Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.
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In the early 20th Century, a different moral panic gripped the United States: a rural nation was rapidly moving to anonymous cities, sexual mores were changing, and Americans became convinced that an epidemic of white female slavery was sweeping the land. Thus a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport any person across state lines for prostitution “or for any other immoral purpose.” Suddenly premarital sex and adultery had been criminalized, as scam artists would quickly figure out. “Women would lure male conventioneers across a state line, say from New York to Atlantic City, New Jersey,” David Langum explains, “and then threaten to expose them to the prosecutors for violation” unless paid off. Inveighing against the law, the New York Times noted that, though it was officially called the White Slave Traffic Act (aka The Mann Act), a more apt name would’ve been “the Encouragement of Blackmail Act.”

That name is what brought the anecdote back to me. A better name for the child pornography bill would be The Encouragement of Blackmail by Law Enforcement Act. At issue is how to catch child pornographers. It’s too hard now, say the bill’s backers, and I can sympathize. It’s their solution that appalls me: under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you’ve been assigned.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American.” Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

I kid you not — that’s it.

As written, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 doesn’t require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history — being suspected of any crime is enough. (It may even be made available in civil matters like divorce trials or child custody battles.) Nor do police need probable cause to search this information. As Rep. James Sensenbrenner says, (R-Wisc.) “It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I’m not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children.”

Among those risks: blackmail.

In Communist countries, where the ruling class routinely dug up embarrassing information on citizens as a bulwark against dissent, the secret police never dreamed of an information trove as perfect for targeting innocent people as a full Internet history. Phrases I’ve Googled in the course of researching this item include “moral panic about child pornography” and “blackmailing enemies with Internet history.” For most people, it’s easy enough to recall terms you’ve searched that could be taken out of context, and of course there are lots of Americans who do things online that are perfectly legal, but would be embarrassing if made public even with context: medical problems and adult pornography are only the beginning. …

You’d thing that Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who claims on his Web site to be “an outspoken defender of individual privacy rights,” wouldn’t lend his name to this bill. But he co-sponsored it! You’d think that the Justice Department of Eric Holder, who is supposed to be friendly to civil libertarians, would oppose this bill. Just the opposite.

(I didn’t quote the part about tea partiers failing to oppose it because they obviously have, once they have heard about it.)

I’m not the least bit surprised Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder supports (supported?) this bill. It’s completely consistent with this regime’s hunger for power and disregard for all civil liberties.

You know what else wasn’t surprising? Lamar Smith (R-TX), who introduced SOPA in the House, also introduced PCIPA on May 25, 2011. He is a frightening, alarming, parasitic, authoritarian control freak whose every action and word seem to prove that he should have no access to power of any kind.

Basically, New Hampshire state thugs kidnapped Johnathon Irish’s and Stephanie Taylor’s newborn baby from the hospital because they believed Irish was a danger to the baby due to his membership in the Oath Keepers, a non-violence advocacy, Constitution advocacy organization consisting of former military and law-enforcement members that opposes the violation of Constitutional and other civil liberties by governments. According to the Fox News report linked to above, there were also allegations, presumably by the same thugs, that Irish had physically abused the baby’s mother. I don’t know about that, but there are two things to say about that accusation before knowing whether it is true: 1) Crying “Abuse!” is easy for any government agency to do when they want to backpedal or makes excuses for their obvious crime of kidnapping. 2) If a father is a danger to his baby or baby-mama because of a past record of abuse, then the solution is to arrest him and charge him with a crime instead of kidnapping the baby! How freaking hard is that to understand?

It is not specific, isolated incidents like these, per se, that indict child protective services and other bureaucracies, in my mind. It is the fact that they have the power, officially sanctioned and considered legitimate by many, to commit such crimes in the first place. Kidnappings and murders and rapes and all kinds of other crimes can and will be committed in any society, for nearly every imaginable reason, but the fact that voters and politicians and the laws they write not only fail to prevent such child abuse from happening but empower State thugs to commit it is why I oppose the system.

The greatest problem with these systems is that getting rid of a few bad apples and booting out incumbent politicians obviously won’t solve anything. This crime of kidnapping a newborn baby from its mother because of alleged danger from the father happened because the New Hampshire state government thought it was intervening for the good of the baby. Maternalistic and paternalistic laws exist for the good of society, but the force of State power cannot produce any good because the State must violate some people’s rights in order to protect anyone. Most often it ends up violating the rights of the very people it purports to help. The kidnapping of Cheyenne Irish is another of a million examples of harm done in the name of helping. Cheyenne was temporarily denied the closeness to her mother that helps the mother–baby bond form, and Stephanie Taylor was denied the ability to nurse and care for her baby for the several days that the baby was in State custody. From a libertarian negative-rights perspective, I don’t think either of those could be considered a right; rather, a mother, father, and baby have the right for no one to interfere with their care and custody of their baby unless the baby is clearly in danger. Clearly, she wasn’t.

While the State committed this crime, any kidnapping could be committed for any reason in a free society. Perhaps people would argue that a State that actively tries to protect its subjects, including (or especially) babies, would have fewer kidnappings (and all kinds of other crimes) than a free society, so we shouldn’t tear down the system because of a few inevitable flaws. That’s a reasonable argument, but one that I would be on the right side of and wouldn’t be swayed to the incorrect side of. That debate would probably just consist of both sides saying, “Yah-huh,” and, “Nah-uh,” so I don’t know how productive or interesting it would be. My main argument would be that in a free society, at least there would be no laws or official sanctioning of kidnapping children in the name of helping them. This would be because there would be no avenue or infrastructure for people with the arrogance and megalomania to deem themselves worthy of protecting society to write or enforce such laws.

As a tangential discussion, it is important to keep in mind that if a child suffers physical or emotional abuse, there is nothing special about the State that grants it and only it the right to remove the child from his home and prevent the abusers from reaching him. An abusive parent has immediately, automatically, and permanently relinquished his right to have any form of contact with the victim, pending the victim’s later forgiveness or desire to make some type of amends. However, this does not mean the State is legitimate in taking custody of the child any more than the State is legitimate in doing anything. In any individual case, the State might help a child or even save a child’s life by putting him in a foster home instead of letting him suffer abuse for years and years, but the State is no better at protecting a child than neighbors, friends, family, charities, churches, and other religious groups. (The State’s destruction and impoverishment of the inner city, where most child abuse probably takes place, is another reason its caring/protecting programs should be eliminated along with the rest of it.)

The actual abuse a child has suffered or the actual danger a child is in, in addition to which person(s) to transfer custody to and the faculty of the child to decide for himself, are subject to debate and legal action in the court system that exists in any society. Therefore, in either a Statist or a free society, neither child abuse nor groundsless “protective” kidnapping is likely to run rampant without being checked by enforceable legal action or concerned community interference. However, I would feel much more comfortable trusting child-care decisions to parents in either a free or Statist society and, after that, to neighbors, family, friends, and charities in a free or Statist society than to any government. I put my trust in regular, decent people, who almost invariably show more goodwill and kindness when left to their own devices than when commanded by an authority, than I do in any governments, which have proven for thousands of years across the world to clamor for ever more power and to abuse the power they are given.

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.

Brother: Oh, can I add some political talk here? I encourage you to go vote your convictions and vote early if you can. We just got back from voting. I know you’re not happy (esp with the presidential election) but if you vote for the best candidate in your view in spite of the odds, then you are truly voting for liberty!!

Me: I think, in some weird way, that you’re encouraging me to go vote, even if it’s for Ron Paul. However, I regret to inform you that I don’t vote. Period. I summed up my reasons for succinctly here: http://www.blagnet.net/2008/09/10/why-i-dont-vote/ Ron Paul was the glowing exception in this past presidential primary because he was the only candidate who stood for almost everything I did, and more importantly, he wanted to STOP running peoples lives. Unfortunately, it seems the general American populace doesn’t like that idea. They’re enamored with the notion that someone out there is going to be in charge, even if they do horrible things in our names ($700 billion bailouts, for example).

Brother: Yeah, honestly I had heard about your article but wasn’t sure how to ask you about it. I had not read it until just now.

I think the unfortunate thing about the country is that at each stage the government has grabbed more responsibility and taken away more rights. It’s part of the cycle of history. I’m just choosing to fight it as best I can. I am just one person after all. I voted for the lesser of two evils…both men are more socialist than I’d like.

P.S. – Doesn’t a vote against anything that takes away liberty say more than the lack of a vote? I mean, if you don’t vote “pro-liberty” on the four GA constitutional amendments (at least), then you’re just leaving it in the hands of someone else…the alternative to voting on the issues is to take matters in your own hands and have a revolution with arms (i.e. big guns and bombs).

Me: From whom did you hear about my article? My facebook status?

I can’t find the quote, but I believe Jefferson once said something to the effect that history has shown us that it is the natural course for government to grow at the expense of liberty. It’s not just this government that confiscates your freedom over time, but any such government you would attempt to implement. Hence why I’m an anarchist.

I’m assuming you voted for McCain, but that letter already spelled out why I don’t vote for the lesser of two evils. To make it more specific to the current political climate, even if I did consider McCain the lesser evil of the two (I don’t – they’re both equally as horrible), giving him my vote is a direct endorsement from me to carry out any action he desires in my name. So while he may give the upper class a 3% tax reduction over Obama, what if he decides to bomb Iran? I certainly don’t want that. But if I gave him my vote, that means he can do it with my full backing. No thanks. Choosing between the lesser of two evils is a false choice. It’s like being asked if you would like to be killed by firing squad or by hanging.

I will admit, I didn’t even realize there were amendments to be considered on the ballot. Maybe I’m a bad citizen after all. However, amending the constitution is a worthless exercise anyway. The constitution – US or Georgia – after all is only a worthless sheet of paper. I imagine when I say that, most people freak out, since the Constitution is supposed to be Holy Writ. And I don’t say that because I dislike the Constitution, but rather because I realize that it is unenforceable. But why should it be? If you and I had entered into a contractual agreement, and then decided that all recourse for violations of that contract would be decided and enforced by me, would it surprise you then if I started to violate the original contract whenever it was beneficial to me? You would think that contract is useless. Why is it then that people think that government is bound by our Constitution when it is also the interpreter and enforcer of it? It’s obvious from American history that the government doesn’t care for it’s own restrictive contract, which the occasional glowing exception.

As for those amendments, I must admit they make for interesting internal debate. For instance, should people get tax cuts for using private land for forest conservation? On one hand, I like tax cuts. On the other, the government shouldn’t tell people what to do with their land. Curious.

As for your revolution, there are other methods I think. One is a revolution of minds – not of arms. In other words, if we educate enough people of the evils of the state, then either we force the state to show their true colors by trying to put down that threat – pulling more people to our cause. Or, and this is the path I think is more likely, letting the state continue on it’s destructive ways until it implodes on itself. Then, hopefully, when rebuilding from the ashes we can convince everyone to not put anything in it’s place.

Anyway, yeah. I’ll let you guys know about dinner.

Me: PS: Also, as a follow up, given that the Constitution is ineffective because the government is the controller of the strings, why is it that you think voting in their rigged system is the correct course of action to bring about effective change? It seems to me that would be the LEAST effective route to take.

It should be noted that I blatantly stole the firing squad/hanging comparison from Mike as well.

‘Imagine if every child in the country channelled their Pester Power in service of the Glorious Green Future.’

So says James Russell in his recent book How to Turn Your Parents Green. And he’s far from alone in his musings. npower, a large British electriciy supplier, have also been envisaging a world in which kids, renamed Climate Cops, are instructed to ferret out ‘climate crimes’ in their homes, schools and cities and report them to the authorities, that is, in Russell’s words, to ‘nag, pester, bug, torment and punish the people who are merrily wrecking [their] world’, fining ‘transgressors’ for non-compliance with green orthodoxy.

This is no idle dream. Greens seem determined to convert the nation’s children into environmentalist versions of Mao’s Red Guards, the blindly-revolutionary youths who spearheaded China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution.

In his book, Russell tries to stir up hatred against ‘Groans’ (grown-ups) and their wasteful ways, and encourages children to become ‘Guardians of the Glorious Green Future’, nagging until their parents sign a ‘Glorious Green Charter’.
[...]
All they [the grown-ups] bellow is ‘MORE, CHEAPER!’ and ‘MAKE LIFE EASY!’, ‘slumped in front of the TV’ or ‘salivating over a holiday brochure’. They are ‘merrily wrecking your world… cranking up the heating so you can’t breathe’, chucking out ‘mountains of Revolting Rubbish’, spraying ‘Fiendish Fertilisers and Pestilential Pesticides’ and even ‘poisoning the air you breathe’ with their cleaning sprays. Worst of all, they simply don’t care: ‘People die, they say with a shrug.’

Every contemporary prejudice and fear is somehow woven into the alarmist narrative. Nuclear power is dangerous; plastic bags are apparently strangling Rwandan farmland; household cleaning products are killing Mother Nature; supermarkets are soulless, anti-social pillagers of the environment; development is robbing children of opportunities to play outside; even obesity is tied in – ‘What do you expect if people always use energy which isn’t their own?’

Adults ‘have got us into this mess and they’re too busy goggling at the TV and booking exotic holidays to sort it out… Only you can make the Groans behave because only you can make their lives a misery if they don’t’, the book instructs. The suggestions are so puritanical and authoritarian they might even make spiked’s Ethan Greenhart blush. Kids should patrol for ‘poisons’, demand they be replaced with eco-friendly products, monitor the depths of baths and put time limits on showers; they should start ‘griping for organic carrots’ and clothing, insisting on walking instead of taking the car, ensuring taps aren’t running and toilets aren’t flushed (‘if it’s yellow, let it mellow…’). The list goes on, and an escalating system of fines is to be collected weekly from ‘transgressors’ of the children’s Glorious Green Charter.
[...]
npower has created a new website encouraging kids to become ‘Climate Cops’, giving away diaries to ‘record climate crimes at home and in your community’ and to ‘encourage others to switch-off and conserve energy’. Children are instructed to email details of the ‘biggest climate crime’ to npower, which might send a team to ‘help you bust’ the perpetrators.

Kids should build up ‘case files’ and ‘report back to your family to make sure they don’t commit those crimes again (or else)!’. They are instructed to ‘keep a watchful eye over [the climate criminals] by revisiting the case every week or two to make sure they don’t slip back into any of their old habits’. After that, ‘What about the homes of your uncles, aunts or friends from school?’ Apparently, nowhere is safe from the new Green Guards.
[...]
The march of the ‘Guardians of the Glorious Green Future’ is sinister. It cannot help but remind one of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where thanks to organisations like the ‘Spies’, children ‘were turned into ungovernable little savages, yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the Party… it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State… thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak – “child hero” was the phrase generally used – had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police.’
[...]
Even if global warming is here, there is no reason to accept green policies. Most adults, let alone children, cannot assess independently the evidence for global warming. But adults can resist the imposition of a ‘solution’ that would puritanically destroy the fruits of economic development, deny them to ever-more people in the Third World, and leave everyone less prepared to face the challenges ahead. We are at least capable of thinking critically, understanding and defending our interests, and developing alternatives to miserabilist, doom-laden and retrogressive green ideology. [emphasis added]

It also ought to be obvious why environmentalists are targeting those people least able critically to assess what they are being told: it is a result of the very unpopularity of green ideas among adults. Poll after poll shows the British public does not buy environmentalists’ alarmism, believes the problem is being exaggerated, has faith in mankind’s ability to transcend environmental problems, and rejects the restrictive, retrogressive solutions preferred by greens. Unable to convince the adult population, environmentalists turn to more malleable minds.

One reason why greens seem able to entice children is because mainstream society seems to have lost its cultural authority over the next generation. Perhaps it is time that adults countered the green ideology of limits with a positive, progressive message, defending the fruits of material progress and their expansion to others around the world, and promoting people as problem-solvers who have historically managed to overcome their limitations rather than deriding them as mere problem-creators.

As a lobby for fully equal and uniform treatment by government for LGBT people (and ALL people) under the law, Outright Libertarians has a duty to its membership and the Libertarian Party to support the candidates who best fight for that principle at a local, state and federal level.

Only two Libertarians saw fit to release presidential press releases on this topic — effectively getting into the fight. And only one of those candidates embraced the proposition that equal protection of the law is not a discretionary thing to be implemented or revoked by pluralities, but an uncompromising and fundamental principle of the Constitution of our republic.

In the press release Dr. Phillies issued regarding the California decision and gay marriage in general, he said,

It is wonderful to hear that once again our Courts have defended our Constitutional rights. Once again, our courts have agreed that separate is not and cannot be equal.

I think from an overall government-reducing standpoint, this position is the wrong one to take. As I wrote a couple days ago, the problem is not that government treats people and their marriages/unions unequally; the problem is that it treats them at all. Romantic/familial/sexual relationships don’t have anything to do with government, and I’m confused as to why a so-called minarchist would think they do or should. The heterosexual-vs.-homosexual-marriage issue was created entirely by the State arrogating to itself the power to define what marriage is and license people to call themselves married. Less government, not more or different government, would solve the problem almost immediately.

Surprisingly, Bob Barr is on the right(er) side of this issue. I have not, am not, and will not ever endorse that drug warrior and military interventionist for any office or for any private position whatsoever, but he’s right about one part of this issue: the Constitution says nothing about marriage, the Imperial Federal Government should do nothing about marriage, it’s equally right (that is, wrong) for the Imperial Federal Government to ban same-sex marriages as it is to force all states to recognize them, and however you want to construe the 14th Amendment, the 10th Amendment takes precedence over it.

Using the central government to enforce your lifestyle values is equally as (un)just as Christian fundamentalists and other bigots doing the same for their values.

One of my friends’ Facebook status currently is: “completely thrilled about the California Supreme Court decision today!!!” She is referring to that court’s ruling that California’s ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional.

Since many people, including most of my friends and especially her, believe in the legitimacy of the State declaring things legal and illegal and then forcing everyone within its boundaries to comply with its decrees, it is easy to understand why they celebrate their side winning one in this culture war that the left and right wage on their Statist stage. It is less easy for me to understand why more people don’t catch on and realize that we shouldn’t be fighting and cheering for the State to make favorable decrees for our side, but rather for it not to arrogate to itself the power to make any such decisions at all.

This is the latest in a seemingly unending succession of examples of how the State divides good, caring, well-meaning people into factions and pits them against one another. Maybe if I write about every major example, such as this one, some more people will come to realize that the State promotes hatred, violence, and discord, not order, peace, or good will. I’m not sure how much more obvious it could be that this very issue is created entirely by the existence of a monopolistic State that enforces its dominion over a geographical area. In the absence of a single, final legal authority that arrogates to itself the unique power of legislating values, people would not be directing the guns of the government at others whose lifestyles they abhor, and, to the extent that they would consider it their business to interject, they would do so peacefully and respectfully, not violently and intolerantly. It is also obvious that in the absence of the State even defining what marriage is and in the absence of legislation granting tax/financial/insurance/other preferences to married couples but not to unmarried couples, people could call themselves married or not and neither suffer nor benefit legally from it.

Perhaps you would argue that the simple fact of the existence of the State doesn’t necessarily have to lead to exclusionist legislation on values and lifestyle. Perhaps you are an unrealistic, Utopian dreamer who sees the State through rose-colored glasses and refuses to admit its faults, its contradictions, and its impossibilities.

Logically and in principle, it was exactly as right (that is, wrong) for the state of California to outlaw gays from obtaining marriage licenses as it was for it to legalize it. As Mises argued and in contrast to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, human values are subjective and therefore not the object of moral philosophizing and certainly not for any (just) laws. Therefore, it is not correct to say that one of the rules is better than the other. “But,” you say, “the ban forcibly prevented people from doing something peaceful! It certainly is good from a libertarian perspective for courts to allow gays to marry legally and, better yet, for governments never to ban gay marriage to begin with!”

You have much to learn, young Jedi. What about the fundamentalist nutjobs who supported the ban and vehemently oppose the legalizing of gay marriage? They are forced to live under this new State-enforced value system. They are forced to pay taxes to it and subject themselves to its court system, which is unjust in their minds. I am not defending their desire to wield violent, deadly power over others; I am defending their right to live free of the legal and financial tyranny that is embodied by monopolistic government. Whatever the State decides on any matter, be it favorable to a minority or a majority, it will be unjust to some, usually to many. Although it is right to allow gay couples to give themselves the same marital status as heterosexuals, it is not right to force dissenters to live under the morality that such a governmental decree establishes.

This does not represent a decrease in State intrusion into our lives or a lessening of violations of our rights by the State. The State still defines what marriage “is”; it still makes people fill out legal documents to call themselves married and enjoy a status only legally “married” couples have; it still gives benefits to married couples that it doesn’t give to others. When the State keeps doing the same things it always was, but to more people more equally, that doesn’t entail a decrease in State power.

The only solution to this and every other problem caused by government is the complete abolition of all monopolistic government, everywhere and forever.

I will admit, I have to agree with the supporters of the decision, to this extent only: It is always a good thing for the State to be repealing laws and declaring them unconstitutional, and if it leads to a decrease in State influence in our lives, it should be celebrated. It should be celebrated only to the extent that it makes people realize the State shouldn’t be legislating anything like this at all, not to the extent that it represents a good decision or a decision in favor of the right side, because what is right for some is wrong for others, and that is precisely why Statism is an impossible, Utopian dream (nightmare, rather) and why it will always be the least just system of governance.

It is an understandable position, one I used to take in my darker, minarchist days. However, it is hard to deny the reality that often, the harm that a parent does to a child is not even as bad as the solution the State implements.

Take Christopher Ratte, a Tigers fan who bought his son a Mike’s Hard Lemonade at Comerica Park. He asked the concession stand guy for a lemonade, and he was given a lemonade with liquor in it. He didn’t know that “Mike’s Hard Lemonade” had alcohol in it (he claims). So, maybe he’s dumb and a little out of touch.

Naturally, since I’m writing about it, someone who works for the State found out. What might be an acceptable punishment for giving your 7-year-old son hard lemonade? A fine? Banishment from Comerica Park? A class on how to be a better parent?

Oh. Kidnapping the child and placing him in foster care. I guess I don’t know anything about parenting and even less about appropriate law enforcement. I’m sure they are doing what’s best, though, since they work for mother government. They would never be stupid or negligent enough to do something that would obviously harm a child. Especially something as bad as giving him alcohol.