Those statists at Cato…
“As director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute,” the tag on an article at Ars Technica tells us, “Jim Harper works to adapt law and policy to the unique problems of the information age…” Far easier and more palatable to the moronic mainstream than working to eliminate law [sic for “regulation”] and policy, that’s for sure.
Jim’s exercised that the TSA is breaking the law — though not those against sexual assault, theft, or pedophilia. No, Jim’s upset that the TSA refuses to comply with the Administrative Procedures Act. APA is extremely important to imbeciles like those at Cato, who believe the State — particularly its bureaucracies that slaughter liberty ê is good, even beneficial, especially when rules guide it (a fallacy the Nazis manipulated to their advantage). APA is the body of law that “legalizes” plainly illegal bureaucracies; it does away with the Constitution, replacing your inalienable rights with “civil” ones that bureaucrats bestow — or deny— as the mood takes them; Franklin Roosevelt codified APA, which tells you all you need to know about this abomination. And APA requires an agency to solicit “public comment” before it imposes a new procedure, such as pushing victims into porno-scanners. Alas, TSA was too eager to ogle us to bother with such niceties, so it never asked whether we’d enjoy posing for its carcinogenic strip-tease. No matter: Seeking our opinion is as much a sham as the TSA’s “security” because nothing in the APA compels an agency to heed our advice. It can dang well do as it pleases so long as it allows the serfs to air their grievances against its proposal.
Nonetheless, Jim has posted “a petition on Whitehouse.gov. It says the president should ‘Require the Transportation Security Administration to Follow the Law!’” His op-ed at Ars Technica begs readers to sign his plea — but he somehow neglects to mention another, far more meaningful petition that appeared on Whitehouse.gov within hours of the site’s going live. It garnered over 30,000 signatures in a few weeks and demanded the abolition of the TSA, not its adherence to every dictator’s dream, the APA. And, unless you count the insulting and irrelevant non-response that John “The Pervert” Pistole made to that petition, Our Rulers ignored it. Yet Jim wastes our time and the Kochs’ money with an appeal to the APA.
Ah, Cato, where “adapting law and policy to the unique problems of the information age” replaces liberty’s timeless principles. Let’s hope Cato’s next director sabotages this nest of nincompoops as ruthlessly but more successfully than Ed Crane did: with “friends” like these, Liberty needs none of her millions of enemies.
7:50 am on July 12, 2012
