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Tag: Laws
Why Conservatives are Liberal
Guest Post by Eric Peters
The other day, I “got away” from an armed government worker.
I was “speeding” – that is to say, driving faster than the government decrees to be “safe.” Rounding a curve, I encountered an AGW. In the rearview, I saw him brake and knew he was going to U-turn after me, in order to punish me for harms I hadn’t caused but for rules (and authority) I had affronted.
Rather than stop, I “fled” – and successfully “eluded” the AGW.
The Age of the Two Laws
Guest Post by The Zman
For as long as I have been alive, I’ve understood that the law does not treat everyone equally. We have the theory, all men are equal before the law, but in practice it is something different. This is the product of growing up poor. A poor man, who gets jammed up on a small crime, is going to get processed. That means he will get a public defender, who will negotiate terms with the state. If he hires an attorney, that lawyer will do the same thing, but maybe pulling in a favor from a buddy to get a better deal.
A Libertarian Dilemma
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Not in my Backyard!
But what about when it’s in your neighbor’s back yard? What is the Libertarian attitude – and response – toward something you don’t like being built on someone else’s property?
The question contains its own answer.
It’s one I had to come face to face with recently, too. Proof of my Libertarian pudding, you might say. I think I passed. You tell me – and then tell me how you’d react.
Here’s the set-up:
I moved to a rural area, one with just one stoplight in the whole county – and no zoning laws, if you can imagine such a thing still exists anywhere in America today.
Laws Don’t Apply to Heroes
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Here’s a video documenting another case of law enforcers not enforcing the law… on law enforcers.
A man who had been issued a ticket – that is, ordered to hand over a sum of money as punishment for violating the law requiring both a front and a rear license plate – went to the local police department parking lot, where he video’d several vehicles without front license plates (and one – a Chevy Tahoe – with no license plates at all) but no tickets being handed out.
A law enforcer was present, so the man approached him to ask why he wasn’t doing anything to enforce the law which was enforced without mercy on him. As they talk, the SUV with no plates at all starts up and leaves. The law enforcer takes no action to enforce the law prohibiting the operation of a vehicle on public roads without tags. He expresses no “concern” about this “suspicious” vehicle.
Chart Of The Day: America’s Strongest Growth Sector——-Laws And Prisoners
HAPPY JULY 4TH PEASANTS – ENJOY YOUR FREEDOM
Affronting Huitzilopochtli
Guest Post by Eric Peters
With real crimes – that is, actions that result in real harm to real people – it is easy enough to objectively define the crime.
You either did – or didn’t take something that belongs to someone else.
You either did – or did not – hurt someone else.
If you did, then it’s right and reasonable that you – the causer of the harm – be held accountable.
“Speeding,” on the other hand, is an odd sort of crime.
In most cases, no harm has been caused to anyone. A statute has been offended, nothing more.
To whom must the “guilty” party make amends?
IRS chief: Agency encourages illegal immigrant theft of SSNs to file tax returns
This is your government in action. They knowingly process tax refunds to illegal immigrants using fake Social Security numbers. When your own government enforces whatever laws they chooses against whatever person they choose, it is no longer a legitimate government.
The IRS is struggling to ensure that illegal immigrants are able to illegally use Social Security numbers for legitimate purposes, the agency’s head told senators on Tuesday, without allowing the numbers to be used for “bad” reasons.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen made the statement in response to a question from Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., during a session of the Senate Finance Committee about why the IRS appears to be collaborating with taxpayers who file tax returns using fraudulent information. Coats said that his staff had discovered the practice after looking into agency procedures.
“What we learned is that … the IRS continues to process tax returns with false W-2 information and issue refunds as if they were routine tax returns, and say that’s not really our job,” Coats said. “We also learned the IRS ignores notifications from the Social Security Administration that a name does not match a Social Security number, and you use your own system to determine whether a number is valid.”
Continue reading “IRS chief: Agency encourages illegal immigrant theft of SSNs to file tax returns”
Like a Kid-Touching Priest…
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Years ago, when I worked as an editorial writer at The Washington Times, I got to know the curmudgeonly – and brilliant – writer Sam Francis. One of his most astute observations was that we suffer under a system of anarcho-tyranny. He meant by this that the government does as it pleases, regardless of “the law” (including the Constitution, which is supposed to be the law) while viciously persecuting ordinary people over even trivial infractions of law.
This neatly describes the reason for the increasingly public and general dislike of cops – who are the government’s enforcers (their own term).
But it’s not the enforcement, per se, that enrages.
It’s the double standard.
Another example of this hit the news recently when a brutal Dover, Delaware cop was awarded a quarter-million dollar pension and four months of full salary (and benefits) on top of that as his “punishment” for kicking a man in the face as hard as he possibly could – breaking the man’s jaw.
THE UNITED STATES OF CRAZY LAWS
The Rule Of Law No Longer Exists In Western Civilization
Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
My work documenting how the law was lost began about a quarter of a century ago. A close friend and distinguished attorney, Dean Booth, first brought to my attention the erosion of the legal principles on which rests the rule of law in the United States. My columns on the subject got the attention of an educational institution that invited me to give a lecture on the subject. Subsequently, I was invited to give a lecture on “How The Law Was Lost” at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
The work coalesced into a book, The Tyranny Of Good Intentions, coauthored with my research associate, Lawrence M. Stratton, published in 2000, with an expanded edition published in 2008. We were able to demonstrate that Sir Thomas More’s warning about prosecutors and courts disregarding law in order to more easily convict undesirables and criminals has had the result of turning law away from being a shield of the people and making it into a weapon in the hands of government. That is what we witness in the saga of the Hammonds, long-time ranchers in the Harney Basin of Oregon.
With the intervention of Ammon Bundy, another rancher who suffered illegal persecution by the Bureau of Land Management but stood them off with help from armed militia, and his supporters, the BLM’s decades long persecution of the innocent Hammonds might have come to a crisis before you read this.
Continue reading “The Rule Of Law No Longer Exists In Western Civilization”
THE ODDS ARE NEVER IN YOUR FAVOR
The irony of the phrase “may the odds be ever in your favor” is not lost on the readers of the Hunger Games trilogy of novels or the film adaption. Despite the grimness of the story, over 65 million copies of the books have been sold. The total box office take so far has exceeded $1.4 billion for the four movies. The dystopian series tackles real issues like severe poverty, starvation, torture, oppression, betrayal and the brutality of war. It doesn’t fit into the standard film making success recipe of feel good fluff, politically correct storylines and happy endings. Each film in the series gets progressively darker, with the final episode permeating doom and gloom. The books and the movies capture the deepening crisis mood engulfing the world today. And they realistically portray the world as a place where there are no good guys in positions of power. The ruling class, in all cases, is driven by a voracious appetite for supremacy, wealth, and control.
An Ambiguous, Confusing, Dangerous World
The world is a morally ambiguous place where those in power and those seeking power utilize the influence of media propaganda and PR campaigns built around “heroes” and “icons” to psychologically control the masses, while enriching themselves and their crony capitalist sponsors. Endless war against the latest “bad guys” further enriches the arms dealers and their political lackeys who joyfully use faux patriotism and nationalistic fervor to insist upon more boots on the ground, drones in the air, bombs dropped, and missiles launched.
HE WHO WRITES THE LAWS….
The ONLY person in prison related to torture is John Kiriakou who was the whistleblower.
How To Reduce Police Violence – Eliminate Nanny State Crimes
Via David Stockman’s ContraCorner
By Stephen L. Carter at BloombergView
On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.
I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law.
The obvious racial dynamics of the case — the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is white; Garner was black — have sparked understandable outrage. But, at least among libertarians, so has the law that was being enforced. Wrote Nick Gillespie in the Daily Beast, “Clearly something has gone horribly wrong when a man lies dead after being confronted for selling cigarettes to willing buyers.” Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, appearing on MSNBC, also blamed the statute: “Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.”
The problem is actually broader. It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law. Libertarians argue that we have far too many laws, and the Garner case offers evidence that they’re right. I often tell my students that there will never be a perfect technology of law enforcement, and therefore it is unavoidable that there will be situations where police err on the side of too much violence rather than too little. Better training won’t lead to perfection. But fewer laws would mean fewer opportunities for official violence to get out of hand.
The legal scholar Douglas Husak, in his excellent 2009 book “Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law,” points out that federal law alone includes more than 3,000 crimes, fewer than half of which found in the Federal Criminal Code. The rest are scattered through other statutes. A citizen who wants to abide by the law has no quick and easy way to find out what the law actually is — a violation of the traditional principle that the state cannot punish without fair notice.
In addition to these statutes, he writes, an astonishing 300,000 or more federal regulations may be enforceable through criminal punishment in the discretion of an administrative agency. Nobody knows the number for sure.
Husak cites estimates that more than 70 percent of American adults have committed a crime that could lead to imprisonment. He quotes the legal scholar William Stuntz to the effect that we are moving toward “a world in which the law on the books makes everyone a felon.” Does this seem too dramatic? Husak points to studies suggesting that more than half of young people download music illegally from the Internet. That’s been a federal crime for almost 20 years. These kids, in theory, could all go to prison.
Many criminal laws hardly pass the giggle test. Husak takes us on a tour through bizarre statutes, including the Alabama law making it a crime to maim oneself for the purpose of gaining sympathy, the Florida law prohibiting displays of deformed animals, the Illinois law against “damaging anhydrous ammonia equipment.” And then there’s the wondrous federal crime of disturbing mud in a cave on federal land. (Be careful where you run to get out of the rain.) Whether or not these laws are frequently enforced, Husak’s concern is that they exist — and potentially make felons of us all.
Part of the problem, Husak suggests, is the growing tendency of legislatures — including Congress — to toss in a criminal sanction at the end of countless bills on countless subjects. It’s as though making an offense criminal shows how much we care about it.
Well, maybe so. But making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it. Overcriminalization matters, Husak says, because the costs of facing criminal sanction are so high and because the criminal law can no longer sort out the law-abiding from the non-law-abiding. True enough. But it also matters because — as the Garner case reminds us — the police might kill you.
I don’t mean this as a criticism of cops, whose job after all is to carry out the legislative will. The criticism is of a political system that takes such bizarre delight in creating new crimes for the cops to enforce. It’s unlikely that the New York legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.
Husak suggests as one solution interpreting the Constitution to include a right not to be punished. This in turn would mean that before a legislature could criminalize a particular behavior, it would have to show a public interest significantly higher than for most forms of legislation.
He offers the example of a legislature that decides “to prohibit — on pain of criminal liability — the consumption of designated unhealthy foods such as doughnuts.” The “rational basis test” usually applied by courts when statutes face constitutional challenge would be easily met. In short, under existing doctrine, the statute would be a permissible exercise of the police power. But if there existed a constitutional right not to be punished, the statute would have to face a higher level of judicial scrutiny, and might well be struck down — not because of a right to eat unhealthy foods, but because of a right not to be criminally punished by the state except in matters of great importance.
Of course, activists on the right and the left tend to believe that all of their causes are of great importance. Whatever they want to ban or require, they seem unalterably persuaded that the use of state power is appropriate.
That’s too bad. Every new law requires enforcement; every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence. There are many painful lessons to be drawn from the Garner tragedy, but one of them, sadly, is the same as the advice I give my students on the first day of classes: Don’t ever fight to make something illegal unless you’re willing to risk the lives of your fellow citizens to get your way.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-04/law-puts-us-all-in-same-danger-as-eric-garner
THE MORE RESTRICTIONS, THE MORE MORONS
We are all Idiots who Have to be Saved from Themselves
“Forced by the verdict of a German court, a long-established fishmonger in Hamburg had to attach a sign above his shop’s counter recently, which informs his customers that “fish may contain fish bones”. Packs of peanuts meanwhile contain, as requested by law, the hint that they “may contain traces of nuts”. For the same reason, irons nowadays often bear the request to please not iron things while one is wearing them. Who would have thought?”
The above is from a recent report in the Austrian press. German best-seller author and journalist at “Der Spiegel”, Alexander Neubacher notes in his new book “Total Beschränkt” (“totally restricted”) that this “over-protective policy” actually creates the very helplessness which it ascribes to citizens. He asserts: “Prohibitions are triumphing over reason – the more restrictions, the more morons” (in the German language, the sentence lends itself to word play: “je mehr Beschränkungen, desto mehr Beschränkte”).
He points out that “the State wants to wean us from thinking with ever more regulations, and makes us into idiot citizens who have to be saved from themselves”. The paternalistic infantilization of citizens by the Nanny State is nothing new, but it has become such a scourge in Europe that it has actually spawned an entire literary genre of complaints by now, one that is apparently selling extremely well.
Citizen, you clearly need help: the image Europe’s bureaucrats have of their fellow men
(Photo via taringa.net / Author unknown)
According to the article, Mr. Neubacher’s book should be regarded as the new “standard work” on the topic. The bureaucratic nannies in the EU have provided him with a formidable wealth of material.
Thus the reader learns e.g. that on German territory, bicyclists using an electric bicycle that “only supports pedaling” may have a blood alcohol level of up to 1.6 per mil without being in danger of losing their driver’s license, whereas drunkards using an electric bicycle that “also works while idling” may not exceed a 0.5 per mil threshold. In parts of Berlin, no second bathrooms, no open chimneys and no elevators may be added in apartment renovations; on drilling platforms and wind farms in the North Sea there not only have to be medical supplies and cookies in storage in case of emergencies, but also a “pack of cards”. Prohibitions, says Neubacher, are generally overrunning our daily lives like “knotweed on a cemetery wall”.
Beware the giant knotweed
(Photo via phyllophilus.blogspot.co.at)
Responsible Parties
Montesquieu, who died in 1755, formulated a general rule for a well-run state that has been long forgotten: “If it is not necessary to make a law, it is necessary not to make a law”.
Neubacher not only provides an extensive encyclopedia of the protective siege, he also names those responsible and their motives: politicians, he says, believe they need to be seen to “do something” – and it is easier to pass rules and regulations concerning completely unimportant details of life, than actually doing something substantive. So these regulations are in a way decoys, designed to distract from the politicians’ ineptitude.
Charles de Montesquieu: purveyor of good advice that has been ignored
(Image © Bridgeman Art Library / Versailles)
With regard to this, we would however note that we are even more worried that they might actually do something “substantive”, so our concerns certainly differ from Mr. Neubacher’s in this particular respect.
Neubacher also points out that an entire industry has sprung up under the guise of supposed “consumer protection”, with numerous influential industry lobbies benefiting greatly from regulations and paternalism, which have created “profitable, crisis-resistant business segments, that make a lot of money on the back of Nanny State regulations”.
This is e.g. immediately obvious when considering the ban prohibiting the use of incandescent light bulbs in the EU: allegedly introduced to “save the planet”, the ban’s man aim has always been to “increase the profits of Osram”, which along with other lighting producers lobbied heavily for its introduction. Ever since, Europe’s citizens have been forced to sit in lighting reminiscent of a morgue. As Lord Christopher Monckton remarked to this, given that this morgue-like lighting is highly likely to discourage reading, the continued dumbing down of the population has probably been given a major shot in the arm by the light bulb ban.
Among the many examples for connoisseurs of the prohibitions and regulations created by the “preventative-bureaucratic complex” in Neubacher’s book, we also find the recent establishment of a cemetery for lesbian women in Berlin – where men, you guessed it, are prohibited from being buried. Thus the bureaucrats have ensured peace of mind for members of Berlin’s lesbian community even after they have shuffled off this mortal coil. One cannot even escape the nannies by dying anymore.
Inauguration ceremony of the new “lesbians only” cemetery in Berlin.
(Photo source: AFP)