Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals – Page 48

War Criminal Calls Gun Rights Activists Terrorists, Irony So Thick You Can Cut It

The one thing I do enjoy about the upcoming presidential race is Hillary Clinton. She’s like a perpetual irony machine. Every time she opens her mouth to criticize somebody she dislikes she ends up saying something hypocritical. One group of people she really hates is us gun owners. So she takes every opportunity afforded to her to insult us. Most recently she called us a bunch of terrorists:

During a CNN “town hall” yesterday, Hillary Clinton said she was disappointed that Congress did not pass new gun control legislation following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December 2012. “I believe that we need a more thoughtful conversation,” said the former secretary of state and presumptive presidential candidate. “We cannot let a minority of people—and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people—hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”

I wonder what minority holds more terroristic viewpoints. Gun owners who tend to be very peaceful or officials in the United States government who bomb foreign countries seemingly at random and then laugh about it (seriously, Hillary, that quote is the gift that keeps on giving)? Considering that I’ve never threatened anybody with violence nor wielded violence against another it’s pretty hard to say I’m terrorizing anybody. Hillary, on the other hand, was the head of the State Department for the government that, under the current administration, dropped bombs on civilians in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia (and probably a few other countries that I’ve forgotten about).

I’d say if any minority holds terroristic viewpoints it’s her and her cronies.

That Whole Fair Trial Thing Was Woefully Out of Date Anyways

Do you remember that whole fair trial thing that people used to talk about? It involved zany things like the defendant being able to review all of the evidence that was going to be used to the prosecution. That mess lead to a lot of undesirable outcomes, namely people the state was targeting being found innocent of wrongdoing by a jury. Thankfully our benevolent overlords have corrected this problem and now allow the prosecution to withhold evidence from the defendant:

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled against terrorism suspect Adel Daoud, saying that he and his attorneys cannot access the evidence gathered against him. The Monday ruling overturns an earlier lower district court ruling that had allowed Daoud and his lawyers to review the legality of digital surveillance warrants used against him.

[…]

When Daoud’s lawyers discovered that this case involved secret evidence that they had not been privy to, they eventually asked the court to notify them if any evidence gathered had been done so under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order. Under the normal procedures of American jurisprudence, a defendant has the right to see the evidence against him or her and can challenge the basis on which such a warrant was authorized.

The government responded with its own affidavit from Attorney General Eric Holder, who told the court that disclosing such material would harm national security.

Now if we can just get rid of those inconvenient juries we will finally have a system that can throw anybody in prison for any reason whatsoever. I’m sure a convincing argument can be made for why juries are a threat to national security. After all a jury trial would involve 12 regular Americans hearing all of the evidence, which certainly qualifies as a threat to national security.

Shit like this is why I don’t take arguments claiming we need a government to administer justice seriously.

Economy in a Slump? Just Blow Some Shit Up!

The New York Times, the same publication that gives Paul Krugman space to print is insanity, has a piece under the heading “The Pitfalls of Peace”. As you can imagine from a publication that gives Paul “Boost the Economy By Warring with Aliens” Krugman space, the article is about how war is good for the economy:

The world just hasn’t had that much warfare lately, at least not by historical standards. Some of the recent headlines about Iraq or South Sudan make our world sound like a very bloody place, but today’s casualties pale in light of the tens of millions of people killed in the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. Even the Vietnam War had many more deaths than any recent war involving an affluent country.

Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work. Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.

Emphasis mine. Let us start off with the obvious, if a state is at war it has already failed at the most basic of basics, not getting involved in a war. Wars are only good for two things: destruction and death. And not surprisingly both of those things are bad for the economy. Recreating that which was lost is not economic growth, creating new wealth is. And death is always bad for an economy because is reduces both the number of producers and consumers.

Now let’s get to the second point. According to the author war leads to an investment in science or a, pardon me because this is hard to say with a straight face, liberalizing of the economy. Science is not something that only gets invested in by the state nor only during a time of war. Science is constantly being invested in because science leads to better products. Without being engaged in an all encompassing war we have seen computers go from room sized monstrosities that could only perform a few tasks to devices that fit in our pockets and contain more computing power than their full sized brethren from only a decade back. There is a bitchin’ fully electric car on the market today. The private sector is closer to returning to space than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and it has a plan to mine asteroids for resources (seriously, how cool is that). Of course I don’t want to sell the state entirely short. As it is involved in several minor wars it is investing money into science. It currently possesses the best remotely controlled bombers on the planet! Granted, they’re not really good for anything productive but they exist and that counts for something.

We should also discuss the liberalization of the economy that supposedly occurs during a time of war. World War II, being the last all encompassing war, is a good example. Everything from metal to food to rubber were rationed for civilians so that those resources could be put into the war effort. Perhaps the author has a different definition of liberalize than I do.

Economists often discuss all of the scientific advancements that occur because of war. What they ignore are the scientific advancements made by the private sector regardless of war. The difference between the two methods of scientific investment is that the state focuses on impractical things whereas the private sector focuses on things the average person can fucking use. Give me better computers, cell phones, cars, and e-readers over remotely controlled bombers and aircraft carriers any day.

But, hey, nothing sounds better to the state than war being good for the economy. If there’s one thing the state is good at it’s war. Which is why it only hires economists who say war is good for the economy to its advisory boards.

Johnny Cannabis Seed

Some people in the United Kingdom have taken a page for Germany’s book and begun planting cannabis seeds everywhere:

However, since other places – notably Uruguay and the couple of newly weed-friendly American states – started decriminalising and legalising, British activists have stepped it up, uniting previously fractured groups together under the UK Cannabis Social Clubs banner. The most recent action to come out of the UKCSC camp is an initiative called Feed the Birds, which basically involves people up and down the country planting cannabis seeds in public places in the hope that it will open a dialogue about Britain’s current marijuana laws.

It’s a wonderful way to give the state a gigantic middle finger. But the icing on the cake is this:

Are there any planting spots you’re focusing on in London?

Yup, there are. All sorts of public spaces have been done already, all across London and the UK. I think in the month to come, when the plants start maturing, we’ll start seeing a lot more coverage. Also, to my knowledge, we’ve had a lot of the guerrilla cells targeting politicians’ houses. We’ve also had reports that there’s a grow on property owned by the crown. Hopefully we’ll see something come from that in the next couple of months.

That’s the way to do it. Plant cannabis seeds at the homes of politicians. Sadly they’re more or less immune from the war on drugs otherwise they would get a nice taste of a no-knock paramilitary police raid at two in the morning that ends with their dog getting shot and their newborn baby getting burned by a flashbang grenade. But it still sends a message about the futility of trying to control the spread of a weed.

Good Guy Tesla

In a very positive, and unusual, twist of events Tesla Motors has decided to compete on the quality of its electric cars instead of relying on an intellectual monopoly:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

This move may single handedly do more for electric car development than anything else. Patents are the great barrier between markets and innovation. They prevent inventors from utilizing incremental advancements to create new incremental advancements and stifle innovation as patent holders see no reason to continue improving a product so long as they have a monopoly on it. My hope is that this move will lead other companies to do the same but I’m guessing that won’t be the case.

Check Your Gun Control Privilege

If you can’t beat them, join them. The social justice crowd spends a lot of time talking about privilege. What started out as valid point, that is some individual in society do enjoy privileges over others (for example, as a white male I’m less likely to be the target of police brutality), has become a mechanism to silence any and all opposition. If you don’t agree with somebody you are automatically accused of being privileged and therefore are no longer allowed to have an opinion (which, in my book, would mean the other person has an opinion privilege).

As this mess has gotten increasingly absurd I’ve tried to avoid it as much as possible. But the more I think about it the more I realize that gun control is a form of privilege. Specifically it’s something that only those who the social justice crowd traditionally label as privileged can enjoy.

Consider Michael Bloomberg. He’s arguably the most influential advocate of gun control in modern times. Granted it’s pretty easy to be the most influential advocate of gun control when you’re a billionaire and can personally fund several gun control advocacy groups. But those billions of dollars allow him to fund something else: armed body guards. Bloomberg even has enough cash to pay for armed body guards for his fellow gun control advocates.

Gun control, as the name implies, is about controlling who can have access to firearms. One question that should always be asked when the topic of gun control comes up is who gets to decide who can own a gun. The answer is always the state. And who makes up the state? A president who enjoys a lifetime of Secret Service protection and millionaire white males. In other words most of the people deciding who can have a gun are the very people most social justice advocates point out as being privileged.

So gun control is great if you’re on the top of society. It just sucks if you’re not. Unless the state has deemed you worthy of possessing a firearm or can afford to hire people who have been deemed worthy to shadow you 24/7 you’re mostly reliant on the police for protection. That’s not a good position to be in as police response times increase. And if you live in poorer neighborhoods, places where people arguably need protection the most, you’re going to suffer even longer response times. The further you are from the top the longer it will take to get state protection, if you get it at all.

This brings me to the main point of this post. Gun control works for those who social justice advocates consider privileged because they control who can possess guns and can afford body guards. The rest of us are more or less on our own. Sure we’re given access to police officers who may respond to our call for help if they’re not too busy, tired, or hungry. But if you need immediate defense you’re screwed.

There are bad people in this world, which is unfortunate. But so long as those people exist the need for self-defense will likewise exist. Whether you like guns or not you cannot argue against them being effective tools for self-defense. They’re equalizers that render physical ability and skill mostly irrelevant. A woman bound to a wheelchair can effectively use a gun to defend herself against an athletic male who means her arm. An African-American male can effectively use a gun to defend himself against an armed police officer who is attempting to brutalize him. Any social, physical, racial, or gender privileges an attacker may enjoy are meaningless when his or her target has access to a gun for self-defense. Even targets suffering from most physical disabilities can render their attacker’s ableism irrelevant.

In the end it is the people who social justice advocates label as privileged thate are the primarily advocates of gun control. They are the ones who can decide who can have a gun. They are the ones who can afford armed body guards. They are the ones who can live under gun control without concern.

Women Must Be Tiring of the Patriarchy

Social justice warriors spend a lot of time complaining about patriarchy. Well it looks like women in Washington state have took those complaints to heart and have taken steps to smashing patriarchy:

Between 2005 and 2012, the number of state residents receiving new concealed-carry permits tripled to 62,939. Now some 451,000 Washington residents are allowed to carry a hidden handgun almost anywhere they go, more than 100,000 of them women.

Notably, the growth rate for women getting new permits is twice as fast as that of men.

The thing that annoys me about a lot of social justice warriors is that they spend a lot of time demanding equality but seem to scoff at the idea that guns offer exactly that. Oppression generally requires force disparity. In order to ensure compliance an oppressor must have greater force than the oppressed (this is probably why governments have such a hard-on for gun control). As soon as the oppressed can command equal or greater force then the days of the oppressor become numbered.

I’m also a firm believer that using one oppressor to combat another oppressor still leaves you oppressed. The common strategy for social justice warriors is to use one of the greatest oppressors of our time, the state, to combat oppression by men and whites (ironically though the state is mostly made up of white men). This doesn’t actually solve the problem of oppression. On the other hand if you give women the power to fend of prospective oppressors then patriarchy isn’t easy to achieve.

So fight the patriarchy, encourage women you know get carry permits and assist them in whatever they need to do so.

The Presidential Business Hit List

Regulatory agencies have for a long time been the tool of choice for the executive branch when it wanted to target things it didn’t like but didn’t want to wait for approval by the legislative branch. The current head of the executive branch has made no attempt to conceal his distain for guns so it’s not surprising to see that he sicced his dogs on firearm sellers:

The administration is using an anti-credit card fraud effort dubbed Operation Choke Point to go after legitimate businesses it deems “high-risk,” says a staff report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Internal Justice Department documents show that Attorney General Eric Holder was informed that small businesses were being hurt by the operation as banks dropped them and exited entire lines of business deemed “high-risk” by the government, yet his department has continued to pursue the operation, the report says.

[…]

The Washington Times has reported that several gun retailers have been dropped by their banks as a result of the operation — the most recent being Powderhorn Outfitters, a sporting goods shop in Hyannis, Massachusetts, which was dropped last week by TD Bank after a 36-year business relationship.

And gun stores aren’t the only organizations being targeted by Operation Choke Point. The Washington Times included a convenient picture that covers other so-called high-risk businesses that have cause the Department of Justice’s ire:

It’s pretty ironic that surveillance equipment made it onto a government list of high-risk merchants but I digress. While many people are focusing on the gun store angle specifically I think the take away from this story is that giving the state regulatory power is dangerous. Whenever something bad happens the government always steps in and offers to regulate that bad thing. If the Democrats are in power then self-proclaimed Democrats take the government up on its offer. If the Republicans are in power then self-proclaimed Republicans take the government up on its offer (even though they claim to want a smaller government). Neither side stops to consider the fact that their party won’t be in power forever and when the party in power changes those new regulatory powers will be used in a different manner.

Net Neutrality for Libertarians

Net neutrality is a hot topic in libertarian circles. May libertarians mistakenly see net neutrality as another unwelcome intrusion of the state into the free market. It’s not that uncommon of a trap for libertarians to fall for. When they see a battle that appears to be private enterprise versus government they instinctively side with private enterprise. But net neutrality isn’t a debate between private enterprise and government regulations. It’s merely government regulations versus government regulations.

The mistake lies in seeing businesses like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast as private enterprises. In reality they are where they are today thanks to special privileges granted to them by the state. AT&T and Verizon, for example, have government granted monopolies over a lot of wireless spectrum and Comcast enjoys near or outright monopolies in many areas thanks to government control over who can build networking infrastructure where. Many states even have restrictions against municipalities providing Internet service because of Internet service provider (ISP) lobbying efforts.

But that’s not all. At one time telephone companies were the primarily ISPs. But ISPs have become content providers and content providers have become ISPs. I believe this is what really sparked the net neutrality war. Companies with monopolies on a great deal of copyrighted material suddenly found a way to further exploit that monopoly by controlling what their ISP customers can access. Comcast can leverage its licensed monopolies on a lot of entertainment content by charging competitors such as Netflix an inflated rate that makes it untenable for Comcast customers to utilize Netflix. And if you just download the content from alternate sources (such as BitTorrent) you’re in violation of the law because you don’t have a license for that monopolized content.

What more libertarians should focus on is the fact that there is no free market in providing Internet access. Only those granted permission by the state can do so. And much of the content that makes the Internet valuable is controlled by a handful of ISPs that will happily withhold said content unless you’re getting Internet access through them.

In other words no matter who wins we lose. Losing net neutrality won’t be a win for the free market and keeping it will mean more government control over something that has had too much government control over it. What is truly needed is the destruction of the monopolies on content and infrastructure, which isn’t going to happen through the political process (since the content providers/ISPs have such effective lobbying efforts).

My Six Point Plan to Address America’s Political Problems

Whenever I write something critical about playing party politics there is also some very serious person who asks some variation on “What’s the alternative?” In the past all alternatives I’ve provided have been scoffed at. If I mention voting for third-party candidates they will tell me that third-party candidates can’t win (it’s almost as if they understand the problem of oligarchy but don’t want to quite face it). They claim that agorism, the common alternative I provide, cannot topple the government or if it can the lack of government will lead to chaos. But I’ve finally come up with a six point plan to address this country’s political issues:

Drink a lot of beer
Start a death metal band
Become famous for especially brutal music
Tour the world
Do a lot of hookers and blow
Watch the United States suffer its inevitable collapse from Iceland

This country is fucked. We might as well have a good time and try to watch the fireworks from afar.