An Outrage By Our Neighbors To The North

Police Statism, Political Correctness, Private Crime, Racism
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CTV Edmonton reports the case of a man convicted of “inciting racial hatred” when he burned a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple. This is a clear crime, but the crime is trespass and vandalism, not “inciting racial hatred.” Criminalizing some real or imagined scheme behind his criminal actions is not only unnecessary, it sows the seeds for more and more thoughts being banned. This is little different from prosecuting a religious extremist for inciting religious fervor.  Moreover, as a friend pointed out, in this day and age, burning a cross does not even incite racial hatred. It generates huge outpourings of goodwill for the victims, and widespread condemnation of the ideology behind the criminal behavior. That reaction has far better effects on race relations than prosecutions for thought crimes.

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Article: Intent is Like Remorse

Articles, Libertarian Theory, Private Crime, Private Security & Law
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The argument of this article is that intent, like remorse, is irrelevant to restitution. By default, intent, like any other subjective value judgment,  should play the role of a restitution-discount variable determined by the victim of an aggressive act, not the arbitration company.

Jeremiah Dyke is an adjunct math professor and a libertarian writer. Feel free to contact him at jeremiahdyke@gmail.com or through his website http://jeremiahdyke.blogspot.com/.

Read the Full Article by Jeremiah Dyke

Afterwards, discuss it below.

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Security, Identification, and the State

Immigration, Libertarian Theory, Police Statism, Private Crime, Private Security & Law, Technology, Victimless Crimes
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The fact that the state is deeply imbedded in the production of security and identification makes clear thinking on these matters difficult.

Some people think that since the use of identification cards is ubiquitous in transactions of almost every stripe (rent a car, borrow a book, borrow money or get a credit card, sign a contract, drive a car, rent videos, etc.) that libertarians are just bonkers to insist that people have a right to withhold tendering ID to a police officer. So, let us draw distinctions that matter.

When you provide ID to a private party, you have a choice NOT to provide ID. Since those parties are subject to competition, they only require ID as a condition of doing business if it’s necessary. That’s why you have to provide ID to get credit, to rent something (unless you provide a deposit of money), or when paying by check; but, you don’t have to give ID when buying groceries, eating out at a restaurant, or going to the movies.

The state proclaims ownership over roads, and sets all policies on those roads. For this reason, it was the state that came to be the issuer of drivers’ licenses, which claim to serve as proof that the driver is competent to drive and that the driver has corrected or uncorrected vision of a certain standard. Since almost every adult in the US has a driver’s license, they have also come to be used by many private companies as definitive proof of identification, and are also used by police for the same purpose.

Technological advances in computing and printing have made counterfeiting of IDs less costly and more successful, especially in the last decade. It is well known that just about any 19 year-old college student can get a fake ID to drink.

When the state requires the presentation of identifying documents (or more broadly, an inquiry into the identification of someone), some purposes are legitimate, but most are illegitimate. This is because some of what the state does is legitimate, but most of what it does is illegitimate.

On the legitimate side of the register, it deploys police to patrol to prevent crime, respond to crimes, and nab the bad guys. In the course of nabbing a bad guy, they “book” him, which is a procedure of identification (taking fingerprints and pictures, finding out where he lives by asking for a driver’s license, etc.). Of course, private security can and does nab bad guys, too. They don’t typically do the “booking” of a bad guy because they are required by law to turn him over to the state.

On the illegitimate side of the register, the state enforces a number of malum prohibitum offenses. Among these are the supposed crime of living and/or working in a country without the state’s permission and possessing contraband. Both of these supposed crimes are difficult to enforce, since they are victimless crimes. Because of this, states have evolved low standards of detention and search of people, including the requirement to show ID to officers.

Nowhere is this farce more ludicrous than in the crackdown on security at airports since the September 11, 2001 attacks. IDs are now checked 2, 3, or 4 times in the course of checking in, entering a screening area, passing through a metal detector, and boarding a plane, all with a government-issued ID — either a driver’s license or a passport. Even people as young as me, now 39, can remember a time (before the TWA flight 800 disaster) when showing ID at an airport was not even done once. This hyper-scrutiny of ID documents assumes that the IDs shown are not fakes, which is not at all a credible assumption.

Likewise, with the recent passage of the unjust law Arizona SB 1070, I expect that the industry of producing fake IDs will boom. Who will benefit? Well, some good guys will benefit, being able to evade the state’s crackdown on the non-crime of illegal immigration. But the burgeoning industry will probably cause the cost of fake IDs to fall, giving lots of bad guys these benefits as well.

So, SB1070 will probably cause an increase in “identity theft” and other acts of fraud.

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Waco and Oklahoma City Links

Police Statism, Political Correctness, Private Crime
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Today is April 19, the anniversary of the FBI’s finishing off the Branch Davidians at Waco and, two years later, the Oklahoma City incident, which Timothy McVeigh called payback for Waco. Every year since 2003 I’ve written on at least one of these events. Today at LRC I have “Waco and the New Brown Scare.” Also see my Waco archives, which includes my undergraduate history thesis from 2003. A good book on Waco is Carol Moore’s the Davidian Massacre, all online. As she points out, it was not until 2007 that the survivors from Waco were finally freed. And all libertarians should watch Waco: Rules of Engagement. The video is online.

As for the Oklahoma City bombing, Lew links to the classic piece by Gore Vidal—one of the few leftists who was not enamored of the left-establishment’s 1990s militia scare or blinded to the Clinton regime’s injustices at Waco and abroad. And see Scott Horton’s interview of Jesse Trentadue, “They Are Lying to You About the Oklahoma City Bombing.”

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Clinton Compares Tea Party Members to Timothy McVeigh

Anti-Statism, Private Crime, The Right
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Bill Clinton has recently implied that modern Tea Party activists are all potential Timothy McVeighs:

Former President Bill Clinton on Friday said that “legitimate” comparisons can be drawn between today’s grass-roots anger and resentment toward the government and the right-wing extremism that bubbled up prior to the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City 15 years ago.

True, this probably isn’t as bad as the Bush administration’s claim that citizens who don’t support the Bush administration are “with the terrorists,” but it is fairly bold fearmongering. I doubt that Clinton mentioned the motivation for the OKC bombing. McVeigh, who was trained to kill and trained to make bombs by the United States Army, planned the bombing with his accomplices as retaliation for the Clinton Administration’s mass murder of women and children at Waco. The OKC bombing was carried out on the April 19 anniversary of Waco.

Clinton did say one true thing during his speech: “…be careful with what you say and do not advocate violence.” The state always considers itself exempt from this advice of course.

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