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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On the crime of being an anarchist

Anti-Statism, Police Statism, Totalitarianism
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It’s become rather clichéd to invoke the nightmarish police state envisioned by George Orwell in 1984, but damned if the old boy isn’t vindicated on an almost daily basis.  The most recent move to making thoughtcrime a reality comes, unsurprisingly, from the UK:

…next to an image of the anarchist emblem, the City of Westminster police’s “counter terrorist focus desk” called for anti-anarchist whistleblowers stating: “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”

The move angered some anarchists who complained that being an anarchist should not imply criminal behaviour. They said they feel unfairly criminalised for holding a set of political beliefs.

This wouldn’t be so worrisome, had the police characterized anarchism in the uninformed and sensationalist fashion still common in mainstream media: that of radically leftist vandals intent on dismantling not just the state but the capitalist infrastructure that in their view props it up.  Violent thugs, in other words; the kind who show up at G-20 summits to smash windows and set fires.  Yet these people make up a minuscule fraction of anarchists, despite the disproportionate amount of TV time they receive.

Now, however, the police are prepared to view anyone who promotes a stateless society — from old hippies to free-market Rothbardians — as potential criminals, regardless of which values they promote, and what crimes they’ve actually committed.  Which, for the vast majority of anarchists, is none at all.

Given their Stasi-like call on citizens to serve as snitches (at least it’s still voluntary…for now), it makes one wonder what the police are truly afraid of: the infrequent real crimes of self-styled “anarchists”; or the growing popularity of the ideas advanced by peaceful radicals — property, prosperity, and the end of the criminal, Leviathan state.

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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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On Rand Paul and Slavery

Health Care, Nanny Statism, Political Correctness, Racism, Totalitarianism
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Reason’s Matt Welch criticizes Rand Paul for Paul’s assertion that the right to healthcare implies slavery. While it is true that in minds of many, the term “slavery” specifically refers to chattel slavery as practiced in the United States prior to the end of the American Civil War, the term itself is not so limited. And this is not the first time that a prominent person has used the term in regard to employment restrictions: Curt Flood was well known for saying “A well paid slave is nonetheless, a slave.” The same applies here. Indeed, I have compared modern attitudes and events to slavery myself, more than once. Of course, there are critical differences between Rand and Flood and myself, with melanin levels likely being the most important one. But just as Flood’s comparison in the past was apt, so to is Paul’s comparison in the present an accurate description. It is easy to see that there have been far worse tortures in the past than waterboarding, or even beatings, but I would certainly still call the latter “torture.” So, too, would I call forced labor of any sort “slavery.” Wearing a smock rather than rags does not change the name.

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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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