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[laliberty]

From my 1981 copy of “Free to Choose”

[laliberty]

"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.”

— Frédéric Bastiat

[laliberty]

I'm saddened to write of the death of libertarian economist Walter E. Williams. He passed away Wednesday morning at the age of 84, less than a day after teaching a class at George Mason University, where he worked for 40 years and helped transform his department into a highly respected center of free market scholars. ...

Williams was so libertarian that he refused to accept the term as a descriptor. I interviewed him in 2011 and asked him whether he saw himself as part of the libertarian movement to which he had contributed so much. No, he said. "I just do my own thing." ...

The state, Williams argued, typically forced blacks into hopeless situations, provided ineffective relief, and then blamed the victims for failing to rise above their circumstances, all while consolidating power into elite hands. Seemingly beneficial interventions such as minimum wage laws that priced unskilled blacks out of the labor markets, public housing in crime-ridden projects, and mandatory schooling at terrible public institutions were particularly pernicious because they came wrapped in a rhetoric of beneficence.

RIP

[laliberty]

Drugs are winning the war on drugs. It's the morning after the 2020 election, and the result everyone is waiting for—will Donald Trump best Joe Biden, or vice versa?—is still a mystery wrapped in a clusterfuck. But there was one absolutely certain loser last night: the war on drugs. If Americans across the country provided a clear mandate for anything this year, it's ending the hold that drug prohibition has on our country.

Of nine drug decriminalization or legalization measures on state ballots last night—including two addressing hallucinogens and one covering all illegal drugs—not a single one failed. These were decisive victories, too, not close calls. And unlike some previous waves of pro-marijuana votes, which were concentrated in predictable areas, successful anti–drug war measures in 2020 spanned a diverse array of states.

Ballot measures making marijuana legal for recreational purposes passed in three: Arizona, Montana, and New Jersey. South Dakota approved both recreational and medicinal marijuana. In addition, Mississippi voters approved a medical marijuana measure.

Measures to OK consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms got a green light from voters in the District of Columbia and in Oregon.

And Oregonians also approved Measure 110, partially decriminalizing all illegal drugs.

[laliberty]

The reasons people give for why they vote—and why everyone else should too—are flawed, unconvincing, and occasionally dangerous. The case for voting relies on factual errors, misunderstandings about the duties of citizenship, and overinflated perceptions of self-worth. There are some good reasons for some people to vote some of the time. But there are a lot more bad reasons to vote, and the bad ones are more popular.

A bit dated in the specifics now, but never dated in the overall thrust: Think Outside the Ballot Box.

Also, this: 

You might also feel some pressure to suck it up and vote for “the lesser of two evils.” Well, I have a simple message for you: Don’t.

Don’t let anyone steal that disgust from your heart. It is a precious thing. You should treasure your disgust as a sign of your decency, particularly because hardly anyone else will. Don’t let anyone tell you that the nearly uncontrollable urge to retch at the thought of this election is disproportionate, or somehow uncivil. When you contemplate the fate of your country in 2016, you have the right to be depressed, or even despairing.

[laliberty]

[laliberty]

"You see my legs shakin', man? I'm nervous!" says a black man in handcuffs at a traffic stop in Berkley County, South Carolina. Cpl. Steve Zubkoff has detained him because he smelled marijuana in the car. The unidentified suspect is on probation, and it will turn out he has a blunt in his shoe, which he will eventually disclose to Zubkoff.

This is all captured on cameras on the most recent, and possibly last, episode of Live PD, a popular show on A&E that documents police responses to calls across the country. On Wednesday, in the midst of growing anger about police conduct in America, the show was cancelled. That announcement comes just a day after the Paramount Network cancelled Cops, the decades-old series that pioneered the police-reality-show format.

Good riddance.

These shows, and others like them, have turned human misery into entertainment while perpetuating narratives about alleged the need for the drug war and for the strong hand of the police to keep the people in line. In the Berkley County clip, the deputy seems almost amused at the young man's nervousness; the audience is primed to find his reactions comical. But his nervousness comes from a real place. Even as Americans turn more and more against the drug war, especially for marijuana, there are places in America where the young man could still be sent back to jail for a long time for that blunt in his shoe. Many encounters on these shows revolve around drug possession.

That doesn't happen here, or at least not onscreen. But Cpl. Zubkoff, amazingly, lectures the man on how to have "better interactions" with police—and the man apologizes for being nervous. There will be no introspection on camera about whether any of what just happened helped in any way to protect public safety.

These programs have been terrible for our understanding of policing and criminal justice, and we should not treat them as some sort of innocent victims of cancel culture. Shows like these turned their cameras on desperate people living on the margins of society, then made them grist for spectacles of mockery. They present themselves as windows into the world of policing, but what they really do is show snippets of people on the worst days of our lives. And despite a bland disclaimer reminding us that these people are innocent until proven guilty, they invite us to judge them for how they behave during a short television segment. ...

I’ve previously discussed my brief time - during a writer’s strike - working on a couple of cop “reality” shows and my refusal to cooperate in glorifying cops or skewing reality to hide cop misdeeds. See a short account of that here.

Seriously, good riddance to this garbage.

[laliberty]

For the first time in U.S. congressional history, a bill has support from a Libertarian-Democratic-Republican coalition of lawmakers.

Introduced by Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.), the Ending Qualified Immunity Act seeks to squash a legal doctrine that allows public officials to violate your civil rights with impunity if those rights have not yet been "clearly established" by preexisting case law.

"It is the sense of the Congress that we must correct the erroneous interpretation of section 1983 which provides for qualified immunity, and reiterate the standard found on the face of the statute," the bill reads, "which does not limit ability on the basis of the defendant's good faith beliefs or on the basis that the right was not 'clearly established' at the time of the violation."

Rep. Tom McClintock (R–Calif.) signed on to cosponsor, joining Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) and a lengthy list of other Democratic legislators who support Amash's legislation. The death of George Floyd, the unarmed black man who was killed by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, prompted the Republican lawmaker to back the bill.

"Whatever his motive, the killer of George Floyd had 18 complaints for misconduct, and one of his accomplices had six. Why is such misconduct tolerated by big city police departments?" he asked. "Is it because the doctrine of qualified immunity shields corrupt officials from accountability for a wide range of crimes?"

Though qualified immunity was never meant to shield police officers from actual crimes, it sports a sordid history of doing just that.

[laliberty]

#cops

#injustice system

[laliberty]

When [Officer] Mullenix confronted his superior officer after the shooting, his first words were, “How’s that for proactive?” …[T]he comment seems to me revealing of the culture this Court’s decision supports when it calls it reasonable—or even reasonably reasonable—to use deadly force for no discernible gain and over a supervisor’s express order to “stand by.” By sanctioning a “shoot first, think later” approach to policing, the Court renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow.

Mullenix v. Luna, 577 U.S. ___ (2015) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting). (via letterstomycountry)

The supreme court ruled 8-1, with only Sotomayor dissenting, in favor of shoot first, think later tactics by police:

In a per curiam opinion issued today, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit which had refused to grant qualified immunity to a police officer who used deadly force in order to bring a high-speed car chase to a close. Writing in lone dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor faulted her colleagues for “sanctioning a ‘shoot first, think later’ approach to policing [that] renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow.”

At issue in Mullenix v. Luna was a 2010 high-speed car chase that ended when Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Chad Mullenix fired six shots in an attempt to disable the engine of the fleeing vehicle. Although Mullenix was told by his superior officer to “stand by” and “see if” the road spikes that had been deployed by the police “work first” to stop the vehicle, Mullenix nonetheless proceeded to take action. Four of the six shots he fired struck the fleeing driver, Israel Leija Jr., killing him.

In 2014 the 5th Circuit ruled that Trooper Mullenix was not entitled to qualified immunity because the “immediacy of the risk posed by Leija is a disputed fact that a reasonable jury could find either in the plaintiffs’ favor or in the officer’s favor, precluding us from concluding that Mullenix acted objectively reasonably as a matter of law.”

Today the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision. “Whatever can be said of the wisdom of Mullenix’s choice, this Court’s precedents do not place the conclusion that he acted unreasonably in these circumstances ‘beyond debate,’” the Court said.

That judgment drew a sharp rebuke from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Mullenix fired six rounds in the dark at a car traveling 85 miles per hour,” Sotomayor observed. “He did so without any training in that tactic, against the wait order of his superior officer, and less than a second before the car hit spike strips deployed to stop it. Mullenix’s rogue conduct killed the driver, Israel Leija, Jr. Because it was clearly established under the Fourth Amendment that an officer in Mullenix’s position should not have fired the shots, I respectfully dissent.”

Obviously, I rarely agree with Sotomayor. On this dissent, however, she has it right. In fact, she does not go far enough.

This “qualified immunity” is the one of the foundational problems with police and the justice system. It is one of the primary reasons why the “system” is broken.

After all, if police ostensibly derive their powers from us, then they shouldn’t have the ability or right to do anything we couldn’t do. 

Imagine if - like the rest of us - police actually had to suffer consequences for their mistakes, misdeeds, and (too often) outright criminal behavior - instead of facing little to no penalties and often sticking the department or city (that is, the taxpayers) to financially settle with the victims (or families of the victims). It would naturally follow that there’d be more care taken to prevent negative outcomes. Further, imagine that - as a protection from some of this liability - there was “police malpractice insurance” in the same way there is driver’s insurance or medical malpractice insurance. Wrongful or sloppy behavior that produces negative consequences will cause an individual’s insurance rates to rise - in the same way accidents and safety violations would do for a driver. And, a history of police malpractice could even cause a police officer to be uninsurable. And an uninsurable police officer should also be an unemployable police officer. There would likely be insurance requirements for regular de-escalation and safety training. Furthermore, just as there are discounts to insurance for safety devices (airbags, for example), so would there be a discount for, say, using a body cam and a dash cam with an uneditable feed that is automatically streamed to both a police database and the insurance’s database. Also, officers who come forward with evidence of another officer’s wrongdoing (and in so doing protect both the insurance company and, more importantly, the general public) could also receive a discount in their rates. 

The biggest problem with unionized, bureaucratic, and armed government monopolies (aside from everything) is the fact that they pay no price for being wrong. The Supreme Court further entrenching this injustice - after an appeals court absolved police from any actual duty to protect citizens back in 1981 - means that the police misconduct so prevalent today will not be curbed and instead will doubtless continue to escalate.

(via laliberty)

Thoughts on Qualified Immunity from 2015.

[laliberty]

Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) wants to end qualified immunity.

The insidious legal doctrine allows police officers to violate your civil rights with absolute impunity if those rights have not been spelled out with near-identical precision in preexisting case law. Theoretically, it protects public officials from bogus civil suits, but practically it often allows egregious misconduct.

George Floyd's death at the hands of former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin forced new life into the debate, shining light on a doctrine that many people say has contributed to an environment of police abuse. Amash announced late Sunday that he would introduce the End Qualified Immunity Act, with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) signing on as a cosponsor Thursday.

"It is the sense of the Congress that we must correct the erroneous interpretation of section 1983 which provides for qualified immunity," the bill reads, "and reiterate the standard found on the face of the statute, which does not limit liability on the basis of the defendant's good faith beliefs or on the basis that the right was not 'clearly established' at the time of the violation."

That "clearly established" bit is what's most important, as the standard has become increasingly impossible to meet. Two cops in Fresno, California, were afforded qualified immunity after allegedly stealing $225,000 while executing a search warrant because it had not been "clearly established" in case law that stealing is wrong. An officer with the Los Angeles Police Department was given qualified immunity after shooting, without warning, an unarmed 15-year-old boy who was on his way to school, because the boy's friend was holding a plastic airsoft gun replica. A sheriff's deputy in Coffee County, Georgia, received qualified immunity after shooting a 10-year-old boy while aiming at a nonthreatening dog. The list, unfortunately, goes on.

The courts' decisions in those cases mean that each appellant had no legal recourse to seek compensation for lost assets or medical bills.

As of Friday, 16 additional legislators had signed on to Amash's proposal. Not a single one of them is a Republican.

The dissonance is mind-boggling: The GOP claims to be the party of small government and freedom, and they now have the opportunity to squash a dangerous doctrine that has put deadly power in the hands of the state at the expense of the little guy.

[laliberty]

I wrote this in 2014.

Sadly, still relevant.

Police and Racism: The Core of the Problem

The apparent overarching narrative that has emerged from Ferguson  - aside from the media and politicians’ general defense of the heavily militarized police state - has been one about racial discrimination against black individuals by cops (and a justice system) who are predominantly white.

There is absolutely no denying a racial component to all of this. One need only look at how the war on drugs disproportionately affects black Americans, from stop-and-frisk policies in New York to imprisonment statistics nationwide, to see the underlying prejudices that permeate the system.

I worked on a “reality” show many years ago that followed around police. Because this show relied on access in order for it to exist, we had strict instructions to never let the cops look bad.

For my first (and only) episode, the producers voiced concerns about potentially interacting with non-English speakers as that posed a problem since the producers only spoke English. The cop looked right at the camera, smiled, and said: “Sorry, we won’t be pulling any white people over tonight.”

During his beat, he made 6 stops. He issued citations to four people (all on absolutely bogus charges) and arrested one person (also completely trumped up: predicated on a fabricated “anonymous witness,” which led to an illegal search that found an old and clearly broken glass pipe hidden in the spare tire well in his trunk).

He also let one couple go with a warning. Of all the people, they were the only ones who had clearly violated the law (they were smoking, peaceably, in their car), albeit an unjust one. They were also the only ones who weren’t black or hispanic.

The producers asked me to make the cop look credible and competent, and make the guy who was arrested say things he didn’t actually say by reconstructing various pieces of dialog. I quit that show the next day when it was clear that I couldn’t favor the truth.

But with regards to the problem of institutionalized racism, the danger lies more in the institution than the racism. Without the institution - without the power, without the monopoly on the “legal” initiation of force - racism is but an ugly opinion. 

And while the cops may disproportionately target minorities, that doesn’t mean everyone else is safe - as the families of Kelly Thomas and too many others would tell you. No race or gender or age or person is ultimately safe when such force can be wielded.

I’ve long held (with regards to corporatism, in particular) that “so long as there are centers of power, those with means will aim to wield that power or work it in their favor. And there’s no greater power than the state’s monopoly on force.” It’s not a mystery, then, that both politics and police attract the same type of power-hungry people, but government police provide the added incentive of actually being able to physically assault other people while suffering little to no consequences. So, again, it’s no wonder that the types of people who would enjoy inflicting such violence and have a propensity for sociopathy would be attracted to a position that offers such power. 

Of course it’s a position that tends to attract aggressive racists.

Racism itself is a collectivist idea, as it considers people as parts of a group instead of as individuals. Without the state empowering these collectivists, racists would not be protected from the natural costs and consequences of their behavior. 

It’s not black vs white or rich vs poor or red vs blue or young vs old; it’s the state vs us.

-

Follow up: Police and Racism: The Core of the Problem, Pt. 2

[laliberty]

I made this over six years ago. Still applies.

Animalia Paradoxa

[laliberty]

Too often, when police wantonly use deadly force, police unions slow or prevent justice. In March, undercover police raided a Louisville, Kentucky, home. They used a battering ram to break down the door in the middle of the night and then fatally shot one of the occupants, an unarmed emergency room tech named Breonna Taylor. Police were investigating two men believed to be selling pot out of another home, but a judge also allowed police to search Taylor's home, because they believed the men were using it for package delivery. The raid was executed under a no-knock warrant that gives police permission to break into a private residence without identifying themselves. 

Taylor's death resulted in calls for the officers involved to be fired, but Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer warned that the process would be slow. A significant part of why he expected it to take so long, he said, was the city's collective bargaining agreement with the police union. Fischer lamented the process, saying he recognizes "the system is not a best practice for our community."

The city's police union, meanwhile, has expressed outrage that a city council member described Taylor's boyfriend, who fired on police during the raid, as a hero. This is the union's focus: not demanding justice for a woman killed by police in her home but demanding an apology from a local politician who had the temerity to praise a citizen for defending himself and his girlfriend during a botched police maneuver. The union's goal, it seems, is to protect the police from public criticism, not to protect the public from bad policing. That's what police unions do.

These are anecdotes, but the evidence bears the point out. The Police Union Contract Project, which collects and compares police union contracts across the country, notes that the agreements are generally designed to make it difficult to hold police accountable, in part by giving them privileges that are not afforded to the broader public. For example, the contracts often prevent officers from being questioned quickly after incidents and often give them access to information not accessible to private citizens. Cities are often required to shoulder the financial burdens of officer misconduct, and disciplinary measures are often restricted. Forthcoming research out of the University of Victoria's economics department finds that the introduction of collective bargaining produces somewhat higher compensation for police officers. It does not correlate with a reduction in total crime—but it does eventually correlate with higher numbers of killings by police, especially of minorities. ...

Unions aren't the only problem plaguing American police forces; there are plenty of other reforms worth pursuing, from demilitarization to ending qualified immunity. But they have consistently proven to be a force of organized resistance to calmer, safer, less aggressive policing, in part because of how they perceive the nature of the job. 

Police are public servants (sic) granted enormous power over the citizenry. They are tasked with protecting the public and serving their interests. Police unions, in contrast, are tasked with protecting police and serving their interests—even in direct contravention of serving the public. That distinction makes them a barrier to reforms aimed at improving public safety and increasing oversight of how law enforcement behaves. If union-busting is what it takes to reduce the pernicious influence of today's police unions on policing, then it's time to bust some police unions.

[laliberty]

[laliberty]

Public = far safer if 🚫 state intervention

Despite the typical government screw-ups and cover-ups…most people would say, “Yeah I know it’s not perfect, but contagious diseases are definitely one area where we need the government. The free market works for TVs and laptops, but not for containing epidemics.”

As with other arguments for government programs, this one too suffers from a lack of imagination. If the government relinquished its role in handling contagious diseases, the public would be far safer.

First and most obvious: the government restricts freedom of association, and more specifically, the freedom of property owners to exclude whomever they desire. In the current legal environment, it would be pointless for airlines, bus carriers, amusement parks, hotels, etc. to maintain their own list(s) of people with contagious diseases. If these people weren’t considered health risks by the government, then they could sue if (say) Disneyworld refused to let them into the park.

But suppose the government did act as if owners really had the right to control who used their property. What voluntary institutions would spring up to help a free society cope with the problem of contagious diseases?

There are two competing principles that we need to consider. On the one hand, it’s bad for business to exclude potential customers for health concerns, especially if it turns out that the exclusion was based on mistaken information. On the other hand, it’s really really bad for business if a bunch of customers contract a contagious disease from another customer because of lax oversight.

Since business owners are in no position to make these judgment calls themselves, they would gladly pay for independent health experts to advise them on how best to run their operations and minimize the risks to their employees and customers. Through such consultations and (as always) the profit and loss system, over time an efficient portion of resources would be channeled into disease prevention. For example, salad bars would have sneeze guards, critical employees would wear gloves, and bathrooms would have soap dispensers.

But beyond these fairly obvious safeguards, more sophisticated ones could emerge. For example, specialized consulting firms could assemble teams of medical experts to monitor the world, and identify individuals for the airlines who are at risk for contagious diseases. In order for these flagged travelers to buy tickets and board the plane, they would first need to be checked by the medical consultants (or by their own physicians, if the airlines recognized their competence).

The great difference between voluntary mechanisms versus the monopoly CDC is that the former would have every incentive to do a good job. If an airline turned away certain customers because Ace Medical Consultants said they had TB, when in fact they didn’t, this would be horrible for business. Ace’s competitors (who had a better track record) would advertise this fact in their brochures and the airline would switch if it thought the rival could do a better job.

In contrast, what will happen to the CDC in light of the Speaker case? Will its budget be slashed? Will heads roll? Of course not, just the opposite: when government agencies botch the job, proponents consider it proof that they’re underfunded…

          — Bob Murphy, How the Free Market Would Handle Quarantines

[laliberty]

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

—

H.L. Mencken

(via radicalanarchism)