Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

When You Hire Storm Troopers to Enforce Laws

Apparently the San Francisco Police Department is hiring many of the Storm Troopers who found themselves unemployed after the Empire fell:

Authorities in San Francisco released body camera videos on Tuesday of a dramatic shootout in which police officers fired their weapons at least 65 times in 15 seconds at a murder suspect.

[…]

“Nobody was struck by gunfire during this incident. The evidence in the case so far indicates Armstrong fired two rounds from a weapon, and that seven officers fired 65 rounds from their department-issued weapons,” SFPD Commander Greg McEachern told KTVU.

65 rounds were fired and nobody was hit? That’s almost impressive.

What makes this matter funnier is that these are the people to whom gun control advocates want to give a monopoly on legal gun ownership. While any gun owners is capable of firing 65 rounds and failing to hit a target, they are at least held accountable for their actions. The officers involved in this shooting will probably face no consequences for recklessly endangering bystanders, especially since they were extremely lucky and failed to hit any of them.

A Government of Governments

What do you get when you establish a government made up entirely by other governments? Another terrible government:

New revelations about the sexual exploitation of hundreds of women by United Nations peacekeepers have emerged a decade after the organization first identified the problem.

In a draft report obtained by the Associated Press, the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services — a U.N. watchdog within the U.N. — said members of a peacekeeping mission had “transactional sex” with more than 225 Haitian women. The women traded sex for basic needs, including food and medication.

“For rural women, hunger, lack of shelter, baby care items, medication and household items were frequently cited as the ‘triggering need,’” the report said. In exchange for sex, women got “’church shoes,’ cell phones, laptops and perfume, as well as money” from peacekeepers.

I don’t have a problem with prostitution when prostitutes are performing the job voluntarily. However, no interaction with a government agent is truly voluntary. Moreover, the United Nations is holding a good deal of the Haitian population in its prison, err, refugee camps, which gives the government of governments almost absolute control over many Haitians lives.

There is also the issue of accountability. The United Nations was established to oversee national governments. But who watches the watchmen? There is no organization to oversee the United Nations, which means it seldom faces consequences when it does something wrong. While the organization may claim that it prohibits its soldiers from having sex with the people it is oppressing saving, there is nobody to hold it accountable when it ignores its own soldiers who are breaking that rule.

I Am Altering the Deal

I have a theory that the biggest threat a government poses to an economy isn’t any specific set of regulations but constantly changing regulations. One day your business venture is perfectly legal, the next day it’s illegal:

The 2015 Butte wildfire had ripped through nearly 71,000 acres in Amador and Calaveras counties and left millions of dollars in damages behind. More than 900 structures were destroyed in the two counties, according to Cal Fire. Some residents left the community, deciding not to rebuild.

County supervisors embraced legalizing cannabis as a way for the local economy to generate revenue that could help it recover. Enticed by cheap land and friendly laws, the rural county of 45,000 people saw an influx of pot growers.

Not long after, however, anti-pot supervisors, including Mills, were elected to the five-member board. They had promised to ban cultivation in Calaveras County. In January they scored a victory with a 3-2 vote ordering growers to cease operations by June.

With a single vote a bunch of perfectly legal businesses became illegal. While the farmers are talking about suing, they won’t be able to operate their farms during the lawsuit, which could last years, and may not win anyways.

I think this story also explains the obsession most business ventures have with maximizing profits at all costs. Anti-capitalists like to blame capitalism for this obsession but any capitalist would tell you that maximizing long term profits is a better way to maximize overall profits… unless you’re operating in an environment where your business might be declared illegal overnight. I’m of the belief that business ventures are obsessed with short term profits at all costs, at least in part, because they have no idea what the rules regulating their business will be tomorrow. You can’t make any realistic long term goals when you don’t know what the rules will be tomorrow, in a month, or in a year.

This story will likely incentivize cannabis growers in California to maximize short term profits and give little through to long term profits. And when they do, anti-capitalists will blame capitalism instead of the real culprit, government.

Possible Theft Versus Guaranteed Theft

There are a lot of criticisms against cryptocurrencies. One criticism that I see come up periodically is that transactions can’t be reversed. If somebody manages to steal your cryptocurrency, there is no way to reverse the fraudulent transfer. Fraudulent electronic transactions in dollars, on the other hand, can be reversed.

That is a valid criticism. But I would like to point out something that is generally ignored by advocates of government issued money. Holders of dollars are being stolen from every moment of every day via purposeful inflation and there is no way to recover the purchasing power lost to inflation.

Cryptocurrencies can be stolen and if your cryptocurrency is stolen, there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it. However, government issued money is guaranteed to be stolen and there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it.

Incarceration without Conviction

Here in the United States we have a right to a speedy trial… according to four out of seven judges:

New York State’s highest court has tossed out a murder indictment against a man who sat on Rikers Island for more than six years awaiting trial, ruling the delay was caused by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which kept him locked up as it struggled to bolster its case against him.

In its split decision on Thursday, the New York Court of Appeals wrote in unusually pointed language that “incarceration should generally follow conviction, not precede it.” The court’s decision, which cited the defendant’s constitutional right to a speedy trial, was issued less than a month after a federal appeals court in New York vacated a marijuana distribution charge against a man from Cattaraugus, N.Y., who spent seven years in jail and never went to trial.

The real takeaway from this story is that this ruling came down to a single judge. Three out of the seven judges apparently thought it was perfectly acceptable to incarceration a man for six years even though he hadn’t been convicted of a crime.

Stories like this are why I refer to the United States as a police state. A man lost six years of his life just so a district attorney could build a valid case against him. Then only four out of seven judges thought that the incarceration was unlawful. Now the district attorney and everybody else involved in keeping that poor bastard in a cage for so long will likely walk away unpunished. At most a civil suit will result in the man receiving some taxpayer money as an inadequate form of apology. Many Americans assume that a country has to be as bad as North Korea to qualify as a police state but all that is really necessary is for government agents involved in enforcing laws to go unpunished when they abuse their power. Once an environment of accountability ceases to exist, government agents are free to punish anybody they want for whatever reason they want.

Sixteen Thousand and Three-Quarters Dimensional Chess

Trump’s game of multidimensional chess to defend gun rights is getting really complicated:

During a live broadcast in the White House Cabinet Room, Trump appeared to signal support for Feinstein’s radical gun control measures which include banning assault-style weapons.

“Dianne, if you could add what you have also — and I think you can — into the bill,” Trump said.

“Joe, can you do that?” Trump asked. “Can you add some of the things. I’ll help. Can you add what Amy and what Dianne have?”

“I’m going to say this,” Trump continued. “We’re going to get it passed.”

As I said before, you can’t trust a popularis because they will do whatever they believe the masses want them to do. Next week after everybody has forgotten about the shooting in Florida he’ll probably be claiming to support gun rights again. And his supporters will believe him because they’ve invested too much of themselves into him to admit that he might not be what they wanted.

The Arbitrary Nature of Laws

There are always vultures swooping down after a mass shooting to pick at the corpses. Here in Minnesota the vultures, after gorging themselves on the dead in Florida, have introduced one doozy of a gun control bill.

The bill contains it all. Mandatory registration of firearms, a ban on aesthetically offensive firearms, a ban on purchasing ammunition online, banning people who owe child support from owning firearms (which is rather random), etc. The bill has obviously been sitting on the back burner waiting for a tragedy to exploit.

I think the bill is an excellent example of the arbitrary nature of laws in general. If this laws is passed, I would be declared a criminal. Not because I hurt anybody but because some politicians decided to change the rules on a whim.

That’s ultimately the biggest problem with government. It’s impossible to do any long term planning when the rules can changed arbitrarily. Consider the seemingly simple prospect of buying a home. A home is generally a long term investment. However, a single change of the rules one evening could force you to flee the state less you be arrested for violating the new rules. Suddenly your long term investment becomes a liability that needs to be offloaded so you can regain some capital to acquire a place to live in another state. Moreover, unless you live near the border of a friendlier state, you will likely have to find a new job and social circle.

To Cower And Hide

The school shooting in Florida has really demonstrated the incompetency of law enforcement. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) was informed about the shooter on several occasions but never bothered to investigate, the local sheriff received 18 calls about the man but never took any meaningful action, and as the bullets started to fly four law enforcers hung around outside of the school instead of going in:

Not one but four sheriff’s deputies hid behind cars instead of storming Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., during Wednesday’s school shooting, police claimed Friday — as newly released records revealed the Broward County Sheriff’s Office had received at least 18 calls about the troubled teen over the past decade.

One of the pillars of gun control is that nongovernmental individuals don’t need firearms because law enforcers provide adequate protection. But law enforcers have no constitutional duty to protect you and as we saw in Florida they very well may let you get gunned down instead of trying to protect you.

If you find yourself facing a life or death situation, the only person you can rely on is yourself.

A Tolls Is a Toll, And a Roll Is a Roll

Whenever I bring up the subject of privatizing roads, some statist screams, “But then all the roads would be toll roads!” While many private roads would likely be toll roads, at least I would only have to pay for them once:

Roy presented the Minnesota Tolling Study Report to the House Transportation Committee Monday, and fielded questions on how the money would be collected, what the impact on lower income people would be and how it would affect prices of consumer products hauled by trucks.

He told lawmakers this was a “high level study” based on a lot of assumptions, as opposed to a formal feasibility study, which would be more detailed, take longer to do and cost much more. Roy compared the new study to the general range of quotes you get from an auto mechanic after you describe the noise it’s making.

The study estimates that Interstate 94 corridor would generate the most revenue, roughly $5 billion across the next three decades. But it wouldn’t all be pure profit that could be spent on other highway projects.

First you make the tax paying suckers build and maintain the roads then you charge them again for access. That sounds an awful lot like a stadium come to think of it.

While Minnesotans have so far managed to avoid paying tolls on roads, the politicians keep testing the waters because, as the study shows, there is a lot of wealth that can be expropriated by charging the tax payers tolls as well. With billions of dollar on the table, I believe that it’s only a matter of time until Minnesota drops toll booths on its major metropolitan highways. Once that happens the only difference between a private and public toll road will be the fact that you don’t have to also pay taxes for the private one.

Fifteen Dimensional Chess

A lot of Trump supporters said that his announcement to push for a ban on bumpfire stocks was really just a game of four dimensional chess. In that case this must be a game of fifteen dimensional chess:

At the same time, Trump made clear Thursday that he will urge several new gun law restrictions — including raising the age for purchasing firearms, something sources said he was considering.

“I will be strongly pushing Comprehensive Background Checks with an emphasis on Mental Health,” Trump tweeted Thursday. “Raise age to 21 and end sale of Bump Stocks! Congress is in a mood to finally do something on this issue—I hope!”

I should be surprised by how well Trump, a man with a history of supporting gun control, managed to convince so many gun rights activists that he was really a supporter of gun rights. But I’m not surprise. Politically involved individuals tend to be especially gullible. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be involved in politics.

Gun control advocates should be cheering Trump right now because he’s playing their game of incrementalism. Outright banning firearms has been made difficult by various court rulings. But the courts have also supported banning classes of individuals from owning firearms. Gun control advocates have latched onto this fact and have been pushing to expand the number of classes that can be prohibited. One of the classes they’re currently working to add to the prohibited list is people between the ages of 18 and 20. Of course, none of them seem to want to prohibit 18-year-olds from joining the military so I’m not convinced that they actually believe people that young are too immature to possess a firearm. But it would remove gun ownership privileges from a lot of people and that’s their goal.