Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

How to Handle Gun Buy Backs

Gun buybacks have always baffled me. First of all the name buyback is deceptive as it implies the person “buying back” the firearm was the original owner. Since the state was never the owner of the firearms it isn’t buying back firearms, it’s simply buying them. It would be more accurate to call these programs gun buys. More and more individuals are beginning to use the state’s “buyback” program against them. Following this proud tradition gun owners in Oregon attended a gun “buyback” and competed with the state by offering more money for firearms:

They were among a group of gun buyers who’d staked out periphery positions as a firearms “turn-in” took place inside the parking lot. The Ceasefire Oregon Education Foundation conducted the turn-in for four hours. Gun owners could turn in a weapon to foundation volunteers, who were assisted by Portland police with handling the weapons for eventual destruction. In return for each operable gun, owners received the gift card.

“I believe the majority of people would not show up here today,” said foundation volunteer Liz Julee, “if they did not want their gun removed from circulation.”

Obviously Julee doesn’t understand how markets work. People exchange only when they feel as though they’ll come out better in the end. Many people who turn in firearms at these “buyback” programs value the gift card more than the firearm that they never use. Few, if any, are attending because they want to get guns out of circulation (if that was what they wanted to do they could just destroy the firearms themselves). While Julee’s knowledge on the working of markets is lacking several gun owners used their knowledge of how markets work for fun and profit:

But a minority clearly knew that the price point began at about $80 cash to sell their weapons to West or to a handful of other buyers on the sidewalk. The group did not venture into the parking lot to solicit potential sellers, having been instructed by Portland police at last year’s event to keep their distance.

West, 22, traveled from Medford. One of his first purchases of the day, a Remington Nylon 66 22-caliber rifle, was for $20. He immediately resold it for $100 to another gun buyer, Darren Campbell of Salem, who recognized the firearm as worth potentially triple what he paid.

West and Campbell both said they were purchasing guns largely because of their resale value. Other buyers said they purchased guns on a principle — to prevent the firearms from going out of circulation — but all the buyers interviewed had at some awareness of the firearms’ true resale value.

In the end the seller of the Remington 66 was better off because he or she valued the $20.00 more than the firearm. West was better off because he valued the firearm more than the $20 knowing he could sell the firearm for more than he paid. The final purchaser of the firearm was better off because he valued it more than his $100. In the end everybody was better off, which is why markets are amazing.

It’s great to see the free market working against the state, especially when it comes to gun “buybacks.”

The Commonality of Statism

On the surface it appears that there is a vast divide between the Republicans (“right”) and the Democrats (“left”). If you listen to the rhetoric of either side you would believe the Republicans believe in free markets, sanctity of marriage, sanctity of life, and gun rights while the Democrats believe in regulating greedy capitalists, equal rights for homosexuals, women’s right to choose, and prohibiting access to dangerous weapons. Republicans believe they are entirely different from the Democrats and the Democrats believe they are entirely different from the Republicans. The truth, as explained by Jeffery Tucker, is that both sides are exactly the same:

We can and will argue interminably about how government ought to be used. Should government prevent gay people from contracting unions or stop private companies from discriminating against people who chose gay unions? Either way, the state is being brought in to tell people what they can and can’t do. In this sense, the left and the right have more in common than either side cares to admit: Both have a plan for how the state can better manage the social order.

[…]

So come November, we will drag ourselves to the voting booth and look at the names and try to remember what these various people promise to do for us and to us if we ratify their right to rule. Having done so, we are told that we’ve made our choice and now we must live with it.

But maybe it is not really a choice at all. Maybe it is time to let go of our dependency and reject the entire master-slave relationship that is the whole basis of the system itself. Fifty Shades of Government has been the best-seller for hundreds of years. It’s time that the governed write an entirely new book.

We shouldn’t be arguing how to use government to manage our lives, we should be arguing why government is used to manage our lives. According to the Republicans they want to legalize gun ownership while the Democrats claim they want to prohibit dangerous individuals from obtaining weapons. What both sides are actually saying is that they own us and whether or not we’re allowed to own firearms is entirely up to them. It doesn’t matter if you vote for Romney or Obama, both candidates believe they own you and therefore have the right to decide what you can and can’t do.

The majority of Americans have become ensnared in the state’s trap. They have been given state sanctioned confines in which to debate and never attempt to venture into territory outside of that. Political choices are illusionary. Whether you ask the state to legalize or prohibit something isn’t a choice, you’re asking the state to control individuals either way. If you ask the state to legalize something you are saying that the state has a rightful authority over that thing, which necessarily implies that the state may later make that thing illegal. If you ask the state to prohibit something you are again saying the state has a rightful authority over that thing, which necessarily implies you approve of the state’s use of violence against those who partake in that prohibited thing.

It is time we stop debating about how the government should use authority and argue against the government having authority.

Our Side Must Win

I think Reason just summarized every election in the history of the world:

The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins.

No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies.

Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People.

Read the entire article, it’s solid gold.

GM is Heading Towards Bankruptcy Yet Again

The state spent billions of tax victim dollars to keep General Motors (GM) from filing bankruptcy and it appears, unsurprisingly, that GM is heading for bankruptcy yet again:

Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion.

Right now, the government’s GM stock is worth about 39% less than it was on November 17, 2010, when the company went public at $33.00/share. However, during the intervening time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by almost 20%, so GM shares have lost 49% of their value relative to the Dow.

This is why bailouts are such a joke, they reward companies that misallocate resources. When a company allocates resources towards fulfilling the desires of consumers that business is rewarded with more resource, which are voluntarily given to them by consumers. When a company misallocates resources by putting them towards producing goods and services consumers don’t want that company doesn’t receive further resources and eventually fails. When you insert government into the mix you destroy the market feedback mechanism as companies are given additional resources even though they’ve failed to provide for consumer wants. If GM gets another bailout there will be even less motivation for them to fulfill consumer desires as they would be rewarded twice for failing to do so, and the government seems more than happy to deliver GM another bailout less it be embarrassed by the dismal failure that the bailout programs have been.

Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking Ruled Legal

Last week the state ruled it could perform warrantless wiretaps, today it has ruled that it can track your location through your cellular phone without a warrant:

On Tuesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that law enforcement officials don’t need a warrant to track suspects via cellphones. Attorneys argued to overturn Skinner’s many convictions, citing that the GPS location information that led to the defendant’s arrest was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. This didn’t wash with the majority of judges over the case, who voted in a 2-1 ruling.

“When criminals use modern technological devices to carry out criminal acts and to reduce the possibility of detection, they can hardly complain when the police take advantage of the inherent characteristics of those very devices to catch them,” wrote Judge John Rogers in the majority opinion that will affect future cases in a huge chunk of the country.

So much for the Fourth Amendment. Unfortunately if one tries to argue this case on constitutional grounds they’re faced also accepting another constitutional idea, that the courts maintain a monopoly on interpreting the Constitution. Therefore when one says warrantless tracking of cell phones is unconstitutional they much also accept that they don’t actually have a say in whether or not such acts are unconstitutional as the Constitution grants such authority to the state’s courts. I think Lysander Spooner was correct when he said the following:

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

Let Accusations of Me Being a Communist Begin

What I’m about to write is likely to result in accusations of me being a communist. I fully support actions like the following:

The building unveiled today as the Victor Martinez Community Library was part of a Carnegie Foundation endowment of four libraries given to the city of Oakland between 1916 and 1918. Oakland’s librarian at the time, Charles S. Greene, believed that the city’s people would benefit most from libraries placed within their communities.

Despite this vision, the building was one of seven branch casualties of budget cuts in the late seventies, severing vital library life-lines in poor and working communities. Since then, the “Latin American Branch” library building located at the corner of Miller and 15th st. has mostly sat empty, despite the fact that the next nearest library is miles away, and increasingly difficult to access in a city like Oakland with an increasingly expensive transit system. With its eroding chain link fence and decaying, armored exterior, the building is much more than an eyesore; the unused, but inaccessible, space creates a life-draining dark vacuum of stability that serves at best as a convenient place for the unscrupulous to dump their old mattresses, couches and assorted garbage.

This morning, a group of activists opened this building again for use as a library. Inside is the modest seed for a library and community center—hundreds of books donated by people who envision the rebirth of local, community-owned libraries and social and political centers throughout Oakland. We’ve named the building after recently deceased author, Victor Martinez, who overcame a young life of hard agricultural work to become a successful writer in the Bay Area. His semi-autobiographical novel, Parrot in the Oven, has become a seminal work of the Latino experience. Martinez died last year at 56 of an illness caused by his work in the fields.

I know, I know, only a dirty communist would support a group of activists opening up an abandoned building for public use. Bear with me for a moment. The building that the activists opened was a sealed up public library. As I’ve stated before I don’t believe the state has any legitimate claim to property ownership and therefore I don’t believe they have a right to take a building paid for by tax victims and seal it up. Why let such a building lie vacant? Why not put it to use? Just because the state doesn’t want to use it doesn’t mean members of the community don’t want to use it.

Hopefully activists in Oakland will spend more time on actions like this and less time on bitching about the nebulous “one percent.”

The Market for Prisons

One of my friends posted this story about a federal investigation into the Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Facility:

Officials in Lauderdale County, Mississippi, have operated “a school-to-prison pipeline” that violates the constitutional rights of juveniles by incarcerating them for alleged school disciplinary infractions, some as minor as defiance, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday.

My friend blamed the conditions on the free market, namely for profit prisons. I had to contest this fact because for profit prisons are only able to enjoy profits because of state interference in the market. My take on the issue is to rely on a free market instead of allowing the state to run the justice system. As I expected he disagreed and stated disbelief in a free market being able to provide prisons. While I agree with is assessment that the free market would likely be a poor provider of prisons the reason I see for it is different. He believes prisons couldn’t be supplied by a free market due to the sheer expense of building cages, hiring guards to watch the cages, feeding the caged individuals, etc. whereas I believe prisons wouldn’t be supplied by a free market because there isn’t a demand for them.

The idea that imprisonment is a form of justice baffles me. Most people want to be compensated when they’re wronged. If somebody’s car is damaged in an accident they want their car replaced and any legal and medical expenses covered. When their television is stolen they want it replaced. I haven’t met a person yet who, after being victimized, wanted to pay more money to put their aggressor in a cage and pay for that aggressor’s food, water, and medical expenses. That’s what the prison system does, it makes victims into victims again as a portion of their wealth is stolen to pay for the construction, maintenance, and operation of prisons. What’s worse is that victims often of uncompensated for their losses. Is that what people really want? To be forced to pay when they’re victimized? History would say otherwise.

History is peppered with successful stateless societies. Two of the more famous instances of such societies are medieval Ireland and Iceland between the years 1000 and 1300. Medieval Irish law is noted for being created and executed privately [PDF]. While there were kings of sorts in Ireland during that period they held no power to create or execute law. Instead individuals were charged with creating and executing law and this is likely why the legal system in Ireland revolved around compensation instead of imprisonment. Iceland’s period of statelessness is also notable for the compensatory nature of their laws. Like Ireland, Iceland had no central coercive authority dictating law and enacting punishment, instead such matters were left to individuals living on the island. The legal system revolved around godi who were representatives. A godi held no actual power as association was voluntary instead of forced within arbitrary borders. Any individual could chose any godi to represent them and thus more successful godi were ones who best delivered justice in the form of compensation for is constituents’ losses.

In the absence of state coercion dictating laws and punishment societies have tended towards compensatory models. Compared to caging individuals in prisons getting compensation is relatively cheap and we know that markets tend towards efficiency. Therefore a compensatory model has the advantages of getting compensation for victims and is relatively inexpensive. If it wasn’t for the state dictating that aggressors and violators of state decrees be caged we would likely not have any market for prisons and thus people are correct when they say a free market would be a poor provider of prisons. Markets provide for demands, if there is no demand then there is no market.

What the State Does

What happened to the 13 year-old entrepreneur who, in an attempt to make ends meet for his family, purchased a food cart and was shutdown by the state? He and his family are now homeless:

Several weeks after a city zoning officer shut down his hot dog business, 13-year-old Nathan Duszynski and his parents are homeless.

The family was hoping Nathan’s hot dog cart could help them through a difficult time. Nathan’s mother, Lynette Johnson, suffers from epilepsy and his stepfather, Doug Johnson, has multiple sclerosis. Their illnesses have restricted them from finding permanent, full-time work.

The family receives about $1,300 a month in disability payments, Medicaid and food assistance. The three are having a hard time staying together. MLive confirms what the Mackinac Center learned Thursday — Nathan and his mother are staying at the Holland Rescue Mission.

“Nate and I are now in a shelter,” Lynette Johnson said. “Doug can’t stay with us because he takes prescription narcotics to deal with his pain and the shelter does not allow him with those kinds of drugs.”

This shouldn’t surprise anybody, making families of 13 year-old entrepreneurs homeless in order to protect the politically well-connected from competitors is what the state does. In factm in a rare demonstration of honesty, the state simply admitted to protectionism instead of trying to wrap a layer of regulatory bullshit around their misdeed:

Last week, Nathan and his family made an appeal to the Holland City Council. Mayor Kurt Dykstra defended the city’s ordinance, saying it was to protect downtown restaurant owners, who asked that the “success of the downtown district not be infringed upon by those who don’t share in the costs of maintaining the attractiveness of that space.”

It’s a good thing we have a big powerful violent state in place to protect the “success of the downtown district” from dangerous 13 year-old entrepreneurs.

Unintended Consequences of Farm Subsidies

Every time the state interferes with the market they create unintended consequences. This year’s weather can be summed up as hot and dry, which isn’t ideal for growing crops. Needless to say that bitch Mother Nature has greatly reduced the yields on foodstuff and that is leading to increasing food prices:

The price of many food products could rise later this year as much of the country is hit with the worst drought in a generation. Wholesale corn prices shot up nearly 5 percent yesterday, and soybean prices are also heading higher. Crop losses will be a blow to America’s rural economy and cut farm exports. The US Agriculture Department slashed its estimate of this fall’s corn crop by 12 percent – compared with last month’s forecast. Officials say 38 percent of the corn crop is in poor condition because of the drought. A shortage of corn and soybeans is raising concerns about global food shortages and inflation. That said, it would be easy to overstate the impact on the national economy and American consumers, especially if the weather improves soon. It may take months for some food and meat costs to rise in supermarkets. According to a government estimate, cereals and grains accounts for just 2 percent of the US consumer price index.

Nobody should be surprised by this, less supply combined with steady or increasing demand has a tendency to lead to higher prices. What does this have to do with government interference in free markets? Consider a free market in foodstuff for a moment. As food prices continue to fall producers are likely hold onto the food they’ve produced until prices increase sufficiently. Effectively a surplus is created with the intention of selling it at higher prices at a later time.

This is where state interference in the agriculture market comes into play. Through various agricultural subsidies the state has discouraged farmers from creating a surplus of food, instead they are paying farmers to destroy surpluses [PDF]:

In 1936 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had no authority to administer land-idling acreage controls under New Deal farm legislation, on the Constitutional grounds “that powers not granted are prohibited. None to regulate agricultural production is given, and therefore legislation by Congress for that purpose is forbidden.” (U.S. Supreme Court 1936). Subsequently, the Court’s alleged respect for precedent was not extended to this decision, and many later production control measures have passed Constitutional muster.4 At the time, the result of the Court’s decision was a merger of prior concerns about conservation with measures to remove acreage from commodity production. This was done in the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 principally by defining “soil-depleting” crops (the main basic commodities) and “soil-conserving” crops (grasses and legumes), and paying farmers to substitute the latter for the former.

Instead of having surpluses of food waiting to be sold during times of low yield (which are also times of higher prices) farmers have been paid to destroy surplus crops meaning a low yield will necessarily create an actual shortage. Once again an unintended consequence emerges from from state meddling in economic affairs. While the short term gain to farmers was notable the severity of hazard being placed on the rest of society, namely a possible food shortage, has the potential of being extremely damaging.