In no particular order:

Economics

1. Supply-and-demand solves countless mysteries of the world – everything from rent control to road congestion.

2. Almost anyone can understand supply-and-demand if they calmly listen. Unfortunately, the inverse is also true.

3. Poverty is terrible, and economic growth, not redistribution, is the cure.

4. The proximate causes of unemployment are labor market regulation and workers’ misguided beliefs about fairness. But the fundamental cause of unemployment is excessive wages.

5. Free competition is far superior to “perfect” competition.

6. Governments with fiat money have near-absolute power over nominal GDP, but much less over real GDP or employment.

7. Moral hazard and adverse selection are largely the product of – not a rationale for – regulation of insurance.

8. Immigration restrictions are a fruitless crime – and do more harm than all other government regulations combined.

9. Communism was a disaster because of bad incentives, not lack of incentives.

10. The last two centuries of rising population and prosperity should fill us with awe – and the best is yet to come.

Philosophy

1. The greatest philosophical mistake is to demand proof for the obvious. See Hume.

2. The second greatest philosophical mistake is to try to prove the obvious. See Descartes.

3. If you can’t explain your position clearly in simple language, you probably don’t understand it yourself.

4. When possible, resolve debates about “what’s obvious” by betting, not talking.

5. Ignoring the facts of dualism and radical free will is anti-empirical and unscientific.

6. Talking about morality if there are no moral facts is like talking about unicorns if there aren’t any unicorns.

7. There are moral facts.

8. Productive moral arguments begin with clear-cut simple cases, not one-sentence moral theories or trolley problems.

9. Violence and theft are presumptively wrong, and calling yourself “the government” does nothing to rebut these presumptions.

10. The best three pages in philosophy remain Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus.”

Politics

1. Voters are irrational. So is believing otherwise.

2. Government isn’t a solution to externalities problems; it’s the best example of the problem.

3. The main output of government isn’t “public goods,” but private goods that people pretend to want much more than they really do. See Social Security and Medicare.

4. People rarely make the the most internally consistent argument for government action: paternalism.

5. The realistic path to freer markets isn’t “free-market reform,” but austerity.

6. Democrats and Republicans are about as different as Catholics and Protestants – and 80% of the union of their mutual recriminations is true.

7. Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far better. After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far worse.

8. Big reasons why democracy isn’t worse: Unequal participation, political slack, and status quo bias.

9. Libertarians are the dhimmis of democracy.

10. Despite everything, life in First World democracies is amazingly good by world and historic standards and will keep getting better. So cheer up.

Life

1. Life is a gift, and the more the better.

2. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Yep.

3. Be friendly as a matter of policy. Turn the other cheek in the face of ad hominem attacks. It might seem crazy, but it works.

4. Obsessiveness is an powerful solution for physical and social problems. Unfortunately it’s also a major cause of emotional problems.

5. Once you’re an adult, religious people will leave you alone if you leave them alone.

6. People vary more widely than you think. Tell yourself it’s nobody’s fault.

7. Selection is the key to social harmony. Surround yourself with true friends who love you just as you are. If you don’t see any around, quest for them.

8. Raise your children with kindness and respect. “I’m your parent, not you’re friend” is a reason to treat your kids better than their peers do, not worse.

9. Your mind ages at a slower rate than you expect when you’re young, your body at a faster rate.

10. Evolutionary psychology is by far the best universal theory of human motivation. Ignore it at your own peril.

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.

Some unspecified time in my past, I received a potential-juror questionnaire that I was required to fill out and mail back to the courthouse to determine whether I was suitable to serve as a juror. I ignored it and threw it in the trash. “Fuck that, they can come and get me,” I said. It wasn’t a summons; if I didn’t return anything, what difference would it make to them? The threats of enslavement and murder were not entirely explicit, so I decided to ignore it. Then two or three months later, I got an identical letter, except I think it said “Second notice” on it or something similar, so I thought I’d better fill it out and return it. I did and received an official notice of conscription shortly thereafter.

Much to my surprise, I was being conscripted to serve in a federal district court 45 minutes away. How ridiculous, stupid, and impractical. It should be pretty widely agreed-upon, among libertarians and non-libertarians alike, that no free society would conscript innocent citizens to do anything, especially something they aren’t particularly qualified for or enthusiastic about, and especially for which they would be inconvenienced and made poorer by an hour-and-a-half commute on several dozen occasions. This was not a one- or two-day, local criminal or civil trial or anything; it was an 18-month commitment for which the jurors would be required to meet three or four Wednesdays per month every single month. That’s because this wasn’t your typical jury duty; one of the few things I do respect about this process and its requirements is the oath of confidentiality I took, but you might say this jury could be described as “great, dignified, exalted, majestic, illustrious, or eminent.” (Not that I would.)

You might be appalled at the level of situational or medical burden that jury duty must impose upon a person before he can be excused from this involuntary obligation. “Eight months pregnant? Yeah, and your point is? You live an hour and a half away and your commute would therefore be three hours every time? Cry me a river. You’re a student who has mandatory Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes? Next.” Absurd and appalling. I won’t say anything about my observations in particular, but I have heard that if you’re unable to drive and you have five adopted special-needs children for whom you are the primary caregiver, the judge and prosecutor must have a private huddle to determine that, yes, that qualifies as a legitimate excuse to preclude you from juror conscription.

I have to admit a certain admiration and almost liking of the judge who explained the whole process to us and its importance and our function in the criminal justice system. The judge spoke like someone who truly believed that a jury’s most important purpose was protecting fellow citizens against the government. S/He vehemently opposed the notion that any jury simply did the bidding of the judge and prosecutor, or that the jurors were simply an arm of the prosecutor’s office, carrying out its wishes, agreeing with it, and kowtowing to its expertise in complex matters. S/He brought this up several times and didn’t strike me as the politician-type who would say one thing and mean another.

On the other hand, s/he did not believe jurors had the right or the position to judge right vs. wrong, only the facts of the case and their relationship to the letter of the law. This was brought up only because of comments and concerns that I voiced. I felt, probably correctly, that I was alone in the room in my conscientious yet subversive objection to agreeing to submit a judgment of wrongdoing for actions I don’t believe were wrong. Maybe I can be more of a rabble-rouser than I thought (except, I guess, that no one else was roused, save by confusion and indignation at the first expression of anti-authoritarianism they’d heard in a long time). Prompted by prior mentions of drugs and guns by the judge and/or another juror, I brought up my objection to gun laws and drug laws and my inability—nay, refusal—to judge someone in the wrong for violating them, if they hadn’t harmed someone in the process.

Later during the voir dire, when jurors were asked to raise their hands and offer their stories of prior run-ins with the law that might bias them in the cases they might hear, one juror mentioned that his business was audited and he was kind of harassed by the IRS a decade or two ago. I hadn’t thought of the potential of hearing a case of tax evasion, but I realized then and there that I would never, ever, under any circumstances, whether they include other wrongdoings on the part of the defendant or duress (short of jail time) applied to me, vote in favor of the IRS. Never. Tax evasion is a noble act, and if people can get away with it, I say more power to them. The IRS is the aggressor and the defendant is the victim in any case of tax evasion, and I would not punish a victim of the IRS’s predations. If jurors are supposed to consider only the facts of the case, then please don’t blame me for taking all the facts into account, including that all taxation is theft and tax evasion represents an act of self-defense.

Don’t worry; I didn’t say nearly all that. I was not eloquent, forceful, or convincing in my comments. But I made points that many reasonable people agree with.

The other jurors came from all walks of (American) life, and most seemed smart, reasonable, and common-sensical enough. I think they’d make a fine jury, save their sheep-like attitude towards following orders and obeying the law even if they believe them to be wrong.

Because of my expression of support for the principles of jury nullification and eventually mentioning the words “jury nullification,” the judge explained that it was actually illegal, wrong, subversive of the rule of law that binds society, and not backed by any English common-law or American legal tradition. This could be true, but juror conscription, sex-discrimination, and the Three-Fifths Compromise are also part of American legal tradition, and that doesn’t make them right.

The judge clearly believed firmly in the separation of powers by the system of checks and balances in our Constitution, and s/he supported the jury’s position as defender or buffer of fellow citizens against the State. This is why s/he believed it was not the place of jurors to make law; that’s for the legislative branch. (I could mention that it is most certainly the function of the justice system to judge the law; that’s exactly what judicial review is!) On either four or five separate occasions, not in one long speech or un-separated by other matters, the judge stated in no uncertain terms that it was totally and completely illegal, wrong, inappropriate, and un-American for a jury to arrogate to itself the power of deciding on the validity of the law in addition to the facts of the case. It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what you want, it doesn’t matter if anyone was harmed—the jury should decide on whether the facts of the case indicate a violation of the law, and vote “objectively” in accordance with those facts.

I find this disgusting and abominable.

I cannot and will not vote against my conscience, and I cannot and will not violate my conscience to avoid breaking the law or to send someone else to prison for actions that I don’t believe warrant it. There is nothing about any legislator, governor, president, or any other elected official, or lawyer, or judge, or Department of Justice official, or their position, or any other regular citizen like myself, that makes them suited to outlaw something but makes me unsuited to deem that law unjust and invalid. The fact that legislators were voted in by other people, even a majority of voters in a given region at a given time, or the fact that a majority of citizens in this region at this time agree with the law, does not make any law the slightest bit more just, nor does it make it just to imprison someone for violating it. Might does not make right, and the majority should not rule. Six billion people vs. one does not make the one any less justified in his opinion. If I am to judge someone’s guilt, I will make that judgment using my own sense of justice and my own conception of right vs. wrong, and no other criteria.

The easiest and, unfortunately, most prevalent example of the propriety of judging the law instead of the facts is drug laws. I believe most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal, and I won’t participate in adding to that harm by punishing someone for violating them. I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of the monstrous crimes against humanity that have been committed by people who were “just obeying the law.” Right and wrong exist prior to and independent of legislation.

So after the voir dire, before we were dismissed for lunch at 1:45, a few pairs of people were told to switch seats. Apparently our order had some meaning or function. I ended up being the last “alternate” juror, as opposed to one of the first-string jurors originally. It doesn’t seem like there should be anything wrong with this, but really I think there is. The jury system is set up to weed out people who will vote with their own mind and in a way that is subversive to the State’s wishes. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. I experienced it first-hand.

To tell you the truth, I felt a little guilty for saying things that would rub the judge and prosecutor the wrong way and set off alarms in their head that I was not suitable to implement the State’s laws. And I felt bad about feeling bad about that. I felt ashamed all around. But I shouldn’t have; I didn’t “get out” of jury duty; I didn’t say 10% of what I thought about monopolistic government, monopolistic law enforcement systems, juror conscription, and a society that shuns people who would vote their conscience instead of kowtowing to objectionable laws.

I possibly could have had a chance to help put corrupt politicians behind bars, and when I heard that was one of many possibilities, I wanted to leap at the opportunity and keep my mouth shut. Instead I was honest. I’m not going to feel bad about being honest, and I’m not going to feel bad about demurring at the idea of serving the State mostly involuntarily for a year and a half. It was probably one of the more convenient times in my life to undergo such an endeavor, but I would either hate myself for it or come under some kind of stress for promising to uphold the (potentially objectionable) law and then blatantly violating that promise on day 1. Then again, if you want jury-duty advice for the future, know this: you can vote exactly how you want and voice any objections you want, without fear of judgment or repercussions, because no one besides the other jurors—not the prosecutor, not the judge, not even the stenographer or interpreters or anyone else—can know how you voted on anything, ever. At least not in that type of jury.

I’ve heard the reasons why regular, lay citizens should be extracted from their normal lives and forced into jury duty; they sound like good reasons on the surface. But why shouldn’t laymen be conscripted to serve as judges? As lawyers? Oh, are those too specialized positions to leave in the hands of laymen? How about serving as courthouse janitor once every few years? How about substitute teachers or DMV workers or receptionists? There is nothing about jurors that precludes them from being professionals, educated and specialized, just like there’s nothing that precludes every function of the government from being privatized (or abolished!). I know it’s hard to put myself in other people’s mindset sometimes, but I honestly think this is one issue where wacky libertarians like me and others can find common ground. Juror conscription is a violation, it’s impractical, and it has facilitated a State-serving function of the courts, which is the opposite of how juries should be and certainly the opposite of what the founding fathers wanted.

That said, in the future, if I’m conscripted into regular jury duty, I might see if I can swallow my abhorrence of the monopolistic court system and help fight the State from somewhere other than my computer chair. It probably won’t be such a terrible thing. Just think: if you were the sole person responsible for a hung jury on a drug trafficking or gun possession charge, you’d be a minor hero for a day. I don’t know how much you’re told about the particular case before you start serving, but if I can keep an innocent person out of prison, if only temporarily, I will lie to the State to stab it in the back.

I know that Canadians, both from my personal experiences in getting to know several pretty closely during my time in Michigan and from their reputation, are easy-going, friendly, non-confrontational people. But I also think they’re pretty down-to-earth and proud people, and they certainly know how to drink and have a good time late into the night. Man, can they drink. A proper response from the Canadian women’s hockey team to the IOC and the rest of the political correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade would have been to tell them, in true Patrick-Royian fashion, “I’m sorry, we can’t hear you because we’ve got our gold medals clogging our ears.” Oh, no! They’re drinking alcohol! (Perfectly harmless, despite the *gasp!* 18-year-old on their team!) Oh, no! They’re smoking cigars! How un-ladylike! (Perfectly harmless.) Oh, no! They celebrated in public, on the rink! Won’t they think of the children! (Nobody should care how they celebrate. If anything it’s good to show kids how to celebrate peacefully and composedly, I think. It’s also good to show girls that women who like sports are cool.)

Political correctness pisses me off. The IOC and anybody who batted an eye at the Canadian women’s hockey team celebration are a bunch of craven, whiny pansies.

A few days later, he was driving along doing nothing wrong, when a cop pulled him over and asked him where he got that license plate. He said, “The Secretary of State’s office.” (That’s Michigan’s stupid term for the DMV.) The cop asked him if he was trying to be a smart-ass or if he was being serious. Of course he was being serious. The reason the cop was asking, you see, is that this plate was registered to a much older car, and his was obviously very new. He asked him how this came to be. My friend told him the truth, that he simply had it transferred to his new car, and some paper or computer records must not have gotten changed yet.

So, naturally, the cop did what any officer of the law and protector of the people would do: He wrote him a ticket for running a red light, which my friend most definitely hadn’t done. He even had a friend in the passenger seat who could vouch for that with 100% certainty. As my friend pointed out to me while telling this story, the cop didn’t pull over the car that was behind my friend in the other lane and also drove right through the (green) light.

The reason, I suspect, that this clown-suited thug invented a bogus charge on the spot was because he was desperate for ticket revenue, since their tax revenue probably doesn’t cover all their expenses, and, possibly, he might have figured he got caught running my friend’s license plate through their police database, which shouldn’t be done unless there is a prior reason for doing so, meaning he needed a legitimate pretense for pulling my friend over, which function was filled by the red-light violation.

The ticket was for well over $100. I don’t remember the amount, but it is obviously completely irrelevant, and I’ll keep it in the mid-$100s to avoid unnecessarily trumping up the story. Naturally, my friend wanted to contest this ticket and explain to the judge that the officer had obviously made an “honest mistake” so that the ticket would just be thrown out and my friend could lose a morning of his life and go through a lot of hassle in exchange for keeping a small sum of his own money.

However, the judge told him that for some reason or another, possibly due to the nature of the violation or possibly because it was just his word versus that of the barbaric, primitive, parasitic waste of carbon and oxygen who issued the ticket, he couldn’t simply throw the ticket out or do anything else that would result in him not owing the money to the city, save filing an official appeal with the local DA’s office (or whomever). During the hearing, the clown-suited gangster submitted the bald-faced lie that he clearly remembered my friend running the red light and that that was the one and only reason he pulled him over.

My friend met with some attorney or attorney’s assistant and found out that to file an appeal itself would cost more than the ticket was for. This fee was non-refundable, win or lose.

So there you have it, folks. The government of the City of Ann Arbor is officially, proudly, patently, shamelessly a racket, and very little more. All the evidence I’ve ever encountered points to the “transfer theory of government” explaining, at least in large part, the foundation and continuation of every government in the history of mankind. The transfer theory of government, as, for example, Bruce Benson writes in The Enterprise of Law, posits that governments are formed primarily to take money, property, and other forms of wealth from one class of people (the citizens) to give it to another (the people who run the government).

In the future, just so you know: clown-suited thugs are apt to run your license plate in their database if they ever get a free second or two, in order to see if there’s any “crime” they can possibly pull you over for.

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner says Americans are just going to have to get used to saving more of their money. This is after his and Helicopter Ben’s policies have deliberately inflated the money supply and induced people to spend more money on cars, houses, and their credit cards. Unbelievable. (HT: Bob Murphy)

When my liberal-Democrat friends are wary and skeptical of Barack Obama’s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, then you know it was ill-advised. As one of the Regular Guys on Atlanta’s Rock 100.5 said Friday, why not nominate Tommy Hanson for the Hall of Fame? Thomas DiLorenzo was right on the money:

So Obama joins Woodrow Wilson in the pantheon of American presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize (Wilson won it in 1919). I learned this morning that nominations for the prize had to be in by Feb. 20, about one month after Obama was inaugurated. That means that the prize went for his rhetoric during the campaign, not anything he could have actually accomplished. As I recall, his two most memorable foreign policy pronouncements during the campaign were 1) advocating that the U.S. bomb Pakistan; and 2) escalating the war in Afghanistan. He did order the murder of some people in Pakistan by bombardment shortly after taking office. I’m still surprised, though, that he won the prize after killing so few people. Usually, one must be a major league murderer like a Wilson or a Teddy Roosevelt to win such a prize.

Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.) received confirmation from Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold that under the current Senate version of the Obamacare bill, Americans would be penalized with jail time for failing to buy health insurance. Actually, as with all State mandates, the penalty is always death. (HT: David Z.’s Twitter feed on his web page)

A 6-year-old was suspended from his Delaware government school because he was so excited about being a new Cub Scout that he brought one of his new tools to school, a combination knife-fork-spoon-bottle-opener, and used it to eat his lunch. To bring this story up is to point out its stupidity. A 45-day reassignment to an “alternative school” for not hurting or threatening anyone is the latest of a million examples of “zero-tolerance” implying zero thought. Simply taking the tool away for the day and explaining that it could be dangerous, if not in his hands then in someone else’s, would have been an appropriate response. Tell his parents he can’t bring it again. Luckily his 45-day punishment was overturned by the school board in favor of a 3-day suspension. His mother, ignorantly, says she just wants to get her child back into this government indoctrination center as soon as possible. I liked one radio broadcaster’s take on this the most. He said the really alarming part about this and all the other government-school fiascoes you hear about is that our society is losing the type of person who will take a stand and say, “No, this is wrong, the literal interpretation of this zero-tolerance policy is ludicrous, and I will get fired before I punish this child for harming and threatening no one.” Government-school administrators are, by and large, incredibly dense, passionless underachievers who lack common sense or a commitment to any principles to ground their lives in.

Hmm, somehow Barack Obama’s socialized-medicine message sounds better when it’s this melodic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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