However, he sits in federal prison for 15 years and never was prosecuted for burglary. Why? He had some shotgun shells in his possession (he did not have a shotgun in which to use them) and according to federal law, a person with any criminal conviction cannot own either firearms or ammunition.

When the Chattanooga Times-Free Press publicized that situation, the response from its “law-abiding” readers was pretty straightforward: Young broke the rules and now he has to pay. The ferocity of the law itself, the mandatory 15-year sentence, or the fact that federal authorities were using what amounts to legal technicalities to circumvent Tennessee state law was irrelevant to the readers. Rules are rules.

For more than a decade, I have written on issues involving federal criminal law and police brutality, and the two really do go hand-in-hand. While Young admits that he did wrong and was willing to serve the time for burglary, an ambitious federal prosecutor, Chris Poole, decided that what really was needed was for Young to be separated from his wife and four children for a decade-and-a-half over a legal technicality. After all, Young never had been cited for violence against another person and not even Poole would say that Young imposed a danger to society of shooting others.

No, Poole acted brutally because, well, he could act brutally. And the public thinks it is fine because Young “broke the rules.” When I posted my disgust with the case on Facebook, someone else posted, “What about the burglary?” In other words, since he committed burglary, the federal prosecution was justified, and his words pretty much echoed what other Chattanoogans wrote in comments sections. To them, having shotgun shells in one’s possession and committing burglary were one and the same.

This point hardly is insignificant and it points to a most important development that has taken place in this country in the century since the ongoing Progressive Era began, and that development can be put into this one sentence: The United States, once a “nation of laws,” has become a “nation of rules.” More specifically, Americans increasingly are governed by rules set by legislative bodies, rules that are based upon arbitrary numbers and rules that often reflect knee-jerk reactions to something that has happened, and rules that often carry draconian penalties when they are violated.

Laws vs. Rules

Americans from ordinary citizens to politicians to lawyers and judges have come to assume that laws and rules are one and the same. When a state legislature declares that anyone riding in a car must be wearing a seat belt or that a restaurant cannot allow individuals to smoke tobacco products on their premises, such declarations carry the same weight as a law against one person indiscriminately taking the life of another, or someone entering another person’s property without the owner’s permission and taking goods from that person’s home. In the state where I now live (Maryland), signs on the highway remind motorists that a blood-alcohol limit of 0.8 percent is the threshold for “driving while intoxicated” or that drivers cannot use hand-held cellphones while driving constitute “the law.”

Yes, the Maryland legislature has declared such things and the governor of the state dutifully signed the bills, which officially makes them “laws,” but they are not laws in the larger tradition of natural law or a universal understanding of what law really is. For example, going back to the Young case, everyone – including Young – recognized that burglary (stealing) is wrong. No one (again, including Young) is defending his actions in taking something that did not belong to him.

Had Young been charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for burglary, no one would have objected and there would be no accusations of injustice. Even Young and his family agreed with that point. Instead, we see him going to prison for more than a decade because of an arbitrary rule imposed by Congress, which used language in the “law” that was designed to get around the very prohibitions the authors of the U.S. Constitution had imposed upon Congress to create these kinds of “laws.”

What do I mean?

For the most part, federal criminal laws do not prohibit or lay out punishments for acts which historically have been considered to be crimes. Federal murder statutes, for example, do not cover everyone as do state laws. (Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with murder under Texas law. After that event, Congress declared that killing the president would be a federal crime.) Furthermore, even those laws require certain circumstances to be present with their wording being required (in most situations) to show the illegal act had something to do with “interstate commerce,” as Congress literally has to use manipulative language in order to sneak around the Constitutional prohibitions on the federal government usurping authority given to the states.

Federal criminal law often is invoked when someone runs afoul of a federal regulation which tends to be arbitrary in itself. For example, when the feds indicted and tried attorney Johnny Gaskins for “structuring,” everyone at the trial agreed that Gaskins had obtained his money legally, but simply did not want to have to fill out all of the government paperwork that was required if he made bank deposits of $10,000 or more at one time.

(Gaskins’ clients often paid him in cash, earnings he dutifully reported to the IRS, and paying taxes on his income. He earned the money as legal payment for services and kept the cash in a safe in his house. However, he became apprehensive about being robbed and decided to put the money in a bank.)

As I noted in my column about the Gaskins conviction four years ago, Gaskins got in trouble for essentially violating a rule based upon arbitrary numbers. The only reason that the government has tried to criminalize depositing money in banks is supposedly to make things harder for drug dealers who operate with cash and who make large sums of money at a time.

There is, however, nothing inherently criminal about depositing money in the bank, yet federal rules-based law managed to turn a law-abiding citizen into a criminal because he didn’t want to do a lot of paperwork. This is not law in any meaningful sense of the word; it is rules. Americans, however, do not seem to be able to see the difference between the two.

As I pointed out earlier, the commenters in Chattanooga seemed to believe that there was no moral or even legal difference between someone having shotgun shells in the house (without an accompanying shotgun) and breaking into someone’s home and stealing things. Yet, the difference is huge. Burglary always has been judged a crime, and that view has held forth since ancient times.

Having shotgun shells in one’s possession, however, is recent and it goes back to rules and laws passed by Congress in order to harass gun owners and to reduce the pool of people who legally can have guns. This is not because Americans have become increasingly violent or are more likely than ever to shoot each other, but because the Political Classes deem it wrong for individuals who are not government “law-enforcement” agents to have guns in their possession. Thus, Congress passes laws that increase criminal liability but are aimed not at punishing wrongdoers or even improving public safety, but rather just to make a political statement of who is boss – and who is not.

The rules-based of bureaucratic nature of modern American law can be understood as the movement of law from the ancient doctrine of malum in se (acts understood by everyone as being bad in themselves, such as theft and murder) to the modern Progressive doctrine of malum prohibitum (it is bad because the government says it is bad). Attorney Paul Rosenzweig describes this migration of law:

To … fundamental changes in the nature of criminal liability one must also add significant changes in the subject matter of criminal law. At its inception, criminal law was directed at conduct that society recognized as inherently wrongful and, in some sense, immoral. These acts were wrongs in and of themselves (malum in se), such as murder, rape, and robbery. In recent times the reach of the criminal law has been expanded so that it now addresses conduct that is wrongful not because of its intrinsic nature but because it is a prohibited wrong (malum prohibitum) — that is, a wrong created by a legislative body to serve some perceived public good. These essentially regulatory crimes have come to be known as “public welfare” offenses.

Thus, today the criminal law has strayed far from its historical roots. Where once the criminal law was an exclusively moral undertaking, it now has expanded to the point that it is principally utilitarian in nature. In some instances the law now makes criminal the failure to act in conformance with some imposed legal duty. In others the law criminalizes conduct undertaken without any culpable intent. And many statutes punish those whose acts are wrongful only by virtue of legislative determination.

In other words, a governing body sets rules that ostensibly serve what the Political Classes say is good for the “public welfare,” and then these rules are enforced by the State. Lest one think I overstate the problem, the following statistic starkly proves my point: More than half of America’s two million prisoners are incarcerated because they allegedly violated drug laws. Every drug which these people either ingested or traded at one time or another in U.S. History has been legal.

To make matters worse, many of the “public welfare” laws are enforced with the utmost brutality, as governments from the local sheriff to the various bureaucracies of Washington, D.C., carry out about 70,000 raids a year using paramilitary SWAT teams which by definition use the most violent tactics available to American law enforcers. In his newly-released book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko specifically cites 50 instances where innocent people were killed because cops thought a child was holding a gun or the police attacked people only to find they were at the wrong address. The number one target of violent SWAT raids: drug users.

I will put things starkly: governments consider “public welfare” laws to be more important than the laws that were crafted around those acts that nearly every society throughout history deemed to be criminal, and the scope and brutality of how those “public welfare” laws are enforced proves my point. That these things are widely accepted in the USA without much dissent is sad proof that most Americans have come to accept and even embrace this new and monstrous legal regime.

The implications of this shift of thinking are deep and wide. Societies in which people are obsessed with keeping rules (and punishing rule breakers) are not societies in which entrepreneurship can flourish. Entrepreneurs, by definition, tend to break the unspoken rules by challenging the economic status quo. A society governed by draconian rules cannot be a free society, nor can it be an innovative society, as those whose heads begin to stick above the crowd surely will find themselves in the crosshairs of the Political Classes.

Take the fate of Michael Milken, for example. This is a man who helped to fund some of the most important entrepreneurial ventures of the 20^th Century and whose business acumen enabled entrepreneurs who otherwise would not have received financing from the bureaucratic and heavily-regulated financial establishment for their innovations. Not surprisingly, his own financial empire was destroyed because U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani alleged Milken was “breaking rules” and managed to try Milken in the media, thus depriving Milken of justice.

(In order to whip up the media hatefest, Giuliani regularly spewed his disinformation through the establishment newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which were quite happy to help enable Giuliani to commit real felonies of illegally leaking grand jury information while simultaneously claiming to be “watchdogs” of government abuses. The irony – or naked hypocrisy, to be honest – could not be greater.)

With rules come procedures, and Americans today are being boiling in a cauldron of petty rules and bureaucracy. However, like the frog who permits himself to be boiled alive because the water temperatures around him change too slowly for him to notice he is in danger, so are Americans being boiled alive in the rules created by the Political Classes. The end result is ugly, but Americans seem not to notice because they are too busy trying to figure out how to obey the rules.

The female, Channon Christian, was brutally assaulted and died a horrible death by suffocating slowly in a kitchen trash can, where she had been turned upside down. Her assailants sprayed cleaning fluids into her mouth while she was alive and kicked her in the mouth and vagina.

Newsome and Christian were white and their assailants were black, and many people argued that the story was not covered in the national news because of the racial angle. Black Columnist Leonard Pitts argued differently, claiming that the story was no big deal. (For the record, he did condemn the act and wrote that if the accused were guilty, that “I’d be happy to see them rot under the jailhouse.”)

He went on to claim that the alleged racial and sexual violence of the Duke Lacrosse Case was much worse and deserved the coverage it got. There was a difference, however. The Duke charges were a fabrication, something that the police and prosecution knew very early and the supposed facts of the story were so contrived that any mainstream journalist with half a brain should have realized the story was a fraud. (OK, I admit that it is quite difficult to find mainstream media journalists today that would actually possess that much brainpower.)

So, a story that turned out to be a huge fabrication deserved all of the asinine media coverage it received, while a torture-murder story was no big deal. Perhaps that says all we need to know about Leonard Pitts. Unfortunately, it does not.

And, no, this column is not about how Pitts joined in the national media rush to claim George Zimmerman was the Second Coming of the Ku Klux Klan. Pitts wrote that not to “rush to judgment” in the shooting of Trayvon Martin was “moral cowardice.”

But if one wishes to understand what perhaps is the definition of “moral cowardice,” then go no further than Pitts’ recent column condemning Edward Snowden because he isn’t anxious to be thrown into a U.S. prison. That’s right; according to Pitts, “Edward Snowden is No Hero.”

Much of the Left and certainly most of the mainstream Democrats who masquerade as journalists have taken the side of Barack Obama in the Snowden case. After all, only a vicious racist and Hater of All Things Progressive would dare to do anything that would make the sainted Barack Obama look like anything less than the Great Liberator of the World.

To his credit, Pitts is somewhat more ambivalent, but in the end it is clear that he is angry that Snowden dared to expose the “heroic” Obama administration. Pitts writes:

Many of us, after all, believe he struck a blow for freedom in leaking classified information revealing the breadth and depth of government spying on private citizens. But he seems not to have thought through the implications and likely outcomes of that act.

Now, I’m not sure why Pitts, given the Statism that tends to define his commentary, would be against State domestic spying. If the State (and especially a State run by Progressives) should have vast control over the economy and control the way people relate to one another as individuals, then should it not have the means to ferret out “disloyal” people who might be a “threat” to all of the “Progressive values” being championed by the Obama State? After all, Pitts himself has written that criticism of Obama is based in racism. (I will admit that some of the criticism of Obama is racist in nature, but most of it is not; it is political and anyone who takes the office of President of the United States is going to be on the end of a lot of criticism, some of it unfair, but all of it being part of what comes with the territory.)

And what are the “implications and likely outcomes” that Snowden overlooked? It seems that he should have been anxious to accept prison and torture. Even after admitting that Daniel Ellsberg’s contention that if Snowden were arrested, he would be thrown for years in solitary confinement and suffer all sorts of torture, Pitts had the gall to write the following:

…Civil disobedience is, almost by definition, an act of faith. Not faith in government, nor even faith in law, but faith in vindication. It is an act that says, I am right, so I refuse to obey this law and will take my medicine until you see that I am right.

Snowden is not willing to do that, not willing to stand, with head held high, on the courage of his convictions. There is something unseemly about that. It makes his action feel unfinished. And undermined.

He admits that “there’s also something unseemly about some guy sitting safely behind his desk smugly advising some other guy to put the rest of his life at risk for the sake of principle,” but does it anyway. The question is: Why?

I don’t claim to have a personal insight into the thinking of Leonard Pitts except to read what he writes, and it is clear that he holds that critics of Obama are racists, and Edward Snowden is making some serious criticism of the Obama administration. No, he has not called Snowden a racist, but since Snowden in the past supported Ron Paul, I suspect that sooner or later we are going to see commentators like Pitts make the “R” claim, especially since Obama’s henchman, Attorney General Eric Holder, is the point man in the accusation that Snowden is nothing more than a criminal who needs to be arrested and thrown into prison.

Benjamin Jealous, the president of the NAACP,  recently wrote that any criticism of Holder is racist and demonstrates a hatred for civil rights and is an attack on “all Americans.” That Holder made his career as a hatchet man for the Clinton administration, including leading the government’s cover-up in the Waco and Kenneth Trentadue murders, is not even on the radar screen to people like Pitts and Jealous. Holder is black, a Democrat, and a race-baiter, which is all that is needed for those two men to confer Greatness upon him.

One should not be surprised that someone like Leonard Pitts has become a wealthy man with all of his race baiting. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have done the same, and even though Sharpton was indirectly responsible for a number of murders, he still has the respect of the media establishment.

In other words, I am saying that Leonard Pitts thoroughly believes in what would be the Statist doctrines of fascism, given what fascists historically have believed. Thus, I am a bit surprised that he would not be openly condemning Snowden’s exposure of the tyranny and paranoia of the Obama administration, but there is plenty of time for Pitts to change his mind.

There truly is something grotesque when a columnist who claims to support “civil rights” condemns a man for not offering himself up to thugs and criminals to be imprisoned and tortured after enduring a rigged trial in a kangaroo court, all arranged by a so-called champion of “civil rights.” However, I have no doubt that Leonard Pitts is up to the challenge.

There will be no shortfall of commentary on the verdict and the outlandish media coverage (which declared Zimmerman to be a “white Hispanic” in hopes that the racial angle in the case could be most fully exploited), I would like to deal with another perspective with which I am more familiar, that being the prosecutorial abuse that helped drive this case. The politics of race, while front-and-center, did drive the push for criminal charges, but so did electoral politics, and specifically electoral politics that have defined the recent career of Special Prosecutor Angela Corey.

At this point, let me say that even after the trial has ended, I am not sure what happened, but it also was clear that the State of Florida did not meet the legal burden of proof needed for a conviction. That is important to remember, because President Obama, Al Sharpton, and any number of commentators openly are declaring that when there is a high-profile action involving race and a trial, the law should be bypassed and mob rule installed. Make no mistake; Obama, Sharpton, and the New York Times were declaring their belief that the jury should have ignored legal standards of proof in exchange for a verdict that the NYT declared would have been an “emotional catharsis.”

The NYT and most news outlets had refused to note that the gated community where Zimmerman lived had been hit hard with numerous burglaries, thefts, and break-ins in recent months. While the NAACP already has publicly declared Zimmerman a racist because he had made a number of calls before when on neighborhood watch, both blacks and whites who lived there were adamant in their statements about the problems of crime:

One black neighbor of George Zimmerman said the neighborhood’s recent history should be taken into account.

“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.”

Understand that this information was easily available to any journalist who was interested in finding out some fact, but in retrospect, most mainstream journalists and pundits had no interest in going outside of their narrow narratives of race. Ironically, those journalists would then champion a prosecutor who indeed had engaged in conduct that raised questions about her fairness in cases involving people of color. In fact, I have not read one mainstream account that ever referred to Corey’s tenuous relations with ethnic minorities; once she secured charges of second-degree murder, she was considered to be heroic in the eyes of the media.

I was familiar with Corey even before Martin was killed and knew about the complaints of prosecutorial abuse that were threatening her career. After I heard that Florida Gov. Rick Scott had appointed Corey as a special prosecutor to investigate the shooting (after police and local prosecutors had elected not to charge Zimmerman), I knew things would end badly. Corey was in the midst of severe criticism for prosecutorial abuse in a case involving a 12-year-old boy named Cristian Fernandez charged as an adult with murder.

Fernandez had pushed his two-year-old brother against a bookshelf, and the child died soon afterward. While punishment clearly was warranted, Corey’s decision to try him as an adult with him facing life in prison was seen as overkill by a number of people involved in Florida’s system of “justice.” Cory had not expected the level of public anger about her heavy-handed decision, and she clearly was looking for a way to save or at least re-charge her career.

Scott’s appointment clearly was a way for her to do it. First, it would re-establish her “get tough with crime” persona and second, it would blunt the wrath that racial minorities already had shown toward her. As one might expect, she pursued what essentially was a sham investigation that had an inevitable outcome, an outcome that had obvious political ramifications.

The lead-up to Corey’s second-degree murder indictment against George Zimmerman came after what was an almost unprecedented campaign of vilification against him that involved what clearly were coordinated efforts by prominent blacks such as Al Sharpton, the U.S. Department of Justice (led by Attorney General Eric Holder), and the news media. As one who was heavily involved in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case and who had personal contact with a number of journalists who covered the proceedings, I must admit that I was shocked at just what went on.

Early on, the media from CNN to the New York Times to NBC News (and especially its sister network, MSNBC) falsely claimed that the Hispanic Zimmerman was “white,” and that he killed Martin for “racial reasons.” There was no proof, but that didn’t matter as journalists simply declared what they wanted to say.

Perhaps the lowest point of what was a very low standard for media coverage came when NBC News literally spliced together quotes from Zimmerman on a 911 call in order to make it look as though Zimmerman was racially profiling Martin. NBC reported the conversation between Zimmerman and the 911 dispatcher as follows:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

This actually is what transpired during the call:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

The contrast is obvious, as NBC deliberately tried to make the conversation something that it wasn’t for the purpose of painting Zimmerman as a homicidal racist. (The NBC brass first insisted that the network had done no wrong, but later quietly fired some people as even by the abysmal standards to which mainstream journalists adhere this was over the top.)

However, the mainstream journalists hardly were finished completing their self-appointed tasks of trying to railroad Zimmerman to prison. About the time NBC News was busy splicing together Zimmerman’s comments, CNN solemnly broadcast that Zimmerman had called Martin a “f*cking coon.” The left-wing Daily Kos picked it up, as did other news outlets. Two weeks later, CNN finally admitted that he was saying, “f*cking cold,” but not before legal analysts all over the country were declaring that the statement “proved” Zimmerman was targeting and intending to kill black people.

Not to be outdone by its competitors, ABC News declared to its viewers that Zimmerman had “no injuries” from his encounter with Martin. Finally, President Barack Obama himself weighed in, essentially claiming that Zimmerman was a racist murderer who needed to be prosecuted. (He and his attorney general Eric Holder – the same Eric Holder who was in charge of covering up the federal murders at Waco in 1993 – would look into pursuing federal charges against Zimmerman, something the journalists applauded. (Obama made more inflammatory statements at a press conference the afternoon after the announcement of the verdict.)

There was another reason other than sheer dishonesty and the desire to railroad a man into prison that led ABC to cover up the fact that Zimmerman, indeed, had received some injuries during that fateful encounter. It turns out that Corey herself had withheld photographs and other evidence that Martin had injured Zimmerman before gaining the indictment, an action that has enraged the famed defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who publicly criticized her. (For her part, Corey called Harvard University and ranted for 40 minutes and threatened to sue the university.)

Why did Corey even file second-degree murder charges when it was clear that the state could not meet that threshold of evidence? My belief is that the mainstream media made it more likely, as journalists of supposedly reputable organizations literally made things up out of whole cloth and then put the lies on the Internet and in the airwaves. The frenzy that the media worked up made it easier for Corey to look like a crusader for justice rather than the dishonest opportunist that she really is.

As I noted at the beginning of this article, I do not know what happened in that encounter, other than Trayvon Martin was shot dead. At some point, Martin and Zimmerman tangled and it looks as though Zimmerman was getting the worst of it, which led to the shooting. What I do know, however, is that Corey’s people did not come close to presenting evidence that matched their rhetoric and the poisonous rhetoric that American politicians and journalists have been spewing.

The trial of George Zimmerman was a show trial, but somewhere along the line, the six female jurors did not adhere to their pre-written script. However, that will not stop those in power and those who supposedly make a living as journalists from making ludicrous claims that Trayvon Martin was the Second Coming of Emmett Till and that Zimmerman was guilty of second-degree murder because Al Sharpton said so. That is the sorry state of current “justice” in the United States and it will only become worse.

As an ambulance took the seriously wounded Dzhokar Tsarnaev to a hospital, people in Watertown, Massachusetts, realized that the police hunt was over and they cheered. And cheered. Some in the crowd began to chant, “USA! USA! USA!” as though an American team had won an Olympic competition.

To the relieved residents who finally could go back to something normal after effectively living a day under martial law, Gov. Deval Patrick issuing a “shelter-in-place” order, the police had been heroes, protecting them from two mad bombers who already had struck the venerable Boston Marathon and were promising more mayhem and murder:

“Every time a police car passed by, the cheering became louder, and a sense of respect and admiration was felt through the crowd,” said Montana Fredrick, who joined a sea of other Northeastern University students in greeting the officers.

After authorities had gained enough knowledge of who the bombers might be, having scanned the thousands of photos and videos of the blast scenes, the next step was finding the two brothers. In retrospect, one should not be surprised that the two were quickly identified.

Like all big road race events, photos of the finish line and the surrounding area are continuously taken. One reason goes back to 1980, when aninterloper named Rosie Ruiz snuck into the race a half-mile from the finish and claimed victory. She received the laurel wreath in a public ceremony, but later that week race officials had enough evidence to find Ruiz was a fraud, and French Canadian Jaqueline Gareau was named the women’s champion.

Until the bombing, the Ruiz affair was the worst thing associated with the nation’s oldest and best-known marathon but Ruiz’s fraud led to race organizers setting up an extensive video system to ensure that nothing like that ever happened again, with the finish area being the most extensively recorded. And it is not just the professionals doing the video work. Organizations and individuals have literally hundreds of video cameras and video recording devices working throughout the race, and especially at the finish, and it was inevitable that whoever was responsible would have been caught on camera, and they were.

By Thursday night, police knew the suspects and in a firefight in Watertown, the older brother, Tamerlan, was killed. Dzhokar escaped and the manhunt became even more intense.

Until that time, the investigation really was about simple police work, a meticulous effort in which both police and ordinary citizens, including at least one seriously injured in the blast, were able to piece things together. (Unfortunately, the New York Post, which distinguished itself by headlining error after egregious error, committed a journalistic outrage by showing a photo of two local North African high school runners and all-but-claiming they were the bombers.)

When Dzhokar escaped, a police era passed with him and things fell into an abyss from there. First, hundreds of paramilitary police occupied the streets of Boston and surrounding areas, showing off their military equipment and looking every bit the role of the conquering army that one might expect to see in a bad movie.

For all the show of force, this had nothing to do either with finding and apprehending the suspect or “protecting” the citizens of Boston. Instead, they acted as government enforcers of Patrick’s “shelter in place” order for the city and surrounding areas, an order that effectively imposed martial law. These paramilitary “protectors” were not there to apprehend a dangerous suspect; they were there to intimidate the local citizenry into staying in their houses and apartments even though their going to work would have had no interference whatsoever with the police search.

As one blogger put it:

The government and police were willing to shut down parts of the economy like the universities, software, biotech, and manufacturing…but when asked to do an actual risk to reward calculation where a small part of the costs landed on their own shoulders, they had no problem weighing one versus the other and then telling the donut servers “yeah, come to work – no one’s going to get shot.”

It got worse, and I would say hilariously worse because the show-of-force tactics, martial law, and the eternal press conferences featuring Patrick and other Very Serious People actually ensured it would take longer to find Dzhokar. Police, in typical bureaucratic fashion, had created a perimeter in Watertown and they searched everywhere within that area.

If one looks at the picture of the boat in which Dzhokar was found hiding, one can see it is just behind the house, not even 20 feet away. However, while the house fell within the perimeter, the boat did not, and it never occurred to the police to look at what in retrospect would have been an excellent hiding place. The bureaucratic paramilitary cops, however, did not even think of walking an inch past their perimeter line.

It took the owner of the boat who noticed something amiss – after he was permitted to leave his house when Patrick lifted his “shelter” order – to find the wounded Tsarnaev, and police flushed him out about a half-hour later. In other words, despite the show of force and despite the presence of paramilitary cops, armored trucks, and assault rifles, the suspect was captured because a mere mundane was willing to look 20 feet beyond where the cops would go.

Lest anyone think the police were “protecting” anyone, the following video demonstrates just how brutal the police were to ordinary citizens who had committed the “crime” of living within the perimeter. As I watched it, I was reminded of a film I watched last week, “The Hiding Place.” The movie included scenes of Nazi officials and soldiers herding Jews out of their homes and up the streets. And, yes, the scene in Watertown in many ways matched what I saw in the movie, complete with the barking police dog snarling at people forced to run away from their homes with their hands on their heads.

(The police were looking for Tsarnaev, but everyone was a criminal as far as the cops were concerned. Contrary to what the media has been spinning, the police were not protecting anyone, nor did they intend to protect anyone except themselves. They were making a statement to anyone who was in Boston that the police were the absolute rulers and anyone who did not obey a police command completely was putting his or her life in peril.)

The sad thing was that most people in Boston not only put up with this, but actually seemed to believe that the show of force and the brutality of the police were for the good of Bostonians. Notes Anthony Gregory:

One doesn’t have to be any sort of radical to be appalled that thousands of police, working with federal troops and agents, would “lockdown” an entire city – shutting down public transit, closing virtually all businesses, intimidating anyone from leaving their home, and going door to door with SWAT teams in pursuit of one suspect. The power of the police to “lockdown” a city is an authoritarian, borderline totalitarian power. A “lockdown” is prison terminology for forcing all prisoners into their cells. They did not do this to pursue the DC sniper, or to go after the Kennedy assassin, and I fear the precedent. It is eerie that this happened in an American city, and it should be eerie to you, no matter where you fall on the spectrum. You can tell me that most people in Boston were happy to go along with it, but that’s not really the point, either. If two criminals can bring an entire city to its knees like this with the help of the state, then terrorism truly is a winning strategy.

Only a few decades ago, Massachusetts Democrats such as former Governor Michael Dukakkis (the Democratic nominee for president in 1988) believed in civil liberties and were outspoken against police state tactics. It is clear that those days are gone, as Democrats are as enthusiastic as typical conservative Republicans for paramilitary police, snarling police dogs, and all of the boy toys that accompany the modern “warrior cop.”

It gets worse. As I recently noted in an LRC blog post, Progressive Massachusetts does not have capital punishment, but Democratic officials there and elsewhere want Tsarnaev tried under federal law, which does have the death penalty. Such things give cynicism a bad name.

So, we have martial law imposed in a situation that clearly did not call for such drastic action, paramilitary police goons roughing up innocent people in a neighborhood, and police incompetence keeping authorities from finding an allegedly dangerous suspect. And out of all this comes effusive praise for the police and their police state tactics.

One can argue that the music began in Boston almost 240 years ago as American colonials rebelled against what they saw as British police state actions. Now we can say that the music has stopped in that same city, and since the authorities have imposed martial law and received massive public praise for their actions, Americans can expect

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, prosecutor Glenn McGovern writing about the recent shooting of two prosecutors in Texas asked, “Who will protect the protectors?” He wrote:

Working to make America less dangerous can be dangerous. The shocking murders of justice-system officials this year in Texas and Colorado are only among the most recent grim reminders of an everyday threat.

The article brings up an obvious question: Does anyone feel protected by police and prosecutors? Better yet, it seems appropriate to ask: Who will protect innocent citizens from the predations of police and prosecutors hellbent on framing innocent people for crimes, sometimes even “crimes” that never were committed?

This is not a superfluous question. The vast majority of people who have any interaction with an on-duty police officer do so under duress. Either they are stopped for a traffic violation or are being arrested or are being ordered around. In extreme situations, they are on the receiving end of abuse, either during a home invasion (called a “no-knock raid”) or an unpleasant encounter on the street.

As I noted in a previous article, the murders in question seem to have been professional killings, not the acts of someone angry they were put into jail or put on trial. The perpetrators, one supposes, are tied to drug gangs which are a creation of the War on Drugs, something that has benefitted and enriched both police and prosecutors. If their Sugar Daddy turns sour, it is not due to a lack of protection of the “protectors,” but rather the simple fact that the drug war is out of control.

When they come to court, cops often lie under oath (they call it “testilying”) and prosecutors often withhold exculpatory evidence, lie to jurors and judges, and engage in false and malicious prosecutions. And for all of the publicity that wrongful prosecutions and rogue prosecutors like the infamous Michael Nifong receive when sanctioned, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to be disciplined for misconduct and no prosecutor in U.S. History ever has gone to prison for breaking the law in pursuit of a criminal case even though Nifong and many others have regularly trashed the law and clearly engaged in illegal conduct that breaks criminal statutes.

(I should add that Nifong committed a number of felonies during the lacrosse case, including fraudulent use of thousands of federal dollars, lying to a grand jury, ordering his investigator to strong-arm witnesses into changing their stories, and lying under oath during his North Carolina State Bar hearing. He did serve one day in jail for lying to a judge about hiding evidence, but neither state nor federal authorities decided to conduct criminal investigations into his conduct. His losing the ability to practice law was mild compared with what the three lacrosse players were facing – life imprisonment – had they been convicted in what most likely would have been a kangaroo court had they gone to trial.)

I would put the questions to readers: Has any reader ever been protected by a police officer? Has any reader ever had a positive experience with prosecutors? Has any reader ever had a negative encounter with the police? Has any reader ever been wrongly prosecuted?

While McGovern claims, “Men and women responsible for seeking justice within the courts and ensuring public safety are increasingly becoming targets,” he uses some shaky statistics. First, he claims the following:

Each year in this country, well over 100 police officers are killed in the line of duty. Those who enter such careers do so fully cognizant of these dangers.

That is true, but what McGovern does not say is that the vast majority of officers killed lose their lives in car accidents and other accidents; they are not often gunned down by criminals seeking revenge and lose their lives in shootouts in very few situations. In fact, police work is statistically safer than most other occupations. Radley Balko writes:

It’s been a little more than a year since media outlets and police organizations first started reporting about a mounting “war on cops.” Law enforcement officials and commentators blamed budget shortfalls, anti-government sentiment, gun ownership and other causes for the rising violence against police.

We’re now about halfway through 2012, and this year is on pace to be the safest ever for America’s police officers. Oddly, no one is reporting it.

Fifty officers have died on duty so far this year, a 44-percent decrease from last year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF). More remarkably, 17 have died from gunfire, down 55 percent from last year. (21 died in traffic accidents, the remaining 12 in various other incidents.) If the second half of this year follows the first, fewer officers will have died on duty this year than in any year since 1944, a time when there were far, far fewer police officers.

In other words, contrary to what McGovern would have us believe, the “war on cops” is nonexistent. To be honest, it is more likely that an innocent person will be shot and killed by a cop (who usually will face no legal sanctions for the killing) than it is a cop being gunned down. (One thing to remember is that the statistics do not differentiate between a police officer being shot by fellow officers or by someone else with hostile intent.)

If there is a “war,” it is a government/police war on ordinary people. Ever since the Ronald Reagan administration began to sell surplus military gear to local police departments, the militarization of the police has grown exponentially. Nearly every police force has a paramilitary SWAT team, even in localities where there historically has been no violent crime.

Each year, the horror stories of police raids gone badly are brought to our attention – and each year, the number of police home invasions increases, and this year there will be close to 80,000 such “raids,” often done against people for simple drug possession (and many don’t have drugs or any other illegal items in their homes). As for “protectors,” when police engage in these raids, they are protecting no one and certainly any legal doctrine that says police can invade anyone’s house for whatever reason they want is not a doctrine that “protects” the general public.

(Even when police invade the wrong house or kill an unarmed person or destroy property needlessly, they rarely are disciplined and in almost all cases, the police departments do “internal investigations” and – not surprisingly – declare themselves not to be at fault and all of their actions, no matter how egregious, to be fully justified.)

At least one can sue police departments and the municipalities that employ them. Prosecutors, both state and federal, enjoy absolute immunity from lawsuits regardless of their misconduct, and often the misconduct can be personally destructive:

In 10 cases identified by ProPublica, defendants convicted at least in part because of a prosecutor’s abuse were ultimately exonerated, often after years in prison.

Shih-Wei Su was incarcerated for 12 years on attempted murder charges before a federal appeals court cleared him, finding that a prosecutor had “knowingly elicited false testimony” in winning a conviction. The city (New York) eventually paid Su $3.5 million. The prosecutor received nothing more than a private reprimand.

Jabbar Collins served 15 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit before his conviction was thrown out in 2010; Michael Vecchione, a senior Brooklyn prosecutor, had withheld critical evidence during trial. Collins has filed a $150 million lawsuit against the city. No action has been taken against Vecchione.

Last July, two men filed lawsuits for a combined $240 million against the city for wrongful convictions that a state appeals court found were won in part because Manhattan prosecutors had withheld evidence. The men served 36 years in prison, collectively. The prosecutor, who long ago left the district attorney’s office, has not been publicly disciplined.

The lack of discipline for prosecutors that have broken the law is hardly limited to New York City. In 2010, Tonya Craft was put on trial in Catoosa County, Georgia, on what clearly were trumped-up charges of child molestation. The prosecutors, Christopher Arnt and Len Gregor, had a number of illegal (and secret) meetings with the judge, Brian House, who did everything he could to keep out exculpatory evidence.

However, despite the massive misconduct by Arnt and Gregor (which I have outlined many times in my own blog), the jurors quickly saw through the lies and acquitted Craft. When I spoke to the office of the Georgia State Bar that disciplines attorneys, I was told in no uncertain terms that the Georgia Bar considered what clearly would be illegal conduct by prosecutors to be just “doing their jobs.” The assistant to the director remarked to me, “She was acquitted, wasn’t she?” I replied that Craft and her family had to spend a million dollars to defend herself, but the Georgia State Bar official was unmoved. When I asked her if suborning perjury and lying during closing arguments (deliberately misrepresenting the testimony of an expert witness for the defense) constituted “doing their jobs,” she hung up on me.

And Georgia and New York are not unique. They are the system. Understand that individuals who have been wronged cannot seek legal satisfaction because the courts have given prosecutors and judges absolute immunity, and at the same time, governments refuse to take action against their own, something that should surprise no one.

Police and prosecutors are fond of claiming they “protect” the public from “the bad guys.” There only is one problem with that; for the most part, police and prosecutors are the “bad guys,” and the government has said that we are not permitted to protect ourselves from these predators. As for a so-called War on Cops, there is a war, but it is not on the cops or prosecutors. No, these people are at war with Americans who are not politically or legally-connected.

Recently by William L. Anderson: Should Government Try To Extend Booms Indefinitely?

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, prosecutor Glenn McGovern writing about the recent shooting of two prosecutors in Texas asked, "Who will protect the protectors?" He wrote:

Working to make America less dangerous can be dangerous. The shocking murders of justice-system officials this year in Texas and Colorado are only among the most recent grim reminders of an everyday threat.

The article brings up an obvious question: Does anyone feel protected by police and prosecutors? Better yet, it seems appropriate to ask: Who will protect innocent citizens from the predations of police and prosecutors hellbent on framing innocent people for crimes, sometimes even "crimes" that never were committed?

This is not a superfluous question. The vast majority of people who have any interaction with an on-duty police officer do so under duress. Either they are stopped for a traffic violation or are being arrested or are being ordered around. In extreme situations, they are on the receiving end of abuse, either during a home invasion (called a "no-knock raid") or an unpleasant encounter on the street.

As I noted in a previous article, the murders in question seem to have been professional killings, not the acts of someone angry they were put into jail or put on trial. The perpetrators, one supposes, are tied to drug gangs which are a creation of the War on Drugs, something that has benefitted and enriched both police and prosecutors. If their Sugar Daddy turns sour, it is not due to a lack of protection of the "protectors," but rather the simple fact that the drug war is out of control.

When they come to court, cops often lie under oath (they call it "testilying") and prosecutors often withhold exculpatory evidence, lie to jurors and judges, and engage in false and malicious prosecutions. And for all of the publicity that wrongful prosecutions and rogue prosecutors like the infamous Michael Nifong receive when sanctioned, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to be disciplined for misconduct and no prosecutor in U.S. History ever has gone to prison for breaking the law in pursuit of a criminal case even though Nifong and many others have regularly trashed the law and clearly engaged in illegal conduct that breaks criminal statutes.

(I should add that Nifong committed a number of felonies during the lacrosse case, including fraudulent use of thousands of federal dollars, lying to a grand jury, ordering his investigator to strong-arm witnesses into changing their stories, and lying under oath during his North Carolina State Bar hearing. He did serve one day in jail for lying to a judge about hiding evidence, but neither state nor federal authorities decided to conduct criminal investigations into his conduct. His losing the ability to practice law was mild compared with what the three lacrosse players were facing — life imprisonment — had they been convicted in what most likely would have been a kangaroo court had they gone to trial.)

I would put the questions to readers: Has any reader ever been protected by a police officer? Has any reader ever had a positive experience with prosecutors? Has any reader ever had a negative encounter with the police? Has any reader ever been wrongly prosecuted?

While McGovern claims, "Men and women responsible for seeking justice within the courts and ensuring public safety are increasingly becoming targets," he uses some shaky statistics. First, he claims the following:

Each year in this country, well over 100 police officers are killed in the line of duty. Those who enter such careers do so fully cognizant of these dangers.

That is true, but what McGovern does not say is that the vast majority of officers killed lose their lives in car accidents and other accidents; they are not often gunned down by criminals seeking revenge and lose their lives in shootouts in very few situations. In fact, police work is statistically safer than most other occupations. Radley Balko writes:

It’s been a little more than a year since media outlets and police organizations first started reporting about a mounting “war on cops.” Law enforcement officials and commentators blamed budget shortfalls, anti-government sentiment, gun ownership and other causes for the rising violence against police.

We’re now about halfway through 2012, and this year is on pace to be the safest ever for America’s police officers. Oddly, no one is reporting it.

Fifty officers have died on duty so far this year, a 44-percent decrease from last year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF). More remarkably, 17 have died from gunfire, down 55 percent from last year. (21 died in traffic accidents, the remaining 12 in various other incidents.) If the second half of this year follows the first, fewer officers will have died on duty this year than in any year since 1944, a time when there were far, far fewer police officers.

In other words, contrary to what McGovern would have us believe, the "war on cops" is nonexistent. To be honest, it is more likely that an innocent person will be shot and killed by a cop (who usually will face no legal sanctions for the killing) than it is a cop being gunned down. (One thing to remember is that the statistics do not differentiate between a police officer being shot by fellow officers or by someone else with hostile intent.)

If there is a "war," it is a government/police war on ordinary people. Ever since the Ronald Reagan administration began to sell surplus military gear to local police departments, the militarization of the police has grown exponentially. Nearly every police force has a paramilitary SWAT team, even in localities where there historically has been no violent crime.

Each year, the horror stories of police raids gone badly are brought to our attention — and each year, the number of police home invasions increases, and this year there will be close to 80,000 such "raids," often done against people for simple drug possession (and many don't have drugs or any other illegal items in their homes). As for "protectors," when police engage in these raids, they are protecting no one and certainly any legal doctrine that says police can invade anyone's house for whatever reason they want is not a doctrine that "protects" the general public.

(Even when police invade the wrong house or kill an unarmed person or destroy property needlessly, they rarely are disciplined and in almost all cases, the police departments do "internal investigations" and — not surprisingly — declare themselves not to be at fault and all of their actions, no matter how egregious, to be fully justified.)

At least one can sue police departments and the municipalities that employ them. Prosecutors, both state and federal, enjoy absolute immunity from lawsuits regardless of their misconduct, and often the misconduct can be personally destructive:

In 10 cases identified by ProPublica, defendants convicted at least in part because of a prosecutor's abuse were ultimately exonerated, often after years in prison.

Shih-Wei Su was incarcerated for 12 years on attempted murder charges before a federal appeals court cleared him, finding that a prosecutor had "knowingly elicited false testimony" in winning a conviction. The city (New York) eventually paid Su $3.5 million. The prosecutor received nothing more than a private reprimand.

Jabbar Collins served 15 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit before his conviction was thrown out in 2010; Michael Vecchione, a senior Brooklyn prosecutor, had withheld critical evidence during trial. Collins has filed a $150 million lawsuit against the city. No action has been taken against Vecchione.

Last July, two men filed lawsuits for a combined $240 million against the city for wrongful convictions that a state appeals court found were won in part because Manhattan prosecutors had withheld evidence. The men served 36 years in prison, collectively. The prosecutor, who long ago left the district attorney's office, has not been publicly disciplined.

The lack of discipline for prosecutors that have broken the law is hardly limited to New York City. In 2010, Tonya Craft was put on trial in Catoosa County, Georgia, on what clearly were trumped-up charges of child molestation. The prosecutors, Christopher Arnt and Len Gregor, had a number of illegal (and secret) meetings with the judge, Brian House, who did everything he could to keep out exculpatory evidence.

However, despite the massive misconduct by Arnt and Gregor (which I have outlined many times in my own blog), the jurors quickly saw through the lies and acquitted Craft. When I spoke to the office of the Georgia State Bar that disciplines attorneys, I was told in no uncertain terms that the Georgia Bar considered what clearly would be illegal conduct by prosecutors to be just "doing their jobs." The assistant to the director remarked to me, "She was acquitted, wasn't she?" I replied that Craft and her family had to spend a million dollars to defend herself, but the Georgia State Bar official was unmoved. When I asked her if suborning perjury and lying during closing arguments (deliberately misrepresenting the testimony of an expert witness for the defense) constituted “doing their jobs,” she hung up on me.

And Georgia and New York are not unique. They are the system. Understand that individuals who have been wronged cannot seek legal satisfaction because the courts have given prosecutors and judges absolute immunity, and at the same time, governments refuse to take action against their own, something that should surprise no one.

Police and prosecutors are fond of claiming they "protect" the public from "the bad guys." There only is one problem with that; for the most part, police and prosecutors are the "bad guys," and the government has said that we are not permitted to protect ourselves from these predators. As for a so-called War on Cops, there is a war, but it is not on the cops or prosecutors. No, these people are at war with Americans who are not politically or legally-connected.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

In 1982, David A. Stockman, a former Michigan congressman turned budget director for President Ronald Reagan, gave a series of interviews to socialist William Greider who subsequently published an article in Rolling Stone entitled, “The Education of David Stockman.” The article portrayed someone who had come into the administration hopeful that the free-spending ways of the 1960s and 70s would be ended and that the U.S. Government would embrace fiscal sanity, but had become delusioned by the whole process.

Because the U.S. economy at the time was mired in a deep recession, and because Stockman was not singing the same happy tune that everyone in the Reagan administration was supposed to be voicing, the article effectively destroyed Stockman’s career in the Republican Party. Democrats seized on comments such as Stockman’s description of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts as “trickle-down” to push their own agenda of high marginal tax rates and more government spending, while Republicans accused Stockman of being disloyal to his boss.

Democrats and many Republicans, aghast at the double-digit unemployment rates and the rise of interest rates into double-digits as well (home mortgages were at about 15 percent – if one could qualify for one at all), called for the Federal Reserve System under Chairman Paul Volcker to reflate the money supply, and Democrats called for a return of the 70 percent top rates. To his credit, Volcker withstood the pressure, although Reagan repaid him by appointing the “flexible” Alan Greenspan in his place in 1987. Two major financial bubbles later, Greenspan has his legacy.

In the interview, Stockman did not lament lower tax rates and certainly was not repudiating free markets, as Democrats and Republican critics were claiming, but rather was noting the fact that after Republicans managed to cut the top tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, the party no longer was interested in cutting the federal budget. Part of the reason, one should add, was that even small cuts first proposed by Stockman when the administration trotted out its first budget in 1981, were savaged in the media and by just about everyone else in the political establishment and most Republicans ran for cover rather than spending political capital to stop funding Big Bird.

Ultimately, Stockman left the administration and went to Wall Street, where he would gain yet another education in the annals of crony capitalism. He disappeared politically, but has reappeared in the form of a new book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. The release of his book came simultaneously with his lengthy New York Times op-ed in which he laid out the failures of America’s failed experiment in fascism, or “crony capitalism.”

Not surprisingly, the book has faced a savage response from those who either support the political status quo or who believe that state-supported enterprise somehow is going to defy all the odds and lead the U.S. economy into glorious prosperity, and no one has been more vociferous in his denunciation of Stockman than Paul Krugman. Because Stockman essentially has cast his lot with the Austrians School of Economics, Krugman’s anger has turned white-hot, the equivalent of Nebuchadnezzar’s order to heat the furnace seven times hotter than usual.

Because Stockman’s book covers a wide range of subjects, I would like to zero in on his view – one that Krugman hotly disputes – that when an economic boom crashes, the proper response of government and the monetary authorities is to restore sound money and not try to prop up enterprises that failed in the crash. Krugman’s recent article, “The Urge to Purge,” does what Krugman usually does: create an Austrian straw man and then supposedly “demolish” the false argument with Keynesian wisdom.

The Austrian argument about how to respond to a bust that follows a failed boom is laid out well by Murray N. Rothbard:

If government wishes to see a depression ended as quickly as possible, and the economy returned to normal prosperity, what course should it adopt? The first and clearest injunction is: don’t interfere with the market’s adjustment process. The more the government intervenes to delay the market’s adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery. Government hampering aggravates and perpetuates the depression. Yet, government depression policy has always (and would have even more today) aggravated the very evils it has loudly tried to cure. If, in fact, we list logically the various ways that government could hamper market adjustment, we will find that we have precisely listed the favorite “anti-depression” arsenal of government policy. Thus, here are the ways the adjustment process can be hobbled:

1. Prevent or delay liquidation. Lend money to shaky businesses, call on banks to lend further, etc.
2. Inflate further. Further inflation blocks the necessary fall in prices, thus delaying adjustment and prolonging depression. Further credit expansion creates more malinvestments, which, in their turn, will have to be liquidated in some later depression. A government “easy money” policy prevents the market’s return to the necessary higher interest rates.
3. Keep wage rates up. Artificial maintenance of wage rates in a depression insures permanent mass unemployment. Furthermore, in a deflation, when prices are falling, keeping the same rate of money wages means that real wage rates have been pushed higher. In the face of falling business demand, this greatly aggravates the unemployment problem.
4. Keep prices up. Keeping prices above their free-market levels will create unsalable surpluses, and prevent a return to prosperity.
5. Stimulate consumption and discourage saving. We have seen that more saving and less consumption would speed recovery; more consumption and less saving aggravate the shortage of saved-capital even further. Government can encourage consumption by “food stamp plans” and relief payments. It can discourage savings and investment by higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy and on corporations and estates. As a matter of fact, any increase of taxes and government spending will discourage saving and investment and stimulate consumption, since government spending is all consumption. Some of the private funds would have been saved and invested; all of the government funds are consumed. Any increase in the relative size of government in the economy, therefore, shifts the societal consumption-investment ratio in favor of consumption, and prolongs the depression.
6. Subsidize unemployment. Any subsidization of unemployment (via unemployment “insurance,” relief, etc.) will prolong unemployment indefinitely, and delay the shift of workers to the fields where jobs are available.

Keynesians like Krugman endorse every one of those six “remedies” in hopes that the reflating of the boom ultimately will allow the economy to gain what Krugman calls “traction” in order to put the economy back on track. Krugman writes:

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. … It will purge the rottenness out of the system.” Don’t try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.”

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong they were, and we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we?

How naïve we were. It turns out that the urge to purge — the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to mitigate suffering — is as strong as ever. Indeed, Mellonism is everywhere these days. Turn on CNBC or read an op-ed page, and the odds are that you won’t see someone arguing that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are doing too little to fight mass unemployment. Instead, you’re much more likely to encounter an alleged expert ranting about the evils of budget deficits and money creation, and denouncing Keynesian economics as the root of all evil.

Krugman then turns his rant toward Stockman:

But the Mellonites just keep coming. The latest example is David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, who has just published a mammoth screed titled “The Great Deformation.”

His book doesn’t have much new to say. Although Mr. Stockman’s willingness to criticize some Republicans and praise some Democrats has garnered him a reputation as an iconoclast, his analysis is pretty much standard liquidationism, with a strong goldbug streak. We’ve been doomed to disaster, he asserts, ever since F.D.R. took us off the gold standard and introduced deposit insurance. Everything since has been a series of “sprees” (his favorite word): spending sprees, consumption sprees, debt sprees, and above all money-printing sprees. If disaster was somehow avoided for 70-plus years, it was thanks to a series of lucky accidents.

The problem with the U.S. economy, Krugman argues, is that the government is not borrowing and spending enough and that the Federal Reserve System is too timid when it comes to new money creation:

…like so many in his camp, Mr. Stockman misunderstands the meaning of rising debt. Yes, total debt in the U.S. economy, public and private combined, has risen dramatically relative to G.D.P. No, this doesn’t mean that we as a nation have been living far beyond our means, and must drastically tighten our belts. While we have run up a significant foreign debt (although not as big as many imagine), the rise in debt overwhelmingly represents Americans borrowing from other Americans, which doesn’t make the nation as a whole any poorer, and doesn’t require that we collectively spend less. In fact, the biggest problem created by all this debt is that it’s keeping the economy depressed by causing us collectively to spend too little, with debtors forced to cut back while creditors see no reason to spend more.

To solve the problems, Krugman argues, the government should re-create what essentially was a regulated banking cartel that existed before Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress essentially deregulated much of the banking system. Contrary to Krugman’s assertion that this was part of the “Reagan Revolution,” it was a response to the development of alternative financial entities like money market funds which were causing depositors to take their money from the banking cartel. It also was a response to alternative methods of financing new high-technology ventures that the banking cartel would not touch, with Michael Milken leading the way. (The cartel got its revenge a decade later by destroying Milken’s career and having him wrongfully imprisoned.)

Contra Krugman, ideology had almost nothing to do with so-called banking deregulation, and it was politics-laden from the beginning, as one might expect and as Stockman found out when he became a point man for the Reaganites. Krugman’s “solutions” to the current crisis continue:

So what should we be doing? By all means, let’s restore the kind of effective financial regulation that, in the years before the Reagan revolution, helped deter excessive leverage. But that’s about preventing the next crisis. To deal with the crisis that’s already here, we need monetary and fiscal stimulus, to induce those who aren’t too deeply indebted to spend more while the debtors are cutting back.

But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump.

The bad news is that sin sells. Although the Mellonites have, as I said, been wrong about everything, the notion of macroeconomics as morality play has a visceral appeal that’s hard to fight. Disguise it with a bit of political cross-dressing, and even liberals can fall for it.

But they shouldn’t. Mellon was dead wrong in the 1930s, and his avatars are dead wrong today. Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is what ails us now — and policy should be doing more, not less.

In other words, Stockman and the Austrians are not following any kind of sound economic theory, but rather are engaging in metaphysical views about boom and bust. The excesses of the boom essentially are seen as the sins of Mardi gras, while the bust is akin to an economic Lent. The revelers should be punished for drinking too much, according to Krugman’s view of the Austrians.

However, the Austrians argue – if one uses the hangover analogy – that Krugman is demanding a “solution” akin to “hair of the dog.” The bust, say the Austrians, has not occurred because of a lack of “aggregate demand,” but happens because the resources and capital that were malinvested during the boom no longer can be sustained, and that to pour new resources into propping them up robs entrepreneurs of the opportunities to find ways to take resources from lower-valued to higher-valued uses. Far from urging punishment upon individuals hurt by the recession, Austrians argue that government should not block the recovery because so doing unnecessarily prolongs the economic misery.

Krugman and the Keynesians retort with what they see as their trump card: interest rates are at record lows, so the problem is not that an economic “hair of the dog” policy is “crowding out” economic entrepreneurs, but rather that the economy is mired in a “liquidity trap” or a giant Nash Equilibrium from which no one can move unless the government acts with more spending. The problem is not that entrepreneurs are starved for resources and capital – there is plenty of money available to borrow – but that “aggregate demand” is so suppressed that entrepreneurs are not willing to take the necessary risks because the chance of failure is so great, and because reams of borrowed money really create no debt problems – “We owe it to ourselves” – the consumption party can go on indefinitely if only government would borrow even more.

Current space does not permit a full reply in this article to the Keynesian point regarding interest rates (Rothbard has his own rebuttal of “liquidity trap”doctrines), but I believe one needs to zero in on the heart of that argument: during a recession, the Law of Scarcity essentially is repealed. The presence of idle resources and unborrowed money trumps scarcity; abundance, not scarcity, is the problem.

Further examination of the Keynesian argument demonstrates that Krugman and others believe that demand for goods flows from money itself, and the more money that is made available to people, the more demand will follow. If you demand it, they will build. In the meantime, printing money allows governments to pretend to be prosperous when, in fact, scarcity has not been repealed and massive new government spending, be it financed through taxation, borrowing, or money printing, is not stimulating entrepreneurial investment, but rather suppressing it.

The current state of interest rates is not a market phenomenon, as the Keynesians want us to believe, but rather a combination of the Fed creating huge new monetary reserves and government policies suppressing entrepreneurial acquisition of resources. Moreover, as Austrians have noted, government is not promoting true entrepreneurial investment; it is promoting consumption.

On the fiscal side, both federal and state government have enacted so many restrictions on entrepreneurs that many of them find it useless to try to create new products in this country. Why bother? Success will be “rewarded” by government harassment, criminal investigations, and more denunciations of “the rich” by politicians and the media. Instead, we see taxpayers forced to give up their own wealth in order to finance crony capitalist adventures like “green energy” and production of corn-based ethanol, little of which would consumers actually purchase if given a free choice.

In short, the Law of Scarcity always stands. Investments that rode the boom and crash during the bust have done so because they actually weremalinvestments and to try to recreate them after the bust is utter foolishness. Yet, that is what Krugman and the Keynesians are insisting that the government do, and anyone who disagrees does so, according to them, because that person loves watching other people suffer for supposed economic “sins.”

Thus, Keynesians in the end are reduced to name-calling and wild denunciations of character. David Stockman cannot possibly be right, they argue. He is a nut case, a “wacko,” a “kook.” Why? Because he and the Austrians believe that government cannot circumvent the Law of Scarcity through fiat and when government insists on trying to do just that, economic conditions deteriorate. Keynesians and Krugman refuse to listen, and they always will refuse, but that does not mean the Austrians are wrong.

Keynesians always will appeal to the media and political classes. They preach what essentially is an economics with no risk and no need to give up short-term desires for long-term gain. It is an “eat, drink, and be merry” economics, except that the acts of eating, drinking, and making merriment really are what create prosperity in the first place.

Recently by William L. Anderson: Does the Drug War Make Prosecutors Vulnerable?

In 1981, David A. Stockman, a former Michigan congressman turned budget director for President Ronald Reagan, gave a series of interviews to socialist William Greider who subsequently published an article in The Atlantic entitled, "The Education of David Stockman." The article portrayed someone who had come into the administration hopeful that the free-spending ways of the 1960s and 70s would be ended and that the U.S. Government would embrace fiscal sanity, but had become disillusioned by the whole process.

Because the U.S. economy at the time was mired in a deep recession, and because Stockman was not singing the same happy tune that everyone in the Reagan administration was supposed to be voicing, the article effectively destroyed Stockman's career in the Republican Party. Democrats seized on comments such as Stockman's description of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts as "trickle-down" to push their own agenda of high marginal tax rates and more government spending, while Republicans accused Stockman of being disloyal to his boss.

Democrats and many Republicans, aghast at the double-digit unemployment rates and the rise of interest rates into double-digits as well (home mortgages were at about 15 percent — if one could qualify for one at all), called for the Federal Reserve System under Chairman Paul Volcker to reflate the money supply, and Democrats called for a return of the 70 percent top rates. To his credit, Volcker withstood the pressure, although Reagan repaid him by appointing the "flexible" Alan Greenspan in his place in 1987. Two major financial bubbles later, Greenspan has his legacy.

In the interview, Stockman did not lament lower tax rates and certainly was not repudiating free markets, as Democrats and Republican critics were claiming, but rather was noting the fact that after Republicans managed to cut the top tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, the party no longer was interested in cutting the federal budget. Part of the reason, one should add, was that even small cuts first proposed by Stockman when the administration trotted out its first budget in 1981, were savaged in the media and by just about everyone else in the political establishment and most Republicans ran for cover rather than spending political capital to stop funding Big Bird.

Ultimately, Stockman left the administration and went to Wall Street, where he would gain yet another education in the annals of crony capitalism. He disappeared politically, but has reappeared in the form of a new book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. The release of his book came simultaneously with his lengthy New York Times op-ed in which he laid out the failures of America's failed experiment in fascism, or "crony capitalism."

Not surprisingly, the book has faced a savage response from those who either support the political status quo or who believe that state-supported enterprise somehow is going to defy all the odds and lead the U.S. economy into glorious prosperity, and no one has been more vociferous in his denunciation of Stockman than Paul Krugman. Because Stockman essentially has cast his lot with the Austrians School of Economics, Krugman's anger has turned white-hot, the equivalent of Nebuchadnezzar's order to heat the furnace seven times hotter than usual.

Because Stockman's book covers a wide range of subjects, I would like to zero in on his view — one that Krugman hotly disputes — that when an economic boom crashes, the proper response of government and the monetary authorities is to restore sound money and not try to prop up enterprises that failed in the crash. Krugman's recent article, "The Urge to Purge," does what Krugman usually does: create an Austrian straw man and then supposedly "demolish" the false argument with Keynesian wisdom.

The Austrian argument about how to respond to a bust that follows a failed boom is laid out well by Murray N. Rothbard:

If government wishes to see a depression ended as quickly as possible, and the economy returned to normal prosperity, what course should it adopt? The first and clearest injunction is: don’t interfere with the market’s adjustment process. The more the government intervenes to delay the market’s adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery. Government hampering aggravates and perpetuates the depression. Yet, government depression policy has always (and would have even more today) aggravated the very evils it has loudly tried to cure. If, in fact, we list logically the various ways that government could hamper market adjustment, we will find that we have precisely listed the favorite “anti-depression” arsenal of government policy. Thus, here are the ways the adjustment process can be hobbled:

1. Prevent or delay liquidation. Lend money to shaky businesses, call on banks to lend further, etc.
2. Inflate further. Further inflation blocks the necessary fall in prices, thus delaying adjustment and prolonging depression. Further credit expansion creates more malinvestments, which, in their turn, will have to be liquidated in some later depression. A government “easy money” policy prevents the market’s return to the necessary higher interest rates.
3. Keep wage rates up. Artificial maintenance of wage rates in a depression insures permanent mass unemployment. Furthermore, in a deflation, when prices are falling, keeping the same rate of money wages means that real wage rates have been pushed higher. In the face of falling business demand, this greatly aggravates the unemployment problem.
4. Keep prices up. Keeping prices above their free-market levels will create unsalable surpluses, and prevent a return to prosperity.
5. Stimulate consumption and discourage saving. We have seen that more saving and less consumption would speed recovery; more consumption and less saving aggravate the shortage of saved-capital even further. Government can encourage consumption by “food stamp plans” and relief payments. It can discourage savings and investment by higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy and on corporations and estates. As a matter of fact, any increase of taxes and government spending will discourage saving and investment and stimulate consumption, since government spending is all consumption. Some of the private funds would have been saved and invested; all of the government funds are consumed. Any increase in the relative size of government in the economy, therefore, shifts the societal consumption-investment ratio in favor of consumption, and prolongs the depression.
6. Subsidize unemployment. Any subsidization of unemployment (via unemployment “insurance,” relief, etc.) will prolong unemployment indefinitely, and delay the shift of workers to the fields where jobs are available.

Keynesians like Krugman endorse every one of those six "remedies" in hopes that the reflating of the boom ultimately will allow the economy to gain what Krugman calls "traction" in order to put the economy back on track. Krugman writes:

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn't even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. … It will purge the rottenness out of the system." Don't try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because "artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone."

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong they were, and we wouldn't repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we?

How naïve we were. It turns out that the urge to purge u2014 the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to mitigate suffering u2014 is as strong as ever. Indeed, Mellonism is everywhere these days. Turn on CNBC or read an op-ed page, and the odds are that you won't see someone arguing that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are doing too little to fight mass unemployment. Instead, you're much more likely to encounter an alleged expert ranting about the evils of budget deficits and money creation, and denouncing Keynesian economics as the root of all evil.

Krugman then turns his rant toward Stockman:

But the Mellonites just keep coming. The latest example is David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's first budget director, who has just published a mammoth screed titled "The Great Deformation."

His book doesn't have much new to say. Although Mr. Stockman's willingness to criticize some Republicans and praise some Democrats has garnered him a reputation as an iconoclast, his analysis is pretty much standard liquidationism, with a strong goldbug streak. We've been doomed to disaster, he asserts, ever since F.D.R. took us off the gold standard and introduced deposit insurance. Everything since has been a series of "sprees" (his favorite word): spending sprees, consumption sprees, debt sprees, and above all money-printing sprees. If disaster was somehow avoided for 70-plus years, it was thanks to a series of lucky accidents.

The problem with the U.S. economy, Krugman argues, is that the government is not borrowing and spending enough and that the Federal Reserve System is too timid when it comes to new money creation:

…like so many in his camp, Mr. Stockman misunderstands the meaning of rising debt. Yes, total debt in the U.S. economy, public and private combined, has risen dramatically relative to G.D.P. No, this doesn't mean that we as a nation have been living far beyond our means, and must drastically tighten our belts. While we have run up a significant foreign debt (although not as big as many imagine), the rise in debt overwhelmingly represents Americans borrowing from other Americans, which doesn't make the nation as a whole any poorer, and doesn't require that we collectively spend less. In fact, the biggest problem created by all this debt is that it's keeping the economy depressed by causing us collectively to spend too little, with debtors forced to cut back while creditors see no reason to spend more.

To solve the problems, Krugman argues, the government should re-create what essentially was a regulated banking cartel that existed before Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress essentially deregulated much of the banking system. Contrary to Krugman's assertion that this was part of the "Reagan Revolution," it was a response to the development of alternative financial entities like money market funds which were causing depositors to take their money from the banking cartel. It also was a response to alternative methods of financing new high-technology ventures that the banking cartel would not touch, with Michael Milken leading the way. (The cartel got its revenge a decade later by destroying Milken's career and having him wrongfully imprisoned.)

Contra Krugman, ideology had almost nothing to do with so-called banking deregulation, and it was politics-laden from the beginning, as one might expect and as Stockman found out when he became a point man for the Reaganites. Krugman's "solutions" to the current crisis continue:

So what should we be doing? By all means, let's restore the kind of effective financial regulation that, in the years before the Reagan revolution, helped deter excessive leverage. But that's about preventing the next crisis. To deal with the crisis that's already here, we need monetary and fiscal stimulus, to induce those who aren't too deeply indebted to spend more while the debtors are cutting back.

But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump.

The bad news is that sin sells. Although the Mellonites have, as I said, been wrong about everything, the notion of macroeconomics as morality play has a visceral appeal that's hard to fight. Disguise it with a bit of political cross-dressing, and even liberals can fall for it.

But they shouldn't. Mellon was dead wrong in the 1930s, and his avatars are dead wrong today. Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is what ails us now u2014 and policy should be doing more, not less.

In other words, Stockman and the Austrians are not following any kind of sound economic theory, but rather are engaging in metaphysical views about boom and bust. The excesses of the boom essentially are seen as the sins of Mardi gras, while the bust is akin to an economic Lent. The revelers should be punished for drinking too much, according to Krugman's view of the Austrians.

However, the Austrians argue — if one uses the hangover analogy — that Krugman is demanding a "solution" akin to "hair of the dog." The bust, say the Austrians, has not occurred because of a lack of "aggregate demand," but happens because the resources and capital that were malinvested during the boom no longer can be sustained, and that to pour new resources into propping them up robs entrepreneurs of the opportunities to find ways to take resources from lower-valued to higher-valued uses. Far from urging punishment upon individuals hurt by the recession, Austrians argue that government should not block the recovery because so doing unnecessarily prolongs the economic misery.

Krugman and the Keynesians retort with what they see as their trump card: interest rates are at record lows, so the problem is not that an economic "hair of the dog" policy is "crowding out" economic entrepreneurs, but rather that the economy is mired in a "liquidity trap" or a giant Nash Equilibrium from which no one can move unless the government acts with more spending. The problem is not that entrepreneurs are starved for resources and capital — there is plenty of money available to borrow — but that "aggregate demand" is so suppressed that entrepreneurs are not willing to take the necessary risks because the chance of failure is so great, and because reams of borrowed money really create no debt problems — "We owe it to ourselves" — the consumption party can go on indefinitely if only government would borrow even more.

Current space does not permit a full reply in this article to the Keynesian point regarding interest rates (Rothbard has his own rebuttal of "liquidity trap" doctrines), but I believe one needs to zero in on the heart of that argument: during a recession, the Law of Scarcity essentially is repealed. The presence of idle resources and unborrowed money trumps scarcity; abundance, not scarcity, is the problem.

Further examination of the Keynesian argument demonstrates that Krugman and others believe that demand for goods flows from money itself, and the more money that is made available to people, the more demand will follow. If you demand it, they will build. In the meantime, printing money allows governments to pretend to be prosperous when, in fact, scarcity has not been repealed and massive new government spending, be it financed through taxation, borrowing, or money printing, is not stimulating entrepreneurial investment, but rather suppressing it.

The current state of interest rates is not a market phenomenon, as the Keynesians want us to believe, but rather a combination of the Fed creating huge new monetary reserves and government policies suppressing entrepreneurial acquisition of resources. Moreover, as Austrians have noted, government is not promoting true entrepreneurial investment; it is promoting consumption.

On the fiscal side, both federal and state government have enacted so many restrictions on entrepreneurs that many of them find it useless to try to create new products in this country. Why bother? Success will be "rewarded" by government harassment, criminal investigations, and more denunciations of "the rich" by politicians and the media. Instead, we see taxpayers forced to give up their own wealth in order to finance crony capitalist adventures like "green energy" and production of corn-based ethanol, little of which would consumers actually purchase if given a free choice.

In short, the Law of Scarcity always stands. Investments that rode the boom and crash during the bust have done so because they actually were malinvestments and to try to recreate them after the bust is utter foolishness. Yet, that is what Krugman and the Keynesians are insisting that the government do, and anyone who disagrees does so, according to them, because that person loves watching other people suffer for supposed economic "sins."

Thus, Keynesians in the end are reduced to name-calling and wild denunciations of character. David Stockman cannot possibly be right, they argue. He is a nut case, a "wacko," a "kook." Why? Because he and the Austrians believe that government cannot circumvent the Law of Scarcity through fiat and when government insists on trying to do just that, economic conditions deteriorate. Keynesians and Krugman refuse to listen, and they always will refuse, but that does not mean the Austrians are wrong.

Keynesians always will appeal to the media and political classes. They preach what essentially is an economics with no risk and no need to give up short-term desires for long-term gain. It is an "eat, drink, and be merry" economics, except that the acts of eating, drinking, and making merriment really are what create prosperity in the first place.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

Because I have become known as a fierce critic of American prosecutors, both at the state and federal levels, I have received numerous emails regarding the recent murders of prosecutors in Texas. To be honest, all I know about these cases is what I have read in standard news stories on the Internet and certainly cannot give an informed comment other than to say I believe murders are terrible things and my heart does go out to the families who are affected by this outrage.

As far as I can see, these killings have the mark of professional hit jobs with some kind of revenge being motivation:

Sources tell CBS 11 news that the DA was shot multiple times with what is believed to be an assault rifle while Cynthia McLelland was only shot once. Sources also say that there were no signs of forced entry.

How much police investigators know is something that is impossible for ordinary citizens to find out, and I am sure that much of the investigation will be carried out with much secrecy. Furthermore, because the killings are so brutal and so high-profile, a lot of people who might be more skeptical of police investigations are going to be less discerning than they ordinarily would be.

Some folks have asked me whether or not I believe we have a situation in which someone who was wronged by the DA and his staff is taking revenge. My answer is: I doubt it vociferously. The reason is that a lot of people I have known who have been falsely accused or even wrongfully convicted tend to be law-abiding types who would recoil at taking violent revenge.

For example, Reade Seligmann, one of the three Duke students falsely accused of rape in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, is well-known for being an honorable and decent person. His accused teammate, Collin Finnerty, is the same way, and I also know Collin’s mother and father, who made a lot of money on Wall Street.

The idea of any of them committing murder against the disgraced prosecutor Michael Nifong or hiring someone to do such would be anathema to all involved. These are not people connected to crime figures and it is not like they could or would go to the offices of Murder, Inc., to hire a killer. (However, I would not be surprised if a government agent approached some of these people offering his services as an assassin or saying he could find a hit man in order to try to trap someone in a crime. During the time I wrote on the Duke Lacrosse Case, I regularly received emails from someone who kept trying to get me to agree that Nifong should be shot with a “well-aimed bullet, and I always treated the emails as an attempt to get me implicated in a murder “conspiracy.”)

Likewise, I have had contact with others who have gone to prison or individuals who have a wrongfully-convicted family member, and to a person the reaction has been one of sadness and resignation and a determination to clear the name of the wrongfully-accused or convicted. These are people who have believed in the American system of justice and the idea of actually going outside the law and committing murder would be unthinkable to them.

For example, I have come to know the mother of Courtney Bisbee, a teacher in Arizona wrongfully convicted of having inappropriate relations with a student. (The student since has recanted, but the appeals courts do not recognize innocence as a reason to overturn convictions no matter how outrageous they might be, and Arizona’s courts are notoriously bad in this regard.)

Courtney and her family were somewhat typical thinkers among American evangelicals who tend to support the police and the courts – at least until they are the victims. Courtney’s mother has told me more than once that she could not believe this actually was happening in America. However, she has turned her energies into freeing her daughter, not taking violent revenge upon the people who went after her daughter. (In fact, the DA whose office prosecuted the case, Andrew Thomas, recently was disbarred by an Arizona legal ethics panel. While Courtney’s family welcomed that development, it does not get an innocent woman out of prison.)

So, if abused and wrongfully-convicted people don’t target prosecutors for killing, who does? As pointed out earlier, the killings have the marks of professional hits, which means the killers were experienced at what they did, and the most experienced killers today tend to be associated with drug gangs, and that raises another issue: How do we deal with this kind of situation?

Before answering that question, I do need to point out that because prosecutors are so protected by legal immunity that they almost are legally untouchable. Because private citizens, even those who have been egregiously wronged by prosecutors who recklessly pursued a false case, cannot file lawsuits against their tormentors, they must depend upon the very state apparatus that went after them to bring the prosecutors to justice.

Good luck with that. Prosecutors rarely are disciplined, only a tiny handful have lost their licenses (and that was after they had engaged in high-profile wrongdoing), and none have been convicted of crimes related to their misconduct. In other words, they are free to break the law and even if they are caught, most likely will return to their jobs legally untouched.

This is a situation that surely angers many and puts ordinary people in a spot where they are unable to gain even a modicum of justice for grievous wrongs done against them and their loved ones. Yet, even with all of that, I do not know of anyone in the situations of wrongful accusation or conviction in which someone physically attacked a prosecutor.

So, what gives? First, and most important, killings of this sort are rare, very rare. That is why they even are newsworthy. If prosecutors were being knocked off week after week, no one would notice if one more were killed. While the media speculates on a “trend,” so far the trend is two people (and three, if one includes the DA’s wife).

Second, as I noted before, prosecutors most fear drug gangs because they tend to be the most ruthless and the most professional, when it comes to killing. The media is speculating that “white supremacist” organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood might be responsible, but I have serious doubts, since the people involved were not famous for going after militias or disaffected people.

(The Southern Poverty Law Center wants us to believe that “white supremacist” gangs are everywhere, armed to the teeth, and ready to overthrow every government in the country and establish something akin to a “The Handmaid’s Tale” society. It is a great fundraising tool, but not a good description of reality.)

To be honest, the authorities would love for the culprits to be part of a dissident movement if for no other reason than to give the police the excuse to “crack down” on other groups, such as the Tea Party or others who are no threat to anyone. The media would eat it up and anyone considered to be “anti-government” would be lumped with domestic terrorists. While police are speculating that perhaps the Aryan Brotherhood gangs have joined forces with some Mexican drug gangs, even this hardly would be what the SPLC and the New York Times would hope that it is: a full-fledged rebellion among racist groups. (If such ties actually are proven, look for the NYT and SPLC to trumpet the claim that “right-wingers” are killing prosecutors and look for a way to tie the Tea Party to all of it, just as Brian Ross of ABC claimed at first that a Tea Party member committed the Aurora theater shootings last year.)

If the killers are tied with drug gangs, it would be a situation in which the police and prosecutors are being devoured by the monster that they have helped to create. Nothing brings money into police departments like the War on Drugs, and this war not only has corrupted police with money from things like seizure of cash and other property from innocent people, but also has resulted in police forces all over the country becoming little more than paramilitary organizations. To use the drug analogy, police and prosecutors are addicted to the Drug War, its money and the military equipment it encourages them to collect.

The Drug War, however, has resulted in the formation of drug gangs in Mexico that are utterly ruthless in a way that even the worst cops in this country cannot personally fathom. They don’t fear U.S. law or law enforcement, and when they leave a calling card, people know they have been somewhere. Says one law enforcement expert:

…this assassination of DA McClellend and his wife is meant to send a message: no one is safe, no one is beyond our reach. We will kill you and your loved ones. We are in control here.

This is a significant point of escalation in the crisis, (as) this type of high-profile targeting of public officials is a classic insurgent tactic. Its escalating use inside the US shows a complete lack of fear of consequences and demonstrates the fundamental shift in the strategic landscape that has already occurred.

Unfortunately, the latest turn of events will not cause police or prosecutors to take a hard look at their own actions and how they have led to this intractable situation. Instead, they will ramp up the brutality upon innocent people, all in the name of “officer safety” and “protecting prosecutors.” Like the Bourbons of France, they will “learn nothing and forget nothing.”

Recently by William L. Anderson: The FAU Follies: When Universities Provide Circuses (but no bread)

Because I have become known as a fierce critic of American prosecutors, both at the state and federal levels, I have received numerous emails regarding the recent murders of prosecutors in Texas. To be honest, all I know about these cases is what I have read in standard news stories on the Internet and certainly cannot give an informed comment other than to say I believe murders are terrible things and my heart does go out to the families who are affected by this outrage.

As far as I can see, these killings have the mark of professional hit jobs with some kind of revenge being motivation:

Sources tell CBS 11 news that the DA was shot multiple times with what is believed to be an assault rifle while Cynthia McLelland was only shot once. Sources also say that there were no signs of forced entry.

This was an execution, pure and simple. One shot to the head of the wife is not the sign of a crime of anger or passion, but rather of cold-blooded calculation, while multiple shots on the man — and I guarantee that most were fired into the body after he was dead — demonstrate someone is sending a message.

How much police investigators know is something that is impossible for ordinary citizens to find out, and I am sure that much of the investigation will be carried out with much secrecy. Furthermore, because the killings are so brutal and so high-profile, a lot of people who might be more skeptical of police investigations are going to be less discerning than they ordinarily would be.

Some folks have asked me whether or not I believe we have a situation in which someone who was wronged by the DA and his staff is taking revenge. My answer is: I doubt it vociferously. The reason is that a lot of people I have known who have been falsely accused or even wrongfully convicted tend to be law-abiding types who would recoil at taking violent revenge.

For example, Reade Seligmann, one of the three Duke students falsely accused of rape in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, is well-known for being an honorable and decent person. His accused teammate, Collin Finnerty, is the same way, and I also know Collin's mother and father, who made a lot of money on Wall Street.

The idea of any of them committing murder against the disgraced prosecutor Michael Nifong or hiring someone to do such would be anathema to all involved. These are not people connected to crime figures and it is not like they could or would go to the offices of Murder, Inc., to hire a killer. (However, I would not be surprised if a government agent approached some of these people offering his services as an assassin or saying he could find a hit man in order to try to trap someone in a crime. During the time I wrote on the Duke Lacrosse Case, I regularly received emails from someone who kept trying to get me to agree that Nifong should be shot with a "well-aimed bullet, and I always treated the emails as an attempt to get me implicated in a murder "conspiracy.")

Likewise, I have had contact with others who have gone to prison or individuals who have a wrongfully-convicted family member, and to a person the reaction has been one of sadness and resignation and a determination to clear the name of the wrongfully-accused or convicted. These are people who have believed in the American system of justice and the idea of actually going outside the law and committing murder would be unthinkable to them.

For example, I have come to know the mother of Courtney Bisbee, a school nurse in Arizona wrongfully convicted of having “inappropriate sexual touching” with a young man who attended another school. (The accuser’s brother, the state’s star witness, since has recanted, but the appeals courts do not recognize innocence as a reason to overturn convictions no matter how outrageous they might be, and Arizona’s courts are notoriously bad in this regard.)

Courtney and her family were somewhat typical thinkers among American evangelicals who tend to support the police and the courts — at least until they are the victims. Courtney's mother has told me more than once that she could not believe this actually was happening in America. However, she has turned her energies into freeing her daughter, not taking violent revenge upon the people who went after her daughter. (In fact, the DA whose office prosecuted the case, Andrew Thomas, recently was disbarred by an Arizona legal ethics panel. While Courtney's family welcomed that development, it does not get an innocent woman out of prison.)

So, if abused and wrongfully-convicted people don't target prosecutors for killing, who does? As pointed out earlier, the killings have the marks of professional hits, which means the killers were experienced at what they did, and the most experienced killers today tend to be associated with drug gangs, and that raises another issue: How do we deal with this kind of situation?

Before answering that question, I do need to point out that because prosecutors are so protected by legal immunity that they almost are legally untouchable. Because private citizens, even those who have been egregiously wronged by prosecutors who recklessly pursued a false case, cannot file lawsuits against their tormentors, they must depend upon the very state apparatus that went after them to bring the prosecutors to justice.

Good luck with that. Prosecutors rarely are disciplined, only a tiny handful have lost their licenses (and that was after they had engaged in high-profile wrongdoing), and none have been convicted of crimes related to their misconduct. In other words, they are free to break the law and even if they are caught, most likely will return to their jobs legally untouched.

This is a situation that surely angers many and puts ordinary people in a spot where they are unable to gain even a modicum of justice for grievous wrongs done against them and their loved ones. Yet, even with all of that, I do not know of anyone in the situations of wrongful accusation or conviction in which someone physically attacked a prosecutor.

So, what gives? First, and most important, killings of this sort are rare, very rare. That is why they even are newsworthy. If prosecutors were being knocked off week after week, no one would notice if one more were killed. While the media speculates on a "trend," so far the trend is two people (and three, if one includes the DA's wife).

Second, as I noted before, prosecutors most fear drug gangs because they tend to be the most ruthless and the most professional, when it comes to killing. The media is speculating that "white supremacist" organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood might be responsible, but one cannot legitimately equate a violent prison gang that finances itself by dealing in illegal drugs with organizations such as the Tea Party or even Ron Paul supporters, who rightfully are dissatisfied with what they see in present government and speak publicly about it.

(The Southern Poverty Law Center wants us to believe that "white supremacist" gangs are everywhere, armed to the teeth, and ready to overthrow every government in the country and establish something akin to a "The Handmaid's Tale" society. It is a great fundraising tool, but not a good description of reality.)

To be honest, the authorities would love for the culprits to be part of a dissident movement if for no other reason than to give the police the excuse to "crack down" on other groups, such as the Tea Party or others who are no threat to anyone. The media would eat it up and anyone considered to be "anti-government" would be lumped with domestic terrorists. While police are speculating that perhaps the Aryan Brotherhood gangs have joined forces with some Mexican drug gangs, even this hardly would be what the SPLC and the New York Times would hope that it is: a full-fledged rebellion among racist groups. (If such ties actually are proven, look for the NYT and SPLC to trumpet the claim that "right-wingers" are killing prosecutors and look for a way to tie the Tea Party to all of it, just as Brian Ross of ABC claimed at first that a Tea Party member committed the Aurora theater shootings last year.)

If the killers are tied with drug gangs, it would be a situation in which the police and prosecutors are being devoured by the monster that they have helped to create. Nothing brings money into police departments like the War on Drugs, and this war not only has corrupted police with money from things like seizure of cash and other property from innocent people, but also has resulted in police forces all over the country becoming little more than paramilitary organizations. To use the drug analogy, police and prosecutors are addicted to the Drug War, its money and the military equipment it encourages them to collect.

The Drug War, however, has resulted in the formation of drug gangs in Mexico that are utterly ruthless in a way that even the worst cops in this country cannot personally fathom. They don't fear U.S. law or law enforcement, and when they leave a calling card, people know they have been somewhere. Says one law enforcement expert:

…this assassination of DA McClellend and his wife is meant to send a message: no one is safe, no one is beyond our reach. We will kill you and your loved ones. We are in control here.

He continues:

This is a significant point of escalation in the crisis, (as) this type of high-profile targeting of public officials is a classic insurgent tactic. Its escalating use inside the US shows a complete lack of fear of consequences and demonstrates the fundamental shift in the strategic landscape that has already occurred.

In the end, the same police that engage in about 80,000 SWAT raids a year, often against innocent people and usually against those engaging in non-violent actions, now must cower in fear from people even more ruthless and murderous than they. Prosecutors have benefitted from the Drug War and from the growing power of the police, as the prosecutors often cover for the police by refusing to bring charges after police officers gun down innocent people in their ubiquitous drug raids. Now prosecutors find themselves in crosshairs that they cannot escape.

Unfortunately, the latest turn of events will not cause police or prosecutors to take a hard look at their own actions and how they have led to this intractable situation. Instead, they will ramp up the brutality upon innocent people, all in the name of "officer safety" and "protecting prosecutors." Like the Bourbons of France, they will "learn nothing and forget nothing."

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

Modern American Higher Education is a PR juggernaut; a knowledge juggernaut it is not, and watching universities trying to become “relevant” often can be entertaining – if it were not so pathetic. Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton is one of those places that started small and wants to be relevant, but instead has become pitiful.

The university itself is a place that rose from tiny beginnings but now is well-known because of a couple of things. The first is for something that recently occurred in a classroom. The second is for an inexcusable act in which the university has gained a corporate sponsor that would make Blackwater look like a good choice.

My first visit to what is now FAU, which was constructed at an abandoned military base, was in March 1968 when I was a ninth grader. Glades Road, where FAU is located, was a two-lane road that led off into nowhere. My mother and I played tennis on the outdoor courts there. Today, the university has more than 20,000 students and Glades Road is a major thoroughfare. However, two things have given the university some unwanted publicity, so the administration there has done what administrations tend to do at the university level these days: abuse students and rely upon public relations, lots of PR.

The Duke Lacrosse Case would not have been possible without the encouragement and near-criminal behavior of Duke’s administrators. (When the three indicted players were vindicated, Duke paid them close to $7 million apiece, from what my friends tell me. But the administrators were able to use someone else’s money.) The situation at FAU is not the lacrosse case, but nonetheless is telling.

An instructor told students to write the name “Jesus” on a sheet of paper and then step on it. From what I can gather, it was not required to stomp, but if one refused, one had to write as to why he or she took such actions. One student, Ryan Rotela, complained to the administration, and the fireworks began.

My sense is that the teacher was trying to be “edgy,” not blasphemous, although he was smart enough not to get his students to write “Mohammed” as opposed to “Jesus,” as he might have faced a future Fatwa. However, given that the professor is a Democratic Party official in Palm Beach County, conservatives have jumped all over this, as you can imagine. And I only can surmise about the kind of hate mail the professor has received from “outraged” Christians.

Unfortunately, the university has retaliated against the student, creating yet another nasty battlefield in the Eternal Culture Wars. As what happens when the lawyers jump into the fight, we shall see charges and countercharges as the talking heads on all sides continue to nationalize what was an incident in a classroom.

Rotela, who is a devout Mormon, has received a “Notice of Charges” from FAU’s administration with the following points made in a letter the university sent to him:

…according to a letter written by Associate Dean Rozalia Williams, Rotela is facing a litany of charges – including an alleged violation of the student code of conduct, acts of verbal, written or physical abuse, threats, intimidation, harassment, coercion or other conduct which threaten the health, safety or welfare of any person.”

“In the interim, you may not attend class or contact any of the students involved in this matter – verbally or electronically – or by any other means,” Williams wrote to Rotela. “Please be advised that a Student Affairs hold may be placed on your records until final disposition of the complaint.”

I am not sure what Rotela might have done, but I suspect that the university is angry he told someone outside the “community” (as administrators like to call their university when a faculty member or administrator has committed a faux pas) about what happened. One also has to understand that in this modern secular era, most higher education faculty members and administrators are intellectually incapable of understanding why a student might not want to stomp on a piece of paper with “Jesus” written on it.

Nonetheless, the university now has opened a whole new chapter in abuse of students by bringing charges against the student. Whether or not he broke university rules (the courts have ruled that university administrations are not bound by rules or anything else their handbooks say) is irrelevant to the larger issue of yet another university going after religious students. While the university “apologized” for what happened in the classroom (and I am not sure that an apology was necessary), nonetheless its reaction is worse than whatever took place in class.

Around the country, private universities such as Vanderbilt in Nashville have banned Christian groups from meeting on campus, citing the “open access” rules which state that all official student campus organizations must have membership and leadership positions open to all other students, regardless of the beliefs they might hold. The Christian groups have said that while anyone is invited to attend their meetings, their officers must be Christians, which is too much for the Vandy administration.

(State universities have tried the same thing, but have been rebuffed in the courts because, interestingly, their role as government institutions means that they have to adhere to Constitutional standards of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Sooner or later, however, I predict that the courts will vacate earlier decisions in the name of some “Progressive” line of thinking.)

Unfortunately, FAU’s administration has chosen to distinguish itself in quite another endeavor: naming its new football stadium the GEO Group Stadium. For those who do not recognize the firm by its initials, the GEO Groups, Inc., is a firm that makes its money with private prisons. That’s right, FAU has given naming rights to its stadium to an organization that essentially is part of the out-of-control incarceration policies of the United States.Lenore Skenazy notes:

The result of our increased eagerness to lock folks up is that America now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. For every 100,000 Americans, we’ve got 730 behind bars. Our next-closest “competitor” is Russia, with 500 per 100,000. Iran has 350, and China is looking like Sweden or something, with just over 100. Peace out, China! How is it that America is so much more jail-happy than even the most repressive regimes?

The trend began in the 1970s, says Sabrina Jones, co-author with Marc Mauer of the graphic book version of “Race to Incarcerate.” Until then, the number of prisoners in the United States had been pretty stable throughout the 20th century. But in just four decades, it skyrocketed from about 250,000 inmates in 1970 to 2.3 million today.

As one who supports private enterprise, I cannot support private institutions that make their money from state-sponsored decisions to throw certain individuals into what essentially are cages. Not in the name of “efficiency” or “saving money for taxpayers.” Private prisons are not the result of free exchange or free markets; indeed, the majority of people who enter such facilities do so under duress.

Furthermore, because they essentially are government-created entities, private prisons benefit from the nation’s harsh drug laws and the increasing violence committed by police and other state agents. As I told Skenazy when she interviewed me for the article: “These outfits make money by having their prisons filled so they will lobby for laws that call for incarceration of actions that previously people did not go to prison for.” We are dealing with moral hazard on steroids.

Free markets and, to be honest, free minds are not prized at American universities. Groupthink – imposed in the name of “diversity” – is common and it seems that the campus tends to be the last bastion of academic Marxists.

It is ironic, then, that a university that wants to be academically “edgy” is willing to have a very symbol of this country’s obscene policies of incarceration naming its football stadium. I’d like to say I am surprised, but I am not. After all, the administrators and faculty members that attempt to impose cultural and academic Marxism upon students are intellectual descendants of those who supported tyrants like Josef Stalin and Mao when they were murdering millions, all in the name of building “a socialist paradise.”

And, not surprisingly, we see the usual kind of PR talk from all involved, something for which American higher education gives us again and again:

Officials at the GEO Group and Florida Atlantic University asserted that the naming rights were part of a philanthropic mission, and that the company and its chief executive have longstanding ties with the community. A Geo Group spokesman, Pablo Paez, wrote in an email that the $6 million donation was “consistent with the GEO Group Foundation’s commitment to fund educational causes and scholarships.”

“Often, companies are criticized for not engaging in enough philanthropic ventures, but we strongly believe in the importance of good corporate citizenship,” Paez said, adding that the gift will help “thousands of students attend a first-class institution of higher learning over

Recently by William L. Anderson: My Reply to John Carney

Modern American Higher Education is a PR juggernaut; a knowledge juggernaut it is not, and watching universities trying to become “relevant” often can be entertaining — if it were not so pathetic. Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton is one of those places that started small and wants to be relevant, but instead has become pitiful.

The university itself is a place that rose from tiny beginnings but now is well-known because of a couple of things. The first is for something that recently occurred in a classroom. The second is for an inexcusable act in which the university has gained a corporate sponsor that would make Blackwater look like a good choice.

My first visit to what is now FAU, which was constructed at an abandoned military base, was in March 1968 when I was a ninth grader. Glades Road, where FAU is located, was a two-lane road that led off into nowhere. My mother and I played tennis on the outdoor courts there. Today, the university has more than 20,000 students and Glades Road is a major thoroughfare. However, two things have given the university some unwanted publicity, so the administration there has done what administrations tend to do at the university level these days: abuse students and rely upon public relations, lots of PR.

The Duke Lacrosse Case would not have been possible without the encouragement and near-criminal behavior of Duke’s administrators. (When the three indicted players were vindicated, Duke paid them close to $7 million apiece, from what my friends tell me. But the administrators were able to use someone else’s money.) The situation at FAU is not the lacrosse case, but nonetheless is telling.

An instructor told students to write the name “Jesus” on a sheet of paper and then step on it. From what I can gather, it was not required to stomp, but if one refused, one had to write as to why he or she took such actions. One student, Ryan Rotela, complained to the administration, and the fireworks began.

My sense is that the teacher was trying to be “edgy,” not blasphemous, although he was smart enough not to get his students to write “Mohammed” as opposed to "Jesus,” as he might have faced a future Fatwa. However, given that the professor is a Democratic Party official in Palm Beach County, conservatives have jumped all over this, as you can imagine. And I only can surmise about the kind of hate mail the professor has received from “outraged” Christians.

Unfortunately, the university has retaliated against the student, creating yet another nasty battlefield in the Eternal Culture Wars. As what happens when the lawyers jump into the fight, we shall see charges and countercharges as the talking heads on all sides continue to nationalize what was an incident in a classroom.

Rotela, who is a devout Mormon, has received a "Notice of Charges" from FAU's administration with the following points made in a letter the university sent to him:

…according to a letter written by Associate Dean Rozalia Williams, Rotela is facing a litany of charges — including an alleged violation of the student code of conduct, acts of verbal, written or physical abuse, threats, intimidation, harassment, coercion or other conduct which threaten the health, safety or welfare of any person."

"In the interim, you may not attend class or contact any of the students involved in this matter — verbally or electronically — or by any other means," Williams wrote to Rotela. "Please be advised that a Student Affairs hold may be placed on your records until final disposition of the complaint."

I am not sure what Rotela might have done, but I suspect that the university is angry he told someone outside the "community" (as administrators like to call their university when a faculty member or administrator has committed a faux pas) about what happened. One also has to understand that in this modern secular era, most higher education faculty members and administrators are intellectually incapable of understanding why a student might not want to stomp on a piece of paper with "Jesus" written on it.

Nonetheless, the university now has opened a whole new chapter in abuse of students by bringing charges against the student. Whether or not he broke university rules (the courts have ruled that university administrations are not bound by rules or anything else their handbooks say) is irrelevant to the larger issue of yet another university going after religious students. While the university "apologized" for what happened in the classroom (and I am not sure that an apology was necessary), nonetheless its reaction is worse than whatever took place in class.

Around the country, private universities such as Vanderbilt in Nashville have banned Christian groups from meeting on campus, citing the "open access" rules which state that all official student campus organizations must have membership and leadership positions open to all other students, regardless of the beliefs they might hold. The Christian groups have said that while anyone is invited to attend their meetings, their officers must be Christians, which is too much for the Vandy administration.

(State universities have tried the same thing, but have been rebuffed in the courts because, interestingly, their role as government institutions means that they have to adhere to Constitutional standards of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Sooner or later, however, I predict that the courts will vacate earlier decisions in the name of some "Progressive" line of thinking.)

Unfortunately, FAU's administration has chosen to distinguish itself in quite another endeavor: naming its new football stadium the GEO Group Stadium. For those who do not recognize the firm by its initials, the GEO Groups, Inc., is a firm that makes its money with private prisons. That's right, FAU has given naming rights to its stadium to an organization that essentially is part of the out-of-control incarceration policies of the United States. Lenore Skenazy notes:

The result of our increased eagerness to lock folks up is that America now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. For every 100,000 Americans, we’ve got 730 behind bars. Our next-closest “competitor” is Russia, with 500 per 100,000. Iran has 350, and China is looking like Sweden or something, with just over 100. Peace out, China! How is it that America is so much more jail-happy than even the most repressive regimes?

The trend began in the 1970s, says Sabrina Jones, co-author with Marc Mauer of the graphic book version of “Race to Incarcerate.” Until then, the number of prisoners in the United States had been pretty stable throughout the 20th century. But in just four decades, it skyrocketed from about 250,000 inmates in 1970 to 2.3 million today.

As one who supports private enterprise, I cannot support private institutions that make their money from state-sponsored decisions to throw certain individuals into what essentially are cages. Not in the name of "efficiency" or "saving money for taxpayers." Private prisons are not the result of free exchange or free markets; indeed, the majority of people who enter such facilities do so under duress.

Furthermore, because they essentially are government-created entities, private prisons benefit from the nation's harsh drug laws and the increasing violence committed by police and other state agents. As I told Skenazy when she interviewed me for the article: "These outfits make money by having their prisons filled so they will lobby for laws that call for incarceration of actions that previously people did not go to prison for." We are dealing with moral hazard on steroids.

Free markets and, to be honest, free minds are not prized at American universities. Groupthink — imposed in the name of "diversity" — is common and it seems that the campus tends to be the last bastion of academic Marxists.

It is ironic, then, that a university that wants to be academically "edgy" is willing to have a very symbol of this country's obscene policies of incarceration naming its football stadium. I'd like to say I am surprised, but I am not. After all, the administrators and faculty members that attempt to impose cultural and academic Marxism upon students are intellectual descendants of those who supported tyrants like Josef Stalin and Mao when they were murdering millions, all in the name of building "a socialist paradise."

And, not surprisingly, we see the usual kind of PR talk from all involved, something for which American higher education gives us again and again:

Officials at the GEO Group and Florida Atlantic University asserted that the naming rights were part of a philanthropic mission, and that the company and its chief executive have longstanding ties with the community. A Geo Group spokesman, Pablo Paez, wrote in an email that the $6 million donation was “consistent with the GEO Group Foundation’s commitment to fund educational causes and scholarships.”

“Often, companies are criticized for not engaging in enough philanthropic ventures, but we strongly believe in the importance of good corporate citizenship,” Paez said, adding that the gift will help “thousands of students attend a first-class institution of higher learning over the next 12 years.”

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

Recently by William L. Anderson: Paul Krugman and Zombie FinancialHistory

Your points in the November 29 column on Paul Krugman and the Austrians makes good points, and I would like to make a few comments of my own.

I do believe that when one makes apocalyptic comments, one gets what he deserves if the predictions don’t pan out. As you said, that does not mean the Austrians are wrong regarding money and inflation, but expansions of money, especially in the way that the Fed has gone about doing so, are going to have a number of effects, rising consumer prices being only one of them.

I also believe that some of the Austrians, when they predicted near-instant hyperinflation, should have known better. An expansion in the monetary base can lead to what Milton Friedman called the “pushing on a string” effect, as an expansion of bank reserves will not increase the amount of money in circulation (at least not significantly) if businesses and individuals are not borrowing.

This is not to say that the Law of Marginal Utility, as applied to money, is somehow invalidated. An expansion of money in circulation will mean that the value of the marginal unit — in this case, the dollar — will fall, which means more money will be necessary to complete monetary transactions. That is the straight Law of Marginal Utility, and it applies to money as much as it would to anything else that is scarce.

As Murray Rothbard points out in his book, America’s Great Depression, the amount of money in circulation during the 1920s grew, and he terms that as “inflation.” However, according to the Consumer Price Index of that time, consumer prices fell by roughly one percent a year, which the late Jude Wanniski used as “proof” that Rothbard was wrong when he claimed that the 20s was an inflationary period. What we witnessed was an apples-and-oranges kind of comparison, as most people (including most economists) generally are used to defining inflation as an increase in the government’s CPI, but the Austrians would say that changes in the CPI would be the result of inflation and in our case, the result of the monetary policies of the Fed.

While both Austrians and the Monetarists would see inflation as a monetary phenomenon where changes in relative prices of goods and services occur because the value of money, which is used to denote those relative price relationships, changes as the supply expands and contracts. The Austrians take one step further, however, as they go beyond the quantity effects of increases in the amount of money and look at how these monetary increases change the relative prices of real goods. In other words, the significant effect of changing the amount of money in circulation is not necessarily the changes in consumer prices (although they will change over time relative to the money in circulation), but rather the effect that monetary changes will have upon the relationships of the value of real goods to each other.

This point is vital, for the Austrians hold in their business cycle theory that when the central bank manipulates the banking system to increase the amount of money in circulation, the larger effect is not in consumer price changes but rather the fact that relative values of real goods are changed in a way that directs longer-term investment into lines of production that would seem to be profitable but over time turn out not to be. We certainly saw that in the housing boom and in the tech boom a decade earlier. Investments were directed into production lines that could not be sustained, given the preferences of consumers and their own financial constraints.

In the meantime, the actions of the central bank, when added to various policy initiatives by government, can create these booms that are unsustainable within a market setting and sooner or later are exposed by the markets themselves. When the meltdown became absolutely apparent in September 2008, we were seeing a situation where the market was declaring the mortgage securities held by Wall Street firms to be near-worthless.

(I would like to add a separate point here. Why is it that when a firm tries to manipulate the market to make an asset look more valuable than the market would say it is, authorities view that as being illegal, but when the Fed does it, as it is doing with its QE policies, that is considered “good for the economy”? After all, by purchasing billions of dollars of mortgage securities, the Fed is manipulating their values, given that the sheer purpose of Ben Bernanke’s actions is to artificially raise security prices, which is deemed criminal behavior if a private firm does it.)

Krugman has explained that these bubbles were due to nothing more than the failures of private markets, and that unless government regulators intervene, markets always will go over the cliff because, well, because markets are just like that. Yet, if one holds that price signals really do matter, then one would ask why all markets do not behave in the manner we saw. Why not an automobile bubble or a bubble gum bubble or a firewood bubble? Instead, Krugman wants to absolve the Fed, Freddie and Fannie, and the various government agencies that were pushing home ownership and refinancing through policies of having played any part whatsoever in the housing bubble, as he wants us to believe that the problems were due solely to what he and other Keynesians believe to be the inherent failures that automatically accompany market transactions.

Austrians, on the other hand, look for the cause-and-effect. Carl Menger, the original Austrian Economist, begins his classic 1871 Principles of Economics with: “ALL THINGS ARE SUBJECT to the law of cause and effect. This great principle knows no exception, and we would search in vain in the realm of experience for an example to the contrary.” Why the “irrational exuberance?” Krugman holds to the Keynesian line of “animal spirits” of investors, but that is no cause at all. Why shouldn’t “animal spirits” bid down the values? Do they believe that investors are irrational when bidding up asset prices, but are rational when bidding them down? The Austrians would say that Fed policies of driving down interest rates where they would greatly affect mortgage markets, along with the drive-people-into-home-ownership policies of the Federal government created huge incentives for the creation of the housing boom, which ultimately turned into a bubble, and then a huge bust.

Regarding the consumer price effects of the Fed’s policy of spreading dollars around the world, we can see some price increases in various commodities, i.e. food and fuel. Those of us who purchase gasoline or go to the grocery story can attest to some very large price increases over the past five years, and farmers where I live tell me they are having to absorb large increases in the price of animal feed, fertilizer, and diesel fuel. While Krugman wants to explain away these changes as being driven purely by inherent “volatility” and economic growth in places like China, it would seem to me that large increases in the money prices of those things denominated worldwide in dollars just might be due to large increases in the amount of money being poured into these assets and lines of production.

There is one more point. The Fed has vastly increased its balance sheet and has been spreading dollars around the world, mostly to purchase “assets” that essentially have little or no value so that the holders of those assets do not have to take the necessary financial bath. Such actions would not necessarily result in a huge increases of consumer prices overall, but they would have the effect of directing real investment away from those lines of production that would be both profitable and sustainable. Whether it is protecting the banks or the “green investors” or governments that have spent themselves into financial oblivion, the Fed has stymied the recovery by forcing assets into production areas that are doomed to failure. The result is what we see around is in the anemic economic growth.

Where some of the Austrians went wrong was in assuming that all of the Fed’s new money pumping would be channeled into the purchase of consumer goods, thus driving up their prices. We have to look at where the new money is going, not where we might think it is going.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

Recently by William L. Anderson: Malum Prohibitum: The Evil Legal Language of Progressivism

Murray Rothbard liked to say that economists often tended to specialize in the area where their knowledge was the worst, and given Paul Krugman’s butchery of the historical record, I’d say Rothbard had a good point. Regular readers of Krugman’s columns and blog posts and other public statements would believe, for example, that World War II ended the Great Depression, that Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy (who were major forces in deregulation during the 1970s) were conservative Republicans, and that the only thing better than war to bring prosperity would be the nationwide preparation to fight an invasion of imaginary space aliens.

As always, whenever Krugman goes on a partisan political screed, truth is left behind, and his recent column is no exception. While I have no problem with his criticizing Republicans, nonetheless I actually would want for him to get his criticisms correct, especially his points that the Republican Party is dedicated to laissez-faire economics and actually cutting the size and scope of government.

Unfortunately, he decides to make essentially this set of claims:

• The financial meltdown was purely the fault of private enterprise except for one governmental error: it did not regulate enough;
• The GSEs, Freddie and Fannie, had absolutely nothing to do with the meltdown.

Krugman writes:

Start with the big question: How did we get into the mess we're in?

The financial crisis of 2008 and its painful aftermath, which we're still dealing with, were a huge slap in the face for free-market fundamentalists. Circa 2005, the usual suspects — conservative publications, analysts at right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and so on — insisted that deregulated financial markets were doing just fine, and dismissed warnings about a housing bubble as liberal whining. Then the nonexistent bubble burst, and the financial system proved dangerously fragile; only huge government bailouts prevented a total collapse.

Instead of learning from this experience, however, many on the right have chosen to rewrite history. Back then, they thought things were great, and their only complaint was that the government was getting in the way of even more mortgage lending; now they claim that government policies, somehow dictated by liberals even though the G.O.P. controlled both Congress and the White House, were promoting excessive borrowing and causing all the problems.

Every piece of this revisionist history has been refuted in detail. No, the government didn't force banks to lend to Those People; no, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't cause the housing bubble (they were doing relatively little lending during the peak bubble years); no, government-sponsored lenders weren't responsible for the surge in risky mortgages (private mortgage issuers accounted for the vast majority of the riskiest loans).

But the zombie keeps shambling on — and here's Mr. Rubio Tuesday night: "This idea — that our problems were caused by a government that was too small — it's just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies." Yep, it's the full zombie.

The only accusation he left out was that Republicans were responsible for keeping the space aliens away from us, thus nullifying our chances for economic recovery. But, let us take a look at the record, given that Krugman has made some very important claims.

Understand that he is quietly making the larger claim: price signals mean nothing to entrepreneurs; only government regulators and agents can understand the economy and what actually is happening, and that only government, through spending, regulation, and outright ownership and control of the factors of production, can bring about prosperity.

So, let us talk about the government’s role in this whole thing. First, he leaves out an important player, the Federal Reserve System, and the fact that neither Alan Greenspan nor Ben Bernanke would admit to the creation of the housing bubble and both continued with their policies of pushing down interest rates and directing funds into the housing market through their statements and actions.

Second, Krugman ignores the simple fact that government is the single largest player in the mortgage business through its policies of encouraging and funding home ownership. To claim that the only influence government had through the housing bubble was not regulating enough is yet another Krugman howler, and his claims that Freddie and Fannie were not lending during the “peak bubble years” and that government agencies did not encourage loans to “sub-prime” borrowers is the typical Krugman rewriting of history.

I’ll get to Freddie and Fannie in a moment, but the notion that the banks simply came up with the idea of lending to sub-prime borrowers on their own really does defy history. Yes, it is true that the vast majority of sub-prime loans DID come from the banks, and that their attempts to securitize these loans in order to mitigate the risks were a disaster. I have no problem with this accusation against the Wall Street firms, but there is one thing that Krugman leaves out: the infamous Greenspan-Bernanke “Put.”

When the financial deregulation occurred both during the Carter-Reagan years and at the end of the Clinton administration, the government did not get rid of the moral hazard that essentially guaranteed reckless behavior. Both Greenspan and Bernanke time and again promised to “create liquidity” if the banks got into trouble, and when the markets had the trillions of the Fed standing behind them, it is no wonder that they ran off the rails. Moral hazard has a way of encouraging the very actions that lenders and the entities supporting them should not be taking.

Free markets entail both profits and losses, and when the government essentially lets the banks keep their profits but then promises to socialize the losses, why are we shocked, SHOCKED when the banks do the things they did? What Krugman refuses to do is to acknowledge that the players in private enterprise really will respond to the prospect of losses when they engage in risky behavior. Instead, he simply ignores the fact that the banks knew the Fed and the taxpayers were covering their behinds and so they could be free to engage in behavior that anyone with half a brain knew could produce very bad outcomes.

I’ll make another point about the crisis: the Austrians were on it long before the Keynesians and the rest of American economists jumped on the bubble bandwagon. Mark Thornton in 2004 wrote:

Signs of a “new era” in housing are everywhere. Housing construction is taking place at record rates. New records for real estate prices are being set across the country, especially on the east and west coasts. Booming home prices and record low interest rates are allowing homeowners to refinance their mortgages, “extract equity” to increase their spending, and lower their monthly payment! As one loan officer explained to me: “It’s almost too good to be true.”

In fact, it is too good to be true. What the prophets of the new housing paradigm don’t discuss is that real estate markets have experienced similar cycles in the past and that periods described as new paradigms are often followed by periods of distress in real estate markets, including foreclosure sales, bankruptcy and bank failures.

Furthermore, while the Austrians may be laissez-faire in their economic viewpoints, they hardly are fans of the banks and they certainly did not believe that the Fed and the housing bubble constituted a new era of prosperity. (For that matter, I warned the property tax appeals board in Allegany County, Maryland, in the spring of 2006 that the current housing situation was a bubble and that it would crash, and that government officials should not make future budget predictions off what we were presently seeing. They told me flat out that I was wrong.)

By leaving out the Fed’s “Put” and the other quiet assurances from Congress and the Bush administration that the government had the backsides of the banks, Krugman ignores an important reason as to why the banks ignored price signals and engaged in reckless behavior. While I am sure that Krugman was taught early in in graduate school about moral hazard, his leaving out that important point more to his intellectual dishonesty than it does his lack of economic knowledge.

Freddie and Fannie

Were the GSEs actually non-players in this whole affair, as claimed by Krugman? First, if that were so, then neither entity would have gone bankrupt in 2007, since they did not have risky loans on their books. While it is true that neither GSE was responsible for the vast creation of the subprime loans and their subsequent securitization, but that did not mean they were minor players in the system at the time.

Veronique de Rugy writes:

Fannie and Freddie contributed to the housing crisis by making it easier for more people to take out loans for houses they could not afford. Beginning in 2000, Fannie and Freddie took on loans with low FICO scores, loans with low down payments, and loans with little or no documentation.

The federal government's role in the housing market goes back at least to 1938, but that role changed fundamentally in the 1990s when the government made a push to increase homeownership in the United States. At that time, the federal government pursued several policies that were meant to encourage banks to lend money to lower income earners and to give incentives to low income earners to buy houses. The result, as we now know, was a gigantic amount of subprime mortgages at a time when house prices were starting to go down.

In other words, the encouragement to create sub-prime housing loans came from federal policies, something that Krugman ignores. (Krugman apparently wants us to believe that the banks would suddenly create a bunch of bad loans on their own, and with the full knowledge that if they lost money, the government would not be there to force taxpayers to underwrite these bad loans.) Freddie and Fannie did play a role in creating these sub-prime securities, even if Krugman and the NYT want to ignore that fact.

It gets better. Far from being an almost non-existent player in the crisis, we find that the GSEs actually did have large housing portfolios during this time:

…Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are considered government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). Although both were, before the crisis, privately financed, the general sentiment was that in the event of a crisis in the mortgage market, the federal government would step in and back the GSEs. In other words, the government implicitly guaranteed Fannie and Freddie’s securitized loans. This allowed them to borrow at interest rates below those of the financial markets and to hold much lower capital requirements than commercial and investment banks. The aggregate value of this subsidy has been estimated to range “somewhere between $119 billion and $164 billion, of which shareholders receive respectively between $50 and $97 billion. Astonishingly, the subsidy was almost equal to the market value of these two GSEs.”

As a result, by the time the housing crisis began to unfold, Fannie and Freddie had become the dominating force in the secondary mortgage market, providing 75 percent of financing for new mortgages through securitization at the end of 2007. At the end of 2010, they still held about 50 percent of securitized, first-lien home loans.

Economist Russ Roberts also investigated and found that Freddie and Fannie were more like silent partners in the crisis, contra Krugman:

Fannie and Freddie bought 25.2% of the record $272.81 billion in subprime MBS [mortgage-backed securities] sold in the first half of 2006, according to Inside Mortgage Finance Publications, a Bethesda, MD-based publisher that covers the home loan industry.

In 2005, Fannie and Freddie purchased 35.3% of all subprime MBS, the publication estimated. The year before, the two purchased almost 44% of all subprime MBS sold.

We are not speaking of insignificant numbers. Furthermore, as de Rugy points out, Congress and the administration were not exactly non-players in setting the table for a housing crisis:

In addition, lawmakers in both parties enacted policies directed at increasing home ownership rates, resulting in lower mortgage underwriting standards for Fannie and Freddie. Roberts notes that from 2000 on, Fannie and Freddie bought loans with low FICO scores, loans with very low down payments, and loans with little or no documentation. Contrary to Paul Krugman's assertions, Fannie and Freddie did not "fade away" or "pull back sharply" between 2004 and 2006.

As the following chart from Roberts' study shows, during that same time Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) bought near-record numbers of mortgages, including an ever-growing number of mortgages with low down payments.

Moreover, as the chart below shows, while private players bought many more subprime loans than Freddie and Fannie, GSEs purchased hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from private issuers, holding these securities as investments. (The charts are shown in the Roberts article.)

What Krugman would have us believe is that the government, along with its Frankenstein financial creatures of Fannie, Freddie, and the Community Redevelopment Act, only wanted banks to make sound mortgages with the usual minimum of 20 percent down, good credit scores, and the like. That clearly is nonsense. As Thomas DiLorenzo notes, the only way that banks on their own would have made such risky loans was the fact that federal policies demanded they do so.

One does not need to hold the banks to be innocent bystanders to recognize the role of government policy in the financial crisis. Furthermore, while I have no problem with financial deregulation, I DO have a problem with financial deregulation that is backed by moral hazard. Deregulation was supposed to free financial entities to diversify their loan portfolios and to be able to provide liquid capital to entrepreneurs and businesses that had promising and new ventures.

Furthermore, financial deregulation did make possible the revolution in computers and telecommunications, and had we kept the regulatory system Krugman endorses in place, there would be no Apple Computers, cellphone networks, improved transportation, and IBM would still be the industry leader in the dominant mainframe computer business. Since Keynesians know nothing about entrepreneurship and even less about finance, Krugman probably is incapable of understanding how economies grow, still being stuck in the “aggregate demand” intellectual ghetto.

But financial deregulation only could have worked in the long run had the government made banks and financial houses responsible for their losses. By increasing the various government-led financial backstops as deregulation occurred, Congress almost guaranteed more reckless behavior, and no one should be surprised at what happened.

Unfortunately, these tidbits of truth are left out in Paul Krugman’s own zombie version of economic history. That this rewriting of history comes on the editorial pages of the New York Times should shock no one. After all, the “Newspaper of Record” has been fabricating the “record” for a long time.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

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Recently by William L. Anderson: Aaron Swartz and the Feds: How Progressivism Becomes Tyranny

The outrage over the prosecutor-inducted suicide of Aaron Swartz continues, and well it should. Glenn Greenwald's recent column barely contains the rage of a principled civil libertarian who despite his deep Progressive-Left outlook still can understand government-induced evil when its ugly face is revealed.

Indeed, Progressives from Massachusetts to California are outraged at what they correctly see as a relatively minor legal transgression by an honorable activist turned into a "crime" for which punishment would be imposed that would be greater than that experienced by convicted murderers and rapists. Yet — and I despair of my own inability to make this point so that Progressives can comprehend — what these people seem incapable of understanding is that their own legal/political theology is the problem.

Yes, a lot of outrage properly is directed at U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, a Barack Obama-appointed political animal who apparently had her eyes set upon the governorship of that state. Both she and her assistant, Stephen Heymann, who also has a reputation for being politically-ambitious, are now targeted in petitions to the White House to fire both of them, and because the petitions have more than 25,000 signatures apiece, the Obama administration now is legally-obligated to respond to them. (It will be interesting to see if Obama and his equally-culpable U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose own hands are washed in blood of innocent people, will throw Ortiz and Heymann overboard or if they will try to ride out what could be a difficult political storm.)

In California, Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren has introduced "Aaron's Law" in hopes "to prevent a repeat of the abuses of power he experienced." While this might sound dramatic, it truly is futile, just as former U.S. Senator Jim Webb's attempt to deal with the ugly stain of U.S. incarceration policies and especially those involving the eternal Drug War.

Why, does one ask, are all of these "reform" efforts exercises in futility? Greenwald, after all, is an eloquent and impassioned voice for justice, perhaps the best on the modern scene. Even conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, are able to agree somewhat with one another that things have gone too far, that too many people are incarcerated, there are too many laws, and too many "crimes."

Yet, I doubt that one Progressive, Right or Left, that one outraged lawyer in Massachusetts, the Great Greenwald, or even any member of Aaron Swartz's grieving family can recognize the real problem: Malum Prohibitum. Yes, Malum Prohibitum is the very core, the very essence of Progressive law, and it is that legal doctrine that has turned U.S. law into the horror story it has become, but because most Americans have come to believe that Malum Prohibitum is the very essence of justice itself, we are doomed well into the future to live its awful results.

Let me give an example that I believe will explain my position. Many of the same people who are outraged that Ortiz and Heymann could drive a brilliant young man to his death by converting what essentially was a small violation based upon Malum Prohibitum into a series of "crimes" punishable by up to half a century in prison no doubt fully support that Gov. Andrew Cuomo was able to do in the State of New York this past week.

To the lavish praise of the ultra-Progressive New York Times, Cuomo got the state legislature to pass sweeping gun laws that turned legal possessions into illegal contraband. In the future — with the full support of Progressives everywhere — SWAT teams will violently invade the homes of many gun owners to confiscate weapons that pose no danger to anyone and whose law-abiding owners either will be killed or arrested and become treated as though they were dangerous murderers. We know these things will happen, and I would even surmise that Greenwald and nearly every mourner at Aaron Swartz's funeral would agree that New York authorities would be legally and morally correct.

When a man who has owned a gun — say a World War II vintage M-1 Garand — for many years but fails to register it with the authorities in New York, even if that gun is locked in a safe and is unloaded and has not been fired in a generation, the police can and will swoop into his house armed to the teeth. If the man or any member of his family is gunned down in the SWAT melee, at very best Progressives will see it as unfortunate "collateral damage" in the enforcement of a "good law." Yet, that man and his family will have posed no greater threat to society than did Aaron Swartz and an army of his "hacker" friends, but the response of the Progressive "community" will be poles apart.

I say this not to condemn Greenwald — certainly one of the greatest living champions of human rights — or anyone associated with Aaron Swartz, nor do I accuse them of being hypocrites. What we have to understand is that the very essence of Progressivism is the belief that the State and its agents must decide what is right and what is wrong, and that Malum Prohibitum carry the same moral and legal weight as the ancient legal doctrine of Malum in Se. All Progressives — Right or Left — believe these things and cannot imagine a world without such doctrines.

The idea of Malum in Se is that some things are unlawful in and of themselves, and that everyone recognizes the wrongness in the acts. Murders, theft, assault, robbery, rape, lying in a legal proceeding, and other such actions have been illegal throughout history in almost every culture. That people have managed to avoid capture and punishment or that people given State privilege are able to do these things and not be sanctioned does not make them "legal" in the minds of most people, but serves as a cause of outrage.

Unfortunately, Malum Prohibitum has replaced Malum in Se as the guiding legal force in American criminal law. The vast majority of the two-million-plus people in American prisons, both state and federal, and the many millions more in the criminal justice system, are there because they allegedly violated "laws" based upon Malum Prohibitum, and we have to understand that the laws and punishments that flow from that doctrine are severe and arbitrary and have turned this country's "justice" system into a maw of injustice.

Even though at least one "mainstream" U.S. law professor has said that the draconian punishments that Ortiz and Heymann were seeking involved a "fair reading of the law," people naturally are outraged that an original act that in itself was more symbolic that really did not impose harm on others could be legally interpreted as the legal (and moral) equivalent of terrorism with some of the harshest punishments this side of execution being dangled before Swartz. I will go even further: This entire legal episode was based totally upon Malum Prohibitum and that Swartz did not engage in real harm, but simply broke a set of rules that arbitrarily were imposed.

The legal essence of the True American Revolution of Progressivism was the imposition of rules that essentially criminalized actions that before the Progressive Era were legal. Certainly the "crown jewel" of the Progressive Movement of the early 20th Century was alcohol prohibition, but despite the utter failure of Prohibition, American politicians — with full support from the voters who supposedly are the "essence" of democracy — have expanded the doctrines of Prohibition not only to include drugs, but firearms, speech, and some forms of pornography.

Criminal law in the USA, both state and federal, has seen explosive growth in recent decades and almost all of it is based upon doctrines of Malum Prohibitum. Government authorities determine what is "bad," and then they outlaw it with the idea that a submissive populace eagerly will obey the next set of rules politicians and bureaucrats send down the pike. As the Progressive mainstream media fuels the next "crisis," government agents swoop in and "solve" the problem by imposing a new set of rules that the media and their academic allies then declare to be Holy Writ.

This process has gone on almost unabated for more than a century and most Americans could not imagine their lives without being surrounded by arbitrary rules imposed by their supposed "democracy." For that matter, I would say that the near-whole of federal criminal law is based upon Malum Prohibitum, and while state prisons hold many more inmates than do federal prisons, the Drug War that has fueled most of the increase of prisoners primarily has been a federal initiative, and even when states revolt, as many have done with regards to use of marijuana, federal authorities still demand prosecution of people who use the drug, even those who have it prescribed by doctors.

Americans who may be outraged at how federal authorities piled onto Aaron Swartz are perfectly happy with how federal and state governments tell them what they can and cannot eat, what they can and cannot wear, the kind of milk they may drink, how large their soft drink containers might be, whether or not they can own firearms for their own protection, and even what they can believe about the origins of the universe. They are perfectly content that police officers can raid their homes at will, shoot their family pets, pull them over on highways for arbitrary infractions of the rules, and physically assault them and even kill them without having to worry about being punished no matter how outrageous the police conduct. (I cannot count how many times I have been told, "If you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about." Oh, to wish that really were true.)

As I wrote before, the entire federal "criminal" case against Aaron Swartz was constructed upon the doctrines of Malum Prohibitum. Every second that he would have had to spend in prison came about from penalties prescribed by Congress and the government bureaucracies and every second of those penalties was an arbitrary number. Every "crime" he allegedly committed came from rules prohibiting actions that not long ago were legal.

Furthermore, the core of the "criminal" case was fashioned from "wire fraud" and "computer fraud" statutes that made the action "illegal" because he used the Internet and a laptop computer. If this is not arbitrary, then the word does not exist. The original act itself — downloading papers from the JSTOR site — was not clearly illegal, yet Ortiz, Heymann, and their staffs were able to create a mountain of criminal charges that essentially would have resulted in a life sentence for this young man, and ultimately drove him to take his own life.

This sorry legal and moral episode was not made possible by "overzealousness" and I would not dignify the word "zealous" to describe either Ortiz or Heymann. The problem was not that two members of the law enforcement community had such "zeal" for right and wrong that they got carried away and pushed the case beyond some legal or even moral boundaries.

The problem was that two politically-ambitious people were able to use the legal doctrines of Malum Prohibitum to pursue an agenda that would have forced taxpayers to fund what essentially was free political publicity for both of them, publicity that they believed would have resulted in personal gains for themselves. Rudy Giuliani did this successfully by engaging in reckless law-breaking in his pursuit of Michael Milken. James Comey did the same when he went after Martha Stewart, and Joel Klein benefitted handsomely from his legal actions against Microsoft.

Ortiz and Heymann were following the same prescription for "success" laid down by ambitious and immoral people like Giuliani, Comey, Klein, and others. They had no reason to believe that destroying the life of Aaron Swartz would result in nothing but personal rewards that would make them wealthy and powerful. After all, other federal agents had successfully trod the same path and it worked for them.

By slipping a belt around his neck and hanging until his life ebbed away, Aaron Swartz believed he only was ending his own tortured life. He had no idea that his action would (one would hope) destroy the legal and political careers of two evil and ambitious people who should be pursued into oblivion and who deserve a much worse fate than what will befall a publicly-disgraced man like Lance Armstrong.

Unfortunately, there is a much larger story here that needs to be told, and not enough people are going to recognize what that story is, much less tell it to the world. Aaron Swartz was hounded to his death ultimately by the horrid and evil legal doctrines of Malum Prohibitum, arbitrary doctrines that have become the very basis for the laws that rule our lives. These doctrines are what provide support for Progressivism, and until Americans recognize that fact and until Americans are willing to do away with the web of rules and more rules that oppress them, they will be forced to live the nightmare time and again.

This is not simply a problem caused by those Progressives on the Left, as utterly hypocritical as they might be. The law-and-order Progressives of the Right are just as bad (and maybe worse) because they are True Believers that Malum Prohibitum is the essence of the Good Society and that rules are there for a good reason. Perhaps it is that mentality that led the evangelical and politically-conservative World Magazine to lavish praise upon a nihilistic and immoral movie like Zero Dark Thirty while mentioning the death of Aaron Swartz only in passing, with the passage not even beginning to address the vast and arbitrary powers of the prosecutors and making it sound as though only a few activists believed the prosecutors were wrong.

The Aaron Swartz case was not a legal outlier any more than Michael Nifong was a "rogue" prosecutor. Aaron Swartz faced what thousands upon thousands of Americans face every day from a system of laws that empowers the State and crushes liberty and replaces the light of a free society with the darkness of tyranny. Most of the victims of American "justice" choose to experience the horror and remain alive, even though in reality, unbridled State power has sucked the life out of them just as it drained the life out of Aaron Swartz.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

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Recently by William L. Anderson: Be Happy! Progressives Have Wonderful Plans for You!

When Aaron Swartz allegedly chose to end his life last week, he was facing federal criminal charges that a compliant federal jury almost certainly would have transformed into a conviction, with his facing many years in a federal prison. Other writers have spoken out about the case and how it ended tragically, and their knowledge of the Internet and its many nuances is much greater than my own, and I believe their tributes and personal statements are more insightful than anything I could say about Swartz's life and his many accomplishments. (Glenn Greenwald's tribute better sums up in a few words than I could say in 20 pages, so I encourage readers to read what Greenwald and others have to say in Swartz's defense.)

I will write, instead, on a subject on which I have better knowledge: the actions of federal prosecutors and how they are the natural offspring of the Progressive beliefs that so many Internet activists share. Yes, this is ironic, in that the civil religion of many people now mourning Aaron's death provided the fuel for the very fire that engulfed this brilliant young man. The unfortunate thing is that almost no one will recognize the connection and, thus, will continue to embrace the very religion that is strangling them and their creativity.

At this point, let me say that readers of my material surely are going to think that my attempts to draw the connections between Progressive thinking and the malicious prosecution of Aaron Swartz are a stretch. They are not. What happened to Swartz is a logical extension of a civil religion that holds the expansion state power and the employment of "experts" who wield it and make decisions about the use of force is what defines a truly civilized society. While I don't know what Swartz's politics were, I suppose that he, like most other intellectuals in the Harvard-MIT sphere, subscribed unknowingly to the very kind of thinking that ultimately would bring him to a ruinous end.

Federal prosecutors in Boston (who ironically are silent out of what they claim to be "respect" for Swartz's family, as though federal prosecutors give a damn about anyone but themselves) went after him for finding a way to download a number of files from JSTOR, the website that has archived millions of academic journal papers. One blogger put this into perspective:

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The "property" Aaron had "stolen," we were told, was worth "millions of dollars" u2014 with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed. (Emphasis his)

Writes Greenwald:

To say that the DOJ’s treatment of Swartz was excessive and vindictive is an extreme understatement. When I wrote about Swartz’s plight last August, I wrote that he was “being prosecuted by the DOJ with obscene over-zealousness”. Timothy Lee wrote the definitive article in 2011 explaining why, even if all the allegations in the indictment are true, the only real crime committed by Swartz was basic trespassing, for which people are punished, at most, with 30 days in jail and a $100 fine, about which Lee wrote: “That seems about right: if he’s going to serve prison time, it should be measured in days rather than years.”

He even speculates as to why the feds would seem to be so "over-zealous":

Nobody knows for sure why federal prosecutors decided to pursue Swartz so vindictively, as though he had committed some sort of major crime that deserved many years in prison and financial ruin. Some theorized that the DOJ hated him for his serial activism and civil disobedience. Others speculated that, as Doctorow put it, “the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them.”

As correct as Greenwald might be, I think there is an even larger point that Greenwald and others miss precisely because they are Progressives themselves, and because they still subscribe to the political views that made this abusive prosecution possible. The heart of Progressive thinking is that state-sponsored "experts" should be given vast powers because they already know what needs to be done and how to do it.

During the Progressive Era of a century ago, the intellectuals pushing this way of thinking openly despised the U.S. Constitution and any idea that individuals should be free to think and act for themselves. From the belief in the primacy of Eugenics, held by people like Margaret Sanger, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others, to the idea that government could and should manipulate markets in order to obtain "socially-optimal outcomes," Progressives were united in their conviction that intellectuals and "experts" employed by the State could and should make decisions on how others — especially those who were "inferiors" — should live.

While today's Progressives do not openly espouse the overt racism held by most early Progressives (and especially Woodrow Wilson, who brought Jim Crow laws and policies to the federal government), nonetheless they still admire their intellectual forebears and they hold to the belief that State power guided by (of course) Progressives will ultimately produce the Good Society, whatever that may be. All one needs to do is to read the editorial page (and the front page, for that matter) of the New York Times to get a sense of how Progressives think, and how they utterly despise anyone who is not of their ilk.

I have written many articles on federal criminal law for this page, and for other publications, such as The Freeman, Regulation, The Independent Review, and Freedom Daily, and the theme always has been the same: federal criminal law permits ambitious prosecutors (or even lazy career prosecutors) to shape just about any action one takes into a monstrous crimes that the Progressive media echoes as being a huge threat to the well-being of all. While some (including the bloggers and writers dealing with the Swartz case) seem to believe that this legal abuse is the result of "overzealousness" or "overcriminalization," I see it from a very different point of view.

Most federal crimes today do not involve actual theft or unwarranted actions of violence against others, but rather are the result of someone allegedly breaking a rule. Thus, what was "legal" on one day suddenly becomes illegal today, and as time goes on and people continue to break the rules, the penalties become increasingly draconian. (The Drug War and its escalation into the present-day situation in which U.S. police have become essentially paramilitary forces acting like occupying armies is the "gold standard" in understanding how the system metastasizes.)

With these points in mind, I examine the charges against Swartz to point out just how awful and just plain immoral they were. Of course, the standard federal charge of "fraud" is all through the 14 indictments, but it is questionable as to whether or not he actually "defrauded" JSTOR (which settled with Swartz later and the principals of JSTOR clearly did not want Swartz prosecuted). What he did was to devise a system to get around the blocks that JSTOR has in order to keep "unauthorized" users out.

While the feds in the indictment sheet point out that some universities pay up to $50,000 a year for JSTOR services, Swartz did not deprive other professors and researchers at MIT from using JSTOR (except for the brief time when MIT shut down the system to block Swartz, but that was MIT's choice, not Swartz's). He allegedly downloaded close to a million papers, but clearly could not have sold them, so they were not worth anything to him financially.

(The feds told the media that he "stole" material worth "millions of dollars," but there is a huge point that needs to be made: theft means that I have your material — and deprive you of the use of what is legitimately your property. No one at MIT or anywhere else where JSTOR is used was deprived of a single academic paper for their own research. The JSTOR system exists because of Intellectual Property rules, period, and IP rules have become increasingly artificial — and more draconian in the penalties — which is what we have come to understand is the hallmark of the growth of federal criminal law.)

Because he performed the "unauthorized" downloads more than once, the feds essentially repeat the same charges over and over again. Federal law encourages prosecutors to take a single act and fashion multiple charges from it, the feds were able to get 14 separate charges. Furthermore, because he was using a computer and the Internet, the feds could charge him with "wire fraud," which is nothing more than what Candice E. Jackson and I described as a "derivative crime" in which the act itself (using the Internet) is not criminal, but the charges are put together in a way to make an imaginary act a crime.

For example, the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) allows prosecutors to bundle sets of actions and declare them to be a single act of "racketeering." Now, no one "racketeers" anyone, and the "crime" is "derived" from other actions, but "racketeering" sounds quite onerous and has very stiff criminal penalties associated with it. Likewise, "wire fraud" is an imaginary crime that was created simply to allow prosecutors to pile on more charges in hopes of getting a plea bargain. In some cases, prosecutors are permitted to seize a defendant's assets even before a trial, making it virtually impossible for a defendant to pay for decent legal help, and the "indigent" lawyers provided by the government generally are people who mostly plead out drug cases. (American prosecutors have a saying that describes their goals when going after others: "Bleed u2018em and plead u2018em.")

Indeed, Swartz was bled dry. While federal prosecutors have near-unlimited resources, those charged must pay for a defense themselves, and federal prosecutions are extremely expensive. It is not unusual for defendants to have to come up with a million dollars or more. (In the Duke Lacrosse case — a state case — the three defendants had to spend about a million-and-a-half dollars apiece even though the case never came to trial and even though it was obvious from the start that the charges were false.)

As Swartz never had sought to use his abilities to become wealthy, he ran out of money and, according to one blogger, he was forbidden by the federal district judge in Boston from appealing to the public for legal funds. Thus, his attorneys were hamstrung by a lack of resources even before the case was scheduled to go to trial in April.

Then there was stress, and I don't think people can imagine the stress one is under when facing a criminal trial. I have seen good people fall apart under the pressure, and it is that pressure that leads one to plead out just to get things over and done. Because prosecutors are permitted by judges to engage in misconduct (and most judges sympathize with their employer, the government, of course) and because juries generally don't care, the odds of even innocent people prevailing at trial are astronomically small.

I have serious doubts that even with the best of legal help, Aaron Swartz would have prevailed at trial, and that is because federal criminal law does not hold to the mens rea standard. (Under the ancient Anglo-American doctrine of mens rea, a defendant must have intended to commit a crime. Today, the courts interpret that doctrine in a much different way: one must have intended to commit the act that the feds claim is criminal.) Furthermore, as I have written before, federal cases differ from typical state cases in another important way: the action itself.

Assume, for example, that someone is accused of murdering a store clerk during a robbery. One can see on the video the person taking something at gunpoint and then shooting the clerk. No one disputes that an actual robbery and murder took place; what is decided is whether or not the person in the dock is the one who committed the crime.

In federal cases, however, people may well agree on the act itself — Swartz did not deny using a computer to hack into the JSTOR system — but a jury is supposed to decide whether or not the act itself is criminal. Because the laws themselves can be confusing and because certain technical issues might be introduced (one can imagine the terminology that was to be used at Swartz's trial), jurors tend to give up and just assume that the fact that someone is on trial is proof of guilt. I have seen situation after situation in which jurors clearly did not understand what was happening, so they took the default position of "guilty."

I suspect that federal prosecutors would have likened Swartz to a computer hacker who breaks into financial accounts and steals money or someone who creates a malicious virus for the fun of it. By lumping him into a category of real criminals, the feds would have been able to obscure the fact that no one was deprived of any particular good, which clearly would have set him apart from someone who illegally drains the bank account of someone else. Even though Swartz would have gained no material wealth from the downloads, nor could he have sold these papers at any price, the feds still were accusing him of stealing "millions of dollars" of material. That was nonsense, but most federal criminal charges are nonsense.

Federal juries, as most court observers will note, rarely are able to differentiate between real crimes and federal rule-breaking. The difference is huge, but after more than a century of Progressivism, Americans have come to see arbitrary rules having the same moral and legal structure as what historically has been regarded as law. Thus, a jury would convict attorney Johnny Gaskins of "structuring" because he deposited cash holdings at his home in amounts under $10,000. He had obtained the money legally, had reported it to the IRS and paid taxes, but still he was convicted because he broke a rule that had an arbitrary number — $10,000 — attached.

(I also note that when Elliott Spitzer was a U.S. attorney and the governor of New York, he also engaged in "structuring" withdrawals in order to evade the law, as he was visiting prostitutes. Despite the clear evidence against him, the government failed to file charges, as those who are politically-connected have insurance policies when they are caught breaking the law.)

Before the proliferation of federal criminal laws, at worst Swartz would have been charged with trespassing (had it even come to criminal proceedings), and most likely the matter would have been handled privately. However, federal prosecutors had different ideas, and while Greenwald notes that there likely could have been other factors — such as his activism in undermining what he believed to be immoral aspects of IP law — I will claim ignorance here.

Over the years, I have found that federal prosecutors don't need to have any particular reason to go after essentially innocent people. For them, it is fun to destroy others, and they relish the "hunt" and the "chase" as much as anything else. Because prosecutors rarely are disciplined for misconduct, this is a profession that attracts bullies, mediocre attorneys who love to stick it to others, and ambitious but dishonest people. Aaron Swartz fell victim to that state of affairs, and the fact that this kind of malicious prosecution is the direct result of the Progressive mentality means that only those who are not part of the Progressive mindset — a very few number of people, indeed — really will understand what is happening.

Progressives believed (and still believe) that unlimited executive power placed in the hands of "experts" and "good government" types will produce the Good Society. Because of the reality of human nature, political and legal power in the hands of people who believe themselves invincible and righteous always will turn into the worst kind of tyranny. There is no exception.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

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Recently by William L. Anderson: Progressives and the Phony Gun Debate

As one who does not care much for American Progressives, I do read their sites on a regular basis. Not only does that mean reading Paul Krugman's columns, blog posts, and occasionally his television appearances. (I cover Krugman and other "economic Progressives" in my website, Krugman-in-Wonderland.)

Another site I visit infrequently is the Daily Kos, which is one of the most influential Democratic Party sites and receives huge amounts of daily traffic. The Daily Kos does not repeat Democratic "talking points;" it generates political talking points that later are found in mainstream publications and from Democratic politicians themselves. Thus, when the Daily Kos not only calls for prohibition on all privately-owned firearms and lays out the political and legal road map on how to accomplish that political goal, Libertarians and others need to pay attention. These people are serious and are willing to use violent means to accomplish their ends.

We should not be surprised that Progressives have this goal, nor should we be surprised when they deny it and call us "paranoid" and "whack jobs" for believing what Progressives always have believed: all individuals should be firmly and absolutely made subservient to the State, and part of subservience is being disarmed and unable to defend oneself from other predators. Only the State is fit to protect us, even if the U.S. Supreme Court already has ruled that police have no legal obligation to protect anyone.

The writer, identified only as "Sporks," begins with explanations about why an assault weapons ban won't have any effect upon crime in general or spree shootings in particular:

It’s nice that we’re finally talking about gun control. It’s very sad that it took such a terrible tragedy to talk about it, but I’m glad the conversation is happening. I hear a lot about assault weapon and large magazine bans, and whilst I’m supportive of that, it won’t solve the problem. The vast majority of firearm deaths occur with handguns. Only about 5% of people killed by guns are killed by guns which would be banned in any foreseeable AWB.

Furthermore, there seems to be no talk about high powered rifles. What gun nuts don’t want you to know is many target and hunting rifles are chambered in the same round (.223/5.56mm) that Lanza’s assault weapon was. Even more guns are chambered for more powerful rounds, like the .30-06 or (my personal “favorite”) 7.62x54R. Even a .22, the smallest round manufactured on a large scale, can kill easily. In fact, some say the .22 kills more people than any other round out there.

Again, I like that we’re talking about assault weapons, machine guns, and high capacity clips. But it only takes one bullet out of one gun to kill a person. Remember the beltway sniper back in 2002? The one who killed a dozen odd people? Even though he used a bushmaster assault rifle, he only fired one round at a time before moving. He could have used literally any rifle sold in the US for his attacks.

While one could use the above argument against an assault weapons ban, the Daily Kos continues with what it says will eliminate almost all crime:

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence. (Emphasis mine)

Although the writer says he believes that banning all civilian gun ownership will make us "truly" safe, it is hard to agree with such a statement, since murders and other violent crime still happen in countries that either ban civilian ownership or restrict it so that individuals effectively are kept from legal ownership of guns, including Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. The purpose, as one finds while reading this political screed, is for people the author hates — legal gun owners — ultimately to be imprisoned or killed violently by the police, as we shall see.

Like so many government actions that start out being "voluntary" and later become mandatory, the author calls for a national registry emphasizing "voluntary" compliance that then turns into something else:

Along with this, make private sales illegal. When a firearm is transferred, make it law that the registration must be updated. Again, make it super easy to do. Perhaps over, the internet. Dealers can log in by their FFLs and update the registration. Additionally, new guns are to be registered by the manufacturer. The object here is to create a clear paper trail from factory to distributor to dealer to owner. We want to encourage as much voluntary compliance as possible.

Now we get down to it. The registration period has passed. Now we have criminals without registered guns running around. Probably kooky types that “lost” them on a boat or something. So remember those ATF form 4473s? Those record every firearm sale, going back twenty years. And those have to be surrendered to the ATF on demand. So, we get those logbooks, and cross reference the names and addresses with the new national registry. Since most NRA types own two or (many) more guns, we can get an idea of who properly registered their guns and who didn’t. For example, if we have a guy who purchased 6 guns over the course of 10 years, but only registered two of them, that raises a red flag.

What happens at this point? Now the police become involved and the Daily Kos advocates the most violent approach to anyone who might technically "violate" the new rules:

Now, maybe he sold them or they got lost or something. But it gives us a good target for investigation. A nice visit by the ATF or state police to find out if he really does still have those guns would be certainly warranted. It’s certainly not perfect. People may have gotten guns from parents or family, and not registered them. Perfect is the enemy of pretty darn good, as they say. This exercise isn’t so much to track down every gun ever sold; the main idea would be to profile and investigate people that may not have registered their guns. As an example, I’m not so concerned with the guy who bought that bolt action Mauser a decade ago and doesn’t have anything registered to his name. It’s a pretty good possibility that he sold it, gave it away, or got rid of it somehow. And even if he didn’t, that guy is not who I’m concerned with. I’m concerned that other guy who bought a half dozen assault weapons, registered two hunting rifles, and belongs to the NRA/GOA. He’s the guy who warrants a raid. (Emphasis mine)

The recommendation here depends upon one thing: all government agents raiding others are armed, and armed to the teeth. The author, then, is saying that indiscriminate raids, which often end in tragedy and the loss of innocent life, are a good thing and should be expanded.

(We should not be surprised that the Daily Kos is a cheerleader for government violence. This is the same political blog that claims that socialism is good for the United States because it has provided war, the CIA, business subsidies, FEMA and…the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. At least we know what they believe in Washington, D.C.)

As for gun control, the author then demands an end to the gun registry, with a government campaign to tax, harass, arrest, and turn on the propaganda:

A national Firearms Owner Identification Card might be good, but I’m not sure if it’s necessary if we have a national database. We should also insist on comprehensive insurance and mandatory gun safes, subject to random, spot checks by local and federal law enforcement.

We must make guns expensive and unpopular, just like cigarettes. A nationwide, antigun campaign paid for by a per gun yearly tax paid by owners, dealers, and manufacturers would work well in this regard.

If that is not enough, then the government will turn on the hunters as well:

We should also segway into an anti-hunting campaign, like those in the UK. By making hunting expensive and unpopular, we can make the transition to a gun free society much less of a headache for us.

I know this seems harsh, but this is the only way we can be truly safe. I don’t want my kids being shot at by a deranged NRA member. I’m sure you don’t either. So lets stop looking for short term solutions and start looking long term. Registration is the first step.

My guess is that very few crimes have been committed by NRA or GOA members, but that is not his point. These people are different than "Spork," and while they pose no threat to him whatsoever, the very existence of people who might have different outlooks on life is just too intolerable. They must be arrested or killed, but they certainly need to be eliminated. (And to think that the writers for Daily Kos consider themselves to be the Apostles of Tolerance.)

There also is another matter to consider, although I doubt it would bother the Daily Kos people or their fellow Progressives: Since police and other government "law enforcement" officers and departments would not be affected by this gun ban, it is ludicrous to think that many of these weapons and ammunition would not make their way into the hands of civilian criminals (as opposed to government criminals who are permitted to commit robbery, murder, and rape and not have to worry about being punished).

My sense is that the Daily Kos people know exactly what would happen, as armed criminals would go on rampages against unarmed civilians, with the police dutifully drawing the yellow chalk lines around the bodies. One also could expect civilians who did try to defend themselves and their families from armed predators (not police, just regular criminals) quickly and surely would be charged with crimes as they are in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand, as it effectively is illegal for people to engage in self-defense, even if their lives are in danger.

Progressives really don't care whether or not individuals are safe in their homes, and if they truly believed that firearms themselves were the cause of violence, then they would demand disarmament of the U.S. Armed Forces and all state, local, and federal police. Furthermore, most of them know that the vast majority of legal gun owners in this country do not commit crimes, nor are they a danger to the public.

However, most Progressives believe that even the mere presence of a lawful gun owner is so odious and so evil that if the government cannot rid the world of those people, at least it can try to take away all of their firearms. My sense is Progressives will not stop there if they have any success at all with the latest gun-control/gun-ban initiative. As they continue to win more political victories, and as they continue to ravage the U.S. economy, they will become even angrier and more paranoid and more oppressive. Their end is a society in which the State makes all decisions for individuals, and their means is violence and more violence.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

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Recently by William L. Anderson: Understanding the ProgressiveMind

Whenever one sees the word "debate" in the New York Times or any other Progressive Mainstream Media source, one should substitute the word "monologue," which is a much more accurate assessment of what actually is happening. Progressives and the MSM allies do not want a "debate" over gun control; what they want are laws banning private ownership of firearms, period, and anything else is only a way-station to the final destination: total private gun bans.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, the sister of one of the murdered children wrote a well-publicized letter to President Barack Obama, imploring him to ban all weapons except those held by the police and government agencies. Now, one can excuse a grief-stricken 10-year-old child for demanding that the USA adopt what essentially was the gun standard for the former Soviet Union and other communist countries, although I doubt seriously that the child herself actually came up with the idea for the letter at all, or at least its contents.

Nonetheless, the child pretty much has stated what is the ultimate agenda for American Progressives, and until that ban is complete, we will not hear the end of terms such as "sensible gun control." To Progressives, "sensible gun control" is not simple registration or even a ban on so-called assault weapons and handguns. No, it is total and absolute prohibition for private citizens, while at the same time, government authorities are going to be armed to the teeth.

(Lest someone doubt my point that Progressives want to ban private firearm ownership, this article posted on the Progressive Daily Kos website lays out a plan for banning private weapons. The police, of course, would remain heavily armed. Not surprisingly, this website, which is one of the most influential Democratic Party sites, claims that most gun crime is committed by "NRA members." So, when Progressives don't have the data to back up claims, they just make up things as they go.)

In trying to "dialog" with Progressives on this issue, Libertarians have cited facts, appealed to the U.S. Constitution, and pretty much have acted as though Progressives can be convinced with an argument based upon reason and logic. Unfortunately, they forget that Progressives create their logical propositions based upon very different assumptions than do Libertarians. A Libertarian syllogism might go something like this:

• Individuals have rights, and one of those rights is the right to self-defense;
• Firearms provide a very effective way for individuals to defend themselves against those who would seek to invade their property and harm them and their families;
• Therefore, individuals should not be impeded by the State from owning firearms.

The Progressive syllogism, however, is much differently-constructed:

• All individual "rights" really are created and given by the State;
• No private individual has a "right" to self-defense unless granted so by the State:
• Therefore, private individuals have no right to firearm ownership.

A parallel Progressive syllogism would be constructed as such:

• An all-powerful and unlimited State is necessary for the functioning of a good society;
• All individuals employed in occupations that defend the State have the right to self-defense;
• Therefore, those individuals should be equipped with firearms to ensure "officer safety" and the safety of other government officials.

This is not a caricature of Progressive thinking (although I wish it were). To typical Progressives, government is the very essence of life, and anyone who is not directly employed by government or who has been given police powers by the State stands in the way of the State providing life and happiness.

Lest anyone believe that denial of individual self-defense is a top agenda for Progressives, think again. Both Canada and Great Britain essentially have outlawed individual self-defense, and should any individual use any kind of "offensive weapon" in self-defense, then that person faces extremely harsh punishments. Joyce Lee Malcolm writes:

A homeowner (in Great Britain) who discovered two robbers in his home held them with a toy gun while he telephoned the police. When the police arrived they arrested the two men, and also the homeowner, who was charged with putting someone in fear with a toy gun. An elderly woman who scared off a gang of youths by firing a cap pistol was charged with the same offense.

She continues:

The BBC offers this advice for anyone in Britain who is attacked on the street: You are permitted to protect yourself with a briefcase, a handbag, or keys. You should shout "Call the Police" rather than "Help." Bystanders are not to help. They have been taught to leave such matters to the professionals. If you manage to knock your attacker down, you must not hit him again or you risk being charged with assault. (Emphasis mine)

This is quite instructive if one wishes to understand the mentality of Progressives. To the typical Progressives, the elderly lady and the homeowner mentioned above were a threat to the monopoly power and the primacy of the State and deserved harsh punishment — even imprisonment — for exercising "privileges" not granted to them by the State. Keep in mind that Progressives have permitted the police to use deadly force against unarmed people, and that police officers regularly beat people brutally, and even the worst of these actions generally are excused or legally "justified" altogether, or the offending officer receives a wrist slap for punishment.

We must understand that this is not a situation in which we see the "Law of Unintended Consequences" in action; the authorities have fully intended for these consequences to occur, and each time an innocent person is beaten to death by thugs, or each time a person intending to defend himself or herself from an unwarranted assault is charged with a crime, the State and Progressives have won.

Several years ago, while riding a bus in Vancouver, Canada, I conversed with a local and asked him about the prohibition on self-defense. (Canada's laws on this subject are similar to those in Great Britain.) When I asked him his thoughts on the law, he replied, "We Canadians are quite proud of these laws." Incredulous, I asked him why he believed it was wrong for an individual to defend himself against an unwarranted assault. He replied, "It reduces violence, since one has to act violently in self-defense."

I suspect that he echoes a lot (though hardly all) Canadians and probably most citizens of Great Britain. Once State authorities strip rights from individuals, they make it very dangerous for people to try to reclaim them, and ultimately, people just want to be protected from the predations of the State as much as from attacks and assaults on their own property. And since they cannot defend themselves effectively from State agents fully intending to wreak violence upon others, they realize that the best defense is just to be as invisible as possible.

Thus, when they are burglarized or attacked by criminals, they call the police, and then bear the costs. If a loved one is assaulted or murdered, they bear those costs as well. They say nothing that would anger the authorities and invite State-sponsored revenge upon themselves.

But what about the Progressive canard, "The only protection you need is the police"? Nicholas Kristof, in his recent anti-gun ownership screed from the New York Times, writes:

Published research makes it clear that having a gun in the home simply makes it more likely that you will be shot — by your partner or by yourself. Americans are safer if they rely on 911 for protection rather than on a gun.

Other Progressives have written that it is "grotesque" even to contemplate having armed guards at school, yet they will not explain why it is not "grotesque" that police officers carry automatic weapons, and why government officials and other public figures are surrounded by armed entourages that will gun down anyone on sight.

Unfortunately, Progressives do have an answer, even to this question, and it is: "We want children to feel safe, and they won't feel safe if someone with a gun is nearby. As for government officials, they are necessary for our very well-being and if someone is permitted to freely assault an official, then the attackers have assaulted all of us.

There is another lesson for everyone here, and that is the lesson of how socialism really works. In the U.S.S.R., people who were politically-connected received the best medical care, were able to be first in line to receive decent housing, and were permitted to shop in "Yellow-Curtain" shops that had goods unavailable in typical Soviet stores. Everyone else was left more of left to fend for himself, receive substandard medical care, and have to wait in long lines for food and other essentials, and lived in ramshackle quarters.

Likewise, Progressives believe that only state agents should be on the receiving end of proper care and protection. As Glenn Reynolds recently pointed out in a USA Today column, it took 20 minutes for police to respond to the initial 911 call when Adam Lanza began his shooting spree. Yet, according to Kristof and the editors of the NYT, 20 minutes is perfectly acceptable. (No doubt, they would call for "more training" for police officers to ensure better responses, but in the real world, police are under no legal obligation to respond to any calls at all, and since "officer safety" is the mantra of every police department, it always is easier for officers to draw chalk lines around the bodies than it is for a cop to be asked to defend little children from a crazed shooter.)

Furthermore, Progressives don't even believe that draconian gun laws actually reduce spree shootings or other such crimes. Instead, they promote such laws because it forces even more dependence upon State authorities. Malcolm writes about a spree shooting in Great Britain by a man carrying a banned semi-automatic rifle:

In 1987, Michael Ryan went on a shooting spree in his small town of Hungerford, England, killing 16 people (including his mother) and wounding another 14 before shooting himself. Since the public was unarmed — as were the police — Ryan wandered the streets for eight hours with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun before anyone with a firearm was able to come to the rescue. (Emphasis mine)

British law did not protect anyone. Instead, it made law-abiding citizens even more vulnerable to the whims of others who did not respect the law. Yet, I should add that Progressives believe wholeheartedly that this is a perfectly-acceptable set of circumstances. If some eggs are broken while a Utopian omelet is being created, so be it.

One cannot "debate" people who construct their own sets of logical premises and who see State-sponsored violence as the answer to "all of our problems." Progressives do not want individuals disarmed because they believe the result will be less violence and less danger; no, they push disarmament because they believe that a "good society" can come about only when individuals live in constant fear of the State and when the State is so powerful that it can do anything it wants to anyone.

Unfortunately, Progressives view those of us who believe that individual rights come from Natural Law and hold that State violence against the innocent is unacceptable as "whack jobs" and "gun nuts." There is no in-between, and there certainly is no dialogue, for no Progressive will be satisfied until whole classes of people are left totally vulnerable to the whims of State agents. In the end, that is their "good society."

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

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Recently by William L. Anderson: Progressives, Guns, and the Assault onTruth

With the recent re-election of Barack Obama and the overall resurgence of the left wing of the Democratic Party, Progressives must be thinking that E.J. Dionne was correct when he wrote They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era nearly 20 years ago. With the Obama administration about to force a huge increase in taxes and government spending (the "Fiscal Cliff" being a sick joke), and with government agencies increasing their domination of ordinary American life, Progressives are in the driver's seat and as Identity Politics is the dominant political movement, it looks as though we will see a rerun of the 1960s when Democratic Progressives ratcheted up the Welfare/Warfare State.

As the misnamed "Fiscal Cliff" approaches, perhaps we need to better understand the mentality that is driving legislators to this point. On one side, there are the Democratic Progressives, and on the other side are the Republican Progressives, and if we are to make sense of why Congress is at this point, we should know that the people involved in this sorry affair have a way of thinking that is foreign to most regular LRC readers.

What I do in this article is to outline the thinking that Progressives on the Left have regarding various subjects and explain why Libertarian solutions to the problem gain no traction whatsoever with them. Readers won't feel any better after having read this piece, but perhaps they will better understand why we are in this situation, and why the conventional legislative process cannot work. (Space does not permit me also to take a hard look at Progressives on the Right, something I will do in a future article.)

Most of us work and function in a world that is utterly hostile to Libertarian thinking. For example, I teach at a relatively small state university (about 5,000 students) and have come to know many students and faculty members where I work, and like the vast majority of college and university faculties, ours is almost uniformly Progressive in voting patterns.

I understood that point when I took the job and always keep in mind that when I engage fellow faculty members, I am engaging someone who generally subscribes to a way of thinking that holds to the primacy of the State. These people do not regard the State as do I; instead of seeing government as an entity that abuses people, confiscates their wealth and then wastes it upon those who are politically-connected, they see the State as a near-mystical organization that when in the hands of Democrats performs miracles and creates Good Things.

The problem, as they see it, is not limiting the State. No, they believe that anyone who might want to limit State power is borderline mentally ill and is driven by evil intentions. They might interact with people on the "outside" of Progressivism, but they have no respect for them, nor do they wish even to understand any other point of view. There IS no other viewpoint, period.

Libertarians see the constant growth of the State and are alarmed. Progressives, on the other hand, see growth of government as a triumph, the continuation of a necessary process that liberates us from the shackles imposed by private enterprise and by entities like religion, social mores, and the like. Furthermore, any attempt to limit or to cut back growth of the State is seen as an assault upon Progress Itself, for only a strong and unlimited monopoly of State power can save us from private monopolies that would enslave us.

One can see that in the response that Progressives of the Right and Left had toward the Ron Paul candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. Whereas conservative Progressives would say something like, "I like Ron Paul's domestic ideas but am against his foreign policy," the Left Progressives I encountered simply hated Dr. Paul altogether, for he wished to abolish those very things that Progressives believe to be the hallmark of progress.

For example, in an email exchange I had with Clay Bennett, the Progressive political cartoonist for the Progressive Chattanooga Times, he was adamant that Ron was evil because he wanted to limit government spending for domestic purposes. In fact, Bennett intoned, he even is against the Federal Reserve System. To a Progressive like Bennett, the very existence of the Fed (created during the Progressive Era of the early 20th Century) was proof of its importance, and Bennett would not permit any other viewpoint to cloud his thinking.

Like most Progressives I know, Bennett believes that when the State regulates economic exchanges, transfers wealth from those who do not "need" it to those who do, it is doing good. If it were not for State Power, he and others believe, no one but the rich would be able to read and write, no one but the rich would have access to medical care, and no one but the rich would be able to live anything outside of a grim, menial existence. The State and only the State protects us from Capitalist Predators that seek to alter our climate, deprive us of life, and oppress us in every fasion.

(In a cartoon in 2012, Bennett drew a picture of the "Libertarian Lifeguard" who was sitting on his chair and gazing out over all of the drowned people. The message was clear: Libertarians want everyone to die and would refuse even to lend a helping finger to a drowning person, much less a helping hand to anyone in need.)

Progressives and the Supernatural Powers of Government

Now, I am not trying to engage in armchair psychoanalysis but rather am explaining the state of Progressivist thinking, and perhaps the best example I can give is a recent conversation I had with a fellow faculty member where I teach. He and I were talking about the Bush-Gore campaign and he said, quite seriously, "If Gore had won, we would not have had Hurricane Katrina because he would have stopped global warming."

Yes, the guy was serious, dead serious. He believed that government authority given to the Environmental Protection Agency from an environmentalist president would have immediately changed the entire weather patterns of the Western Hemisphere and ended hurricanes.

I'll admit to being stunned by this naiveté, but nonetheless it helps provide a very useful example that I have been able to use in better examining the Progressive mind. One must remember that this person was and is an intelligent man, a Ph.D., and a very good teacher. He hardly is a zombie and I like him and have a high opinion of him, so I am not writing this to belittle a friend in any way. I'm just stating what he believes.

A lot of Progressives are like this. They really believe in the power of the state. They really believe that the application of state power, complete with coercion, threats, and even killing can work major miracles, including giving us better weather. And if there is killing or imprisonment or imposing financial ruin, well, it was deserved because the people to whom these things were done were not willing to share their bounty with others or were too selfish to give up their precious possessions.

On the Left, Progressives believe that the government can create a vast, confiscatory regime that punishes productive people and rewards politically-connected people, and yet this will have no adverse effect at all upon the overall productivity of an economy. When I was in college 40 years ago, many of my Progressive professors really believed that Mao had worked an "economic miracle" in China (I guess Mao did manage the "miracle" of making the blind man lame), and that all it took was the murder of countless millions, people thrown into the maw as collateral damage or simple "broken eggs" to be made into a magnificent omelet.

When Rep. Claude Pepper died years ago, I recall hearing a National Public Radio story on him, with the reporter breathlessly praising Pepper because he had "faith in government." Hubert Humphrey before him also had that great faith in the power of the state, and both Pepper and Humphrey were lionized by the Progressive Media. And no wonder. These men presented the picture of government taking from people property and possessions for which they had no "need" and then supposedly transferring themselves to the "needy."

The faith of the Progressive Left in the creative and healing powers of the State is real; no, I cannot understand it because I am an unbeliever when it comes to the State. Like Paul Krugman, who cannot fathom why anyone would believe in something as silly as God creating the world or Jesus rising from the dead, I cannot understand why anyone would believe that government has sacred, supernatural powers. To me, such a proposition is utterly laughable; to someone like Krugman, when I belittle the State I am committing blasphemy.

But if we are to understand Progressives, we have to understand that they are True Believers in the power of the State to make all of society whole simply by passing and administrating laws that are created "in the public interest." This religious belief is non-negotiable. E.J. Dionne believes ultimately that the State is God. So does Jim Wallis, and both men believe that Barack Obama is the very epitome of the Holy State and that Obama "is going to save us."

For all of the talk from the Progressive Left that their God is science and that religion is unscientific, in reality, their beliefs ultimately are religious. Like the former Soviets who had billboards exclaiming, "Lenin is more alive than the living!", Progressive leftists truly believe that the State can reorder the entire world into a happy, productive, prosperous and peaceful condition, provided that government have enough coercive powers, including the power to kill dissenters. This is their religion and anyone who contradicts it is speaking damnable heresy.

Progressives and the Economy

When it comes to economics, the Progressive Left almost to the person believes that the only successful economy is one that is administered via state control. I have spoken to many Progressives and never once have I heard one deviate from that view. One Progressive, a Democratic Party activist from Chattanooga, insisted to me that because government has a legal monopoly over money, then government is totally responsible for everything good that comes out of an economy. When I asked the person about why the economy of the U.S.S.R. (this was in 1985) was so backward, he replied (seriously), "It is because the Soviet Union has not been a country as long as the United States." He could not recognize his non sequitur for what it was.

Even when Progressives give lip service to markets, they always add the caveat that without government control, markets would run amok and that immediately scores of people would be thrown into poverty at the expense of a few people becoming wealthy. Because markets are self-sabotaging, according to Progressive thinking, massive transfer payments are necessary to keep an economy on its feet.

One must absolutely comprehend this last point in order to understand Progressive thinking: transfer payments are not an economic burden; they are the key to prosperity and without them, the economy would sink into permanent depression. Therefore, to criticize transfers not only is to be "against the poor," but also to demonstrate economic ignorance. (Keep in mind that most Progressives view the economy as a big circle that is internally unstable, and government action keeps the circle moving.)

Several years ago, one of our English professors circulated an email that received many favorable responses. In it, he went off on a screed against the "savage marketplace" that spreads only violence and misery. To him — and to most of my colleagues — there is no such thing as "peaceful economic exchange." No, to him every exchange within a market system reflects violence, exploitation, and useless, dangerous products, and the only way to properly "reform" the system is for the State to have total control of the process. Anything less is unacceptable.

Things that Libertarians hold to be part of natural law, such as the Law of Scarcity or the Law of Opportunity Cost, have little or no meaning to Progressives. When the late Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, the self-identified hawk and Democratic Socialist (he was a true Welfare-Warfare State candidate) was told that his ideas could not be economically supported, he declared, "Then we will create a new economics."

Like Franklin Roosevelt, who proclaimed that the laws of economics were nothing more than creations of human beings and could be changed by creating something akin to the "Socialist Man," Progressives really do believe that they can manipulate an economy by printing money or by borrowing or by raising taxes on wealthy people, and there will be no adverse economic effects. As Krugman likes to claim in his NYT columns and blog posts, massive borrowing is no problem because "we owe it to ourselves."

Crime and Punishment

Progressives also have a love affair with federal prosecutors and with the use of incarceration in order to emphasize their "social goals," the main goal being the destruction of anything akin to free markets. Now, few will admit they love prisons and many even will speak of the "scandal" of American incarceration rates — the highest in the world — but I never have seen Progressives call for anything that actually would lower these rates significantly.

A few examples come to mind. When Rudy Giuliani was illegally leaking grand jury material to the NYT during Giuliani's Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, the NYT never complained about Giuliani's lawlessness. On the contrary, the paper praised everything he did and became the main Progressive megaphone in the Holy War against Michael Milken and his "junk bonds." It did not matter how lawless state agents were during this time; the only thing that mattered to the NYT was to destroy Milken, not because he was a threat to the economy (in fact, Milken financed much of the investment needed to create the Digital Age), but because he was a threat to the statist quo that Progressives cling to religiously and because his actions allowed investors and entrepreneurs to do an end run around the stultifying regulatory process that had limited investments in new technologies since the New Deal.

That Giuliani was breaking federal laws (and Progressives view federal law to be Holy and Sanctified) was not important because he did it to save us from that Predatory Capitalist Milken. Breaking laws for the common good is something that should be reserved to those who protect the rest of us from the Milkens of our age and nothing should stand in their way, and certainly not Rule of Law.

In a recent editorial, the editors of the Chattanooga Times called for the imprisonment of Wal-Mart executives and the destruction of Wal-Mart stores because the company did what every other company has done when it wants to do business in Mexico: pay some bribes. (The same editors not once have editorialized against the practice of "milker bills" and "fetcher bills" introduced by legislators in order to force companies to hand over campaign contributions. The same Progressive editorialists also have demanded that the government continue to pay billions of dollars in subsidies to "green energy" firms, the same firms that the record demonstrates have paid millions in campaign contributions to the Obama administration. According to these Progressives, a leftist government is incapable of being corrupt.)

But while Progressives call for the jailing of people they don't like while decrying America's incarceration rates, they also stand firmly behind the drug war, the militarization of America's police and state-sponsored brutality toward dissidents like Bradley Manning. (In the case of Manning, one can say that Progressives were against torture before they were for it.)

Yes, there are some Progressive writers like Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Wolf who are desperately trying to inform people as to the murderous violence that Barack Obama and his State apparatus are inflicting upon innocents here and abroad, but for the most part they are ignored. To Progressives where I work — and in Washington, D.C., and Progressive communities in general, Obama really is a savior, a Holy and Sacrosanct god.

For all of the Progressive love affair with science, the NYT demonstrated beyond a doubt that it would jettison real science for metaphysics during the Duke Lacrosse Case. The newspaper actually tried to float a theory that the lacrosse players possessed a towel that could wipe away the DNA of one person but leave the DNA of everyone else touched by that same towel. The idea was so preposterous that attorneys for the accused lacrosse players laughingly referred to it as the "magic towel," but the NYT and many Progressives pushing this case clung to its theory despite its utter implausibility.

Given the various "Occupy" movements that sprang up this past year, one would think that Progressives would oppose the "crony capitalism" that infects our economy. Au contraire, Progressives are True Believers and the vast web of bailouts, subsidies, and market manipulations that have been at the heart of Barack Obama's economic policies demonstrate that point. Whereas Libertarians see the very public financial collapse of Solyndra as being the essence of folly, Progressives believe that if the government subsidizes the "green energy" sectors, and orders increases in the "energy efficiency" of electricity-using goods, that out of that will come a wonderful energy-based Utopia.

Writers like Robert Bryce have tried to explain that the goals of the Progressives and the actual capability of "green energy" are not compatible, but such good sense is ignored. In my conversations with many Progressives, and in reading their websites and articles in Progressive outlets like the NYT, I can see that Progressives truly believe — truly believe — that there are no contradictions in their energy outlooks. If government directs resources to a "socially desirable" end, and if the spending and the political will follow, then there is no doubt that the desired outcome will occur. After all, they argue, government directed the Manhattan Project, and in the end science gave us the atomic bomb.

Libertarians loathe no federal agency as much as they do the Internal Revenue Service. They view it as an unwarranted expansion of the State into their lives, and they see an agency full of people who have way too much power over the daily lives of others. Progressives, on the other hand, believe that the IRS has too little power. The mission of the IRS — to seize tax revenue — is utterly important for it is the IRS that ultimately allows us to pay for the "Social Contract" that Progressives believe is central to life itself.

Likewise, Progressives also view the growth of the Regulatory State as being absolutely essential to our well-being, and any attempt to cut back on any regulation is seen as a nuclear attack on "progress" itself. For example, in 1995 after a moderate Republican challenge to some Environmental Protection Agency regulations, Anthony Lewis writing from his regular perch on the NYT editorial page shrieked that "they want feces" to wash up on beaches.

To Progressives, expansion of the Regulatory State always is done in the name of "reform," and there is no word more dear to American Progressives than "reform." Libertarians see regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Products Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Transportation Security Administration as being predatory in nature and harmful even at best. These agencies, to Libertarians, do not protect anyone, impose costs upon people who should not have to pay them, and in the case of the TSA are outright oppressive.

That is not how Progressives see them. If it were not for the EPA, our rivers would be sewers, our air purely toxic, capitalist-created goods (and especially toys for young children) would be inherently dangerous, with children being killed by the scores, monopolies springing up everywhere hoarding our wealth, and passenger flights regularly would be hijacked by terrorists and other "gun nuts" who would systematically be forcing flight after flight to crash.

These things are self-evident to Progressives, and the use of facts means nothing to them. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Progressive columnist Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal wrote a column, "Government to the Rescue." I would urge people to read his column, not because of its self-proclaimed wisdom, but rather because it provides a huge window into the mentality of American Progressives.

To Hunt, 9/11 was the Ultimate Market Failure, an example of how private enterprise endangers our very lives, and how Government saves us. Literally. That everything of which Hunt wrote already was heavily regulated by government — including airport security — simply had no bearing on his worldview. There was no government failure because the government, when in "proper" regulatory mode, is incapable of failing.

Likewise, read Paul Krugman and other Progressives on the financial meltdown of 2008, and to them, the only reason it happened was that government did not regulate the economy enough, and that was because a political regime that believed wholeheartedly in "untrammeled" markets was in power. Because Progressives (and especially Progressive economists like Krugman) believe that prices send important signals ONLY when an economy is organized into what "economists" label as a State of Perfect Competition, in the case of Wall Street, prices meant nothing at all.

Because private enterprise creates and sustains monopolies, argue Krugman and others, players in the system cannot and will not respond to prices because prices are administered by the system and are rigged to the advantage of those at the head of the line. Because of that situation, markets (and especially financial markets) will run headlong over a cliff, dragging everyone down, and the only thing that can keep that from happening is strict regulation from the central government. In their view, only regulators trained and employed in federal agencies have the clarity and foresight to understand what will work and what will not; anyone employed in private enterprise has no capability of foresight whatsoever.

When bureaucrats do make that "rare" error, or when the TSA agent does something really stupid, Progressives also have an answer: more training. To Progressives, "training" really is a mantra, and is a solution for all government ills. Because State agents really do have all of the answers, the only thing that is needed is for others employed by the State to receive the benefit of that wisdom through training and more training.

I wish I were just creating "straw men" or fabricating caricatures of Progressives, and that certainly is how some of them will react upon reading these words. My viewpoints, however, come from reading thousands of articles, columns, and editorials and from my many conversations with my colleagues. I am not accusing my colleagues of being evil; many of them are decent people, good teachers, and wonderful mentors to their students. What I am saying is that the things I have written reflect their worldviews.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

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Recently by William L. Anderson: Once Again, the U.S. Courts Rule That Progressivist Fiction Is Truth

Progressives smell blood in the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut and their coordinated assaults, while not actually making Americans any safer, nonetheless are going to see positive results for the anti-gun lobby. Not surprisingly, the New York Times, which is full of what Daniel Okrent once called "bien-pesant" journalists, has been leading a full-scale charge, demonizing any gun owner who does not carry a weapon as part of his or her employment as being a murderer or enabler of shooting little children.

A lot of writers, such as Robert Higgs and Will Grigg, have dealt with the utter hypocrisy of President Barack Obama decrying the killing of American school children while at the same time ordering drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere in which little children are killed. However, since Obama has been declared by at least some of his supporters as "our lord and savior," one would suppose that The Great And Holy One is beyond any criticism, and especially criticism from the "bien-pesant" journalists that rule our media.

It is very clear that the Obama anti-private gun ownership people are on the offensive right now. The mass murder of little children by a private gun user has a way of doing that. (There was no such outcry when Bill Clinton and Janet Reno ordered the massacre of more than 20 children at Waco in 1993. After all, Branch Davidians were on the fringes of what "bien-pesant" journalists would call polite or acceptable society, or what my academic colleagues call "wackos," "gun nuts," and "whack jobs." In other words, they were not like the rest of us, so the FBI and BATF gave them what they deserved.)

Since the Sandy Hook killings, the NYT has run a huge spate of editorials and columns denouncing gun owners, calling for new controls, and generally taking the offensive against anyone who might think differently than journalists in mid-town Manhattan. Before I deal with a couple of these pieces, I will relate a personal story of dealing with the NYT types.

I went to high school with a couple members of the Sulzberger clan (their mother was the publisher of the local Chattanooga Times, which was propped up by Sulzberger money even as her own policies ran the paper into the ground). Not surprisingly, they were permanently aghast at the way of thinking that other young men in Chattanooga might exhibit, and it was clear that the Sulzbergers really did regard the rest of us as the Great Unwashed and worse. There was only one way to think and view the world, and anyone who did not carry the proper "credentials" or who might think differently than a True Sulzberger would think was not worthy even of casting a shadow in front of them.

Over the years, I have known a number of people who either have written for the NYT or who have connections with the paper, and while my relationships with them are pleasant enough, nonetheless the real divide remains. The air of intellectual and moral superiority that many of them carry is unmistakable. (I also have known some who are decent enough people, but they also don't last in that environment and take their talents elsewhere.)

I write this not as a personal slam against people who are connected with the NYT, but rather to point out that these are "Progressive" people who approach life from a very different viewpoint than most readers of this article. For all of the talk about a "gun-control debate," they are not interested in debating anyone, since the Great Unwashed have nothing important to say. The following two pieces I critique will demonstrate that point quite well.

In an editorial entitled "It's the Guns," the anonymous editorial writer intones:

President Obama on Wednesday gave Vice President Joe Biden Jr. a month to complete a job that he could have finished that afternoon. It is time to come up with, as Mr. Obama put it, "a set of concrete proposals" to make the nation safer from guns. The ways to do this are well-known because the nation has grappled with gun massacres many times before. It is Congress that hasn't.

For years sensible gun-control bills have been offered and rejected. The occasional bill has actually become law — but in hollow, loophole-riddled form — and then been allowed to lapse. Farther-reaching proposals focusing on things like banning certain kinds of bullets, or taxing them out of existence, have been laughed at. (Emphasis mine)

What is a "sensible" bill? To be honest, the only "sensible" bill that would truly be acceptable to these people would be a total ban on all privately-held firearms and handguns. Period. This is what they believe. Like all good Progressives, the NYT editors hold that anyone who does not use a gun in the line of government employment is not fit to possess guns. Government agents are "trained" to use guns; ordinary citizens are not, or so what is what Progressives believe.

When one tries to inject logic into the discussion, the editors slap down any such notion:

Congress remains is mired in excuses and passivity — an assault-weapons ban is a nonstarter, Republicans say, because assault weapon is a vague term. "How do you define assault weapon?" Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican of Alabama, asked Politico, saying a ban wouldn't fix anything. "We've seen that movie before," he said. What that answer ignores is that definitions are possible, but the gun lobby and its supporters, mostly in Mr. Shelby's party, pepper them with exemptions to make them less effective and to keep the gun-making business nice and healthy. (Emphasis mine)

No, Shelby is correct. The so-called definitions in the end are arbitrary. The typical standard rifle one can purchase at Wal-Mart or Dick's Sporting Goods is no less lethal than an "assault rifle." The AR-15, which allegedly was used in the Sandy Hook shootings, fires bullets the same way any rifle shoots them; there is nothing special about the rifle itself that makes it any more deadly. The definitions of which the NYT editorialist speaks are based simply the cosmetic aspects of the gun, period.

True, an assault weapons ban would include something about bayonet holders, but mass murderers generally don't use bayonets and the bayonet itself does not make a bullet any less lethal. So, if it is not the lethal capacity of a rifle, then what is it?

It goes back to the view that Progressives have about government itself, that government is sacred and holy, and that includes the armed forces. Thus, if any ordinary citizen has a rifle that might look something like what a U.S. soldier carries, that in and of itself is wrong and violates the purity of the State. Regular people should not own military-style guns because, well, they just shouldn't.

To many of us, cosmetics are just cosmetics and don't mean much. Progressives, however, believe that government is so sacrosanct that there needs to be a separation between what ordinary "mundanes" might own and what is in the possession of the state, and that certainly holds when one is speaking of firearms. I believe that is one of the reasons that I never have read an editorial in the NYT or any other Progressive publication that condemns or even questions the militarization of the police.

Police forces at all levels of government have become much more military in style and much more abusive in their treatment of ordinary citizens, and I believe the two things are related. As Will Grigg points out in this article, even small towns where there is almost no violent crime now are subject to marauding police officers armed with military-style gear that allows them to "play soldier." On top of that, we have seen exponential increases in SWAT-type raids in which innocent people are killed, young children terrorized, and people unnecessarily exposed to police brutality.

That the Progressives have not condemned such Police State events speaks volumes to the current gun control media monologue. In reality, innocent people are much more likely to be victims of "soldier-style" police brutality than they are a mass shooter, but to the NYT crowd, the former is acceptable because it is carried out by state agents, and there is no higher or holier calling than to be part of the State.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof then cites the Usual Litany of Things that have been trotted out before — and have not prevented a single murder via firearm:

There's a reasonable argument that the Second Amendment confers an individual right — to bear a musket. Beyond that, it's more complicated. Everybody agrees on a ban on fully automatic machine guns. The question isn't whether to limit the right to bear arms, but where to draw the line.

I'd like to see us take a public health approach that reduces the harm that guns cause. We could limit gun purchases to one a month to impede traffickers, make serial numbers harder to file off, ban high-capacity magazines, finance gun buybacks, require solid background checks even for private gun sales, require microstamping so that bullet casings can be traced back to a particular gun and mandate that guns be stored in gun safes or with trigger locks.

It then gets better:

The gun lobby often cites the work of John Lott, who argued that more guns mean less crime, but scholars have since thoroughly debunked Lott's arguments. Published research makes it clear that having a gun in the home simply makes it more likely that you will be shot — by your partner or by yourself. Americans are safer if they rely on 911 for protection rather than on a gun. (Emphasis mine)

First, the "debunking" is found in one paper that appeared in Stanford Law Review, which hardly is going to require the kind of rigor needed to debunk other arguments backed up with statistics. (Law reviews are run by students and tend to be highly ideological, and simply do not carry the same authority that other peer-reviewed journals might have.)

Second, his idea that 911 "protects" us is a howler. Sandy Hook School is a perfect case in point. Here is a school that had a lockdown security system that supposedly was foolproof, yet Lanza still got into the building. Furthermore, people at the school did call 911, yet 27 people quickly were murdered. The police, like the police at the Columbine murders, played no part in preventing tragedies.

No doubt, Kristof believes that creating more "gun-free zones" like what we have in schools and movie theaters would make us more "safe." Jeffrey Tucker absolutely debunks that notion:

In the days that followed the (Sandy Hook) killing, my browser kept taking me back to a Wikipedia link about the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. The law, still intact after many challenges and rewrites, reads: "It shall be unlawful for any individual knowingly to possess a firearm that has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce at a place that the individual knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a school zone."

Guns of all sorts are banned anywhere near schools. If the government's laws had worked, this killer would have realized that his plan was unachievable. After all, the world's most powerful government had banned the whole idea of guns at school.

But the law did not work, at least not as intended. On the contrary. The killer could be pretty sure going into this that he would be the only one at the school with a gun. (emphasis mine)

He continues:

Think of this: Schools in particular have been singled out as a place without the ability to defend against violence. The law has been challenged and revised and debated ever since, but the bottom line stands. Have school shootings declined? Most major shootings now occur in gun-free zones, and nearly twice as many since the act passed than in the 20 years prior. (See the full list.)

The silly idea of having "gun-free zones" falls right in the line of Progressivist thinking, and Progressives are people who do not like to be confused with facts. The creation of these "zones" is not done in order to protect anyone; indeed, law-abiding people in those areas are more vulnerable to spree killers than they would be elsewhere.

No, the creation of "gun-free zones" is ideological, period. Progressives are making the statement that guns are bad and that people need to be protected from the evils that the mere presence of a gun create. As the NYT intoned, "It's the Guns." It is not people, just the guns.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

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Recently by William L. Anderson: My Belated List of Things for Which IAmThankful

When a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals this week dismissed lawsuits brought by former Duke Lacrosse players against the City of Durham, it repeated the fiction that governmental institutions in this country are so necessary to preserving "our way of life" that the individuals working in those institutions should not be held accountable for their conduct no matter how outrageous or illegal it might be. The institutional cover, the justices ruled, is enough to "prove" good faith in the power of the state to act in a pure and righteous manner, even if those who were wronged can demonstrate that government agents were lying.

The lawsuit stems from the false indictment of three former lacrosse players for allegedly raping Crystal Mangum, a Durham prostitute and stripper (who currently is charged with murdering a former boyfriend), at a party in March, 2006. I have written numerous articles on this case, which became famous (or infamous) on a number of fronts and ultimately was dismissed by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper in April, 2007. K.C. Johnson, the college professor whose blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, has well-documented everything in that case, has commentary on the latest ruling from the justices, and it is well-worth reading.

(The justices, however, do leave intact that lawsuits filed against former Durham police officers Mark Gottlieb and Ben Himan, both of whom played up-front roles in the "investigation" and also testified to the grand juries that returned criminal indictments against three of the players, David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann. Whether or not the courts decide to protect those two scofflaws in future proceedings is another matter.)

In the past several years, I have written a number of articles and papers on the Progressive Era and its continuing legacies, and I continue with that theme in this piece. For all of the talk that our country is a Constitutional Republic, it actually has been a Progressive Democracy for more than a century, as the original U.S. Constitution today is nothing more than parchment under glass, and any contemporary legal interpretation of the Constitution is conducted through the Progressivist viewpoint. (Keep in mind that Progressivists like Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly openly despised the Constitution and believed that at best it should be ignored and at worst, publicly discarded.)

The Governing Paradigm of Progressivism

If we can reduce the Progressivist ethos to one line, it would be this: Experts should rule us. In legal terms, that means that judges defer to the "experts," who actually are nothing more than government employees. For example, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it contained language that specifically forbade racial quotas as a means to redress racial discrimination.

However, in less than a decade, the U.S. bureaucracies were imposing those forbidden quotas upon numerous institutions and businesses and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled specifically that it must "defer" to the interpretation of the law by federal bureaucracies. (Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence Stratton in The New Color Line explain the SCOTUS rulings and how bureaucrats now write law.) This hardly was unusual, as the process began during the Progressive Era in which Congress would write laws, but bureaucracies then would write the actual rules that would be the standard by which the authorities would implement and enforce the laws. The ominous process gained speed during the New Deal, as Congress ceded much of its lawmaking power to President Franklin Roosevelt and the executive branch, and the process continues to the present time.

Like all political movements, Progressivism was backed by the secular ideology based upon the viewpoint that formal education would produce "experts" firmly grounded in science who would wisely and competently guide American society in ways that would be superior to the "chaos" created by free markets and constitutional rule of law. (Judge Andrew Napolitano has written a book, Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedoms, in which he explains how Progressivism and the institutions it spawned eviscerated historical American liberty. David Kiriazis and I have an upcoming paper in The Independent Review in which we show how Jim Crow policies and Progressivist economic regulation were tied together.)

One of the standing doctrines of Progressivism was that government agents, if they were to do their jobs properly, needed to be shielded from methods of accountability wielded by ordinary citizens. That meant that individuals who might be harmed by wrongful actions of government agents (acting "under the color of law") had limited recourse in seeking redress for the harm brought to them.

Not surprisingly, judges have been hyper-vigilant in protecting the main players in criminal courts — prosecutors and judges — from lawsuits filed for wrongful conduct, ruling that these individuals have absolute immunity when acting within the scope of their "official" duties. (The only reason that former Durham County prosecutor Michael Nifong has not been dropped from the lawsuit is that he also declared himself to be the main investigator of the criminal case against the lacrosse players, and usurped the role of the police.)

Defenders of this practice point out that prosecutors and judges can be disciplined by panels that supposedly oversee their conduct and that they also can be brought before various state bars that can strip these people of their law licenses if the conduct is egregious enough. The North Carolina State Bar, for example, took away Nifong's license because of his actions in the lacrosse case. Furthermore, supporters of this system argue, wayward prosecutors and judges can be criminally charged for misconduct.

For all of the claims that these ballyhooed "safeguards" are sufficient, in reality they are a joke, a very sick joke. Nifong's punishment was mild when compared to the outright criminal behavior on his part. Despite the huge number of cases in which prosecutorial misconduct has led to fabricated charges and even wrongful convictions, not one prosecutor in this country's history has been convicted of a crime related to such wrongful conduct. When I laid out evidence of massive misconduct by two prosecutors in the 2010 Tonya Craft case in Northwest Georgia, the representative of the Georgia State Bar curtly replied, "They were just doing their jobs." When I asked her if subornation of perjury, withholding exculpatory evidence, and lying to jurors during the trial was just "doing their jobs," she hung up the phone.

In reality, judges and prosecutors are held accountable only to panels of other government workers or, to be more specific, many of their cronies. The Progressivist notion that formally-educated "experts" would not be subject to the same base motives that mere mundanes exhibit is laughable on its face, but that farce today masquerades as a sacred legal doctrine.

The Progressive Lacrosse Ruling

When the judges in the lacrosse case recently made their rulings, they based them upon the doctrine of "sovereign immunity" which protects governmental bodies and the individuals that are employed by those bodies from lawsuits. The judges ruled that the City of Durham, being a municipal body, has sovereign immunity and should be protected as such.

However, the judges went much further than simply to restate sovereign immunity, as they also restated the Progressivist doctrine that the "experts" employed by the city were acting in good faith because, after all, they were experts. The Kafkaesque views of the judges are further exposed by their statements that the original accusations from Mangum — no matter how ridiculous and untrue they might have been — were reason enough to pursue a criminal investigation, and, the judges rules, the fact that Nifong secured criminal indictments — even though police officers lied to grand jurors — was enough to establish the "legitimacy" of the criminal charges against Evans, Finnerty, and Seligmann.

This is important, for the justices restated the Progressivist viewpoint that governmental bodies are incapable of wrongful conduct whenever they follow — even loosely — the established norms of "procedure." Thus, it did not matter if the investigation was bogus, if statements given by police officers were untrue, if police officers wrote and filed fabricated reports, and that the "lineup" in which Mangum identified her alleged attackers was rigged as long as the veneer of "procedure" was followed, which then sanctified the entire dishonest process.

Because of the underlying themes of race and class that drove the lacrosse case in the first place, the corruption of the "legal process" that was evident has been lost. The fact that officials from Durham, the Durham County DA's office, and Duke University lied early and often is obscured because of the race and class narratives. (Film maker Ken Burns recently repeated in various interviews his view that those charged in the case were hardly "innocent," and that they only were "mildly inconvenienced" by the whole affair. I will have commentary on what Burns said in a later article.)

That federal judges have chosen to protect outrageous conduct by government officials is hardly surprising, given the record of the courts and the political and legal doctrines that underlie their decisions. Once again we are told that the most important thing is that police, prosecutors, and judges need to be free to "do their jobs" and that we must be willing to put up with "collateral damage" so that the "system" can be free to protect us from the bad people.

What we are not told — and what the pundits never seem to ask — is why we should even confer legitimacy upon a system in which liars and wrongdoers receive immunity from punishment for outright criminal behavior. This is not the problem of a "second-best" set of circumstances or even the admission that human beings are fallible creatures. No, what we are seeing is tyranny in action in which those who rule over the rest of us declare that they are so pure and so holy and so necessary to our well-being that we cannot and will not hold them accountable no matter how egregious their actions might be. This is not the institution of justice; it is the institutionalization of lying, the very antithesis of justice.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

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Recently by William L. Anderson: A Nation of Bureaucrats

While recently attending a Thanksgiving Day church service, I listened to people speak about those things for which they gave thanks, such as the availability of "first responders," such as police officers. There was the usual being thankful for "America" and "religious freedom" and the like. Therefore, I believe I need to put together that list of things that make me break out into a chorus of thanksgiving.

I am:

• Thankful for those brave police officers in Fullerton who beat an obviously dangerous homeless man to death, and I especially am thankful for the police union that represents the brave officers that were charged with second-degree murder in that beating. The union went after members of the elected city council of Fullerton who had the audacity to criticize those brave officers who only were acting selflessly as they ganged up on the dangerous homeless man (who was mentally ill). I especially want to praise the union for making false charges about two council members because it is very important for police officers and their unions to have free speech when they are spreading lies about others. Unless the police are able to kill whom they please and intimidate everyone else, we won't be safe, and if you don't believe me, you are ungrateful and should receive a visit from these same public servants.
• Thankful for those brave police officers and governments at all levels that take property through asset forfeiture, because without that property that is taken without any evidence whatsoever that the owners were using it to commit crimes then might be used by selfish individuals instead of serving our gallant "first responders." If people's lives are ruined in the process, all the better, because everyone needs to obey the rules, even if they don't know what the rules are, and even if governments break all those rules. We can't be safe unless governments are lawless; you can ask the police and the politicians who support them.
• Thankful for those brave and honorable prosecutors such as Michael Nifong, who will lie in order to convict innocent people. Everyone knows that if you are charged with a crime by the state that you are guilty, and the very act of declaring one's self to be "innocent" is in itself an act of proclaiming guilt. I'm especially thankful for those brave and honorable prosecutors in Mississippi who employed forensic frauds such as Steven Hayne and Michael West so that they could give false testimony and convince juries to wrongly convict innocent people. It is important that we have lots of people in jail because Corrections Corporation of America needs to be profitable so that it can buy off more politicians and build more prisons.
• Thankful for Great Men of the Cloth such as Jim Wallis of Sojourners, who never stops talking about the poor, and then helps to convince politicians such as President Barack Obama to pursue policies that will ensure that we have lots of poor people in this country. Wallis needs to have the poor in order to feel good about himself, as he calls for government help for those same poor. Indeed, it is important that the government do things like make it more difficult to produce electricity, jack up fuel prices, and stifle entrepreneurs because everyone knows that low energy costs and the availability of goods and jobs to produce them would then help make poor people better off, which then would result in Wallis's unemployment or force him to get a real job.
• Thankful for Great Men of Wealth like George Soros and Warren Buffett who call for even more state control over the economy in order to look as though they are "public-spirited" citizens willing to pay higher taxes and the like. Soros, while helping to bankroll politicians and "think tanks" like the Center for American Progress that denigrate and condemn gold and praise the blizzard of paper money, has been buying lots of gold himself. After the financial crisis began in 2008, Buffett purchased millions of dollars of assets in troubled financial firms such as Goldman-Sachs and then openly (and successfully) lobbied for federal bailout money for those same firms. I'm especially thankful that both men have been praised for their "public spiritedness" and supposed willingness to sacrifice their wealth for the "good of the country," even though their actions actually make them wealthier and help destroy economic opportunities for other entrepreneurs. That also is good for America because President Obama and soon-to-be-Senator Elizabeth Warren already have said that entrepreneurs are parasites and that only government can create jobs and wealth.
• Thankful for our brave and fearless Commander-in-Chief who had the good sense to outsource torture instead of having CIA agents directly torture people, since everyone knows that Americans don't do that sort of thing. I'm also thankful for President Obama's courage in ordering assassinations of 16-year-old boys, and bravely having American drones launch missiles in order to break up weddings and other such events in Pakistan because everyone knows that the very purpose of the wedding was for the couple to produce offspring that then would engage in "terrorism" against the USA many years down the road. It is very important that President Obama not be held accountable for these policies because anyone who tries to do that is doing so only because he or she is a racist.
• Thankful for all of the Republican voters who rejected Ron Paul during the presidential primary because everyone knows that Dr. Paul wants all of us to be strung out on drugs and starve to death, since Dr. Paul doesn't believe that the government should do everything for us, including provide us with food that the government claims is good. Dr. Paul also is against the USA invading and bombing lots of countries, which means he also is against the kind of economic stimulus that invading and bombing and killing provides.
• Especially thankful for those millions of Americans who blindly support policies and politicians that impoverish us, destroy economic opportunities, wage war against innocents, create a police state, take away our liberty, and generally brutalize the innocent, since everyone knows that what we really need is a strong government that can tell us what to do.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

Recently by William L. Anderson: Surviving Sandy: A Few Life Lessons

When flying cross-country recently, I stood in line like everyone else for the TSA "security" check and thought about Judge Andrew Napolitano's recent book, A Nation of Sheep. How did Americans, once known for their independence and fierce devotion to their rights, become people who easily are herded, abused, and subjected to regular state-run humiliations?

Perhaps the larger question I should have asked was this: How did a people in a society once identified by its rule of law become a people who now willingly subject themselves to what essentially is a rule of rules? The answer to me has become increasingly obvious: the USA, once known for its swashbuckling entrepreneurs, now has become a nation of bureaucrats, or, to be specific, a nation of people who think like bureaucrats.

As for people dutifully standing in line at the airport, waiting either for what some have called the "porno scanners" or to receive a "pat down" that legally can be defined as sexual assault, the answer is simple. They want to get on the plane, and they know that for passengers that resist or refuse to show deference to the TSA agents barking out orders, the consequences for them could be serious, the worst being arrested and charged with "interfering with the duties of a federal officer," which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison. At the very least, they will miss their plane, which will throw all sorts of havoc into their travel plans, costing them dearly.

Like the others shuffling through security, I just wanted to make my flight, and the distance to my destination ruled out driving. Any individual challenge to the abusive state of affairs I might have wanted to pursue would have ended badly for me. Of that I am sure. On one side, federal agents would have been permitted to kill me had they imagined I posed a threat, and on the other side, I would have had to pay for my acts of resistance with my own financial and personal resources.

The creation of this situation has come not only about because government officials no longer feel any sense of personal restraint upon their conduct but also because Americans themselves have become accustomed and even comfortable to living within a structure of ever-stifling rules that can trip them up no matter how hard they try to obey them. What people in this country once would have deemed oppressive has become the New Normal.

Roots of Our Non-Resistance

In his 1982 book, An American in Leningrad, attorney Logan Robinson noted that people in the former Soviet Union could do almost nothing without state interference. Their lives were forever tied up with standing in line for bad food, poor consumer products, and getting documents from the vast Soviet bureaucracy that would give them permission to do whatever. Resistance was futile for them; Robinson noted that even though he stood up against bureaucrats and argued with them, that option was not open for average Russians who did not carry the status of being an American.

Robinson's friends told him that he had not "left his American values" at home, and while his insistence at correct treatment might have irritated his Soviet hosts, nonetheless they knew that brutalizing him would create an international incident that would have spiraled beyond their control. For the Soviet citizen, subtle brutality was a way of life and they got used to it, and the average person living in that country really could not imagine being treated any other way.

We like to think that it is something about "communism" and the oppression of those who ran the political system in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba that has created the economic dysfunction that has characterized communist regimes. Defenders of that system have claimed that it has been the lack of political and religious freedoms that has resulted in the poor economic performances of those countries, but that "American Exceptionalism," a "religious belief" which is accepted by both Right and Left in this country, would enable the U.S. economy to "work" even if it were to copy the socialistic aspects of the command economies.

This belief — that Americans had a special quality that would permit them to make socialism work — ultimately has turned an entrepreneurial people into a nation of bureaucrats. Lest one thinks that a stifling bureaucracy is not in line with the modern American character, think again. Political reports that seven of the 10 wealthiest counties in the USA are contiguous to Washington, D.C. According to a recent news publication:

Washington, D.C., is now the country's wealthiest metro area, replacing Silicon Valley in the top slot, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

The average household income for residents of the Washington metro area was $84,523 in 2010, when the nation's median household income was $50,046, Bloomberg reported in an analysis of census data.

These are the bedroom communities for people who work in Washington in federal bureaucracies or Washington-related industries, such a military contractors or other firms that do extensive business with the federal government. In the past four years, the U.S. economy has been in the worst slump in 80 years, yet Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area gained in wealth while the rest of the nation has become poorer, as much of the wealth gained by Washington and its nearby residents has been directly or indirectly confiscated from people who have been employed in more productive pursuits than serving the bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, the numbers and scope of productive people are dwindling, and those that either are employed or supported by bureaucracies are growing in number. The growth of the power and reach of American bureaucracies also has another negative effect: it slowly but surely is changing the character of what was once the most entrepreneurial country on the planet into a place where bureaucracy not only rules, but it also pays and pays very well.

As the U.S. Government over the past century has expanded its reach, it also has expanded the bureaucracy needed to enforce the growing number of government edicts. The natural home for bureaucracies has been the executive branch, which is right in line with the ideology of Progressivism, which has held that an Administrative State run by "experts" must replace the messier and less-precise political economy that has revolved around markets, market prices, and profits and losses. Indeed, since the Progressive Era began more than a century ago, the U.S. Presidency has grown in size and power, and that growth has come at the expense of the freedom of everyone else.

Besides the economic burdens and the undermining of Constitutional rights that come with the fattening of the federal executive branch, the growing bureaucracy has had another important — and insidious — effect on how Americans live their lives: Americans increasingly see economic and social life as being about obeying rules, lots of rules. Living under the heavy hand of the state has become the New Normal in American political economy, and those that dissent are finding that bureaucracies have their ways of making people miserable.

In a recent Freedom Daily, James Bovard wrote about how ordinary citizens are finding their lives ruined by Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats who insist that property owned by individuals has been classified as a "wetland," despite the fact that the normal characteristics of what one might think is a real "wetland" did not characterize the land in question. In other words, the classification was arbitrary, yet EPA employees enforced the "wetlands" rules with iron fists, not caring about the consequences to the property owners.

As Bovard noted, some of the landowners were able to prevail in court while others went to prison for the "crime" of constructing duck ponds that federal authorities already had approved. That an American jury would vote to send someone to prison for constructing legal duck ponds speaks volumes about the mentality of people in this country.

Why the readiness to convict, and why the iron-fisted bureaucracy? Ludwig von Mises in his classic book, Bureaucracy, explains:

…bureaucracy is imbued with an implacable hatred of private business and free enterprise. But the supporters of the system consider precisely this the most laudable feature of their attitude. Far from being ashamed of their anti-business policies, they are proud of them. They aim at full control of business by the government and see in every businessman who wants to evade this control a public enemy.

Bureaucracies, writes Mises, exist to implement and enforce rules, and the more rules, the more bureaucracy to ensure their enforcement:

Bureaucratic management is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do. His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.

While that "superior body" consists of the legislative branches, including Congress and the various state legislatures, much of the rule-making actually is done by the bureaucracies themselves. Before the Progressive Era, the rules generally were fixed within the body of the laws written, but as the federal and state governments began to expand the scope of their powers to direct and regulate the economy, the apparatus became unwieldy and the executive branches began to grab more power in the name of "orderly transfer." Conversely, the law itself has become less precise, as legislatures now leave the specifics to the bureaucracies.

For example, during the Great Depression Congress passed law after law essentially ceding its lawmaking powers to the Franklin Roosevelt administration. With laws came new enforcement agencies, and those agencies were given the power to write the actual rules which would serve as the interpretation of the laws.

This process only has accelerated. For example, when the ObamaCare legislation was being debated in 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that the only way to know what was in the bill was to pass it. Janie B. Cheaney in a column in World Magazine writes:

The 2010 healthcare law is a milestone of “thingness.” Nancy Pelosi’s famous dictum that we must pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it is only partly true: We’ll never know its full potential for mischief. Already it involves over 180 agencies and bureaus, levies 21 new or higher taxes, requires 16,500 IRS employees, and has generated 13,000 pages of regulations-so far. The phrase “the Secretary [of Health and Human Services] shall determine” appears 1,563 times in the bill, and what this unelected autocrat shall determine is limited only by her ambition.

To put it another way, Congress really had little to do with the law except to set some vague guidelines into motion which would then be transformed into rules and policies set by the various bureaucracies in charge of interpreting what Congress had said. That this would be an assault upon the Rule of Law itself brought little, if any, real outrage.

Many of the same conservatives who denounced that law had no problems voting for the so-called Patriot Act, which empowered government agencies to essentially interpret any action that law enforcement officials did not like as a form of "terrorism" and to prosecute it as such. The creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security a year later vastly expanded the internal spy networks of the U.S. Government, essentially turning everyone into a "terrorist suspect" who is forced to "prove" one's innocence to skeptical bureaucrats.

The upshot of this vast expansion of government powers in the past century has meant that individual citizens must receive official permission from government employees to do just about anything. People need routine criminal background checks to be employed in nearly all occupations today; occupational licensing is a way of life and anyone who attempts to perform a job without official permission from someone in a government office risks not only fines but even imprisonment.

Citizens and Bureaucratic Thinking

When one combines this growth of bureaucratic power with the tenets of federal criminal law which easily enable federal prosecutors to criminalize just about any act, people find themselves facing prison even though they have harmed no one. Bovard's previously-noted account of the prosecution and conviction of James Wilson for alleged "destruction of wetlands" is a case in point.

The lands in question had not been classified as "wetlands" before the arrival of the George H.W. Bush administration. During his campaign, Bush said he wanted to be known as the "Environmental President" and declared that in his administration there would be "no net loss of wetlands."

Bush and his federal agents were able to engage in a legal trick to ensure the "no net loss" promises. First, the Environmental Protection Agency simply re-interpreted the Clean Water Act with its prohibition of discharging so-called pollutants into the "navigable waters of the United States" into meaning that any water that fell as rainfall or was in a puddle, however, temporary, fell into the "navigable waters" category.

The logic was that the water eventually would migrate into what would be "navigable waters," so those waters needed to be regulated at their source, not when they were in channels that actually could support navigation. Note that Congress did not change the language of the law or give the EPA any more powers; the EPA, operating on a campaign promise from President Bush, simply changed its interpretation of the law, and the courts upheld the changes, original congressional intent notwithstanding.

The second legal trick the EPA pulled was to change its own rules on classifying wetlands, and the results were predictable, if not tragic. Property owners suddenly found their own lands that hardly fit the description of "wetlands" so classified, which meant that their own property rights were strongly restricted. On top of that, EPA and U.S. Fish and Wildlife bureaucrats enforced these changes with threats, criminal prosecutions, and outright brutality, as judges and juries simply fell into line with what federal prosecutors demanded, and the media did its part to denounce these "polluters" and "despoilers of the environment."

As Bovard noted in his article, not even federal prosecutors argued that Wilson and his development firm did environmental damage, nor did they establish any criminal intent. Instead, prosecutors told jurors that Wilson had broken a rule — an arbitrary rule at that — and that point was all that jurors needed to convict. Yes, American jurors were willing to send one of their countrymen to prison, a man with no criminal record or who posed any threat to the public — because his firm disputed a new rule set down by the EPA, a rule concocted for political purposes.

If anything speaks of the bureaucratic mindset of modern Americans, perhaps that verdict does so best. Likewise, when a Virginia federal jury convicted pain specialist William Hurwitz in 2006 for prescribing pain narcotics to people who lied about their pain symptoms — and then sold those pills on the street for money — jurors interviewed afterward agreed that Dr. Hurwitz was no criminal, and they agreed that he did not know his patients were lying to him.

Instead, one of them told journalists, Dr. Hurwitz "fell down on the job." American jurors were willing to destroy the life of a respected physician and send him to prison because they believed he did not enforce federal drug laws with proper zealousness. All of them agreed that he was no threat to the public, but they destroyed him anyway because rules are rules.

Americans like to think of themselves as free and independent people, and perhaps at one time that was the case. Today, however, Americans find their lives governed at every level by bureaucrats in a way that is not much different than the state of things that existed in the old U.S.S.R. While one does not have to obtain an internal visa (as did former Soviet citizens) to travel cross-country, if one drives, the vehicle must pass government inspection and one must have government permission if one is to drive a car at all. Should one choose to fly, one must not be on a secret government "No Fly List," and one must be willing literally to strip naked in front of Transportation Security Administration bureaucrats in order to be permitted to board a plane.

As Americans have ceded previous liberties to bureaucratic control, people have come to believe that these bureaucracies are necessary for their very survival. If one speaks of eliminating government agencies and ending the power that bureaucrats employed by those agencies have over American life, the howls of indignation arise and political cartoonists and editorial writers denounce the very idea that Americans could live for even a second without, say the U.S. Department of Education (which did not exist until 1979) or the Federal Reserve System. Those that imply that this country might be better off without these bureaucracies immediately are depicted as a threat to the commonweal.

Wrote Mises in 1944:

Today the fashionable philosophy of Statolatry has obfuscated the issue. The political conflicts are no longer seen as struggles between groups of men. They are considered a war between two principles, the good and the bad. The good is embodied in the great god State, the materialization of the eternal idea of morality, and the bad in the "rugged individualism" of selfish men. In this antagonism the State is always right and the individual always wrong. The State is the representative of the commonweal, of justice, civilization, and superior wisdom. The individual is a poor wretch, a vicious fool.

And it gets worse. Recently, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, centered at the University of Maryland, claimed that people who seriously questioned the usefulness and legitimacy of the massive federal bureaucracy and are "reverent of individual liberty" should be viewed suspiciously as potential "domestic terrorists." Not to be outdone, the Missouri Information Analysis Center in 2009 in a document given to all police officers in that state declared that people who have Ron Paul bumper stickers or call themselves libertarians should be regarded as "potential domestic terrorists," and it even broadened its "potential terrorist" qualifications to people who own gold.

Then there is the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign being pushed by the Department of Homeland Security. Americans are told to be eternally suspicious of one another and not to hesitate to report anything that seems out of the ordinary. Perhaps it should be noted that not one authentic "terrorist plot" has been uncovered by this internal spy program, nor has it resulted in any kind of increased public safety.

Once upon a time, Americans would have been utterly distrustful of government attempts to replicate the former East German Stasi. But once upon a time, Americans also were wary of a growing and smothering bureaucracy, and they also appreciated the good work of entrepreneurs. Today, bureaucrats are called "heroes" and entrepreneurs such as James Wilson are met with hostility.

Triumph of the Will of the Bureaucrats

For more than a century, Americans have had one constant political theme drilled into them: any expansion of the state is a good thing, and the only way our society can "progress" is for the "experts" in the executive branch of government to be given increasing amounts of power to make decisions for us. Free and independent people do not make good bureaucrats, nor do they gladly follow bureaucratic rules.

Over time, however, the propaganda has worked and Americans also have had to come to terms with the draconian penalties people must pay for disobeying arbitrary rules. There also is another factor at work, and that is the fact that Americans today are more likely to be working either in administrative positions or be working with organizations where administration has been growing.

Take medical care, for example. According to the Fall 2012 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, in 1971, there were about three administrators in health care to every four actual medical practitioners. Today, that ratio is about 5.1 to 1, with most administrative growth coming about either to deal with federal funding or the carrying out of federal mandates. This explosive growth in medical administration not only serves to force up overall costs of health care, but it also has helped to bring about changes in the way Americans approach bureaucratic management.

What was unacceptable to Americans a few decades ago has become a "normal" way of life. People have come to accept state controls that not long ago would have been unthinkable. When he pushed for Congress to create Medicare in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson did not claim that he was going to unleash vast new bureaucracies. When he demanded Congress pass the Patriot Act in 2001, President Bush did not say that he was going to create huge new internal spy networks that would sweep up innocent people.

Bureaucracies are costly, they draw people away from entrepreneurial activities, and they also feed the mentality of state dependency. In hard economic times such as what we are experiencing now, people crave security and are willing to give up even their freedom to have the assurance they will have an income.

Unfortunately, such fear turns Americans against each other. Not only are Americans told to spy on each other and to enforce a "rules-first" mentality, but bureaucracies by nature do not create wealth and can exist only through plunder, and when plunder becomes a way of life, the result is that people are pitted against each other and the society becomes predatory.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

Recently by William L. Anderson: Alack and Alas, We Are Undone for Bernanke Has Twist (and QE1, QE2, QE3, and QE Forever)

The snow began to fall Monday afternoon, and it continued to fall…and fall. By Monday night, we were in an all-out blizzard — and I was out driving, picking up one of my daughter's friends to have her spend the night at our place, given schools would be closed the next day. After picking up Sasha's friend, we drove through one whiteout after another, which is a most interesting experience after dark (but I have become used to it, living in famously snowy Garrett County, Maryland.)

Hurricane Sandy (which became a tropical storm soon after hitting the New Jersey coast) was flooding the East Coast, but in our county (average elevation of 2,300 feet, which is high for the eastern USA), Sandy's precipitation was snow, heavy, wet, and sticky snow that acted more like falling cement. Three feet of it in places. We knew we would lose our electricity and at about 9 p.m. on Monday night, the lights flickered, and then went out for good.

In fact, the lights would not come on again at our place until about 5 p.m. the following Saturday, November 3. Between those days, I would learn some life lessons about survival and living without the thing that most supports modern life: electricity.

Garrett County, Maryland, is located on the Allegheny Plateau and is famous for snow, lots of it. This place is not what comes to mind when one usually thinks of Maryland, which is more famous for the Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore's Inner Harbor, and Ocean City.

However, this is my sixth autumn here and we have had snow falling around the end of October for three of them, so having snow at this time of year is not unusual. What is unusual, however, is for there to be three feet of October snow, and while most of the leaves have fallen from the trees, nonetheless few trees, fences, and even some roofs were not able to withstand the heavy white mass that whacked us last week, and the end result was the destruction of electric and telephone lines.

So, on Monday night, we went to bed in the dark and woke up in the dark. Thank goodness, we had somewhat prepared. We had flashlights, a gas grill (with a separate gas burner) in the garage, and large bathtub full of water to enable us to flush toilets. My wife had bought lots of drinking water and we hoped that the lower-lying places like nearby Cumberland would recover quickly enough for new supplies to be made available, if need be. As for heat, we have a wood stove and a large pile of firewood to serve a relatively small and well-insulated house.

It turned out that our preparations still were not enough. We could have made it through two days and even three, but the water in the tub finally ran dry, although we could have melted snow. (We chose to fill up gallon jugs where I work and use them to flush the Johns.) In fact, two days after the lights went out, the problem supposedly was fixed and our power was on — for 20 minutes. A local transformer blew and then 10 houses on our road were in the dark. All of our neighbors had power, but we did not, and would not for another three days.

The lights came on Saturday evening and I could feel my blood pressure dropping. On Sunday morning, I was able to grind the Ethiopian coffee beans I had roasted in my wok and have a real cup of coffee. (OK, I had three cups of coffee, but I was making up for lost time.) Life almost had returned to normal.

All of this made me think about the larger picture. Yes, the lights finally came on, and sooner or later every house in our hard-hit county will have electricity again, but we have to keep in mind that as the political situation deteriorates in this county, we have to be prepared to live weeks and maybe longer without electric power. And at this writing, it looks as though Americans might send Barack Obama back to the White House and there has been no president in modern history who has been more hostile to conventional generation of electricity than Obama. In his rush to relegate demon coal to the historical ash heap, Obama has made it clear that he wants every coal-fired electric plant in this country to be shuttered for good, damn the consequences. (Anyone who believes that wind farms will adequately replace the huge coal-fired electric plants need not read anymore, since that person already is delusional.)

So, what are the lessons I learned, and how can I apply them to the future? The first is that I was somewhat at a disadvantage not having a generator, but even more important was the loss of water. So, what do I do? After all, the last time residents here lost power for this long was during and after the infamous October 2002 ice storm that hit before the leaves had fallen from the trees. Should I purchase thousands of dollars of preventative merchandise in order to deal with a future problem that might not come until 10 years from now?

In the end, you see, this is not necessarily a production problem, but rather an economic one. What should I do to prepare for disaster without going overboard? My first instinct was to look for emergency hand pumps for wells, as I'd be willing to push down a lever a few hundred times to keep the water flowing into my house. Hand pumps do not require fuel. I may go that route.

This week, I will speak to an Amish neighbor who has running water but no electric pump and no windmill. I need to see what he has, given that he and his family were able to handle the storm and the aftermath much more easily than I was able to do. I cannot imagine living a long stretch without electricity, but the Amish have done just that and it is worth it to find out some of the things they do which help make electricity irrelevant to their lives.

Second, I need to purchase a generator, but not necessarily something that will power my house and the rest of my neighborhood. Again, I don't want to go overboard with spending, as do not want to end up shelling out thousands of dollars so that I can live five days in slightly better comfort than my neighbors. A generator certainly is in the future picture, but do I buy a powerful-but-expensive one, or a generator that would keep our essentials running, such as refrigerators, freezers and, perhaps, our water pump.

Third, living precariously in the aftermath of a natural disaster calls to our attention the importance of community and that is something that government at all levels has destroyed. It is true that Garrett County is not New York or New Jersey, as the local culture is not the at-your-throat-all-the-time existence that characterizes that part of the country. Unions are not strong here, which means that after a disaster like what we experienced, people who try to help are not asked to show their union cards, as was the case in the hard-hit areas on the coast.

But the problem is much deeper than just unions, although they are joined at the hip with the worst elements of the State. For all of the "liberal" talk about government and community, in reality, government as it exists now is the very antithesis of community. In a place where community mattered, a post-disaster scenario would see people quickly coming together to pool their resources and talents, assess damage, and work together.

However, the modern scenario is for people not only to wait for government agents (i.e. FEMA) to arrive before they did anything, but also for taking orders and getting supplies. This is not community by any stretch; instead, it is comparable to how people lived in the U.S.S.R. when the communists ruled.

In the 1970s, a large hotel in Moscow caught fire, and the reaction of the residents who came from western countries versus the Soviet Union is eye-catching. Japanese tourists staying there got out by tying sheets together into a life-rope. Americans soaked towels in water to aid them in breathing as they crawled to the exits. All of the "foreigners" escaped and survived.

Russian guests, however, waited for instructions and many of them died. (Logan Robinson recounts this event in his 1982 book, An American in Leningrad.)

What happened in Moscow more than 30 years ago is not much different than what happens in this country after a disaster. Governments at all levels step in, send troops or other people with badges who bark orders and make threats and, after several days, bring supplies for which people must stand in line for hours to receive. Price controls guarantee misallocation of resources, and, not surprisingly, people are at each other's throats.

To make things worse, politicians swoop in for photo-ops and political operatives such as Paul Krugman tout the wonders of government (as long as people who "believe in government" are in charge), or newspapers like the New York Times insist that only massive, authoritarian government intervention is appropriate after a disaster. Yet, the actual effect of this outright invasion is much different than what the "experts" claim it to be.

While some people do receive needed supplies in the process, we forget that the people furthest from the sources of needed information are the ones with the most authority to make important decisions. Not surprisingly, the decision-makers engage in behavior designed to make themselves look good. People who actually are victims of the disaster are treated as political pawns and are made subject to arbitrary arrest and denied any role in helping themselves.

That clearly was not the case in Garrett County, where there was not a FEMA worker to be seen. Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, who wants to run for president in four years, dropped in to promise "resources" to people whom he knows did not vote for him, but most people here understood his goal was to look good, not do good.

The real heroes here were not government agents, but electric utility workers from other states, including Florida and Georgia, who worked in terrible conditions to restore electricity. Unlike New York and New Jersey, where non-union linesmen were ordered to stay away, the line workers were welcome in a county where nearly everyone lost power.

Furthermore, there was a sense of community here. People in church congregations assessed needs and helped each other. Members of our own church fed us and let us come to their place to take showers and get some respite. (Because of our aging dog, we elected to sleep at our place and cook some meals on our grill, and as long as we had water, we were OK.) Local road crews plowed our county road, so we were not closed in.

(Three winters ago, we had about 20 feet of snow, yet there was not one day in which our road was not passable, even when we had two consecutive blizzards which piled more than five feet of snow in a little more than two weeks. The county road crews are dedicated and, to be honest, seem to enjoy their role when times are tough.)

What I have found through this affair is that as individuals, we need to be prepared, and that means redirecting some of our present consumption to things that might be relevant only in an emergency, and when we will have such an event, no one knows. But we also have to realize that we are part of a community, which means reaching out to neighbors, getting to know them, finding out their needs, and not living our lives in hermetically-sealed containers.

On the other hand, we also see that large-scale government disaster relief tends to make things worse and exists mostly to make politicians look good and to give people with badges and guns the authority to boss others around and make threats. Unfortunately, the latter is what our "elites" believe to be best for all of us.

Furthermore, if the present trend of government to eliminate the burning of coal and natural gas to generate electricity continues, we can expect more of these blackout episodes, and we won't need a natural disaster for that to occur. Time to prepare for what seems to be inevitable.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

In Beatrix Potter's classic The Tailor of Gloucester the poor tailor laments the loss of the "twist" of silk needed for the waistcoat he is creating, declaring, "Alack and alas, I am undone, for I have no twist." When Potter wrote the story in 1902, the notion that a central bank (the U.S. Federal Reserve System did not exist then) would come up with "clever" means to hide the fact that its operations were bankrupt was not quite in the realm of politically-acceptable actions.

Such financial shenanigans would come a decade later, when Europe burst into warfare and governments hopelessly inflated their currencies to pay for the carnage, leading to what has been a permanent "twist" in policy. Continuing in that vein of deception, Ben Bernanke and the Fed have come up with schemes such as "Operation Twist" and Quantitative Easing to hide the fact that it is bankrupting the economy.

Aptly named "Operation Screw" by financial analyst Peter Schiff, Bernanke's "Operation Twist" scheme has been an attempt to have the Fed purchase long-term federal treasuries and sell some of its portfolio of short-term paper in order to bring long-term and short-term interest rates closer, bringing down long-term rates in the process. I say "scheme" because that is exactly what it is: an attempt by the Fed to use monetary trickery in an attempt to fool the markets.

The standard line from Bernanke and his admirers (and even some of his critics, such as Paul Krugman, for whom the Fed never can inflate enough) is that the U.S. economy is in the doldrums because "aggregate demand" is lacking following the financial crisis of 2008. Thus, any action by the Fed to lower interest rates and to improve liquidity is bound to result in increased "aggregate demand," which means that Americans will buy things and lead to an economic rebound that will put people back to work.

As Krugman writes:

…Obama is in a much better position than the conventional wisdom would suggest; the economy isn't booming, but it's growing, and the labor market is moving sideways rather than down. It's not Reagan's morning in America (which reflects the different and much more intractable nature of the 2008 crisis and aftermath), but it's not the political disaster you might imagine.

Krugman probably is right in that a semi-stagnant economy that does not seem to be in crisis plus a decidedly-weak Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, probably does spell victory for Barack Obama in November. So be it. I cannot imagine a President Romney actually doing what is necessary to bring the economy to a real recovery and to let people know what actually is happening.

In the arena of political economy, the Keynesian theory wins hands down over anything the Austrians can produce for the simple reason that under Keynesianism, there is no such thing as malinvestment. All capital theoretically is interchangeable, and no matter where government funnels new money, be it in road construction or paying for new solar energy panels, the economic effect pretty much is the same: increased "aggregate demand."

If Bernanke purchases $40 billion a month of housing securities, as the Fed has announced it will do, all the better, as it will drive down mortgage interest rates and give households more money to spend. Bernanke's only mistake, at least according to the critics on the Left, is that it is still too little, and that the only thing that really will light a fire under the economy is hardcore inflation.

On the other hand, Austrians are derided as "liquidationists." Just let the economy fail, have people put out of work, and the Austrians are in full-blown celebration. Contrary to the Keynesians, however, Austrians do not believe the entire economy somehow must be liquidated. For that matter, unlike the Keynesians, Austrians do not believe that liquidation of the malivested portions of the economy would mean that everything else had to fall apart, too. Writes Schiff:

Prior injections of quantitative easing have done little to revive our economy or set us on a path for real recovery. We are now in more debt, have more people out of work, and have deeper fiscal problems than we had before the Fed began down this path. All the supporters can say is things would have been worse absent the stimulus. While counterfactual arguments are hard to prove, I do not doubt that things would have been worse in the short-term if we had simply allowed the imbalances of the old economy to work themselves out. But in exchange for that pain, I believe that we would be on the road to a real recovery. Instead, we have artificially sustained a borrow-and-spend model that puts us farther away from solid ground. (Emphasis mine)

To put it another way, Schiff is agreeing that had the Fed and Congress not bailed out the banks and financial houses in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers failure four years ago, the initial downturn would have been worse than what happened. Being that the crisis came in the middle of a presidential campaign, it is not surprising that Congress and the Fed acted as they did.

As a short-run strategy, the bailouts and the Obama "stimulus" that followed the president's inauguration provided what seemed to be a "softer landing" than what a hard-nosed policy of allowing the malinvestments to liquidate might have been. However, the "soft landing" was not landing at all, but rather a fall into an economic version of quicksand. True, another round of "quantitative easing" or yet another financial trick by the Fed will have some effect, but on the margin, each "pull-another-rabbit-out-of-the-hat" scheme will be less effective than the previous action.

At some point, the economy stops growing and all there is left is the inflation, and this result is inevitable no matter what the Keynesians might claim. The problem is that Keynesians believe that an economy is nothing more than a homogeneous mass of factors of production and final products into which one stirs money. If things slow down, just add more money.

Austrians hold to the tenets of what is known as Say's Law, which is nothing more than an acknowledgement that consumption requires production, and that the source of increasing standards of living come from the ability of an economy to produce goods that help consumers fulfill their different needs. (No, Say never wrote that everything that is produced will be consumed, contrary to Keynesian claims. Say just was arguing that the real source of purchasing power within an economy comes from those things that are produced. Furthermore, Keynes did not "discredit" Say's Law; instead, he created a straw man and then demolished the false argument.)

From this vantage point, it is easy to see what is happening as the Fed floods the world with more dollars, be it through Operation Twist, or the endless QEs. If, as Austrians believe, that a price system helps to determine the value relationships between the different factors of production, including labor, then anything that distorts a price system ultimately will distort those factor relationship. The longer the distortions continue, the harder it becomes for the economy to have a meaningful recovery.

By the time the housing bubble collapsed, the distortions within the economy were obvious. Had the economy been allowed to correct itself, as Austrians were recommending, then the U.S. economy would have been on the road to a real recovery by now. Instead, Congress, the president, and the Fed pursued policies that not only stymied the needed correction, but actually tried to undo it.

One must understand that without a meaningful correction, there is no recovery. What Twist and the QEs are doing is to block the correction by forcing even more distortions upon the economy, which means that not only must the economy work through the damage caused by the original housing bubble (and the Tech Bubble before it), but it now must deal with the distortions that Bernanke and others have imposed.

Contrary to what Washington is telling us, Bernanke is not "fighting" a recession; he is creating a depression. By insisting that inflation will cure our economic ills, Bernanke and others are only making the economy worse. Be prepared for depressed conditions for years to come.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

I guess it is good that the Democratic National Convention is over if for no other reason than Paul Krugman can get some sleep, given his heart was pounding with joy and admiration over the brilliance of the speakers. No doubt, all this fall he will coordinate his columns and blog posts with talking points from the Obama campaign and the DNC, and I am sure that some real howlers are in store for us lucky readers.

His latest column of gratitude and worship comes in the form of praising Barack Obama for his Wondrous Works in Giving the Economy Life Eternal, or at least a small recovery. He writes:

On Inauguration Day 2009, the U.S. economy faced three main problems. First, and most pressing, there was a crisis in the financial system, with many of the crucial channels of credit frozen; we were, in effect, suffering the 21st-century version of the bank runs that brought on the Great Depression. Second, the economy was taking a major hit from the collapse of a gigantic housing bubble. Third, consumer spending was being held down by high levels of household debt, much of which had been run up during the Bush-era bubble. 

The first of these problems was resolved quite quickly, thanks both to lots of emergency lending by the Federal Reserve and, yes, the much maligned bank bailouts. By late 2009, measures of financial stress were more or less back to normal. 

This return to financial normalcy did not, however, produce a robust recovery. Fast recoveries are almost always led by a housing boom — and given the excess home construction that took place during the bubble, that just wasn't going to happen. Meanwhile, households were trying (or being forced by creditors) to pay down debt, which meant depressed demand. So the economy's free fall ended, but recovery remained sluggish.

What Krugman wants us to believe is that by bailing out the banks and financial houses (which was pushed by the Bush administration and continued by Obama’s presidency), the economy was saved. No, what happened was that the original downturn was not as great as it would have been had some other Kool-Aide-drinking banks also were forced to face the music — complete with some executives losing their Connecticut mansions — and the public find out very quickly which financial institutions were zombies and which were not.

Now, Krugman would argue that had the bailouts not occurred, the entire financial system would have collapsed. Granted, if the best thing the financial system could do was to engineer a housing bubble with more liabilities than the entire wealth of the world, maybe it needed the exit door. However, I suspect that we would have seen something quite less than the Apocalypse as Wall Street figures would have seen it in their interest to find a way out of the mess they had helped to create.

But there is more. Economist Mario Rizzo had a most interesting and insightful post recently on Facebook, writing:

The Democrats say that we cannot go back to the policies that caused the financial crisis and recession. Ok. So what were those policies: The irresponsible expansion of Fannie and Freddie? The excessively easy monetary policy of the Fed? Inadequate regulation of securities? I do not remember a single Democrat objecting to these policies during the period before the crisis. I do remember Barney Frank pushing more and more expansion of Freddie and Fannie, though. Oh, the Bush tax cuts. No economist I have heard of says that the tax cuts caused the crisis and recession. So what are they talking about? 

In fact, what do we have today? For one, it is a financial system full of zombie institutions with the bailouts obscuring which institutions are healthy and which are not. Furthermore, we have the clashing policies of easy money and picky regulations. Yes, the Obama administration is demanding that banks lend money out the wazoo, but the regulators don’t want anyone to get those loans. One might want to try a policy in which the banks actually have to bear the consequences of bad and even reckless loans without having the Federal Reserve and the taxpayers standing behind to clean up the mess. I suspect that we would see some civilized behavior on Wall Street; instead, we see what, frankly, is a rigged game in which the government pushes down interest rates, limits the loan choices for banks via strict regulation, and then holds out the prospect of small-but-near-guaranteed returns from federal paper. Gee, I wonder where the banks will send their money.

And then there is the GM bailout. Krugman writes:

But, that said, Mr. Obama did push through policies — the auto bailout and the Recovery Act — that made the slump a lot less awful than it might have been.

 There is a bit of a problem here; the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts did not help the economy; they hurt it. Yes, they kept the United Auto Workers in cash, which was the real purpose, anyway. (More on this below.) However, they also diverted huge amounts of capital away from more productive sectors in order to fund a venture in Crony Capitalism or maybe even Crony Socialism.

I doubt that Krugman is familiar with Frederic Bastiat, and reasonably so, since Bastiat really emphasized opportunity cost and Krugman really seems to believe that by printing money, government can do away with that pesky little economic law. The GM and Chrysler bailouts not only were politically-motivated, but also were carried out with a political calculus, all the way down to determining which dealerships would be closed and which would stay open. (It seems that campaign contributions had something to do with the calculus of decision making.)

Bastiat was a master of understanding the larger picture, something that Keynesians are not able to comprehend. (Sorry, folks, the use of aggregates does not constitute a view of a “big picture” of economics.) Instead of looking to the UAW members who kept their jobs, Bastiat would have looked at the opportunities that were lost and the entrepreneurs who could not see their own ideas fulfilled because the UAW needed a bailout.

I notice another trend in Krugman, writings, and that is a very sneaky theme that goes something like this: The economy is going to recover very well, anyway, so we should re-elect Obama to “validate his record.” Furthermore, Krugman wants us to believe that if Mitt Romney were elected and the recovery occurred, that would be very bad because he would wrongly get the credit for recovery. (Actually, I think it will be bad if either man wins the election, but that is another story.)

If Obama is re-elected and the economy slides down, then I am sure that Krugman simply will blame the Goldstein Republicans or even George W. Bush. Of that we can be sure.

While I did not watch the DNC (or RNC) conventions, I did see a hilarious Youtube of former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm claiming that Obama’s auto bailout saved the entire U.S. manufacturing sector and with it, the whole economy. Not only is she completely unhinged, but the notion that forcing taxpayers to underwrite a horribly-unproductive industry is not the way to save anyone except for those who were politically-connected. Furthermore, her claim that the “entire auto industry” would have collapsed without the bailout is simply false.

I do find it instructive that Krugman never mentioned this mangling of the facts, but as I have said before, the guy is a political operative, not an economist. A real economist would not claim that throwing money into a political rathole constitutes a stimulus that leads to recovery.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

Before I look at some aspects of a recent Paul Krugman column, I need to tell readers that, no, I did not watch any of the Republican National Convention, and I don’t support Mitt Romney or the Republican Party, which officially has set itself up as nothing more than the political faction of the Neoconservatives. If Romney is elected, he still won’t be president; no, Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney still will be the men behind the curtain.

It always is amazing to me to see how certain narratives continue to exist, even after real-live experience has debunked them time and again. Krugman always is claiming that the Republicans (including Romney and Paul Ryan) really are Radical Free Marketeers in action and if elected, will work to make government so small it “can be drowned in a bathtub.” We have had six Republican presidents in my lifetime, and I cannot recall one time that government was smaller in spending and in scope than it was when that person took office. When writing of Keynesian economics, Krugman claims that the critics are blind to the facts, but when he writes about politics, he is as blind as anyone from the Washington Times or Fox News regarding the rhetoric and the facts.

Nonetheless, in today’s column, he goes off on Republicans and Medicare, claiming:

But back to the big lie. The Republican Party is now firmly committed to replacing Medicare with what we might call Vouchercare. The government would no longer pay your major medical bills; instead, it would give you a voucher that could be applied to the purchase of private insurance. And, if the voucher proved insufficient to buy decent coverage, hey, that would be your problem.

I have no idea if the Republicans can impose the Next Wonkish Measure or not, or if they would give a real-live effort. I just don’t know, but given the rhetoric and reality of the past, I cannot imagine that they will do what Krugman breathlessly claims they will do. But, hey, the guy is a master of regurgitating Democratic Party Talking Points, and that is the perspective that I take. After all, he is first and foremost a political operative.

What does interest me is what he says next, for it reflects his “knowledge,” or lack thereof, about markets and how they work. Take his following points regarding insurance and Medicare:

Why would anyone think that this was a good idea? The G.O.P. platform says that it "will empower millions of seniors to control their personal health care decisions." Indeed. Because those of us too young for Medicare just feel so personally empowered, you know, when dealing with insurance companies. Still, wouldn't private insurers reduce costs through the magic of the marketplace? No. All, and I mean all, the evidence says that public systems like Medicare and Medicaid, which have less bureaucracy than private insurers (if you can't believe this, you've never had to deal with an insurance company) and greater bargaining power, are better than the private sector at controlling costs. 

I know this flies in the face of free-market dogma, but it's just a fact. (Emphasis mine) You can see this fact in the history of Medicare Advantage, which is run through private insurers and has consistently had higher costs than traditional Medicare. You can see it from comparisons between Medicaid and private insurance: Medicaid costs much less. And you can see it in international comparisons: The United States has the most privatized health system in the advanced world and, by far, the highest health costs.

Since I don’t have the cost numbers in front of me, I won’t dispute what he has said, and furthermore, I will answer using the assumption that his numbers are correct. Instead, I ask this simple question: Why would a private firm create a bureaucracy and then voluntarily engage in practices that force up its costs? After all, as economists since 1871 will note, the value of the final product is not determined from the value of the factors of production, but the other way around.

In other words, firms would gain nothing from engaging in activities that are more costly than necessary to provide a final product. When we do see something as Krugman describes, we need to know why private insurance costs would be higher than government bureaucracy costs.

Krugman does not give an answer, except to claim that what we are seeing is a free market in action. To me, this is a non-explanation, given that I never have seen an economist — including Krugman — claim that firms can be more profitable by imposing higher costs upon themselves. So why would the insurance companies do it, especially since they operate in what Krugman seems to claim is a near-unregulated free market?

I think anyone who has worked for an insurance firm or for any regulated industry can tell you that government “oversight” is costly. Furthermore, what Krugman does NOT say is that Medicare and Medicaid officials are not subject to many of the same regulations that are laid down on private firms. Certainly no firm would create a bureaucracy that is unnecessarily costly as in free markets, higher costs do not lead to higher profits. I also would like to add that the regulatory process also serves as a domestic protectionist device that keeps out competition — and leads to higher prices for consumers.

Now, if Krugman really wants to claim that the pre-1871 theories — that the cost of production is what determines the cost of the final product — he is free to do so. However, he just might be rejecting the price theory that has been taught for more than a century. If he wishes to turn back the clock to David Ricardo’s theory of value, so be it.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

The Best of William Anderson

Standing before
the podium with his reading glasses perched on his nose in a Really
Serious Position, former FBI Director Louis Freeh read the summary
of his damning report on what happened at Penn State University.
The university, he intoned, was directly responsible for permitting
Jerry Sandusky, the former football team defensive coordinator and
now a convicted child molester, for preying on young "troubled"
boys.

So far, the
media response has been lockstep not only in its condemnation for
Penn State and the late Joe Paterno, the legendary coach who won
more games than any other NCAA Division I football coach in history,
but also in its praise for Freeh. (I include links from the New
York Times, ESPN,
and CBS
Sports.)

Not being familiar
with the details of the report or the Sandusky case and the role
of Penn State officials in trying to hide what they feared was happening,
I will ask readers to judge the accuracy and tone of Freeh's report
and make their own assessments. However, before the media and legal
world goes on to paint Louis Freeh in the most heroic terms, I would
remind readers that probably any one of us could have written that
report and made the same damning comments made by Freeh and his
underlings. It hardly is heroic to come upon a situation after the
fact and to write those things which apparently were obvious in
hindsight.

No, I am writing
in order to let readers know that this "heroic" Louis
Freeh has some serious baggage of his own, baggage that includes
covering up murders, whitewashing the most hideous domestic massacre
since Wounded Knee, publicly making wrongful accusations, and further
turning the Federal Bureau of Investigation into an entity that
James Bovard accurately has called, "A
Stasi for America." Louis Freeh does not deserve our praise;
indeed, he does not even deserve our scorn. Instead, he deserves
to be sitting in a cell at the federal Supermax Prison in Colorado,
as the crimes he committed during his years at the FBI pale in comparison
to anything done by Paterno, whose legacy Freeh has destroyed, or
even Sandusky ever did.

If the charges
for which Sandusky was convicted are true, then the man truly was
a monster and needed to be caught. His victims will be scarred for
life — but they will be alive and can seek healing. However, one
of the victims of Louis Freeh, Katherine Andrade, cannot seek healing
because she was incinerated at Waco in 1993 as a result of the direction
actions by the man who now stands in judgment of Joe Paterno.

Katherine
Andrade While She Lived

Katherine
Andrade after Receiving "Assistance" from Louis Freeh

Bovard explains
what Freeh, who apparently did not have the same concern for the
children trapped at the Branch Davidian residence as he did for
the children whom Sandusky abused, had his underlings do on the
final day of the 1993 Waco siege:

…CS gas was
delivered via 54-ton tanks driven by FBI agents. The tanks smashed
through much of the Davidians' home and intentionally collapsed
25 percent of the building on top of the huddled residents. The
FBI knew the Davidians were lighting and heating their residence
with candles and kerosene lamps and had bales of hay stacked around
the windows. The FBI also knew that "accumulating [CS] dust
may explode when exposed to spark or open flame," as a U.S.
Army field manual warned. Six years after the assault, news leaked
that the FBI had fired incendiary tear gas cartridges into the
Davidians' home prior to a fire erupting. Attorney General Janet
Reno, furious over the FBI's deceit on this key issue, sent U.S.
marshals to raid FBI headquarters to search for more Waco evidence.
From start to finish, the FBI brazenly lied about what it did
at Waco — with one exception. On the day after the Waco fire,
FBI on-scene commander Larry Potts explained the rationale for
the FBI's final assault: "Those people thumbed their nose
at law enforcement."

Freeh's assault
killed 80 people in broad daylight, but Freeh and his agents had
something that neither Sandusky nor even Paterno never had: control
of the legal process that ensured no one from the FBI that committed
crimes that day would have to face even a hint of justice. That
is because Freeh was able to use his powers as FBI director to block
inquiries, cover up any wrongdoing, and control the direction of
congressional investigations that followed.

Following allegations
made during the Oscar-nominated documentary, Waco:
The Rules of Engagement, that the FBI had fired live ammunition
into the Davidian residence along with launching incendiary devices,
Freeh's FBI staged a re-enactment. As James
Bovard explains, this was not an ordinary re-enactment:

On April
19, 1993, FBI agents relied on commercial, off-the-shelf ammo
— the type that would be used by any hunter or shooter.

For the March
19, 2000, (Sen. John) Danforth-FBI reenactment, the FBI used military-issue
ammunition that had a special chemical coating on the gunpowder
to reduce muzzle flash (helpful in preventing soldiers from being
detected in combat). The military ammo thus had a built-in flash
suppressant. Since a key issue was the length of the muzzle flashes,
using flash-suppressing ammunition ensured that the reenactment
would be a farce.

The Danforth-FBI
reenactment further biased the test results by having the FBI
agents use weapons with 20-inch barrels — instead of weapons with
14-inch barrels which agents carried on April 19, 1993. The longer
a weapon's barrel, the less muzzle flash will be shown from each
shot.

This is a
tricky way to do an accurate reenactment. But the reenactment
produced the politically correct result, and Danforth proceeded
to denounce the American people for thinking bad things about
their federal masters.

No doubt
Danforth, the FBI, and others will continue to insist that there
was no gunfire by FBI agents on April 19, 1993. But if the feds
are innocent, why have they gone to such absurd lengths to conduct
the tests in such a manner?

This is what
the ancients once might have called a "cover-up." Notice
that Freeh never had to worry about being cited for doing what essentially
is criminal activity (called "obstruction of justice")
even as he has accused Penn State officials of obstructing investigations
into what Sandusky was doing. The difference is that the now-dead
Paterno has a tarnished legacy, Sandusky is in prison, and two Penn
State officials face criminal charges for allegedly hiding information
about crimes that were committed.

Freeh's legacy
of hiding murder and mayhem does not begin and end with Waco, however.
The 1995 murder of Kenneth Trentadue in the Oklahoma City federal
lockup also has been legally covered up, thanks not only to Freeh,
but also to the Clinton administration's legal "fixer,"
Eric Holder, the present U.S. Attorney General who now stands accused
of covering up crimes related to the "Fast and Furious"
program that has exploded in his face.

In the aftermath
of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI actively was searching
for the "John Doe Number Two" who supposedly accompanied
Timothy McVeigh, and when Trentadue was arrested by federal officials
in California ostensibly for violating probation, the FBI sent him
to Oklahoma to be further questioned. Shortly after arriving at
the federal lockup, officials supposedly found
Trentadue dead in his cell after allegedly hanging himself with
a bed sheet.

Not surprisingly,
even though Freeh's FBI engaged in a vigorous cover-up and denials
that the death was due to anything but suicide, Trentadue's brother,
Jesse, an attorney in Utah, realized
immediately that the FBI story was not true. Paul Craig Roberts
writes:

The victim
was Kenneth Michael Trentadue.  At 7 AM on August 21, 1995,
officials from the Oklahoma Medical
Examiner‘s office arrived at the new Oklahoma City Federal
Transfer Center for the body of a man recently picked up for parole
violation who allegedly was a suicide by hanging. The astonished
state officials saw a body with scalp split to the skull in three
places, throat slashed, and a body completely covered in blood,
bruises and burns.

As law requires,
the officials asked to see the cell in which the alleged suicide
occurred. Federal officials pulled rank and refused on the grounds
that a federal investigation was underway.

A federal
investigation was not underway.

The state
officials told the prison officials that the body’s condition
required FBI notice and protection of the cell as an undisturbed
crime scene. Associate Warden Max Flowers, however, ordered the
cell to be cleaned before any investigation could be done. Flowers
claimed that medical staff informed him that Trentadue was HIV-positive
and that it was urgent to remove the infectious blood.

Trentadue
was not HIV-positive.

Because this
is a case with many twists and sidetracks, one should listen to
Lew Rockwell's interview with Jesse
Trentadue available here. Once again, we see how Louis Freeh
and his underlings were able to get away with a number of serious
crimes ranging from murder to obstruction of justice.

Compared with
murder and covering up the crime, a false accusation from Freeh's
FBI would seem to be minor, but the way that Freeh and the FBI handled
matters in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing demonstrated the outright
criminal mindset that seems to govern that organization and is part
of Freeh's enduring legacy of lies and incompetence. Following the
bombing in Atlanta during the Olympic Games, the FBI quickly fixated
itself upon security guard Richard Jewell, who was the first to
suspect that the backpack left alone under a bench might contain
a bomb.

The bomb exploded
with one person killed, but in the aftermath, Jewell was a hero
for having acted quickly. However, the FBI decided via one of its
vaunted "profilers" that the pudgy guard was the person
who made and planted the bomb. Not surprisingly, the
FBI began to leak to the media that Jewell was their man, and
he was subjected to the horrors of the media rush to judgment, something
that seems to be a permanent fixture in U.S. culture.

Jewell,
who died in
2007, ultimately was exonerated but not before the FBI and its
Progressive media allies had ruined his reputation. While Freeh
denied having anything to do with the leaking of false information,
nonetheless he was in large part responsible for the lawless culture
of the FBI which encouraged agents to act recklessly and dishonestly.

As Louis Freeh
presently basks in the media adulation that he does not deserve,
one should remember the man's own legacy, one that never will be
tarnished because the Progressives that control the media and this
country's politics will never permit such a thing to happen. Freeh
no more deserves to be on a podium criticizing the “culture” of
Penn State University than would John Edwards deserve to give a
sermon condemning adultery.

What happened
at Penn State was wrong and it should not have been allowed to continue.
However, what Freeh did while heading the FBI makes the worst abuses
at Penn State look to be a pleasant walk in the park. If anything,
the fact that Louis Freeh is permitted to stand in judgment of others
is proof that our present political culture is so broken that it
is beyond repair.

July
16, 2012

William
L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him
mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland,
and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute. He
also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit
his blog.

The
Best of William Anderson

There are many
enduring myths about government that the "elites" of our
society continue to push upon one, and one of them is that those
of us who are not "elites" have a duty to serve them —
in the name of our "social contract" to the state, of
course. Now, such demands (and they are demands, make no mistake
about it) always are couched in terms of "service" to
"our country," and anyone who might challenge such thinking
immediately is labeled as "selfish" or "unwilling
to serve."

Coupled with
this demand that we engage in servitude to the state and those who
run it is the everlasting Progressive belief that government can
do things without there being an opportunity cost. (Indeed, the
only time I ever see Progressives invoke the doctrine of opportunity
cost is when someone suggests that tax rates be cut. Suddenly, we
hear something like, "This country cannot afford to
have a cut in taxes.")

For many years
until the spring of 1973, the USA had military conscription, and
I remember taking my draft physical in December 1972 just a little
more than a month before the signing of the Paris Peace Accords
ending most U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. When the draft
ended and I realized I would not be going to Vietnam or anywhere
else the U.S. Armed Forces would choose to send me, I was relieved,
not just because I was not going to die in a war, but also because
I had my life back again.

Unfortunately,
for the past four decades, Americans have been harangued by Progressives,
both conservative and liberal, that some sort of conscription, be
it military or "national service," was necessary for all
of the "right" reasons. The young must learn to "serve,"
and the latest salvo comes via (What else?) the New York Times
editorial page in which Thomas E. Ricks, a fellow at the Center
for a New American Security, calls for yet another state scheme
to wring forced labor from young people.

Like a typical
policy wonk in Washington, Ricks is full of wonderful ideas on how
this scheme will revitalize America and in his mind, the possibilities
for greatness have no end:

A revived
draft, including both males and females, should include three
options
for new conscripts coming out of high school. Some could choose
18 months of military service with low pay but excellent post-service
benefits, including free college tuition. These conscripts would
not be deployed but could perform tasks currently outsourced at
great cost to the Pentagon: paperwork, painting
barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, and generally
doing lower-skills tasks so professional soldiers don't have to.
If they want to stay, they could move into the professional force
and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.

Those who
don't want to serve in the army could perform civilian national
service for a slightly longer period and equally low pay — teaching
in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure,
or aiding the elderly. After two years, they would receive similar
benefits like tuition aid.

But what if
someone objects to being essentially kidnapped by state authorities
to do work at low pay levels? Ricks has a snappy answer:

And libertarians
who object to a draft could opt out. Those who declined to help
Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no
Medicare, no subsidized college loans
and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government
can have it.

Someone of
Rick's statist mentality actually thinks this is a good argument
against libertarianism when, in fact, it only exposes the underlying
ignorance he and his ilk have about government. Notice that he does
not exempt the "libertarian" from paying for things
like subsidized loans, mortgage guarantees, or Medicare. No, what
he is saying is that anyone who objects to the government's scheme
of minimum-wage slavery at age 18 will be forced to live another
form of slavery for the rest of his or her life.

Furthermore,
the person who objects to being conscripted no doubt will face harassment
from the authorities who will remind that "ungrateful"
citizen at every turn that one really cannot live life apart from
the harassment and interference that is the hallmark of statist
America. However, Ricks not only demonstrates his utter contempt
for anyone who might object to state-sponsored brutality; he also
proves that he is economically illiterate, which seems to be a characteristic
of the Washington policy wonk.

A new draft
that maintains the size and the quality of the current all-volunteer
force, saves the government
moneythrough civilian national service and frees professional
soldiers from performing menial tasks would appeal to many constituencies.

Others argue
that the numbers don't add up. With an average cohort of about
four million 18-year-olds annually, they say, there is simply
no place to put all these people. But the government could use
this cheap labor in new ways, doing jobs
that governments do in other countries but which have been deemed
too expensive in this one, like providing universal free day care
or delivering meals to elderly shut-ins. And if too many people
applied for the 18-month military program, then a lottery system
could be devised — the opposite of the 1970s-era system where
being selected was hardly desirable. The rest could perform nonmilitary
national service.

Yes, there
is no limit to what one can do with what essentially is slave labor.
One only can imagine the quality of these services and the scandals
that would break out as government officials would discover that
they could make these kids do personal chores for those people who
are politically-connected. But the possibility of scandal or plain-awful
"free" services does not deter Ricks from really getting
revved up. He continues:

Similarly,
some of the civilian service programs would help save the government
money: Taking food to an elderly shut-in might keep that person
from having to move into a nursing home. It would be fairly cheap
to house conscript soldiers on closed military bases. Housing
civilian service members would be more expensive, but imaginative
use of existing assets could save money. For example, V.A. hospitals
might have space.

The pool
of cheap labor available to the federal government would broadly
lower its current personnel costs and its pension obligations
— especially if the law told federal managers to use the civilian
service as much as possible, and wherever plausible. The government
could also make this cheap labor available to states and cities.
Imagine how many local parks could be cleaned and how much could
be saved if a few hundred New York City school custodians were
19, energetic and making $15,000 plus room and board, instead
of 50, tired and making $106,329, the
top base salary for the city's public school custodians, before
overtime.

Like the typical
Beltway statist, Ricks has no concept of opportunity cost. (Come
to think of it, neither do the famous economics faculty members
at Princeton. Maybe Ricks can get a job there teaching economics.)
In his view, if the government "saves money," then somehow
the whole country experiences "savings." Individuals who
are bearing the real costs don't count; after all, their entire
existence is to serve the state.

Ricks
paints the picture of energetic young people who anxiously would
await their turn to serve the nation when, in reality, conscription
of this kind would create what involuntary servitude always creates:
sullen, bitter people who do what they have to do in order to survive
another day of tyranny.

I do find it
interesting that the New York Times, the same newspaper that
constantly excoriates the Old South because it (like a number of
northern states) had chattel slavery, is so anxious to feature someone
who advocates that America's young people essentially be sold into
the "peculiar institution." Yet, like all Progressives,
the editors of the NYT and those that buy into the mentality of
Statism believe that all Americans have the duty to "serve"
the state. That is, except for their own sons and daughters who
are much too important to be conscripted into servitude.

July
13, 2012

William
L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him
mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland,
and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute. He
also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit
his blog.

The
Best of William Anderson

Even though
at our house we don’t have television reception, we do have a TV
and watch videos. My kids like to watch reruns of shows like “Bones”
and “Castle,” and I admit to enjoying the old “Nash Bridges” episodes.

All of these
shows involve cops and other government officials “solving” crimes,
and while the methods used at times might not exactly be constitutional,
nonetheless they always get it right. Furthermore, the cops in these
shows care about getting it right.

Once again,
we see how Hollywood fantasy collides with reality. The “superdetective”
who uses deduction and intelligence to solve a crime simply does
not exist, anymore, or if in existence, is a very rare species.
Instead, police today depend heavily upon preconceived “narratives”
in which they decide at the beginning who is “guilty,” and how to
construct “evidence” to prove that guilt. If the evidence does not
fit the narrative, then police either ignore it or get prosecutors
to do the legal version of pounding square pegs into round holes.

I make this
point because American law increasingly has moved in the direction
where evidence no longer matters when it comes to determining who
has committed a crime. For that matter, it does not even matter
if someone actually has committed a crime; the only thing that is
important is whether or not the authorities claim there has been
a crime and that the “guilty” party will be punished. Modern criminal
"investigations are not something out of "Bones"
or "Law and Order." Instead, they are something
out of South Park.

Nowhere are
“imaginary crimes” more prevalent in this country than in so-called
sex crimes, be they rape, sexual assault, or child molestation,
and no other set of “crimes” requires less proof for conviction.
For all of the wistful talk of “revolution,” Americans need to understand
that a legal revolution already has occurred, as Congress, the courts,
and the executive branch have teamed up to wipe out what once was
called “due process of law.”

While “due
process” exists in form, it no longer means anything in substance,
and the Mondale Act and the Violence
Against Women Act have further eviscerated what have been called
“the rights of the accused.” Being that the main purpose of the
VAWA was to get more convictions of assault, sexual assault, and
rape against men, the law has been very successful, but only by
spreading the net very wide (on the assumption that all men are
rapists and women always tell the truth they when accuse men of
rape) and eliminating requirements that the prosecution bring corroborating
evidence.

It is important
to remember that”sex crimes” in this era
have become intensely political. Passage of the VAWA, just like
the Mondale passage some 20 years earlier, had been preceded by
huge amounts of propaganda claiming that rape and sexual assault
were “epidemic,” and that only the federal government could save
the day, and the way to do that was to destroy due process, rules
of evidence, and any sense of “fair play” when “sex offender” accusations
were made.

For example,
the so-called “rape shield” laws that exist under the VAWA umbrella
prevent defendants from entering a lot of exculpatory evidence in
the name of “protecting the victims’ privacy.” When combined with
the “no drop” policy that the VAWA has encouraged, it becomes extremely
difficult even for falsely-accused me to be able to avoid going
to prison. (The assumption behind “no drop” is that a recantation
of the charges by the original accuser always comes about because
of “sexist” pressure placed by the male accusers. In reality, because
prosecutors have so many legal weapons, “no drop” pretty much means
that even innocent people are going to plead out to something
even if there is no evidence except for the original accusation.)

Federal authorities
were able to entice states to end due process in so-called sex crimes
by offering huge amounts of money to state and local governments
which not only can be used to prosecute such cases, but also for
a number of other programs, such as battered women’s shelters and
the like. (Yes, rape and domestic violence exist, although the kinds
of numbers that are thrown about such as more than a quarter of
women attending college are raped are based upon very shaky numbers
and methodologies.)

To put it another
way, when crimes such as rape, sexual assault, and child molestation
are alleged, innocence really is not a defense at all. Thus, there
is no need for government investigators to do an accurate of thorough
job, as such work might uncover evidence that the charges are false,
and police and prosecutors are loathe ever to admitting any kind
of wrongdoing no matter how outrageous their actions.

The Duke
Lacrosse Case and the VAWA

The
infamous “rape” charges by a prostitute against three Duke University
lacrosse players is a study in the injustices spawned by the
VAWA, although most people do not understand the role this law played
in the prosecution of what turned out to be a non-crime. Indeed,
while the facts of the case are most telling, the VAWA provided
the bedrock for prosecutor Michael Nifong’s baseless charges. The
account in Wikipedia explains the basic outline:

In March
2006 Crystal
Gail Mangum, an African
American student at North
Carolina Central University who worked as a stripper, dancer
and escort, falsely
accused three white
Duke
University students, members of the Duke
Blue Devils men’s lacrosse team, of raping
her at a party held at the house of two of the team’s
captains in Durham,
North Carolina on March 13, 2006. Many people involved in,
or commenting on, the case, including prosecutor Mike
Nifong, called the alleged assault a hate
crime or suggested it might be one.

In response
to the allegations Duke University
suspended the lacrosse team for two games on March 28, 2006. On
April 5, 2006, Duke lacrosse coach Mike
Pressler was forced to resign under threat by athletics director
Joe Alleva and Duke President
Richard
Brodhead canceled the remainder of the 2006 season.

On April
11, 2007, North
Carolina Attorney General Roy
Cooper dropped all charges and declared the three players
innocent. Cooper stated that the charged players — Reade Seligmann,
Collin Finnerty, and David Evans — were victims of a “tragic rush
to accuse.” The initial prosecutor
for the case, Durham
County‘s District
Attorney Mike Nifong, who was labeled a “rogue prosecutor”
by Cooper, withdrew from the case in January 2007 after the North
Carolina State Bar filed ethics charges against him. That June,
Nifong was disbarred
for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation”, making
Nifong the first prosecutor in North Carolina history to lose
his law license based on actions in a case. Nifong was found guilty
of criminal
contempt and served one day in jail. Mangum never faced any
charges for her false accusations as Cooper declined to prosecute
her.

While this
does explain what happened, nonetheless it does not tell how the
case got as far as it did. People tend to blame Nifong’s “rush to
judgment” and the explosive response from the local community and
the Duke University administration and faculty, but perhaps the
most important element is left out: the influence of the VAWA which
enabled Nifong to push what he and others knew to be baseless charges.

Following the
party during which two strippers (actually prostitutes) left in
a huff after it became clear that none of the players present were
willing to pay for sex, especially after the two women literally
had grossed everyone out with their antics during their “exotic
dance,” the women left in a car. After Mangum refused to leave the
car driven by her partner for the night, Kim Roberts, Roberts called
the police and an officer brought the drunken Mangum to a mental
health facility called Durham Access.

While an intake
nurse was examining Mangum, she asked the disheveled woman, “Were
you raped?” Mangum said she had been, and from that point, the provisions
of the VAWA took hold. If a woman claims to have been raped, a set
of procedures then must be followed, and the first is for the alleged
victim to be examined either by a physician or a certified Sexual
Assault Nurse Examiner or SANE.

Many SANEs
are professional nurses who perform their duties admirably, but
others simply are feminist zealots who see themselves as “anti-rape”
crusaders and the SANE who helped in Mangum’s examination, Tara
Levicy, fell into the second category. While Levicy did not do the
actual exam, nonetheless she signed the examination sheet (illegally,
I would add), and then became the point person from Duke University
Medical Center.

Levicy’s role
in this case was huge if for no other reason than she was a hook
onto which Nifong and his supporters in the news media and at Duke
University could hang their accusations. Even after word came from
the state crime lab that there absolutely was no DNA that matched
any of the players to Mangum, Nifong confidently went on
with the case, knowing that North Carolina had done away with any
requirement of corroborating evidence, thanks to the VAWA, and all
it would take would be an accusation. Furthermore, as he told the
media,
a lot of the information that would discredit Mangum would not be
permitted to be heard in court because of “rape shield” laws,
another VAWA provision.

It could be
said of the Duke case that there was no “there” there. It was a
hoax, albeit a hoax kept alive by the VAWA, a dishonest prosecutor,
the academic community, and a news media that never learns. By setting
a required investigation into motion, one that came about even though
Mangum recanted her charges while in the DUMC emergency room (although
she revived them later), the VAWA did what it always does: establish
a pro-prosecution bias from the start.

To get a sense
of just how ridiculous the whole thing is, take the situation of
Reade Seligmann. He was at the party, but left during the “dance”
because he was disgusted with the whole thing. He called a cab,
went to an automatic teller at a bank (where he was recorded by
the bank’s camera), went to a restaurant where he got something
to eat, and then went to his dorm.

According to
the clock at the bank, Seligmann was withdrawing money at the same
time he supposedly was beating and raping Mangum. Ordinarily, not
being present at the scene of the supposed crime while the “crime”
was being committed at one time might have been seen as a strong
alibi. However, the VAWA, along with other federal policies in cases
of alleged sexual assault or rape, go by the ironclad premise that
once an accusation of this kind is made, the authorities must pursue
the charges as though they were true.

(Nifong, after
being faced with this hard evidence, decided to change the timeline
arbitrarily in order to pound the square evidence peg into the round
hole of truth. Not surprisingly, the New York Times swallowed
the whole thing, which is typical in these kinds of racially and
politically-charged cases.)

Even when prosecutors
find exculpatory evidence or it becomes clear that their star accuser
is lying, for the most part they ignore the 800-pound gorilla sitting
in the corner because of “no drop” policies. Even though North Carolina
does not have such a policy, nonetheless once prosecutors in that
state levy charges, they are loathe to give up stalking their “prey,”
no matter how specious the evidence.

One has to
understand how close the Duke students came to being convicted for
something that never happened. Although much of the national media
(except the NY Times) turned against Nifong after defense attorneys
revealed in a December 15, 2006, hearing that Nifong had hidden
DNA evidence from the lawyers and had lied to judges during earlier
proceedings, Nifong still had the “law” on his side.

First, much
of the DNA evidence (that Mangum had the recent DNA of a number
of unidentified males in her underwear — none of it belonging to
any lacrosse players, despite her description of the alleged attack)
fell into the category that Nifong believed would be withheld due
to “rape shield” laws. Thus, to him, it was irrelevant even if it
did impeach the “victim’s” entire testimony.

Second, because
the VAWA did away with the “corroborating evidence,” the fact that
there was no DNA evidence to fit Mangum’s original claims was irrelevant;
all that was needed for a conviction was tearful testimony from
Mangum that Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans brutally
assaulted and raped her, and had the trial been held in Durham,
North Carolina, where there still exist a large number of “true
believers” in Nifong’s non-evidence, most likely the jurors would
have felt the community pressure for a conviction.

For that matter,
Mangum and Nifong already colluded in late December to change her
testimony and timeline in order to do away with both DNA and Seligmann’s
rock-hard evidence that he was not at the scene when the alleged
attack occurred. That Nifong’s credibility was shot did
not prevent the media (and especially Sports Illustrated)
from heaping praise on Nifong for doing a 180. The mentality behind
the VAWA and its supporters is such that prosecutors and their witnesses
always are assumed to be telling the truth — even when it is obvious
that they are not.

Third, the
State of North Carolina dropped charges in the case only after an
exhaustive investigation by two seasoned prosecutors who, unlike
Nifong, actually wanted to know what happened, not a fictional version
of the event. Nifong was out of the case because the North Carolina
State Bar did something that was unprecedented in state history:
it filed misconduct charges against a sitting prosecutor before
a criminal case had been fully adjudicated. The decision to charge
Nifong came from a majority of one vote from the committee that
fashioned the charges.

The investigators
were stunned by not only the lack of evidence, but the dishonesty
of the entire process, and the two special prosecutors made it clear
to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper that he should choose
words that made it utterly transparent that the case had been a
fraud. Yet, because of the VAWA, had the NC State Bar voted not
to charge Nifong, most likely a jury in Durham would have convicted
the three young men, and they still would be in a North Carolina
prison.

Like the Mondale
Act, the VAWA is able to enable more criminal convictions because
the “rights of the accused” have been replaced with “the rights
of the victims” (even if there are no real “victims”). Hearsay “evidence,”
once rejected by Anglo-American courts as being unreliable, is standard
fare in “sex crime” cases. For a while, the courts even permitted
children to testify on closed-circuit television from the judges’
chambers so that the Sixth
Amendment right of being able to “face one’s accuser” could
be ignored in the name of garnering more jury convictions.

While the VAWA
has not been successful in doing away with the “facing one’s accuser”
provision of the U.S. Constitution, nonetheless by destroying “corroborating
evidence” standards and by setting in motion a guilt-assuming process
of non-investigation, any man is vulnerable to accusations from
anyone who wants to make an accusation of rape or sexual assault,
since the accusation itself is the “conclusive” evidence. Lest anyone
doubt what I have written, the bizarre and utterly dishonest case
against Harold Allen of Narragansett, Rhode Island, should give
one much pause.

Patrick
Lynch and Rape Charges against Harold Allen

In June 2007,
Patrick
Lynch, then the attorney general of Rhode Island, announced
his office had charged Harold Allen of Narragansett with raping
a woman 32 years before. Lynch, who then had aspirations of being
the state’s governor (his 2010 Democratic primary bid was unsuccessful),
declared that Allen had raped a woman when both were 16 years old,
and that the woman had “just remembered” via “recovered memory”
therapy. (Lynch
pointed ignored that “recovered memory” techniques had long been
discredited, but like everything else in government and especially
criminal law, what is discredited in the real world becomes standard
fare when the state is involved.)

At least Nifong
had an actual place and (sort of) time when the alleged assault
against Mangum occurred. Lynch declared in his indictment that the
rape had occurred sometime between April and October of 1975, and
that the place where it allegedly happened also was unknown.

This was vintage
VAWA: no one knew the date, time, or place, but a rape must have
occurred because the woman, after having undergone therapy, claimed
it was so. There was no corroborating evidence, nothing; only her
claim. (The one “witness” said Allen had been at the girl’s house,
but Allen pointed out that the two were neighborhood friends, and
that it was not unusual for him to have been at her place or elsewhere
with her. After all, 16-year-olds generally tend to be social creatures.)

Yet, that claim
was enough for Lynch to file charges. Unfortunately for him (and
his political career) it became clear that even Rhode Island residents
thought his antics were a bridge too far, and
the AG soon after introducing the case with much fanfare went into
retreat and dismissed the accusations. The real problem came
because Rhode Island law created high standards of proof for charges
involving “recovered memories,” in large part because of the publicity
garnered from earlier “repressed memory” cases that were strongly
criticized by experts in psychology.

Without the
VAWA, Lynch would not have dreamed about charging Allen with rape.
Despite there being no evidence other than a woman’s supposedly
“recently liberated” memory, Lynch was free to file charges. Likewise,
every male who reads this needs to understand that he, too, can
find himself in the same situation. Because there is no statute
of limitations on rape, any woman can accuse any man of rape after
the fact, even if the two never had any contact, or even if they
were in the same locality.

For example,
assume that one of my female students was unhappy with her grade.
She could get back at me by alleging that I raped her, and once
she made her accusation, the following things would happen:

• I would
  be arrested, handcuffed, marched before a media in a “perp walk,”
  and have my mug shot then publicized in the media;
• I would
  be suspended from my job and possibly fired;
• The charges
  would be nationalized and I would be vilified from coast to coast;
• In order
  to begin to be able to refute the charges, I would have to be
  able to account for every second of my time during a period perhaps
  of several months because the law would not require for her to
  be specific in either the time or the place when the alleged assault
  occurred;
• The VAWA
  provisions would kick in if I were to find out that she had made
  false accusations before, because they would not be admissible
  as exculpatory evidence;
• I would
  have tremendous pressure to plead to “something” because of mounting
  legals bills.

This is not
paranoia. This is how the law operates today in this country. As
I noted earlier, innocence no longer is a defense in American courts.

While most
readers rightly are horrified at the reality of modern American
law, there also are those people who believe that “rights of the
accused” should not be in existence at all, and are quite happy
with the state of affairs. For example, the American Civil Liberties
Union at first objected to both the RICO and VAWA statutes because
of the way these laws destroyed due process, but after both had
been in place for a while, the ACLU dropped its opposition and actually
praised the laws.

Why?
The ACLU leaders approved of the outcomes. The RICO statutes allowed
Rudy Giuliani to go after Michael Milken and others on Wall Street,
and the ACLU saw it as a necessary thing in the battle to destroy
capitalism. As for the VAWA, when feminism is involved, ultimately
that is the side the ACLU will choose to support.

Giving up principles
for politics is standard fare these days. For that matter, Peter
Neufeld of the Innocence Project, declared after no inculpatory
DNA was found in the Duke case that DNA did not matter. This
from a person whose organization has gained freedom for wrongly-convicted
people using…DNA evidence. In other words, many people will give
up whatever principles they have in order to achieve certain political
outcomes.

The substitution
of politics for law ultimately creates South
Park Nation where accusations automatically bring convictions,
and we have arrived at that sorry point. We are not “in the process
of getting there,” as some might think. No, we are there, something
that most Americans will refuse to realize — until something happens
to them, and by then it will be too late for them.

July
9, 2012

William
L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him
mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland,
and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute. He
also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit
his blog.

The
Best of William Anderson