Category: News You Need to Know

Buying Debt Just to Forgive It

I feel almost alone in the realm of libertarian bloggers who doesn’t despise everything the Occupy movement does. Many participants in Occupy are hardcore socialists but even hardcore socialists come up with good ideas. One of the ideas recently spawned from the Occupy movement is the Rolling Jubilee project, which is looking to buy up debt just to forgive it:

The Rolling Jubilee project is seeking donations to help it buy-up distressed debts, including student loans and outstanding medical bills, and then wipe the slate clean by writing them off.

Individuals or companies can buy distressed debt from lenders at knock-down prices if it the borrower is in default or behind with payments and are then free to do with it as they see fit, including cancelling it free of charge.

As a test run the group spent $500 on distressed debt, buying $14,000 worth of outstanding loans and pardoning the debtors. They are now looking to expand their experiment nationwide and are asking people to donate money to the cause.

I really like this project because it stands to erase much of the debt currently facing individuals voluntarily. No funds from tax victims is required, no money has to be printed, and no coercion has to be used. Instead individuals can voluntarily donate money to the cause of helping people currently facing crushing debt.

Another interesting potential of this project is the creation of a market for distressed debt relief. One of my friends mentioned that this project could cause the price of distressed debt to increase as demand by the Rolling Jubilee project increased. If that happened the project would effectively be self-defeating because it would raise the cost of buying distressed debt higher than its donors could afford. I see another potential outcome, it could decrease the cost of distressed debt. As a general rule a creditor would rather receive something from one of their debitors than nothing. Losing $90,000 is better than losing $100,000 after all. Because of this it’s possible that creditors could enter a bidding war with one another for Rolling Jubilee’s money. Creditors could try to undercut one another in the hopes that the Rolling Jubilee project will buy their debt. Instead of getting nothing from their debitors creditors could get a portion of what they loaned.

It’ll be interesting to watch if this project gets off of the ground.

Man Facing the Death Penalty for Defending Himself from State Agents

If you were woken from your sleep early in the morning by the sound of people breaking into your home what would you do? I’m guessing that most readers of this site would arm themselves and prepare to defend their lives. It’s a logical response as home invaders are rarely interested in helping you. Unfortunately the police have resorted to the criminal activity of breaking and entering to enforce their employer’s erroneous drug prohibition, and this has put both officers and homeowners in danger. What makes this worse is that defending yourself from possible burglars is illegal if those burglars are police officers:

Four officers wounded in a Utah drug raid described a chaotic scene of gunfire, bodies and blood Thursday as they presented testimony against the Ogden man accused in the shootings.

Matthew David Stewart, 38, could face the death penalty if convicted of aggravated murder in the January shootout that killed one officer and wounded five others at his Ogden home.

[…]

Stewart insisted a day after the raid that he didn’t hear agents identify themselves and that he believed he was going to be robbed and killed when “a bunch of guys” broke his door open, an investigator for the prosecutor’s office testified Thursday. The hearings have focused heavily on how agents say they shouted out police commands.

Stewart was just waking up for a nightshift at Walmart and “felt like he was being invaded,” said Robert Carpenter, the investigator for the Weber County attorney’s office who recorded the interview at Stewart’s hospital bed.

Stewart said he pointed a 9 mm Beretta from his bedroom into a hallway but maintains police fired first.

Stewart’s testimony sounds all too familiar. No-knock raids, raids where police officers don’t identify themselves before storming in, have become more popular for drug enforcement operations. The police claim that no-knock raids are needed for officer safety as they don’t give potential drug deals time to dig in and defend themselves. What the police fail to acknowledge is the possibility of a homeowner defending themselves against unknown assailants, which puts officers in danger when they are the assailants.

The state protects its own. Even when police officers give homeowners every reason to believe they are being attacked by non-state thugs, and thus have grounds of legal self-defense, the state prosecutes the homeowners. Apparently homeowners are supposed to be telepathic and know that the people kicking down their doors in the middle of the night are police officers and not non-state thugs.

Not Everybody is Celebrating Obama’s Victory

If you turned on the news after Obama’s reelection you probably got the impression that everybody in the world was celebrating Obama’s victory. Obviously this wasn’t the case for much of the gun rights community or the Republican Party. Another group of people who didn’t celebrate Obama’s reelection were the families of his victims:

The roars celebrating the re-election of U.S. President Barack Obama on television give Mohammad Rehman Khan a searing headache, as years of grief and anger come rushing back.

The 28-year-old Pakistani accuses the president of robbing him of his father, three brothers and a nephew, all killed in a U.S. drone aircraft attack a month after Obama first took office.

“The same person who attacked my home has gotten re-elected,” he told Reuters in the capital, Islamabad, where he fled after the attack on his village in South Waziristan, one of several ethnic Pashtun tribal areas on the Afghan border.

“Since yesterday, the pressure on my brain has increased. I remember all of the pain again.”

Many people have lost family members to Obama’s murderous rampage through the Middle East. Every drone strike her orders seems to end in multiple casualties, each of which have family and friends. Imagine how barbaric the United States must seem to those who have lost family members to its wars.

A Flaw in the State’s Grand Scheme

The state’s track record hasn’t been holding up well after Hurricane Sandy. First the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) required people needing information to look it up on their website even though power outages made accessing websites rather difficult. That glaring oversight wasn’t enough though because another of the state’s schemes isn’t working so well. It seems replacing physical food stamps with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards has consequences:

Recipients buying eligible foods are suppose to swipe their EBT cards like any other credit card for their purchases but since Hurricane Sandy hit, most Lower East Side stores don’t have electricity to run credit card transactions and are only accepting cash. Leaving many people on EBT with empty wallets, empty refrigerators and no access to food.

“The supermarkets don’t even really want to sell anything. They’re open but if you don’t have cash, you messed up. And everybody in these projects, they take EBT…food stamps,” a La Guardia Houses resident told WNYC’s Marianne McCune.

It shouldn’t surprise anybody that a large central government builds its schemes on large centralized infrastructures. When the power goes out the state’s schemes seem to fail entirely.

It’s a Good Thing We’re Sinking Money into FEMA

Remember what I said about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lacking the specialized knowledge required to deal with natural disasters? The agency decided to demonstrate my point:

When President Barack Obama urged Americans under siege from Hurricane Sandy to stay inside and keep watch on ready.gov for the latest, he left out something pretty important — where to turn if the electricity goes out.

Despite the heightened expectation of widespread power and cable television failures, everyone from the president to local newscasters seem to expect the public to rely entirely on the Internet and their TVs for vital news and instructions.

[…]

A call to FEMA’s news desk, however, found even they didn’t have any non-Internet information readily available beyond suggestions that people call 911 in an emergency. When asked where folks should turn for information if they have no power, a FEMA worker said, “Well, those people who have a laptop with a little battery life on it can try that way. Otherwise, you’re right.”

This agency, which so many statists claim is necessary, doesn’t have enough knowledge to know that power is often knocked out during natural disasters. Needless to say the Internet isn’t a terribly useful tool if you don’t have power. Yet people will continue to claim that FEMA is not only necessary but a demonstration of how competent the federal government is at handling problems no state government or group of individuals can.

Warfare as a Form of Welfare

Many proponents of state welfare also claim to oppose war. This isn’t surprising since proponents of state welfare try to position themselves as compassionate and caring. What they fail to understand is that warfare is also a form of welfare:

Approximately 1.4 million Americans work as members of the armed forces, and another 1.6 million workers labor in the civilian “defense” industry. These Americans are welfare clients of the “workfare” variety.

As an economic factor, they might just as well be digging holes and filling them back in (in fact, as a US Marine infantryman, I did quite a bit of exactly that!). The vast bulk of the work they do serves no “legitimate” function with respect to actual defense of the United States from attack or invasion, and in fact more likely increases the risks of such.

Some high double-digit percentage — I think 75% is a reasonable and conservative estimate — of “defense” spending is not about “defense” in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s about keeping those 3 million workers on the clock, and keeping their politically connected employers in profit.

Setting aside the apparently arbitrary percentage selected by the author the point of this article is clear, warfare employs some 3 million individuals. Every tank, ship, and missile requires manpower to design, build and, employ. Somebody must drive the tank, entire crews are needed to operate a ship, and missiles don’t fire themselves (yet). On top of building and operating military equipment there is also a massive number of support personell from janitors to secretaries to cooks.

Were the wars ended many of these 3 million people may find themselves without work. Facing a sudden surplus of labor it may take some time before those people are able to find employment again. By maintaining the warfare aspect of the warfare-welfare state some 3 million people find themselves being paid through tax victimization to be unproductive. Furthermore this form of welfare is self-perpetuating:

If that was the end of it, it would be pretty bad — one out of every five dollars earned by American workers siphoned off on an incredibly inefficient welfare program. But that’s not the end of it at all. The existence of the welfare program is a major incentive for going to war early and often.

If there is no war then the warfare-based welfare program must be either downsized or eliminated. Therefore a warfare-based welfare program encourages going to war because it allows those employed by warfare to continue to be employed and because nobody likes to have trillions of dollars of equipment lying around unused. Claiming to be in support of welfare but opposed to warfare, at least in the United States, is oxymoronic. Warfare is welfare.

Apparently We’re Helpless without Big Government

According to the New York Times big storms, like the ones that just hammered the east coast, require big government:

Most Americans have never heard of the National Response Coordination Center, but they’re lucky it exists on days of lethal winds and flood tides. The center is the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where officials gather to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.
Related in Opinion

Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big government,” which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it.

Unsurprisingly this article is a thinly veiled exploitation piece meant to attack Romney while jacking off Obama. What I want to address is the claim that natural disasters require a big government. Consider the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for a moment. Supposedly this single organization has enough knowledge, foresight, and resources to coordinate and supply disaster relief efforts throughout the country. Without them, if the New York Times is to believed, it would be impossible for areas to recover from major disasters.

Let’s consider resources for a moment. As a federal agency FEMA must supply whatever resources are necessary to help with disaster relief throughout the entire country. Being a large country the number of resources necessary is absolutely mind boggling. Furthermore different regions face different potential disasters and therefore need different resources. Damage caused by tidal waves is different than damage caused by tornadoes and therefore the resources required to recover from a tidal wave are different than the resources necessary to recover from a tornado. Yet disasters such as tidal waves will not affect interior states and tornadoes are far less likely to occur in coastal states.

Resources include everything from drinking water to temporary shelter to specialized knowledge. The last resources, specialized knowledge, is the most important because without it there is no way to effectively determine the other resources needed for disaster relief. Who is more likely to know what is needed when a tornado touches down and destroys a vast section of a Midwestern town: a bureaucrat sitting in Washington DC that has likely never experienced a tornado or residents living in the affected Midwestern town that have dealt with tornadoes before? In all likelihood it will be the latter group.

Stocking FEMA with resources necessary takes resources form somewhere else. Scarcity is a fact of life and the government, no matter how badly it wants to, cannot overcome it. The resources sent to FEMA come from other parts of the country meaning each individual state has less resources available to prepare for local disasters than they would if FEMA didn’t exist. Wyoming would have more free resources to invest in preparing for coal mine collapses while Texas would have more free resources to invest in preparing for oil fires if they weren’t sending resources to FEMA.

There is also no guarantee that resources taken by FEMA will be distributed to areas affected by a disaster. FEMA only enters the equation when the federal government declares a disaster. When floods struck Duluth, Minnesota governor Dayton requested FEMA provide assistance, a request that FEMA denied:

On July 19, Governor Dayton requested individual assistance for home and business owners affected by June’s one-in-a-lifetime Duluth-area flood.

Today, FEMA denied Dayton’s request, and the governor is none too happy about it. “The Governor is very disappointed in FEMA’s decision, and is currently working with state agencies to explore next steps,” says a release from spokesman Bob Hume.

Minnesota, like every other state, has sent resources to FEMA. When storms hit and devastated Duluth FEMA refused to release its resources. Individuals working on disaster relief in Duluth found themselves with fewer resources than would have been available if FEMA wasn’t syphoning them. Not only are resources taken from localities and given to FEMA but there is no guarantee those resources will ever be made available.

Individuals are also able to prepare for natural disasters. By stocking nonperishable foods, generators and fuel, blankets, drinking water, and medical supplies an individual can prepare themselves for surviving the disruptions caused by natural disasters. By taking advantage of division of labor one individual in a community can focus on stocking food while another can focus on ensuring available shelter. Working together directly individuals can prepare necessary supplies because they have access to the sole source of specialized knowledge regarding each person’s personal needs. FEMA, sitting off in Washington DC, has no way of knowing what your or I need when a disaster strikes. It’s impossible to know the needs of another individual, especially when you’ve never met them.

Natural disasters don’t require big government. In fact big government can actually be extremely detrimental to disaster relief.

Map of Pakistani Drone Strikes

It appears as though our Nobel Peace Prize winning president has been blowing piles of Pakistanis to pieces. Salon posted a map of American drone strikes in Pakistan noting whether Bush or Obama ordered the strike and the number of reported militants (which is any military age male regardless of whether or not they were actually engaged in hostilities) killed. It’s amazing how a president who campaigned on peace managed to order so many assassinations.

Unintended Consequences of Prohibitions Against Texting While Driving

Individual states across the country are passing laws that prohibit texting while driving. How have these laws fair? Not well, in fact these bans have been followed by an increase in accidents:

It’s perplexing for both police and lawmakers throughout the U.S.: They want to do something about the danger of texting while driving, a major road hazard, but banning the practice seems to make it even more dangerous.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that 3 of every 4 states that have enacted a ban on texting while driving have seen crashes actually go up rather than down.

It’s hard to pin down exactly why this is the case, but experts believe it is a result of people trying to avoid getting caught in states with stiff penalties. Folks trying to keep their phones out of view will often hold the phone much lower, below the wheel perhaps, in order to keep it out of view. That means the driver’s eyes are looking down and away from the road.

One thing statists and other authoritarians never seem to learn is that making a law against something doesn’t stop people from doing it. Theft, murder, smoking marijuana, and tax fraud are all illegal yet people still steal, murder, smoke weed, and commit tax fraud. What happens when a law is passed that prohibits an action is that people keep performing that action but they try to do it in secret. Thieves move to robbing homes during average working hours when the owners are unlikely to be there, murders come up with complex and sometime absurd plots to avoid being caught, producers and consumers of marijuana have created a very successful black market, and people develop ways to shuffle money around in order to confuse the state’s tax collection goons. In the case of texting while driving people are more apt to hold their cell phone lower, which will entirely remove their eyes from the road and thus increase the chances they’ll get into an accident.

Support the Troops, Bring Them Home

When I express my opposition to the United State’s wars I’m sometimes met with accusations that I don’t support the troops. This attitude baffles me. How can you better support troops then to remove them from a dangerous place where they regularly run the risk of being stabbed, shot, or blown up? War is Hell. Soldiers from different sides try to kill one another in the name of an ideology or flag. Furthermore the consequences of war don’t stop after the shooting ceases. For many soldiers the aftermath of fighting in a war is so great that they find themselves unable to cope with what they’ve experienced and decide to take their own lives. In fact the number of military suicides in 2012 exceeded the number of military fatalities:

The number of suicides among U.S. Army active duty and reserve personnel in 2012 is higher than the total combined military fatalities from Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan over the same timeframe.

While many people will say that this proves the need for more counseling they aren’t addressing the root of the problem. People end up having to do heinous things in war, things humans have a natural tendency against. A soldier may find himself having to shoot an armed child, call down artillery strikes on areas populated with both enemies and civilians, or even torture suspected enemy combatants. These things take a psychological toll on most people and no amount of counseling can repair such mental scars.

Removing soldiers from the battlefield is the only way to effectively put an end to the ever increasing number of military suicides. If you really want to support the troops advocate an end to these needless wars.