Licensed spectrum came into being for a reason. In the early days of radio, unlicensed radio stations in urban areas regularly got into “power wars” with rival stations, leading to plenty of static. Compared to this free-for-all, the licensing of radio stations in the US, and then the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, helped to solve such problems.

Actually, very little of that paragraph has even the ring of truth. As B.K. Marcus and Timoguapo van Swanson have detailed, the homesteading principle based on libertarian property-rights theory and common-law tradition was perfectly capable of resolving bandwidth disputes and remains the best way to resolve them. The Federal Communications Commission served the interests of wealthy, politically connected dinosaurs who didn’t want to keep up with new types of competition, and it continues to serve the interests of large, established companies at the expense of small businesses and consumers today.

David Z. at No Third Solution and many other blaggers have expressed their due outrage at the treatment of the Michigan woman who was threatened with fines and possibly jail time for looking after neighbors’ children while they waited for the school bus. I have nothing to add to this sorry affair except these brief things: 1. This is an expected outcome of Statism; this is not a bug but a feature. 2. Crap like this is probably not as rare as Statolatrists would have us believe. 3. I just want to log this in my long list of examples of State-created divisiveness, of the destruction of voluntary cooperation and community by monopolistic government.

Slate magazine ran a series of articles about the dentistry industry (I bet you never realized those two words rhymed before…me, neither), including this one about why dentistry costs so much. Unsurprisingly, since it appeared in Slate, it is devoid of any serious economic analysis. The only two explanations I could glean from the article were: because government doesn’t pay for it and because other people don’t pay for it. The former would be because of a lack of socialization by our benighted leaders, and the latter because of the way dental insurance operates. Now, while an analysis of dental insurance in America could be of interest and could produce not only suggestions as to how to bring dental costs down but also provide guidance for our medical insurance industry, we get none of that. As far as I know, any actual explanation of the high costs of dentistry must include State-mandated certification (barriers to entry), regulations that prohibit less-educated and therefore lower-paid dental technicians from operating a simple dental-cleaning business (reduced competition), and the fact that for some reason, people purchase insurance for things that are relatively cheap, routine, and totally expected! This increases costs in the same way as it does for medical care!

My friend’s Facebook status currently says, “is definitely a nerd and looking forward to hearing Paul Krugman speak on Friday.” Paul Krugman is a dolt. Now that I’m unemployed, looking to move to Virginia to get in-state residency status to apply to George Mason University and become an economist, I have made this a solid, official, un-renegable goal: I will write a book titled Paul Krugman is a Dolt, it will be published, and it will receive wide acclaim.

It must be embarrassing to be a Statist writing about economics these days. Thomas Woods quotes one Harold Meyerson, who shared the extent of his ignorance with us in his recent Washington Post column. This is gold, Jerry, GOLD!

The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago [sic], is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything.
[...]
[Economists told us] there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn’t exist.

The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes.

Well, honestly, in the Austro-libertarian’s mind, yes, Keynes’s reputation is not only still intact, it has been augmented as never before.

Speaking of insatiable parasites, the government of Hawaii will now tax its residents on gross gambling income rather than net gambling income.

A Hawai’i resident who wins $10,000 in a year, for example, and loses $9,000 in the same year used to be taxed only on the $1,000 in net winnings. Under the new law, that resident would be taxed on the full $10,000 in winnings.

I imagine several other states already have similar laws, but it’s no coincidence that at least one state is enacting such a tax during the Second Great Depression. Many companies offer better deals to customers in an attempt to maintain revenues (…and, unfortunately, they also fire a lot of people to cut costs) to stay afloat. The first resort of governments is to take whatever they can from their captives. It is sad to read comments about this and other stories from people who probably claim to love freedom and justice and all those other things that, they’d say, made America great, but then when it gets down to specifics they bend over backwards to support anything and everything that helps the State at the obvious expense of its subjects.

It doesn’t matter that this is unenforceable. The intent and the attitude of these parasites in government is what should really boil your blood.

Y’see, gals, if you follow sports and know a little bit about them, then you can sail right through the interrogation about your cocaine-filled golf clubs without arousing any suspicion. Such efforts to traffic drugs would obviously be unnecessary if the drugs were legal, which would be better for everyone in society because their sale, distribution, and use would be safer and our civil liberties wouldn’t be the collateral damage of the War on Drugs.

A Maryland high-school softball coach was fired after parents drank beers that they brought to an end-of-the-year team party. Because underage high-schoolers were present, observing their parents imbibing alcohol. At the coach’s private residence. A firing over this probably wouldn’t happen in a free society. Hysterical teetotaling anti-alcohol crusaders are about as wretched as they come. Without a doubt, they are more to blame for society’s alcohol-related problems, such as underage binge-drinking and drunken driving, than any other factor. There is no way they could exert as much influence without the State enforcing their delusions upon society. All of this influence is harmful. A dead giveaway of a brain-dead Statolatrist zombie is that they suggest government school board members could rise to any position of importance in an educational system in a free society (or probably any other organization or business).

In a free society, family and community would be intimately involved in the education of children because it would be necessary and because there would be neither the inclination nor the opportunity to relinquish such responsibilities to State bureaucrats. Conversely, bureaucrats and other strangers would have no opportunity to claim authority over parents or their children. Idiotic teetotalers and other brands of moral busybodies would never be in a position to make decisions about other people’s children or, in this case, a coach who supposedly…let parents do something that was in some way bad to their own children.

Frank Hatley of Cook County, Georgia, was imprisoned for one year for failing to make child support payments for a child who, as the court was aware, was not his.

In June of last year, a judge ordered Hatley to jail for failing to reimburse the state for public assistance that was paid to support his “son,” who, as the court was aware, is not actually his son.
[...]
For 13 years, Hatley made payments to the state until learning, in 2000, that the boy might not be his biological son. A DNA test that year confirmed that there was no chance he was the father, according to court documents.

Hatley…was relieved of any future child support reimbursement but was ordered to pay more than $16,000 that he had owed the state before the ruling.

Anyone who wants to claim such absurdities as this could happen and carry on for a full year in a non-monopolistic, non-coercive legal system, and that the agency responsible could continue operating as usual after this came to light, simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Only coercive monopolies can get away with things like this; private, peaceful bodies cannot and would not.

The British socialized medicine system will ban private organ donations from dead donors. Basically the problem is that foreigners were paying top dollar (pound, euro, whatever) for the organs of dead Britons, and it horrified the busybodies in the UK government that scarce resources were being voluntarily allocated via the price system, and that such exchanges were taking place outside of the gentle governance of the NHS.

An independent report said the public needed to be confident that scarce donor organs were allocated fairly within the NHS.

Transplant surgeons said the ban would reassure the public that organs will go to those in greatest need.

Everything is scarce and the only sensible, practical, or remotely principled way to allocate those scarce things—yes, including body parts that their owners want to donate—is by the price system of the free market that matches supply to demand. No governing body or other self-anointed group of experts could ever allocate resources or direct people more efficiently or “fairly” than the free market’s price system does. It is simply not possible in the real world, even if the governing body had the best of intentions, and especially not when decisions will inevitably be made for political rather than economic reasons. Here is a much more logical and refreshing take on the U.S.’s screwed-up, government-run organ donor system.

Those Philadelphia cops who pulled three shooting suspects out of a car and beat them back in May 2008 have been cleared of any crimes by a grand jury. (Wow, that was almost a year and a half ago?!) The most surprising part of this case is that their chief, Charles Ramsey, fired four of the officers and suspended or demoted another four, and he’s not backing down from that decision. “I have 40 years of law enforcement experience. I kinda know what I’m looking at. In my opinion, all the actions were not justified.” Good for him.

A program that allows citizens to file anonymous complaints on the Illinois secretary of state’s website about people misusing handicapped parking spots received 114 tips in its first month and a half. People snitching on each other to punish them for disobeying laws that have no basis in natural law, no relation to right vs. wrong, and that attempt to force common courtesy on everyone? Sounds par for the course for governments. Wake me when you hear of an example of government promoting a sense of respect, community, and courtesy among its captives.

A Fort Myers Beach councilman was fired after other council members learned he was married to a former porn star. Terrible and unjust. They fire him in July 2009 “without cause” after he had been married since October 2008. The dolt who led the vilification said, “It’s a matter of how effective he becomes after this situation. How much disruption there is.” You stupid moron, there was no decrease in his effectiveness and there was no disruption until you got it into YOUR pathetic little brain to make an issue out of it. You can’t work with him and approve of his effectiveness for nine months and then decide his marriage might be disruptive to his job only after you learn of it! And soon, after his wrongful termination suit against the city, the idiots on the town council won’t have to pay for his settlement out of their pockets, oh, no; it will come from the town’s treasury, in other words, other people will pay for their stupidity directly or indirectly. Prudes are bad enough, but idiotic prudes are just depressing.

An Illinois millionaire didn’t like the $80,000 property tax bill on his mansion, so he had himself ordained by some online “church,” put a wooden cross on his house, and called it a church to get a property tax exemption. Good for him, I say! Not good for him or the rest of the taxpaying suckers, say idiotic Statolatrists everywhere. A man defends himself from a crime in a nonviolent and somewhat clever way, and the sanctimonious public responds with violence and derision. Everyone is pleased that this sham was found out and the guy will now have to pay back taxes, because nonviolent nonparticipation is a violation of their moral code. (I’ll conveniently gloss over the fact that this millionaire banker made his fortune off of the ultimate State racket, the monopoly on currency, because the principle of nonviolent nonparticipation remains the same.)

How the “buy American” attitude backfires: it spurs resentment and nationalism, whereas free, borderless trade engenders the respect, goodwill, mutual prosperity, and reciprocal interdependence that characterize true civilization. Libertarians at least as early as Frederic Bastiat have known this as a truism. Welcome to the 19th century.

Libertarianism is individual liberty, personal sovereignty, voluntary association, and moral egalitarianism for all people. By “moral egalitarianism” I mean everyone is equally imbued with and bound by the same rights and the same moral obligation to respect the identical rights of others; no one has the right to do anything that anyone else may not also do. I think the existence of those rights and the non-aggression principle that follows from them come as close to epistemological certainty as they can get, and the burden is on Statists to explain why these principles are imaginary, illegitimate, or impractical and why they have the right to threaten murder on any who would assert these rights.

I doubt very many people oppose those beliefs in principle. What they oppose are their fantastical imaginings of what those beliefs would imply in practice. At the same time they remain willfully ignorant of how the State opposes those innate rights—is essentially the institutionalization of the negation of liberty. What they refuse to grasp is that the very existence of the monopolistic State implies threats of murder to anyone who secedes or doesn’t participate. As hard as it is to come to grips with, Statists must realize that peaceful abstention is a violation of their moral code, and that this is abominable.

It would be helpful to the blogosphere and to the worldwide discourse on political philosophy in general if a significant number of Statists would challenge themselves as far as they could with this question: “If the first principles that libertarians endorse are right and just, then why does (my vision of) their practical implementation strike me as so frightening, so horrific? What experiences, conditioning, or other principles make me either (a) reject the implementation of those principles anyway, and/or (b) insist that Statism and not freedom are the natural corollary of those principles?”

Most people’s experience with states, living their whole lives under one, never considering what true freedom can do for a society and not looking too closely lest their Statist foundation be shaken, causes them to believe that states are a force of good even when the balance of evidence is against them. So they lash out in ridicule at libertarians instead of focusing their skepticism on their own beliefs, which is where everyone’s skepticism belongs at first.

In the comments to Radley Balko’s very good, polite, short post about Ted Kennedy, a few peculiar Statist sentiments blemish an otherwise sensible discussion about the lack of merit in Ted Kennedy’s career and agreement with Balko that Kennedy shouldn’t be venerated simply because he’s no longer eligible for the census. On the other hand, they did provide me a good starting point for yet another instructional blag post.

As you could have guessed, the contentious comments concerned Balko’s opinion that we shouldn’t admire Kennedy’s “ability to use politics, as opposed to civil society, to solve problems” and that “Getting elected to political office in itself adds no value to society as a whole”.

One commenter began,

Huh? How would be have better effected change via civil society? Presided over the local kiwanis club? Written the Great American Novel? Become a pundit? Blogger (journalist)? CEO?

Always interesting to hear what libertarians value, how small-minded they are – I guarantee there’s total radio silence on the passing of major business figures, however they themselves used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests. However corrupt and crass they are within their own sphere.

Instead of living off of the labor of captive taxpayers and voting to take and spend more of their money every year, Kennedy could have spent his inherited wealth on charity, community organizations, and private businesses that provided goods and services to people who wanted them, voluntarily. The reason people donate to non-profit organizations and do business with private companies is (usually) because they want to, because they prefer the goods or services more than they prefer the money they part with and more than the goods or services they could get elsewhere. The reason the state and federal governments have to take your taxes upon threats of murder is because the government is not voluntary and people don’t want to give their money to it. Even Ted Kennedy himself didn’t want to give more of his money to the Imperial Federal Government than he had to…otherwise he would have. He could have worked for free, but he didn’t.

In this instance, we see that the commenter’s failure to understand that “civil society” is superior to government action results from his failure to understand what “government action” implies: Submit to their edicts and give them your money, or they will take the money plus penalties and they will enter your home or business to make you comply; insist on keeping your money and living your life how you please, as is your perfect right, and they will enslave you in a metal-and-concrete cage for five or ten years; resist their beatings, kidnapping, and enslavement, as is your perfect right, and they will shoot you. It is not possible to misunderstand that the State and all its agents are the aggressors in this scenario—in the real world, every day.

If committing the atrocious offenses of not sharing much of your money and behaving or doing business in frowned-upon ways is enough to warrant the death penalty, then surely actually threatening people with murder and interfering with their lives in myriad ways is a crime against humanity that removes all pretense of legitimacy from their operation. If you would claim the latter response is necessary and proper for the former offenses, then it still remains to be explained how non-violent non-participation ranks as criminal, or even dangerous, to the Statist. The laws and the infrastructure to make and follow through on the threats precede any act by any citizen; in fact, they predate even the birth of every citizen (except at the founding of a new state); so they cannot reasonably be passed off as a response to a preexisting danger.

Doubtless the true believer would respond, “But it is in man’s nature to be contentious and violent; the preexisting State with its threat-and-punish infrastructure keeps everyone civil, cooperative, and happy.” Glossing over the fact that this is simply false, it is obvious that elected and unelected officials are not angels; they are impaired by the same shortcomings as everyone else. Further, it is obvious that the types of people who are attracted to the violent, deadly police power of the State suffer from even greater hubris, intolerance, greed, and megalomania than the average person and in proportion to the power they aspire to attain.

I have stated what principles libertarians value and gone into a little detail about what we oppose in the State. So we’re “small-minded”? Believing in the strength of community, free exchange, voluntary cooperation, and the physical, emotional, and psychological independence from the controlling hubris of others—the conviction that the answer to many of our material and psychological problems is in ceasing to kill, threaten, and coerce each other—this is small-minded? You can’t possibly comprehend what is implied by our statement “peaceful action is a better way to effect change than is governmental coercion”—what’s implied is an all-encompassing, revolutionary conception of community, law, economics, war, peace, and everything else about human interrelationships—and still refer to it as small-minded.

The better libertarian thinkers (and those of us who follow them) rail against “major business figures” who “used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests” as fervently as we do against the government agents themselves. See, for instance, this masterful essay by Roderick Long, this Kevin Carson column, and this post of mine. Maybe my fellow libertarian blaggers can leave some more links in the comments; there must surely be 100 easily accessible anti-corporatist writings that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

The commenter continued,

You could say the same you said here about FDR or Lincoln: proper management of the state, and the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world – it’s oh-so-dirty. Libertarians would rather sit on a perch apart from it all, sometimes hiding their eyes, sometimes throwing peanuts, or pretending like all problems can be solved via a little Mill or communitarianism. And that there’s a nice clean wall between politics and everything else.

7/15/2050: Radley Balko dies, contributed not much of anything because he spent his life as a journalist, and on the basis of a little Rand and Econ 101 and utilitarian philosophy decided that it would be of some value to humanity or even his community to give the stock libertarian take on whatever was at the top of the news cycle. And what do journalists really do for us anyway?

Obviously you are not paying attention.

We could say the same about FDR or Lincoln? Child, much, much worse has been said about FDR and Lincoln, and deservedly so. They are more responsible for our corporate-military-socialist state than any other two people. The death and impoverishment they permitted to be visited upon innocent people is, quite possibly, incalculable.

It is almost unfathomable to me that anyone could think the State is “the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world.” I shall take the liberty of assuming this statement refers mainly to economics—the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy our needs. The claim is that the government can take care of any problem or need that arises in a community better than the free market—especially in the 21st century with technology making the entire world more connected than ever and the pace of business faster than ever. Though my libertarian readers are already familiar with Ludwig von Mises, Statists would benefit—if only to bring a little more knowledge and sophistication to the debate—from reading Mises’s seminal essay on why socialism can’t calculate and Murray Rothbard’s perspective on Mises, his opponents, and the calculation debate.

Without reading an entire economics essay, Statists could just answer me this: How is it that elected officials and coercive referendums voted for by “the people” are better able to govern society than the cooperative choices and economic exchanges made voluntarily by “the people”?

If the “collective action problems” he refers to are legal and court systems, his position is no less secure. Check out my posts about Anthony de Jasay’s masterpiece The State (here) and Bruce Benson’s masterpiece The Enterprise of Law (here and here).

Another commenter answered his smear that libertarians, journalists, and others outside of the professional criminal class do nothing for society:

MLK never had to get elected to spur social change.

And BTW, Radley helped get a guy off of death row because of his work. More than I can say for Ted Kennedy. Other journalists have also managed to force a president’s resignation over Watergate and bring to light the massacre at My Lai just to name a couple of things. I would say that journalists have done more to expose corruption and spur change than any politician ever has.

We don’t just sit on our perch either. Go check out the work that Libertarians have done at the Institute for Justice and FIRE. Real results that actually matter to every day people who are being mistreated by peaceful legislators and their good intention regulations.

The discussion was mostly downhill from there:

“Working as a legislator isn’t a peaceful way to make change. After all, the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance or else we would be imprisoned or fined. There isn’t anything peaceful about that at all.”

And here’s the reason folks, why libertarians will never have any serious chance as politicians in the country. Nutters.

Yes, it is “nutters” to insist aggression is wrong, that keeping the peace by threatening imprisonment and murder is wrong, that encouraging a sense of community by forcing everyone to live by your rule whether they voted for it or not is wrong. The part in quotation marks, which the commenter thought was “nutters,” is a perfectly accurate and admirably principled way of understanding the world; I am constitutionally incapable of imagining how anyone could be more succinct and correct about the role of a legislator or how someone could object to it. Unbelievable.

“the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance”

And he was elected to do so as public official by you, we, the people of the country, along with the other 99 senators. You’re acting like this is a dictatorship.

Ah, yes, the old Might Makes Right justification—″a majority voted your personal liberties and a large chunk of your money away, so don’t go spreading social discord and spewing hatred because you disapprove of our mob-rule. Sure, you voted against all the people in power, but the best thing about our enlightened system is that we force everyone to comply whether they agree or not.”

It is more common than I would have thought, though no less peculiar, for Statists to justify a rights-violation because multiple people commit it rather than one. What difference does the number of people committing it make? Seriously. Blags have comments for a reason. I like getting comments.

Referring to the same passage that the previous person thought was “nutters,” the original Statist commenter wrote:

This is childish. You need to grow up. It’s not different from me saying that prisons are bad because people get locked up against their will, but refusing to take on what to do about murderers.

What to do about power and how one should distribute power is the paramount question for any society at any time in history, and solutions are judged in terms of bad and less bad. If you can’t bring yourself to stare it in the face and maybe try to make the best of it, your opinion on anything to do with politics is worthless. You don’t get to complain and be taken seriously if you want to hide.

As a policy I only address things that make sense, so the last few sentences I will ignore. (I included them to give you a full appreciation of this person’s thought processes.)

What is childish is the Statist attitude that the majority should rule, that people who peacefully abstain are somehow doing some unspecified thing that endangers your person or property, and that everyone who disagrees with your grand vision of how to run the world should be punished and made to comply. I can think of nothing more childish in the political arena. You have made no effort to understand any theory of ethics or morality, nor anything like property rights or economics. Literally the only framework you go by is “majority rules.” You don’t appreciate that people have good reason to object to their freedoms being put to a vote and to complain after losing the vote. You refuse to see how pointing guns at, restricting the preexisting freedoms of, and taking property from people who haven’t harmed or even threatened anyone is worse than the hypothetical harm that they might have done; that the government agents are committing aggression even by their own standards. You are unable to understand how anyone could object to being lorded over by a charlatan with a bright smile and a fancy suit, nor have you shown any ability to grasp how rights or freedoms could exist prior to and independently from a monopolistic state. Your political philosophy begins and ends with “majority rule.” This is the single least nuanced idea in the history of the world since “woman submit to man because he is stronger.” You are a childish buffoon who should have NO SAY in how I or any other human being run our lives.

Our objections to the aggression that defines states are very different from objecting to locking real, actual aggressors up in prison (though you just said “people” and libertarians know that governments should lock up their own people before anyone else). Your analogy looks, to me, like this: illegitimacy of legislation : no alternative to legislation :: illegitimacy of prison : no solution to murder.

Okay, analogies weren’t your strong point in fifth grade. You are ignoring stuff YOU WROTE, in the same discussion thread. Our alternative to governmental legislation is offering a goddamned product to people and selling it to them for an agreeable price. Writing a book. Starting a charity. Educating your own children instead of leaving it to the State. Et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam. These are the things you ridiculed in your first post as being ineffective compared to coercive legislation. Libertarians have plenty of solutions to murder, and all crime. Eliminating the police state is a nice first step.

Distributing power is not the paramount question for all societies. It is protecting individual rights, which allows real community to develop voluntarily and “organically” and which allows for the material progress that has increased our standard of living over the centuries. When private property rights are protected and individuals have a sincere, personal, reciprocal interest in the well-being of their neighbors, then power and many other things will be distributed more heterogeneously. Surely you don’t think giving power to politicians and taking it away from the public will distribute power in any just way? If you’d like a scholarly but brief and accessible discussion on the distribution of power in society, read the first part of Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock.

You seem very dissatisfied with this country. There are plenty of other ones out there. Why don’t you try the libertarian oasis of Somalia? You won’t have to worry about the pesky ‘dictatorship of the majority against the minority” (also called Democracy) there! You’ll be free to do as you please. No pesky governments to get in your way (they won’t even bother to build your roads!)

If things get too tough, you can always try your luck in the socialist hellhole of Sweden or Norway :)

Seriously, most of you sound like Ruby Ridge wannabe’s under a guise of reading a few Ayn Rand books, which is why you won’t be taken seriously.

Personally, if I were going to compete for a Special Olympics medal on a political website, taking the contradictory stance from what I know most readers there take, I would go to some effort to gussy up my arguments and review my thought processes to make sure I was representing my ideology well. You know, being a good ambassador for libertarianism.

None of that for these Statists. Why don’t you try the Statist’s wet dream of North Korea, or Cuba, or Zimbabwe? You gave the worst example of (what you misunderstand as) anarchy; it isn’t fair to counter with the worst examples of your beloved monopolistic States? Oh, there’s only one type of anarchy but many varied and sundry types of states. I see. And that American and Ethiopian military force attempting to impose order but, somehow unsurprisingly, only supplying murder, terror, and destruction to Somalia—you gonna pin that one on the anti-military, non-interventionist libertarians, too? You haven’t made sense yet; you might as well shoot for the moon and hope some more of your hysterical mischaracterizations of libertarianism stick for your Statist brethren.

We have observed no fewer than two of the classic inane, ignorant dismissals of libertarians in a single comment thread about Teddy freaking Kennedy: “You’re always free to move elsewhere” and “Oh, you’re just a stupid Randroid.” Add a third item to the list of ideologies Statists don’t understand. OBJECTIVISM IS NOT LIBERTARIANISM! WE ACTUALLY DON’T LIKE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH!

Sorry for rambling. I got up on my soap box for the first time in a while and wanted to flesh out my thoughts thoroughly. It’s clear from reading the whole discussion thread that brief, pointed criticisms of their statements are insufficient to sway them in the least. I know this was old hat for my libertarian colleagues; this was written to any and all non-libertarians, so I hope they read it and find some sense in it, coming away with a better understanding of freedom and the State than Radley Balko’s commenters came with.

Ordered by Congress to “buy American” when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting sewage pumps made outside of Toronto. After a Navy official spotted Canadian pipe fittings in a construction project at Camp Pendleton, Calif., they were hauled out of the ground and replaced with American versions.
[...]
This week, the Canadians fired back. A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts—the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.
[...]
Take, for instance, Duferco Farrell Corp., a Swiss-Russian partnership that took over a previously bankrupt U.S. steel plant near Pittsburgh in the 1990s and employed 600 people there.

The new buy American provisions, the company said, are being so broadly interpreted that Duferco Farrell is on the verge of shutting down. Part of an increasingly global supply chain that seeks efficiencies by spreading production among multiple nations, it manufactures coils at its Pennsylvania plant using imported steel slabs that are generally not sold commercially in the United States. The partially foreign production process means the company’s coils do not fit the current definition of made in the USA—a designation that the stimulus law requires for thousands of public works projects across the nation.

In recent weeks, its largest client—a steel pipemaker located one mile down the road—notified Duferco Farrell that it would be canceling orders. Instead, the client is buying from companies with 100 percent U.S. production to meet the new stimulus regulations. Duferco has had to furlough 80 percent of its workforce.

“You need to tell me how inhibiting business between two companies located one mile apart is going to save American jobs,” said Bob Miller, Duferco Farrell’s executive vice president. “I’ve got 600 United Steel Workers out there who are going to lose their jobs because of this. And you tell me this is good for America?”

The Democrats’ goals of winning more votes and securing more power over economic affairs has led them to force policies on American individuals and businesses that limit their trading partners, pit people of different nations against each other where mutually beneficial trade would normally take place, replace self-interested and more-informed decisions with political edicts from on high, and reduce economic efficiency by punishing the increased division of labor that necessarily emerges in a free (global) economy. The number of correct policy decisions made by this bumbling idiot in the White House remains steady at one: to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, and that’s just a promise at this point.

Raise your hand if your economic philosophy openly and proudly promotes mutual prosperity, complete freedom of trade, and a worldwide division of labor, with all the peace and cooperation that come along with it.

Why are our chances of reaching a great age so affected by wealth and status? The obvious answer is that more income buys better health. But it is a lot more subtle than that, as shown three decades ago by the Whitehall Study, in which epidemiologist Michael Marmot examined the death rates of British civil servants. To the surprise of many, he found that his subjects—all in continuous paid employment and with equal access to health care—were more likely to die in any given year if they were in a lower-grade job than a higher one. Marmot concluded that the employment hierarchy itself created status-dependent stress that affected the workers’ health.

In their new book, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett extend this idea with a far-reaching analysis of the social consequences of income inequality. Using statistics from reputable independent sources, they compare indices of health and social development in 23 of the world’s richest nations and in the individual US states. Their striking conclusion is that the societies that do best for their citizens are those with the narrowest income differentials—such as Japan and the Nordic countries and the US state of New Hampshire. The most unequal—the United States as a whole, the United Kingdom and Portugal—do worst.

Many measures of the quality of life, including life expectancy, are correlated with the degree of economic equality in each country. A variety of problems such as mental illness, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unwillingness to engage with education, misuse of illegal and prescription drugs, teenage pregnancy, lack of social mobility and neglect of child welfare increase with greater inequality. Violence, from murder to the bullying of children at school, follows the same pattern. These trends are tied up with issues of trust: the authors chart a profound decline in trust in the United States from the 1960s to the present, which matches rising inequality during the long Republican ascendancy.

First of all, while I am far from defending Republicans, the authors’ and/or the reviewer’s assertion that Republicans carry most of the blame for inequality and mistrust is absurd and puts the rest of their arguments under suspicion. Anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention knows Republicans have been growing more and more left-liberal over the years, to the point that we have neocons that resemble Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt more than Eisenhower or Goldwater or any other politician associated with conservatism in the 1950′s and 1960′s. Second, what “long Republican ascendancy”? And what exactly did the idiots in the Democratic Party do to stem this rising tide of inequality? Tax and spend and inflate and ruin schools and destroy families and wage a war on drugs? Which was different from Republicans…how?

The review continues:

How can inequality affect such a diverse set of social problems so profoundly? The authors make a compelling case that the key is neuroendocrinological stress, provoked by a perception that others enjoy a higher status than oneself, undermining self-esteem. This triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure and blood sugar levels, from which myriad health and social problems unfold. This seemingly hard-wired response has been well studied in social hierarchies of monkeys; low-status animals become predisposed to atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. Humans experiencing chronic stress exhibit similar symptoms, accumulating abdominal fat under the influence of a part of the brain associated with addiction.

Cortisol overrides ‘feel-good hormones’ such as oxytocin, involved in establishing trust, and dopamine, the reward signal that reinforces memory, attention and problem-solving ability. Cortisol-induced stress predisposes some individuals to mental illness or violent behaviour. It can hasten the arrival of puberty, which may prompt premature sexual adventures, providing a plausible explanation of the high prevalence of teenage pregnancies in the most unequal societies. Cortisol also transmits stress to a fetus, with lasting consequences for physical and emotional development.

I have heard about some of that research, and it is probably all valid as far as it goes. The only problem is: cortisol doesn’t know why it is released or what situations it is acting in. It only increases our perceived stress level, whatever that means; it’s a broad term. These authors would have us believe that success (wealth and high-level job status) necessarily and systematically involves less stress than mediocrity and even poverty. I don’t believe it for a minute. That sounds like the tendency, driven by class-envy and class-warfare, of liberals to refer to poor people as the “working class,” as if wealthy, educated people earned their status by privilege and conniving. The opposite is usually true. Successful people typically work harder and longer than others to get there, and get rewarded with more stress, more responsibility, and less free time. Smart, industrious people, who are more often “successful” than others, I think, experience plenty of stress during high school, college, graduate school, and after. The cortisol doesn’t know the difference; it doesn’t know whether it’s being released because of the pressures of succeeding or the stresses of not succeeding. Neither, I’d wager, do our bodies or our lower-level neural functions.

The research with primates showing that animals lower in their social hierarchy are less healthy than the higher-status animals offers one good argument against mine, namely, that monkeys might not have the higher cognitive functions and psychology that allow humans to differentiate between, and fret over, different types of stress like socioeconomic stress, the pressure to succeed at a difficult job/school, the stress of having little free time, raising kids, your country descending into a poverty-ridden police state, etc.—but the monkeys still suffer from their hierarchy-related stress, which I think has been shown to be correlated with (maybe caused by?) cortisol. This would at least partially invalidate my notion that cortisol affects our organs and nervous systems the same regardless of what our higher-level (uniquely human) psychologies perceive as the causes of our stress, because if monkeys, with their sub-human brains and incapacity for understanding subtle differences between stressors, are still harmed by the stresses of being lower on the totem pole, then maybe different stressors affect humans differently in some fundamental way, even though the hormone (cortisol) is the same and all of our other organs, including the brain, are basically similar across a large population. (If there were some fundamental, neurological differences between people who end up wealthy and those who don’t, which is absurd, then those would likely be the causes of their bad health, not the inequality.)

(Then again, maybe we should give primates more credit because maybe they can differentiate between different stressors about as well as we can.)

One aspect of the primate studies that might make them invalid to be compared with human societies is: I don’t know that higher-status monkeys experience all that much stress, the way higher-status people do. Do wealthy humans in executive-level jobs have lower cortisol levels than others? Does this relate to the higher-status monkeys in any meaningful way? Probably not.

The book also addresses the impact of inequality on the hormone oxytocin, dubbed the “trust hormone.” Cortisol reduces the effectiveness of oxytocin, which the authors skew to imply that mediocrity- and poverty-induced stress makes humans less trustful of others and exacerbates their psychological, and therefore physiological, problems. Same thing for dopamine.

Not surprisingly, libertarian social and economic theory offers solutions to both the problems addressed by the book and the problems with its analysis. Libertarians have explained extensively how certain Statist policies increase inequality. Four such things are inflation, government schooling, dependence-inducing social-welfare programs, and outlawing of vices (prostitution and the War on Drugs, which keep urban minorities poor and in a state of war with police and each other). Libertarianism also explains that nations that extend their welfare states to such an extent that these inequalities are mitigated (France, Scandinavia) make everyone poorer, not everyone richer. Wilkinson and Pickett would argue that the greater good is evidently served by making society poorer but equaler rather than making everyone richer but some more than others. That isn’t a metaphysical impossibility, but the problem is that this can only be true in the short run; as Mises and Hayek showed, a middle-of-the-road policy must lead to totalitarian socialism.

To dispense with the odd claim that a massive welfare state can make people more trusting and friendly towards each other, one only needs to peek out of his ivory tower and look at the world for a minute or two. Almost everything the State does causes demonstrably more strife and divisiveness among its subjects, as political instead of economic decision-making pits factions against each other and each new interference with our freedoms of exchange and association lead us to seek more of the pie, more control over others—lest they take our slice along with our control over ourselves.

Lastly, libertarians of all stripes assert that true market anarchism would reduce the sizes of the upper and lower classes, putting more people into the middle class while making everyone richer in the long run. I have never seen anything in any Statist theory or governmental program that would reduce the influence of the power elite while enlarging the economic pie for everyone. Government takes and redistributes; it doesn’t create wealth or facilitate the growth of wealth. It rewards the rich and powerful by giving favors, protection, and barriers to entry into most industries; it limits the options of the poor by insisting on running their schools and providing for them while turning our cities into police states; and it squanders everyone’s wealth by inflation and immeasurable waste.

Her friends’ responses: “hear hear!” “No guns and arms? That settles it, no more gym.” (admittedly, kind of funny) “But then what the hell am I going to do in Texas? Ah well at least I can still drink and drive.” “True dat!”

No kidding! We should probably also make murder illegal—that would really dissuade demented psychopaths from murdering anybody!

This country sucks because its citizens suck, and it’s only going to get suckier in my lifetime. I am more afraid of fascist police-state advocates like these than I am of gun-wielding maniacs. Mainly because the government will always have guns.

Do these people ever notice that the frequency of maniacal public shootings like the one in Binghamton, NY, has only increased in recent decades along with the increase in police-state measures like gun-control laws? Correlation does not prove causality, but it sure as hell doesn’t prove that the measures prevent mass murders! Get it through your head: We already have somewhat strict gun-control laws, no additional number or severity of gun-control laws will keep guns out of the United States, murderous psychopaths are never swayed by the existing laws against murder or against owning the guns, they will simply turn to bombings or something else if they can’t get ahold of a gun easily, the government will ALWAYS have guns and that is a bad thing (which was the entire point of the Second Amendment), a society would be better off trying to keep people from wanting to shoot 30 people instead of preventing anyone from owning a gun, and the increasing influence that the State has had in our lives during the last century is most definitely a significant source of the strife, hatred, poverty, desperation, isolation, and psychosis that drives people to public mass murder.

Because they shouldn’t pay for anything. Associated Press reports:

Eight years of frustration are close to an end for scientists seeking ways to use embryonic stem cells to combat illness and injury.

On Monday, President Barack Obama plans to reverse limits imposed by President George W. Bush on using federal money for research with embryonic stem cells.
[...]
But it stirs intense controversy over whether government crosses a moral line with such research, and opponents promptly denounced the move.

The moral line is crossed not when the State decides to fund some controversial or questionable endeavor, but when it forces anyone to pay for anything he finds objectionable. The pertinent part of the matter is not how useful the stem cell research will be (probably moderately) or whether there is some objective ethical standard that the State is adhering to or violating (there probably isn’t). The most important issue is that the State makes one rule for everyone and forces everyone to fund its decisions, no matter how unethical or immoral some people find them.

I was proud to say I voted against my state’s ballot initiative that would allow already-available tax money to be spent on stem cell research in my state. The issue was not whether I approved of the research that would be permitted; the issue was whether any single person whose tax dollars would fund it opposed it. There are many such people, and I stick up for them by siding with them in their fight to keep the government from taking their money against their will and funding things they abhor with it.

Most people don’t think that way. They think, “If you support it, vote Yes; if you oppose it, vote No. That’s what a ballot proposal is for. The side with the most supporters wins, and by the way you should think like me.” How abominable. How monstrous. How barbaric. It is by propagating that type of attitude that democratic governments secure their power over their subjects: pit the citizens against themselves and condition them to believe the good of the society lies in securing the police power of government and forcing their way of life on the minority. Democracy is mob-rule. It is Might Makes Right. Invoking the right of the majority or the authority of the State (when it happens to be on your side) automatically and instantaneously puts you in the wrong.

The bellowing blowhard busybody brigade complains these crosses — built on land the church owns, with money freely given to the church for that purpose — would encroach upon the views from their yards. Sad as that may be, the view from your yard stops being your own private property once you start looking over another’s land.
[...]
Of course, we are informed government zoning laws require shorter crosses. No doubt; that’s exactly why government zoning is a ridiculous and petty tyranny. Such laws should be immediately and completely abolished.

Leave South Hills Church alone. What goes up on their own property is their own business.

How terrible it would be for a church to have three crosses that are larger than some petty criminals decided should be the limit for “accessory structures.” Almost as bad as citizens, legislators, and bureaucrats threatening to fine, imprison, and, if resisted, murder the church property owners for daring to do what they want with their own property (and only their own property).

I’ve never even been to Nevada, but I bet Charles didn’t really think such principled advocation of property rights would be looked upon favorably by a city newspaper. (Update: Well, Vin Suprynowicz writes for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and they’ve tolerated him for years, but this was a different paper.)

I understand the objection that many Statists have to a hypothetical world without zoning laws. People would have to suffer hog-fat rendering plants on one side of their homes and airports on another! I doubt that would happen, for a variety of reasons. For instance, homesteading rights for homeowners and homeowners’ associations who were there first and protection against pollution from industrial properties, in a libertarian, common-law tradition, would serve us just fine. And, admit it: the free market is capable of innovating and implementing myriad solutions that you and I and (especially) State bureaucrats never would have thought of. It isn’t a good idea for Statists to deny this truth anymore; steadfast opposition to any and all individual freedoms is more consistent.

Statists imagine that homes and businesses would be ugly, they would pollute, they would be loud, they would generally be impossible to deal with and would lower everyone’s property values, without the stern fist of the State to impose order upon them. Yes, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it. What a nightmare. Almost as hellish as living under a monopolistic state that wastes trillions of dollars and destroys wealth with unmatched tenacity; that extracts property taxes, income taxes, estate taxes, sales taxes, capital gains taxes, and every other tax it can get away with and shoots you dead if you protest enough; that monopolizes the currency, the utilities, the justice [sic] system, the education system; that, in an increasingly transparent and brazen (or clueless) fashion enriches itself at the expense of its subjects; that operates by threatening, fining, beating, kidnapping, enslaving, and murdering people who do things with their own property that it disapproves of—those are far, far worse, by many orders of magnitude, than living across the street from a church that builds three large crosses on its own property.

Disregarding even the rampant hypocrisy of lashing out at senators from other states who could be said to be acting merely in self-defense when they opposed the bailout (which amounted to transferring dollars from their constituents to Michigan residents), we see even more hypocrisy in the fact that the same people who wanted the automotive companies to be given even more taxpayer money than they have (so far) been given scoff at the idea of a bailout of the porno industry.

Today the WRIF morning show interviewed Joe Francis, the producer of the Girls Gone Wild franchise, and before they got him on the phone they were laughing derisively at the idea that the Imperial Federal Government should bail out the pornography industry. Joe Francis and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt have made an official plea to Congress to give pornographers a $5 billion donation because the recession has made people more depressed and their sex drives have therefore diminished. The porno industry can help millions of Americans, they claim, so it should be bailed out for the good of the country.

How many people are employed by the pornography industry? How many people buy its products? What percentage of the American economy is due to pornography? (I don’t know the exact numbers and don’t care, though I could probably find out with Google.) Since Americans actually want pornography and pay a lot of money for it, two facts that distinguish it from American cars, the pornography industry might be deemed more worthy of saving than American automakers. There is exactly nothing that makes GM or Chrysler more deserving of saving than any porno company. (Of course, there is nothing that makes any company worthy of receiving taxpayer dollars, but then again there isn’t even a government worthy of receiving our money…)

Anyone claiming that one industry or group of companies should receive loans, grants, or bailouts from the federal government but another industry or group of companies shouldn’t is a complete hypocrite and cannot back up his claim with any principles of any kind. All this meddling by the government and rent-seeking by otherwise good and private companies creates a divisive, embittering attitude amongst the public—a feeling of “I have to grab my slice of pie from the State or else someone else will get it” or “We should get this or that amount of money and you shouldn’t!” Despite the incessant insistences of liberal anti-capitalists, this is not the nature of competition in free-market capitalism. As George Reisman wrote, “The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.” Competition in this atmosphere of socialist wealth-redistribution and political (instead of economic) decision-making is embittering, divisive, and wealth-destroying.

P.S. I wonder how many spam comments this post will receive, with all the instances of the word “pornography” and its derivations in the post…

After an introduction to the workings of customary legal systems in earlier societies, the rest of Benson’s book to this point focuses on the “transfer theory of government,” i.e., the hypothesis that modern legal systems were consciously and specifically directed towards taking property from less powerful people to give it to more powerful people.

He explains how local judges and other authorities, who were employed by and reported to the king, forced the king’s laws onto the public and forcibly extracted payment from them:

By 1168, circuit tax collectors and itinerant justices had become another “great subdivision” of the royal court. The itinerant justices conducted royal inquests regarding financial issues and issues of justice, and they transmitted royal commands to counties and hundreds [towns or groups of towns; a subdivision of a county in Medieval England]. The justices also amerced [fined] frankpledge groups that failed to or refused to fulfill their policing duties, fined communities that did not form all men into frankpledge groups, and amerced both communities and hundreds that failed to pursue criminals or report all crimes through inquest juries. Such amercements were increasingly important, implying that the positive reciprocal incentives of the populace to participate in law enforcement were extremely weak.

I.e., whereas everyone in the community has a common, reciprocal interest in both obeying customary law and demanding obeyance in others, they see no such benefit in obeying Statist law, which is why they must be forced to.

Perhaps you will be as intrigued as I was in this interpretation of the meaning and purpose of the Magna Carta, which I had never heard before:

The king’s drive for revenues and power caused considerable discontent, particularly during John’s reign. In 1215, powerful barons renounced their homage to the king and revolted, demanding a document that would specify the laws and customs that would govern them.

On June 19, 1215, John put his seal on the Magna Carta, which is widely perceived as a significant foundation of Anglo-American constitutional government. “According to the great justice Sir Edward Coke and others, Magna Carta had saved England from the rule of tyrants, had consecrated basic civil and political rights, and had germinated English Constitutional government.”¹ The thirteenth-century barons were depicted as men seeking to secure the rights of all men, not just the nobles. In fact, the charter reflected an effort by barons and other powerful groups (e.g., the English Church) to regain their power and privilege that kings subsequent to Henry I had been eroding. The revenue-taking of the kings in many forms was now considered illegal, and Magna Carta re-established the barons’ feudal right to confiscate felons’ land. In addition, “no free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any wise destroyed, save by the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.”² This passage is widely interpreted as a guarantee of trial by jury for all Englishmen, as a prohibition of arbitrary imprisonment, and as a grant of equal justice for all (due process). In fact, it was intended to force King John to guarantee trial for barons before their peers under existing feudal procedure, and it established the “germ” of due process for the feudal aristocracy.

From this very early period of government expansion in law and law enforcement, legal “reform” was carried out in the context of the government institutional system of the time. This should not be surprising. Those institutions were developed to transfer wealth to powerful groups; the barons would likely retain them, anticipating their own benefit.

Three powerful groups combined in competition with King John to force him to affirm Magna Carta. In addition to the barons and the prelates of the English Church, the merchants were eager to translate their growing economic power into political power. Magna Carta guaranteed freedom of travel, for instance (a privilege merchants had had for some time), merchants were freed from “evil and excessive tolls,” and the boroughs were guaranteed the liberties and privileges already granted.³ None of these really represented significant changes, but most of Magna Carta was backward-looking rather than forward-looking, re-establishing rights and privileges that barons had once enjoyed.

This vaunted document and glorious occasion might have been an improvement on the status quo, but we see two things that were true of states in 1215 that remain equally true today: 1) monopolistic states engender conflict and competition between individuals and groups, they create incentives for people to organize themselves into factions that will compete against each other, and they both encourage and allow these groups to use the violent, deadly police power of the law to harm others for their own benefit; 2) further legislation, such as the Magna Carta, is not the best way to ensure freedom, privileges, wealth, and peace; rather, simply getting rid of existing State activities would allow peace and prosperity to return as it naturally would have existed all along in the absence of the State and its encroaching laws.

One more passage, on lawyers and their licensing:

There were well-formulated reasons why the “evolution of the class [of legal advisors] had been slow, for it has been withstood by ancient principles.”⁴ Individuals not skilled in the art of pleading were less likely to be able to conceal their guilt. Furthermore, one litigant might be unable to hire a skilled spokesman while another could. Thus, rather than give one litigant an unfair advantage, custom developed whereby professional councillors and pleaders were not allowed. By the early thirteenth century, however, pleaders had begun to appear. The earliest records of a pleader identify John de Planez as pleading on behalf of Henry II, and Richard had a permanent contingency of pleaders. As with other legal developments under the English kings, the legal profession was developed to give additional advantage to the king. [emphasis added]

London began to license two distinct groups of legal professionals—attorneys and pleaders—in 1280, but the king’s justices took control of the licensing function in 1292 and severely limited entry into both branches of the profession. …Attorneys and counters had become licensed court appointees and quickly evolved into an organized professional group. Common law was becoming case law; those who wished to learn the profession joined guilds or fraternities that
eventually developed into the Inns of Court, the English law schools.

These professional lawyers had an immediate effect. Legal procedure became much more complex than it had previously been…. In addition, lawyers, rather than ecclesiastical clerics, became the primary candidates for royal judges. The resulting insulation from Roman law “permitted the common law system to become a confusing puzzle of undefined principles. It became cumbersome and ill-equipped to keep pace with the new demands made upon it by political, economic, and social change.”⁵

Benson also goes on to note that trial by jury was considered to imply an automatic guilty verdict, so defendants were coaxed and forced to accept trial by jury. This is slightly different from today’s Western jury-trial systems, in which prosecutors pressure innocent defendants to accept plea-bargains; but our system is similar in that juries are easily manipulated by trickery, legal jargon, intimidation, emotionalism, and outright exclusion by Statist lawyers and judges, leading to the same result of juries rendering guilty verdicts too often, especially for victimless crimes, and anyway, lots of innocent defendants accept plea bargains because they (or, their attorneys) know how reliably juries will rule in favor of the State.

In summary: 1) There is much evidence, in the legal structure Medieval England after the Norman conquest, in favor of the transfer theory of government, with many activities and institutions clearly having been instituted deliberately and consciously to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. (If a State apologist would claim that such deliberate malice was unlikely and, anyway, doesn’t continue today, then that makes the case against authoritarian Statist law and in favor of anarchic customary law even stronger because then no reform, not even electing exclusively honest and upstanding statesmen of a certain political party, can rescue the system of pervasive injustice.)

2) From very early on, there was a vast disconnect between what was legal or illegal and what was right or wrong. The law was completely unprincipled and arbitrary. This corrupting trend, which continues more strongly than ever today, sows contempt for the law and disrespect for other members of society.

3) When State employees and other powerful lobbying groups institute reforms that they claim are for the common good, the State employees and those who deal with the State are probably the ones who will benefit, and any peripheral benefits the masses enjoy are minimal and coincidental. While it is true that the Magna Carta led to further reforms of English common law that might have provided real benefit to the public, it seems obvious that abolishing the government activities that necessitated such proclamations in the first place would have been a faster, fairer, and longer-lasting method of giving justice (and thereby peace and prosperity) to the masses.

4) Beginning in the infant stages of proto-English common law, the positions of lawyer, judge, and juror were created, licensed, and employed specifically and deliberately to ensure verdicts favorable to the State and thereby increase its theft of the public’s wealth. The profession of attorney was created, licensed, and supervised by the king’s underlings and, to some extent, the King of England himself, for the specific purposes of giving the State an advantage in trials, reducing competition/erecting barriers to entry, making the law so needlessly complex and esoteric that only licensed attorneys could understand it, and ensuring that lawyers (who would eventually become judges) were lackeys of the king from day one. Sound familiar?

Benson’s references:
1. Bruce Lyon, A Constitutional and Legal History of Medieval England, 2nd ed., pp. 310-311.
2. Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederick W. Maitland, History of English Law, vol. 2, pp. 171-172.
3. Lyon, pg. 316.
4. Pollock and Maitland, vol. 1, pg. 211.
5. Lyon, pg. 438.