Carnival Of The Libertarians - Resurrected

I'm the proprietor of the "Carnival Of The Libertarians" franchise. 

I tried to keep it going for a year or so, but got so much non-Libertarian blogspam that I gave up on the project. 

Here's an attempted resurrection of Carnival Of The Libertarians.  If this gets any significant traffic, every few weeks I'll repost what I think are the best liberty-minded blogs, articles, essays and rants. 

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Brian Micklethewaite of Samizdata has an excellent idea about how to ensure that our governments have read the constitution. 

Guess who is the nation's largest drug smuggler?  The DEA.  

An investigation conducted in Mexico found the American government allowed that country’s largest drug cartel, Sinaloa, to operate without fear of persecution. That groups is estimated to be responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine coming into the country through Chicago. In exchange, the leaders of Sinaloa provided the DEA information on rival gangs.

 "But in a Libertarian society, who would decide which cartel gets to be the favorite?"

The Verge has a great piece on the irony of one Nobel Peace Prize winner hunting down another Nobel Peace Price nominee. 

If you've ever wondered about the ratio of legitimate constitutional legislation vs. bureaucratic "guidance" that you can be fined or jailed for not following, just go here. 

If you are a Libertarian, you are probably tired of hearing about the greatness of Sweden's healthcare system.  Well, Sweden's healthcare system is now moving toward what the U.S. system just abandoned, while the U.S. is moving towards what Sweden has given up on trying to make work.  Or something.

The main problem is naturally due to the central planning of health care, whether or not it is planned by regional “competing” governments. While access and quality are guaranteed by national law, Swedes usually have to line up for care. As noted above, wait times may be days or weeks for appointments with GPs while several (or many, and increasing) hours for ER care, but the real problem is apparent in specialist care such as surgery where wait times are not uncommonly several months, or even years.

Reason Magazine displays Hillary Clinton's abysmal ignorance on The Drug Trade, The Drug War, and therefore, just about everything else. 

Holy Nullification, Batman !!!  The New Hampshire Legislature is considering a bill that would mandate that juries be instructed that they could vote to acquit if they disagreed with a law. 

What's the difference in a Statist and a Libertarian?  Just 30 days of reading. 

I love me some NFL, and I look forward to the day when I can legally bet on some NFL.  But according to Reason Magazine, no city should ever do anything to attract the NFL. 

Sports stadiums not only appear to be a bad deal for tax payers, but having a franchise could also hurt loyal fans by making it difficult to watch their hometown team play thanks to the expansion of sports broadcasts and the complexities of NFL blackout rules. 

“If you have a team in Los Angeles and it doesn’t sell out, they can blackout the game in Los Angeles which means you often lose games…and as a fan there’s no payback in that,” says Daniel Durbin, Director of the University of Southern California’s Institute of Sports Media and Society. 

Though local boosters like LaBonge may continue to dream of having the NFL in the city, it’s becoming increasingly clear that not having a team may be the best deal for tax payers and fans alike. 

Go here and you'll learn that our government has spent $3,000 per American (i.e. $6,000 per taxpayer) to rebuild Afghanistan.  The article doesn't mention how much we spent to tear it down prior to the rebuilding. 

Here's something else on the NFL Cronyism Trifecta - tax exemptions on earnings, free stadiums, and to put some icing on the cake, the city and state provide them with free security guards. 

My father used to tell me that "even a blind hog can find an acorn every now and then".  That bit of wisdom even applies to Paul Krugman, the New York Times Obama apologist.  Go here to see him actually get something right. 

Colbert nails it on U.S. foreign policy. 

A professional drug warrior goes batshit crazy over the mere idea that he might no longer be paid to interfere in the lives of other people. 

Here's Barack Obama's best debate performance.  Ever.  He's debating some dude named Barack Obama. 

Finally (and yes, this is bait for an Instalanche) here's Glenn Reynolds comparing marijuana legalization and the dismal failure of Obamacare. 

That's all, folks !!






 

Columbia U. vs. You

Here's a Glenn Reynolds piece that ran in the New York Post yesterday.  I started following this attempted theft in either Reason magazine or Liberty magazine a couple of years ago.  Can't remember which. 
What does this amount to? 
If someone or some organization has enough political clout, your stuff can become their stuff. 

We often hear politicians and pundits denounce property rights. Property rights, we're told, protect the fat cats against the needs of the public. They're a tool for keeping the little guy down.

Like a lot of what we hear from politicians and pundits, this is exactly the opposite of the truth. The fat cats don't need the protection of property rights, because they already control the political system. It's the little guy (or gal), the one without political juice, who needs strong property rights for protection from the fat cats and the politicians they control.

This was demonstrated again this week, as the last legal barrier (a possible US Supreme Court review) to Columbia University's efforts to condemn and seize two businesses -- Tuck-it-Away Self-Storage and a gas station owned by Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur in West Harlem -- vanished.

Columbia said the condemnation was necessary to support the university's "vision" for a new campus; school President Lee Bollinger called the victory "a very important moment in the history of the university."

The picture of fascist thief Lee Bollinger came from here. 

It was an important, if not especially proud, moment for Columbia -- but it was surely a bigger moment in the lives of those West Harlem business owners, as their property gets taken away to promote the "vision" of what is, in fact, a multibillion-dollar corporation servicing the daughters and sons of the wealthy, the powerful and the connected.

The picture of Cowboys Stadium, built on stolen property by the City of Arlington as a gift for Jerry Jones, came from here. 

Traditionally, the "public-domain" power was used to acquire property needed for things like roads and bridges. It's still often defended in those terms, but the "public use" required for such takings has now been interpreted by courts to include pretty much anything the government wants to do with the property -- including handing it over to someone else who just happens to be wealthier or better-connected than the original property holder.

The picture of the Ballpark in Arlington, built on stolen property as a gift to George W. Bush, came from here. 

In this case, the government lacks even the weak excuse that the change will boost tax revenues, since -- as Megan McArdle of The Atlantic Monthly pointed out -- the property is being transferred from taxpaying businesses to a largely non-taxpaying enterprise.

Part of the American Dream was the expectation that if you started a business, you might go broke but you didn't have to worry about the government seizing your business on behalf of those with more political juice. That sort of thing was for Third World countries, corrupt kleptocracies where connections mattered more than capability.

The picture of the Bush family taking their triumphant lap around their pile of plunder during the World Series came from here.  Those with plenty of time to kill can go to this earlier post to read about how George Jr. was able to turn an $86 million dollar investment, plus a $205 million dollar taxpayer subsidy, plus a land theft, into a profit of $164 million dollars.  Kinda reminds me of the Iraq war.  Sorry for the digression.  Back to Glenn Reynolds.   

Not anymore. In fact, some of those formerly corrupt Third World countries have started providing stronger protection for private property, as they've realized that the more power you give to politicians and their cronies, the less incentive people have to try to succeed through hard work. What's the point, if you're at the mercy of the cronies?

We, on the other hand, seem to be moving backward.

The fact is the powerful and connected -- the Bloombergs, the Bollingers, et al -- don't really need strong legal protections. Nobody's going to take their property anyway. (When's the last time you heard of a rich guy's home being condemned?) For those with juice, things seldom get as far as the courts.

The courts are supposed to be there to protect the rest: The people without the connections, the ones who depend on the rule of law to keep the predators away.

Speaking of predatory courts favoring predatory developers, this is the famous "little pink house" from the Kelo vs New London court case.  Go here to order a copy of "Little Pink House: A True Story Of Defiance And Courage", by Jeff Benedict.  And once again, the villain of the story is another academic fascist, Claire Gaudiani, the president of Connecticut College. 
That protection has never been perfect, of course, but in the area of eminent domain it's become a sick joke. The message sent is that your property belongs to you -- until somebody with more clout wants it for something else, be it a "vision," or a moneymaking scheme.

Of course, this whole rule-of-law thing works both ways. Those politicians and their cronies are quick to rely on legal protections when their own interests are threatened by people outside the political system. But by undermining the property rights of the unconnected, they weaken the social contract that protects their own positions.

As with our actual currency, our political class has debased the moral currency by which it governs, as well. May they have joy of the results.

Another "Instalanche"

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has looked upon my typing and smiled. 
This is my second "Instalanche" - that's what they call it when Reynolds links to something you wrote and sends you a small fraction of his 300,000 hits per day. 

If I'd known this was gonna happen, I would've used spell-check. 
Go here.  I'm the 4th link from the top. 
And yes, being excited about this makes me a total geek. 

An Army officer comments on the Columbia Missouri drug raid

This video has now been seen by more than 1.2 million people.

Go here for my thoughts on why we continue to put up with government employees breaking down a door in the middle of the night, shooting two of the family dogs in front of a 7-year-old boy, finding a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, and then charging the homeowner with "child endangerment".
(It's because we're sheep.) 



Here's an email to Radley Balko from an army officer serving someplace in Afghanistan:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.


For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they're after is present at the location, and that it's too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I'm a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call "cordon and knock": they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn't happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we're going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don't have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don't see any reason why they can't use similar methods.

And here's Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit on the officer's comments:

Quite different from using door-busting tactics to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders. Of course, one difference is that we care about winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan . . . .

Glenn Reynolds on "The Knowledge Problem"

If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" -- President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981.

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.

Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can't possibly be smart enough to make them work.

Later on in the essay:

Hayek's insight into economics and regulation is often called "The Knowledge Problem," and it is a very powerful notion. But recent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations.

This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren't going to strike until later, after the November elections.

But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. As the Atlantic's Megan McArdle wrote:

"What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It's earnings season, and they offered guidance about , um, their earnings."So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable

And there's more:

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there's some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!

More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what's more striking is that Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation -- well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.

In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It's like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb, and God knows there's plenty of evidence that Congress isn't a repository of rocket scientists. But it's just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn't make much difference.

The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing

He continues:


The bad news is obvious: We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good:  Incompetence is built into the system.

The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.

If that doesn't encourage skepticism toward big government, it's hard to imagine what will.

I loved everything about this essay except the last sentence.  As long as politicians are promising free healthcare, money, salvation, chickens in every pot, etc., there will be those who believe every word of it. 

Go here to read the whole thing. 

The contradiction pics came from here and here and here and here.