Civil Liberties

Prohibition: 16 Results

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When a law bans exchanges wanted by everyone directly involved a number of things happen:

1) The exchanges continue;

2) Prices of the banned items rise and wars to control turf begin;

3) New criminals are created, including many people who are ordinary good people (like colored margarine seekers);

4) New enforcement agencies and staff are created;

5) New jails are built and new jailers are trained;

6) Laws, lawyers and lawsuits proliferate;

7) A new branch of law and its practitioners prosper and support further extension and complexification of regulations;

8) A portion of the entire apparatus of enforcement and punishment is progressively corrupted;

9) New agencies and staff are created to discover, eliminate or suppress the corruption;

10) Many begin to support ever more drastic suppression and punishment;

11) A profitable subliminal partnership emerges unifying the interests of violators and enforcers as the profits from the illegal trade are negotiated and distributed among them;

12) The business engages all of the following: bad people buying and selling, good people buying and selling, police, judges, academics, enforcement trainers and suppliers, prison builders and suppliers, staff to support all of this, journalists to cover it, media organizations to sell the coverage;

13) Completely uninvolved people are caught in crossfires, including taxpayers;

14) The costs of controlling the new flourishing evil continue to grow seemingly without limit;

15) The vast network of beneficiaries of the law applaud and lobby for its continuation, vilifying all opposition;

16) Everyone gets more and more discouraged and inclined to hate all humanity. This list is probably too short.

However all of these bad things may be balanced by the fact that creative people are engaged in producing media based on the things that happen because of the prohibition, and by watching and reading we all learn delightful new things about how the world works. (channeling Voltaire).

It is not enough to simply ban exchanges that have consequences we don’t like. The costs of doing it should be compared with the costs of not doing it. Those costs usually dwarf the costs that would arise from unhindered transactions.

The Connecticut Massacre

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There is information still coming to light about this awful case. Early reports, such as the name of the shooter and the alleged murder of the father, were predictably wrong. It turns out that the shooter, named Adam Lanza, a 20 year old with a history of odd behavior and some evidence of mental illness, such as autism, was living with his mother who was his first victim. There are a number of suggestive reports, that she decided to “stay home to care for” her 20 year old son.

The treatment of severe mental illness in this country has been altered for the worse by a movement that began in the 1960s when mental illness began to be described as a “civil rights ” issue. Several books and movies described abuse of power in commitment of the mentally ill. The first such movie was “The Snake Pit” in which a young woman is committed for what sounds like schizophrenia. The treatment of the time (1948) can be seen as barbaric but there was nothing else available. She did recover, although we know that without adequate treatment, recovery from schizophrenia is unlikely.

The movie that really devastated the mental hospital system was called “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and starred Jack Nicholson.

The movie was powerful in showing the Nicholson character as a guy who just is “different” and harmless.

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DemoThugs Rampant

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I’ve written numerous times (here, for example) about the growing tendency of the “progressive” Left to use intimidation tactics against those who dare to disagree with them. Given that this group now dominates the Democratic party, it was predictable that violence, intimidation, property destruction, and electoral fraud would come to play an increasing part in national elections, and this is now happening.

The national dinosaur media hasn’t done a very good job in reporting on these events, but some local media outlets have done much better. Watch this video (which comes via a comment from Jason in LA at the above-linked post)…it may take a few seconds to start, and it’s about 5 minutes long, but you should definitely watch the whole thing.

Here’s another story–four men in Ohio caught stealing Romney signs while driving a union-owned truck.

As I noted in the post at the first link, the son of a Wisconsin state senator was actually beaten up when he objected to 2 men stealing a Mitt Romney yard sign on the lawn

See this report from the 2004 election…J Christian Adams, an attorney and former DOJ official, says he observed SEIU union members attempting to block access to the polls by Bush supporters (identified by their bumper stickers) in West Palm Beach. And, of course, we’re all away of the decision by Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, to drop the case against members of the New Black Panther Party who were accused of committing voter intimidation in the 2008 election—even though it seems that the government’s case was basically already won.

In Virginia earlier this month, the son of Democratic Representative Jim Moran was caught on video coaching someone on how to commit voter fraud.

On television (HBO), Bill Maher said:

If you’re thinking about voting for Mitt Romney, I would like to make this one plea: black people know who you are and they will come after you

Immediately followed by “I’m kidding”..you know, it’s not really very funny. The remark is an insult to black people as a group, of course, as it feeds a stereotype of blacks as inherently violent, and it is poisonous to political dialog and to American society as a whole. (Ed Driscoll, from whom the Maher link came, said in response to the “black people…will come after you” line: “OK, but if Stacey Dash, Condi Rice, Mia Love and Star Parker are coming over, could you ask them to give me some advance notice? I really need to tidy the place up first.”)

The rage, irrationality, and lack of respect for the rights of others which has been demonstrated by so many Obama supporters in this campaign in very disturbing…but should not be surprising in view of the conduct of the “progressive” Left over the last two or more decades.

As J Christian Adams said:

Tuesday is the day you get to decide whether America is a land where a thugocracy can flourish, or whether freedom’s holy light will thrive. The founders of this great land foresaw a day like November 6, 2012. Every patriot who came before you acted. Now it is your turn.

Abortion: The Only Freedom the Democrats Will Leave You

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[Note: This post isn’t really about abortion itself but instead about the exception Democrats make for the issue of abortion in their ideology. It didn’t have to be abortion with all it’s related moral and legal complexity. It could have been some other medical procedure or anything that affects the human body. Don’t get distracted by the broader issues of abortion itself.]

The 2012 Democratic platform states:

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.. [emp added]

The Democrats claim to support abortion, even to the extremes, because they believe that women own their own bodies and have the right to perfectly control anything that happens to those bodies. They argue that as long as any part of the fetus/infant remains inside the woman’s body, it directly affects her body and she has a right kill the fetus if she so chooses. Any interference in that choice is social and government violation of the principle of self-ownership and control.

That sounds good … but the Democrats are obviously lying. The Democrats don’t really believe that women own their own bodies nor that women have an innate right to control what happens to those bodies.

I state that with perfect confidence  because once you stop to think about it, it becomes obvious that the Democrats commitment to “Our bodies, our choice,” begins and ends with abortion.

Far from being the natural outgrowth of a broad philosophical commitment to the idea of self-ownership and control of our own bodies, the Democrats stance on the right to abortion is the sole and glaring exception to an ideology that otherwise treats the bodies of women like the bodies of government owned cattle.

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RuiNation

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So a few days to go until Election Day; I guess we can call this the final heat. Texas is pretty much a red state stronghold, although there are pockets of blue adherents throughout. Yes, even in my neighborhood, there are a handful of defiant Obama-Biden yard signs visible, although outnumbered at least three to one by Romney-Ryan signs. It amounts to about three or four dozen, all told; I think that most of my neighbors prefer keeping their political preferences this time around strictly to themselves.

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