New York City’s Mayor-Turned-Nanny-Wannabee, Michael Bloomberg got a taste of his own medicine when he was denied a second slice of pizza at a local restaurant. Says the “report,” from The Daily Currant:

Bloomberg was having an informal working lunch with city comptroller John Liu at the time and was enraged by the embarrassing prohibition. The owners would not relent, however, and the pair were forced to decamp to another restaurant to finish their meal.

Sometimes one of these busybody control freaks gets his just deserts, even before he’s finished his meal!

…cross-posted at LRCBlog.

E.T.A.:…by the way, in case the quotation marks around “report” are too subtle, this is a satirical story, like those on The Onion, although this would make my day if it actually happened!))

It must be for some. And one man, 63-year-old Jose Santiago Delao of Texas, was willing to provide dental services on the cheap, despite not having a license. Eventually he landed on the authorities’ radar and was arrested following a complaint from a woman about a botched molar repair:

Delao admits he skirted the law, but isn’t remorseful.

“Jesus Christ didn’t need or didn’t have a license,” Jose Delao told Yahoo News during a jailhouse interview. “People hurt and they needed it. People didn’t have enough money to visit the regular dentist.”

Delao, a former dental lab technician, claims he couldn’t turn his back.

“It broke my heart,” he said, tapping his chest, “because I have the experience.”

But authorities say Delao, a native of Costa Rica, has never been a licensed dentist in Texas. If convicted, he could get two to 10 years in prison….

A survey of published news reports shows that as many as eight such underground dental clinics have been shutdown in the U.S. since last summer.

“I would clearly classify it as a problem,” said Dr. Frank Catalanotto, chair of the Department of Community Dentistry at the University of Florida. “It is potentially a big problem.”

I disagree that the problem is unlicensed dentistry. The problem is that there is obviously a market demand for low-cost dentistry that isn’t being met, probably because the barrier to entry in the field as a state-licensed dentist is so high, a barrier which licensed dentists have a vested interest in maintaining, as it protects their market share from would-be competitors like Delao. But people are far more likely to be uninsured for dental care than for medical care, or simply can’t afford to pay the high prices of mainstream dental work. Delao understood this and tried to meet the need, to his credit. He may have committed some crime (if, as the story reports, he did not let a patient leave when she wanted to), but trying to help people isn’t one of them.

(Cross-posted from A Thousand Cuts.)

The Attorney General’s exact words:

What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes. You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it.

You’ve been a bad, bad… citizen.

Cower — interesting choice of words that. Cower is a word more associated with fear than shame in my mind. One cowers in fear. One blushes or hides out of shame.

It’s a natural inclination in those with a love of power to want to see those beneath them cower. Our proper posture when faced with the disapproval of our betters is on bended knee, shoulders trembling, head bowed in anxious deference.

It’s also interesting that Holder suggests smokers “cower” outside of buildings, doing their nasty deed in private, on their own initiative. Silly me, I thought it was because government regulations and corporate policies require them to smoke only in designated areas outside. I doubt most such smokers feel any shame in the act, though they may huddle in winter.

I wonder, Does Holder cower in shame over his responsibility for hundreds of gun deaths as a result of Operation Fast and Furious and his zealous prosecution of the Drug War?

[Originally published as a comment in response to someone who announced publicly on Google+ that he sincerely believed that, as radical as it may sound, part of the Bill of Rights should be repealed. The post below isn't a complete case against ignorant, opportunistic statists with an irrational fear of guns, but it highlights a number of inconvenient facts and devastating arguments for their position.]

Obama the Mass-Murderer-in-Chief
makes light of shooting people.

The idea of repealing the 2nd Amendment is not that radical really. It’s just further down the road this country is already on — toward a full-on police-surveillance state. What’s truly radical these days is any defense of liberty and property.

You know that gun control has a racist history in America, right? And that it disproportionately harms women, minorities (particularly blacks), and the poor? Gun control doesn’t work. It just disarms potential crime victims.

Gun control laws were used to make blacks less dangerous, more vulnerable targets of (racially motivated) police abuse and private crime. Even now they are used to incarcerate blacks who haven’t committed any real crimes. Lacking evidence for anything else, the state puts them away on weapons charges (and/or drug charges, but the Drug War’s another unjust racist policy we don’t need to get into).

Women use guns to defend themselves from would-be rapists, domestic abusers, and the like. Guns are an equalizer, giving them a way to protect themselves from bigger, stronger men. You would deny them this? Police protection is a joke; they usually don’t arrive in time.

As I mentioned above, gun control doesn’t work, especially in America. There are already so many guns in private hands here that any new restrictions or bans will have no appreciable effect. Any politically feasible new laws will not involve confiscating these existing guns and will not ban private secondhand sales. Criminals are not wont to respect “gun free zones” and other gun laws in any case. They’ll just purchase their guns on the black market or steal them (as Adam Lanza did).

The Clinton AWB did not reduce gun crimes. A new one won’t either. Connecticut essentially still has a state-level AWB; Lanza’s (mother’s) Bushmaster was CT AWB compliant. So-called “assault weapons” aren’t even the most powerful civilian firearms (many hunting rifle calibers are more powerful); AWBs typically only ban cosmetic “scary” features that don’t affect the lethality of the firearm (like a collapsible stock); and banning high-capacity magazines won’t slow down shooters much (it only takes a second to reload even if you’re not very skilled).

And gun control laws treat people as guilty until proven innocent. They violate the rights of peaceful people to liberty and property. I can see no justification for violating the rights of innocent people just because some bad guys use firearms to murder other innocent people, occasionally a large number of them at once. I get as saddened and outraged as anyone in the anti-gun crowd when these things happen, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

Bottom line: New stricter gun control laws won’t make anyone safer. They won’t stop these mass shootings. They’ll probably contribute to making them worse if we see any change at all (there actually isn’t upward trend in these shootings over the past 30 years and crime is generally down in the US). Government will just have more power and the people less freedom and less security. If you do manage to repeal the 2nd Amendment and confiscate all/most privately-owned firearms in the United States, what are you going to do when the nutcases start using homemade explosives?

One of Obama’s drone victims.

Meanwhile, I don’t see any of the anti-gun crowd shedding any tears for the many children Obama has murdered overseas with his drone strikes. He’s a mass murderer many times worse than Adam Lanza (as was Bush), yet these people voted him back into office and turn a blind eye to his crimes and hypocrisy. What happened to the anti-war left that harangued Bush? Is it really saving human lives that motivates you? Or is it just an unacknowledged lust to control that which you fear, hate, and don’t understand?

There is libertarianism — with its debatable scope and definitions and borders — and then there is parody libertarianism, that is, the one where every business person is dubbed heroic, no matter how cronyistic they may be, and of course, where the Little Guy is squashed daily beneath the mighty, faceless feet of Making Money because no one cares; and so Government is Necessary.

Apropos of that inaccurate impression, those on the moderate left — the guiltiest when it comes to repeating it as gospel —  should consider the following story.

The Mayor’s office of Green Bay, Wisconsin recently sent Catholic homeless shelter St. John the Evangelist a letter that says by allowing “too many people to stay at its overnight shelter” St. John is violating the terms of their building permit (they debate this).

The reason for the shelter’s sudden upswing in homeless people might just be that it’s December and December is cold. In fact, the shelter is only open in cold weather and is intended to be an emergency location for people who don’t have anywhere else to go. Nevertheless, as reported in this local Fox affiliate, the charity’s building is permitted to house 64 people, and 64 people it shall house and no more.

Last week, the city sent St. John’s officials a letter saying they had five days to comply with its conditional use permit capacity of 64 overnight residents. According to the city, the shelter has been over its capacity every night in December, reaching as high as 86 people one night last week.

“When we grant a conditional use permit to someone, we expect them to hold up their end of the deal and they clearly aren’t,” said Jim Schmitt, Green Bay’s mayor.

“As far as we’re concerned the operational plan allows us to go to 84,” said Reilly.

Green Bay’s assistant attorney says that doesn’t matter because the shelter’s operational plan isn’t the same as the 64 beds on its city permit.

“They cannot put an operating plan together that violates the CUP,” said Jim Mueller, an assistant city attorney for Green Bay.

“We need to take care of the people who are going to be coming to the shelter tomorrow night in the middle of the snowstorm,” said Reilly.

That could cost the shelter $681. The city plans to start issuing a fine of that amount each night the shelter goes over capacity.

Neither the news reports nor the actual letter from the mayor’s office detail any witnessed overcrowding or unsafe circumstances, only that the numbers are not matching up in the way that they must (and that some local residents have complained about “drinking and loitering”).

It is not an exaggeration to say that this shelter could be saving the lives of homeless people this winter and by extension  the mayor could be killing people by preventing them from being helped by a willing charity.

Furthermore, the idea that the mayor of the city can and should make sure these fines occur is based on three assumptions:

1) That the people who are at the shelter every day and can actually gauge how much space is available do not know as well as the mayor does, or as well as the previously written mandates says.

2) That even if the shelter is uncomfortable, even bordering on dangerously overcrowded, that the alternative of potentially freezing to death is better and that the homeless individuals cannot decide for themselves whether or not to stay at the voluntarily-offered shelter, and or whether they would prefer to brave a night in the cold.

And 3) Since the city council and the city planning commission could permit the shelter to house more people if they decide, they also have the legitimacy to decide such matters. Even though, according to the Fox story, they won’t meet until next year, thereby making the shelter choose now between losing money to fines or turning away people seeking shelter.

All of these assumptions are authoritarian,condescending, bureaucratic,  and downright dangerous. They have nothing to do with helping the poor and downtrodden. Perhaps the fourth, worst assumption of all is simply that “rules are rules” no matter anyone’s good intentions.

Quite simply, advocates for the state can have it both ways. Private charity can never feed all the hungry or mend the sick, they say, so we simply must have government. What’s that? You don’t have the proper papers for giving out that food? Sorry.

The New Deal arguably began the demise of mutual aid societies and other voluntary charities and social securities and the Great Society mostly finished the job. The current common attitude about charity  is beautifully summed up by the late, great Harry Browne who said, “Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, “See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.”

And the Green Bay story is not unique. How about New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s restriction on food donations to the homeless (at government-run shelters) because calorie and salt counts could not be ascertained? How about the anarchist group Food, Not Bombs blocked from feeding the homeless in Orlando, with their members even jailed? How about Philadelphia’s ban on feeding the homeless in public? How about the loophole for the Green Bay Mayor’s legitimized pushiness, the very existence of zoning laws?

Hell, how about every time a small business owner, or a food truck driver, or a taxi driver cannot start a business due to the artificially high cost of entry into that market? What have we lost if those individuals become dependent on the state instead of becoming entrepreneurs?

In spite of all this, individuals do keep on, demonstrated beautifully by this quote from the Green Bay shelter’s deacon, Tim Reilly: “The obstacles [the mayor] may put in front of us are secondary to taking care of those who need shelter. This is what it means to be Christian.”

Still, even when wearing a minarchist or moderate hat, or even pro-government hat, these kinds of robotic restrictions on kindness are infuriating. Again, people who believe in a some kindly welfare state shouldn’t even support red tape like this; what they do instead is ignore it and excuse it and incidents like the above mentioned.  And by not even letting the private sector compete fairly with government, to see who might win, the latter aptly demonstrates that it’s not just a coercive institution, but a damned cheat as well.

Book review of The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom by Laurence Vance. Vance Publications, 2012. Orlando, FL. $9.95 at Amazon.com. Cross-posted from LibertarianChristians.com.

To many newcomers to libertarian ideas – especially Christians – it is not always perfectly clear why libertarians oppose the War on Drugs so strenuously. Some Christians even think that the only reason libertarians oppose government prohibition is so that they can get high legally. Nothing could be further from the truth. Simply put, we despise government prohibition because it is a power no government should have. Moreover, the War on Drugs is an incredible example of precisely how a government usurps liberty, destroys lives, and consolidates power unto itself. This short book by Dr. Laurence Vance, writer at LCC, LewRockwell.com, Mises.org, and the Future of Freedom Foundation, explains in great detail why everyone should oppose the War on Drugs .

Vance begins the introduction by giving his purpose in collecting these essays into book form:

This is not a book about the benefits of drugs; this is a book about the benefits of freedom. I neither use illegal drugs nor recommend their use to anyone else. I am even skeptical about the health benefits of most legal drugs.

So why this book? Because I believe in freedom. I believe in individual liberty, private property, personal responsibility, a free market, a free society, and a government as absolutely limited as possible.

The book then contains 19 essays, written over the past 4 years, that tackle the War on Drugs from a variety of angles. A few common themes resonate throughout the book:

1. The War on Drugs is unconstitutional. You would think that “conservatives” who support the United States Constitution would readily admit when the Federal government has overstepped its bounds, but such is rarely the case. Still, the Feds do not follow their own rules, and we should point this out whenever possible. Substance prohibition has never been constitutional.

2. The War on Drugs is a total failure. It has clogged the judicial system and incarcerated completely innocent people, instigated worldwide violence, corrupted law enforcement, eroded civil liberties, and destroyed financial privacy. Additionally, it hasn’t even been able to prevent drugs from getting into prisons much less the general population. By any standard of “helping” anyone, the War on Drugs has completely failed. To me, those in jail for possession of illegal drugs – assuming they have not committed a violent act – are prisoners of war and deserve to be liberated immediately.

3. Drug abuse is a health issue, not a legal issue. If you oppose government intrusion into health care, then there is no reason at all to support the War on Drugs. It is not the government’s business to dictate health issues to you.

4. The War on Drugs is a war on the ideals of liberty and a free society. Actions that are not aggressive in nature have no business being prohibited by government. Vices are not crimes, and it is not the purpose of government to monitor the behavior of citizens like a nanny! The War on Drugs is a perfect example of why government intrusion into people’s lives does nothing but harm. In order to ward off “vices” like illicit drugs, the government must continuously undermine liberty.

Vance even has an essay for why Christians should oppose the War on Drugs. Yes, Christians are free to consider drug abuse a great evil, but such evil should not be compounded by a drug war that is an even greater evil. Vance argues that Christians are both inconsistent and immoral for calling upon the state to punish non-crimes:

It is not the purpose of Christianity to use force or the threat of force to keep people from sinning. Christians who are quick to criticize Islamic countries for prescribing and proscribing all manner of behavior are very inconsistent when the support the same thing [in the United States]. A Christian theocracy is just as unscriptural as an Islamic theocracy.

Now more than ever we Christians ought to expose the War on Drugs for what it is: a War on Freedom. Laurence Vance concisely brings you a wealth of information to educate you on the issues, and I highly recommend this book to any believer anywhere.

Interested in learning more? Check out The War on Drugs is a War on Freedom at Amazon.com.

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” ~ Clay Shirky

You know the slavery Kool-Aid is working well when those who are oppressed petition their oppressors for more of that which helps keep them oppressed.

For instance, public education is a tool that was designed–specifically and directly–as a means of controlling the hoi polloi.  The educational system of compulsory public education championed by Horace Mann, chock-full of multiple-choice testing perfected by Frederick J. Kelly, feeding into statistical models based upon the work of (eugenicist) Sir Francis Galton, was (and is) designed to fulfill the need for employees who are primed and ready to inhabit factories where efficiency can be measured in ways developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor. (The fact that so few of such factories currently exist in America should also be telling, but that’s a different discussion.) Mann believed “universal public education was the best way to turn the nation’s unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens.” The whole thing was designed to produce a seething throng of people ready to take orders, stand in line, ask few questions, and install bumpers all day–accepting the interminable boredom of such a life–while their over-lords made a ton of money.  Free and compulsory public education was never intended to create inquisitive, risk-taking, leaders. Or entrepreneurs and/or business owners.  Or frankly, owners of anything! Yet, people clamor that “education is a right” and “we need more funding for our schools” despite the inescapable fact that these same crap holes are doing their best at producing children incapable of independent thought and unable to read a book (or a blueprint), solve a simple mathematics problem, or devise a new strategy.  It’s damned sad, really.

A similar conclusion can be drawn regarding government job creation. Throughout the current election season, you’ll hear people clamoring that Obama will do all he can to create jobs while Romney won’t, or some such simplistic foolishness. Any president who claims to create jobs, uses tax dollars and government debt to pay people wages that are too high, for work that otherwise likely would not be done. In other words, the money is wasted on boondoggles. This action has at least two negative side-effects.  One, it takes money from those who produce it and gives it to someone else. (That’s the taxation piece.) That might sound good to the recipient unless he realizes that he is only getting the proverbial fish that feeds him for a day, if that long. Secondly, this stolen–they call it stimulus nowadays–money results in those at the top having more real income than the supposed beneficiaries of those government-created jobs. (That’s the inflation piece.) The people who think they benefit from the government-created-jobs are worse off in the long term, despite all appearances to the contrary in the short term. Ludwig von Mises spoke of this phenomenon in, “On Current Monetary Problems” with:

The advocates of annual increases in the quantity of money never mention the fact that for all those who do not get a share of the newly created additional quantity of money, the government’s action means a drop in their purchasing power which forces them to restrict their consumption. It is ignorance of this fundamental fact that induces various authors of economic books and articles to suggest a yearly increase of money without realizing that such a measure necessarily brings about an undesirable impoverishment of a great part, even the majority, of the population.

An injection of money into the economy by the government generally results in a transfer of wealth towards the top—real income transferred from those who can least afford it to those who already have plenty. (I already noted some time ago that this phenomenon seemed to get rolling in 1980.  The chart below is instructive.) One might even suppose this state-facilitated income transfer is the reason why statists in power so strongly support government control of the money supply, but that’s another discussion. Bottom Line:  Those who clamor for a president who cares about them get the same treatment and results as they would from some random bastard who openly scorned them. (No offense to the random bastard you support!)

And yet, here we are at election time, and the clarion calls continue to go up, from both sides of the ostensible aisle.

Cross-Posted at LRCBlog.

NASA-Certified Space Taxi

It sure seems like that’s what NASA is doing. NASA has to do something in order to maintain its relevance as the space age dawns in the era of commercial space flight. NASA is still running scientific-exploratory missions to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, but even this role will be soon be overtaken by private enterprises like Planetary Resources.

From Space.com comes news that NASA has launched a private space taxi certification program. The program will consist of a two-stage “process aimed at ensuring commercial passenger spaceships currently under development will meet the agency’s safety standards, schedule and mission requirements.” Yay, NASA’s record of safety, timeliness, and priorities with minimal bureaucratic waste leaves me reassured.

Budget cuts no doubt have something to do with the certification program as well. “NASA expects to award multiple firms a Certification Products Contract (CPC), each of which will run for 15 months and be worth up to $10 million.” Restrict competition, rake in the dough, ensure the continuation of your own jobs, and retain control of the space industry — all in the name of safety, science, human progress, and protecting taxpayer “investments.”

The certification program appears to apply only to firms wanting to be hired by NASA — for now. Firms that want to ferry NASA crew to the behind-schedule and over-budget boondoggle that is the International Space Station (ISS) will have to get certified. But how long until NASA attempts to expand its regulatory reach beyond its own contractors?

NASA admitted in 2011 that it is not “fundamentally a public regulatory agency.” But that can change. We can be sure that the United States federal government will attempt to regulate space travel and commercial activity just as it regulates travel and business on Earth. The only question is, Which agency will be assigned to do the regulating? Will it be NASA, or some other new or existing agency? Surely the top bureaucrats at NASA would rather it be them.

What do you think? Is NASA positioning itself to become the regulator of space travel and commerce? Let us know in the comments.

[Prometheus Unbound]

“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” ~ Frederic Bastiat

No. Not even.

When Romney said “there are 47 percent who are with him [POTUS], who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them” he was roughly half right. Very. Roughly. What he left out is that the “other” 47 percent, those that are with him [Romney] are after the same thing. Admittedly, the number of people who are unrepentant tax feeders, to use Will Grigg’s apt description, is likely (hopefully?) lower than 94 percent. The naive, hopeful dreamer in me would peg it at probably closer to 65–75 percent.  Whatever the exact number is, the simple fact of the matter is that politics — particularly in the U.S., but abroad as well — is dominated by sociopaths with megalomaniacal tendencies who are often attended to and served by sycophants with dependency issues.

The other 25-35 percent and I just wish they’d all leave us the hell alone.

(Cross-Posted at LRCBlog.)

As I sat on one of those metal benches, retying my shoes after enduring yet another near-cavity search courtesy the TSA, something both rather obvious and rather sad dawned on me. It is, in fact, the answer to the question that heads this post, and that answer, by the way, is “No.” As a matter of fact, “Hell no.” As I sat there, I contemplated how much more intrusive the searches could get before the public rose up and said, “Enough!” Simultaneously, a conversation I had enjoyed with a fellow traveler as we stood in a very long line at the Monroe County (Rochester) International Airport rolled around in my head.

She had quipped, as we inched closer to our turn in the scanner, “I’m just glad that we haven’t had a bra bomber yet.” We laughed, but it was more out of pain than humor. She and I both knew that we were experiencing a real-life reenactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that things would get worse–likely a lot worse–before they got better. (And that’s making the very large assumption, an assumption I might characterize as a pipe dream, that things will ever get better.)

As an aside, and just to provide some context for my conclusion, I recall talking to an executive from ExxonMobil 10 to 15 years ago. It was at that time when gas prices had just begun to creep up to levels that before then had seemed unthinkable. As I recall, the highest they had been was nearing $1.50/gallon, although that figure is just a guess. As I whined about the prices and how people would cope, he calmly asked me: “Wilt, do you think prices are at the highest level they could reach while people still buy lots of gas?” I thought about it a minute and had to conclude he was correct. Gas could (and probably would) far exceed that price level without any real reaction from the public, except whining as they drove their SUVs 35 miles to work alone. The same logic is true of the practices at Airport Security Theatre.

At what point do you think people would refuse to endure more? I submit that TSA could install curtains, with TSA-employed nurse practitioners and physician assistants performing very thorough “security checks” and all we’d have is longer lines. Shucks, people might begin to use the occasion for informal check-ups! I can hear the conversations now. “Bill, how are those hemorrhoids?” “Feels good Stan, and we’ll see what the nurse says at Airport Security next week. I’m flying on business.”

Coincidentally to all this thinking, I was in the midst of reading R. Dwayne Betts’ “A Question of Freedom.” It is a prison memoir of a young man sentenced to 10 years, spending much of it in maximum security prisons–and in “the hole” much of that time–for car jacking someone as a teenager. While Betts’ story is fascinating for a number of reasons, what struck me most viscerally was this statement he makes in a chapter entitled, “Prison 101…” Says Betts, “Prison life is a series of small indignities that you’re made to adapt to.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Cross-Posted at LRCBlog.