Not that the national Libertarian Party was in danger of being taken seriously any time soon (or, you know, ever) but I gotta say I'm feeling pretty good about not voting for Bob Barr right about now.

Non-aggression isn't a plank in the Libertarian platform. It's a core principle. Duvalier's record as dictator of Haiti is unforgivable, and Barr's association with him is, too.

deer hunting, machiavelli, and balancing the budget

This is the best argument for private gun ownership I've read in a long time:

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world...

I wish [Machiavelli] was around today, if only to hear the praise he would have for a nation that every year assembles and then disbands the world’s largest army purely for the purpose of managing its deer population. For millenia, philosophers have pondered how one can maintain a well-armed population that can fend off all attackers, while simultaneously maintaining ordered governance. In America, we’ve fulfilled this dream, and we’ve done it so well and so effortlessly that no one seems to have noticed.

If this argument holds any water at all...maybe we could stand to spend something less than the rest of the planet combined on the military, hmmm?

(via Sullivan)

the illiberal left in washington state (and everywhere else)

Washington's ballot initiative I-1068, which would abolish state criminal and civil penalties for marijuana (for adults 18 and over), hit a snag this week, when the Service Employees International Union and "other players in progressive causes" declined to financially support the drive to get the necessary signatures to put I-1068 on the ballot. Phillip Dowdy of the group Sensible Washington writes:

Over the last month, the SEIU and others in state politics have talked with Sensible Washington about steps they could take to ensure that the initiative turned in enough signatures to qualify for this November’s ballot because marijuana legalization being on the ballot would drive extra voter turnout in ways that would benefit progressive causes and candidates in November in what’s shaping up to be a tough year for Democrats and progressive issues. Now after stringing the I-1068 campaign along for four weeks, they’ve walked.

This, despite the fact that a slim but significant majority of Washington voters support the legalization of marijuana, according to a recent poll.

Anyone who is truly serious about reforming drug laws should have given up on the mainstream left as a reliable ally a long time ago. If you can't get a former litigator for the ACLU to vote the right way in Gonzales v. Raich, you're pretty much screwed.

Bruce Ramsey really nailed it on the Seattle Times blog yesterday:

I keep telling people that a lot of the lefties in this state, and particularly in this city, are not liberal. They aren't interested in individual rights [em. added]--at least, not rights to do very many things outside a bedroom. Progressive activists are believers in government. They want to save the Earth by controlling people more, including by banning the use of tobacco outdoors in the public parks. I think the broad group of people who vote leftward are far more tolerant than the activists, and would vote for I-1068 if they could. Maybe now they won't get the chance.

things i don't have time to comment on

...but that you should read.

--The new coalition government in the UK is actually talking about rolling back its own police power. File this under "I'll believe it when I see it", but Greenwald is depressingly correct: it is inconceivable that we would hear what Nick Clegg is saying from Barack Obama.

--Matt Yglesias on the fuzzy line between public and private. This is an argument libertarians should take seriously. This too.

--On a related note, Thoreau has an excellent suggestion for libertarian-ish pols who cannot seem to address issues of race and civil rights without stepping in it up to their eyeballs.

how we treat foriegners is a leading indicator

Greenwald:

What's most amazing about all of this is that even 9 years after the 9/11 attacks and even after the radical reduction of basic rights during the Bush/Cheney years, the reaction is still exactly the same to every Terrorist attack, whether a success or failure, large- or small-scale...

It really is the case that every new Terrorist incident reflexively produces a single-minded focus on one question: which rights should we take away now/which new powers should we give the Government? We never reach the point where we decide that we have already retracted enough rights. Further restrictions on rights seems to be the only reaction of which our political and media class is capable in the face of a new attack. The premise seems to be that if we keep limiting rights further and further, we'll eventually reach the magical point of Absolute Safety where there will be no more Terrorism. For so many reasons, that is an obvious myth, one that ensures that we'll reduce rights infinitely and with no discernible benefit.

Sadly, this is old news. I can't really say I find the Obama administration to be a disappointment in this regard, but only because my expectations were so low to begin with:

And herein lies the real problem. The political center in this country, if the actions of the political class are any indicator (and is there any reason to think that they aren't?) is still so irrationally afraid of terrorism that there is broad support for shredding the Bill of Rights in the name of the appearance of security.

And no politician is going to fix that. This is a cultural problem. The politics merely reflect that.

quick ones

--This is why you should care about the 2nd Amendment, even if you don't care about (or for) guns (and for the record, I neither particularly care about or for guns, myself.) If "shall not be infringed" means anything other than exactly that, then "Congress shall make no law", etc., don't mean a whole hell of a lot, either.

--This seems to be under the radar in the national media, but marijuana possession in the City of Seattle is now effectively decriminalized. (Hooray Seattle!)

--The only basketball league that will suck worse than the WNBA.

health care, ctd

Last week I wrote:

"I think universal health care is a perfectly laudable goal... That said, I have absolutely no faith in the American political system to create and run a Canadian or French-style single-payer system (setting aside for the moment whether I would actually want it to or not). There are too many stakeholders in the status quo...we'd have to have public (only) campaign financing first."

Yesterday, Robert Reich pointed out a perfect example of why I think this is the case:

It's bad enough when industry lobbyists extract concessions from members of Congress, which happens all the time. But when an industry gets secret concessions out of the White House in return for a promise to lend the industry's support to a key piece of legislation, we're in big trouble. That's called extortion: An industry is using its capacity to threaten or prevent legislation as a means of altering that legislation for its own benefit. And it's doing so at the highest reaches of our government, in the office of the President.

When the industry support comes with an industry-sponsored ad campaign in favor of that legislation, the threat to democracy is even greater. Citizens end up paying for advertisements designed to persuade them that the legislation is in their interest [emphasis added]. In this case, those payments come in the form of drug prices that will be higher than otherwise, stretching years into the future.

It should be said that this is coming from an unabashed liberal whose support for universal insurance is much less qualified than my own.

A blind spot too many libertarians and most conservatives have is the danger posed by collusion between the private sector and the government. It isn't free enterprise when businesses game the government to their competitive advantage. I have no idea what Mr. Obama (or perhaps more accurately, his team) are thinking here, whether this is a necessary compromise on the path to universal insurance or is actually the way they want to proceed. In either case, they seem to be taking a page from some of the worst economic policy of the Republicans.

All of which goes to reinforce the fundamental silliness of the Team Red/Team Blue mentality...Republicans aren't opposing Obama's health care reforms because they think it's bad policy (it is) but because it's Obama's. More to the point, it isn't difficult to envision an alternate reality in which a Republican president would have struck the exact same deal, with full support from the party. Democrats/liberals/progressives that are supporting reform (it should be said that there is no shortage of liberal disappointment in the general half-assedness of the Obama "plan"), I can only presume, are supporting it primarily because...it's Obama's.

criticizing cops is protected speech

Via Radley Balko via Andrew Sullivan, a beautifully articulated opinion from Judge Alex Kozinski:

Defendant relies heavily on the fact that Duran was making obscene gestures toward him and yelling profanities in Spanish while traveling along a rural Arizona highway. We cannot, of course, condone Duran’s conduct; it was boorish, crass and, initially at least, unjustified. Our hard-working law enforcement officers surely deserve better treatment from members of the public. But disgraceful as Duran’s behavior may have been, it was not illegal; criticism of the police is not a crime.

[T]he First Amendment protects a significant amount of verbal criticism and challenge directed at police officers…

The freedom of individuals to oppose or challenge police action verbally without thereby risking arrest is one important characteristic by which we distinguish ourselves from a police state…

Thus, while police, no less than anyone else, may resent having obscene words and gestures directed at them, they may not exercise the awesome power at their disposal to punish individuals for conduct that is not merely lawful, but protected by the First Amendment.

Inarticulate and crude as Duran’s conduct may have been, it represented an expression of disapproval toward a police officer with whom he had just had a run-in. As such, it fell squarely within the protective umbrella of the First Amendment and any action to punish or deter such speech–such as stopping or hassling the speaker–is categorically prohibited by the Constitution…

No matter how peculiar, abrasive, unruly or distasteful a person’s conduct may be, it cannot justify a police stop unless it suggests that some specific crime has been, or is about to be, committed, or that there is an imminent danger to persons or property.

Kozinski is probably one of the best jurists in the country in terms of recognizing the constitutional limits of police power. Which is of course why he will never be nominated to the SCOTUS.

more on the means and ends of liberty

I think both the Civil Rights Act and the women’s movement did in fact lead to tremendous net increases in liberty... Federal intervention, while certainly limiting freedom of association and trumping more local jurisdictions, resulted IMO in an overall increase in freedom. That many traditional libertarian conservatives, such as Goldwater, seem to have been willing to sacrifice a great gain in overall freedom in order to maintain status quo levels local self-rule seems to me to betray a commitment to ancient ideals of liberty as community self-government in conflict with the modern idea of liberty as freedom from coercion.

--Wilkinson on Bartlett on liberals and libertarians.

My hypothesis is that conservatives (and right-leaning libertarians) tend to invoke "federal intervention" and "judicial activism" when talking about the means to ends that they don't personally care for and/or to which they are indifferent. If, for example, Kelo had been decided differently (i.e., correctly), would conservatives have been howling federal overreach in the governance of New London? I somewhat doubt it.

obama and dc school vouchers

While I really like the spirit of what Megan McArdle has to say here:

I'm willing to countenance the possibility that Barack Obama genuinely believes that the DC voucher program is not helping the students who participate...[but] how come the Obama girls benefit from leaving the DC public school system?

...

What is it about the Obama girls that enables them, nearly uniquely, to benefit from school choice?

...I just can't get on board with the argument that Mr. Obama's (possibly wrongheaded) opposition to vouchers somehow obligates him to put his children in public school. Vouchers make it possible for people to send their children to private school that otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it. The Obamas can afford it.

You can argue that vouchers constitute a sort of tax refund rather than a simple entitlement, I suppose, but since they are targeted towards people who probably are getting more back than they "paid in" (and a great many more people pay in and get nothing), it looks a lot more like an entitlement to me.

Now, I don't think for a minute that Mr. Obama's opposition to it is rooted in a desire to cut entitlements--he's keeping the teachers' unions sweet. But I also don't understand why Megan and so many other conservatives and libertarians don't see vouchers as the wealth transferring entitlements that they certainly look like to me.

(Full disclosure: I am a product of public education, from kindergarten through a PhD.)

tax day in the old north state

It's a forgone conclusion that I am unhappy about income tax, generally. So I'll not belabor that point.

I do want to say a word or two about the state income tax in North Carolina, however.

NC's tax rate in our bracket is not as high as, say, California's. That is as it should be. It's only slightly lower than Oregon's--a place I would very much prefer to live, if we ever manage to land two jobs there--though it is worth noting that Oregon has no sales tax (it's 7% here), which I imagine puts Oregon ahead overall.

It is noteworthy that NC's rates (in our bracket at least) are higher than both "Taxechusetts" and New York. For the life of me, I don't know what I get for it. It certainly isn't forward-thinking transportation infrastructure, or a pleasant and efficient DMV.

To be sure, income tax isn't everything (see the example of Oregon, above.) Property taxes, gas taxes (NC's are the highest in the southeastern US), etc., also make a big difference; my observations here are by no means a complete assessment of the relative tax burden of the several states.

But what really gets me is the sheer retardedness of NC's D-400-TC form, which clocks in at a whopping 6 pages, sends you flipping back and forth to do calculations that could be handled in a much more straightforward manner, and (to top it all off) won't give you .pdf file in which you can save changes. And to add insult to injury, they instruct you to add a "consumer use tax" to recapture the sales tax they assume you would have otherwise paid on money you had the temerity to spend somewhere other than North Carolina. (There's a table that's essentially a straight percentage of your income. Then it says you can make an adjustment if you feel you owe more or less. Guess what I adjust mine to?)

I love Durham, and will miss it when I'm gone. But the State of North Carolina leaves much to be desired. I look forward to taking my income elsewhere.

i'm smiling next to you in silent complicity

Today's post by Will Wilkinson is nominally about libertarian agnosticism in the debate over gay marriage, but this bit applies beautifully as a general principle:

One cannot use an ideological image of perfect justice to excuse or ignore an obvious injustice within the actual imperfect system. That these injustices could not arise within one’s vision of the best society does not mean that they have not in fact arisen. That a debate would not occur in an ideal world does not mean that it is not occuring or that nothing morally hangs on its conclusion. To decide to sit out the debate, with an eye on utopia, is not a way to keep one’s hands clean.