlands decriminalized marijuana:

• The lifetime prevalence of marijuana use among people 12 years of age and older was 17.0 percent in the Netherlands versus 36.9 percent in the United States.
• The lifetime prevalence of heroin use among the same age group was 0.4 percent in the Netherlands and 1.4 percent in the U.S. (So much for the "gateway drug" theory!)
• The homicide rate per 100,000 people (average from 1999 to 2001) was 1.51 in the Netherlands as compared to 5.56 in the U.S.

These statistics, of course, are not proof that drug use (or the murder rate) would not rise if drugs were decriminalized in the U.S., but they’re a bit more compelling than Hawkins’s single statistic which tells us little about drug use in the Netherlands overall.

The conservative Hawkins, who probably considers himself an opponent of socialism, next launches into nanny-state reasons why we can’t simply make illegal drugs legal. If this were "a purely capitalistic society," Hawkins writes, then maybe the case that drug use only harms the user would be plausible (though one suspects Hawkins would remain unconvinced). Given that it’s a welfare state, however, it’s entirely implausible because we will all have to bear the burden of the unemployment, welfare, and hospital bills of all of those new addicts that legalization will create. "Even setting that aside," he continues, "we make laws that prevent people from harming themselves all the time in our society," citing helmet laws, seatbelt laws, anti-prostitution laws, and anti-suicide laws as examples.

Herein lies the problem for conservatives today: Unwilling to reexamine the nanny state and call for its severe reduction or abolition, they end up employing the same arguments for curtailing people’s freedom to consume substances they don’t like (in this instance, certain drugs) as liberals do for curtailing people’s freedom to consume substance that liberals don’t like (such as tobacco or Crisco). The solution to the problems created by the nanny state is not to curtail more and more freedoms so that others don’t have to bear the burden of some people’s bad choices but to abolish the nanny state so that each person is responsible for bearing the burden of his own bad choices.

In the end Hawkins seems to boil all his arguments down to this: "And make no mistake about it, drugs do wreck a lot of lives." Even though he follows that up with an admission that "drugs aren’t the only things that wreck lives and not every person who does drugs ends up" a wreck, drugs seem to occupy a special place in Hell as Hawkins imagines it. We may not be able to legislate away all the other bad things that people can do to themselves (albeit not for lack of trying), but the government can at least force them not to inhale, inject, or ingest substances that Hawkins and his ilk know have the potential to harm them. Anyone who complains about the waste or misuse of taxpayer dollars, the crime that prohibition induces, and the loss of God-given freedoms is obviously a crackpot — or is that crackhead? — who is "trying to apply unworkable theoretical concepts in the real world" and needs to stop being so selfish and sacrifice some of his liberty for the greater good.

If Hawkins really believes this, it makes you wonder what he’s smoking.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

Referring to President Bush’s latest socialist scheme, Kate Baicker, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said, "There are always going to be some winners and some losers . . . ."

As if anticipating this comment 58 years ago, Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action: "The statement that one man’s boon is the other man’s damage is valid with regard to robbery, war, and booty. The robber’s plunder is the damage of the despoiled victim. But war and commerce are two different things."

In short, if the president’s latest attempt further to socialize the already heavily socialized health insurance industry, as characterized by Baicker, really does result in "some winners and some losers," it must be, according to Mises, either "robbery, war, [or] booty." To one degree or another, it is all three. It robs some citizens to provide booty for others, with the tax-eaters making war on the taxpayers.

It is also the final nail in the coffin of anyone’s characterization of Bush as a conservative, for with this proposal Bush is officially asking for a tax increase on "about 30 million Americans," according to Baicker. Given that government estimates are usually quite far off the mark and that the administration is naturally going to try to make the policy appear to harm as few people as possible, it’s probably safe to say that far more than 30 million Americans are going to see a tax hike out of this.

Now the Democrats will argue about the specifics of the plan and complain that the plan doesn’t go far enough toward Castro-style socialized medicine — never mind this recent example of how well that system works — but the fact is that they, as well as most of their cohorts on the other side of the aisle, must be overjoyed that a Republican president who has expended much effort burnishing his reputation as a tax-cutter is now proposing to end the decades-old exemption of employer-paid health insurance from income taxation. Finally they can get their hands on all that money that has eluded their grasp for all these years!

The administration will counter that, in fact, "more than 100 million Americans" will end up saving money under Bush’s plan, but that is a matter that time can correct. Under Bush’s plan families get a tax deduction for up to $15,000 worth of health insurance premiums (individuals get only $7,500), with any overage being taxable. The Reuters article linked above notes that "[a]verage family coverage offered by employers costs about $11,500 annually." Thus, without even changing the tax code again, the feds can ensure themselves a steady stream of increasing revenue: with health care costs continuing to climb precipitously, the average will easily reach $15,000 in a few years. Throw in a few reductions in the deduction and you easily have a tax increase on most, if not all, Americans in no time flat.

The essence of the plan is more fascistic than out-and-out socialistic: taxation combined with faux federalism and increased subsidization and regulation of private insurance companies (to avoid the appearance of having a single-payer health care system). The IRS will rob taxpayers of their hard-earned money if they or their employers dare to spend more than the government’s approved amount on annual health insurance premiums. Then the feds will kindly turn around and supply some of that money — probably very little once administrative costs are taken out — to the states so that the state governments can tighten their grip on the health-care industry by "arrang[ing] for uninsured residents to get coverage," as Reuters describes it, adding that "states could subsidize health insurance premiums directly, they could establish high-risk pools for the sickest people, and could help individuals and small businesses create their own insurance pools."

The whole plan is perverse. Employees with generous employers will now be penalized, either by paying higher taxes or by having their benefits cut so as to avoid those taxes, while the ranks of those on the government health insurance dole in one fashion or another will increase, causing upward pressure on health care costs. This will, in turn, cause health insurance premiums to rise, pushing ever more people over the government’s arbitrary limit, increasing the amount of income subject to confiscation by Washington. Then come further interventions to "fix" that problem, and before you know it, we’re off to Havana General Hospital.

Furthermore, even from a utilitarian standpoint the plan doesn’t make sense. According to the Reuters article, "[t]here are about 47 million people with no insurance in a country of 300 million. Baicker said Bush’s tax proposal would result in u2018upwards of 3 million or more [sic] newly insured people.’" Meanwhile, taxes are going to increase on at least 30 million people. Thus, in order to insure an additional 1 percent of the population — and a mere 6 percent of the uninsured, for that matter — the government is going to hike taxes on 10 percent of the population.

Ah, but there is an escape clause, says the administration. No one has to pay the higher taxes — to be a "loser," in Baicker’s words. Anyone who just shuts up and does as he’s told can avoid them. "Baicker," reports Reuters, "said about 30 million Americans could face higher taxes under the president’s plan u2018if they didn’t change their behavior’ — meaning giving up an employer’s more generous health plan in favor of a less-costly one." There you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: it’s all about government control of your behavior. Do as you’re told, and no untoward consequences will befall you; do otherwise, and we’re coming for your bank account. Can they make it any plainer than that?

In the great game of politics, there are always winners and losers because government does not produce anything. It can only rob Peter to pay Paul. From a purely political standpoint, then, Baicker was correct in that assertion.

Meanwhile, unlike the "robbery, war, and booty" of politics, every day billions of people interact peacefully in the marketplace, with each party to an exchange coming out a winner because he has exchanged something he valued less for something he valued more. As Mises put it, again in Human Action, "The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another." That is, of course, precisely what happens with government programs, where one group of citizens fights with another to see which group can steal more from the other.

Instead of increasing the government’s role in health care, whether via Democrats’ up-front socialism or Republicans’ backdoor variety, it’s time we abandoned the road to serfdom and embraced a genuinely free market for medicine. Otherwise we’ll all end up losers. Just ask Fidel.

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

DIGG THIS

A brief discussion of the old TV western Bat Masterson, and westerns of that era in general, has been taking place on the LRC blog. Lew Rockwell was disturbed to find that a program of which he had fond memories actually perpetuated the myths of the noble Yankee white man and the ignorant, savage red man, while Ryan McMaken pointed out that the western myths had the added effect of increasing the public’s acceptance of a large, centralized, corporate state. Thus did the discussion end largely in despair of finding a western series with which libertarians can be comfortable.

I hereby nominate for the most libertarian-friendly western TV series not a stalwart, deadly serious, white-hats-versus-black-hats drama like Gunsmoke but the 1965—67 situation comedy F Troop.

Now it might seem odd to suggest a series in which the central characters are, for the most part, members of the United States Army as a libertarian’s dream. However, when one considers the particulars of the show, it becomes obvious that, as is often the case, comedy can tell the truth which drama shrinks from bringing to light.

First of all, the men of F Troop are a miserable lot of lazy bumblers, exactly the sort of people who in real life couldn’t be employed anywhere except on the federal gravy train. Stationed at Fort Courage (the last word that could be used to describe the soldiers therein), Kansas, they include the exceptionally myopic lookout, Vanderbilt; the over-the-hill and slightly senile Duffy; the overweight immigrant Hoffenmueller; the eager but far from musically inclined young bugler, Dobbs; and the scheming Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke (played by Forrest Tucker) and his rather dim sidekick and partner in crime, Cpl. Randolph Agarn (Larry Storch). O’Rourke and Agarn are forever scheming to make money off the taxpayers’ backs, ordering more supplies than necessary and diverting the excess to their own profitable ventures, including the local saloon. The commanding officer of F Troop is Capt. Wilton Parmenter (Ken Berry), a clumsy but well-meaning sort who accidentally continues his family’s tradition of military heroism by sneezing in the midst of a retreat during a Civil War battle. His sneeze is misinterpreted as a command to charge, and the troops reverse direction and win the battle for the Union. (Okay, so this one thing makes him less than a hero to most LRC readers, but since it was an accident, I’m willing to cut him some slack.) His "reward" is to take command of Fort Courage.

Now I ask you: Where else in popular culture could you find a more accurate portrayal of how the federal government, including its military, actually operates? People who couldn’t find work in the private sector get sinecures on the government payroll and then do their level best to extract as much as they can out of the taxpayer, while the people in charge are incompetent dolts who would be just as useless in the private sector as their subordinates.

Whereas Gen. Sheridan, much to Lew’s dismay, was featured positively in Bat Masterson, Gen. Custer fares much more poorly in F Troop. In the episode "Old Ironpants," Capt. Parmenter attends an officers’ training school run by Custer. Upon his return to Fort Courage, accompanied by Custer, he bids the general adieu with the parting comment, "Good luck on your new assignment at Little Big Horn." Meanwhile, Parmenter has been transformed into a Custer clone, complete with goatee. He proceeds to treat everyone in Fort Courage like dirt, drilling the men to death and even trying to have his erstwhile girlfriend, Wrangler Jane (Melody Patterson), arrested for the mere act of being friendly and speaking to him. (When O’Rourke tells Parmenter that he can’t arrest Jane because she’s a civilian, the captain replies, "Then draft her. Then arrest her.") The men and Jane have to "un-Custer" him in order to be treated like human beings again.

Now that’s how to portray a mass murdering general — as a man who considers his own soldiers worthless objects that are beneath his dignity and entirely expendable. No wonder he had no trouble slaughtering Indians by the score (when they didn’t get him first) and ordering his men on to certain death! As far as he was concerned, only one person, himself, and only one cause, the glory of the U.S. government, mattered. It certainly beats the glorification of Sheridan on Bat Masterson.

Finally, and probably unwittingly, F Troop demonstrates the glories of capitalism. Wrangler Jane, one of the most kindhearted and good-natured characters on the show, runs the local general store. O’Rourke and Agarn, for all their faults in skimming from the army for their own gain, run a profitable business in partnership with the local Indian tribe, the Hekawis. The Hekawis, while comic figures just as the soldiers are, are treated with a great deal of respect by their business partners, who often come to them for help. Best of all, it is precisely this partnership that keeps the relationship between the white man and the red man peaceful — not that the Hekawis seem particularly eager to fight, but it doesn’t hurt that they stand to lose substantial cash if they disrupt the relationship. For example, in one episode Don Rickles guest stars as Bald Eagle, the renegade son of Hekawi Chief Wild Eagle. When he asks Wild Eagle if he will lead the Hekawis in an attack on the fort, Wild Eagle replies, "Not during big end-of-month sale." Thus we see that trade is a powerful deterrent to armed hostilities.

So let’s hear it for the men (and woman) of Fort Courage! In their own highly comedic ways — and F Troop, as far as I am concerned, is one of the funniest TV series ever, especially in its first season — they show us the bad, the ugly, and the just plain inept of government and the good of free markets and respect for individuals, whether soldiers, civilians, or "Indians."

Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.