Notwithstanding the reminders from the likes of Noam Chomsky that the FBI (and, I presume, the CIA?) has no proof that Osama bin Laden orchestrated or ordered the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Eric Margolis’s matter-of-fact assertion that “Bin Laden long claimed he had no role in 9/11,” to me it seems extremely, vanishingly unlikely that bin Laden was not a murderer. Many Muslims whose judgment isn’t clouded by all-consuming hatred of the Great Satan recognize that bin Laden killed more Muslims than non-Muslims. In this case, as with presidents and dictators who are accurately called murderers for the deaths they ordered, I call bin Laden a murderer if he never pulled the trigger or pushed the detonator that killed any innocent. Without having analyzed any of the FBI’s, CIA’s, or anyone else’s raw intelligence data or other evidence, from my blagging chair I would put bin Laden’s likelihood of guilt as high as O.J.’s. Besides, he has loudly and proudly claimed responsibility for many non-9/11 murders.

If he is a murderer, then isn’t death a suitable punishment for his crimes? Doesn’t one forfeit his right to life when he maliciously (i.e., not in self-defense) kills innocent people? I think libertarian justice theory is even divided on this issue: some say no one should kill another except in self-defense, some say taking the life of a proven murderer is justified, some say the alleged killer must be convicted in some type of trial according to the legal (or anarchic protection and insurance) system of the victims or their representatives. I’m probably biased by emotion and circumstances, but I tend to think that every relative or friend of anyone killed by bin Laden’s terrorist attacks, which includes people of many nationalities and includes more than the 9/11 attacks, would be justified in seeking retribution in the form of retaliative killing, given that his guilt is proven. Some, including myself, say that his guilt is already proven, so the formality of a trial might not be strictly necessary. A trial would be preferable, though, for several reasons, as follows.

You could say that our Imperial Federal Government was acting as the representative of bin Laden’s thousands of American and non-American victims and exacting their revenge (justice?) for them, given its superior resources. However, I don’t think the State has any more justification to take someone’s life than it has to do anything else, no matter how justified that State’s subjects would be individually and no matter how heinous the crime. (I vehemently oppose the death penalty because the State should definitely not have permission to kill anyone, less so than any of its other activities.) If Chomsky and Margolis are right, then the Imperial Federal Government would not be justified in punishing or seeking justice against bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks. If most other people are right about 9/11 or at least about the thousands of other people bin Laden has murdered, then those people and their governments would be right in seeking justice or revenge (not the same thing). Therefore, I cannot conclude that it was necessarily right for the State to take bin Laden’s life, but killing a mass murderer per se certainly isn’t the worst thing the Obama regime could have done.

What should it have done, then? All of bin Laden’s victims and their military representatives, if you want to call them that (they don’t represent me, that’s for damn sure), had four options as I see it: do nothing about him, assassinate him, issue drone bombings and missile launches in the hopes that you kill him (and inevitably kill innocents in the process), or capture and try him for his murders. First, what were the legal and practical options the President had?

Professor Jon Silverman discusses and weighs all the legal avenues Obama (and Bush) could have taken regarding bin Laden. I liked that column both because and in spite of the fact that he doesn’t draw any solid conclusions.

This article by Emma Mustich of Salon.com, “Was killing bin Laden legal?”, is a thorough but brief must-read, even to those who recognize that legality rarely has anything to do with right and wrong. But if you’re going to talk about bringing someone to trial, then the realities of law and legality are unavoidable. Mustich writes:

Der Spiegel spoke Tuesday to University of Cologne professor Claus Kress, who questioned the legality of the terrorist leader’s assassination, insisting that justice is “not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial.” According to the Spiegel:

Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person.

[...]
Elsewehere in the media, James Downie quoted an explanation offered by one of his New Republic colleagues, who does believe the killing of bin Laden was legally justified:

“There are targeted killing issues where the legal background is complicated,” says Brookings fellow (and New Republic contributor) Benjamin Wittes. But, as it turns out, “[t]his isn’t one of them.” One week after the September 11 attacks, Wittes explains, President George W. Bush signed Public Law 107-40, in which Congress authorized the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” No one fit this description more closely than Osama bin Laden. (By contrast, the NATO missile strike in Tripoli that allegedly killed Muammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Al Arab and three of his young grandchildren this past weekend has elicited greater controversy, because the U.N. resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, among many other differences from 107-40, did not include an authorization of force against Qaddafi or his family.)

For their parts, co-founders of the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law John Norton Moore and Robert F. Turner have argued that bin Laden’s killing was legal according to the U.N. charter as well as Security Council Resolution 1373, passed within a month of Sept. 11, 2001, which emphasises “the need to combat by all means … threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.” Turner adds: “The targeting of Osama bin Laden is no more an assassination than was the intentional downing in 1943 of a transport aircraft carrying Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Killing the enemy during armed conflict is not murder.”

Finally, professor Scott Silliman, who is executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security at Duke, told the Christian Science Monitor he has no doubt that bin Laden was “a lawful target”; the CSM also spoke to American University’s Stephen Vladeck, who expressed satisfaction that the U.S. government had “d[one] everything by the book.”

Glenn Greenwald (surprise) exposes the lie that bin Laden was armed or fighting back when he was captured or shot, making the SEALs’ shooting of him definitively non-defensive.

Thus do some scholars consider the targeted killing legally justified because, (a) he’s a murderer and, (b) it’s war, while some reject that conclusion because killing would only be justified in immediate self-defense, even in war.

It is important to remember that, like it or not and agree with it or not, the Imperial Federal Government is at war with Al Qaeda and the jihadists. Many people recognize that as horrible and murderous as the jihadists are, they are waging their war in response to American foreign policy specifically, not wealth or freedom. Even so, it is possible and, I think, useful to consider this war on terrorism and the hunt for bin Laden from the perspective of those fighting the war and those who support it (including the Statist and militarist legalities discussed above). Osama bin Laden did declare war on the “Great Satan” and all that entailed for him (innocents, military, and politicians). Therefore, it is at least possible to understand why military leaders would use any and all means necessary to cripple the threat (short of killing innocents; that is never understandable except as an honest mistake).

Is it a given that in a war, the leaders must not be targeted for death? Churchill and the American leaders did not regret the decision to hold Nazi war criminals on trial (more on that below), but was von Stauffenberg unjustified in attempting to assassinate Hitler? What if some French or British or American or Russian or Polish people helped him do it? (Maybe they did, I don’t know; I can’t stand Tom Cruise.) Would that go against the doctrines of war? Would some Allied soldiers have been wrong in shooting at or bombing Hitler or Himmler or Goebbels or Göring? Why in the world would that have been a bad thing? Was the aforementioned downing of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s airplane wrong? Why is it acceptable in a time of war to kill other soldiers but not target their leaders for assassination? Should French and Polish civilians and soldiers have tried to arrest every Nazi who marched into their countries instead of killing them? No, okay, then why not try to kill military leaders instead of arresting them (and instead of inflicting civilian casualties)? What if, instead of fire-bombing Dresden, the Allied leaders put together a team of Navy SEALs to assassinate only top Nazi military brass? How could that possibly have been a bad thing? Perhaps only the initiator of the murders, an unprovoked, non-defensive murderer, can rightly be retaliated against with killing? Can’t these questions be extended to any war and any war leaders? And make no mistake about it: Osama bin Laden was a war leader, according to himself and just about every government on Earth.

Therefore, attempting to put myself in the shoes of those engaged in this war, I can at least understand the decision to kill instead of arrest. Perhaps, as in any situation, if you are not shooting in immediate self-defense, then shooting is not permissible? Perhaps it is not considered acceptable for leaders to try to assassinate each other, whereas it would be justifiable for individual victims, their families and friends, or conscientious objectors on either side to assassinate a leader believed to be a past and future murderer? If so, then it would be acceptable to assassinate a murderous American president, which it decidedly is not.

I am left to conclude that within the realm of this war and considered from the perspective and interests of those fighting it, targeted assassination is understandable, but from a consistent, objective, self-defensive and not offensive, justice-seeking standpoint, capturing and trying bin Laden would have been preferable. If some stupid American jury or biased international jury found him not guilty, which would be a plainly incorrect decision, only then would I consider it justifiable to go all Dexter on him and bring him to justice where the “law” couldn’t. (Keep in mind that any jury could only find bin Laden not guilty for the purpose of sending the message, “Well, American presidents and generals are more guilty, so I won’t convict him until they have been,” which is irrelevant and immaterial to a murder trial.)

Which brings us to what Glenn Greenwald calls “the Osama bin Laden exception” and the legal and moral implications it entails. As John Cole says,

I’m the hypocrite here. I’m stridently against extrajudicial killings, the death penalty, targeted assassination, etc. I’d wager most of you are, too.

But when I heard that Osama had been killed, I’ll be damned if I didn’t think “Thank God that monster is gone.” Sure, in my ideal world he’d be brought back to the US, tried, and then imprisoned for the rest of his life. But you know what? I can not honestly say I give a damned that he took a double tap to the skull. Sorry. And I’d be also willing to bet that is where most of you all are- this may or may not have been legal, but you don’t give a shit, because that scumbag is at the bottom of an ocean somewhere and got what he deserved.

At an initial, emotional level, it’s hard to disagree. I do feel hypocritical and inconsistent. I feel glad and relieved that he’s dead. I almost wish I didn’t. It’s hard to see anything morally wrong with the retributive killing of a proven murderer per se. But I’m still forced to conclude that any killing not in self-defense should be avoided. Most especially, the State should not be permitted to get away with extralegal, extrajudicial actions of any kind. In this I do see many things morally and practically wrong with the State even having the powers or capabilities to carry out targeted assassinations, not to mention all the other things that any State with such powers will do (is already doing!). This is why I made the disclaimer above that the Obama regime killing bin Laden per se isn’t entirely bad, but many things implied and entailed by that decision and action are very bad.

What does the bin Laden capture-and-kill imply about the Imperial Federal Government’s boundaries (legal and moral) and the leeway it takes with handling justice, whether legal or not and whether towards American citizens or not? Could you imagine needing to quote anyone other than Glenn Greenwald on this issue?

My principal objection to it [the "bin Laden exception"] — aside from the fact that I think those principles shouldn’t be violated because they’re inherently right (which is what makes them principles) — is that there’s no principled way to confine it to bin Laden. If this makes sense for bin Laden, why not for other top accused Al Qaeda leaders? Why shouldn’t the same thing be done to Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen who has been allegedly linked by the Government to far more attacks over the last several years than bin Laden? At Guantanamo sits Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational mastermind of 9/11 — who was, if one believes the allegations, at least as responsible for the attack as bin Laden and about whom there is as little perceived dobut; why shouldn’t we just take him out back today and shoot him in the head and dump his corpse into the ocean rather than trying him?

Once you embrace the bin Laden Exception, how does it stay confined to him? Isn’t it necessarily the case that you’re endorsing the right of the U.S. Government to treat any top-level Terrorists in similar fashion? Again, this isn’t an argument that the bin Laden killing was illegal; it very well may have been legal, depending on the facts. But if we just cheer for this without caring about those facts, isn’t it clear that we’re endorsing a dangerous unfettered power — one that runs afoul of multiple principles which opponents of the Bush/Cheney template have long defended?

For me, the better principles are those established by the Nuremberg Trials, and numerous other war crimes trials accorded some of history’s most gruesome monsters. It should go without saying for all but the most intellectually and morally stunted that none of this has anything to do with sympathy for bin Laden. Just as was true for objections to the torture regime or Guantanamo or CIA black sites, this is about the standards to which we and our Government adhere, who we are as a nation and a people.

The Allied powers could easily have taken every Nazi war criminal they found and summarily executed them without many people caring. But they didn’t do that, and the reason they didn’t is because how the Nazis were punished would determine not only the character of the punishing nations, but more importantly, would set the standards for how future punishment would be doled out. Here was the very first paragraph uttered by lead Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson when he stood up to deliver his Opening Statement:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

And here was the last thing he said:

Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have “leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.”
[all emphasis Greenwald's]

I actually believe in those precepts. And if those principles were good enough for those responsible for Nazi atrocities, they are good enough for the likes of Osama bin Laden. It’s possible they weren’t applicable here; if he couldn’t be safely captured because of his attempted resistence, then capturing him wasn’t a reasonable possibility. But it seems increasingly clear that the objective here was to kill, not capture him, no matter what his conduct was. That, at the very least, raises a whole host of important questions about what we endorse and who we are that deserves serious examination — much more than has been prompted by this celebrated killing.

It’s not a good precedent, and it doesn’t speak highly of the moral character of the leaders who issued the order.

Before concluding with what bin Laden’s death implies for the future, I wanted to revisit the natural emotional responses of John Cole and myself that I touched on above and those of others around the world.

Perhaps my relatively sheltered, comfortable life and my lack of exposure to non-fictional death and violence bias this feeling of mine, but I can’t completely relate to those who say they find nothing (or very little) positive in any human’s death. For example, some commenters at Bob Murphy’s blag, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, Robert Higgs, and surely thousands of others around the interwebs and millions of others around the world find no joy or happiness in the death of even a mass murderer, and that isn’t just people who adored bin Laden and supported his ends and his means. As I said above, I couldn’t describe my reaction as joy or happiness when I first saw the news on TV, but I was definitely glad and relieved. Still positive emotions, but I just didn’t feel strongly about it. Maybe that’s only because our own murderer-in-chief ordered the mission and would receive much praise and credit for it.

One thing I was positively disgusted by and not conflicted at all about was the celebration from Americans that Sunday night. In Washington, D.C., in New York City, at the Mets–Phillies game, which is the main thing I was watching that night. It was pure collectivist, militarist, nationalist jingoism. The first thing that the footage of the impromptu celebrations and chants on Pennsylvania Avenue reminded me of was the audiences at the hangings and beheadings on the TV show The Tudors. They were (depicted as) bloodthirsty, barbaric animals who savored the sight of the king’s justice being done, believing like sheep that anyone the king ordered to death must be an awful sinner who deserved to burn in hell for all eternity. That is exactly what those celebrators and chanters are: bloodthirsty cavemen with iPhones and American flags instead of clubs and loincloths. Seeing that spectacle on TV actually gave me a little satisfaction at the moral high ground I (like to think I) have over the liberal Democrats who claim to be so much more understanding, fair, sympathetic, and certainly not militant or jingoistic. But they are just like the neoconservatives they so despise. Liberal Democratic Obama voters (past and future) probably constituted the majority of the celebrators on Pennsylvania Avenue that night, and my opinion of them is even lower because of it. I hadn’t known it could go any lower.

However, it should be noted that not only in degree but also in kind, there is a difference between Americans celebrating the death of a mass-murderer and Arabs celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At first glance, the libertarian or other-anarchist or general anti-militarist might say, “Americans cheering bin Laden’s death are cheering from the same perspective and for the same reasons as Arab America-haters cheering the deaths of Americans, because those Arabs see Americans as responsible for the deaths of many of their compatriots just like Americans see Al Qaeda as responsible for the deaths of many Americans.” This viewpoint fails to distinguish between collective responsibility (which in this case does not exist for the American victims) and individual responsibility (which in this case does exist for bin Laden).

Rather, Noam Chomsky’s analogy is p-… p-… perrr-… (I can do it)… perfect (wow, that was hard):

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

Considered from this perspective, it definitely doesn’t make bin Laden’s murder something we should rejoice about or something we should have aimed for specifically; I don’t want George W. Bush or Barack Obama assassinated, especially not by some Iraqi or Afghani paramilitary unit, possibly because I am an American like them and naturally exhibit some nationalistic, tribal solidarity with them, and possibly because that’s an awful, hypocritical, counterproductive goal for the freedom movement. Therefore, if I don’t want one mass-murderer assassinated, I shouldn’t want the other one assassinated. This solidifies my position above that in the absence of a life-threatening situation, the Navy SEALs should have captured bin Laden for trial and execution rather than summarily executing him.

And isn’t it odd how Obama and so many Americans cite this as a testament to national greatness? I thought it was so arrogant for Obama to say that this operation proves that “America can do whatever we set our mind to.” He wasn’t the least bit humble, apologetic for all of that other death and destruction he and Bush have caused in the meantime, or thankful to any other nation except Pakistan (which was probably a token thank-you to mitigate the inevitable cries of “Pakistan obviously isn’t our ally!”). Robert Higgs was as disgusted by this claim of “greatness” as I was:

First, I dislike the whole idea of “the greatness of our country.” Countries cannot be great. They are abstractions and, as such, they are incapable of acting for good or for evil. Individual residents of a country may be great, and many Americans are great, because, to borrow Forrest Gump’s construction, “greatness is as greatness does.”

The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great. The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.

But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart.

Finally, as for the ramifications and the bin Laden–less future we have ahead of us, Laurence Vance, Anthony Gregory, Robert Higgs, Eric Margolis, and Justin Raimondo (and hundreds if not thousands of others whom I haven’t read) have said the cost of 5,000 American lives, a million Iraqi lives, trillions of dollars, and perhaps unrecoverable (in our lifetimes) civil liberties was not worth it to kill one man, however hated and dangerous. As those and others have also noted, bin Laden’s death doesn’t portend the end of anything, really. As Anthony Gregory writes elsewhere,

The smarter liberal media are playing this up as a repudiation of the Bush approach to the war on terror. Yet this only makes sense if Obama himself had actually repudiated that approach. He has instead tripled down in Afghanistan, continued the war in Iraq, multiplied the drone attacks many times over, and continued to treat international law as well as the U.S. Constitution as flexible rules in the waging of war and enforcement of national security. Insofar as Obama is implicitly admitting none of this was necessary to catch Osama, he should be criticized for persisting in it, not hailed as a hero of foreign policy restraint.

Indeed, Obama promises more war: Osama’s “death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must – and we will – remain vigilant at home and abroad. . . . The cause of securing our country is not complete.”

Glenn Greenwald writes,

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

Those are rhetorical questions. None of those things will happen. If anything, I can much more easily envision the reverse. Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed. Futile decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may temporarily dampen the nationalistic enthusiasm for war, but two shots to the head of Osama bin Laden — and the We are Great and Good proclamations it engenders — can easily rejuvenate that war love. One can already detect the stench of that in how Pakistan is being talked about: did they harbor bin Laden as it seems and, if so, what price should they pay? We’re feeling good and strong about ourselves again — and righteous — and that’s often the fertile ground for more, not less, aggression.

I fear that the combination of this celebration of “greatness” at a military accomplishment and the fact that we will now be living in a permanent national security state without a Public Enemy No. 1 (or much concrete success to show for our ongoing efforts) will only embolden the Imperial Federal Government’s efforts at home and abroad, weaken Americans’ opposition to the national security state, and encourage more encroachments of our civil liberties, because without bin Laden to serve as a cause célèbre, people will just become accustomed to the national security state as a way of life. Maybe no matter what, with or without a cause célèbre, the national security state was doomed to persist and expand.

Here are some highlights from Michael Moore’s Twitter feed from March 19 to March 22, 2011:

May I suggest a 50-mile evacuation zone around Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize?

So, what’s wrong with this picture (Libya)? Here’s what:

#1. If the Arab League supports this military action, why haven’t they sent in their Arab troops and planes in real amounts? Uh-huh

#2. Our job is 2 prop up Arab dictators (Saudi, Yemen, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, etc), not overthrow them & everyone in Arab world knows it

#3. So knock off “it’s our moral obligation 2 defend ppl of Libya.” After Iraq & Afghan & support of dictators, we have no moral standing.

#4. Too little, too late. So NOW we try 2 help the Libyans after Khaddafy has retaken most of country? Really just a big show, isn’t it?

#5. We have neither the troops, stomach, or $$ to fight a ground war for months/years to defeat MK. So can we get back to the NCAA?

[re-tweeting from tomtomorrow] Erased history: Bush’s wars were initially supported by many prominent liberals who bought into the official talking points.

OK. Let’s hear from the “liberals” who say this is a just war because we’re protecting innocent Libyans–like that’s what we do!

Aren’t most revolutions won when the ppl themselves win them? Rare that it works otherwise. U can send them stuff, but it’s their fight.

Coalition-licious! MSNBC reports U.S. carrying out “almost all military operations” http://j.mp/gXOY4I

Final tweet 4 now: All I’m saying is, regrdless where u stand on war or wht party u belong 2, ANY mil action by us,

…because of our past actions, DEMANDS that every patriotic American give the utmost scrutiny 2 ANY call 2 war by our leaders.

This appears to be a civil war in Libya. Not a war of genocide. Not a revolution. One thing’s clear: None of us want Khadaffy to win.

But who is the opposition? Don’t send weapons 2 rebels til u know who they r! Last time we did that we armed bin Laden & the Taliban.

If the rebels want a democracy then support them w/ the arms they need. But u must do same 2 help Bahrain/Yemen or u have no credibility.

But let the Euros do it. Libya is 172mi fr Eurp (closer than Flint is 2 Chicago). The French helped us 230yrs ago & that worked out ok…

…for us. Not so good for Louis XVI. Be careful what u wish for.

We fired over 100 Tomahawk missiles into Libya this weekend @ over $600K-1M a missile. Each missile would pay for 12-20 teachers in US.

CNN reports the usual 70% of my fellow Americans support this air war. Same as Iraq03. Always the same rah-rah % @ the start. Regrets later.

Note to Republicans & Iraq Invasion Supporters: Your attacks on Obama’s war are hypocritical, hollow, & obscene. Your wars have wrecked us.

Libertarians knew Obama wouldn’t be as anti-war and anti-intervention as he characterized himself during the presidential campaign, so I don’t think any of us is surprised at the ease and eagerness with which Obama has intervened violently in a civil war 6,000 miles away, not any more surprised than we were that he has continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and sent 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. We also won’t be surprised when it becomes more costly (money, lives) than the Democrats expect and when their intervention backfires and leads to the propping up of some other dictator or terrorist group or stirs more anti-American sentiment.

To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes.

I remember Chuck Rangel saying he would support a military draft in 2003 or 2004 to dissuade politicians from starting more wars and expanding our military efforts because, presumably, they would be more hesitant to send unwilling soldiers to die, especially when their sons or relatives were among them. Maybe, but that’s not how everyone would take a draft bill. Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel openly favor compulsory national service of some kind, not necessarily military. In that context, the Obama regime seems quite likely to pass a bill like Chuck Rangel’s in order to implement their national community-service dream, not necessarily to send thousands of boys to the Middle East as cannon fodder. However, as anyone could predict, “community-service” slavery could easily be transmuted into “military-service” slavery by other politicians or by “national emergencies” caused by those politicians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As David Z. predicted a year ago and I predicted a couple times in the past year, the bailout money taken/inflated from the American public and given to Chrysler and GM will not be repaid. “Oh, but it’s not a bailout; it’s a LOAN!” Eat crow, you accessories to robbery.

But, at least we only lost $30 billion in this venture instead of the possible maximum of $44 billion.

The $30 billion isn’t the end of it because this is the way Obamanomics works. It’s the same way Bushonomics and every other socialist, dirigiste economy works: the rich and well-connected benefit at the expense of the common people, who don’t get bailouts and are impoverished by inflation.

Hat tip: David Z. at …no third solution

…my impression is that he plans to increase American military presence in Afghanistan while doing nothing close to giving up or withdrawing in Iraq. This is a terrible foreign policy scarcely different from the neoconservative one. I hardly see how he could expect to gain or maintain much power in our Imperial Federal Government without those positions, though. I think there will be a significant American military presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq on the last day of Obama’s presidency, as will there be in most other countries where the Imperial Federal Government has military bases and personnel. I won’t be surprised if the numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan are almost as high as they are today.

I stand by those predictions, as Robert Fisk might.

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.

I am flabbergasted by people’s complete ignorance of the laws and trends of economics. It is damn near impossible for the free market to make anything more expensive or worse in quality, in the long run. Only coercion and redistribution can do that. Most of the things we consume as necessities or luxuries in our modern lives—houses, cars, computers, food, even medicines—tend to become better, cheaper, and more abundant over time. This is despite, not because of, the interference by government in the free and voluntary exchanges of peaceable people. The fact that we are supposedly spending more on health care (health insurance) than we used to should raise a red flag that something is preventing the market from working as it always does and as we all want it to, and that this thing is the State!

I don’t know why other countries seem to spend a lower percentage of their GDP and a lower amount of money per capita on their health care than the U.S. does. It is definitely not because our health care system is the best in the world. It must be because of the nature of the federal government’s interference in the health insurance industry and its history of regulations and so forth. If the alleged success of other nations’ health care industries is any guide, it is possible that complete and total socialization will actually decrease per capita expenses on health care relative to the requisite decreases in the quality and quantity we will receive. On the other hand, if the history of our government’s interference in the health care market is any guide, Obamacare will end up costing many times more than expected. (According to Peter Schiff, in 1966 it was predicted that Medicare would cost the taxpayers $12 billion in 1990. Instead, it cost $107 billion in 1990, and it’s four times that now!)

Something about the Imperial Federal Government would have to change, drastically, for American taxpayers to evade a similar fate from Obamacare. It is very possible that a mixed economy is worse in some ways for this and other industries than a nearly completely socialized one. Maybe not in the long run, though.

One entertaining part of the speech that I heard on the radio was when he vehemently denied that Obamacare would ever cover illegal immigrants. Obama can say that all he wants, and he can hold true to that promise with flying colors during his regime, but I predict that taxpayer-funded health insurance will cover illegal immigrants and visitors who didn’t pay for it, sooner or later. Quite possibly, the Republicans will let it happen to pander to Hispanic voters.

I wonder how many non-libertarian-minded people considered this: One reason people oppose the coverage of illegal immigrants’ health care with taxpayer money is because the immigrants didn’t pay for it with their taxes, and we can’t have people coming here and bankrupting our treasury by, basically, stealing products and services from the taxpayers. (Perhaps the main reason people oppose giving health care and other things to illegal immigrants is because they suffer from the misconception that the place where your mother was lying when she gave birth to you has any bearing on your rights or your freedom or your character as a human being.) But the whole point of Obamacare is to take money from people who earned it and give it to people who didn’t! It is a wealth-redistribution program in the form of mandatory insurance policies and taxes! Millions of people, like me and probably you, do not want to be forced to pay for other people’s health care, or anything else, for that matter. It isn’t charity and it isn’t altruistic! It’s bald, shameless theft! The supporters of socialized medicine are being inconsistent and hypocritical by endorsing the theft of tax money from captive Americans to pay for other Americans’ health care but opposing the theft of tax money from captive Americans to pay for foreigners’ health care.

Though it [General Motors] was able to shed some plants and employees, it will have most of the same stifling work rules on the shop floor. It did, however, manage to shed a lot of interest payments to creditors who entrusted their money to GM in return for claims on GM assets, only to be given the shaft by the Obama administration,

The main difference in the new GM is that it will have an ownership group whose primary concerns are NOT the financial success of the company. The UAW will be primarily concerned with keeping union members employed and happy and not shifting any manufacturing to lower-cost venues. The US Government will be primarily concerned with making sure the UAW is happy and promoting a number of its own goals, like “sustainable” plants and smaller cars, irrespective of whether these goals make business sense. It will be a company more concerned with whether plants have recycling programs and workers with American passports rather than cost or quality. Both the UAW and the US government can pursue such non-business goals secure in the knowledge that financial success is virtually irrelevant, as the US taxpayer can be counted on to make up any shortfalls.

The Obama administration has denied GM’s creditors the money that GM owed them and has assumed a majority ownership of GM. According to the Washington Post,

…the new GM will be an anomaly among American businesses because most of it will be owned by the U.S. and Canadian governments. The U.S. Treasury owns 60.8 percent of the new company’s common stock, the UAW retiree health trust has 17.5 percent and the governments of Canada and Ontario 11.7 percent.

…The company’s stock value would have to rise to unprecedented levels for the U.S. to break even on its investment [the bailouts].

As I wrote in April:

Also, don’t forget that the federal government will throw more money at the Big Three; it is unrealistic to assume they can remain profitable for long, if at all; artificial stimulation of sales will constitute a small portion of Obama’s interference with their restructuring and refocusing. More money, more incentives, more subsidies, more edicts from on high.

It is far from over. This is only the beginning of the auto bubble. It will be inflated while the Big Three stagger on the inadequate legs provided by the government, and when the bubble bursts because demand isn’t high enough and Americans can’t afford to keep buying cars—de facto or de jure nationalization.

We are basically at the de facto nationalization stage. Obama said the government has “no interest” in running GM or any other car company, from which we can conclude he and his cronies have an interest in running GM or another car company.

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.

Then Richman explains how this cannot remain true under any medical-insurance plan like Obama’s:

Obama will not be able to keep his promise if he gets the “reform” he wants. He favors a “public option,” which is a euphemism for a government insurance plan. Obama says a government plan will keep private insurers “honest” through competition. But what will keep it from being a predatory competitor? After all, it will have a guaranteed source of revenue that no private insurer has: captive taxpayers. So the public option would be able to price its policies below market level and put the squeeze on the private companies.

…government is the only entity that can truly price predatorily because it can hold down explicit prices to consumers while recouping its costs implicitly through taxation or Fed-monetized debt.

Let’s not forget that Obama favors having a government bureau define the contents of the basic insurance coverage—that is, the state will dictate to insurers what services they must sell to their customers. Plus, the emerging reform plan would outlaw a premium schedule based on risk or existing illness. People who are sick or more likely to get sick could not be charged more than healthy people. (By that logic, the owner of a simple wooden house would pay the same fire-insurance premium as the owner of a brick house.)

Moreover, people would be compelled to have insurance (and then pay taxes on their employer-originated coverage). This will give the government the incentive to impose price controls—“guidelines,” no doubt—to keep insurance “affordable” and “universal.”

If the private insurers protest that these terms make profitable operations impossible, Obama and his allies will accuse them of profiteering and proclaim that the free market has once again failed to deliver medical care.

At that point insurers may choose to leave the medical policy market. Meanwhile, when reimbursements to doctors and other providers shrink in the name of cost-cutting and red tape mounts, doctors may choose to take early retirement or find other ways to make a living. (Some doctors have stopped accepting Medicare patients.)

Obama says the public option is needed to “inject competition into the health care market so that [we can] force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest.” But who is limiting insurance competition today?

Government, of course.

Interstate competition in medical insurance is illegal. There is no national market. Americans living in Texas are not free to buy coverage from a firm operating in Maine. …

One reason interstate competition is not allowed is that states throughout the country, to different degrees, force insurers to provide coverage for all kinds of services that most people might never buy on their own. Mandated coverage results from service providers’ lobbying state legislatures – a truly corrupt rent-seeking system. (See John Seiler’s Freeman article here.) Interstate competition could nullify the mandate system, as people bought policies from companies in states with fewer requirements. Opponents of interstate competition say this would set off a race to the bottom. What they mean is that it would permit people the freedom to tailor policies to their personal requirements.
[...]
When Obama promises to make health care and insurance “affordable,” he means he will impose price controls, overt and covert, on providers and insurers. Promises of cost-cutting should get the same credit as past such promises: exactly none. Cost-cutting is not a bureaucracy’s strong suit.

We know where price controls lead: to shortages, decline in quality, queues, rationing, and regimentation. Welcome to healthcare reform.

It scares me. Socialized medicine and increasingly State-run banking systems will be the major forces that turn the United States into a second-class society. I wish it scared more people.