Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

Chicago to Close More than 60 Indoctrination Centers

Woe is Chicago, their budget situation is forcing them to close over 60 indoctrination centers:

The city of Chicago plans to close more than 60 schools, in one of the largest mass school shutdowns in US history.

The move, which would affect about one in ten schools, is an effort to plug a $1bn (£659m) budget shortfall and address declining enrolment.

I know, everybody is screaming doom and gloom over this news but let’s be honest, the students weren’t using those schools anyways. When your city has a dropout rate of 40% your city can stand to close a few schools. It’s not like better alternatives don’t exist. Let’s face it, Chicago (along with most public education facilities) has been doing a poor job of educating children. With the 40% dropout rate we see that children aren’t falling for the bullshit and are leaving to pursue better options. Why continue to sink money into something that is ineffective and unwanted by students?

The Surveillance State

Via Bruce Schneier’s blog I came across an excellent, and short, essay regarding the surveillance state. Ian Welsh, the essay’s author, sufficiently sums up the tense relationship between the rulers and the enforcers:

This is one of the biggest problems the current elites face: they want the smallest enforcer class possible, so as to spend surplus on other things. The enforcer class is also insular, primarily concerned with itself (see Dorner) and is paid in large part by practical immunity to many laws and a license to abuse ordinary people. Not being driven primarily by justice or a desire to serve the public and with a code of honor which appears to largely center around self-protection and fraternity within the enforcer class, the enforcers’ reliability is in question: they are blunt tools and their fear for themselves makes them remarkably inefficient.

It’s easy to see the state’s motivation for implementing comprehensive automated surveillance. Paying enforcers to perform surveillance manually is expensive. Why would the rulers want to spend large amounts of money on manual surveillance when they can automate a great deal of the work and pocket the saved wealth? This is also the reason why the state tries to involve everybody, whether they’re an enforcer or not, into its surveillance system. How many times have we seen the phrase, “If you see something, say something?” Hell the phrase has its own Department of Motherland Fatherland Homeland Security (DHS) webpage. Every tattling neighbor increases the state’s watchful eye without incurring additional costs. Fortunately surveillance has a weakness:

The reliance on surveillance is however a weakness, one of many. One of the simplest ways to reduce the power and reach of the oligarchy is to destroy surveillance equipment, much of which is very easy to reach. I have frequently said that we will know that people are becoming more serious when they start destroying surveillance equipment, when it becomes an ethical imperative to do so; ideally when people believe that blanket surveillance is an ethical wrong.

I, am, thus interested to see that the Barefoot Bandit Brigade destroying surveillance cameras. In the US, those who oppose current elites directly seem strongest around Oakland and in the Pacific Northwest.

I touched on the strategy of destroying the state’s surveillance system when Minnesota politicians proposed reinstall red light cameras. Welsh puts forth an interesting idea: one can judge how serious people are about avoiding the state’s watchful eye when they begin openly advocating and participating in the destruction of surveillance equipment. It will be interesting to see if organizations like Camover and the Barefoot Bandit Brigade become more prevalent in the United States as the state becomes even more intrusive.

South Dakota to Allow Armed Teachers

The aftermath of the Connecticut shooting has seen very little common sense. We’ve seen countless people claim that more gun control legislation is needed but South Dakota is bucking the trend by allowing teachers to arm themselves:

The measure does not force school districts to arm teachers and will not require teachers to carry guns.

But it allows each school district to choose if staff could be armed. It takes effect in July.

Under the Republican-sponsored bill, school staff given permission to carry firearms on campus will be known as “school sentinels”. The state has given a law enforcement commission the task of establishing a training programme for the sentinels.

This is the appropriate response. Allow teachers that want to carry a gun on the job to carry a gun on the job. It’s a simple strategy that increases the cost of inflicting violence upon schools, doesn’t require gun owners to submit to further state tyranny, and doesn’t cost tax victims any additional money. I wish other states would remove their restrictions against teachers carrying at work but most states seem focused on punishing gun owners instead of protecting children.

The Illusionary Division

According to the Star Tribune Minnesota Democrats are split on the issue of gun control. The divide, for all intents and purposes, is illusionary:

A bipartisan majority of Minnesota House members and gun-rights groups are lining up to back a new proposal at the State Capitol that would tighten penalties on Minnesotans who obtain weapons illegally and would prohibit felons from owning ammunition.

[…]

But the proposal also is laying bare the divide within the DFL on gun rights, and could signal the first serious dissension within a party that now controls the Legislature. Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, who heads the House Public Safety and Finance Committee, has already proposed a bill featuring universal background checks — an element that gun safety activists say is key step toward restricting gun violence.

The two options are expanding the state’s power by give state agents more data and new crimes to charge people with or by prohibiting private sales of firearms. No matter which side wins we, the people, lose. But the illusion of choice exists and ,so long as that illusion exists, people will believe they are free.

No One Talks, Everyone Walks

No one talks, everyone walks. It’s a phrase that has been commonly used by radical anarchist groups for some time now. The meaning of the statement is obvious, if nobody talks to the police, prosecutors, or grand juries everybody will be able to walk away. Police, prosecutors, and grand juries are specialists in destroying lives. What seems like a casual conversation about a friend can turn into the evidence needed for prosecutors to bring charges against that friend, which is what appears to have happened with Aaron Swartz’s case:

When journalist Quinn Norton was presented with a subpoena in 2011 to appear in front of a federal grand jury, she “had to Google grand jury to find out what it was.” She did not know that in a small, closed hearing, federal prosecutors would push her to inadvertently help incriminate her dearest friend and then-lover — Aaron Swartz.

[…]

The journalist explains how she at first cooperated with the prosecutors, convinced that she knew nothing that could be used against Swartz. But, as she learned, prosecutors are pro fishermen — they cast wide nets. In a moment Norton describes as “profoundly foolish” she told the grand jury that Swartz had co-authored a blog post advocating for open data. As we now know, his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto was used by prosecutors as evidence that the technologist had “malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.”

Norton recalls how “it had not sunk in that I’d accidentally betrayed someone I loved. It was so mind-numbingly stupid on the part of these powerful men, these elites of law enforcement, that I couldn’t conceive that I’d actually harmed Aaron.”

What seemed like innocuous information to Norton ended up being the rope needed by the state to hang Aaron. Unfortunately the cruelty of the state is not well known, which isn’t surprising since we’re brought up in this country to believe that the police are your friends, politicians are your representatives, and the innocent need not worry about talking or surveillance.

Anarchists were made well aware of this fact during the First Red Scare, where foreign anarchists were forcibly deported under the Immigration Act of 1903 and the Immigration Act of 1918 (both commonly referred to as the Anarchist Exclusion Acts). This is why Leah-Lynn Plante, Katherine Olejnik, and Matt Duran refused to testify to a grand jury. Because of their unwillingness to cooperate with the state they ended up walking free. Had any one of them testified to the grand jury it is likely all three of them would be facing multi-year prison sentences.

I don’t mean to lambast Norton. She, like Swartz, is a victim of the state. At no point did she mean to hand the grand jury a statement they could fabricate into charges against Swartz. In all likelihood she didn’t realize that the “justice system” in the United States is staffed by individuals who specialized in destroying lives.

Hopefully some benefit can be derived from this entire fiasco. At the very least it should be a demonstration of why you should never, ever, cooperate with police, prosecutors, grand juries, or any other element within the “justice system.”

When Seconds Count the Police Aren’t Showing Up

With the amount of time police have to dedicate to expropriating wealth from the general populace in the form of traffic citations, civil forfeiture laws, and rounding up slave labor for Federal Prison Industries and Corrections Corporation of America it’s not surprising that the time they have set aside for helping people has dwindled to almost nothing. In fact the police have become so inept at protecting the people of Oakland, California that the people have finally decided to help one another directly:

OAKLAND (KPIX 5) – Oakland’s crime problems have gotten so bad that some people aren’t even bothering to call the cops anymore; instead, they’re trying to solve and prevent crimes themselves.

KPIX 5 cameras caught up with a half dozen neighbors in East Oakland’s Arcadia Park neighborhood Monday as they walked the streets on the lookout for crime. The vigilance has never seemed more necessary than now; 25 homes in the neighborhood have been burglarized over the last two months alone.

In a neighborhood that has started to feel like the wild west, people have even started posting “wanted” signs.

People often get suckered into believing that the state provides protection for those living within its borders. The police aren’t required to provide protection and, in many parts of the world, people have learned that the police are almost useless when it comes to providing protection. In such cases the people end up having to find alternative methods to ensure the safety of their community. I believe we’ll see communities creating their own methods of providing protection as more police departments demonstrate their ineffectiveness.

Dissents Will not be Tolerated

A tyrannical regime has a vested interest in ensuring the general populace remain ignorant of its atrocities. This is likely why the United States government has been pursuing Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, so veraciously and why they have been making the life of Bradly Manning a living hell. Manning has plead guilty to “aiding the enemy” (I’m guessing his other option was to face execution) but releasing information about atrocities being committed to the United States government. When you read Manning’s justification for leaking the information it makes you wonder who the United States government considers to be an enemy:

Manning said: “We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general [that] might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day.”

It appears as though the United States government considers the people living in the United States to be enemies as they have been fighting the release of any information that makes their actions look less than honorable. I believe it’s important for the people living under a war happy state to understand the true costs of war, which involves death and destruction on both sides of a conflict. When people are punished for revealing atrocities committed by a government you know that government is worried about the ramifications of its actions.

Who Will Build the Broadband

Without the state who will build the broadband? Apparently the people who want to use it:

Look outside of your window: if you see miles of farmland, chances are you have terrible internet service. That’s because major telecommunications companies don’t think it’s worth the investment to bring high-speed broadband to sparsely populated areas. But like most businesses, farms increasingly depend on the internet to pay bills, monitor the market and communicate with partners. In the face of a sluggish connection, what’s a group of farmers to do?

Grow their own, naturally.

That’s what the people of Lancashire, England, are doing. Last year, a coalition of local farmers and others from the northwestern British county began asking local landowners if they could use their land to begin laying a brand-new community-owned high-speed network, sparing them the expense of tearing up roads. Then, armed with shovels and backhoes, the group, called Broadband for the Rural North, or B4RN (it’s pronounced “barn”), began digging the first of what will be approximately 180,000 meters of trenches and filling them with fiber-optic cable, all on its own.

The next step, after raising half a million pounds from shareholders, is to convince Lancastrians to pony up about fifty dollars a month for internet service. (Those who invest £1500 or more can get a year’s free service, a tax credit of 30%, and the option to sell the entire investment back in 2016 at full value.) This isn’t AOL dial-up: customers will have access to a blazing fast 1 gigabit connection, something that many city-dwellers, myself included, would covet.

Regardless of what statists tell us people can accomplish great things without the assistance of fear mongering war hawks.

Segregation, Jim Crow Laws, and the State’s Involvement

A common criticism of libertarianism is that segregation and Jim Crow laws would still be in place if it wasn’t for the state’s intervention during the Civil Rights Movement. According to statists segregation and Jim Crow laws only ended because the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This argument sounds good on paper but it falls apart when you look at the history of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The first thing that should be noted is the word “laws” in Jim Crow laws. How did Jim Crow laws come into existence? Through state decree. Statists seem to forget that segregation and Jim Crow laws were put into place by the state. In other words the state didn’t magnanimously bring civil liberties to the downtrodden, it merely repealed its previous laws. Slavery was no different. First slavery was legalized by the state only to later be repealed. Somehow statists equate the abolition of slavery as a magnanimous action on behalf of the state and ignore the fact that the institution of slavery was first legalized by the state.

Let’s look at a slightly different, albeit similar, scenario. If a schoolyard bully and his friends have been beating up on a classmate for years and suddenly, one day, the bully tells his friends to stop we don’t praise the bully for being magnanimous and protecting his classmate. Instead we rightfully point out that the bully and his friends shouldn’t have been beating up their classmate in the first place.

One does not get to call himself a protector if he was the aggressor who decided to stop his aggression. That state doesn’t get to call itself a protector of civil liberties because is stopped persecuting a group of people. To say that the state is responsible for abolishing slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws requires ignoring the fact that the state legalized slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws.

Another Example of Statist Environmentalism

I’ve discussed statist environmentalism at length on this blog but one of my favorite points to bring up is the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t prevent the emission of pollutants, it licenses pollution. If you want to emit pollutants into the environment you merely have to purchase a license from the EPA.

OK, the EPA doesn’t prevent the emission of pollutants, but they inspect potential sources of pollution to ensure those sources don’t emit pollutants, right? As it turns out, not so much:

Tyler County Emergency Management Coordinator Dale Freeman says just under 20,000 gallons of oil have spilled into Otter Creek off County Road 2590. Tyler County officials were alerted to the spill Saturday by residents who noticed the oil in Otter creek.

[…]

The pipeline is owned by Sunoco Logistics and the company says the leak has been patched up and oil is no longer flowing through the pipeline.

Sunoco sent a statement to 12News via email saying “We will perform a thorough investigation into the cause of the incident. Right now, our priorities are the safety of the community, our employees and contractors, and the protection and restoration of the environment.”

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality are helping with the clean up. Crews have been ordered to work around the clock until it is complete.

It’s a good thing the EPA is involved in helping with the cleanup effort. After all they apparently forgot to inspect the pipeline, ensure proper oil leak detection capabilities were built into the pipeline, and ensure proper methods were in place to contain any unexpected spillage. In addition to that the EPA is likely to suffer no consequences for failing its supposed mission of protecting the environment.

A question many people may be asking is what alternatives exist to statist environmental protection. Once again I turn to my friend private law, in this case tort law. Tort laws revolve around compensating victims for damages caused by third parties. This system has been the traditionally chosen system for stateless societies such as medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland, the American Frontier, and Neutral Moresnet. In fact tort law was also traditionally used in the United States against polluters until the 1840s. Before the 1840s a person could sue a coal plant if soot emitted from the plant landed on the plaintiff’s property. After the 1840s the state, who has a monopoly on courts, started allowing polluters to emit pollution if they were also providing a “public good” (a term that was defined by the same court that oversaw the suit). Allowing property owners to sue polluters, and therefore hold polluters entirely responsible for the damages they cause, would likely lead to a reduction in polluting entities. Under the EPA polluters are generally immune from prosecution if the amount of pollutants they emit are below a certain threshold set by the EPA. If a polluter wants to emit pollutants above that threshold they must seek the EPA’s permission. Furthermore the amount of damages a polluter is responsible for paying are generally capped, which is why British Petroleum (BP) was able to get away with leaking crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico without going bankrupt.

Were the state’s protections removed from polluters the cost of polluting would increase and, therefore, the instances of emitted pollution would likely go down. If Sunoco Logistics knew they would be entirely responsible for repairing the damages caused by a spill from their pipeline do you think they would forgo effective leak detection, containment mechanisms, and other safety procedures that would reduce the likelihood and severity of a spill? Probably not, and if they did they would find themselves facing bankruptcy in rather quick order. In fact oil companies may find that running pipelines is entirely too costly and find other methods of transporting oil to refineries or they may choose to build smaller refiners at the oil fields (or even find alternatives to oil).

Under a system of private law inspections and regulations would likely be handled by competing entities that would also be held responsible if they failed to perform property inspections or create effective regulations. The EPA, being a state entity, is immune from consequences of performing a poor job or failing to fulfill its responsibilities. Therefore no recourse exists if the EPA approves something that shouldn’t have been approved. If multiple entities were performing inspections and creating regulations then those who did an effective job would likely be relied on while those who did a poor job would likely become irrelevant and therefore go bankrupt.

So long as we continue to put the state in charge of protecting the environment the environment will face constant threat. Decentralizing the power to protect the environment will give more options and offer victims of polluters easier access to compensation, which would encourage potential polluters to contain their messes.