The Obama regime has been up to some heavy justice-trampling entirely aside from planting the seeds for takeovers of both the health care and financial trading industries. Glenn Greenwald details Obama’s authorization of the assassination of U.S. citizens. While it’s true that this has become old news and I have even written a few blag posts since this Greenwald post, the quotes are no less juicy:

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations.
[...]
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
[...]
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist.

In more Orwellian news, the Supreme Court ruled that some convicted sex offenders can be kept in prison indefinitely by federal officials (presumably the Department of “Justice”), after they have completed their prison sentences. It is terrifying how broadly sex crimes are defined, how aggressively they are pursued, and how remorselessly people who have only been accused, much less convicted, of sexual crimes are treated. There are people whose lives are ruined because they had oral sex as teenagers or because they walk around naked in their kitchens and their wannabe-tyrant neighbors have some twisted appetite for punishing others for anything they can. This ruling will soon extend to terrorism and all other crimes that some lawyer or judge can construe as being related to “national security”, if it doesn’t already.

The RIAA and MPAA want the government to force all computers to contain software that automatically deletes alleged copyright-infringing material. The best arguments against the RIAA and MPAA anymore are quoting them verbatim and reporting their behavior. As Voltaire quipped, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The RIAA and MPAA could not exist in their present form or commit any of the violations they have become infamous for without a monopolistic state and, particularly, a powerful central government backing them up. By the way, did you know there is an “Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement”? My god, they might as well rename it MiniIntelProp.

We are coming up on Presidential Candidate Obama’s original proposed date (summer 2010) for withdrawing (or at least beginning to withdraw) most American soldiers from Iraq. While I don’t believe he ever actually had any intention of scaling down the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or reducing the U.S.’s military presence in the Middle East to any considerable degree, my skepticism and his duplicity are not even necessarily the most important issues about his promises/plans to withdraw troops. Most important is any well-intentioned president’s inability to divert our military’s path from one of aggression and expansion to one of defense and contraction. There are too many people and too many industrial interests opposing such a sea change for it to ever happen, except that I think America’s impending financial collapse will force the military to contract and withdraw, which side effect will be nothing but good.

You don’t have to be remotely libertarian-ish to be outraged at this: Novartis sales rep who alleges she was raped by a client was subjected to “disciplinary action” by HR, and the managers showed no interest in pursuing the case or bringing the alleged rapist to justice. I don’t have anything to add; the heinousness of it all is self-evident.

I think it’s sad how many people want more nationalization/centralization of all kinds of laws and regulations. An alarming percentage of people think national or even worldwide standards for businesses, behaviors, and just about everything else would make our lives better, but this is exactly the wrong attitude. More diversity of options, as a general rule, makes just about everything better in the long run, mainly because freedom is good for people and more innovation occurs when we can try different things and succeed or fail based on merit. The latest example that prompted me to write this is a comment I read in a discussion thread about stupid alcohol sales laws, commonly called blue laws. The comment read, “i hate the variation in alcohol laws from State to State. this shit needs to be modernized and made uniform across the Nation. i think it’s absurd that in my state, PA, i can’t buy liquor/wine from ANYWHERE but a State store.” Yes, since it is obvious that government and only government has created your problem, then the best solution is MORE government and MORE concentrated power in the hands of people who are EVEN FARTHER removed from your home and your life and who care about you individually EVEN LESS than the people who passed the current laws, if that’s possible. I’m sorry to end on an arrogant or haughty note, but Statists are stupid.

My current concern is the misguided vitriol directed by liberals at Tea Partiers and the former group’s lack of any position to be criticizing anybody’s politics.

Perhaps the rare liberal who visits our little blag will take issue with the loaded language I used in the title: “haters”. My word choice was deliberate and accurate. Most liberals hate the Tea Parties and every single little, last thing that they stand for. Most liberals seem to have nothing but ridicule and scorn for the embarrassing Tea Partiers and their benighted selfishness and racism. Most liberals would not listen to half of what any Tea Partier had to say except to use it as ammunition for their rants about how horrible Tea Partiers have to be to object to all the plans that the liberals have for everyone. I do not say liberals hate Tea Party participants themselves, because I would not put words that personal into other people’s mouths, and most people at least recite the empty, semi-Christian defense “I don’t hate the person, I hate the act.” On the internet, on Facebook, on TV and radio, the sentiment is clear and almost universal: liberals hate the Tea Parties’ ideas and demonstrations the way any group with power hates protestations against and threats to that power.

Consider the most recent Tea Party gatherings, the anti-tax protests on April 15th. Obviously I strongly sympathize with their message on that day and agree wholeheartedly with their goal of reducing taxes. What sentiment therein do liberals find so objectionable? “Leave us alone,” “Stop taking our money,” “Stop spending our money on things we don’t want,” “Stop threatening and imprisoning people for keeping their own money”? These messages, at least, are completely defensive. “Stop doing this, stop doing that, let us govern our own lives.” There is no inherent malice, violence, or any type of aggression behind a defensive message like that, yet liberal Democrats find it worthy of scorn and hatred. Contrast that with the messages almost every Republocrat politician campaigns on: “These are my plans for everyone,” “This is what I will do with your money,” “This is what I will force everyone to do,” “This is what’s good for the whole nation.” Please don’t pretend the plans and promises of politicians require no coercion and carry no threats of punishment for non-compliance, and please don’t try to twist anti-tax protests into something the slightest bit coercive. Leave such bald dishonesty for the politicians.

While it’s true that I’m probably inserting my own ideas of what I would be protesting at an anti-tax (or other anti-government) rally and not considering the full scope of what various neocons and other dupes have said at other rallies over the past year (for example, here is an issue I agree with liberals on and that does, in fact, make Tea Partiers an embarrassment), I’d wager that the whole of the Tea Parties’ message is no more violent than the ideas of their detractors.

I came across a column about the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party in my very own town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was written by a liberal named Rick Keith who made some good points and several bad ones. He attended the April 15th Tea Party on the University of Michigan’s campus and reported on the hypocrisy he saw in the Tea Partiers. The worst part, which could have been turned into quite a humorous column, was that Rick Keith pretended to give half a flying fuck about the United States Constitution. Being much more of an adherent to Lysander Spooner’s position on the Constitution than to the strict Constitutionalism of someone like Ron Paul (whom I still openly supported in 2008 and would support again in 2012), I would not be too interested in defending the Constitution too vigorously. Keith’s purpose in arguing Constitutional points with the Tea Partiers was not, I imagine, to convince them that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are defending the Constitution much better than the Tea Partiers’ ideal politician, nor to convince them that he loves the Constitution more than they; rather, he was trying to expose their hypocrisy by showing them that many of the things they want and the things they benefit from are unconstitutional. I don’t imagine he was successful, especially at that anti-tax rally, as there was no income tax in the original Constitution and the central government functioned just fine for 125 years without one (excepting Lincoln’s war taxes).

He is well informed but misinterprets many things with typical liberal-Democrat bias, so I’ll give a brief summary of the lukewarm attacks he managed to make on the hypocrisy of the Tea Partiers and assume he speaks for most liberals:

They recited the Pledge of Allegiance, for some reason, and Keith probed the speaker to tell the socialist, Statolatrist history of the Pledge. He got no response. That’s a good point, and I commend him for knowing his history and speaking up about it.

A doctoral student spoke out against government spending and praised private enterprise, even though though the student engages in federally funded cancer research in federally funded buildings at a federally funded university.

Some local conservative talk-radio host confused the TARP bank-bailout program with Obama’s stimulus spending package. This conservative “didn’t mention the Stimulus’s $140 billion tax cuts to the ‘We’re Taxed to Death’ audience, nor the hundreds of billions to create jobs in rebuilding a crumbling infrastructure, increase efficiency and advance new technologies.”

Needless to say, Keith disagrees with the Tea Partiers’ preferences about what they would like to do with their own money, and he points out that Exxon paid no income taxes to the Imperial Federal Government last year by funneling taxes through offshore subsidiaries. See, Exxon’s taxes are relevant because in the liberal Democrat’s mind, if one company weasels out of its taxes, that means all companies are rolling in profit and no one is being overtaxed, so the Tea Partiers’ complaints about being “taxed to death” are hypocritical and based entirely in fiction!

The Tea Partiers’ idol, Ronald Reagan, cut taxes and simultaneously over-spent, and Reagan and G.H.W. Bush bailed out banks and created soaring debt, all of which these Tea Partiers supported or would have supported.

The Tea Partiers are also apparently hypocritical because the federal government subsidizes all kinds of industries but the Tea Partiers don’t want this to extend (further) into health care. According to Keith, federal government subsidies = subsidies that the Tea Partiers support, so suddenly opposing Obamacare makes them hypocritical?…

Either way, I’m sure there are inconsistencies in there, and I’m equally as sure that Keith’s exposure of them involved a little bit of reaching and no small amount of hypocrisy of his own. Luckily for me, I am not hampered by any association with conservatism, support of any political party, attendance at any Tea Party rallies, or misunderstanding of history, economics, or political philosophy, so I can tear into Rick Keith’s pathetic delusion of American politics at will:

Rick Keith, by your assistance in putting both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in power, you are an accomplice to murder like every other Democratic- and Republican-voting American in the last century. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Africans, Arabs, Serbs, Croats, Kosovars, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Americans is on your hands. All of you. Every president you have supported is a war criminal who belongs in prison next to the ones you’ve hated, and you are an accomplice to their crimes.

The Clinton-led NATO bombings of Yugoslavia/Serbia were unconstitutional and murderous, as are Barack Obama’s continuing airstrikes on Pakistan. The Drug War and the very existence of the Federal Reserve are unconstitutional as well. While it is legitimate to bring up the Tea Partiers’ inconsistencies in their support of strict Constitutionalism solely to point out their errors, even if you don’t support strict Constitutionalism yourself, the politicians you so idolize do swear to uphold the Constitution and are bound by the laws of their office, so by their own rules, they are criminals. Very few of the trillions of dollars your president and your Congress have spent have any remote justification in the Constitution, anywhere.

The boring, lame argument that people who receive or benefit from government money are hypocritical to oppose government spending is simply lazy. It is not possible to avoid government-provided products or services, but we can still point out the injustice of funding them coercively and promote their more efficient provision by companies and communities, privately and voluntarily. It might surprise you to learn that that cancer research student is not solely responsible for the state of public and private education and does not control the sources of funding that pay for biomedical research in this country today. On the contrary, it is your fault that no one can do privately funded research or get a privately funded education in the sciences.

Obama’s stimulus plan will have proven to create mostly government jobs and government debt, exactly as Herbert Hoover and FDR did. If you really wanted to improve the economy and unemployment in the long run, you would have supported tax cuts and spending cuts, so that people can spend their money as they see fit and not as politicians see fit.

You fail to mention that Barack Obama voted for the TARP bailouts, making him a contributor to that inflationary, impoverishing debacle. Conservatives are hypocritical (or at least dumb) for supporting Reagan’s cut-and-spend policies, debts, and bailouts, so all of the present-day liberals are, too, for calling out the Tea Partiers on it while simultaneously supporting the exact same things when Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Ben Bernanke do them.

Rick Keith’s and every other liberal’s idolization of Bill Clinton, saying he brought us “prosperity (with tax increases), based on emerging technologies, a new infrastructure and the Information Age,” belies a strong bias, something that will probably, unfortunately, survive through Obama’s deficits and unemployment. Your misunderstanding of economics is not surprising, so let me tell you a little something about the business cycle and the federal reserve. The “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, because much of that growth you liberals love to extol was fueled by debt enabled by the federal reserve, which came back to hurt the economy when the tech and dot-com bubbles burst. Inflation enriches people in the finance industry temporarily and impoverishes everyone in the long run, and that’s what we’ve been seeing throughout the existence of the federal reserve, including during the Clinton administration. Government spending can only be wasteful in the long run because those expenditures are not subject to the price system or the profit and loss of the free market, so that spending and investment that made us so rich in the 1990′s is one of the hundreds of things that made us poorer now. I repeat: the “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, just like the “good times” of the housing bubble weren’t so good.

Lastly, we come to Obamacare, liberals’ standard for all that is great about the Savior of America and Congress’s wise spending under the guidance of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is disgusting power grabbing and vote buying at its worst. “Debacle” will not begin to describe this when my children are grown up. “Debt” will scarcely mean anything anymore when the printing presses inflate the money supply constantly to give stuff away for free when all the Baby Boomers and unemployed stiffs don’t have to pay for anything and health care providers don’t have to make any economic decisions. Medical charity, which used to provide for the indigent, has already all but disappeared and will, in fact, be outlawed. The price competition that improves quality, increases number, and decreases price will also be outlawed. In his column, Rick Keith accuses conservative Tea Partiers of working to “tear down excellence” by “elevating mediocrity.” The more government controls medical care, the more this becomes true: equality is increased by bringing everybody down to a common level. Outlawing economic calculation on the free market absolutely cannot and will not make anything better or cheaper for the masses. (Not that the market hasn’t already been screwed up by decades of government interference.)

The Tea Parties have been infiltrated by neocons, anti-immigration flag waivers, bland supporters of a little less government but only domestically, and straight anti-Democrat simpletons because those are the types of people who predominate in the non-Democrat American populace. Similarly, the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party rallies were so strongly ridiculed because the type of people who predominate in the Democratic ranks are blind Statolatrists who oppose any and all governmental cuts (non-military, of course) and despise the idea of people keeping more of their own money that should be the government’s. If this were inaccurate, then liberal Democrats would have something nice to say about the anti-tax protests and would have opposed some of Barack Obama’s and Congress’s spending/stimulus/bailout actions. But they haven’t, and they won’t, because they are blind followers of just about anyone with a (D) after their name, especially when those Democrats propose to take more money from people who earned it and give it to others.

Every time I see someone in politics, I seriously think—You know how we’re supposed to be the lunatics of life, people like you and me, anyone in show business…comics, writers, directors, dancers, musicians, announcers, actors, we’re supposed to be the lunatics of life. But you know who is, really, to me? Anyone who gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and thinks, “Maybe I’ll lead! Yes! I’ll be the leader! Everyone will be following me!” Serious maniac…seriously unwell people.
[...]
I mean, think about it: any city council in any city in the United States, any school board in any city—does anyone seriously think they mean anyone well?!

Some unspecified time in my past, I received a potential-juror questionnaire that I was required to fill out and mail back to the courthouse to determine whether I was suitable to serve as a juror. I ignored it and threw it in the trash. “Fuck that, they can come and get me,” I said. It wasn’t a summons; if I didn’t return anything, what difference would it make to them? The threats of enslavement and murder were not entirely explicit, so I decided to ignore it. Then two or three months later, I got an identical letter, except I think it said “Second notice” on it or something similar, so I thought I’d better fill it out and return it. I did and received an official notice of conscription shortly thereafter.

Much to my surprise, I was being conscripted to serve in a federal district court 45 minutes away. How ridiculous, stupid, and impractical. It should be pretty widely agreed-upon, among libertarians and non-libertarians alike, that no free society would conscript innocent citizens to do anything, especially something they aren’t particularly qualified for or enthusiastic about, and especially for which they would be inconvenienced and made poorer by an hour-and-a-half commute on several dozen occasions. This was not a one- or two-day, local criminal or civil trial or anything; it was an 18-month commitment for which the jurors would be required to meet three or four Wednesdays per month every single month. That’s because this wasn’t your typical jury duty; one of the few things I do respect about this process and its requirements is the oath of confidentiality I took, but you might say this jury could be described as “great, dignified, exalted, majestic, illustrious, or eminent.” (Not that I would.)

You might be appalled at the level of situational or medical burden that jury duty must impose upon a person before he can be excused from this involuntary obligation. “Eight months pregnant? Yeah, and your point is? You live an hour and a half away and your commute would therefore be three hours every time? Cry me a river. You’re a student who has mandatory Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes? Next.” Absurd and appalling. I won’t say anything about my observations in particular, but I have heard that if you’re unable to drive and you have five adopted special-needs children for whom you are the primary caregiver, the judge and prosecutor must have a private huddle to determine that, yes, that qualifies as a legitimate excuse to preclude you from juror conscription.

I have to admit a certain admiration and almost liking of the judge who explained the whole process to us and its importance and our function in the criminal justice system. The judge spoke like someone who truly believed that a jury’s most important purpose was protecting fellow citizens against the government. S/He vehemently opposed the notion that any jury simply did the bidding of the judge and prosecutor, or that the jurors were simply an arm of the prosecutor’s office, carrying out its wishes, agreeing with it, and kowtowing to its expertise in complex matters. S/He brought this up several times and didn’t strike me as the politician-type who would say one thing and mean another.

On the other hand, s/he did not believe jurors had the right or the position to judge right vs. wrong, only the facts of the case and their relationship to the letter of the law. This was brought up only because of comments and concerns that I voiced. I felt, probably correctly, that I was alone in the room in my conscientious yet subversive objection to agreeing to submit a judgment of wrongdoing for actions I don’t believe were wrong. Maybe I can be more of a rabble-rouser than I thought (except, I guess, that no one else was roused, save by confusion and indignation at the first expression of anti-authoritarianism they’d heard in a long time). Prompted by prior mentions of drugs and guns by the judge and/or another juror, I brought up my objection to gun laws and drug laws and my inability—nay, refusal—to judge someone in the wrong for violating them, if they hadn’t harmed someone in the process.

Later during the voir dire, when jurors were asked to raise their hands and offer their stories of prior run-ins with the law that might bias them in the cases they might hear, one juror mentioned that his business was audited and he was kind of harassed by the IRS a decade or two ago. I hadn’t thought of the potential of hearing a case of tax evasion, but I realized then and there that I would never, ever, under any circumstances, whether they include other wrongdoings on the part of the defendant or duress (short of jail time) applied to me, vote in favor of the IRS. Never. Tax evasion is a noble act, and if people can get away with it, I say more power to them. The IRS is the aggressor and the defendant is the victim in any case of tax evasion, and I would not punish a victim of the IRS’s predations. If jurors are supposed to consider only the facts of the case, then please don’t blame me for taking all the facts into account, including that all taxation is theft and tax evasion represents an act of self-defense.

Don’t worry; I didn’t say nearly all that. I was not eloquent, forceful, or convincing in my comments. But I made points that many reasonable people agree with.

The other jurors came from all walks of (American) life, and most seemed smart, reasonable, and common-sensical enough. I think they’d make a fine jury, save their sheep-like attitude towards following orders and obeying the law even if they believe them to be wrong.

Because of my expression of support for the principles of jury nullification and eventually mentioning the words “jury nullification,” the judge explained that it was actually illegal, wrong, subversive of the rule of law that binds society, and not backed by any English common-law or American legal tradition. This could be true, but juror conscription, sex-discrimination, and the Three-Fifths Compromise are also part of American legal tradition, and that doesn’t make them right.

The judge clearly believed firmly in the separation of powers by the system of checks and balances in our Constitution, and s/he supported the jury’s position as defender or buffer of fellow citizens against the State. This is why s/he believed it was not the place of jurors to make law; that’s for the legislative branch. (I could mention that it is most certainly the function of the justice system to judge the law; that’s exactly what judicial review is!) On either four or five separate occasions, not in one long speech or un-separated by other matters, the judge stated in no uncertain terms that it was totally and completely illegal, wrong, inappropriate, and un-American for a jury to arrogate to itself the power of deciding on the validity of the law in addition to the facts of the case. It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what you want, it doesn’t matter if anyone was harmed—the jury should decide on whether the facts of the case indicate a violation of the law, and vote “objectively” in accordance with those facts.

I find this disgusting and abominable.

I cannot and will not vote against my conscience, and I cannot and will not violate my conscience to avoid breaking the law or to send someone else to prison for actions that I don’t believe warrant it. There is nothing about any legislator, governor, president, or any other elected official, or lawyer, or judge, or Department of Justice official, or their position, or any other regular citizen like myself, that makes them suited to outlaw something but makes me unsuited to deem that law unjust and invalid. The fact that legislators were voted in by other people, even a majority of voters in a given region at a given time, or the fact that a majority of citizens in this region at this time agree with the law, does not make any law the slightest bit more just, nor does it make it just to imprison someone for violating it. Might does not make right, and the majority should not rule. Six billion people vs. one does not make the one any less justified in his opinion. If I am to judge someone’s guilt, I will make that judgment using my own sense of justice and my own conception of right vs. wrong, and no other criteria.

The easiest and, unfortunately, most prevalent example of the propriety of judging the law instead of the facts is drug laws. I believe most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal, and I won’t participate in adding to that harm by punishing someone for violating them. I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of the monstrous crimes against humanity that have been committed by people who were “just obeying the law.” Right and wrong exist prior to and independent of legislation.

So after the voir dire, before we were dismissed for lunch at 1:45, a few pairs of people were told to switch seats. Apparently our order had some meaning or function. I ended up being the last “alternate” juror, as opposed to one of the first-string jurors originally. It doesn’t seem like there should be anything wrong with this, but really I think there is. The jury system is set up to weed out people who will vote with their own mind and in a way that is subversive to the State’s wishes. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. I experienced it first-hand.

To tell you the truth, I felt a little guilty for saying things that would rub the judge and prosecutor the wrong way and set off alarms in their head that I was not suitable to implement the State’s laws. And I felt bad about feeling bad about that. I felt ashamed all around. But I shouldn’t have; I didn’t “get out” of jury duty; I didn’t say 10% of what I thought about monopolistic government, monopolistic law enforcement systems, juror conscription, and a society that shuns people who would vote their conscience instead of kowtowing to objectionable laws.

I possibly could have had a chance to help put corrupt politicians behind bars, and when I heard that was one of many possibilities, I wanted to leap at the opportunity and keep my mouth shut. Instead I was honest. I’m not going to feel bad about being honest, and I’m not going to feel bad about demurring at the idea of serving the State mostly involuntarily for a year and a half. It was probably one of the more convenient times in my life to undergo such an endeavor, but I would either hate myself for it or come under some kind of stress for promising to uphold the (potentially objectionable) law and then blatantly violating that promise on day 1. Then again, if you want jury-duty advice for the future, know this: you can vote exactly how you want and voice any objections you want, without fear of judgment or repercussions, because no one besides the other jurors—not the prosecutor, not the judge, not even the stenographer or interpreters or anyone else—can know how you voted on anything, ever. At least not in that type of jury.

I’ve heard the reasons why regular, lay citizens should be extracted from their normal lives and forced into jury duty; they sound like good reasons on the surface. But why shouldn’t laymen be conscripted to serve as judges? As lawyers? Oh, are those too specialized positions to leave in the hands of laymen? How about serving as courthouse janitor once every few years? How about substitute teachers or DMV workers or receptionists? There is nothing about jurors that precludes them from being professionals, educated and specialized, just like there’s nothing that precludes every function of the government from being privatized (or abolished!). I know it’s hard to put myself in other people’s mindset sometimes, but I honestly think this is one issue where wacky libertarians like me and others can find common ground. Juror conscription is a violation, it’s impractical, and it has facilitated a State-serving function of the courts, which is the opposite of how juries should be and certainly the opposite of what the founding fathers wanted.

That said, in the future, if I’m conscripted into regular jury duty, I might see if I can swallow my abhorrence of the monopolistic court system and help fight the State from somewhere other than my computer chair. It probably won’t be such a terrible thing. Just think: if you were the sole person responsible for a hung jury on a drug trafficking or gun possession charge, you’d be a minor hero for a day. I don’t know how much you’re told about the particular case before you start serving, but if I can keep an innocent person out of prison, if only temporarily, I will lie to the State to stab it in the back.

This is the type of crap that will dominate our lives if people don’t stop trusting politicians and start realizing the free market’s price system is what allows resources to be allocated the most efficiently, where they are needed, with minimal waste. This type of bureaucratic calculationism has impoverished hundreds of millions of people in socialist countries since the early 20th century—for example, in the Soviet Union, where people stood in bread lines and factories produced millions of huge nails and screws in order to meet their production-mass quotas more quickly and easily.

In a free society, the price for labor would be highest where it is needed the most, and it would decrease when it is less needed. No government program or bureaucracy can crunch enough numbers to make decisions anywhere nearly as well or as fast as the price system of the market. If the government weren’t screwing education systems up and then offering more of itself as the solution, the need for science teachers would be signaled by high wages and other attractive perks of the job. The need for more schools or more students at a particular school would also be signaled by greater profits or lower prices. This is a microcosm of the State-vs.-liberty argument, in which Statists claim certain things would never work fairly or resolve themselves justly without the benevolent, monopolistic State to make it so. The economy is simply one major facet of human action and interaction, and no facets are immune to the laws of human nature that make liberty more just and efficient than Statism.

To understand why corporations, unions, and lobbyists spend such vast sums of money on political contributions is to understand how campaign finance “corruption” could be done away with in a clear, easy, and fair way. The reason they spend so much is because they get so much in return! With every political campaign and every election, a huge amount of money is at stake for every business—and most individuals, for that matter—and especially for the largest corporations, whose success and riches depend upon the corporate-political establishment. They spend so much money because there is the potential to get so much in return. The fact that large corporations donate money to opposing candidates and their parties is proof of this: it isn’t ideology, it is just good business.

My liberal friends and seemingly the majority, or a large minority, of Americans interested in politics are neither outraged nor saddened at the affront to individualism and self-governance that our current fascist-corporatist political-economic system represents. The mob elects legislators and bureaucrats who rule over everyone, whether we voted for them or not and whether their plans are in our best interest or not. They take people’s money and do whatever they want with it without our consent, and they’ve proven their ineptitude at spending our money in every way and at every turn. Obviously very few people are upset about this, beyond occasionally booting out incumbents who didn’t redistribute enough wealth. But now people get outraged because corporations can donate and spend as much money (part of which is our confiscated money) as they want to influence how their/our money is spent and how the conduct of business is governed in this country, whereas before, corporations could only spend a limited amount for such purposes.

First of all, those people have picked an awfully odd point to become saddened or outraged. If they thought about this issue from a principled angle, they would have been outraged long before the dollar amount for political donations/promotions was uncapped. But, most importantly, if you want to end the undue influence that corporations have on politics, get politics out of business! If politicians didn’t have the power to govern so many aspects of our lives, including the economy, then corporations, unions, and lobbyists would have no chance to engage in rent-seeking. As P.J. O’Rourke quipped, “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” In summary, achieving a state of less democracy, with its idiotic wealth redistribution and its monopolistic enforcement of mob-rule, would greatly reduce the influence that corporations have on politicians because politicians would have less influence on everything.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly skipped town for two days, so SF had no mayor. This is a problem? Let people run their own lives for a while without getting in their way, and see how well it works!

I think it is incredibly unfair to fire teachers or other public employees because of some supposedly scandalous but completely legal pictures of them on Facebook or mySpace or somewhere else on the internet. Sometimes, the victims were fired for things that weren’t even pornographic or illicit in any way. Ashley Payne, a 24-year-old teacher in Barrow County, Georgia, was fired because of non-pornographic pictures and supposedly profane comments posted to her Facebook page. “I wasn’t doing anything illegal, I wasn’t doing anything provocative,” she says. She had set everything in her profile to “private” and was not friends with any students or parents. She has no idea how the parent who brought the complaint gained access to her photos. Oh, and also, the parent complained of Payne’s holding an alcoholic drink in one of the pictures. The completely infuriating, despicable, wretched, reviled, pathetic, sanctimonious destructiveness of idiotic teetotaling motherfuckers aside, by what right does a school board fire a teacher for doing nothing illegal, pornographic, harmful, or even unadvisable by any standards? I wish I had the link to a story about another teacher who was fired over some photographs of her in provocative poses, taken either by her boyfriend or husband before she ever became a teacher. So if you have ever done anything that someone in the school system or related to someone in the school system wouldn’t have done herself, that is grounds for firing. This is so typical of the the overly intrusive nanny state and the fascist busybodies that run our stupid society.

It strikes me as a sign of technological impairment or old-fogey-cluelessness when people refer to blog posts as “blogs.” To me, the LRC contributors are the most prominent perpetrators of this transgression. They’ll write, “In reference to your blog from yesterday…” or “…which I wrote about in a previous blog.” Hey, guys, “blog” is short for “web log,” as in, a journal. You wouldn’t refer to an entry in a child’s diary or a starship catpain’s log as a “log.” You would call it an entry. The proper term is blog post or blog entry. You can shorten it to “post” without using any more keystrokes than you now use. Calling a blog post a “blog” is like Senator Ted Stevens calling an email “an internet.” (In case you were wondering, yes, this is the only type of situation in which I would use the conventional “blog” instead of the uber-|337 and irreverent “blag.”)

Ha! Some person at “Progressive Nation” writes of the “growing rift between Libertarians and Republicans. No, this is not a repeat from the 1970′s, the 1980′s, the 1990′s, or every year of the Bush regime.

The first-class moran who occupies Michigan’s lieutenant governor post wants to tax bottled water companies to rescue the flagging revenues of a college scholarship program. In the state with the worst economy in the nation. The one that’s been in a depression for a year longer than the rest of the nation. The one losing businesses in hordes. It is simply depressing that after all these years, liberals refuse to understand that taxes hurt businesses and employment, and that taking more and more money from the taxpayers to put into government programs only destroys wealth. If you want education to be more affordable, or you want to save the environment (as the rest of this idiotic tax would fund), get the government out of both, and let people, companies, and communities solve their problems for themselves.

Juice is as unhealthy as soda and contributes just as much to obesity and diabetes, say some scientists. Yeah, you know who else blamed juice for the world’s problems? HITLER.

…the intense, near-pathological self-regard in the speech was not Obama’s alone, of course; we must do him the credit of acknowledging that in this regard, at least, he was what we so often proclaim our leaders to be: the embodiment of the nation. His soaring proclamation of American exceptionalism, in a setting supposedly devoted to universal principles of peace, was breathtaking in its chutzpah—but entirely in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen, and the ruling elite above all.
[...]
Here is chutzpah—and hubris—raised to the level of the sublime. Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred, extremism, chaos and brutal corruption around the world—and offered them as justification for the hideous, unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech: War is Peace. In this perverse inversion of values, Obama, as a warmaker, is actually a peacemaker, you see—and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who was evoked at several points in the speech.

And here we come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech. And perhaps the most significant too. All the cant about America’s altruism and “enlightened self-interest” in killing millions of people—Indochina was one of many convenient blank spots in Obama’s historical survey—for the sake of all the children of the world (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in our sight) was just par for the rhetorical course. It was nothing that had not been said many times before, including the references—so lauded by Obama’s liberal apologists—to those inadvertent “mistakes” America seems to keep making; out of a surfeit of good intentions, no doubt. But I don’t think an American president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi before. (And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, no less! Oh, that sublime brass….)
[...]
In any case, aside from the particulars of any real situation or hypothetical scenario, the speech is a glaring example of Obama’s deep-seated (and perhaps unconscious) contempt for the path of peace, and its practitioners. It is also a manifestation of his own inferno, of his desperate need to justify—to himself and to the world—his free, deliberate choice to follow the blood-choked “path of action” as the commander-in-chief of a bloated, brutal war machine.

No one forced any of these decisions—or these specious, obscene justifications—on Obama or Blair. It is their own narcissism—their own lust for power, and their love for the system that gave them that power—has covered them with the blood and shame that now taint their every word and deed.

I skipped a lot of commentary on the specifics of his speech, and there is some great stuff (one of the primary focuses of the essay, actually) on the utility and success of non-violent resistance to bloodthirsty war machines and terrorists alike.

If you want a recipe for real disgust with the prevailing political establishment, and a real opening for radical critique, one of the things that has to happen is that dissidents need to begin to see that even the longed-for best-case scenario can’t possibly deliver what they want, because what they were promised just won’t fit through the political channels that they had put their hope in. An obvious tool like George W. Bush inspires a lot of fear and loathing; but he also inspires a lot of faith in the myth that if only someone who wasn’t such an obvious tool were in power, these problems would all get sorted out right quick. But when you have a ballyhooed reformer holding the reins of power, over-promising and under-delivering—and when it becomes increasingly clear that politics as usual will keep on keeping on—that’s often when you begin to see a real chance for a crack-up.

Excellent.