Dear George W. Bush,
When you were president, I claimed to dislike you because your policies violated my principles. With deepest regret, I must inform you that this was a lie. In reality, I have no principles, and despised you merely because you are a Republican.
Yours in partisanship,
Thousands of “anti-war” Democrats
P.S.
Sorry about your dog.
How far could they go? Well there’s at least a new yard stick. Over the weekend, EU leaders struck a deal with the Cypriot government to seize 7% out of every savings account with under €100,000 and 10% for every account with a balance of €100,000 or higher.
Even among us who, ideologically speaking, question the ethics and morality of income taxation to begin with, a tempering factor that leaves one like myself politically engaged within the institutions of the status quo is the idea of a social contract.
Even though, for a libertarian such as myself, I’d very much like to renegotiate that social contract. And one could argue — and I would — that I was bound to that contract against my will by birth. Despite all that, there’s an understood arrangement between myself and the state; they tax their pound of flesh, and what’s left over belongs to me and me alone.
What the Cypriot government has done is violate this contract in the most obscene and frightening of ways. They have, with the power of the state, reached into the accounts of its citizens and expropriated their wealth in the most egregious of ways: summary expropriation. The rules have been changed, retroactively. The arrangement between person and state has been forcefully, and I would says violently, renegotiated.
Make no mistake. This is an act of violence. Theft is an act of violence. Thus, one might argue that the Cypriot government has lost its moral authority to govern. At the very least, it’s lost its moral authority to levy taxes against its own people.
The question is, what will the Cypriot people do? If they revolt, morality is certainly on their side.
It has now come to pass that Toronto can lay claim to being the fourth largest city in North America, passing Chicago, with its city proper population now ringing in at an estimated 2,791,140. This is a significant climb in population for Toronto, rising about one-quarter of a million people in a decade.
Both for Canada’s largest city and most hated city, the statistical milestone is nothing more than that. And as a datapoint on its own, it really is nothing more than that.
I’ve been lucky enough in my life to have lived outside of Canada, and been lucky enough to have stamps in my passport from almost every continent in the world. And truth be told, there’s a lot of places I’ve been which I wouldn’t mind spending a great deal more time in.
That said, Toronto is “special” in the world today. It’s perhaps, in the developed world, the city most defined by immigration. A fact lamented by conservatives and embraced by liberals. In the year 2013, a majority of the people living in the City of Toronto, North America’s fourth largest city, were not even born on this continent. I think the liberals are on the right side of history, here.
Cities like New York and Chicago could once claim a similar statistic, in their heydays as destinations for masses of immigrants from Europe. But America has fallen out of love with the idea of immigration being a good thing. While immigrants still contribute to America in a big way, culturally America has grown distrustful of immigration and a majority of Americans would like to see the gates into America churning ever more slowly — and more discerningly. » Read more…
This column by Andrew Coyne is very good. You should read it.
Coyne’s thesis, I think, is this: Canadian conservatism is really a mixture of different groups, including libertarians, fiscal conservatives, and social conservatives. These groups don’t have a lot in common, but they can, under the right circumstances, put aside their differences to support a political party. Right now, that party is the Conservative Party of Canada. That party, however, isn’t giving the different groups in the coalition anything in exchange for their support. Eventually, this will destabilize the coalition of different groups that makes up the conservative movement. Or at least, it should.
Social conservatives aren’t getting any new restrictions on abortion.
Libertarians aren’t getting fewer regulations or a smaller government.
Fiscal conservatives aren’t getting a balanced budget.
In fact, if one had to pick the one salient idea still holding the different conservative groups together, it would be this: the alternatives — including the dreaded Coalition of Opposition Parties — would be worse.
There is that, and then there is Stephen Harper himself.
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Here is a list of beliefs I think most orthodox libertarians hold:
I could go on. But let us be clear about what I am doing. Each belief has two parts: first, a policy prescription (X should be permitted, or X should not be done.) The second part is a logically possible consequence of enacting that prescription.
Libertarians have many ingenious and empirically supported arguments for why the consequence for each policy is unlikely to arise. I can even see an orthodox reading my list rolling his eyes: “Any business owner stupid enough not to hire qualified black people would quickly be out of business.”
Okay. But most people, I would argue, do not adopt a position because of the consequences that are likely to result but also because of the consequences that could result. They should not necessarily be criticized for doing so.
Most every road-to-serfdom argument I’ve heard from libertarians and conservatives has a similar form: if we let the state do X, which looks mostly harmless, then that may lead to it doing Y, which is not harmless at all. Few see a need to ask for the data showing how likely it is that X will lead to Y. Oftentimes, we’re just asked to believe that higher taxes will lead to concentration camps, which is why I am waiting for Denmark to open its version of Guantanamo Bay.
The point, however, is that we all agree that the negative consequences that could flow from some policy are, for most people, a reason against that policy. This is not to say that everyone is a consequentialist; it is just to say that consequences matter.
All I have done is connect a smattering of libertarian beliefs to some of their worst possible consequences. Indeed, these consequences are more than possible. In a few cases, history and a rudimentary understanding of human nature suggest they are almost plausible (which is why I don’t want to hear about potential alien invasions in anyone’s rebuttal; alien invasions are possible, but before we had civil rights laws, ‘whites only’ signs actually happened. It is not crazy to think they might happen again if those laws were abolished.)
We should do this/not do this — even if –. That is the formula. And it is the “even if” part that is an obstacle, I think, to selling libertarianism to a wider audience. Many will nod along to the policy prescriptions — more freedom! less government! — and then shrink back in horror when they hear the “… even if” part, or figure it out for themselves.
What do we do then? » Read more…
With regard to today’s Supreme Court decision upholding Taylor and Canada’s anti-hate speech laws:
Obviously, libertarians will hate the decision, but hopefully they weren’t disappointed. Did anyone really think the Court would strike down the censorship provisions in every human rights act across Canada?
But I see a puzzle. To quote the decision,
the term “hatred” contained in a legislative hate speech prohibition should be applied objectively to determine whether a reasonable person, aware of the context and circumstances, would view the expression as likely to expose a person or persons to detestation and vilification on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.
The Court’s opinion repeatedly emphasizes the objective elements of hate speech. It is reasonable to prohibit such speech because of its objective effects on targeted groups. This is why the Court rejects considerations of speaker’s intent; if an utterance is harmful, the intent of the speaker does not mitigate that harm. Similarly, the truth of an utterance is also irrelevant to its effects. As the Court argues,
Truthful statements can be presented in a manner that would meet the definition of hate speech, and not all truthful statements must be free from restriction. Allowing the dissemination of hate speech to be excused by a sincerely held belief would provide an absolute defence and would gut the prohibition of effectiveness.
This actually sounds correct, as far as it goes. If what you’re worried about is limiting the effects of speech, then truth and speaker’s intent are both irrelevant. What matters is how the speech will affect other people. With regard to hate speech, those effects can be broken into two categories:
The total impact of a hateful utterance will be a combination of these two effects. If Bill Whatcott’s anti-gay flyers lead more people to hate gays, then they are effective in sense (2). If they lead gays to feel badly about themselves, then they are effective in sense (1). Perhaps they did both.
While I haven’t had time to dig into today’s decision, it appears that the Court found hate speech laws a reasonable infringement on freedom of expression because of effects of type (1). That is, the audience’s reaction matters (here I use audience in a broad way, to refer to anyone who hears the hateful utterance. An anti-gay utterance could have a negative effect on gays without any gay person ever hearing it, if the people who do hear respond in the wrong way.)
One of the puzzles this sort of reasoning raises in my view is this. In its decision, the Court made sure to reiterate that hate speech laws do not extend to private speech acts. If Whatcott had invited a person to his house and shown that person his flyer, that would not have been prohibited (and if it had been prohibited, the relevant law would then have been in constitutional peril for being overbroad.)
The question, however, is why not? Why not prohibit any expression of hatred, whether private or not? The fact that a hateful utterance is made privately has, as far as I can tell, little to do with its effects, and any connection between the effects of an utterance and whether it is made in (say) a church or my house would be tentative and contingent.
» Read more…
I’ve addressed this issue many times, with great expatiation in the past. But now I will give it a name. It is the neocon gambit, and it goes like this: if you care about a fiscally responsible government then the choice is between conservatives and everyone else.
The neocon gambit asks that, say libertarians and free market types suspend their other political convictions on gay rights, foreign policy, the war on drugs, abortion rights, and so on. In exchange, we get lower taxes and a “smaller government” with a much bigger military, more prisons, more police, and harsher sentencing for all crimes.
The neocon gambit is advanced by various people in various ways.
Stephen Taylor of the National Citizens Coalition advances it as a matter of practicality — the art of the possible, as he fondly puts it.
Then there is Lance over at Small Dead Animals. He takes issue with what he sees as the left demonizing the right over racism and other bigotries, when as he puts it, the real issue is “Fiscal Responsibility”. » Read more…
Inspired by John Holbo’s delightful essay published on the Bleeding Heart Libertarian’s blog.
Suppose that every society that exists, at least beyond a certain level of sophistication, was built, at least in part, atop a series of injustices. Suppose, further, that the harm or deprivation these injustices caused was not distributed randomly, like lightning strikes, but fell upon some groups (for example, women and racial minorities), while the benefits of these acts accrued to others. Because these injustices happen repeatedly, often but not always at the behest of the law, the deprivations and the benefits stack up. A pattern emerges.
One can speculate that there comes a point in a sophisticated society in which people reflect on this state of affairs. Reflection leads to explanation. Or rationalization. Attitudes change and new policies are proposed to address the flaws in the system. Those who wish to maintain old attitudes and ways of doing things find themselves ostracized. A few of those who were benefiting from the system find themselves losing privileges they’d been taking for granted. It makes them angry.
So far, everything I’ve said really happened. Now let us graduate from reality to fable.
UPDATED, see below for Rush Limbaugh’s post-election reaction.
Exclusive to The Volunteer, Dissociated Press provided the following roundup of reactions to the reelection of President Barack Obama.
What is left to hope for? That the American people will soon regret their choice? That another four years of economic stagnation and escalating debt will cure them of their insane appetite for charismatic liberals? If four years of endless failure have not rid them of this madness, the disease may well be terminal. Perhaps others will still see some cause for hope, and in another few weeks my friends may persuade me to see it, too. But today I will hear no such talk, and I doubt I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow. At the moment, I am convinced America is doomed beyond all hope of redemption, and any talk of the future fills me with dread and horror.
– Robert Stacy McCain, American Spectator. Reportedly said while he was drying his eyes in a Confederate flag, earlier soiled when he vomited into it after seeing a black man kissing a white woman.
The white establishment is now the minority…And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things? … The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore.
– Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, shortly before he was fired for being Irish.
It’s true, it’s true we were beaten, yes, but by what? By money and ethnic votes, essentially.
– Former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau, lamenting Romney’s loss from a hidden fortress in Quebec City. To be fair, he may have been talking about some other beating he’d received.
Why, putting it coarsely, doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Condoleeza Rice? Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Marco Rubio? Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Suzanne Martinez…
Are we going to get the votes Obama got last night. We’re not? Really, we’re not?
We won’t. But we’re not getting the votes that Obama got last night because we have Condoleeza Rice – and she is a pinnacle of achievement, and intelligent, and well-spoken . . . You can’t find a more accomplished person. Marco Rubio. And really, speaking in street lingo, we’re not getting credit for it.
And the white Republican establishment is putting these people out front, but they really don’t believe that Marco Rubio is that good of a deal. Window dressing! If that’s the perception of Obama voters, than how do we change that?
– Rush Limbaugh, shortly before the pharmacy refused his attempt to trade a black person in for some Oxycontin.
I’m posting this strictly for the lulz. Eric Dondero, a self-described libertarian Republican who once worked for Ron Paul, is spitting mad about President Obama’s victory.
And when I say spitting mad, I mean that literally.
If I meet a Democrat in my life from here on out, I will shun them immediately. I will spit on the ground in front of them, being careful not to spit in their general direction so that they can’t charge me with some stupid little nuisance law. Then I’ll tell them in no un-certain terms: “I do not associate with Democrats. You all are communist pigs, and I have nothing but utter disgust for you. Sir/Madam, you are scum of the earth.” Then I’ll turn and walk the other way.
This is even funnier if you imagine Daffy Duck saying it. Which you probably are, now that I’ve mentioned it.
Daffy Dondero’s “personal boycott” gets even funnier (and pettier, if you can believe it.)
Have a neighbor who votes for Obama? You could take a crap on their lawn. Then again, probably not a good idea since it would be technically illegal to do this. But you could have your dog take care of business. Not your fault if he just happens to choose that particular spot.
Yes, well. I believe some jurisdictions may also frown on pet owners letting their dogs shit on other people’s lawns. Then there’s that whole respect-for-private-property thing.
When not befouling his neighbor’s yard, Dondero is doing his part to dismantle the “libertarians are all assholes” stereotype.
When I’m at the Wal-mart or grocery story I typically pay with my debit card. On the pad it comes up, “EBT, Debit, Credit, Cash.” I make it a point to say loudly to the check-out clerk, “EBT, what is that for?” She inevitably says, “it’s government assistance.” I respond, “Oh, you mean welfare? Great. I work for a living. I’m paying for my food with my own hard-earned dollars. And other people get their food for free.” And I look around with disgust, making sure others in line have heard me.
Keep in mind: this isn’t something he’s planning on doing; it’s something he’s already doing. Imagine how many converts he’s made.
No, not to libertarianism. To the libertarians-are-all-assholes point of view. Well done, sir! Well done!
If all libertarians were like Dondero, Gary Johnson would have received at least five percent of the popular vote. You know it’s true.
Dig into the comments for even more fun.
Hint: when Dondero’s not glowering in disgust at people in the line at Walmart, he’s predicting “Nazi-style concentration camps” in two or three years. What a guy! We need more like him!
Suppose there were three options, A, B and C. Suppose you rank them as follows C > B > A. Suppose that if you choose C, there’s no chance of C obtaining. Suppose choosing B, instead, meant there was a one-in-60-million chance of B’s obtaining because you chose it. If someone were to tell me that I should choose B in order to be “effective,” I’d think it were some kind of great joke.
Whatever “effectiveness” means, one-in-60-million is way, way outside of the criteria for “effectiveness.” Choosing any option, once it’s beyond what can reasonably be described as “effective” for reasons of “being effective” is like arguing that you should throw food in the air, rather than on the ground, in order for it to reach a starving infant on the other side of the world. Sure, there’s a one-in-60-million chance that a gust of wind will take the food will turn into a hurricane will travel over the oceans and land before a starving infant, and there’s about a one-in-a-trillion chance that the earth will open up and quantomly transport the food to the other side of the world if you throw it on the ground, but if you’re going to throw your food to alleviate starvation on the other side of the world, “effectiveness” has exactly nothing to do with why you ought to pick tossing it up or throwing it down.
And so it is with this, and all other, elections. Pick a candidate for whatever reason, but don’t get suckered into “effectiveness” talk. Treat that kind of talk as it should be treated — as a great joke. And laugh with me.
If I were voting in the U.S., I’d be voting for Gary Johnson. I like Gary Johnson. I like him a lot. When it comes to determining the outcome, casting a ballot would be just as good as not casting a ballot at all — the difference between 0 and 0.00000006 is not a difference worth talking about. I wouldn’t be voting to change the outcome of the election, because I’m no fool. I’ve never voted to change any outcome of any collective decision when there are more than, say, 40 or so participants. Once my vote is beyond the one-in-40 threshold, I’m just noise, no signal.
So when I hear people tell libertarians to vote for some mainstream Republican or other, I just laugh and laugh. And when I hear progressives urging other progressives to abandon voting for Johnson or Jill Stein in favour of Obama, because that way their vote matters, I have just as hearty of a chuckle. You might as well stay at home and throw food in the air for all the good it’ll do anyone.
Terrence posted the following video on his facebook wall. His comment (and I hope he doesn’t mind my repeating it) was:
“Irony: Whittle’s argument is garbage, and he probably knows it, but as a partisan it is rational for him to make it.” I wanted to address myself to the arguments as well, and explain why, if I could, I would be voting for Gary Johnson. But first, the promised video:
The argument is this:
1. Only two people have a realistic chance of winning. Candidate A and Candidate B.
2. There are better candidates, C and D, but no one thinks they have a chance.
3. If you vote for C or D, your vote will have no impact on who ultimately comes out the victor. It will be as though you never voted at all.
4. If you vote for A or B, however, your vote will matter to who ultimately comes out the victor.
5. A is, by your lights, a really bad candidate while B is, by your lights, also a really bad candidate, but slightly better.
6. You have an obligation to bring about the best outcome from within the feasible set.
7. The best feasible outcome is B winning.
8. Therefore, you ought to vote for B.
I have a few objections to this argument.
Consider premises 3 and 4. 4 appears to me to be false. The reason is this: Even if only A or B have a realistic chance of winning, your voting for either one of them has about as much impact on the outcome as your not voting at all. The difference is that between one in, say, 1 billion, and 1 in 10 to 60 million. At those odds, it is just as true to say that your vote does not make a difference in either case. One in 10 million (to pick the most generous option) odds does not reach the necessary bar to count as “making a difference.” Both are, effectively, as good as not voting at all. Whether you pick B or C, it would be as though you didn’t vote at all.
But look at premise 3 again. The truth is that your casting a ballot for C or D will not make a difference in this election (but neither will your choosing A or B), although it may have an impact on the next election. If C or D reach just 5% of the national vote, they will automatically be on the ballot in all 50 states come 2016. That alone is enormously significant. It is also much, much more likely that C or D will reach the needed 5% threshold with your voting for either one of them, than that your vote will tip the balance in favour of either A or B. So if getting on all of the ballots in the next election is important enough for you, you have a much easier time of being “effective” in this election by voting for either C or D, then bothering with A or B.
Let’s now take a look at premise 5 and 6. Those of us who would rather pick C over either A or B typically think the difference between A or B are orders of magnitude less than the difference between (A or B) or C to the well-being of our fellows. If I have a one in 10 million chance of being effective in the battle between A or B, and value the difference at 10 utils, then my expected utility is 10/10,000,000, or 0.0000001. But if I have a one in a billion chance of being effective in the battle between (A or B) or C, and value the difference at 10,000 utils or more, then my expected utility is 10,000/1,000,000,000 or 0.000001 (or more!). So I should pick C.
So that’s what I think of the argument, and part of the reason for why I think it’s bad.
But then there’s that bit at the very end of the video, where this guy is busy trying to tell you that your rain drop of a vote matters. It’s like he forgot what he said at the beginning about preferring Ron Paul or Gary Johnson over Mitt Romney. He basically told the people that prefer those candidates to Romney that their vote is a rain drop. If it’s not just a rain drop, then you should vote for your most preferred candidate. That would be Ron Paul or Gary Johnson. Oh, wait, it’s merely a rain drop if you vote for either one of those two? But it’s not a rain drop if you vote for Romney? I’m confused about the rain drop analogy and how it’s supposed to count in favour of voting for Romney, while not counting in favour of voting for Johnson.
Well either it is or it isn’t a rain drop. If it is, then who cares whether you vote Johnson, Paul, Romney or write in Cthulu? But if it isn’t, why would you pick anything other than your most preferred candidate?
Also, for very many of us, foreign policy is a deal breaker. For my own part, I would never vote for anyone who participates in drone striking Pakistani innocents. Or being bellicose with Iran. If a candidate is on the ballot who is busy saying things like, “peace be with you, and also with you,” that seals it for me.
Hello, Gary Johnson. Good bye, Mitt Romney.
Tomorrow, lots and lots of Americans are going to vote. Many of them (most?) are ignorant voters. Over time, the worse the electorate, the worse the policies, the worse the political outcome. Having some kind of competence test for voting is a complete non-starter. Even if it were possible to construct a sound test of general competence, it would never pass political muster. Disenfranchisement, for whatever reason, is anathema. It is worse than a third rail.
Luckily, many people in the U.S. are aware of their ignorance. Luckily, many people volunteer not to vote. Not because it’s futile, not because they don’t like the options, but precisely because they feel it would be morally wrong for them to try to impose their ill-informed preferences on others.
It would be morally wrong to vote when you are ignorant. That is Jason Brennan’s, a colleague and friend, argument in his second-to-latest book, The Ethics of Voting. Another way of putting his thesis is that if you’re going to vote, you have an obligation to cast an informed ballot. He recently (as in two hours ago) participated in a Huffington Post live segment to provide the view. It was an irritating segment, mostly because Erol, a different participant, made no contact with Jason’s actual views when trying in vain to object to it. I think it is bad form to pretend to know what someone else is arguing, and then objecting to that. It is better form to admit that you need more information, or clarification. A lot of philosophy would be better if people asked more questions before attempting to “debunk” a view that no one has presented. Here’s the video:
Jason’s is a provocative thesis. I think I’m persuaded that it is true. The truth of the thesis can be seen when you reflect on his thesis in the following way:
Suppose you were the only elector. You get to decide who will be the president of the United States, or the prime minister of Canada. Your choice imposes a president or prime minister on all Americans or all Canadians. I think it is fairly obvious that if you had this power, you would have the obligation to become very well-informed before choosing for others. Politics is high stakes, after all. The consequences of your choice are significant, and your decision impacts other people, people who do not consent to having this leader.
Something (sufficiently) similar happens in actual elections, with very many people voting. Each of the people who vote are choosing not just for themselves, but for everyone. Whenever you’re making a choice for other people, you have an obligation to become sufficiently informed. So, if you’re ignorant, you shouldn’t vote.
That’s Brennan’s argument. I think I am now comfortable joining the Brennan camp on this issue. I had two objections to the view, and Jason has good responses to both.
The first is the wash-out argument. I read somewhere that ignorant voters effectively vote randomly. As the numbers increase, the ignorant vote gets washed out (it’s basically like a million people flipping a coin, and the probability is that 50% will get heads, 50% will get tails, and it’s as though they never bothered to vote in the first place), but the informed vote is not random, and so determines the outcome (their choice is not based on arbitrary criteria, like who they’d like to have a beer with, or who looks better holding a baby). It turns out that, empirically, ignorant voters are worse than random. It would be better if ignorant voters flipped coins to determine who they will vote for (if you’d like, I can look up the studies).
The second objection was the drop-in-the-ocean argument. Sure, whenever I’m choosing for other people, I have an obligation to be informed about what I’m choosing for them. But my obligation decreases proportionately with my effectiveness. If I’m one of ten people choosing for others, I have a strong obligation. What does my obligation look like when I’m not one of ten, but one of millions? It would be like adding a thimble-full of water to a mega-flood covering New York City. I may be “contributing” to the flood, in some way, and the flood is bad, but what difference does my thimble-full make? Whether I spill it or not makes no noticeable difference… not even to an ant!
I offered a similar sort of thought to Jason, to which he gave the following reply: We, each of us, have an obligation to avoid participating in a collectively harmful activity, even if no individual one of us can bring about the harmful outcome. By way of example, he asked me to imagine an innocent six-year-old tied to a steak on Healy Lawn. There are 100 Georgetown students with a rifle. Each bullet is sufficient to kill the six-year-old, and each of the 100 students is dedicated to firing a fatal shot (and none of them will miss). I cannot stop them. Now someone hands me a rifle, and says that I can join in the shooting, if I’d like. Suppose further that I always wanted to know what it was like to fire this particular rifle. My joining or not joining this firing squad makes no difference to the outcome. The six-year-old’s days are numbered. Does that mean nothing counts against my participating in the firing squad? Most of us, myself included, are going to think that something does count against my participating, even if my participation or non-participation makes absolutely no difference to the outcome. Being part of a collectively harmful activity is bad, and we all have reason not to participate. Jason calls this the ‘clean hands’ principle. I endorse the clean-hands principle.
With those objections out of the way, we have our conclusion: If you’re going to vote, you have an obligation to vote well. If you’re ignorant, and don’t know enough about economics, political science, or theories of justice, you have a moral obligation to abstain from voting. Voting ignorantly is a shitty thing to do to the rest of us. Those ignorant voters that stay at home on election day should be applauded, Jason argues. They have voluntarily disenfranchised themselves, and thereby eliminated their (most probably) negative externalities.
Over the last little while, I’ve been doing my best to let people know that municipal law enforcement can walk onto your private property without giving you notice, and without a warrant.
I think these sorts of no-notice, no-warrant power of entry provisions are an outrage. More people should be aware of it, and more people should be outraged by it.
Here’s a few links to my latest pieces about the topic:
1. Should bylaw officers have all that power? (Huffington Post)
2. Hey officer — get out of my backyard! (Huffington Post)
3. Fight property bylaw bullies (Ottawa Sun)
4. Toilet police unconstitutional (Ottawa Sun)
Writing about this topic got me the nod for the inaugural “Freedom Fighter of The Week” on Ezra Levant’s show “The Source” on the Sun News Network. You can watch that below:
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been railing against a specific provision in the Ontario Municipal Act. That provision permits municipalities to pass bylaws that allow bylaw officers to walk onto your private property without having to give the landowner notice, and without the need for a warrant.
It lets strangers come onto your property, while you’re away at work, and maybe your kids are home alone. It allows them to do this with no oversight, and without a confidential complaint system to ensure that bylaw officers don’t become nothing more than bylaw bullies.
Section 436(1) of the Ontario Municipal Act gives bylaw this extraordinary and unreasonable power. It needs to be repealed. That’s what I argue in this Huffington Post piece. And what I’ll be talking about at the Canadian Property Rights Conference in Ottawa.
If you think that this Power of Entry (or Right of Entry, as it’s sometimes called) is necessary for effective enforcement, you should have a conversation with Alberta. Or Manitoba. Or Saskatchewan. Or any of the three Territories. All of these jurisdictions require that “reasonable notice” be given to the landowner prior to an investigation or inspection. If the landowner gives them the middle finger, as probably she should, the bylaw officers can try and get a warrant to enter the private property.
At no point can they just hop over your fence and maybe peek in your windows if a neighbour complained, or if the officer has a hunch (or just wants to see your backyard. He can always claim, afterwards, that he thought he saw something contrary to bylaw somewhere on your property. Since there is no arms-length body overseeing these officers, nor accepting complaints about their behaviour, these officers are basically free to check out your yard for any reason whatsoever).
Isn’t this, dear reader, just about the best way to harass your neighbour if you’ve got a beef with her? Phone in a phony complaint to bylaw. Your complaint is totally anonymous. Can they do anything to you if you’re obviously just stirring up shit? No, they can’t.
What a brilliant system we have in Ontario!
It’s a recipe for abuse. And it really has got to go.
“I am of the opinion that the properties proposed for expropriation are absolutely essential for the safety and security of Canada,” reads the final decision from Ottawa, signed by Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose. “For that reason and in absence of valid justification to do otherwise, I have confirmed my intention to expropriate.”
And with that confident assertion by a Minister who loves Ayn Rand, Frank Meyers is going to lose his Gulch to a modern-day Robert Stadler, determined to push through Project X in Trenton.
John Meyer, Frank’s son, said this at trial: “Canada is about rights and freedoms—the right to own property and the freedom to enjoy it to the fullest.”
At some point, we really should recognize John’s comment officially and formally, through a property rights amendment to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can sign a petition at either the website linked, or here, on Ontario M.P.P. Randy Hillier’s site.
Read more about the Meyers here.
The National Post has an interesting series of articles (1, 2, 3) exploring Ontario’s court system, and just how long you have to wait to see your case all the way through to a verdict. In Ontario, the wait is too long.
(There’s a joke in here about how long you have to wait for any government-provided service, but I’m just going to let it slide).
Meanwhile, of the cases that make it all the way through, Ontario’s prosecutors have the lowest “guilty” verdict rating of all provinces — at 55.6 per cent.
The article goes on to mention several possibilities for bringing that wait list down. More money (surprise!), more judges (shocking!), pre-trial screening, moving to some sort of electronic method of scheduling and re-scheduling court appearances (it’s still the 18th century for Ontario’s courts… I could be wrong, but I think they said Ontario’s system still uses carrier pigeons for client-lawyer communication), and so on.
Here’s a suggestion they didn’t canvass: Make fewer laws. Get rid of a bunch of them. There, I’ve solved your problem.
This should interest co-blogger Terrence Watson:
Neil Peart, like many of us, was an Ayn Rand fan in his twenties. Neil Peart, of course, is the drummer for Canadian rockers Rush, who are slowly getting the kind of respect that they deserve (I’m not really a fan, but it doesn’t matter. They are amongst the best in that genre, which I don’t like all that much). As Peart got older, he lost his love for Rand and turned into a “bleeding heart libertarian.”
Here’s a nice excerpt from a Rolling Stone interview with him from June 12:
This is somewhat random, but you were interested in the writings of Ayn Rand decades ago. Do her words still speak to you?
Oh, no. That was 40 years ago. But it was important to me at the time in a transition of finding myself and having faith that what I believed was worthwhile. I had come up with that moral attitude about music, and then in my late teens I moved to England to seek fame and fortune and all that, and I was kind of stunned by the cynicism and the factory-like atmosphere of the music world over there, and it shook me. I’m thinking, “Am I wrong? Am I stupid and naïve? This is the way that everybody does everything and, had I better get with the program?”
For me, it was an affirmation that it’s all right to totally believe in something and live for it and not compromise. It was a simple as that. On that 2112 album, again, I was in my early twenties. I was a kid. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist. Paul Theroux’s definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also – I’ve just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into… a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.
(N.B. “Libertarian” with a capital-L refers to the political party. “libertarian” with a lower-case-l refers to the political philosophy. It makes me a bit grumpy when people get it wrong, and I sort of expect Rolling Stone to get it right…)
H/t: Paul McKeever
Hey, you know what really bothers me? When one country figures that laws passed by their legislature apply to the entire fucking world.
You know who the leading proponent of that idea is? The United States. That’s right, a nation that refuses to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court because it might place their citizens, soldiers and scumbag politicians in legal jeopardy has no issue whatsoever with applying its laws on foreign soil.
It started with the War on Drugs, which dovetailed nicely into the War on Terror, and now American copyright law is being applied extraterritorally.
For the record, I don’t take issue with the concept of copyright law. I just happen to think that it has historically been unevenly applied, and not infrequently at the expense of the people that actually create shit and in favor of the cocksucker corporations that have a long and storied tradition of robbing creative people fucking blind.
If it were up to me, the creator of something would hold the copyright of their work in perpetuity and the distributor of it – which would be the aforementioned cocksucker corporations – would do so under a license. I think that’s going to happen eventually, but the cocksucker corporations are going to have to bankrupted first.
Unlike in most industries, where something is created by an employee of a corporation, the creative arts are created by people who work under an advance system. The corporation might front you the money to create your work, but an advance is just that, an advance. The corporation deducts that advance money from their net profit before you see a fucking nickle. If your work never turns a profit for the corporation, you’ll wind up owing them money.
Oh, and you get no say in what the corporation’s expenses are. Let’s say that you make the most beautifully record about coprophilia ever committed to wax and Universal Music decides to take it to market. You get no say in whether or not Universal buys all of the ad time in the world promoting it on the Disney Channel. You’re still paying for it out of your advance, even though you’re pretty sure that kids who like cartons aren’t likely to CDs about people that are turned on by shit.
Better still, when your shit-glory record fails miserably and you find yourself hopelessly mired in debt to Universal Music, Universal Music still owns your work forever. Not only are you professionally and financially fucked because of Universal’s disastrous marketing decisions, you lose the right to own your own, well, shit.
More importantly, illegal downloading – while not exactly helping the entertainment conglomerates – isn’t what’s killing them. Corporate stupidity and a lack of competition is. If you think that investment banking is operating on a suicidal business model, you don’t know the first fucking thing about the entertainment industry.
Look at how many record companies and movie studios there were thirty years ago, compared to how many there are now. Now think of how many truly memorable records and movies there are compared to thirty years ago. You can draw a pretty even line in the decline of both, can’t you?
Does anyone really think that people are going to pay as much for the fifteenth carbon copy of Britney Spears (or the ninth reboot of the Spiderman movies) as they going to for the tenth? Even when each gets progressively more nightmarishly bad than the last?
I would humbly suggest to you that they won’t. If they can’t download it for free for the fucking pop culture irony of saying that they’ve seen it, they’ll just ignore it. It turns out that the mergers and acquisitions culture is working out just as well for the entertainment industry as it did for banking. A lack of competition creates a corporate atmosphere that no sane person wants anything to do with. Sure, you’ll make a fuck-ton of upfront money, but you’ll wind up running into the arms of big government the second the market wises up to your horseshit. And the market has decidedly wised up to their horseshit.
If the goddamned government managed to stop piracy tomorrow – which it won’t – those cuntish mega moguls would still be broke in five years. Those dopey cunts really do believe that if they eliminate the possibility of your taking their garbage for free, that you’re actually stupid enough to pay for it, while blissfully ignoring the fact that their product is fucking garbage
That’s not even what I want to argue. What I want to point out is “who in the fuck is the United States to shut down a Hong Kong-based company and arrest folks in New Zealand based on the whimsy of shitheel motherfuckers like Chris Dodd, formerly the United States Senator from CountyWide and currently the president of the MPAA?” And make no mistake, this is all about the infinitely power-drunk and suicidally moronic desires of Washington’s lobbyist assholes.
Let’s now consider that you’re a judge in someplace like Spain or Italy, and you have credible evidence that the United States government carried out the kidnapping of someone legally on your soil, and taken the victim to some shithole like Syria, Lybia or Egypt, where they were tortured without due process of law. That violates literally dozens of laws or international conventions, most of which the United States was party to. How well do you think that Washington is going to respond to your “tough on crime” posture?
People who have never set foot in America, and are merely accused of committing crimes against suicidal industries can lose the liberty and have their property seized with impunity. But American policymakers, who have arguably committed crimes against humanity can traverse the globe with impunity, irrespective of what the law anywhere says.
At some point, the extraterritorial application of domestic laws in going to work both ways. And Americans aren’t going to like the way that looks.
Ron Paul is driving the neoconservative right crazy. For them, a Ron Paul presidency signals the end of America. His foreign policy will be the final nail in the coffin of the United States.
They often lament that many of Ron Paul’s views are driven by wacky conspiracy theories. In particular, they focus on a one-time event in which Ron Paul refused to dismiss 9/11 “truthers” out of hand, saying that he just didn’t have time to follow the issue.
In the minds of neoconservatives, this is tantamount to Ron Paul being a truther himself. Which is unsurprising, since that’s simply how neoconservatives work. There is right and wrong. And no in between. If you’re not solidly on their side, then it goes without saying that you’re solidly on the other side.
That said, one should dig a little deeper into what exactly is behind the neoconservative thought process that leads them to the inescapable conclusion that a Ron Paul foreign policy would be the end of the United State.
Well, to understand that, you must consider that the right versus wrong dichotomous thinking that neoconservatives are so comfortable with. And then you must consider their worldview which is, to say the least, highly conspiratorial.
Pamela Gellar, a neoconservative anti-Islam blogger, and a stalwart of “protecting liberty” — at least in the minds of other neoconservatives — advances the conspiracy theory that Muslims all around the world are engaged in a highly organized and insidious plan to bring down Western civilization from within and replace it with a global Islamic Caliphate. And worse, even so-called moderate Muslims might be involved and are merely practicing Islamic lying to decieve us all. » Read more…