Archive for the ‘Police/law enforcement’ Category
Monopolistic law-enforcement systems are a racket
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009My friend got a new car, a white Subaru Legacy, to replace his old white Subaru Legacy. Apparently, Michigan law lets you transfer your old license plates to your new car in some (all?) situations, so he just took his license plate off of his old Legacy and put it ...
Amanda Knox: guilty…or is she?
Monday, December 7th, 2009I was very intrigued by this short video featuring an Italian lawyer, who has practiced in the U.S. and in Italy, explaining the differences between criminal trials (specifically, the judges and juries) in the two countries. He was being interviewed in the context of the conviction of Amanda Knox, the ...
Because in a free society, people would attack each other without provocation or fear of punishment from a higher legal authority
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009A man returns home from drinking one night to find part of his house on fire. He warns everyone, wakes them up, helps them outside, then goes back inside to rescue someone who, he had just learned, was asleep upstairs. Do the police officers at the end of the driveway ...
Anarchist Elliot Madison wrongfully arrested, robbed
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009In a continuation of law-enforcement agencies' general disdain for and dismissal of our civil liberties, Elliot Madison, a self-described anarchist, was arrested for using Twitter and a police scanner to help G20 protesters coordinate their efforts and avoid police officers. The charges on which he was held don't indicate any ...
Matthew Martens is pure evil
Thursday, July 9th, 2009Today's inductee into the Special Hell is Matthew Martens, the federal prosecutor who used illegal, underhanded, and downright evil tactics to railroad real estate attorney Victoria Sprouse in a travesty of a criminal trial. William L. Anderson sets the record straight with his usual excellence: The prosecution, led by Martens, convinced ...
Obama Defense Dept. advocates post-acquittal detentions
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009We'll see if this actually happens: Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, July 5th, 2009"Minarchy is the theory that free market capitalism is best protected by a socialist monopoly." —Less Antman, in response to Sheldon Richman's post
This just in: Americans are stupid
Friday, June 19th, 2009No, this isn't just stupid. It's stupid and evil and inhumane. As if electing complete idiots with no economic knowledge and no regard for individual rights to the presidency every four years for the last several decades weren't proof enough: A jury ruled in favor of the RIAA, against the ...
Fish in a barrel
Friday, June 19th, 2009Here are a few issues or news stories that I've come across recently that I could offer easy and obvious solutions or objections to, or that libertarianism has already provided an easy and obvious answer to: Philip Morris supports new FDA regulations on cigarettes. Why, when they've opposed previous interventions in ...
Toy guns aren’t weapons
Saturday, May 16th, 2009I have difficulty believing anyone actually supports zero-tolerance policies and extreme political correctness anymore—anyone, that is, except government bureaucrats. By "extreme" I mean atrocities such as this, which any sensible person would be outraged at: NEWTON COUNTY, Ga. -- The latest case of zero-tolerance at the public schools has a 10-year-old ...
Obama DOJ: Government officials are above the law
Friday, April 10th, 2009Literally. This is the legal doctrine the Obama regime's Department of Justice [sic] is invoking in its recommendation that Jewell v. National Security Agency be dismissed. Kevin Carson, in his column National Security: The Last Refuge of Scoundrels is incisive: If the Obama Justice Department’s legal doctrine is allowed to stand, ...
Tell me if I am being sexist, realistic, naive, all of the above…
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009I'll get right to the point: When I hear about a rape case or a rape accusation, my default reaction is to side with the accused man or boy until I hear compelling evidence of his guilt. My default reaction probably should be to side with no one and have ...
Pulitzer for Balko?
Monday, February 23rd, 2009Some commenters to this Radley Balko post suggested he deserves a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. I think that would be fantastic. I have no idea what it takes to be nominated or to win a Pulitzer, but as far as I can tell he ought to ...
Unlawful imprisonment on airplanes
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008Passengers aboard a TACA International Airlines flight were kept on board the plane for nearly 14 hours on November 30. It was supposed to be 4.5 hours. Radley Balko asks, "How is holding someone in an enclosed airplaine on a tarmac with no circulating air and little food or water ...
Minarchist states and basic necessities
Saturday, November 15th, 2008What are the most basic necessities of life, of survival? I'd say food, water, and shelter. In our modern world, a fourth good one to add to the list would be medicine. I think it's fair to say that without these four and certainly without the first three being available ...
Early English law screwed the masses to benefit the aristocracy
Thursday, November 13th, 2008In my ongoing and very occasional progression through Bruce Benson's masterpiece The Enterprise of Law, I am learning more and more about the origins of authoritarian (State-originated and -enforced) law and its usurpation of customary (community-originated and reciprocal-incentive-enforced) law in Medieval England. The main thrust of chapter 3 is that ...
Cops mistake hypoglycemia for drunkenness, beat man into coma
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Detroit resident Ernest Giglen was beaten by police officers who mistook his hypoglycemia as drunkenness, which led to his entering a hypoglycemic coma. I haven't heard of any police officers beating a diabetic man during a hypoglycemic shock before, preventing him from getting to the hospital quickly and making his ...
Authoritarian law engenders conflict, discourages voluntary interaction
Friday, September 19th, 2008From chapter 3 of Bruce Benson's The Enterprise of Law, "The Rise of Authoritarian Law": When government becomes involved in the enterprise of law, both the rules of conduct and the institutions for enforcement are likely to change. The primary functions of governments are to act as a mechanism to take ...
Agents of the State are better than everyone else
Monday, September 15th, 2008An LRC reader writes in disgust to Lew Rockwell: Please don't use my name because, as you know, i am a news reporter for [a certain TV station], and it could get me in trouble. I am outraged at what I have seen about the horrific train wreck that killed about 20 ...
Customary law must be widely accepted and evolves for the better
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008After my long essay about customary "law" and the market of preferences, decency, and reputations in internet content providers, Tim Swanson posted a comment recommending The Enterprise of Law by the economist Bruce L. Benson. This book is about customary vs. governmental law and the market for law-enforcement services in ...
Jury nullification protects people from the State
Saturday, August 16th, 2008Prosecutors and judges have an alarming tendency to empower the State over individuals. Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute reports on a juror who was removed from a jury by the judge, against the protests of the defense, for attempting to protest the very law the defendant was accused of ...
Paul Craig Roberts on the “terrorist watch list”
Sunday, July 20th, 2008Paul Craig Roberts violates Godwin's Rule but still manages to make excellent points in a good column about the ludicrous terrorist watch list and no-fly list maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. That's real talent. Money quote: The ACLU says that "putting a million names on a watch list is ...
DWI arrest at BAC 0%
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Radley Balko blags about an Arizona designated driver who was arrested for DWI with a blood-alcohol content of 0%. Balko and the newspaper columnist he cites both thought the arresting officer might have been getting back at the designated driver's husband, a lawyer who defeated the officer in a DWI ...
Kill switches and remote control
Friday, July 4th, 2008Bruce Schneier, the computer-security guru whom Brad at WendyMcElroy.com often links to, wrote a pretty chilling post on kill switches and remote control. This type of technology is an example of why government is not your only enemy, but its creation of the national-security state enables private companies and individuals ...
Lynch mobs, stones, and glass houses
Friday, July 4th, 2008I urge you to read this column published at Wendy McElroy's website ifeminists.net, written by one WolfmanMac, about the increasing criminalization of being male: Lynch mobs, stones, and glass houses. The nuanced insight and analysis of one man's child-porn charges in particular and society's attitude about sexual predators in general ...
An anecdotal story about incompetent police and gun control
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008On the WRIF-Detroit morning show I heard a story from a caller about a ridiculous ordeal he went through as a result of his attempts to protect his next-door neighbor's property. He called in response to the show's discussion about Joe Horn, a 61-year-old Texas man (not an Atlanta Falcons ...
Gonzalo Guizan: another death by drug war
Friday, June 13th, 2008Radley Balko writes of another victim of the paramilitary-style drug raids that Republocrats and their myrmidon voters continue to support in the name of protecting our liberties or our morals or some such. On May 18, police in Easton, Connecticut conducted a heavily-armed drug raid on the home of Ronald Terebesi, ...
Wendy McElroy: the State discourages helpfulness and decency
Sunday, June 8th, 2008Many libertarians have come to consider the police and other law-enforcement divisions of the State as the most directly vicious and physically dangerous branches of the State to deal with. Wendy McElroy wrote about why you should never voluntarily talk to agents of the State or offer them any unnecessary ...
Why I oppose monopolistic justice (sic) systems
Thursday, June 5th, 2008The only remaining halfway-decent argument against the unregulated free market that I've encountered is that private police, courts, and retribution systems would be unaccountable to the actual justice of natural law and result in an increase in unchecked use of force against innocents. This would happen, they say, because there ...
Child faces prosecution for calling the Cult of Scientology a cult
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Jacob Sullum reports at Reason's Hit and Run that a British teenager has been summoned to court and faces a fine (and, presumably, a mark on his criminal record) for holding a sign outside of the Cult of Scientology London headquarters with the word "cult" on it. I don't understand ...
Juror conscription is not a civic duty
Friday, May 23rd, 2008I wonder if anyone but myself, who is pretty thoroughly obsessed with quotations from famous figures throughout history, enjoys our random quote generator that Kel put at the top of our page. (He didn't write the code, he just put it up there; the plugin is by Dustin Barnes.) I ...
To the Home Office, everyone is a terrorist suspect
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008It's a shame George Orwell didn't foresee the advent of computers and the computer age because if he had, 1984 would have been so much more frightening. The Home Office of Great Britain plans to create "Big brother" database for phones calls, emails and web use. This fascism hasn't been ...
Protest = Terrorism
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008That's the point we're coming to under this national-security state in 21st-century America. Republicans and Democrats and the people who continue to support them like a battered wife who won't leave her abusive husband are to blame. Karen De Coster on the LRC blag: If you are going to St. ...
Anarchy and law and order
Saturday, May 17th, 2008That's it. Anthony Gregory is my favorite political writer. Living, that is. I mean, no one could ever surpass Bastiat, Mencken, and Rothbard. His latest achievement is a beautiful explanation of how anarchy would promote order and natural law better than Statism does. I urge everyone of every political variety to ...
“But the State has to protect the children!”
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008"Or else stupid and negligent parents would cause all sorts of harm to them!" It is an understandable position, one I used to take in my darker, minarchist days. However, it is hard to deny the reality that often, the harm that a parent does to a child is not even ...
Can anarchism save Somalia?
Sunday, April 27th, 2008"Good government" is a paradox. Any people so decent as to be capable of implementing it would be better off without it, and any people so rotten as to need it would be incapable of implementing it. —unknown Somalia's condition, its history, and the attempts by the U.N. and U.S. to impose ...
Statolatry on the radio
Monday, April 21st, 2008A quibble I have with women, by and large, as regards their moral-political thought processes is that they are too hesitant to take a definitive side, to make a polarizing statement, to pronounce a strong (negative) judgment of people, ideas, or institutions. I made sure to say "by and large" ...
More rational thoughts on FLDS kidnapping
Sunday, April 20th, 2008I have decided I am an inadequate blagger. This is because I don't have enough time for writing and can't focus and materialize my thoughts into excellent blag posts, unless I take a lot of time for it. So I just link to other, (semi)professional writers who do it much ...
Insightful thoughts on the Eldorado polygamy compound raid
Saturday, April 19th, 2008I felt the need to chime in about the potential rights and certain wrongs of the raid by Texas police of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints polygamist ranch in Eldorado, but I think Wendy McElroy expressed thoughts very similar to my own much better than I could have. If I have ...
Hated attorney thinks he’ll get a biased jury
Saturday, April 12th, 2008When he's on the stand for illegal-campaign-donation and obstruction of justice charges. Article from the Detroit News. As much as he probably deserves some kind of punishment for all the defendants whose rights he's violated over the years, any charge relating to "excessive" campaign donations and almost any charge relating to ...
Orwellian Real ID tyranny
Sunday, April 6th, 2008After Anthony Gregory's announcements on the LRC blag and Mises blag introducing the Independent Institute's new blag, The Beacon, I realized that my recent lament that Gregory has only recently resumed regular blagging was misinformed; he has apparently been writing for that blag since October and was, in fact, its ...
The State is NEVER wrong
Friday, February 1st, 2008A good post about more law-enforcement abuses, which was one of the blag posts that trackbacked to J.D. Tuccille's aforementioned blag post. (Oh, but imagine the horror of a law-enforcement agency that wasn't the highest instance of legal authority in a state! Why, bad things would happen to good people ...
It IS happening here
Friday, February 1st, 2008Republocrats currently use fear-mongering on two big issues to garner support for their various State interventions into our lives—terrorism for some, global warming for others. Perhaps it can be said that libertarians also use something akin to fear-mongering in our debate and discussion, though of course I think it is ...
How the British government protects its subjects
Thursday, January 24th, 2008By shielding them from the dangers of watching TV without paying an unjust and exorbitant fee to the State, of course. I happened across this web page about one Briton's experience with the TV licensing arm of the State, and the first thing it brought to mind was, of course, ...
Habeas Wha?
Friday, December 28th, 2007Is posting a speech a total cop out when it comes to submitting a post? You bet. But that doesn't make this speech, concerning the ever growing disdain the Federal Government has for every American's natural right to habeas corpus, any less relevant. Please, enjoy the wonderful Judge Napolitano. ...