Tag Archives: freedom

Big Brother Behavior Mod

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You’ve seen in some of the news media reports on a new Federal government team designed to facilitate the government’s ability to persuade us to do various things it thinks appropriate for us.  The team being formed to spearhead this effort is colloquially called a “Nudge Team” because it’s ostensibly intended only to suggest to us better, more efficient ways to achieve goals.

As you might expect, I have some thoughts on this.

The formative document is called, interestingly enough, “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights,” and it has this illuminating statement in the opening paragraph:

In 2010, UK Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which through a process of rapid, iterative experimentation (“Test, Learn, Adapt”), has successfully identified and tested interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government….

Notice that: advance government priorities, not those of a Sovereign citizen.  The next paragraph fleshes this out:

The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help…scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials.

The government intends to engage in “behavioral interventions” to “persuade” us to their (more efficiently achieved) goals.

But wait—isn’t that just ordinary advertising, something every business man, from a one-man home office business to the GEs and Bank of Americas, does to get us to buy their products?

Investor’s Business Daily talks about the government not having a clear idea of what is “good for us” (never minding the primacy of the government’s goals for us), that the government can’t be trusted to stop at any particular point—the slippery slope concern—and the (subtle at first) loss of our individual liberties as the government gets this sort of program rolling along.

IBD is right on all counts, but it’s that last that’s most important of the three.  And that leads me to my concerns.

There’s nothing wrong with advertising when businesses or individuals do this.  It is, after all, limited to more or less friendly persuasion.  We’re also free to walk away from it at any time, whether by changing the channel, hitting the mute button, turning the page in our magazine or newspaper, or closing the door on the salesman.

Not so much when it’s the government doing the “advertising.”  Government has too many ways to suggest that we heed its blandishments, from the way it “guides” potential contractors in its project notices, or “encourages” folks to get onto its food stamp program, all the way up to, and including, enemies lists and open assaults by Federal agencies on organizations that disagree with the government.

Along with that is a concept that’s being lost in modern America (and which loss facilitates government dominance of our activities): not everything done in the private sector is appropriate for the government to do also.  More strongly than that, most things done in the private sector are wholly inappropriate for government to do.  When the government does engage in what is for the private sector, freedom is put in peril.

One source of the risk is that government tends, in the end, not to do alongside private individuals or enterprises the things that we do, but to do those things instead.  This isn’t because government can do these things more efficiently.  Rather, it’s because government can do them more cheaply than the private sector: government can—must—do this with OPM, with taxpayer money.  From the beginnings of this crowding out, government winds up saying to us, “No need for you to do these things; we’ve got this.”  From there it’s a short step to, “Butt out.  This is government business.”  It’s a (subtle, but the more insidious for that) threat to our liberty.

Nudge team “persuasion” is on that latter list; it’s wholly inappropriate for our government to involve itself in such a thing.  Especially given the avowed behavior modification aspect of it.

The government’s central…Nudge Team…document can be seen here and here.

Another Reason to Shoot Down Drones

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Deer Trail, CO, is looking at passing an ordinance allowing its residents to shoot down drones.  It seems those good folks have a proper disdain for government fishing expeditions masquerading as “surveillance.”

But it’s not just the government that’s intruding objectionably.

When Tina Turner got married at her estate in Switzerland over the weekend, she wanted to keep paparazzi away.  But photographers used drones and other aircraft to get the exclusives they [wanted].

And [emphasis added]

Drones are gradually becoming established in Germany as a tool of photographers and television crews….  Drones are cheaper and quieter than helicopters and can be navigated unnoticed over gardens or in front of windows.

And

“They can be very helpful—it works well in the US,” says Heiko Schoenborn of the photo agency WENN.

Maybe Deer Trail should expand its target list.

Corporations and Religion

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On Friday, the Philadelphia-based US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that “for-profit, secular corporations cannot engage in religious exercise….”

The case centered on a complaint concerning the HHS/Obamacare contraceptives mandate brought by Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp,

a manufacturer of wood cabinets based in East Earl, PA, and its owners…Mennonite Christians [who] say the requirement violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which guards against laws that substantially burden that right.

The majority held that

while there is a history of the courts protecting the rights of for-profit companies to engage in speech, the same can’t be said for religious rights.

“Even if we were to disregard the lack of historical recognition of the right, we simply cannot understand how a for-profit, secular corporation—apart from its owners—can exercise religion[.]”

Judge Kent A Jordan dissented, noting that Supreme Court decisions, in fact, have recognized corporations’ right of free exercise of religion.  Further,

The government takes us down a rabbit hole where religious rights are determined by the tax code, with non-profit corporations able to express religious sentiments while for-profit corporations and their owners are told that business is business and faith is irrelevant.
…
It is the profitmaking character of the corporation, not the corporate form itself, that the Majority treats as decisively disqualifying Conestoga from seeking the protections of the First Amendment or RFRA.  That argument treats the line between profit-motivated and non-profit entities as much brighter than it actually is, since for-profit corporations pursue non-profit goals on a regular basis.
…
[I]t said that…any harm to the Hahns’ religious liberty is “too attenuated to be substantial” because it is Conestoga, not they, that must face the Mandate.

Charles Proctor, who was among those representing Conestoga, asked an important question:

How do you parse separate those three sentences in the First Amendment?  They are only separated by a semicolon. In my opinion, you can’t.

The answer is plain: in fact, they aren’t three sentences; they’re one sentence, and the clauses are “not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon[.]”

Moreover, too many on the Third Circuit plainly do not understand the concepts of ownership or property.  Companies are nothing more than agents of their owners.  Religious rights—and free speech rights and any other rights—denied men’s agents are rights denied the agents’ owners by constricting those owners’ capacity to act through their agents.

It’s also clear, on a point not raised in the WSJ Law Blog article, that the contraceptive mandate also violates the Establishment Clause by placing the government’s determination of appropriate religious behavior above the agent company’s—or individual’s.

The full appellate opinion can be seen here.

2nd Amendment Denial, Personal Type

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Following a request from the FBI, the Sanford Police Department reported Thursday that it has halted its plan to return George Zimmerman’s gun and other pieces of evidence used at his murder trial.

Never mind that Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges, and so the State of Florida has no grounds for refusing to return to him his property and no grounds for withholding from him his concealed carry permit.

Never mind that the same FBI that asked the SPD to retain Zimmerman’s property has already completed an extensive investigation into Zimmerman’s racial bias as part of a general investigation into the man prior to his arrest and trial, finding no hint of racial bias.

Zimmerman is to be denied his property, “pending…DOJ investigation.”

And so the persecution continues.  Within a broader theme to facilitate the Progressives’ attack on the 2nd Amendment.

They Don’t Get It, Local Edition

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In an article about police’s increasingly routine use of automatic scanners,

which can be affixed to police cars, bridges, or building to amass millions of digital records on the location and movement of vehicles…includ[ing] such details as location and license plate numbers[,]

comes this little tidbit.

The Mesquite Police Department, in Texas, has vehicle records stretching back to 2008, though the city plans to begin deleting files older than two years.

“There’s no expectation of privacy” for a vehicle driving on a public road or parked in a public place, said Lt Bill Hedgpeth, a police spokesman.  It’s just a vehicle.  It’s just a license plate.”

There’s also no expectation that police—our employees—will surveill us constantly, building a permanent database (some might say, a dossier) on us while on an idle fishing expedition, for future prurient curiosity.  There’s no expectation that government—our employee—will track our movements, and thereby track our meetups, and with whom, just because it feels like it.