Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

The United States of Rome

I’ve been on a huge Roman history kick for the last several months. Currently I’m reading Rubicon by Tom Holland. I’m a bit over 200 pages in and it has been an excellent read. The history itself is fascinating but the various parallels between the twilight of the Roman Republic and the United States are also worth noting. For example, the Romans had a similar strategy when it came to justifying war. From page 152:

The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.

Like the Roman Republic, the United States never performs a preemptive strike without first convincing itself that its target is an eminent threat even if there is no plausible threat. Furthermore, the Romans had a similar attitude towards the “rights” of its citizens. From pages 202 and 203:

At stake was the issue of what to do with Catiline’s henchmen. Many were of good family, and it was forbidden by the severest laws of the Republic to execute any citizen without a proper trial. But did the state of emergency entitle Cicero to waive this sacred injunction? Caesar, still nervous that the hysteria might sweep him away, proposed the novel idea that the conspirators should be imprisoned for life; Cato, opposing him, demanded their execution. Here, in the clash between these two men so matched in talent, so opposite in character, was the opening salvo of a struggle that would eventually convulse the Republic. For now, it was Cato who emerged triumphant. A majority in the Senate agreed with him that the safety of Rome was more important than the rights of individual citizens. And besides, who ever heard of imprisonment as a punishment? The conspirators were sentenced to death.

Like in the Roman Republic, the rights of Americans end where the politicians’ perception of safety begins.

The Founding Fathers put a lot of effort into emulating the Roman Republic and that effort wasn’t wasted. As the United States marches into its twilight it continues to emulate the Roman Republic as it marched into its twilight. Perhaps the next stage of the United States will be a monarchy as well.

Representative Advocating for a Return to Slavery

A lot of people in the United States are delusional about slavery. They believe that it ended after the Civil War. In reality the rules were merely modified. Before the Civil War slavery was defined by skin color. Slaves were black. After the Civil War slavery slowly began to be redefined by criminality. If you were found guilty of a crime, you could be enslaved by the government. That definition remains today but now there is a representative with senatorial aspirations who wants to remove all criteria and make everybody a slave:

Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke hopes to introduce a bill to Congress this year that would require all young people to spend at least a year “in service to this country.”

O’Rourke, who currently represents the 16th District of Texas, which includes El Paso, held a town hall in Corsicana on Thursday and shared his idea with those in attendance.

Why should the government pay market rates for labor when it can simply force people to work for it whatever compensation it deems appropriate (maybe you’ll get paid a pittance like soldiers do or maybe you’ll be paid nothing at all)?

I’m probably too old to qualify as a “young person” but if I did qualify, I’d refuse to partake just as I would refuse to go to war if drafted. While each and every one of us who lives in this country has relegated ourselves to an amount of abuse by the government there is always a line. My line is overt slavery and I’m guessing that I’m not the only one.

Continuing the War Against the Homeless

Greg Schille had a plan to help the homeless individuals of Elgin, Illinois during this especially brutal winter. He invited them into his home for a “slumber party.” However, the City of Elgin wasn’t pleased with his actions. Elgin already had a solution to its homeless problem, exposure, so it threatened to condemn his home if he didn’t cease giving the homeless shelter from the cold:

A suburban Chicago resident who was offering up “slumber parties” in his basement for homeless people in his neighborhood during dangerously cold weather says city officials have given him an ultimatum.

Stop the “slumber parties” or the house will be condemned.

Greg Schiller, of Elgin, said he began letting a group of homeless people sleep in his unfinished basement last month during brutally cold nights, offering them food, warm beverages and a cot to sleep on while watching movies.

Yet again we see the fact that you don’t own your home. If you did own your home, you could do with it as you pleased. If you wanted to shelter homeless people in your basement on especially cold nights, you could. But you don’t own your home, the government does. You’re merely allowed to lease it so long as you pay your rent property taxes and abide by the ever increasing number of rules.

We also see yet again that city governments don’t want the homeless helped, they wants them gone. In the eyes of a city government the homeless are a problem and the only solution is to make them go away. To that end city governments try to pass ordinances that make the lives of homeless individuals as miserable as possible in the hopes that such ordinances will encourage them to move elsewhere. Not only do these ordinances criminal homelessness but they also criminalize helping the homeless. If these ordinances result in homeless individuals freezing to death, all the better as far as the city governments are concerned.

As She Should

The mother of the victim of the recent swatting incident is calling for the officer who killed her son to be brought up on charges:

An attorney representing Lisa Finch, the mother of a man who was killed by Wichita police last week after a “swatting” prank call, is calling for criminal charges to be filed against the officer who fired the fatal shot.

“Justice for the Finch family constitutes criminal charges against the shooting officer,” attorney Andrew Stroth told the Associated Press in a phone interview.

As she bloody well should.

As I said in my original post, swatting is a byproduct of trigger happy law enforcers avoiding consequences for their actions. If law enforcers were held responsible for their actions, it would likely instill a sense of responsibility into law enforcers. If law enforcers had a sense of responsibility, swatting wouldn’t be a thing because few departments would respond to an anonymous tip by deploying a SWAT team to a provided address to perform a little shock and awe. Instead they would investigate the matter to determine if the reported incident is even legitimate and then act accordingly.

I really hope that the officer who shot Andrew Finch ends up facing criminal charges. Storming a home and gunning down an unarmed man in response to an anonymous call is criminal.

I’m Altering the Deal

Jeff Sessions who, even for a government goon, is a particularly loathsome piece of shit announced that the federal government will again pursue states that have legalized cannabis:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday rescinded a trio of memos from the Obama administration that had adopted a policy of non-interference with marijuana-friendly state laws.

The move essentially shifts federal policy from the hands-off approach adopted under the previous administration to unleashing federal prosecutors across the country to decide individually how to prioritize resources to crack down on pot possession, distribution and cultivation of the drug in states where it is legal.

“We have to stop people from smoking the jazz cabbage less they begin listening to the music of the negro!” –Jeff Sessions (Probably)

At least I assume that’s Session’s motivation for this announcement because the drug can’t be too dangerous since the states that have legalized it haven’t gone up in flames. But I guess the federal government feels the need to fulfill its prophesy that cannabis kills by siccing its murderous thugs on cannabis users.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong with Government Controlled Healthcare

If you live in Britain, I hope you weren’t scheduled to undergo a “non-urgent” surgery because the National Health Service (NHS) has ordered all hospitals to cancel such appointments:

Every hospital in the country has been ordered to cancel all non-urgent surgery until at least February in an unprecedented step by NHS officials.

The instructions on Tuesday night – which will see result in around 50,000 operations being axed – followed claims by senior doctors that patients were being treated in “third world” conditions, as hospital chief executives warned of the worst winter crisis for three decades.

Let the government control healthcare, they said. It’ll be better, they said.

With the wave of a hand the NHS has determined what is urgent and what isn’t urgent. If it deemed your health issue not to be urgent, then you just got tossed out of the system until at least February. If it deemed your health issue to be urgent, then you just found yourself put at the front of the line. I’m sure those in the former category are perturbed while those in the latter category are cheering the miracle of government controlled healthcare.

This is the issue with allowing government to control healthcare. With a single decree the government can shuffle around everything. It can determine that your condition isn’t critical and cancel your appointments. It can determine that you don’t live a healthy enough lifestyle and are therefore a burden on the system and thus no longer covered by it (but you’ll still pay your taxes towards the healthcare system). When the government controls healthcare it gets to decide matters related to your health, not you. Fortunately, medical tourism is a thing. Those who just found their appointments canceled can still travel to East Asia to get the operation they need for a reasonable price. However, the British government won’t credit those individuals on their taxes even though it failed to deliver the service it promised in return for those taxes. Tough break.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

There is a belief among statists that laws can prevent undesirable behavior. But statists have been passing laws for thousands of year, which is the same amount of time that other people have been ignoring them. Any law that is found to be inconvenient is ignored or bypassed:

But in an effort to cut down on the drunken mayhem, the town imposed a public drinking ban over the holiday—a law that apparently didn’t stop a few crafty, determined drinkers from setting up their own boozy sanctuary off the coast.

According to the BBC, the group spent Sunday building a makeshift private island off the Coromandel Peninsula, constructed out of sand, seashells, and a few wooden planks. The revelers set it up at low tide, and dragged out a picnic table and a cooler so they could get blasted out on “international waters,” see some fireworks, and stay away from the cops.

Sometimes I think nobody learned from Prohibition. The government of the United States went so far as to amend its constitution to prohibit alcohol throughout the country and yet people continued to manufacturer, trade, and consume alcohol. The United States’ War on (Some) Drugs is yet another example of undesirable laws being ignored. In fact the desire to ignore drug prohibitions is so strong that many individual states have announced that they’re no longer bothering to enforce them for cannabis. And why should they? While cannabis may be illegal people are still using it.

Prohibiting an activity doesn’t make that activity go away. At most it pushes that activity underground. But oftentimes a prohibition is blatantly ignored as is the case with these heroes who went so far as to construct a small sandbar in international waters.

Government Subsidized Murder

What happens when you combine trigger happy law enforcers and pranksters who are either oblivious to the consequences of involving law enforcers or simply don’t care? The phenomenon known as swatting:

Here’s what seems to have gone down. Two individuals were playing Call of Duty and got into an argument online over a game with a $1.50 wager. One of them, a person with the Twitter handle @SWauTistic, threatened to swat user @7aLeNT. The latter then provided an address that wasn’t actually their own in response to the threat. Shortly thereafter, @SWauTistic allegedly called in the false report, which led to a police response at the provided address. Andrew Finch, who lived at the address, reportedly went to the front door in response to the commotion and was shot. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon,” said Livingston. The police haven’t said whether Finch had a weapon at the time, but his family has said there were no guns in the house. The officer who fired the shot is a seven-year department veteran who will be put on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

The individual who called in the false report was arrested but I’m betting that the trigger happy officer will be found innocent of any wrongdoing because he has a magic badge.

Swatting isn’t new but this story received more attention than most because somebody ended up dead. Sadly this was a question of when, not if. Law enforcers in this country kill a lot of people, oftentimes under very questionable circumstances. With a few very rare exceptions, officers who kill people are found innocent of wrongdoing. The lack of consequences certainly isn’t helping make law enforcers less dangerous. In addition to being trigger happy law enforcers in this country also like to respond with shock and awe. If you call in a hostage situation, there’s a good chance that a SWAT team will be kicking in a door instead of trying to make contact with the reported hostage taker in order to open negotiations. Of course, if they tried to make contact with the hostage taker instead, they would discover that the report was false and not have to go in guns blazing.

What this story ultimately illustrates is that if you want somebody dead, the government will happily do it for you.

The Cure to Inflation Must Be More Inflation

What happens when you give dictatorial powers to somebody who is entirely ignorant of economics? Socialism:

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced a 40 percent increase to the minimum wage as of January, a move that will foment what many economists already consider hyperinflation in the oil-rich but crisis-stricken nation.

Inflation is getting out of hand, what should we do? I know! We’ll increase the minimum wage! That’ll fix it!

Every proponent of a minimum wage is ignorant of the fact that mandating a minimum wage doesn’t actually increase anybody’s purchasing power. When you mandate a minimum wage you guarantee that any work that isn’t worth that minimum wage is eliminated. Teenagers bagging groceries may be worth $2.00 an hour but not $3.00. If the minimum wage is set to $3.00 an hour, those teenagers suddenly find themselves unemployed. The higher the minimum wage is set, the more jobs are eliminated.

In addition to eliminating jobs, minimum wage laws also increase inflation. Some jobs simply can’t be eliminated by a business, which is something many proponents of minimum wage bring up when the above point is brought to their attention. A restaurant can’t operate without cooks (At least not yet. But cost decreases in automation will make such restaurants feasible very soon). If a minimum wage is set to, say, $15.00 an hour but a cook is only worth $10.00, then the restaurant owner has to either close shop or increase their prices. Most restaurant owners will opt for the latter, which means the cost of a meal goes up. Suddenly an $8.00 mean becomes a $10.00 meal and everybody who eats out finds themselves with less purchasing power.

By increasing the minimum wage 40 percent, the Venezuelan government guaranteed the elimination of many jobs and major increases in prices. These two things will only cause the average Venezuelan more misery. But dictators are seldom concerned with the amount of pain the average person has to suffer. Dictators are concerned with enriching themselves.

Extending Professional Courtesy into Next Year

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman promised to announce whether Office Noor, the Minneapolis law enforcer who murdered Justined Ruszczyk, would be charged. Today Freeman made an announcement but it wasn’t the announcement he promised:

A decision on whether Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor should be charged in the shooting death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond will be made sometime in 2018, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said Thursday.

His professional courtesy will be extending into next year, which makes sense. The 2018 Super Bowl is being hosted in Minneapolis. Based on what the public has learned so far it appears that Noor isn’t going to be charged. When that’s announced it will likely cause some civil unrest. Seeing how far the city and country have already gone to appease their National Football League (NFL) masters I’m not surprised that this announcement is being pushed back into 2018, likely sometime after February 4th.

This must is clear, justice, or even the illusion of justice, isn’t as important as the annual handegg championship game.