Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

Fun With History

I’m a history buff. I know, what fun blogger isn’t? But my interest in history doesn’t lie in anything specific. While there are a few historical topics that greatly interest me such as feudal Japan and Viking Age Europe, I generally find myself studying random topics because something about that topic piqued my interest. Recently I’ve found myself interested in the history of alchemy, the predecessor to chemistry. To satisfy this interest I have been reading The Secrets of Alchemy (Synthesis) by Lawrence M. Principe. It’s an excellent title if you are interested in the topic.

During the first part of the book, which discusses Greco-Egyptian alchemy, there is a short discussion of the monetary debasement that was occurring in Rome at the time. As I didn’t expect to find a common thread between my interest in alchemical history and economic theory this discussion surprised me. As it turns out Diocletian was busy debasing the Roman currency by reducing the amount of precious metal in issued coinage.

Diocletian apparently ordered the destruction of all alchemical literature involving silver and gold. While alchemists at the time had not found a way to transmute base metals into noble metals they did find numerous ways to make base metals look like, at least on the surface, noble metals. In addition to writing down processes for making base metals appear to be noble metals the alchemists also wrote down processes for discovering such slights of hand. The theory put forth in the book, which I find very intriguing, is that Diocletian ordered the destruction of alchemical works involving silver and gold because he didn’t want the knowledge about how to detect debased currency to spread.

One of my favorite aspects about studying history is finding all of the common threads that run between my various interests. This story was certainly one of the most interesting collision between my interests that I’ve encountered.

Zero Accountability

The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) has a colorful history involving a lot of abuses of power. Police departments abusing power isn’t something that surprises people these days as it’s incredibly common, especially in larger cities. But people often wonder why so much abuses takes place in modern police departments. I believe the answer lies in the lack of accountability modern police officers face. One of Minneapolis’s finest has a habit of beating people while off duty and two lawsuits filed against the department for his behavior have turned into payouts for the victims:

A judge’s order in a Minneapolis police brutality suit last week pushed the city’s bill to $410,653.33 for two lawsuits filed against police officer Michael Griffin.

The suits, one stemming from a 2010 incident and the other from 2011, both involve cases in which Griffin was off-duty and at downtown bars when he allegedly punched or kicked people who did not want to fight him. Three people were hospitalized as a result of the incidents, including one man who was unconscious and bleeding for more than five minutes, according to one of the lawsuits.

Griffin remains a patrol officer in the Fourth Precinct on the city’s North Side, according to a department spokesman. The status of an internal affairs review of the incidents was not immediately available Friday.

Notice two important points. First, the city is footing the bill. Although officer Griffin was the attacker in both cases the tax victims of Minneapolis are left paying for his violence. Mr. Griffin should be the one who has to pay his victims as he was the one who wronged them. Second, Mr. Griffin is still on active duty. The man has been found at fault for assaulting two people. He should not be allowed to remain in his position of authority.

But cases like this aren’t uncommon. Police officers are generally insulated from the consequences of their misdeeds. Cities often pay the bills of lawsuits stemming from police abuses cases and officers found guilty of wrongdoing often remain employed by the department. This insulation from wrongdoing means officers often face no consequence when they abuse their power. If one doesn’t suffer consequences for abusing power they are more likely to abuse power.

I believe making officers personally responsible for their actions would do a lot to reduce abuses of power performed by police in this country.

Criminal is an Arbitrary Label

Both advocates of gun control and gun rights spend a lot of time discussing the need to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. On paper it sounds like a good idea but when you look at what the label “criminal” means in American society it becomes a less desirable idea.

What is a criminal? Criminal, in our society, is a completely arbitrary label. If a select group of individuals gather in a designated marble building, write some words on pieces of paper, and a majority of them later vote to make those words law then anybody in violation of those words is no a criminal.

Imagine that today, March 7th, Mr. Smith is an upstanding law-abiding citizen. Tomorrow some guys donning suits and gathering in a marble building write some words that Mr. Smith is in violation of and vote to make it law. By March 9th Mr. Smith is no longer a law-abiding citizen but a wanted criminal.

This is why I have no time for programs that are supposedly meant to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Until we redefine criminal to actually mean something other than arbitrarily selected individuals the mission of keeping anything from the hands of criminals is foolhardy. Instead we should first work to make the process of defining who is and isn’t a criminal something consistent and predictable instead of arbitrary. Once that has been done we can have a discussion about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.

People Find a Way

China is reeling from a recent knife attack that claimed the lives of 33 persons:

Authorities on Sunday blamed a slashing rampage that killed 29 people and wounded 143 at a train station in southern China on separatists from the country’s far west, while local residents said government crackdowns had taken their toll on the alleged culprits.

Police fatally shot four of the assailants — putting the overall death toll at 33 — and captured another after the attack late Saturday in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. But authorities were searching for at least five more of the black-clad attackers.

Tragedies such as this point out something that we must all come to accept. Humans are creative creatures. Our creativity can be used for both good and evil. Gun control advocates focus their attention on wanting to prohibit firearms. Prohibitions against weapons, like any prohibitions, don’t work because human creativity will render it meaningless in a short period of time. History has shown us this with alcohol prohibition in the United States and we see it today with the war on unpatentable drugs.

An absence of guns simply means other weapons will be used and in our creative hands everything is a weapon. The chemicals under my bathroom sink can be mixed into a rather unpleasant gas. My kitchen contains numerous sharp objects that, as the linked story demonstrates, can cause a great deal of harm in a fairly short period of time.

Prohibitions are pointless. They throw a lot of innocent people in cages and fail to hinder the evil in any ways. This is why I feel we need to stop implementing prohibitions and start focusing on identifying the causes of society’s ills. Calls for prohibitions are a waster of time and effort and this is proven time and again whenever evil men are able to accomplish their goals when prohibitions that were supposed to hinder them are in place.

When You Suck at Doing What You Do

The big news circulating around the Bitcoin community is the apparent demise of Mt. Gox:

As of late Monday evening, the embattled Bitcoin site MtGox appears to have pulled the plug entirely in the wake of sustained DDOS attacks and the “transaction malleability” problem that has plagued other websites. The site is gone and the company’s Twitter account appears to have been erased entirely.

Several news outlets seems to be reporting this event as the death of Bitcoin. Anybody who understand the Bitcoin protocol knows this isn’t true since Mt. Gox didn’t have any control over the block chain, which is what determines who has which Bitcoin. Mt. Gox was merely one of several exchanges although it was the largest.

People who have kept an eye on Bitcoin related news know that the people behind Mt. Gox has consistently demonstrated incompetency. It always baffled me how it was able to maintain the status of the largest exchange when other exchanges did a better job and almost always had better prices. But Mt. Gox’s incompetency eventually caught up with it and it now appears to have gone under. This is an example of a free market at work. A company that sucked at fulfilling the desires of the market went away.

While it does suck for any individual who had Bitcoin or fiat currency in a Mt. Gox account it should also teach a valuable less: you cannot trust a person you’ve never met with your money. Bitcoin allows anybody to create a wallet. So long as you keep your private key private any Bitcoin sent to your public key are secure. I keep a little Bitcoin in online wallets for quick transactions but never more than I’m willing to lose. All of my other Bitcoin are sent to an account that I possess the private key for. This is something I encourage everybody to do since it’s the only way you can guarantee your Bitcoin won’t disappear if the online wallet provider disappears.

Arizona SB 1062

A lot of emotions have been fired up due to Arizona’s SB 1062 [PDF] bill. If you’re not familiar with the number this is the bill in Arizona that would grant business owners of that state the legal ability to refuse to provide goods and services to homosexual and transgendered persons for religious reasons. The debate over this bill has gotten pretty heated. One side believes that this bill must be stopped because it enables discrimination and the other side believes the bill should be passed because it allows business owners to choose who they wish to associate with. Many libertarians are in the latter camp because of their support for voluntary association. I, insofar as I care about the bill, oppose it.

As a strong advocate of voluntary association how could I oppose a bill that would seemingly advance a business owner’s legal ability to choose he or she wishes to associate with? Simple. This bill doesn’t advance voluntary association, it creates another privileged class.

If you read through the bill it grants business owners the legal ability to refuse service to individuals (the bill doesn’t specifically state homosexual and transgendered persons) if providing that service would go against their religious beliefs. In other words if a business owner refuses services to somebody and that individual sues then the business owner can say that providing services to that person would have violated his or her religious beliefs and it would be a valid legal defense. So this law means religious individuals gain the legal privilege to discriminate against other individuals while nonreligious people do not.

Voluntary association allows any individual to choose who he or she wishes to associate with regardless of reason. This bill allows religious individual to choose who he or she wishes to associate with while leaving nonreligious people unable to do so. As longtime readers of this blog know I’m against providing legal privileges to specific groups. All should be equal under the law. Any attempt to grant specific groups privileges, which is what SB 1062 does, should be opposed in my opinion.

Ukrainians Understanding the Arguments for an Armed Populace

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or only watching American news media you’re probably aware of the current crisis in Ukraine. While many media outlets have made it appear as though violent revolutionaries are fighting an otherwise peaceful government the truth is the Ukrainian police have been committing a lot of the violence. To this end the Ukrainian Gun Owners Association has put forth an argument favoring the unconditional right of Ukrainian citizens to bear arms:

Today every citizen of Ukraine understands why our country has hundreds of thousands of policemen. Last illusions were crushed when riot police used rubber batons and boots at the Independence Square on peaceful citizens.

After such actions we realize that it is not enough to only adopt the Gun Law.
As of today Ukrainian Gun Owners Association will start to work on the preparation of amendments to the Constitution, which will provide an unconditional right for Ukrainian citizens to bear arms.

People should have the right to bear arms, which will be put in written into the Constitution.

Authorities should not and will not be stronger than its people!

Armed people are treated with respect!

I have no idea of influential this organization is but it’s still interesting to see such an organization and that it is arguing in favor of the right to keep and bear arms. Ukraine is a prime example of what happens when the state is better armed than the people. While such disparity of force doesn’t mean the people cannot hold their own against the state it does mean that more people will die in order to beat back the state’s thuggery.

When the Legal System Turns On Itself

As we know the state has been having a hard time finding enough of the chemicals used in lethal injection to execute all of the prisoners currently on death row. Part of the reason for this is because European drug manufacturers are doing everything within their power to withhold these drugs from being used in state executions. This has lead the state to look for domestic suppliers of the drugs. While such suppliers do exist they are being subjected to the same legal system that put convicts on death row. A domestic seller of the drugs used in lethal injection faced a lawsuit if it supplied said drugs to the Missouri prison system. Instead of dealing with the lawsuit the seller not to sell the drugs:

In a lawsuit filed in federal court this month against the Apothecary Shoppe, Taylor’s lawyers said US drug regulations barred the pharmacy from supplying the drug for use in the execution, and asked the judge to block the sale.

Among other arguments, they said the pharmacy’s custom-made pentobarbital would cause him “severe, unnecessary, lingering, and ultimately inhumane pain” during the execution.

They argued the unregulated nature of compounding pharmacies in the US yielded “no evidence [the pharmacy] will or even has the capacity to test the pentobarbital… to ensure it will not cause unnecessary pain and suffering.”

In recent days, the Apothecary Shoppe notified Taylor’s lawyers it would not sell pentobarbital to Missouri for the execution – and had not already.

In return, Taylor’s lawyers filed a motion late on Monday to drop their suit.

It’s rather ironic that the same legal system that sentences people to death has been successfully used to make the execution of a convicted man more difficult (although it’s likely that Missouri either has a stockpile of the drugs on hand or will find an alternative way to kill the convict). Sometimes a bloated bureaucracy can be used to muddle itself up. I only hope this trend continues because if there’s one thing I would like to see made more difficult for the state it’s executing people.

The Solutions to Inflation isn’t Wage Increases

Inflation is a hidden tax. By having monopoly control of the money supply the state is able to devalue a currency by simply releasing more of it into the market. The Federal Reserve, which controls the United States money supply, has been releasing an imperial (because we don’t do metric here) shit ton of currency into the market. This has caused the value of the dollar to continue dwindling.

According to mainstream economists constant inflation is necessary for a functioning economy but the rate of inflation must be kept low. Economists that actually know what they’re talking about, that is to say those of the Austrian tradition, point out that inflation is bad because it constantly decreases the wealth of individuals. Regardless of what school you subscribe to the current rate of inflation should be worrisome. While official inflation numbers are periodically jiggered to make them look better the cold hard fact is that the stuff people actually need to buy in order to survive is increases at an alarming rate:

It’s is not her imagination. While the government says prices are up 6.4 percent since 2011, chicken is up 18.4 percent, ground beef is up 16.8 percent and bacon has skyrocketed up 22.8 percent, making it a holiday when it’s on sale.

“Oh my god!” Singer said as she spied bacon for $3.

“The things that are going up in price are the things I absolutely need to buy,” she said. “It’s the meat, it’s the milk, it’s the eggs and it’s getting out of hand.”

The report goes on to argue that the real issue is wages not increasing. While people certainly like hearing arguments for why their wages should increase the real issue is that wages and inflation are inseparable. Increasing wages to match inflation necessitates increasing wages to match inflation. It’s an Ouroboros. The real issue is that the state is manipulating the market to favor itself and its partners at the expense of everybody else.

Legal tender laws make holding dollars desirable. If you don’t hold dollars you can’t legally pay taxes and other made up debts to the state. Failing to pay the state what it demands ends with you either being in a cage or a grave. First receivers of newly issued money are able to enjoy the full purchasing power of that money. Inflation doesn’t actually begin until newly issued money being to circulate. Therefore the state is able to give newly issued money to its partners and they get to enjoy the full purchasing power. Once they’ve used that money it enters the system and inflation begins to kick in, which makes the dollars currently being held worth less.

So long as the state is able to manipulate the money supply that we’re required to use things are going to get worse for everybody not politically connected. The issue isn’t wages it’s state monopolization of the money market. Until that problem is solved (and it will eventually be solved by an economic crash if nothing else) consumers are going to feel an increasing amount of financial pain.

Immigration

The issue of immigration appears to be back in the news. Democrats claim to want to make it easier for foreigners to become United States citizens and grant amnesty to non-citizens who are already in the country. Republicans claim to also want to make it easier for foreigners to become United States citizens but are against granting amnesty to non-citizens who are already in the country. In other words both parties are using individuals not from around here as political pawns (in other words, business as usual). As expected this has fired up both parties’ political bases.

When the Democrats and Republicans claim they want to make the process of immigration easier they really mean they want to cut down on the paperwork and waiting period for non-citizens to become citizens. Granted, I’m not really sure why somebody living outside of the United States would want to move here of all places but that’s not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is the fact that politicians are arguing about making the process of crossing an imaginary line easier.

If you want to cross an imaginary line on a map you should be free to do so without begging some suit-clad dudes in marble buildings for permission. People born on the other side of the imaginary line being unable to cross it freely is the problem. Nobody should be forced to seek permission from bureaucrats to cross public land. Especially when you consider the fact that the United States was founded by people who either came from the other side of the imaginary line or were descendents of people who did.

But the state has convinced many people living here that those on the other side of the imaginary line are barbarians and must be prevented from crossing that line. We’re told that the state has to inspect anybody crossing the line to ensure they’re not going to kill us all. How ironic that the organization that claims it must ensure people crossing the line won’t kill us is the same organization that crosses the imaginary lines of other nations just to bombing the fuck out of their people. I’m sure the state is a great judge of moral character.

The bottom line is that the entire issue of immigration is stupid. People should be able to move about freely without receiving some stupid stamp of approval. Being born on the other side of some imaginary line doesn’t determine the content of your character. After all, there are many people that have been born on this side of the imaginary line that are, in my opinion, assholes. If we want to argue about immigration let’s discuss drawing lines around all federally owned property so that every politician and federal agent is required to go through immigration in order to enter non-federally owned property. That would certainly be more beneficial to our society as a whole.