Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Leniency Will Not Be Tolerated

Justice is supposed to be a mechanism for righting wrongs but when it’s controlled by the State is becomes a mechanism for expropriating wealth and viciously punishing the disobedient. At one point in time some common sense could be exercised even within the justice systems of the United States. Nowadays common sense has been almost entirely removed from the courts by minimum sentencing laws, lying to juries about their rights and duties, etc. And when those mechanisms fail there is always the overriding ability of higher courts.

Here in Minnesota a man had the poor judgement to get drunk and tweet threats at the St. Paul Police Department over a speeding ticket (that wasn’t even issued by that department). Not surprisingly, charges were pressed against the man. As luck would have it, the man in the muumuu who oversaw his case wasn’t entirely vicious:

He wrote a letter of apology to the police and pleaded guilty to making terroristic threats and under the state’s sentencing guidelines, he should’ve been sentenced to 12 months and one day in jail. His attorney asked for a 365 day sentence because that would convert his crime from a felony to a gross misdemeanor.

“I don’t think you had the intent to do it,” the judge said at sentencing. “You didn’t have a gun. You weren’t going out to try to search where they live. You weren’t going to make a planned attack. You just wanted to send a tweet out to affect as many people as you can, and that worked.”

“To give you a felony sentence . . . at your age . . . I don’t feel in balance that that’s in the best interests of society. We got too many people on probation [for] felonies already, and . . . I can accomplish much of the same thing on a . . . durational departure on a gross misdemeanor,” Dakota County Judge Timothy McManus said.

And that’s the sentence Rund got — a misdemeanor: four months in jail, the rest of the one-year sentence stayed, three years probation, no booze.

Since it’s obvious the man had neither the intent or ability to carry out his threats, I don’t find any jail time to be appropriate. But jail time was inevitable so I’m happy that the judge saw that a felony was entirely out of line for this kind of behavior. However, the common sense he tried to introduce to the system was squashed by a higher court:

Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court said the judge shouldn’t have done that, ruling that none of the reasons for departing from the state’s guidelines for the crime are allowed under the law.

Another travesty of justice committed.

Punishments should fit crimes. A felony charge is often a life ruining event since it can render an individual almost unemployable and it strips them of many of their so-called rights. Getting drunk and tweeting unrealizable threats isn’t a life ruining act and therefore should not result in a life ruining punishment. The first judge understood that but the “justice” system was unwilling to let that kind of good judgement stand.

The Evils of the Drug War

The war on unapproved drugs may be one of the most evil acts being carried out here in the United States. It took an entirely voluntary activity, introducing chemicals into one’s own body, and turn it into an excuse for unprecedented levels of expropriation and criminal activity by agents of the State.

Using the drug war as justification, police have stolen cars, cash, and other property as well as sexually assaulted a practically uncountable number of victims. Their victims include the elderly, disabled, and even children:

But now, a lawsuit filed on behalf of several students and seeking class-action status for all of them makes some far more disturbing allegations:

a) Deputies ordered students to stand facing the wall with their hands and legs spread wide apart;

b) Deputies touched and manipulated students’ breasts and genitals;

c) Deputies inserted fingers inside girls’ bras, and pulled up girls’ bras, touching and partially exposing their bare breasts;

d) Deputies touched girls’ underwear by placing hands inside the waistbands of their pants or reaching up their dresses;

e) Deputies touched girls’ vaginal areas through their underwear;

f) Deputies cupped or groped boys’ genitals and touched their buttocks through their pants.

[…]

According to the lawsuit, the deputies had a list of 13 suspected students. Three of them were in school that day. For that, they searched 900 students. (And, let’s just point out again, found nothing. In a school of 900.)

If several adults went into a school and sexually assaulted 900 children most people wouldn’t even wait for a trial, they would grab the pitchforks and torches. But when the adults are wearing badges the behavior is suddenly seen as excusable in many people’s eyes. Oftentimes when officers commit such heinous crimes they receive no punishment, which encourages more wicked people to seek a job in law enforcement.

I’m hoping this lawsuit results in the involved officers being jailed. Even if the accusations of sexual assault are unfounded (which, considering the actions performed by officers in the pursuit of unapproved drugs, seems unlikely) the officers violated the privacy of 887 students (they only had a list of 13 suspected students) by searching them without any reason whatsoever.

You are Responsible for Your Own Anonymity

Reality Leigh Winner (who, despite her name, was not a winner in reality) is currently sitting in a cage for the crime of leaking classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents. Unlike Edward Snowden, Reality didn’t purposely go public. But she made a series of major mistakes that allowed the NSA to identify her after she leaked the documents. Her first mistake was using a work computer to communicate with The Intercept:

Investigators then determined that Ms Winner was one of only six people to have printed the document. Examination of her email on her desk computer further revealed that she had exchanged emails with the news outlet, the indictment said.

By using a work computer to communicate with The Intercept, she made hard evidence against her easily available to her employer.

Her second mistake was physically printing the documents:

When reporters at The Intercept approached the National Security Agency on June 1 to confirm a document that had been anonymously leaked to the publication in May, they handed over a copy of the document to the NSA to verify its authenticity. When they did so, the Intercept team inadvertently exposed its source because the copy showed fold marks that indicated it had been printed—and it included encoded watermarking that revealed exactly when it had been printed and on what printer.

Most major printer manufacturers watermark any pages printed by their printers. The watermarks identify which printer printed the document. In addition to the physical printer, the watermark on the document posted by The Intercept also included a timestamp of when the document was printed.

Reality’s third mistake was trusting a third-party to guard her anonymity. Because of The Intercept’s history of working with leakers it’s easy to assume that the organization takes precautions to guard the identities of its sources. However, a single mistake, posting the printed document without editing out the watermark, gave the NSA enough evidence to narrow down who the leaker could be.

The lesson to be learned from this is that you alone are responsible for maintaining your anonymity. If you’re leaking classified materials you need to do so in a way that even the individual or organization you’re leaking them to is unable to identify you.

Never Listen to the Government

George Carling said, “I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me.” That rule is perhaps one of the wisest one ever made.

Not too long ago the government was encouraging people to buy electric cars. Electric cars, according to the government, were more environmentally friendly than their fossil fuel powered counterparts. One of the incentives the government used to encourage electric card adoption was tax breaks. Electric car owners, for example, didn’t have to buy gasoline so they didn’t have to pay the taxes put on it.

But that was then, this is now. The government has now realized that electric cars are cutting into its profits so it has decided to renege on it’s position of encouraging electric car adoption:

Minnesota is joining a growing number of states to tack an extra registration charge on vehicles powered exclusively by electricity as a way to make up for lost gas tax revenue.

The new $75 surcharge approved by state lawmakers takes effect in January.

$75 may not seem like a lot but I guarantee that that fee will increase over time.

And this matter is made even worse because, unlike offers made by private entities, you have no recourse when the government decides to renege on one of its offers. Electric car owners must either pay the new registration tax or suffer the potential consequences of driving an unregistered vehicle.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

Municipal governments usually claim that the will help tenants when they find themselves being wronged by their landlord. Many tenants throughout the country try to take those governments up on their offer only to find out that what a government says is not necessary what a government does.

A man in Augusta, Maine found himself living in a property infested with bedbugs. The landlord was apparently unwilling to address the issue so the man went to the municipal government for help. Not surprisingly, the municipal government made no effort to help him so the man submitted an official protests:

Earlier that day the man had made a complaint at the office against his landlord, claiming a bed bug problem in his apartment building. He became angry after being told that he did not qualify for assistance.

“He whipped out a cup (full of live bedbugs) and slammed it on the counter, and bam, off they flew, maybe 100 of them,” said City Manager William Bridgeo.

The bedbugs landed on the counter and on an employee. The building closed until an exterminator could kill and dispose of the bugs.

With a cup full of bugs the man was able to shutdown an entire government building. That’s a cheap denial of service attack. Unfortunately, the man’s bedbug problem will likely remain unresolved but at least he didn’t roll over and take it when the municipal government weaseled out of one of the offers is made the denizens of Augusta.

I Don’t Think Theresa May Understand How Networks Work

Politicians never let a tragedy go to waste. After another attack in London Theresa May, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was quick to exploit the tragedy by using it to call for restricting the Internet:

The Prime Minister said introducing new rules for cyberspace would “deprive the extremists of their safe spaces online” and that technology firms were not currently doing enough.

[…]

London attack shows too much tolerance for extremism in UK, May says
“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed – yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide,” Ms May said.

“We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning.”

She obviously doesn’t understand how networks works.

Networks are groups of interconnected people or computers. While the Internet is the largest network in the world it is not the only network, which is what Theresa’s proposal fails to address. She seems to think that restricting the Internet, a proposal which is absurd by itself, would silence the forces her government is at war with. It wouldn’t. Even if there was a way to effectively restrict what kind of content is posted on the Internet it would simply cause those being restricted to create a separate network.

What shape would such a network take? While predicting the future is impossible there are some precedences that could give us an idea. Guifi.net, for example, is a mesh network that spans most of Catalonia. Even if every Internet connection to Guifi.net was severed the nodes on the network would still be able to communicate with one another. Drug cartels also built their own large scale network in Mexico.

Humans are social creatures and therefore strive to build networks. Every attempt to interfere with this drive has failed. Even the mighty Roman Empire, despite its best efforts, was unable to stop early Christians from networking. Eventually they networked to such a scale that they Christianized the empire. Theresa May can make whatever proposal she desires but even if it is implemented it will fail because it’s attempting to interfere with one of humanity’s most basic drives.

Never Forget

Never forget… your password. Doing so could earn you some jail time:

US courts are still torn about how to handle defendants who refuse to give up passcodes for encrypted smartphones, judging by two recent court cases reported in the Miami Herald. In one, child abuse defendant Christopher Wheeler got six months in jail for failing to provide a correct code, despite pleas to the judge that he couldn’t remember it. In a different court, a judge let off Wesley Victor (accused of extortion), even though he also claimed to have forgotten his iPhone code.

The main difference in the cases is that ten months had passed after Victor’s initial arrest, and as his lawyer argued, “many people, including myself, can’t remember passwords from a year ago.” In the same case Victor’s girlfriend (and reality TV star) Hencha Voigt was ordered to divulge her code to police, but provided one that didn’t work. She’s also facing contempt of court charges, and is scheduled to appear next week. Both defendants are accused of threatening to release sex tapes stolen from social media celeb YesJulz unless she paid $18,000.

Holding somebody in contempt of court for claiming to forget their password is a fascinating concept to me. There is no way to prove whether or not somebody actually forgot something or lied about forgetting something. Under the concept of innocent until proven guilty a judge should have to refrain from punishing somebody for claiming to forget their password since it’s impossible to prove if they’re lying. But this country doesn’t operate under the principle of innocent until proven guilty, it operates under the principle of granting people in muumuus the power to arbitrarily decide whether somebody is telling the truth of lying.

Even the man who gave the police officer an incorrect password has a plausible excuse. He was in a stressful situation where an armed man was ordering him to do something against his will. It’s not unusual for people to forget or misremember basic information during stressful situations so it’s not implausible that the man simply misremembered his password at the time. But now he’s going to prison even though his guilt cannot be proven.

Create Wealth, Not Jobs

Expanding on my previous post, many people have fallen into the trap of believing that the solution to unemployment is to create more jobs. On paper is seems to make sense. If people don’t have jobs then the solution is to create jobs. However, unemployment is a symptom of a problem, not the actual problem itself:

But employment is not an end in and of itself. Rather, it is a means to an end: namely the increased standard of living that the worker obtains by trading his labor for wages.

In a free market, employment is a value creation process — with jobs stemming from the wants and needs of consumers as conveyed through the price system.

It is this productive nature of free-market jobs that make them desirable and capable of increasing a worker’s standard of living.

Wages spring directly from, and are proportional to, the degree in which a job creates wealth by helping to satisfy an unmet need. As is the case for all mutually-agreeable trades in a free market, both sides gain and wealth is created: the worker receives wages that he values more than his labor and the consumer receives a product or service he values more than its price.

In other words, a worker’s wages are reflective of the additional wealth he helped create, which enables his newly improved standard of living.

Because government-created jobs are devoid of this wealth creation process, they are merely a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the program’s beneficiaries.

Unemployment stems from a lack of wealth. Most often the lack of wealth is caused by government. Through their burdensome regulations governments place roadblocks in front of entrepreneurs that prevents them from creating new wealth. Through their burdensome taxes governments siphon wealth from practically everybody under their rule. Government regulations also force currently existing wealth to be misallocated.

Solving unemployment by having the government create jobs actually exacerbates the problem. Since governments needs to siphon more wealth from the economy to create jobs there is less wealth in the hands of producers and consumers, which means consumers aren’t able to buy as much so producers respond by producing less. Eventually the drop in production forces producers to lay off employees, which increases the amount of unemployment. You can see where this vicious cycle ends up.

The solution to unemployment is to reduce the amount of wealth being siphoned by governments. With more wealth in hand entrepreneurs can create more wealth, which will actually allow the unemployment issue to be solved.

The Result of Relying on Coercion Instead of Market Forces

Minimum wage laws are seen by many as a mechanism to uplift the poor by ensuring every employee receives a “living wage.” For the economically ignorant that fairytale makes sense. For those with even a slight understanding of economics it’s a recipe for disaster.

The problem with minimum wage laws is the same problem with any government writ, they’re based on coercion instead of market forces. Market forces are based on wealth creation. When more wealth is created employees can be paid. Government writ doesn’t create new wealth so minimum wage laws rely on the current amount of wealth. Since the employers don’t have more wealth to draw from they’re forced to increase their prices to compensate, which often makes their product unaffordable to those who could previously afford it:

The U.S. restaurant industry is in a funk. Blame it on lunch.

Americans made 433 million fewer trips to restaurants at lunchtime last year, resulting in roughly $3.2 billion in lost business for restaurants, according to market-research firm NPD Group Inc. It was the lowest level of lunch traffic in at least four decades.

[…]

Cost is another factor working against eating out for lunch. While restaurants have raised their tabs over the past few years to cope with rising labor costs, the price of food at supermarkets has continued to drop, widening the cost gap between bringing in lunch and eating out.

Statists often scoff at the idea that minimum wage laws hurt the poor. How could laws that are advertised as helping the poor possibly hurt the poor? By forcing employers to increase their prices and thus make their product that was previous affordable to poorer individuals unaffordable.

The best way to help uplift the poor is to create more wealth. Creating more wealth requires fulfilling the wants and needs of consumers. Commands from governments cannot accomplish that no matter how many people vote in favor of them.

The State’s Definition of Justice

To most people the term justice creates images of people who were wronged being compensated by the individual(s) who wronged them. The State has a different view of justice. In the eyes of the State justice creates an image where it is compensated whenever anybody has been wronged. This skewed view of justice is what motivated the State to primarily pursue crimes that will be profitable to it instead of crimes involving a victim. It’s also why when the State wrongs somebody it resists compensating them:

A Tennessee man who served 31 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit is petitioning the state to compensate him $1 million for the years of his life that were taken away. All he’s gotten so far is $75.

In October 1977 a Memphis woman was raped in her home by two intruders. She later identified one of them as her neighbor, Lawrence McKinney, who was 22 at the time. He was convicted on rape and burglary charges in 1978 and sentenced to 115 years in jail.

DNA evidence cleared him of the charges in 2008, and when he was released in 2009, the Tennessee Department of Corrections gave him a $75 check to restart his life.

This story is from 2016 but a search indicates that he still hasn’t been compensated beyond $75 even though the State stole 31 years of his life.

If you kidnapped somebody and detained them for 31 years do you think that you’d get off with a $75 fine? Probably not. You’d likely face a lifetime in prison. But when it comes to rules the State’s attitude is that rules are for thee, not for me. Mr. McKinney will be lucky if he ever sees more than $75 from his case because the State wants to profit off of every crime, even its own.