Life Sentence at 11 Years Old?

Legal System, Police Statism, Private Crime, Private Security & Law, Totalitarianism
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Good’s Cord Jefferson asks: “Should an 11-Year Old Boy Go to Jail for Life?” Read the account. It is horrifying that a boy could do something so evil. My own daughter is 11. I could simply not imagine her doing anything like this. I am sure many of you feel the same. Indeed, the sense that this boy is completely alien to our own experience is one of the reasons it is tempting to support locking him up and throwing away the key. Despite this, however, such a move would do far more harm than good. This is not simply a matter of him being too young to punish. That is perhaps true, perhaps not. Rather, it has to do with the evils inherent with the state monopoly on justice and punishment, and the particular evils introduced when we combine that monopoly with a child offender.

The state, through taxation, separates the consumer of goods, such as roads and schools, from the buyer of those same goods. None of us are customers of a public school in the sense of being able to take our money elsewhere if we get bad service. This causes people to lobby legislators and other public officials and causes a lot of the aggravation that people express when they need the state to do something. But it also, through the criminal justice system, separates the recipients of justice — the victims and families of victims — from the criminals and tortfeasors. This separation has some very significant evil effects of its own.

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Our Dystopian Future: Biodiesel

IP Law, Police Statism, Science, Technology
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Recently, I was listening to the BrainStuff podcast, which I highly recommend, and Marshall Brain, the host and founder of Howstuffworks.com covers the possibility of bacteria or algae being used to create fuel, eliminating our need for fossil fuels. This is quite fascinating, and listeners speculated that the oil companies might simply kill such technologies. Brain then started speculating on ways to get around this possibility, and came up with the idea that an inexpensive do-it-yourself kit might be developed, and spread widely, making it impossible for the cheap and easy method for fuel production to be shut down. This is a very optimistic view, but I think his idea could be jeopardized by intellectual property laws.

If such a method were produced, it is difficult to imagine the bacteria/algae being unencumbered by patents. The patent holders would have incentives to prevent the sort of underground fuel production plants that Brain describes. The oil companies would not need to kill the technology. Unauthorized production of fuel could be addressed in the same way that unauthorized production of drugs and alcohol is addressed: with police raids and tax crackdowns. In fact, one way to help prevent people “unfairly” using the intellectual property of others would be to require the tracking of mileage and gas purchases for registered vehicles, so that no one could own a car, drive 20,000 miles in a year, but not have gas purchases which correspond to the miles driven. The templates for these things are already in place. All which is really needed is a new application. Old wine in new bottles.

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How the State Corrupts Religion

Statism
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MSNBC reports on the horrifying death of a two year old. The child apparently died of starvation. This is a good example of why separating the church and state, just as separating everything else and state, is so important. The separation of church and state benefits the church more than it benefits the state. States with close ties to religion do not suffer; the religious organizations which ally themselves with the state do. They begin to take on the characteristics of the state: the lack of accountability, the lack of personal involvement in the lives of people they supposedly serve.

The lack of a genuine personal relationship? The lack of attention to detail? That does not sound like Christianity as I am familiar with it. That sounds like government as I am familiar with it. When religion and state wed, religious practice gives way to state practice, not the other way around. You do not see government unionized workers selling their worldly possessions and working to serve the poor, but you do see people ignoring their own religious tenets in order to qualify for government funds.

Involving the state in charity destroys much of the value of that charity in that it radically alters the incentives of the charity workers. It basically transforms them from philanthropists into government employees, and people like Quasir Alexander suffer for it.

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Putting the Highway in Information Superhighway

Podcast Picks, Technology
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In a recent episode of This Week in Google, Jeff Jarvis, with some support from Leo Laporte, suggested that perhaps, given the incredible importance of the Internet, it should be treated like the highway system, with the government paying companies to build it out, but having state guaranteed access. I enjoy listening to TWIG, and many other programs on the TWIT network, but this idea immediately made me think of an old SNL skit:

Compared to turning the Internet into something like the highway system, the ideas in that clip are absolute genius. Consider what the government routinely does on the highway:

  • It limits speed, sometimes in opposition to highway engineers’ opinions
  • It sends out patrols searching for contraband
  • It claims the right to stop and inspect travelers’ cars based on the judgment of the police officer (probable cause)
  • It levies taxes on machines which use the highways, above and beyond the taxes it already collects on the purchase
  • It licenses users, charging them for the right to drive, on top of the taxes it already levies on the sales of vehicles and license plates
  • It mandates insurance, corrupting the insurance industry and incentivizing them to support government policies and donate to political campaigns
  • It forbids the use of technology to hide the interior of the car (window tinting laws) as well as technology to avoid speeding tickets (bans on radar jammers and detectors)

Turning the Internet into something like the highway system would mean government inspecting Internet traffic, blocking it, or even arresting users for things like copyright violations, setting policies on how traffic is prioritized, banning encryption except for approved encryption which the government can decrypt at will, taxing users for the right to use the Internet, and mandating the purchase of security programs. It is hard to imagine a finer example of a Bad Idea.

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Rule By Overseer

Legal System, Police Statism, Statism, Totalitarianism
By / / 3 minutes of reading
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Radley Balko highlights the ridiculous case of a man arrested for interfering with police for filming them while they are on the job. Considering a passive observer, filming an arrest, to be “interfering” must be a special police corollary to the uncertainty principle that I missed in physics class. A friend asked the question, “how can one know what not to do?” This is a good question. If the laws on the books, and publicly clarified by the “authorities” are no shield, then what do we have?

As I mentioned before, police interactions with “civilians” are similar to the interactions between enslavers and slaves of the past. The rule on what can and cannot be done are set by the government official with whom you are interacting. Instead of rule by law, we have rule by overseer. Instead of viewing the police officer with whom you are speaking as a man as yourself, consider him a would-be slave master. He is has little reason to doubt his superiority to you. He has rights, and we have responsibilities.

How can it be otherwise? Whenever there is an asymmetry in recognized rights, there is great danger in interacting. During such interactions, the well-being of the oppressed is almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of the oppressor.

Consider the risks involved when an ordinary citizen has an interaction with the police. If a police officer is the violator, except in extremely egregious cases, nothing will happen to him. He will not be immediately fired after the accusation. A very bad outcome for a police officer will be him being fired, with no criminal record, and the ability to compete for a private sector job just like everyone else. Even in the case of him being prosecuted, he will likely be acquitted, and even if he is found guilty, he will be punished much less severely than an ordinary citizen.

On the other hand, consider the risk for a citizen. If a person with a regular job is arrested and held for several days, he may be fired from his job. An employer may not be able to afford to employ someone who is not at work, irrespective of the reason behind the absence. That means that even a misbehaving officer can ruin a person financially, even if that person is ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing. As I have mentioned before, this asymmetry is similar to that which existed between blacks and whites in the US (and especially the American South) prior to the middle of the 20th century. In such an environment, rather than being oppressive, segregation is actually desirable for the oppressed class. Unfortunately, the government does not permit mundanes, as the heroic William Norman Grigg calls ordinary citizens, to segregate themselves from the state.

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