Brian Martinez – Page 9 – The Libertarian Standard

Mileposts on Environmentalism’s Road to Hell

By Brian Martinez / September 11, 2010 / 2 minutes of reading

Will there come a time when firefighters have to consider saving an endangered species over someone’s home? One wonders:

Lost in the images of aircraft dropping giant red plumes of retardant on a Colorado wildfire this week is the fact that the practice may not be legal under federal environmental laws.

A federal judge in July declared that the government’s current plan for dropping retardant on fires is illegal, and he gave the U.S. Forest Service until the end of next year to find a more environmentally friendly alternative.

The issue appears to hinge more on how the retardant is used than on the retardant itself, but when human lives and property are on the line, should it matter at all if some fish and plants are put at risk? Plants grow back and waterways recover, even from the worst disasters. People’s lives and homes aren’t so easy to reassemble.

Then we have the Federal government’s futile attempts to spark the “green economy”, which has succeeded primarily in shipping jobs overseas (h/t Jeffrey Tucker):

The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s….

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

Bastiat weeps! Of course the unintended consequences are never considered by policy makers when The Future of Civilization is at stake (or at least when cheap political points can be scored). A few hundred people’s livelihoods, consumers’ freedom of choice: small sacrifices on the environmentalists’ altar. Maybe Mother Earth will thank us in a few million years.

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Jan Brewer, Big Fat Liar

Immigration, Vulgar Politics

By Brian Martinez / September 8, 2010 / 3 minutes of reading

Not that a politician caught stating a mis-truth is shocking news to anyone, but this particular lie was pure gasoline poured onto the already-raging firestorm surrounding illegal immigration:

In a column released online today, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted that Arizona Republican governor Jan Brewer, a strong proponent of her state’s controversial immigration bill, has claimed that Arizona’s “law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded.”

As Milbank noted, the Arizona Guardian checked that claim out and found no evidence of beheadings; Brewer’s office did not respond to a request from the columnist for documentation for the beheading claim.

Months later, as Brewer campaigns to remain Arizona’s governor, she finally admits she might have, sort of, kind of, not really told the truth:

But the claim has come back to haunt her after her stammering debate performance in which she failed to back it up and ignored repeated questions on the issue from a scrum of reporters.

Brewer has spent the time since backtracking and trying to repair the damage done from her cringe-worthy debate against underdog challenger Terry Goddard.

“That was an error, if I said that,” the Republican told the Associated Press on Friday. “I misspoke, but you know, let me be clear, I am concerned about the border region because it continues to be reported in Mexico that there’s a lot of violence going on and we don’t want that going into Arizona.”

She said she was referring to beheadings and other cartel-related violence in Mexico in comments she made earlier this summer about decapitated bodies found in the state’s southern region.

No, that’s not what she was referring to. She didn’t say anything about headless bodies found in Mexico, unless Arizona law enforcement is now engaging in operations south of the border (emphasis added):

Appearing on a local television show Sunday morning, Gov. Jan Brewer described how bad Arizona’s illegal immigration problem has gotten.

“Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded,” she said.

No reasonably literate person could read that statement and interpret it to mean that she was referring to drug war violence in Mexico. Brewer lied in a grandstanding attempt to gin up support for the state’s fascist anti-immigration bill. Everybody knows she lied, including her Democratic opponent in the governor’s race, the press, and most other people paying attention. Unfortunately, that doesn’t include Arizona voters, who still favor her over Goddard by a nearly two-to-one margin.

What’s worse, Brewer’s mendacity, or the Arizona electorate’s gullibility? It’s an embarrassment in either case.

Jan Brewer, Big Fat Liar Read Post »

Tasers don’t kill people

Police Statism

By Brian Martinez / August 23, 2010 / 3 minutes of reading

But cops armed with Tasers sure as hell do:

The Denver coroner has ruled that the July 9 death of an inmate at the new jail was the result of homicide.

Marvin Booker was being processed on a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia when he got into a scuffle with jail deputies. He was shocked with a Taser device, placed in a chokehold and held to the floor as jail deputies piled on top.

Other inmates said Booker, 56, who was listed as 175 pounds in Denver court records but was actually 5-foot-5 and 135 pounds, was then carried to the holding cell at the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Facility and dropped face fir5 st. He never recovered.

The coroner’s finding means simply that another human being caused Booker’s death, rather than from natural causes, suicide or an accident. It is not the coroner’s role to determine who might have caused the death or whether the homicide was justifiable.

The Denver district attorney’s office is investigating Booker’s death to determine if criminal charges should be filed against the deputies involved, who are on paid vacations until the matter is settled. I would like to believe that someone will be held responsible for this man’s senseless death, but I’m not holding my breath. If it had been private citizens who dog-piled a homeless person and caused him to suffocate, they’d already be in jail and facing murder charges. But when it’s five deputies who are caught on video smothering a small man who had been arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia (itself a non-crime), suddenly it’s more important to “review policy.” And maybe they’ll, you know, be disciplined.

…

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Who are the worst Americans?

Anti-Statism, The Left, The Right

By Brian Martinez / August 16, 2010 / 5 Comments / 3 minutes of reading

From Stephen Bainbridge via Tyler Cowen comes a list of the worst Americans:

John Hawkins asked a bunch of right of center bloggers to list the “20 Worst Americans of all time,” from which he compiled the following list. The comments are mine. Personally, I find the collated list pretty much of a joke. It reflects the partisan passions of the moment, not anything resembling a serious verdict of history.

It goes on to list the usual suspects from the modern political right’s perspective: the Clintons, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, various spies and assassins, FDR, Ted Kennedy and so on. I agree with Bainbridge that several selections are historically dubious; leftist loudmouths such as Moore and Al Sharpton seem inconsequential next to true monsters like FDR and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I doubt Bainbridge would agree with a libertarian’s list, however, although some overlap would exist. But we libertarians enjoy the benefit of an anti-state, pro-liberty perspective, which neither the right nor left will entertain. Thus while Bainbridge puts John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of “our greatest President”, at # 3 of his own list, Booth’s target would top mine. Yes, Abraham Lincoln: the worst American ever.

And certainly no other assassin or spy or anyone else who has undermined the state would go on my list of worst Americans. The worst Americans are the ones who have used the state to murder, rob and terrorize innocent people. Lincoln prosecuted a war to prevent secession and caused the deaths of 600,000 Americans and virtually unmeasurable economic destruction. Timothy McVeigh isn’t our worst domestic terrorist: the United States government is.

FDR, who ushered in the modern welfare state and deliberately goaded the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, thus providing an excuse to push the U. S. into WWII, surely is in the top five. As is his successor, Harry Truman, for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with atomic weapons.

Then there’s Alexander Hamilton, a strong centralist whose ideas of protectionism and fiat currency plague American economic policy to this day.

Here are some of my choices, not in a meaningful order after the top five or so:

Abraham Lincoln
Woodrow Wilson (World War I tyrant, established the Fed and the first progressive income tax, allowed segregationist government policies)
FDR
Harry Truman
Alexander Hamilton
LBJ (expanded involvement in Vietnam, biggest spender on social programs since FDR)
George W. Bush (two wars, unprecedented expansion of Federal government)
Ted Kennedy (worst recent example of our ruling political class)
Alan Greenspan (architect of the Fed’s disastrous monetary expansion)
Paul Krugman (apologist for neo-Keynesian economic policy)
John Marshall (4th Chief Justice of SCOTUS who greatly expanded Federal power)
Janet Reno (murderess of 76 Branch Davidians in Waco)
J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI’s first and still most evil ~~dictator~~ director)

I’m sure readers can think of many others, but this is a good start.

Who are the worst Americans? Read Post »

Florida, the Sundown State

Immigration, Police Statism

By Brian Martinez / August 12, 2010 / 2 Comments / 2 minutes of reading

So what’s a politician to do when his candidacy is flagging and he’s taken a hard shot to the breadbasket for appearing “soft” on illegal immigration? He gets medieval on . . . well, somebody:

Florida Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum unveiled a sweeping immigration bill Wednesday that in some ways goes further than Arizona’s controversial law to apprehend undocumented workers and residents….

“Arizona is going to want this law,” McCollum said. “We’re better, we’re stronger, we’re tougher and we’re fairer.”

The proposed law would require immigrants to carry valid documentation or face up to 20 days in jail and would allow judges to hand down stiffer penalties to illegal immigrations who commit the same crimes as legal residents.

That’ll show ’em! If you’re unfortunate enough to look like an illegal immigrant in Florida, be prepared to carry a portfolio proving you have the government’s permission to exist inside its borders. Apparently the “fairer” part of the bill is that unlike Arizona’s SB1070, it doesn’t hold legal residents criminally liable for harboring illegals.

Naturally this bill has raised more than a few concerns among Florida’s Hispanic lawmakers, who fear it will lead to racial profiling (a claim I’d happily dispute as soon as I see a Florida cop shaking down some Yankee retiree for being unable to prove he didn’t just step off the boat from Oslo), and there are the obvious obstacles such legislation would face in the courts. A Federal judge has already slapped an injunction on the most odious parts of Arizona’s bill, even as McCollum’s proposal takes it a step further.

In short, chances are slim the bill will survive intact, if it becomes law at all. But what’s a few violations of civil liberties, if it means the Sunshine State lowers the boom on the Brown Peril?

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