Mimi & Eunice: What Did We Do Before Laws?
IP Law, Mimi & Eunice on IP
This is a syndicated post, which originally appeared at Mimi and Eunice » IP. View original post.
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Passing a BillMeNow For Later
(Austrian) Economics, Business, Nanny StatismJeremy B. White of the NY Observer writes:
“City Council Member Brad Lander introduced a bill today that would require banks to help pay for the upkeep of foreclosed homes by posting bonds with a minimum value of $10,000.”
What he failed to write was that if this bill were to pass, new mortgage applications would either require a $10,000 fee to cover for foreclosure contingencies, or more likely just include a risk premium for that $10,000 bond. Even if the bill would ban sticking the potential mortgager with that bill, it would compel banks to be even stricter in their lending standards than they would have been otherwise, thus cutting off otherwise qualified applicants from buying homes, foreclosed or otherwise.
In either scenario, the tendency will be to have empty foreclosed homes sitting longer in unkempt vacancy than in the counterfactual situation in which the government didn’t meddle as much.
Don’t you love well-intentioned, yet clueless legislators?
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The Power To Classify Is The Power To Destroy
ClassificationismThe state has a fetish for categorizing and classifying things, as if the label you “officially” stick on things changes reality. Yet that classification has legislative teeth. Lately I have become more aware of this destructive power. Not because it comes from the state–I am already used to that, but because often times government agencies, part of the executive branch, are the ones operating under rather wide legislative powers granted by Congress. None of this is new, of course. It just seems that it is becoming more prominent as the number of bureaucracies and bureaucrats continues to increase.
Instead of private law or contracts or generally accepted, time-honored societal agreements, the state corrupts reason and destroys language, replacing common sense with legislative fiat, all while making us more depending on the state to determine what reality is and how we deal with others.
Examples abound. The state controls the definitions of marriage (and of divorce, of course). The state defines who is an employee, who is an employer, and whether you have had “income.” Is Julian Assange a journalist? If he “is,” then according to the state he is treated in a specific way.
Classificationism goes hand in hand with licensing and other forms of control and regulation. If you want to open a kitchen or restaurant, better have the proper licensing. Usually the state will require licenses if you have a certain number of customers or some other category. Then, legally, you “are not” a “restaurant” if you do not meet the guidelines required for the license. But if you do, then magically you and your property are subject to the state’s magical incantation (also known as legislation). The FCC has recently been trying to reclassify ISPs so that they fall under the agency’s telecommunications category, extending the FCC’s power to control the internet.
A rather egregious and recent example of, in this case, re-classificationism, has to do with Obama’s administration trying to “crack down” on companies that treat workers as independent contractors instead of employees (so that unions do not have access to those workers). The IRS and other agencies can determine if someone is a “contractor” or an “employee.”
Even when it comes to the basic rights that the government is “supposed” to protect, classificationism exists. Is email like regular mail?. Is there an expectation of privacy? It all depends on how the bureaucrats massage language in the political arena.
Should e-cigarrettes be regulated like real cigarettes? What “is” a “firearm” or a “machinegun”? Or an “assault weapon”? Where“is” Emmanuel’s “residence”? What is a “controlled substance”? (A toy soldier “is” a “firearm” in British airports, by the way).
One could point out that the agencies in charge will have to have rules and regulations of their own, as the details of implementing and executing Congressional mandates lies with them. That is certainly correct. However, it is striking to see just how much agencies can control by merely moving from category to category entire industries, peoples, occupation, objects and actions. The power to classify is the power to destroy.
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Clean Our Society* of Guns!
Firearms, Vulgar Politics* but surely not the guns of the state, that is. That’s the jive I get from RFK’s daughter’s comments on further limiting gun freedom:
Townsend said she believes the Justice Department and “this country have got to do a better job on gun regulation and on gun control and making our citizens safe.”
“As my father said, we glorify killing on movies and on television screens and call it entertainment,” she said. “We make it easy for men of all shades and sanity to acquire weapons, and violence breeds violence. Repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.”
Repression brings retaliation? Gosh, sounds also like an argument against foreign invasions and wars and the imposition of various kinds of legislation on other countries. If we want to be coherent about banning guns, should we not start with the military?
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Angels and Fools
Vulgar PoliticsThere are many responses one might consider for the vile and hateful Westboro Baptist Church, which plans to picket the funeral of Christina Green, the 9-year-old girl murdered along with five others in Saturday’s shootings in Tucson. My initial thoughts, admittedly not in keeping with my philosophy of non-aggression, involved swinging a baseball bat. Hard.
Fortunately I am nowhere near Tucson, and cooler heads have prevailed; one good approach, as organized by resident Christin Gilmer, is a so-called “angel action” — people wearing tall “angel wings” who surround and block out the Westboro slimeballs so that mourners will be able to grieve and say farewell to Christina in peace.
There are also not-so-good ways to handle this, as the Arizona legislature has demonstrated by attempting to restrict the Westboro picketers, who nonetheless are free to carry on their disgusting crusade in public areas. (The worst thing you can ever hear a politician say is “I’m gonna fix this,” as state senator Kyrsten Sinema did.)
If roads and parks were privatized this would not be necessary; I doubt many property owners would want to be associated with such demonstrations, and no cemetery owner with any respect for the dead would allow them near the entrance. But so long as the state monopolizes roads and other rights-of-way, we have to put up with these fools. Better to have them shunned and blocked from public view by private citizens than to have them silenced by the state.