Author: Christopher Burg

With Great Power Comes… Great Power

Sometimes I wish that I was a politician because then I could vote myself a raise whenever I wanted one:

MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) – The Minneapolis City Council last Friday approved a pay raise for all its members and the incoming mayor starting in 2018, according to public documents.

Though the resolution was not previously on the agenda or passed through any standing committees, outgoing Council President Barb Johnson proposed the measure at this year’s final meeting to give each member of the Council and the mayor a $10,000 salary increase, with annual raises matching those given to other city employees through collective bargaining agreements. The proposal passed unanimously, though no period of public comment was noted in the meeting’s minutes.

Politicians who vote themselves raises like to make any number of excuses. The most common excuse is that any vote for a raise doesn’t take effect until after the newly elected politicians take office so they’re not actually voting themselves a raise. However, with such a high incumbency rate in this country voting for a raise for the next set of politicians is usually the same as voting themselves a raise so that excuse is incredibly feeble. Other politicians try to justify giving themselves raises by claiming that they do a hard job. But robbing people and forcing them to do their bidding isn’t terribly hard since they have an army of uniformed thugs willing to do their dirty work.

Of course the denizens of Minneapolis could always opt to replace the entire city council but the next set of politicians will do the exact same thing because almost nobody is going to turn down the opportunity to give themselves a raise. This is what democracy looks like.

Protectionism

I live in Minnesota so I’m used to the concept of driving to neighboring less tax happy states to acquire cheaper goods, especially goods that are eligible for sin taxes. Many tax happy states find themselves competition, especially near their borders, with their less greedy neighbors and this causes a great deal of friction that ultimately leads to tax happy states protecting themselves by brining legal might against its denizens who shop in neighboring states:

Keeping the old punch bowl filled can get spendy at this time of year, so you can’t blame Juncheng Chen for making an epic party run to try to keep costs down. Unfortunately, officials in his home state of New York don’t like it when their captive subjects drive across the border to stock up in jurisdictions where the booze prices are cheaper. They arrested him earlier this month and issued a press release about law enforcement’s great blow against frugal scofflawry.

“Juncheng Chen, 45, of 136-18 64th Road, Flushing, Queens, was arrested by investigators with the Tax Department’s Criminal Investigations Division after his vehicle was stopped by New York State Police in Rye, NY. The vehicle was packed with 757 liters of liquor, which Chen allegedly purchased at five different liquor outlets in New Hampshire.”

[…]

New York, as it turns out, taxes booze at $6.44 per gallon. Hefty as that sounds, that’s only somewhere around the middle of the pack, as U.S. states go. But people are natural comparison shoppers, and bargains abound. “Spirits are taxed the least in Wyoming and New Hampshire, where government-run stores have set prices low enough that they are comparable to having no taxes on spirits,” notes the Tax Foundation. With such a price differential at hand, why not make a long-distance party run and split the savings with some lucky customers?

Well, except that state officials get pissy if they catch you.

Statists are often baffled by the fact that libertarians oppose taxes. In their world taxes are this magical thing that leads to the creating of great products and services. What they don’t see is the dark side of taxation, the force used to collect it. The United States of America is supposed to be one country where denizens of one state can freely travel to and perform business in other states. However, tax laws in one state can lead to legal trouble for people who buy goods or services in a neighboring state. Here in Minnesota the state government actually expects denizens to pay it the difference in taxes if a good or service is acquired in a state with lower taxes. If you don’t, and the state catches you, it can and will bring its law enforcers into the equation to extract the money out of you by force.

The Taxpocalypse

I doubt there is anybody in this country who isn’t aware of the tax bill that was recently passed. I’m not writing a post arguing whether it will or won’t actually lead to lower taxes because I’m not actually qualified to digest the current tax code, let alone the new tax code. Instead I’m just going to wait and see if I actually get to keep more of my paycheck.

What I do want to write about is peoples’ reactions, specially those who opposed this bill from the beginning. If most of these people were opposing the bill because it would actually lead to higher taxes, I could understand their reaction. However, most of them aren’t complaining about that. Instead they’re almost hysterical because various government programs are getting cut and that will somehow lead to people spontaneously combusting or some such nonsense.

With almost instantaneous access to information across the world I cannot fathom how anybody still believes that government programs actually do what their proponents claim they do. Everyday we read stories about government programs either not delivering the services they promise to deliver, money being diverted from government services into the pockets of the people put in charge of them, or new private startups coming into existence in order to provide the very service the government service provider promises to deliver. What I’m saying is that the government doesn’t actually do what it claims it does and therefore nobody would care if a department charged with providing a specific service gets its funding cut.

No matter how much funding government service providers receive they always provide, at best, a subpar service and their slack must sooner or later be picked up by nongovernmental individuals and organizations. That being the case, letting individuals and organizations who actually help people keep a bit of their money will do more good than any funding to a government program.

An Impressive Level of Corruption

People often talk about the amount of corruption present in so-called third world nations. They mention how police officers in Latin American will pull you over but not issue a ticket if you slip them $20 or how getting a building permit in a timely manner in Africa requires a bit of grease to get the gears moving. However, this kind of corruption is amateur hour compared to the corrupt here in the United States of America, especially around Washington DC.

Consider this story. It involves a state government giving permission to a foreign company to operate a tollway at an area that suffers from significant traffic congestion. As part of this deal the state government gets a kickback and in exchange it prevents improvements from being made to either the nearby roadways or mass transit systems. On top of that a local level of government pretended to fight the deal until it was given a kickback of its own:

The current I-66 project, as well as the express lane schemes on Interstates 95, 395 and 495, all contain contract provisions negotiated behind closed doors that ensure improvements are never made to streets bordering the tolled routes. The theory is that the free roads are the “competition” for the toll road, so the deals say that the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) must pay the foreign firms “compensation” in the event improvements are made. This is a powerful financial incentive for VDOT never to improve Northern Virgnia’s notorious congestion.

Leaders in Arlington, the city surrounding the tolled stretch of I-66, originally feigned opposition to tolling, but subsequent events show that they were just holding out to win lavish concessions from the state in the form of transit funding. With more buses tying up the streets already narrowed to accommodate bicycle lanes that are never used, the area’s congestion will necessarily increase.

Defenders of the I-66 deal often say people can just use transit or carpool, but they fail to mention that the I-66 deal extended existing high-occupancy restrictions by three hours. They likely are not aware that the I-66 contract limits improvements to the Orange Line Metro, and that the road will soon require three occupants instead of just two to qualify as a carpool. The I-95 and I-495 Express Lane deals force state taxpayers to pay penalties to Transurban, an Australian company, if carpooling actually becomes popular.

The governments of Virginia and Arlington as we as Transurban must be felling good right now. All three of them have already made money on this deal and their profits are only going to increase! And the best part is that none of them have to worry about a pesky competitor throwing a wrench into their scheme because the governments have a monopoly on the transportation infrastructure and can therefore prevent additional parties from building more roadways, light rail, or other forms of transportation! Everybody is a winner except the plebs who have to drive between Virginia and Washington DC.

While people living in the United States think so-called third world nations are corrupt, they often fail to see that the country they live in has more money exchanging hands in corrupt deals that the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many of those supposedly corrupt nations. The only difference is that the supposedly corrupt nations are far more transparent about their corruption whereas here in the United States corruption is mostly kept behind closed doors and wrapped in a veil of political ceremony.

Like You and Me, Only Better

If you’re being attacked and you managed to call 911, a law enforcer will probably show up in time to draw chalk around your body and take some pictures of your corpse. Now when a law enforcer is attacked the whole goddamned world will be alerted so that other law enforcers can drop everything they’re doing, such as responding to your attack, so they can help one of their fellows:

Last week, while many of us were caught up by the internet getting ripped apart by the seams, FCC chairman Ajit Pai also announced a new national system of wireless emergency Blue Alerts, which will notify the public if police officers are threatened, “missing, seriously injured, or killed.”

However, there won’t be such a system to alert everybody in the area when we’re being attacked. I guess we’re just not important enough. Perhaps if we spent more of our time steal wealth from each other to give to the State, we would get our own national alert system.

Isn’t it strange how everybody in this country is supposedly equal under the law but the law continues to establish an environment where favored individuals, such as government employees, enjoy privileges that others do not.

We the People Site Shuttered, But Nothing Has Changed

Under the guise of better enabling the people to get their issues noticed by the federal government, the Obama administration started the We the People petition site. The site was celebrated by Obama’s supporters are a great step forward for the United States government. Now those people are upset because the Trump administration shutdown the site:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is temporarily removing a petition tool from its website after 11 months of silence, promising to respond to public concerns next year.

The Trump administration said the platform, used extensively by critics and less frequently by allies, will be removed at midnight Tuesday and return in late January as a new site.

It remains to be seen whether the site will come back online as promised or not. However, nothing has actually changed. If anything the government has just become slightly more honest. While Obama’s supporters celebrated the We the People site, it accomplished nothing. Any petition that reached the required number of signatures to be addressed by the federal government were either dismissed with a wave of a hand or tossed down a memory hole.

The government doesn’t give a shit about what you think and never did.

Individual Morality and Consequences

As a radical individuals I don’t subscribe to the idea of objective morality. If such a thing as objective morality existed, the human race would have had no choice by to agree with each on the matter. But if you ask 10 individuals to describe their beliefs of what is moral and what is immoral, you’ll likely hear 10 different systems of morality.

When I express my disbelief in objective morality, especially to libertarians, I’m usually met with a lengthy explanation of how a world without objective morality would devolved into a world of murder, rape, and pillage. It’s the same argument Christians often make against atheists. Without a belief in God, they believe people will just murder, rape, and pillage. However, people who make these arguments make two mistakes. First, they assume that all morality must be established by an outside force. Second, they believe morality and consequences are interchangeable.

My disbelief in objective morality doesn’t mean I don’t have a system of morals. As I noted above, if you ask 10 individuals to describe their moral beliefs, you’re likely to get 10 different answers. Each of those individuals will express a system of morality to you, indicating that they do have an established system of morality, but disagree on the definitions of moral and immoral. They will disagree on the definitions precisely because they have established their own system. While their system may be heavily influenced by outside forces, such as philosophy, it is a system unique to them. I, for example, have a self-defined system of morality. While I think that it’s a pretty good system and the world would be a better place if everybody lived by it, I have no way to prove objectively that it is a good system and the world would be a better place if everybody lived by it.

The second failure objective moralists often fall into is treating morality and consequences as interchangeable concepts. While an absence of a moral system may give an individual the excuse to murder, rape, and pillage, they very well might avoid performing those actions because they realize doing so could lead to severe consequences. If you try to murder or rape somebody, they might kill you in self-defense. If you try to pillage a neighborhood, the people living there might kill you in self-defense. Even if you managed to get away with such actions, somebody is likely to search for you or hire somebody to search for you so that their idea of justice can be exacted. Even sociopaths tend to understand that actions have consequences and that can often regulate their behavior.

Socialists and libertarians strongly disagree on what constitutes morality. Even though they disagree on morality they can often live together in relative peace. Why? Because they both recognize that their actions have consequences. If a socialist tries to appropriate a libertarian’s means of production, the libertarian might use violence to dissuade the socialist. Likewise, if a libertarian decides that a group of socialists is a threat to their private property and attempts to use violence against them, the socialists may respond with violence of their own.

Just because somebody doesn’t believe in objective morality, or morality of any kind, doesn’t mean they’re going to murder, rape, and pillage.

Another Day, Another Officer Involved Shooting

Yesterday an individual somehow managed to get a weapon into a police interview room and apparently drew the weapon against himself, which lead to an officer involved shooting:

A man was injured after a police shooting inside Minneapolis City Hall Monday afternoon.

Police chief Medaria Arradondo said Minneapolis police personnel were interviewing the man, and then left him alone in a room.

“And he began injuring himself with an edged weapon. After attempting to subdue the adult male subject, officers discharged their weapons,” Arradondo said.

The man was rushed to Hennepin County Medical Center. His condition is not known.

One has to wonder how the individual got the weapon into the interview room but I digress.

The more I see the term “officer involved shooting” the more I realize how euphemistic it is. The first reports of this incident simply mentioned an officer involved shooting, which didn’t tell me if an officer was shot, if an officer shot somebody, or if all parties involved were shot. If you read a headline that says, “An officer involved shooting occurred at the Minneapolis City Hall,” you might be lead to believe that somebody shot a police officer.

Why can’t people use the far less ambiguous description, “An officer shot somebody,” or, “An officer was shot?” Why do so many people fell the need to tiptoe around what actually happened?

Without Government Who Would Withhold Evidence

A man accused of rape was acquitted when a trove of text messages showed that his sexual encounters were consensual. What makes this story especially noteworthy though is that law enforcers withheld this evidence from the court:

The criminology student at Greenwich University had spent nearly two years on bail and three days in Croydon Crown Court when the trial was stopped in a dramatic fashion after it emerged police officers had failed to hand over evidence that proved his innocence.

[…]

Now, the judge has called for an inquiry at the “very highest level” to understand why police failed to hand over critical evidence including 40,000 messages from the accuser to Mr Allan and friends.

It’s unfortunate that the attitude of law enforcers to go after convictions instead of justice expands beyond the United States’ borders.

What’s especially unfortunate is that this kind of behavior isn’t unusual. With these stories circulating on a daily basis one has to wonder why people still trust the government to dispense justice.