The Transportation Security Administration has demonstrated over and over again that they cannot be trusted with neither your personal liberty nor with your health. This infographic gives an excellent description of why and how they fail. (Cross-posted at StopAustinScanners.org.)

Created by: OnlineCriminalJusticeDegree.com

Stefan Molyneux interviewed me yesterday for his Freedomain Radio program about the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. We discussed the First Amendment violations of and other problems with SOPA. Audio is here and streamed below: FDR_2060_sopa_kinsella_interview.mp3 (24.7 MB; local copy).

(And check out Youtube’s cool “snowflake” feature.)

[c4sif]

Last year, in Hillary Clinton’s Historic Speech on Global Internet Freedom, Adam Thierer praised Hillary Clinton for a speech drawing

a bold line in the cyber-sand regarding exactly where the United States stands on global online freedom. Clinton’s answer was unequivocal: “Both the American people and nations that censor the Internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote Internet freedom.” “The Internet can serve as a great equalizer,” she argued. “By providing people with access to knowledge and potential markets, networks can create opportunities where none exist.”

But of course this is a complete sham. The fedgov and the Obama administration may not like it when other oppressive regimes restrict their own subjects’ access to technology, when this is contrary the American state’s geopolitical “interests,” but the cekatS is not at all in favor of Internet freedom. Witness the relentless push to keep increasing copyright law and its insidious effect on Internet freedom. Thus, Obama signed the horrible ACTA (probably unconstitutionally), and his administration is also: using other trade agreements to export the draconian DMCA-type copyright provisions to other countries; and has proposed to expand “tough” enforcement of copyright, including wiretaps and other legislation to curb “piracy” on the Internet. And it’s why

U.S. Copyright Czar and Obama administration officials secretly cooperate with Hollywood, recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law … Obama administration’s cozy relationship with Hollywood and the music industry’s lobbying arms and its early support for the copyright-violation crackdown system publicly announced in July.

And it’s why we have the looming threat of SOPA, which endangers Internet freedom, which, as I’ve noted before, is one of the most important tools available in the fight against the state.  And it’s why the cekatS wants to control and restrict it. And it’s doing so, cleverly if perversely, in the name of (intellectual) “property rights” and fighting “piracy”. And who can doubt Obama will sign SOPA if Congress puts it on his desk? (Even though Vice-Thug and IP Poobah Biden hypocritcally spoke out against SOPA type provisions recently.)

And it’s why the Obama administration has seized websites to censor Wikileaks. And ICE has seized hundreds of domains in the name of stopping piracy and at the behest of the MPAA, in addition to other ICE domain seizures in the name of stopping child pornography (“Operation Protect Our Children“–What do you mean “our,” kemosabe?).

No one can seriously think that the central state, or the Obama administration, is in favor of Internet freedom.

As for Hillary Clinton’s lies and claims to be for global Internet freedom despite being part of an administration hell bent on destroying it, her true views were revealed long ago, in 1998 in the wake of the Drudge Report breaking the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, in response to a question by reporters  Hillary Clinton was asked by reporters whether she favored curbs on the Internet. Her response:
“We’re all going to have to rethink how we deal with the Internet. As exciting as these new developments are, there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function…” And, as Thierer notes in his piece, Hillary Clinton also said “We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with [the Internet], because there are all these competing values. Without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function, what does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation?” Note here how IP (reputation rights are a type of IP) is once more at the root of the threat to the Internet (one reason I have concluded that copyright is even worse than patent). Of course the political elites–the real 1%–and the Big Media they are in cahoots with, hate the lack of the official “gatekeeper” function. They hate the Internet, social media, talk radio, podcasting, cell phones, twitter, and video cameras.

Recommended podcasts:

• Aaron Burr and the Challenge to Jefferson’s America, KERA Think, Dec. 1, 2011 (“Who fostered imperial dreams for the young United States of America? We’ll explore the life and story of our country’s third vice president this hour with historian David O. Stewart. His new book is American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America“);
• 238. Lew Rockwell Attacked By a Parasite, LewRockwell.com Podcasts, Dec. 2, 2011 (“Ron Smith talks to Lew Rockwell until a federal employee intervenes”. In the podcast, Lew quotes a great line from a recent Gary North column: “Europe’s game of kick the can will continue. The best summary of the outcome was made by a Spanish government worker on Sunday, November 20, the day of national elections. The socialists were thrown out of office. He said this: ‘We can choose the sauce they will cook us in, but we’re still going to be cooked.’”).

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

By establishing a system of prisons, with wardens, guards, and other personnel, who never have any personal reason to punish inmates, the state creates a punishment industry. Note that this is not a “just punishment industry,” but simply a punishment industry. The people involved in the actual day-to-day punishment have no direct connection to the punished. The inmates are just part of the job. The state actually encourages, necessarily, that the prison industry employees dehumanize the inmates. This is true whether the felon is a serial rapist or a drug addict who has never harmed a soul other than himself.  As morally corrosive to the guards and wardens as this is with adult inmates, it is even worse with children.

In addition to the evil effects it has on the jailers, the privatization of such things will naturally lead to the prison industry lobbying for more things to be considered crimes. Consider the example we see in the arts: Copyright holders have pressed for longer and longer copyright terms, moving laws further and further away from the original terms envisioned by the Framers. Such a push for the expansion of the term and scope of offenses punishable by imprisonment is similarly inevitable.

Punishment is not limited in scope to the punished. It affects the punished, the punishers, and those affected by both. Monopolizing it and expanding it, while perhaps giving some comfort to the victims and those outraged by crime, has the additional effect of expanding the state and, eventually, barbarizing those who support it.

Aside from his legacy as one of the giants of the Austrian school and modern anarcho-capitalism, Murray Rothbard was for a time a political activist, one of the founding members of the Libertarian Party, which got its start in the basement of David Nolan’s home some 40 years ago.  Rothbard’s radicalism kept the LP honest for a time, but eventually it began to behave like most other third parties, softening its principles to make its platform more appealing.  Eventually Rothbard, following a split with “low tax liberals” such as Ed Crane (founder of the Cato Institute) and David Koch (a Cato benefactor), left the LP, and took with him most of its radical heart.

No doubt Rothbard would be doing barrel rolls in his grave to see what’s become of the LP lately.  The most recent candidates for the party’s Presidential nomination, Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root, both former Republicans, have been hard at work promoting not so much personal liberty but the kinder, gentler sides of former and current members of the U. S.’s stable of tinpot dictators.

Espinoza/AP

First, there’s Barr, now a lawyer based in Atlanta, representing Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the former “president for life” of Haiti who now stands accused of ransacking his country’s treasury.  Barr attempted to defend his client by favorably comparing his reign to an earthquake:

Speaking to CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield, Barr did his best to defend his client’s tainted legacy, noting that, while Duvalier “is very well aware of the personal risk that he faced coming back to Haiti,” that “paled in comparison to the needs of his people.” Barr was tight-lipped about the details of Duvalier’s return and what he wanted to accomplish, other than to say that he wanted to “see funds made available to help the relief effort which, by any reasonable estimate here, has not progressed well.”

Then Whitfield hit Barr with a tough question on his integrity: after all the American government had done to clean up Duvalier’s mess, as a former Congressman, did he see any conflict of interest? Barr seemed to take offense, arguing that the American government had not helped much and, that, in fact, “the country is in worse shape now than it was at the time Mr. Duvalier was president.”

AP/file

Well, at least Barr isn’t representing the LP in his capacity as Baby Doc’s defender.  I wish the same could be said of Root’s mash note for Egypt’s embattled president Hosni Mubarak, which was not only written by a sitting LP committee chair but was published on the party Web site:

I just got off the phone with a longtime friend- a successful Egyptian business leader. He believes that several hundred thousand people in the streets do not represent the 80 million citizens of Egypt. They represent anarchists, communists, and Islamic extremists- all with an agenda and axe to grind. He says if you polled the people of Egypt today, the majority would support Mubarak. He says that the backbone of Egypt- the business owners, small business community, and middle class still support Mubarak and the military. They are horrified by the mobs in the street and are shocked at Obama’s tepid response to the riots and the one-sided portrayal of the situation by the U.S. media.

Because, you know, video footage of protesters being beaten and shot by Mubarak’s hired thugs can’t possibly mean that…Mubarak has sent hired thugs out to beat and shoot protesters.  And besides, they’re anarchists, the filthy little upstarts.  Totally asking for it!

It is shameful that the party of Nolan and Rothbard has become the party of apologists for dictators, but I can take comfort in knowing that as the Libertarian Party’s radical core has dwindled to nothing, so too has its relevancy to libertarianism in general.