Fears of Decentralization

History, Immigration, Legal System, Libertarian Theory, Police Statism, Political Correctness, Racism, Statism, Taxation, The Left, The Right, Vulgar Politics
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Many libertarians, perhaps most notably Thomas E. Woods, support the decentralization of power from the federal government, including the power of nullification. Many people fear and denounce this power, often because they like the immense power of the central state and are supporters of big government. There are, however, some very real concerns by people who desire freedom as their highest political goal. A simple question, which is asked in various forms is “if decentralization leads to more freedom, why did African slavery thrive in a more decentralized America, and only go away (well, sort of) when the central state forced it to go away?” Similar statements could be said of Jim Crow.

Tom Woods briefly addresses a critical point which bears emphasis: a major problem with decentralization is that decentralizing power may have huge negative effects for people who cannot vote.  The very people who are most obsessed with them not having political power are the people who are most empowered by the receding power of the central state. This points to the people that libertarian activists should concentrate on protecting: non-citizens (including both legal and illegal immigrants) and convicted felons in states which strip them of the franchise. As most minorities have the ability to exercise the vote, the greatest evils of the past have no chance of being repeated. And some unprecedented benefits may come about. Without the significant support of the federal government, individual states could not maintain the murderous drug war at the levels at which it is currently prosecuted.  Family and morals-destroying welfare programs would have to be greatly scaled back without the ability to print money. Taxes would have to be levied to pay for these things, forcing citizens to carefully evaluate just how much they wish to impoverish themselves in the attempt to eradicate various victimless crimes.

The benefits don’t end there. Freedom would be catching in this country for several reasons. Our national myths support the value of freedom. The proximity of states and the freedom of movement among them, in the face of massive differences in the amount of liberty inside them, would mean that the most inventive, industrious people would tend to leave less free areas and go to more free ones. This would impoverish the most oppressive states, further pressuring them to liberate. Perhaps the single most important factor which would allow liberty to really catch in the United States is that the US military would not be looking to crush these efforts, as it does in other countries. If liberty is to be permitted by any government, it is likely that it will have to be permitted in the USA, as the American government is among the world’s most fervent supporters of foisting government on people, whether they like it or not, in the name of “stability.”

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Don’t These Uppity Negroes Ever Get Tired of Being Uppity?

Business, Corporatism, Humor, Pop Culture, Racism
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I’ve written on the phenonenon before, most recently, while examining the trite hate-fest that pretends to be media coverage surrounding LeBron James. And frankly, I’ve found myself disagreeing with Bryant Gumbel on a number of salient points throughout these discussions. This time though, Gumbel is on-point. Recently he made these comments, regarding the NBA Lockout and how NBA Commissioner David Stern is handling it:

Stern’s version of what has been going on behind closed doors has of course been disputed, but his efforts were typical of a commissioner who has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men as if they were his boys. It’s part of Stern’s M.O., like his past self-serving edicts on dress code and the questioning of officials. His moves were intended to do little more than show how he’s the one keeping the hired hands in their place.

His comments have drawn a lot of ire, much of it from black media members. (In full disclosure, I tend to discount white media member’s discomfort when a black person uses a supposed slavery analogy. Call it a personal failing.)  Try though I may, I can’t find what is incorrect about Gumbel’s statement.

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Super-statists Love The Super State

Anti-Statism, Firearms, Political Correctness, Racism, Totalitarianism
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After a horrific and murderous weekend in NYC, Mayor Bloomberg, frustrated that folks determined on committing crimes are ignoring those magical incantations and spells enacted by local legislators, does what must necessarily follow in the mind of the statist: call the feds.

“We cannot tolerate it,” Bloomberg said while speaking at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn. “There are just too many guns on the streets and we have to do something about it.”

New York has the toughest gun laws in the country, but Bloomberg said the city alone cannot stop the onslaught of shootings. “We need the federal government to step up,” he said.

The problem of crime is that it finds a way. And prohibitions are, at best, marginal; but they are totalitarian nonetheless and have no place in a free society. To try to control the means of the few by subjecting the entirety of society to the dictate of a despot is a symptom of desperation. After all, not every place experiences the same level of overall crime or the same numbers of crimes committed by firearms.

And then there is the elephant in the room. As Robert Wicks points out, “‘getting guns off the streets’ is just code for ‘getting poor urban minorities to disarm themselves.'” Indeed, NYC’s own government report on crime shows that minorities both commit and experience a higher percentage of crimes. Yet because most minorities are not criminals but potential victims, gun disarmament leaves minorities in a greater situation of peril. Of course, politicians do not understand economics or how incentives work so they would never think that ending drug (and gun) prohibition, welfare, taxes, zoning and licenses, rent control and compulsory education would radically lower crime across the board.

As for Bloomberg, his policies, and the policies of Albany, are–let’s face it–pretty much an epic fail. The last thing anyone needs is the federal government coming in to “fix” things.

 

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It’s 2011: Do You Know Where Your Uppity Negroes Are?

Humor, Pop Culture, Racism
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Uppity Negro: N.—a Black person who is committed to reversing the crimes of self-refusal, self-denial, and self-hatred that are endemic to the Black community and detrimental to the Black psyche. Syn.—UNAPOLOGETIC. VAINGLORIOUS. MULTIFARIOUS. JUST AUDACIOUS. ~ The Urban Dictionary

Having written on both LeBron and Kobe it should be pretty clear that I like sports. What I find particularly fascinating is how a combination of selective logic and the availability heuristic drive almost all sports discussions, be they on “sports talk radio” or during the ostensibly more journalistic major network coverage. In the case of Kobe, I was amazed that something as innocuous as a video game could draw so much discussion, but then again, the discussion of irrelevant crap even remotely involving sports has spawned an entire profitable network. Just ask Disney. (FTR, I openly admit to watching way too much of this particular network.)

Recently, I found myself Tweeting about LeBron James quite a bit. (Yes, I obviously have time to kill.) I have also found myself responding to several negative posts about him among my Facebook friends. Over the last few days, people I don’t even know have exchanged barbs with me about James. Ironically, this is despite the fact that I was fiercely hoping for a Dallas victory. How did this author—a staunch supporter of Dirk, J-Kidd, and the Mavs—morph into a protector of LeBron’s image? Truthfully, I do not know. Well, I did not know, until I watched a particularly interesting telecast on “The LeBron Network,” which is occasionally also referred to as ESPN.

During the episode, amid ample dissection of the game itself, much was made of a statement James made during the post-game press conference. At some point during the presser, after he had been asked a breathtaking variety of insipid questions ranging from “Did you choke?” to “Why do you think you perform so poorly during the clutch?” James was asked, “What do you think about the people who hate you?” (or words to that effect). No, I am not making this up. Whatever happened to asking sports figures about, well, sports—Xs and Os and the like?

LeBron responded with some variant of, “Tomorrow those people will wake up with the same life they have, and so will I.” I was proud of him. The reporters on ESPN were aghast! Surely, he will regret saying that later, they opined. My question is simply, “Why?” What LeBron said was accurate. Maybe he should have been more sheepish in his response. Sheepish always plays well for the cameras. Maybe he should have continued to respond politely to even more insulting, vapid, and frankly, silly questions. Good for him that he did not. After some consideration I now realize that LeBron’s biggest offense that night was the same as his biggest offense throughout this whole saga, dating back to The Decision.

LeBron James is an uppity Negro!

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Eugenics and central-planner hubris

Anti-Statism, Nanny Statism, Racism, Totalitarianism
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Forced eugenics programs where “sub-standard” humans are involuntarily sterilized are evil. You don’t have to be a libertarian to agree with that. But leaving aside the fundamental objection to the injustice of such programs, the most notable case upholding an involuntary negative eugenics policy in the United States reveals something else troubling about proponents of the command-and-control state.

Carrie Buck

In his Buck v. Bell decision, that titan of modern American “legal realism” Oliver Wendall Homes, Jr. famously justified his decision to allow the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck by stating “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” The 1927 ruling inspired a blossoming of eugenics laws across the United States targeting not only the mentally handicapped, but also petty criminals and social undesirables like the poor, women who were sexually promiscuous, and others who happened to be of a different ethnicity than the eugenicists.

But poor Carrie Buck wasn’t even really retarded. She was a troublemaker or a rape victim, depending on who you believe. Her daughter (the third generation to which Holmes referred) wasn’t an imbecile either. She was actually on her school’s honor roll the year before she died of measles. If Paul Lombardo’s version of the story is correct, that case is a terrible, terrible example of the trauma of a woman’s victimization in rape and subsequent pregnancy being compounded by central planners. Holmes the eugenicist was too concerned with aggrandizing the power of the state at the expense of the individual to be concerned with whether the woman to be sterilized in the case before him was even “unfit.”

[Note: For more on the Progressive historical context in which Buck v. Bell was decided, see Michael Giuliano’s September 2008 article in The Freeman.]

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