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.
[...]
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.

On the bright side, the January 17 internet “blackout” day of protest against SOPA and PIPA prompted several lawmakers to withdraw their support for the respective bills, with 13 more following on January 18. As left-libertarians are fond of saying and other libertarians need to be more vocal and specific about, “public” or “community action” doesn’t have to mean voting and government action. Massive protests might very well have succeeded in killing these bills in their current forms.

Ron Paul has introduced a bill to repeal section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, the part that authorizes the President to order the military detention, without charge or trial, of any American citizen who has been labeled as having “substantially supported certain terrorist groups”. Yet another reason I think Ron Paul deserves more attention and praise, especially among libertarian anarchists who demur over actually supporting him because of perfectly valid philosophical reasons (they don’t like his stance on immigration, for instance, so they will not actually vote for or support the candidacy of anyone they have any differences with, or anyone at all, for that matter). Still, it becomes more obvious every day that he is on our side and does a great job spreading the message of liberty from his platform, which is that of a politician. As Glenn Greenwald would be quick to point out (actually, has already been), praising a few of Ron Paul’s positions, votes, and introduced bills doesn’t mean you’re going to vote for him, hope that he wins, agree with him 100% of the time, or even support democracy as an acceptable or effective means of change (well, Greenwald hasn’t mentioned this last one). I, for one, do hope he wins the Republican nomination and would probably vote for him if he did. In fact, I’m likely to vote for him in Michigan’s primary.

The city of Detroit will soon go bankrupt and its finances likely put under the the charge of a governor-appointed (corporate) emergency manager. When Michigan Governor Rick Snyder was elected in 2010, he received much criticism for his “emergency manager” law, which would place a bankrupt city’s finances under some type of corporate manager(s) appointed by him. This criticism reached new heights recently when he defended this law in his State of the State address, said it could apply to Detroit soon, and became the object of street protests outside his home. Maybe if Detroit hadn’t recklessly run up its debt as its revenue plummeted and its idiotic citizenry, led by both unions and corporations, hadn’t twice elected that worthless, disgusting abomination of a human being Kwame Kilpatrick as mayor, the city wouldn’t be in such financial ruin.

But of course Detroit unions oppose any substantial cuts or an emergency manager and basically seem to be saying they don’t want to suffer now, regardless of what this will mean for later. Many other voters, Republicans, and Democrats in and around Detroit are saying the same thing. My perspective on Detroit’s dilemma reminds me of the battle between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and government unions: it is perfectly libertarian and principled to oppose both the public-sector unions resisting the cuts and the governor’s proposals to balance budgets. That said, the city of Detroit and especially the people responsible for its finances don’t have the option of “well, we just oppose everything” and will have to choose some course that will result in its citizens and businesses losing either more or less money. I feel compelled to opine not only on the root causes of their problem (monopolistic government, democracy, a captive tax base, corporate–government collusion, union–government collusion) but also on the situation they currently face: bankruptcy and further debt and loss of money, or bankruptcy and a governor-appointed emergency financial manager. Maybe there are more options, but it’s hard to criticize the governor too much on this point. It seems almost certain that the Detroit city government will go bankrupt, so what’s wrong with an austerity plan that will make it less bad? Medicine tastes bad, but you have to take it. The opponents of the emergency manager say that it is undemocratic and requires too many concessions by unions. Well, democracy and government-supporting (especially Democrat-supporting) unions largely caused Detroit’s problems in the first place, so they sure as hell shouldn’t be relied on to solve its problems. The only thing that seems a little inequitable about the demand that unions make concessions to balance the budget is that unions aren’t responsible for all of the city’s debt; decades of mismanagement by officials and businesses are equally responsible, and they don’t appear to be required to make concessions or any types of payments or contributions to fix the problem they helped create.

The Monster Cable company claims EBay, Craigslist, Costco, Sears, Backpages, FatWallet, PriceGrabber, and ComputerShopper are “rogue” sites that should be targeted for takedown by the Imperial Federal Government, such as by SOPA/PIPA-type legislation, which of course it supports. While I have to admit I see nothing about a free society that would prevent a company like Monster Cable from existing and succeeding, that doesn’t mean I can’t rail on it for the dishonest, conniving, exploitative, Statist, anti-consumer, piece-of-shit company that it is. Monster Cable has issued cease-and-desist letters to other cable makers for completely frivolous patent infringement reasons. It has sued a mini golf company, an automotic transmission shop, and a deer salt block company for trademark infringement. Monster Cable’s entire business model, other than using the patent system and the courts to try to bully people into giving it money, seems to be exploiting customers who think more expensive HDMI cables are even one iota better than cheap ones. Regardless of company or price, all standard HDMI cables perform identically (barring some defect, which is vanishingly rare). It is not the least bit surprising that Monster endorses fascist government takedown of any website that treats consumers well or doesn’t subscribe to Monster’s fantastical acid trip of a definition of property, theft, and criminality. Fuck Monster Cable and everyone who works for it, especially its lawyers.

Speaking of SOPA, its author, Lamar Smith (R-TX) is, not surprisingly, a hypocrite who violated provisions of SOPA that would have labeled him a criminal. Lamar Smith is a despicable scumbag on the level of Kwame Kilpatrick. He’s a clueless Republican authoritarian control freak who ought to be locked away in a nuthouse for the rest of his life as a precaution for the rest of society.

In case you doubt how much power and influence the United States professional criminal class has on policies all around the world: the U.S. ambassador to Spain threatened to put Spain on a trade blacklist if it didn’t pass SOPA-style site-blocking legislation. Of course, Wikileaks, which has all but vanished from the news in recent months, leaked the documents that revealed this. Later, “American Chamber of Commerce in Spain chief Jaime Malet wrote a cautionary letter to incoming Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy. He warned of the potential flight of foreign investment from Spain and urged him to take action on the protection of intellectual property once in office.” Rajoy’s government responded by passing acceptable legislation, known as the Sinde law, within 10 days of taking office.

$56 billion later, airport security is still junk.

So far, 80% of “green energy” loans the Obama Department of Energy has issued have gone to top Obama donors, according to Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer.

Here then, is a practical guide to the Obama administration’s nonsensical solar policy: Washington gives tax breaks to Wall Street to fund LLCs [limited liability corporations] that buy solar panels from the Chinese to “help” the American solar industry, while the ITC [United States International Trade Commission] threatens to levy a tariff on those solar panels, which would raise the price of solar energy to U.S. homeowners. In short, Wall Street pockets the money and consumers get higher solar-energy prices.

We should stop reflexively indicting Wall Street “greed” and focus instead on Washington as the disruptive force in one market meltdown after another. Solyndra, the poster child of the Law of Misguided Subsidies, borders on irrelevancy compared to the full impact of bad economic policy.

Speaking of large internet-related companies, Canadian ISPs admitted that their pricing structure (which they call “usage-based billing”) is designed to discourage/reduce internet use by its customers. Cory Doctorow writes, “In other words, they’ve set out to limit the growth of networked based business and new kinds of services, and to prevent Canadians experimentation that enables them to use the Internet to its fullest.” Michael Geist, whom he quotes, says that this pricing model, therefore, is more accurately called behavior-based billing. As a rule, private companies in a free market always strive to attract more customers in order to do more business and make more money, in contrast to government-created “companies” and government agencies, which always seem to be seeking to limit the amount of products or services they have to provide to customers (water, electricity, every office you have to go and wait in line). This indicates that Canadian ISPs are not truly private companies in anything resembling a free market.

Another company that is not close to being entirely “private” and operates in a market that isn’t close to being free is Time Warner. Time Warner supported a bill in the North Carolina state legislature that would prevent city governments from introducing fiber-optic broadband infrastructure in their cities. Simple pro-business right-wing conflationists reflexively support a bill that would prevent city governments from doing anything (especially providing a product or service that can and/or should be provided by private companies) and reflexively support the interests of private businesses. They are not entirely wrong, because the ultimate solution is not to get city governments into the fiber-optic broadband business or any other utility. However, the solution that would help the residents of cities where broadband is scarce, expensive, or nonexistent is to remove the regulations that are keeping it that way rather than passing new laws that seem to be mainly aimed at propping up telecom giants. No, I don’t know what laws North Carolina or any other state might have passed restricting competition and expansion in the broadband industry, but, well, look at this bill. It’s a bill that the state legislature will pass that will have profound effects on the telecom industry. It is undoubtedly one bill out of thousands across the country that have set regulations and restrictions on telecommunications, always to the detriment of the average (or, especially, poor) citizen.

Higher education might be the next asset bubble. Well, it’s certainly overpriced, a situation that is entirely the result of government interventions (mainly guaranteed loans to everybody) whose purpose is to make college affordable to more people. All government action has unintended consequences.

This is a great TED talk by Indian scientist Sugata Mitra about how children can teach themselves (and motivate themselves) when given the opportunity (and the necessity) to do so.

Speaking of the problems with traditional, regimented, government education, Boston University Psychology professor Peter Gray writes about the seven sins of our forced-education system. He expands upon a previous post in which he called forced education “prison”. In this post, he also outlines seven reasons compulsory education is harmful to society and not just the children who are currently forced to go to school. Numbers 3 and 4 are “Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance” and “Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.” It’s a really good, brief read.

Sixty-three percent of people killed in the Iraq War have been civilians.

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

Glenn Greenwald is dismayed at the speed with which the Obama regime’s official reason for sending military aid to Libya changed.

Glenn Greenwald writes another masterful post on America’s two-tiered justice system: one standard of justice for legislators, high-level bureaucrats, and their big-business cronies, and another standard for everyone else. It is not possible to read Glenn Greenwald consistently and objectively and remain an Obama supporter, or possibly even a Democratic Party supporter.

Confessions of a Price Controller by Joseph Antos. He explains how Medicare’s price-control system keeps prices up, which is no different from any price controls.

The Resource-Based Relative Value System (RBRVS) is founded on the simple, but incorrect, view that higher payments are justified for services that require greater inputs—ignoring the consumer side of the market.
[...]
Prices must respond to both the supply and demand sides of the market to allocate resources to their best use. Medicare ignores the market, setting prices for physician services based on an academic theory with its roots in the Soviet Union and implemented by the American Medical Association. Those prices do not reflect the value patients receive from their care, and they do not reflect shifts in the demand for particular kinds of services (such as primary care) as the population ages or as more people have health insurance.
[...]
The problem for a government price controller is that he can never know when the price structure is “right.” He can know when physicians are unhappy with their prices because they will complain, but that does not necessarily mean that those prices should be raised. He cannot know when prices are too high, because physicians benefiting from that mistaken generosity will not complain. The bias is always to raise prices, not lower them.

As good, simple, short as that column is, the last sentence struck me as some platitude that was insisted upon by an editor, which might be a good example of why the glorious world of blagging and self-publishing produces more unfiltered honesty and relevant commentary than writing for some corporate publication. Or maybe it’s just because it was published by the American Enterprise Institute. Either way, it was kind of funny and dumb: “Let’s hope a Republican Congress will have the guts to start pulling the needle out of our arms.”

UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First, originally published at cnbc.com. You can’t make this stuff up.

Federal Student Aid To For-Profit Schools Has Tripled In Recent Years, The Consumerist. This is because when the State subsidizes something by taking money from people who earned it and giving it to others, there is no incentive for the prices to go down. In fact, there is incentive for the prices to go up, so they have. In other words, the demand for college in general and the demand for expensive colleges in particular have increased because price is much less of an issue now that the Imperial Federal Government will give you loans to pay for everything. Because the demand is artificially inflated, so are the prices. It is simple.

Obama argues his assassination program is a “state secret” by Glenn Greenwald. I don’t know why everyone who calls himself a “liberal” doesn’t read Glenn Greenwald regularly. I haven’t ever seen a Glenn Greenwald blag post shared by my friends on Facebook. I doubt the implementation of a state assassination program was cited in that one article, shared by at least two of my friends on Facebook, listing all the things Obama has accomplished in his first two years in office with a Democratic Congress. I wonder why they aren’t too proud of that one. I wonder how many have even heard about it.

The Cost of the TARP: One More Time from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Money quote:

Thanks to their access to below market credit in their time of need, courtesy of the taxpayer bailouts, the Wall Street executives are still pocketing tens of millions a year and the banks are again making record profits. Had the market been allowed to work its magic, this wealth and income would have been available for the rest of society. The financial sector will continue to be a drain on the rest of the economy because the government saved it from the consequences of its own recklessness.

Egan’s point is that a large proportion of the Rebublican rank-and-file unquestioningly believe half-truths and blatant lies fed to them by right-wing media. For instance, that Obama is a Muslim, he was born in Kenya, he signed the TARP bailouts into law, and Michelle Obama and 40 friends recently vacationed in Spain on the public’s dime. He’s right, this is pretty alarming. Plenty of voters of all stripes believe things that are wrong, but I’m sure many of them are topics of debate or are not extremely easily disprovable. But to believe things that are objectively, undeniably, obviously wrong, immediately and easily disprovable, is indicative of willful ignorance that should alarm everyone.

But how about the things that liberal Democratic voters never bother to look into or question? For instance, how Obama voted on the aforementioned TARP legislation. (No, Egan didn’t bother mentioning that Obama voted Yea or that he has willfully continued and done nothing to reverse any effects of TARP.) How many Democratic voters know about Obama’s vote on a warrantless wiretapping program or how his regime feels about Bush’s warrantless wiretap policy? (Admittedly, these made bigger headlines than other crimes, failures, and broken promises of Obama’s.) How about the cost of Obama’s failed stimulus vs. the cost of almost 6 years of the Iraq War under President Bush? How about the number of Pakistani non-combatants killed by Predator drone attacks under President Obama in only a year and a half? How many Democratic voters would even be in the ballpark if asked to guess about those numbers? How many liberal blaggers care about the willful ignorance of Democratic voters on these issues? On the other hand, how many gladly avoid railing against Obama for things that, if (when) Republicans did them, they would rant about until they were as blue as Tobias Fünke?

More than a thousand people [as I mentioned, it was actually 30,000 in the end] gathered Wednesday outside a metro-Atlanta shopping mall in hopes of being placed on a waiting list for federal housing assistance.

Fights broke out, children were reportedly trampled, and police had to stop the crowd from storming a nightclub being used by the East Point Housing Authority in East Point, Ga….

[T]the line for Section 8 housing vouchers formed two days ago and grew into the hundreds Tuesday night. People even slept outside the nightclub despite repeated assertions from the housing officials that the line was unnecessary and everyone would receive an application.

By Wednesday morning, the crowd had grown so large that East Point police began patrolling the area in riot gear and first responders were tending to people who were overheating in the sun.

People became frustrated when officials, feeling overwhelmed, did not open the doors at 9 a.m. as they had planned, reports CBS Atlanta. Those waiting in line were told by officials to move from one location to another before riot gear-clad police and housing officials handed out applications.

“I find this amazing,” Ed Schultz said on “The Ed Show” Wednesday night. “One can only imagine watching this videotape … how many other cities have it like this across America. And I think we have to ask ourselves the moral question, aren’t we better than this?”

Indeed. But when a welfare-statist government arrogates to itself the function of providing anything to its subjects, especially some basic necessities like housing or food, the subjects will naturally become dependent on the government, expecting it to provide things for them and thinking of those handouts as their right, instead of becoming self-sufficient adults like they ought to.

The Regular Guys show, which broadcasts on an Atlanta rock station and which I frequently listen to online, sent someone out to the scene of this travesty on Thursday, knowing that chaos and pitifulness would ensue again and hoping to get some good audio from some of the handout seekers. One of the Regular Guys interviewed an aspiring rapper/producer/mixer/whatever, who was in line to get rent-free housing mainly so that he could raise his young son with slightly less hardship than if he had to pay for housing. He was less pathetic and clueless than you might expect, and probably less so than the Regular Guys were hoping for. Naturally, the radio guy turned the issue to where the money was coming from to pay his rent and who would be providing this money. The interviewee said something like, “The government, I guess,” and might have understood the radio guy’s point by the end: all of the tax-paying citizens were going to be paying for this housing, not some magical fund from “the government” or “Obama”.

This was predictable and uninteresting, quite depressing, actually, but I suppose that’s the best they could do with only audio at 6:30 in the morning.

I think it would have been much more interesting, though admittedly too heavy for a brief segment on morning entertainment radio, to discuss how those people in their cars in the 85° heat braving a chaotic crowd of 30,000 angry, unemployed people and waiting in line for not hours but days, in some cases, were the victims of our welfare state to a much greater degree than white, suburban, tax-paying radio show hosts. They are the victims of Obama and Bush and Clinton and Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt and the Federal Reserve. The Imperial Federal Government with its impoverishing wars and debt and inflation have made it harder to get a job. The insidious social programs of the 20th-century welfare state have destroyed the families of inner-city black people. The Drug War has wasted almost as much money and lives as aggressive foreign wars. The endless regulations on housing, labor, education, farming, et cetera ad nauseam have made all of those things more expensive and less attainable for everyone, most of all the people who were born into poverty or bad families or bad neighborhoods where success in anything other than rap or basketball is now considered selling out or shameful.

Before anyone goes lamenting their own woes and their victimhood under the heel of the modern welfare-warfare state, consider the people who never even got a chance to succeed because the United States government made their families poor and their neighborhoods poor and enforces thousands upon thousands of policies that are sure to keep them psychologically dependent on the government and therefore poor as well. This might not excuse them for much blame for their situation in life, but it certainly goes a long way to explaining why they are there, and this is a travesty we should oppose with as much vigor as we oppose anything our government does to its own citizens.

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.
[...]
In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with “Thanks but no thanks,” remarked Visser, despite BP’s desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer –the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment –unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.
[...]
The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work.

This doesn’t prove the impossibility of governments doing something efficiently or effectively, because the Dutch government (and those 12 other governments whose help the idiots in the Obama regime refused) apparently have fairly fast and effective ways to mitigate an oil-spill catastrophe. And while it’s true, as Sheldon Richman reminds us, that environmental catastrophes are more accurately attributed to government failure than market failure, all the governmental failures involved in allowing the BP spill to happen and delaying the cleanup efforts do not prove that freedom can permit no catastrophes and no environmental damage. This sorry episode does prove, however, that Obama’s hopelessly incompetent and union-cozy minions are no better than any other regime’s bureaucrats and will bring us nothing resembling “hope” or “change”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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