It’s For The Children!

Why is it that when busy-bodies want to control you, they always claim they are doing it “for the children?” Well, that’s just a silly question. Obviously, it’s because this is quite possibly the most powerful argument in history. Every bureaucratic scold holds it in reverence because he knows that nothing can resist it. All other forms of human persuasion — logic, reason, facts — are powerless against it. Every bureaucrat knows that if you want to get the support of the people, then you only have to find a way to make your issue “for the children” and you prevail. After all, you don’t hate children, do you?

Many have fallen before the power of this argument. The great unwashed tremble in fear of their bureaucrats, least they evoke the power of this dreaded argument. And now, the powers that be have unleashed their Kraken on Lewis Greenberg, a St. Louis artist who created a sculpture park in commemoration of the Holocaust out of his front yard. Greenberg has been sentenced to 20 days in jail for his landscaping decisions.

But what about property rights, asks the novice? Does Greenberg not own his property? Assuming he has not signed a private agreement — perhaps as part of a private neighborhood homeowners association — that such a thing as a front yard sculpture park can’t be erected, isn’t a property owner allowed to do with his property as he pleases? And if not, can you really say that he owns it? In the conspicuous absence of other supporting arguments, city officials went right for the big guns on this one, saying they “only want Greenberg to make his yard safe in a neighborhood full of young children.” Think of the children!

What about freedom of expression? Don’t citizens have a First Amendment right of free speech? Isn’t art a form of speech, and therefore protected under the constitution? Silly neophyte! Didn’t you know that you lose your First Amendment rights the moment there is even the possibility that someone could be offended? Some people don’t consider Greenberg’s Holocaust commemoration ”art.” To them it is an “eyesore” that “is lowering their property values.” On top of that, there are pointy sticks that could potentially impale some poor innocent child who engaged in trespassing on private property. Do you want children to be impaled?

In what appears to be a feud that goes beyond one man’s interpretation of the Holocaust, neighbors of Greenberg have tried everything to get him to remove the structures. When talking to Greenberg didn’t work, neighbors started calling the police on him. When the police department said that “the role of the city is to establish minimum standards, not to interpret individual expressions,” neighbors petitioned for a social worker “to determine whether he was fit to continue to live alone” in an attempt to get him committed. When the social worker declared Greenberg “mentally competent,” they pulled out the argument of last resort. If not for us, do it for the children!

Perhaps twenty days in prison is a small price to pay for the terrible danger Greenberg has unleashed on the children of this world. The rest of us should be happy that there are kind bureaucrats who care so deeply for the children that they are willing to set aside property rights and First Amendment rights and put someone away for the crime of erecting sculpture on private property. As obedient citizens, we can only hope that when we grow old ourselves and proceed to make questionable landscaping decisions there will be such a benevolent neighborhood association with the backing of law enforcement ready to put us in jail or a mental institution, whichever is politically more expedient. We can rejoice that we finally have the power to jail our neighbors who indulge in gaudy concrete gnomes and plastic lawn animals. We can sympathize with the city prosecutor who lamented that, “there is only so much we can do. We can’t take a bulldozer to the property.” But it’s possible that even he underestimates the sheer awesomeness of “for the children.” Even bulldozing the property is not beyond the power of this argument. He’s just not trying hard enough. Does he hate children?

Published May 20, 2010 – 3:17 pm Categories: Features | Post a comment

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Psychic Cops

Minority Report Precog Unit

A SWAT team goes Minority Report. Apparently they forgot that you need a pool of psychics for that to work.

Published May 20, 2010 – 10:09 am Categories: Quips | Post a comment

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The Right Dictator

Allen articulates the Right Man Fallacy.

“It would be good if [Obama] could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”

But can you be sure that he would ever relinquish it?

Published May 19, 2010 – 5:56 pm Categories: Quips | Post a comment

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Quit Your Job, We’ll Take Care Of You

And so was born a nation of “creative types.”

Published May 19, 2010 – 11:40 am Categories: Quips | Post a comment

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The Lost Tribe of Congress

Pretty much everyone not hopelessly lost in fantasy land admits that the government-run mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were at the heart of the housing bubble that set off the current financial crisis. Even Timothy Geithner, during Senate testimony, admited that, “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.” But then he went on to claim that regulators simply didn’t have enough time to devote to the problem (oh well, maybe next time).

But last week they did have the time. On Tuesday, congress voted on a bill that would end the Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) status of both institutions, removing the central line of taxpayer money that currently sustains them. But in a telling vote that was split very neatly along party lines, Democrats blocked it. Future bailouts now seem likely to continue without end, and will add to the current $145 billion that the US Treasury has already thrown into the black hole of Fannie and Freddie so far.

So why, when bailouts are so unpopular, did congress cast a baffling vote to prevent any meaningful reform for the worst offenders of all, an action that will undoubtedly lead to future huge bailouts?

Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal provided perhaps the best analysis so far of why such a baffling vote is actually imminently understandable:

We’re sitting here trying to struggle to figure out how this could be. The way I think you can best understand it is by looking at the Democrats as kind of like a lost tribe in Star Trek. If they voted against this stuff, they’d be cutting off their oxygen supply. Housing is like an alternative economy for the Democrats. You’ve got construction unions, you’ve got developers, you’ve got local housing authorities. This is something they control. This is a source of patronage, it’s a source of contributions. And they simply are not going to kill it. They’d be killing themselves.

Published May 17, 2010 – 11:47 am Categories: Features | Post a comment

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Privatize Space

It seems that the meaning of national identity has changed over time. It used to be that when people said we did something as a nation, they meant Americans did it. It didn’t matter whether they did it for themselves with their own means or whether they had some official title. What mattered was that they were Americans. Now it seems that people rely on their government programs to create a national identity for them. For instance, today when people say we went to the moon, they mean NASA, a government run program funded by Americans took certain other Americans serving in some official capacity to the moon. The difference between these two meanings is vast.

To this day, we Americans claim the Wright brothers’ accomplishments as American accomplishments, and rightly so. After all, they operated in a uniquely American environment that didn’t prevent people from trying something crazy like flying, if they wanted to spend their time that way. Yet they were totally self-funded, and were actually competing against a rival who was well funded by congress, Samuel Pierpont Langley (who no one remembers because his congressionally funded contraptions never flew). Is the accomplishment of the Wright brothers any less American because they lacked similar congressional funding? According to today’s interpretation of national identity, instead of claiming the success of the Wright brothers,  Americans should claim the failures of Langley.

Today, many Americans complain that NASA is being gutted. The shuttle is being decommissioned with no viable replacement, since plans for the Constellation have been scrapped. The most common objection is that we will lose our supremacy in space. Even people who otherwise support radical spending cuts morn putting NASA under the chopping block. But congress should be doing everything it can to cut wasteful spending, and NASA is not immune to waste. Indeed, as Richard Feynman pointed out, the Challenger disaster, which set NASA back by ten years, was largely due to the bureaucratization of NASA. There is every reason to believe that private industry can do a better job. For one, if a private company displayed the same incompetence that lead to the Challenger disaster, they would probably not be in existence today.

But as NASA is scaled back (rightfully), so too should the regulatory burden that is hindering private space exploration be scaled back. For instance, it took 11 years, according to Peter Diamandis, to get permission from the FAA to launch a company that would make a private sector zero gravity experience available to the public. And when Diamandis launched the original X prize, he had to go to the FAA and explain to them that current regulations prevented competitors for the prize from flying their vehicles in America. Unless the laws were changed, the accomplishments of the X prize would in no way be American accomplishments. In fact, Dr. Diamandis goes on to explain that if the current regulatory regime had been in place at the beginning of the aviation industry, we would not have an aviation industry.

The truth is that private space exploration is held back more by bureaucracy than by technology. The only thing keeping the private industry out of space is an astronomical regulatory burden. But when these hurdles are overcome and private industry in America eventually goes to the Moon and then to Mars, it will be no less an American feat, just because the government didn’t fund it. Risk aversion and budget cuts may ensure that the future of space does not lie with NASA. But the he real danger is that if the bureaucracy remains stubbornly resistant to being dismantled, we can be sure that the future of space will not belong to Americans, either.

Published May 16, 2010 – 10:42 am Categories: Features | Post a comment

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How “Serve And Protect” Becomes “Harass And Collect”

What happens when you have to go through a bureaucracy any time you want to accomplish anything? In Russia, all activity is so heavily regulated that the only way to get anything done is to bribe someone. A Levada Center poll of 1,600 Russians said they believed that “bribes are given by everyone who comes across officials” in Russia. Bribes are necessary to obtain better medical services, “buy” drivers licenses, pay off traffic cops, get your kids in the right school, dodge the draft or bury a loved one. Yeah, pretty much everything.

In America, we like to think that this type of thing doesn’t happen. It is true that Transparency International gives the US a Corruption Perceptions Index score of 7.5 (0-10, 0 being most corrupt). While not the best, it’s not as bad as Russia’s score of 2.2. But it seems obvious that the more we give anonymous bureaucrats power over every aspect of life, the more of a danger corruption becomes. Add to that the fact that we are now in a recession and temptations are high to ask for a little grease for the gears.

A troubling sign of this is that because of a recession induced reduction in revenue, rather than cut wasteful programs, many cities are making ends meet by giving out more fines and citations. While not technically bribes, the distinction is starting to get fuzzy. Do people just speed more during a recession? Obviously not. In fact, in many parts of the country, speed limits are actually intentionally set too low in an obvious attempt to generate more revenue. Also, the primary objection behind red light cameras is that cities intentionally shorten the timespan of the yellow light so that more motorists are ticketable (damn the safety consequences). So I suppose that the difference is that instead of individual bureaucrats hitting you up for a little grease, you have the entire government, backed by a system of police, courts, laws and (least we forget) paperwork asking you for just a little bit extra in taxes that no one voted for. Whether you call it a bribe, a tax, a fine or a ticket, it essentially amounts to the same thing in the end — your money in the hands of bureaucrats.

Published May 15, 2010 – 8:09 pm Categories: Features | Post a comment

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Immigrants: America’s Favorite Scapegoat

Americans are increasingly using immigrants as the root cause of all their problems. Being the universal scapegoat is hard work, and perhaps we should pay them for the service. After all, it allows us to completely ignore our real problems while pretending like we are actually doing something to solve them.

It is at least somewhat understandable that a misunderstanding of the economic benefits of immigration can lead people to believe that immigrants are economically harming our country (an argument dealt with here). It’s a false claim, but at least it has some superficial plausibility. Blaming them for crime and violence, however, is just insulting as well as being wrong. It’s completely understandable that immigrants would be upset about this.

But no less than the governor of Arizona had a TV commercial made that puts the blame squarely in the lap of our hard working immigrant population.

Arizona’s new law is partially a reaction to the tragic killing of a rancher by an alleged illegal immigrant. But is the alleged fact that the killer was an immigrant (legal or illegal) relevant here? After all, you don’t need new laws to make killing illegal. Are such occurrences a sign of an immigrant crime wave sweeping the state? In point of fact, violent crime has actually gone down over the last decade. As  has pointed out in his article How Immigration Crackdowns Backfire:

Over the last decade, the violent crime rate [in Arizona] has dropped by 19 percent, while property crime is down by 20 percent. Crime has also declined in the rest of the country, but not as fast as in Arizona.

Again, immigrants primarily come here to work, and the vast majority of them wish to stay out of trouble for fear of being deported. This is true for legal immigrants, but it is especially true for illegal immigrants. They want to do everything possible to not attract attention to themselves. (It’s worth mentioning here that Milton Friedman considered it even more beneficial for the American economy if the immigration was illegal.)

So if not immigration, what is responsible for the crime that Governor Brewer is referencing in her ad? If you watch it, you may notice that all of it has to do with drug trafficking. It is true that Mexico and many other Latin American countries have a drug problem. It is also true that this problem is currently spilling over our southern border. But it is not true that immigration is to blame. For that, you would have to look at our long fought War on Drugs, which has been escalating ever since Nixon declared it a “war” four decades ago. Today, it can be described only as an utter failure. It is not just that it has failed, for a long time it has been obvious that it is a war that can never succeed. And yet we keep fighting it. Why? As O’Grady points out,

The drug-warrior industry, which includes both the private-sector and a massive government bureaucracy devoted to “enforcement,” has an enormous economic incentive to keep the war raging.

But for all the supply side assaults, demand is what keeps the drug suppliers in business, and America has plenty of demand which will not be eliminated any time soon (read “never”). As O’Grady makes clear, “strong demand and the high profits that are the result of prohibition make illegal trafficking unstoppable.” But attacking demand comes with it’s own problems, not the least of which include SWAT team raids of Americans for misdemeanor drug possession, often by mistake. These days, even small towns in America have their own SWAT teams, often conducting anywhere between one and five raids per day. If, for whatever reason, a SWAT team does storm your house in the middle of the night with a “no-knock” warrant and you do the rational thing and take measures to defend yourself and your family, who do you think is going to get prosecuted, if you even survive the attack? In one case, the local police department gave their SWAT team an award for bravery after a botched raid on the house of an innocent family. As one commentator noted,

Do we really want to live in a country where when someone busts into your house at night you’re supposed to assume they might be cops?”

Increasingly, this is not the America of the future, it is the America of the present. So why dedicate entire departments of government to fighting a hopeless war which only enriches criminals by pushing up profit potential, then turn around and blame the entire mess on “immigration?” It is pure avoidance of the true problem, and it is a problem that severely impacts the civil liberties of Americans, as well as vilifying a hard working and diverse group of people. The fact that there are vanishingly few people in America today who do not have immigrant ancestry makes the insult all the more bewildering.

Al Capone would not have been possible without America’s noble experiment. The violence and crime that is erupting on our borders is a direct result of our failed drug war and has little to do with immigration. Our continued denial of this only enables the existence of a hundred Capone’s, while the actions of our government only serve to make their products more profitable, to the extent that drug farmers in America cringe at the thought of legalization, let alone the cartels south of the border, which would essentially be put out of business overnight. New laws making people carry ID cards will do nothing to solve the problem. A “papers please” regime sets a bad precedent for our country, infringing on the civil liberties of Americans. There is little reason to believe that such laws won’t be abused. It’s time to stop blaming the innocent and realize that this is a problem largely of our own making.

Published May 8, 2010 – 3:12 pm Categories: Features | Post a comment

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Ellen Realizes It Was a Bribe — Too Late

Apple decided that celebrities would probably be better spokespersons for their new creation than tech reviewers, so they sent a lot of them, including Ellen and her partner, free pre-market iPads, while many reviewers were finding review models hard to come by. Apple apparently understood that this was actually a down payment for good publicity. Clearly, bribing celebrities with products is cheaper than paying them as spokespersons, but you do lose some control of the message. They are supposed to say nice things! Not like those pesky reviewers, who might actually do their jobs by criticizing Apple products. Ellen is just figuring this out now. Ellen to Apple, “I’m so sorry! I love you! Please keep sending me free pre-market swag!!!” To avoid such misunderstandings next time, have her sign a contract as a spokesperson and get the desired behavior in writing.

Published May 7, 2010 – 12:46 pm Categories: Features | Post a comment

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Prohibition: At What Cost?

Michael Vick‘s got nothing on your friendly neighborhood SWAT team. You may have heard about the Missouri family who in February suffered a SWAT team raid that ended in a charge of child endangerment, not against the SWAT team, but against Jonathan E. Whitworth for the possession of a “small amount” of marijuana (never mind that police murdered his dog in front of his kids). Here’s the (highly disturbing) video. What you may not know is that there are 100-150 of these raids in America every day, “the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.” When a similar raid happened to Cheye Calvo, a DC-area small-town mayor, he started giving talks around the country about such SWAT team civil liberties abuses. He lost two dogs during the incident. For unexplained reasons, the SWAT team that stormed Whitworth’s house decided killing one dog was enough. They let his other dog alone. It might just be time to start asking what cost we are willing to bear to enforce our modern prohibition. Is the cure not worse than the disease?

Not all SWAT raids are drug related. In Maryland, a SWAT team raided three houses looking for someone who stole some stuff out of a police cruiser. While it isn’t clear whether they found the thief in the process, they did manage to break into the home of a perfectly innocent family, hit the husband in the face with a shield and shoot the family dog.

Published May 5, 2010 – 12:36 pm Categories: Features | Post a comment

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