Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

What’s Mine is Mine and What’s Yours is Mine

Jay over at MArooned has a post showing some people don’t understand the concept of private property. Here’s the jist of the story:

A group of homeless people and housing activists took over a privately owned Mission District duplex on Sunday in what served as the climax of a protest designed to promote use of San Francisco’s vacant buildings as shelters for the needy.

OK so we have a bunch of people who decided they could just take over a home for a while and protest. The police stood by and did nothing but watch and eventually left without making any arrests. But some of the things aid by those homeless individuals made me realize something. People respect the concept of private property until they don’t have property:

Because of housing speculation during the real estate boom, “a lot of tenants were evicted,” Gullicksen said. “Now a lot of those homes are sitting empty. The city should be doing something to turn vacant buildings into affordable housing.”

They may be vacant but they aren’t owned by the city you putz. But of course Mr. Give-Me-Your-Money has a solution to the city not owning the property:

Specifically, he said the city should foreclose on buildings where hefty back taxes are owed or use its powers of eminent domain to turn over long-vacant homes to nonprofit developers. The group is not advocating turning over the city’s stock of new but unsold properties to the homeless.

So the city can either steal the house by collecting on taxes that shouldn’t exist (I’m sorry but property tax isn’t a legitimate tax in my book it’s just a mechanism to ensure you don’t actually own your property) or use their power of eminent domain to outright steal the house. Now eminent domain has always troubled me since it allows somebody to steal another person’s property so long as the one doing the stealing has the government on their side. Like property tax, eminent domain is a mechanism that prevents individuals from actually owning property since ownership implies it can’t be taken without the theft being labeled a crime giving the owner recourse. Needless to say anybody who makes a suggestion based on leveraging property taxes or using eminent domain pisses me right the fuck off. Oh and I love this part:

Jose Morales, 80, lived in the San Jose Street building for 43 years before he was forced to leave in 2008 through the Ellis Act, which allows property owners to get out of the rental business.

Morales said he now lives in a small space in an office building in the Mission District.

“The city should have protected me,” he said. “It’s like they don’t see me. It’s like I’m a ghost to them.”

Guess what buddy you just learned something, you need to take your own protection into your own hands. My question is this, you rented this home for 43 years right? Why the Hell can’t you just go rent SOMEWHERE ELSE? I know what a concept huh?

In this case the city shouldn’t have protected your whiny ass. The individual who owned the house decided he no longer wanted to rent it out. Tough shit buddy. What an individual does with his own property is his business alone. Thankfully the property owner’s attorney understands the concepts I’m talking about:

Zacks said he hopes charges are filed over what he characterized as “people taking the law into their own hands and breaking into property.”

“It’s sort of ridiculous to think that a private property owner like Mr. Tehlirian would have any obligation to house the homeless,” he said. “It’s a problem we should deal with as a community, not something that should be foisted on the back of a small property owner.”

Exactly a person who owns a house should not be required to let somebody else live there. If you want to set up a charity home and let homeless people live there you have that right. But nobody should be demanding a government entity force a homeowner to house the homeless. If you want the government to steal shit from those who can afford it and give it to you who can not afford it move to a communist nation. What is being demanded is redistribution of wealth which is exactly what Karl Marx was all about.

Kind of Scary When You Think About It

According to the Department of Defense:

According to a Department of Defense report, there have been at least 32 “accidents involving nuclear weapons.” And the report only counts US accidents which occurred before 1980.

What kind of accidents you ask? Well:

They include such gaffes as nuclear bombs inadvertently falling through bomb bay doors; the accidental firing of a retrorocket on an ICBM; the vast dispersal of radioactive debris; and the loss of enriched fissile material and nuclear bombs (which are “still out there somewhere”).

I’m sure after each of these accidents the only words uttered were, “Oops.” Read the entire report here (It’s a PDF document so be warned).

Because It’s Worked So Well Before

An unsurprising story from Africa appeared on the BBC today. Apparently there’s violence in South Sudan. I know what a shocker right? Of course this next part doesn’t make sense:

This is why the south’s semi-autonomous government has launched an ambitious initiative to control the violence.

In Jonglei, the biggest and most violent state in the south, teams of officials have been touring remote areas for the past three months, telling cattle-herders to hand in their guns.

So there’s massive violence and the solution is to… disarm the cattle herders. Yeah because disarmament has worked so well in other countries to curb violence. Wait a minute that’s a complete crock. Disarmament only makes live easier on the lawless who refuse to turn in their arms. That does beg the question why would any of the cattle herder turn in their means of self defense against the lawless? Well because:

Those who refuse face five years in prison or a fine of 20 cows.

The classic government mechanism for disarmament. Give us your guns or we’ll take them and either send you to jail or steal even more of your property. Of course:

“We found people were already fed up with these arms, so they co-operated with the civil authorities,” said Jonglei State Governor Kuol Manyang.

I’m guessing the reason you’ve found co-operative people isn’t because those people are sick of their guns but because you’re forcing them to turn in their guns. When citizens do this in place of government it’s called theft.

Danger of The Census

As everybody knows the United States Constitution requires the population of the United States be recorded every ten years. This is done by the Census Bureau and many of us are angry that they ask questions beyond what is constitutionally requires. Of course we’re called paranoid and asked what danger could possible exist by answering the other questions. Well that extra information has been used before to persecute a group of Americans.

The article talks about what happened shortly after the bombing at Pearl Harbor:

In the 1940 Census, the Census Bureau loudly assured people that their responses would be kept confidential. Within four days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau had produced a report listing the Japanese-American population in each county on the West Coast. The Census Bureau launched this project even before Congress declared war on Japan. The Census Bureau’s report helped the US Army round up more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans for concentration camps (later renamed “internment centers”).

Yup that extra “harmless” information in the Census helped the United States Army to round up a group of “undesirables.” If something has happened before it can happen again. People need to remember every time government tries to gain more information about you they will inevitably use it against you.

Some Scary Stuff Going Down in Wisconsin

The NRA just threw out an alert for those of you in Wisconsin. Two anti-gun pieces of legislation have been introduced. I haven’t read through them as of now but here is what they apparently cover:

* Require that all firearm transfers be conducted through a federally licensed dealer except to family members. That means if you wanted to sell your firearm to a friend, you would have to find an FFL and pay whatever transfer fees they felt appropriate.

* Go WAY beyond federal restrictions for firearm possession and prohibit individuals convicted of misdemeanors. This provision is a blatant constitutional violation. In Heller v. D.C., the ruling states that only felony convictions are justified in restricting this constitutionally guaranteed right.

* Also require that all firearms transfers be reported and all guns registered into a centralized database.

* Establish no limitations on who would have access to this database.

So those of you across the Mississippi from me may want to get on the horn with your representatives.

My View of The FCC National Broadband Plan

There has been a lot of talk in the tech community as of late about the FCC’s recent National Broadband Plan. People who don’t understand how government and taxes work are proclaiming this as a great idea since it means FREE INTERNETZ!!!!!!!!!111oneonetwo OMG!!. That’s now how things work. In fact the FCC’s plan also includes a plan for an additional tax.

No thanks. I’m more than happy to give the money that would go to paying even more taxes to a private entity who has a reason for keeping me happy (That being my money.). Economics 101 states you can’t get something for nothing (Unless you are challenge at math and actually believe in Keynesian economics.). When the government provides a service they pay for it with your tax money. Look at the breakdown of your pay check next time. Notice your gross pay is MUCH higher than your actual take home pay? Yeah that’s all tax money taken by your federal and state government to pay for fuck ups services like social security and medicare.

This situation is far more dangerous when it involves free and open communications that the Internet provides. Government is not benevolent, it does not have your best interests in mind. Government is made up by people with power and power corrupts. A private company can not compete with government programs because unlike a company a government doesn’t have to actually make money to continue existing (Look at our deficit.). The scary thing with government provided broadband (Which this National Broadband Plan would eventually turn into.) is it would most likely shut down broadband provided by private industry. At that point our Internet access, like China’s, becomes the whim of our government. This is where censorship and filtering start coming into play ladies and gentlemen.

People shouldn’t be clamoring for free* government provided Internet. Government can’t manage money. Show me a single government program that has succeeded monetarily. Instead people should be demanding the government stay as far away from Internet access as possible. We don’t need to deal with what China has and Australia is getting.

A private company has a reason to ensure its customers are happy, money. You can simply refuse to pay a company money if you don’t like their service. On the other hand you can not simply refuse to pay taxes if you don’t like the government’s service. I wish people would think about that part for a moment before trying to get free* Internet access (Which the FCC plan won’t even initially provide, they call it “affordable” so it’ll probably be a subsidized item.).

* Free until you notice your take home pay becomes even less.

And People Want This Stuff in Their Cars

One thing people seem to clamber for more and more are methods of tracking and disabling cars remotely. Usually people talk about wanting to be able to track their car and disable it if it gets stolen. There are various methods of implementing such a device allowing for these things to be done via SMS or a web page. Of course companies that make these devices promote them as enhanced security and peace of mind. Parents love the idea of being able to track their teenager’s every move. The problem made apparent by Bruce Schneier is such devices are double-edged swords:

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Oh yeah and the part to concern yourself with:

Ramos-Lopez’s account had been closed when he was terminated from Texas Auto Center in a workforce reduction last month, but he allegedly got in through another employee’s account, Garcia says. At first, the intruder targeted vehicles by searching on the names of specific customers. Then he discovered he could pull up a database of all 1,100 Auto Center customers whose cars were equipped with the device. He started going down the list in alphabetical order, vandalizing the records, disabling the cars and setting off the horns.

Any device that you can use to remotely disable your vehicle can be used by somebody else as well. In this case the devices were put into place by banks since the people buying the cars had been delinquent on payments. But after the WAY over-blown Toyota fiasco there is a lot of talk by government officials about requiring automobiles to be equipped with black boxes. If the government does that you can bet money they will also put in a remote kill switch.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

This time its being used to collect more tax dollars. Via Dvorak Uncensored we have a touching story of the IRS doing what the IRS does:

Arriving at Harv’s Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. “They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending,” says Harv’s owner, Aaron Zeff.

Oh crap I forgot to paste in the best part:

The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff’s on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was … 4 cents.

And that’s not all:

Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as $202.31, leaving Harv’s with an obligation of $202.35.

So because of being short four cents on his taxes Mr. Zeff now owes the IRS $202.35. Yeah the American tax code is so just and fair.

I Liked It Better When I Didn’t Have Anything to Report On

Usually the gun rights front here in Minnesota is relatively quiet. That is until Mr. Paymar gets a bug up his butt and decides to introduce anti-gun legislation. This is more of a heads up than anything since I just got NRA-ILA alert today (Sorry I’ve been busy). The two previously mentioned anti-gun laws are being heard today by the Crime Victims/Criminal Records Sub-Committee at noon. My last letter writing efforts went out to everybody on all three of the involved committees but phone calls in the next hour certainly won’t hurt. The bills are:

House File 2960 would force private sales at gun shows to go through background checks. Gun prohibitionists, like Representative Paymar, falsely claim that a large number of criminals get their guns from gun shows; however, the most recent federal study on gun shows put the figure at only 0.7 percent. This effort is a stepping stone for gun control advocates seeking to ban all private sales, even among family and friends.

House File 1396 includes a provision that would allow a court that issues a domestic abuse protective order to prohibit the respondent from having any contact with a PET OR COMPANION ANIMAL OWNED, POSSESSED, OR KEPT by a party protected in the order. This new provision could have serious consequences for Minnesotans who exercise their right to keep and bear arms.

The first one is obviously the one I’m most worried about. Minnesota is a pretty leftist state and these kinds of bill do have a chance of getting through. The last thing I want is to be legally required to beg the government for permission to sell my private property. Let’s hope these two get shut down in committee.