Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Reducing Violence

Because no tragedy can be allowed to go to waste, almost immediately after the recent shooting in Oregon Mr. Obama stepped behind is podium and demanded his fellow politicians further restricting legal firearm ownership. He did this under the guise of reducing violence. Not too long afterwards the United States bombed a hospital:

Jason Cone, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) U.S., disclosed the updated casualty figures on his Twitter feed, where he also said that the bombing went on for longer than 30 minutes “after American & Afghan military officials in Kabul & Washington first informed of proximity to hospital.”

He added that the precise location of the hospital had been communicated to all parties to the conflict “multiple times” in the past few months. He said MSF was “urgently seeking clarity,” on how the bombing took place.

In a statement, the organization said that it “condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific bombing of its hospital in Kunduz full of staff and patients.” Of the 37 wounded, 19 are Doctors Without Borders Staff.

What Mr. Obama purports to be addressing are the approximate 11,000 homicides committed with firearms. Setting aside the absurd belief that disarming the general population will somehow reduce homicides let’s consider the grand scheme of things, namely the number of people murdered by governments.

By far the largest murderers in human history have been governments. This is true today. Only an organization with the means and will to involve itself in outright wars with out such entities can rack up a body country in the thousands or millions. Hell, Operation Enduring Freedom killed somewhere between 1,000 and 1,300 civilians in three months alone. And that’s just one operation in one country out of the known seven the United States is actively bombing.

I’m not condoning the actions of the shooter in Oregon, he was a piece of shit murderer after all, or trying to make his crimes seem less than what they are. What I am pointing out is the hypocrisy of a butcher like Obama talking about reducing violence. We’re talking about a man whose only notable achievement has been maintaining a continuous state of war throughout his entire presidency. He even manages to keep bombing countries he’s said we’re no longer at war with. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t take any statements he makes about reducing violence seriously.

Brew Up Some Agorism

One of the hardest questions for a new agorist to answer is, “What kind of agorist business can I start?” Coming from a society that has very little entrepreneurial spirit left, which isn’t surprising when children are told their highest aspiration in life is to get a college education so they can work for somebody else, it’s not surprising that this question is so commonly asked. Hell, I still ask it (although I’ve finally got some solid ideas). In my experience the first step in answering that question is identifying a market with relatively high demand, a low entry fee, and an abundance of regulatory burden.

Beer is a good example. Drinking is a common pastime for people, getting into home brewing is affordable for people of even modest means, and there’s a massive amount of regulatory burden:

In a video posted in September by the group Learn Liberty, two college professors break down the cost of a brew to reveal who and what is responsible for that price tag.

According to Peter Jaworski of Georgetown University and Christopher Koopman of George Mason University School of Law, the answer is simple: taxes.

Koopman says that up to 44% of the cost of a beer can be attributed to federal, state, and local taxes. Furthermore, Koopman says that beer is “one the most highly regulated industries across the country,” which causes additional problems for craft breweries.

Any market where 44 percent of the cost comes from taxes is a good place to start when you’re not interested in collecting taxes. The real barrier to entry in the beer market is learning how to brew a halfway decent beer. Fortunately we’re living in a renaissance period for home brew. Information on getting start is not only widely available but the people who already know how to do it are usually happy to teach newcomers (especially if they’re selling brewing equipment or otherwise profiting from teaching).

Some may be concerned that the home brew market is saturated at this point. If everybody who brewed beer sold their creation under the table for profit that might be the case. In my experience most of the people who brew beer, like most people in general, are overly concerned with being a good law-abiding citizen and therefore do not sell their beer or sell so little that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Because of this beer is still, in my opinion, a good market for a budding agorist to dip their toes into.

The Illusion Of Choice

Like Christmas, presidential elections seem to assault our world earlier every cycle. The 2016 presidential election is still more than a year away but is already clogging our news feeds with coverage. At the rate things are going the 2020 presidential election will begin ramping up before the 2016 election has even concluded!

What’s especially frustrating is how irrelevant elections are. I know, people will tell you this election is the most important election in our nation’s history. Republicans will argue that any of their candidates, no matter how sickening they may be, are a better alternative to Hillary or Bernie. Democrats will claim the country is doomed if any of the Republican candidates wins. The Green and Libertarian parties are apparently suing in the hopes of getting their candidates the same national coverage the Republican and Democratic candidates enjoy. And throughout all of this you will have to suffer friends, family members, and pretty much everybody else telling you how you need to vote.

Herein lies the problem, there is no choice. There are multiple candidates but that’s different than a choice. A choice would be a ballot box for abolishing offices or the entire government. But no ballot in the United States, as far as I know, has an option for abolishing an office. Your “choices” are to either be ruled or be ruled.

This is why I can’t bring myself to give a damn about any election. I have no interest in being ruled. The only interest I have is to advance individual freedom, which cannot be realized through elections.

Once Data Is Retained You Lose All Control

Apologists for the National Security Agency (NSA) claim that Americans have no need to worry since the agency’s focus is on foreigners. Sometimes they even claim that the NSA cannot legally act on any of the domestic communications it collects so there is no danger to Americans regardless of how expansive its surveillance apparatus is. These arguments are irrelevant though because once your data is retained you have no control over how it is used.

Case in point, the NSA has been sharing data with domestic law enforcement agencies:

The Justice Department is investigating the FBI’s use of information taken directly from mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA)’s collection of telephone metadata.

[…]

Another ongoing Justice Department investigation is examining the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s use of “parallel construction.”

Parallel construction is a controversial investigative technique that takes information gained from sources like the NSA’s mass surveillance, covers up or lies about the sources, and then utilizes them in criminal investigations inside the United States. The information was passed to other federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

While the NSA itself may be restricted to some extent from using any data it collects on domestic individuals there is nothing stopping it from handing that data to an agency that isn’t. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are all agencies that can act on data collected on domestic individuals by the NSA. Furthermore, due to the secrecy of the NSA’s program, these domestic law enforcers can made defending against any collected data extremely difficult. You only have a right to face your accuser publicly if your accuser isn’t hiding behind the nebulous label of “national security,” after all.

Basic Income Only Strengthens The Ruling Class

There appears to be a worldwide competition to see which country can implement the stupidest idea. Possibly heading the United States’ competition are the basic income advocates:

Basic Income Action is, according to co-founder Dan O’Sullivan, “the first national organization educating and organizing the public to support a basic income.” In an email, he tells me that “Our goal is to educate and organize people to take action to win a basic income here in the US.”

Interest in a basic income, also called a guaranteed or universal income, an annual unearned salary, or just “getting handed a giant lump sum of free cash every year,” is percolating. Of late, it’s been the subject of magazine features, it’s been championed by economists from major financial institutions, and it’s even been touted on the presidential campaign trail.

Basic income is an appeal idea to many for the simple fact that it promises everybody a salary for doing nothing. It’s an idea so appealing even some libertarians have been suckered into it (and then had their arguments ruthlessly decimated). And according to its advocates it will help topple the power of the ruling class (or the “one percent” as they call it):

Perhaps the biggest thrust of the basic income movement’s argument is that technology is eliminating jobs, and they’re not coming back. (Hence we see more wealth accumulating at the top 1 percent, the class that happens to own the bulk of the automated labor; and an infamous economic recovery that has largely benefitted the rich, not the middle class.)

I’ve already addressed the fallacy of technology eliminating jobs so I won’t go into that more here. What I want to address is the ludicrous claim that basic income will somehow loosen the grip of the ruling class.

Where, exactly, does the money to fund basic income come from? Basic income advocates will tell you it comes from taxes. Somehow they miss the fact that taxes are monies collected by the State, which is yet another name for the ruling class. In other words basic income gives the top one percent yet another justification to steal money from the people. More insidious though is that it makes receivers of basic income even more dependent on the top one percent.

It’s a trick the federal government has used for decades. After collecting taxes from each state the federal government then redistributes them under the friendly title of “aid”. Some states end up getting more than they paid in while others receive less but none of the money is given without strings attached. Each state is then told to either do what they’re told or their money will be cut off. For states that receive more than they pay this is especially bad because they’re receiving the sweet end of the deal. But even the states that receive less than they pay don’t want to piss off the federal government because they would then lose more money. So you end up with a system that allows the federal government to dictate any number of terms to the states.

Basic income would allow for the exact same thing on an individual level. After collecting taxes the State could, and certainly would, attach a number of strings to basic income. If you didn’t comply you wouldn’t get a basic income. For people entirely reliant on basic income this would effectively mean they would be entirely without money. Those who had an additional revenue source would still stand to lose a sizable chunk of cash and would therefore also be motivated to comply. Anybody who pays any attention to politics in this country can already tell where this would lead: the further empowerment of the ruling class.

Basic income is just another statist wet dream. It sounds benevolent on the surface but would only serve to further entrench the oligarchy. Toppling the ruling class requires decentralization. Their tools of control must be rendered impotent. Granting them even more power over the populace’s livelihood accomplished the exact opposite.

Papers, Please

Many decades ago a tiny island nation faces oblivion at the hands of one of its larger neighbors. Its neighbor was not a kindly sort. Very early in its existence it blamed all of the nation’s ills on members of a particular religion. At first things weren’t too bad. The nation forced members of that religion to register with the government and submit to additional security checks. Eventually stores owned by members of that religion were boycotted and then destroyed. Finally members of that religion were hauled off to be executed en masse.

Even though vaguely familiar with history realize I’m talking about World War II, specifically as it related to Britain and Nazi German. I bring this up because I would think a country that was facing complete annihilation would be a bit more proactive in not because its would-be destroyer. But Britain, a nation that truly loves tyranny, has taken a rather frightening step in a very dark direction:

Imams, priests, rabbis and other religious figures will have to enrol in a “national register of faith leaders” and be subject to government-specified training and security checks in the Home Office’s latest action on extremism.

The highly controversial proposal appears in a leaked draft of the Government’s new counter-extremism strategy, seen by The Telegraph, which goes substantially further than previous versions of the document.

The strategy, due to be published this autumn, says that Whitehall will “require all faiths to maintain a national register of faith leaders” and the Government will “set out the minimum level of training and checks” faith leaders must have to join the new register.

Registration will be compulsory for all faith leaders who wish to work with the public sector, including universities, the document says. In practice, most faith leaders have some dealings with the public sector and the requirement will cover the great majority.

One might point out that this is different because it doesn’t target any specific religion but we all know that broad laws have a way of being enforced very selectively. And there is certainly nothing stopping a supposedly secular state from persecuting all religions.

The real takeaway though, in my opinion, is the fact that Britain is planning to force all faith leaders to register with the government and submit to compulsory training. Historically subsets of societies registered on special government lists haven’t fared very well. Even if this is never passed into law the fact that the proposal is viewed as acceptable by even a single member of the British state shows just how far that nation has slid into imitating that which tried to destroy it not even a century ago. I think our friends across the pond are in for some dark times.

Child Terrorized For Being Intelligent And Having Drive

What happens when a child with a Middle Eastern name and appearance builds an electronic clock and brings it to school? If you said, “He’s awarded for his efforts and drive to learn,” you’d be incorrect. The correct answer is he’s terrorized by the State:

Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.

He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

[…]

Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one “who knows I’m a good boy.”

Ahmed was spared the inside of a cell. The police sent him out of the juvenile detention center to meet his parents shortly after taking his fingerprints.

After interrogating, cuffing, and parading him around like some kind of captured beast the police magnanimously decided that they had terrorized the poor child enough and announced they would not pursue charges. Of course they never went so far as to apologize for their absurd overreaction:

Irving’s police chief announced Wednesday that charges won’t be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after he brought what school officials and police described as a “hoax bomb” on campus.

[…]

Asked if the teen’s religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances.

“We live in an age where you can’t take things like that to school,” he said. “Of course we’ve seen across our country horrific things happen, so we have to err on the side of caution.”

Every officer involved with this travesty should be arrested and charged with kidnapping. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of bullshit. Circuit boards along do not make a bomb. Unless there was some clay or other such material that at least kind of resembled an explosive attached to one of those boards there were no grounds whatsoever for anything more than a cursory glance.

The levels of idiocy that has to take place for these events to spiral so far out of control is almost awe inspiring. You need a teacher to not bother with looking at the clock and using a bit of critical thinking to contact the police. Then you need the police to against not bother taking a look at the clock and applying a bit of critical thinking. On top of all of that you have to have a society full of people who are so fucking compliant with anybody holding a badge to not storm the jail, arrest the police, and hold a trail to determine their possible guilt and punishment.

That school doesn’t deserve a student like Ahmed. Hell, this society doesn’t deserve a student like Ahmed. Students that demonstrate intelligence and drive should be somewhere where their knowledge and skills will be appreciated and advanced. My only hope is that this fiasco doesn’t stomp down his drive and he’s eventually able to start an underground company and make billions of dollars without paying one cent in taxes.

The Fragility Of Control

I’m a fan of the concept of defense in depth, which is one reason why I hate any solution that is dependent on everybody acting in a particular way. Prohibitions are just such a solution. Gun control advocates like to point to countries such as Japan as proof that control works. Of course gun control relies on everybody in society being unarmed so as soon as one person breaks the prohibition the entire solution falls to pieces. Even though manufacturing firearms is verboten in Japan, at least for the serfs, one Japanese man managed to build numerous firearms in his home:

A 60 year old man in Japan was recently arrested for building homemade guns of his own design. According to him it was his hobby for the last 40 years. He used scrap anvils as a source of hardened steel and crafted his own ammunition using toy caps and casted lead bullets.

In this case the man was merely building firearms as a hobby and no evidence exists that he meant to sell them to nefarious sorts. Although they’re a bit rough overall the firearms actually look pretty well made. More importantly, due to Japan’s strict firearm restrictions, the man was probably one of the more heavily armed individuals in the country. Had he decided to either use or sell his firearms nefarious purposes it would have left the general population at a severe disadvantage.

No solution that depends on everybody in a society to act in a specific way can succeed because there will always people that act outside of those specifications. That’s why I prefer solutions that can be decentralized. Restricting access to firearms only works so long as everybody is unarmed. Allowing individuals to arm themselves reduces the overall advantage a firearm provides to a single individuals. Arming individuals is a better solutions to gun violence than restricting gun ownership precisely because it relies on hardening individuals instead of expecting them to act in a specific manner.

All Laws Are Backed By The Threat Of Death

A lot of people, either willfully or ignorantly, haven’t comprehended the fact that all laws are backed by the threat of force. I like to point this out whenever one of my statist friends advocates for a new law that seemingly carries minor consequences. Usually I’m rewarded for me efforts by being accused of making a hyperoblic statement or being ridiculous. But facts are facts and laws are violence:

On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law…..

The problem is actually broader. It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law. Libertarians argue that we have far too many laws, and the Garner case offers evidence that they’re right. I often tell my students that there will never be a perfect technology of law enforcement, and therefore it is unavoidable that there will be situations where police err on the side of too much violence rather than too little. Better training won’t lead to perfection. But fewer laws would mean fewer opportunities for official violence to get out of hand.

If a person I’m debating is especially touchy they will usually reply with a variation of, “So you don’t support any laws? You’re fine with people murdering other people?”

Anarchism isn’t the opposition to all laws but the full comprehension of the fact that laws are backed by the threat of force. Therefore we put it on individuals to decide what they’re willing to enforce. Historically stateless societies had laws against initiations of force such as assault, murder, rape, theft, and other situations where one person was clearly harming another. These laws existed not as decrees written by men in marble buildings but by the actions of individuals.

Consider murder. Most individuals are will defend themselves if somebody tries to murder them and will go so far as to kill their attacker. The same goes for assault. Somebody being assaulted is typically willing to defend themselves to the point of escalating to deadly force is their attacker continues to escalate matters. Rape is another crime where victims are generally willing to escalate matters to deadly force if necessary. Theft, although seldom reaching such a drastic point, can result in somebody killing a thief, usually if the thief attempts to interfere when the rightful owner arrives to retrieve their property.

But very few people are willing to post a sign on a road with an arbitrarily selected limit and kill anybody who exceeds it. They may be willing to support a speed limit if somebody else is willing to enforce it but that is different than being willing to take the responsibility upon themselves.

The other factor in stateless law is whether members of a community will tolerate it. Let’s return to murder. If somebody was attacked and circumstances escalated to the point where the intended victim killed the aggressor would members of the community support it? Historically most communities were fine with that by the fact members didn’t see it as necessary to punish the would-be victim. The same could not usually be said for individuals who attempted to enforce victimless “crimes.” If you murdered somebody who exceeded your arbitrarily posted speed limit it is likely other members of the community would view you as a murdered and retaliate. In stateless societies each individual was a lawmaker and the community was the check and balance.

Laws are threats of force. The question is whether you’re willing to use that force to prevent a certain action. If you’re not then you have no business asking somebody else to do. If you are then you have no need to have others write it down and vote on it. That is the basis of anarchist law and that is why stateless societies tended to be far more peaceful than their statist neighbors and why the number of laws were very few.

Law Don’t Protect Your Privacy

I have a confession to make. Even though I beat on the privacy drum constantly I can help by groan whenever I hear somebody saying stronger privacy laws are needed. It’s not because I disagree with their sentiment. Usually people demanding stronger privacy laws have their hearts in the right place. But their efforts are wasted. Privacy laws don’t protect privacy.

Consider medical records. The legal system through numerous laws and court rulings generally considers medical records to be confidential. While that’s all fine and dandy that hasn’t stopped the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) from obtaining medical records:

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been sifting through hundreds of supposedly private medical files, looking for Texas doctors and patients to prosecute without the use of warrants.

Instead, the agents are tricking doctors and nurses into thinking they’re with the Texas Medical Board. When that doesn’t work, they’re sending doctors subpoenas demanding medical records without court approval.

The DEA can’t even count how many times it has resorted to the practice nationwide. A spokesman estimated it was in the thousands.

Even though these medical records are generally treated as confidential the DEA can still obtain them without so much as a court ordered subpoena. That’s because privacy laws do not equal privacy. Privacy is the ability to control who has access to your personal information. It necessarily implies you being the primary controller of your information and deciding who can and cannot access it. If you really want medical records to be private you should advocate that individuals be granted sole possession of their records and be allowed the exclusive right to decide when and by who they can be accessed.