Monthly Archives: May 2008

More News From The Police Watch Front

Police Watch

This time, it’s the Philadelphia Police Department that’s under scrutiny:

PHILADELPHIA — A half-dozen police officers kicked and beat three suspects pulled from a car during a traffic stop as a TV helicopter taped the confrontation, and the city’s police commissioner said “it certainly does not look good.”

The video, shot by WTXF-TV, shows three police cars stopping a car on a city street on Monday, two days after a city officer responding to a bank robbery was fatally shot.

The tape shows about a dozen officers gathering around the vehicle and pulling three men out. About a half-dozen officers hold two of the men on the ground. Both are kicked repeatedly, while one is seen being punched; one also appears to be struck with a baton.

The third man is also kicked and ends up on the ground.

“On the surface it certainly does not look good in terms of the amount of force that was used,” Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said. “But we don’t want to rush to judgment.”

Yea, cause you know there are so many ways that something like this can be interpreted:

Doug Mataconis
http://www.belowthebeltway.com

Help Reduce Child Abuse: Legalize Polygamy Now!

Religious Liberty, Reproductive Rights, Sex, Theory and Ideas

A great deal of attention is focused on the recent raids on the FLDS compound in Texas. The behavior of the state has rightly been condemned, most effectively by Les Jones who wrote:

Imagine that some parents in a school district were accused of child abuse. Now imagine that the authorities took every child from the elementary, junior high, and high school away from their parents and put them in foster care. That’s a rough analogy of what’s happening in Texas.

There is no question that that the people in charge of the FDLS abuse their members. The church leaders will evict dissidents, break up families, particualrly by ordering women to leave their husbands.

Why do church members allow the abuse to happen?

The interesting question in this matter is why do the members of the church tolerate the mistreatment? Why do fathers who presumably love their daughters permit them to be given to men as trophies? Why do mothers who love their sons permit them to be sent to slave away in coal mines at a young age? The members of the FLDS are human beings, with all the emotional attachment to their children that is inherent in humanity. Why are people making these horrible choices?

When people are stay in a hostile environment, it is generally for one of three reasons:

1) They are too lazy to leave/change.

2) They are afraid to leave, because leaving would be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

3) They are afraid to leave, because they will be forced to abandon something so precious that leaving is more unbearable than staying.

The Sources of Fear:

It is readily apparent that people are afraid to leave for both sets of reasons:

1) Children who leave find themselves cut off from family. Poorly educated, they lack the ability to support themselves and live a mean, impoverished lifestyle. They are literally ‘foreigners in their own country’.

2) The church owns most of the property. Thus a person who wishes to leave usually owns only the clothes on their back and little more. People are not paid; rather their salaries are held in common in a bank owned by the church leaders. They are not permitted to bank elsewhere or to withdraw their money without permission. Church leaders have been known to arbitrarily reduce the balances credited to dissidents.

3) The members of the church are afraid of the outside world. They fear that they face persecution by outsiders. they are terrified of law enforcement.

Predator Pressure and Feudalism:

But why is the church so powerful? Why can it make such demands of its members? The sad fact is, the people who are members of the church have little choice; their fears of persecution are well justified – Mormons have faced persecution throughout their history. Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob who was outraged by his advocacy of polygamy. In the mid 19th century, there were anti-Mormon pogroms. The Federal Government insisted that the Mormon leaders repudiate polygamy before permitting Utah to become a state. The raids in the 1950’s solidified hatred and distrust of the outside world. The fear of persecution exists because polygamists are persecuted in the U.S.

Furthermore, because of the persecution, devout church members faced a difficulty in finding business partners and naturally banded together and did business largely with other church members. This lack of trade allowed church leaders to gradually take over the community’s wealth. In effect the fear of persecution recreated feudalism. The church leaders became the noblemen, and the common church members became the peasants.

As the church gained a totalitarian control of their members’ economic activities, the church was able to isolate their members from being able to function in outside society. The church could exert a totalitarian control of how the young are educated. It could make or ruin men.

Furthermore, the members of the church are denied access to the court system; after all if a man is vulnerable to prison-time for bigamy he is hardly likely to sue the church for ripping him off.

Ending the Dark Ages

By criminalizing their deepest religious beliefs, the state in effect empowers church leaders to abuse the members of the church at will. If the malignant power or the church elders were an arch, the laws banning polygamy would be its keystone. Legalizing polygamy would doom the feudal system.

Parents who felt that telling a church elder to go to hell would not leave them poor would be far less likely to permit their children to be sexually abused or kicked out of their community. Church elders who were aware that their flock could leave at any time would have a great deal of incentive to treat their followers kindly rather than abusively.

There is nothing inherently evil in polygamy itself. Most people would not choose to be part of a polygamous marriage. Some though, for a variety of reasons, do. Absent the violence and fear that is caused by prohibition, there is no reason why their experiences should not match that of Janet Averett who writes:

I was raised in a polygamous home. My dad had two wives, and each wife had her own house and kids. As kids we wore blue jeans, listened to rock ‘n’ roll music and watched TV. We went to public school and many attended college. We fell in love and married whoever we wanted, at or above the legal age.

We now work and live all over the country. I am no longer in a polygamous group, and neither are most of my brothers and sisters.

The laws against polygamy are holdovers from a dark ages where homosexuality and interracial marriages were similarly outlawed. The proponents of outlawing homosexuality and interracial marriage could point to many problems associated with those practice when they were outlawed. However, upon close inspection, all of the violence, degradation, social harms, and psychological problems associated with these former illegal activities were in fact caused by their prohibition. The same is true of polygamy.

Legalization would go a long way to ending the culture of subjugation and child abuse that is alleged to exist within the FDLS community.

tarran
I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.
https://thelibertypapers.org/author/tarran/

From My Cold, Dead Lap

Crime and Punishment, Government Regulation, Individual Rights, The Nanny State

California trying to say pets can’t ride on driver’s lap:

A California lawmaker wants to ban motorists from holding pets on their laps while driving. Getting caught could net a $35 fine.

The bill passed the California Assembly on a 44-11 vote Monday and now heads to the Senate.

Assemblyman Bill Maze said his legislation has nothing to do with pet-loving celebrities who are photographed driving around Los Angeles with their small dogs.

Maze said he introduced the bill after seeing a woman driving with three dogs on her lap.

He said unrestrained pets are a distraction that put motorists and their passengers at risk.

My dog (the one whose Indian name is “cat who barks”) hates riding in the car. Can’t stand it. The only he’ll ride is if he can just jump on my lap, lay down and do nothing. He’s neither a distraction nor does he put me at risk.

As Radley Balko says, “If this were causing people to drive recklessly, you’d think it would be covered by laws against . . . reckless driving.”

This is just one more superfluous law created by a nanny-stater with too much time on his hands.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

Rational Voters?

Democracy, Economics, Look About, Politics, Theory and Ideas

Over at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux linked to his article discussing Bryan Caplan’s book, The Myth of the Rational Voter.

In the always-wonderful comments section, a commenter named Bret made this point:

So let me get this straight.

If I vote in a way that makes me feel fantastic and wonderful about myself and I really couldn’t care less if I’m poorer because of that vote, then that’s irrational? It would somehow be more rational to vote in a way that makes me feel miserable yet be a bit richer?

This sounds like rationalism run amuck to me.

What is missing here is that he’s not making a point about rationalism, he’s actually pointing out the flaw in democracy. Perhaps at the same time he’s pointing out a flaw in Caplan’s thesis, but when I read it I had to respond:

Bret,

You implicitly make a great point, but I think you’re drawing the wrong parallel here.

Rationalism could be defined as following the proper course of action to achieve your goals. The course of action which is most likely to achieve your goals is the most rational, the course of action least likely is the least rational.

So let’s say that the average voter’s stated reason for voting is to make things better. In that case, voting for a socialist policy is likely not to achieve his goals, despite the fact that he believes it will. In that case, his vote would be irrational.

In another case, let’s say the average voter’s true (revealed preference) goal is to feel good about himself and feel like he’s a part of the system. In that case, the vote which makes him FEEL best is the most rational, regardless of the outcome.

Note the difference. In the first case, the voter values outcome. In the second, the voter values feeling good. Your implied point is likely that most voters fall into the latter category, not the former.

And if anything, that’s an indication of the flaws inherent to democracy, not of irrationality. Because most voters care more about how they FEEL about their vote (despite professing to care about outcomes), democratic politics tends towards satisfying voters’ emotional needs, rather than realizing the most economically efficient outcomes.

I’ve posted previously that liberty is an end, democracy is a means, and I am only in favor of democracy in as much as it meets the end of liberty.

I think this is the flaw in Caplan’s thesis. He assumes that people are truly interested in using their vote to improve outcomes. I think most (like myself) have become so fatalistic about our inability to affect policy that we rarely believe our vote will change outcomes. Thus, we vote to make ourselves feel better, like we’re doing the right thing. If Caplan assumes that we rationally desire to influence outcomes, of course many people vote irrationally— meaning the policies they vote for won’t achieve the outcome they desire. If Caplan changes his assumption, though, to the same assumption I make— they vote the way they’ll FEEL best about— the votes are no longer irrational. The votes may not achieve the outcome they profess to desire, but the votes do improve their personal happiness, which is likely the true goal.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

Cuba — Perhaps I Spoke Too Soon

Foreign Affairs, Individual Rights, The Surveillance State

About a month ago, I blasted an article by a tongue-in-cheek reporter who wanted to use Raul Castro’s easing of restrictions on cell phone ownership as an excuse to criticize cell phones (suggesting– implicitly– that oppression and no phones is better than freedom and phones).

I stand by that post, but I stepped over the line in another regard. I suggested that while I didn’t expect much of Raul Castro, that he should be applauded for easing some of these restrictions. Instead, I’ve now heard reports that he may be using this freedom as a honey pot to catch those with “illicit” monies:

A Cuban dissident I met in Havana last year sent me today an article he wrote about the real motive behind relaxing these bans. It has been reported in the state-controlled media that people purchasing these goods are later being investigated by the authorities who want to know the real sources of their income. As it’s widely known, the average Cuban salary is less than $20 a month, while the cost of most of these goods ranges in the hundreds of dollars. Many Cubans get their extra money from relatives in the United States, but many others run independent (and illicit) small businesses.

My friend tells the story of the first person to purchase an electric bicycle, which cost the equivalent of $1,070. This man had a small butter factory that apparently was very profitable, since he was selling the butter at a lower price than the government. After buying his electric bicycle, the authorities investigated him and discovered his factory. They proceeded to confiscate everything they found in his home, including the bike.

It’s still possible that these reforms may be a bit too addictive for the Cuban people, and actually may help them to break the stranglehold that the regime has on the island. In particular, personal computers and cell phones open doors of communication that will not be easily shut.

But I must apologize. I too quickly defended Raul Castro, assuming that perhaps he was doing this merely as a PR move to soften the image of his regime to the world. I didn’t catch the implications above. It appears that very little has changed down there.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/
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