Category Archives: rights

Freedom and Culture

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From Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal:

The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that the new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.

Now where might we be seeing that today?

Big Brother Alive and Well?

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The House Judiciary Subcommittee held a meeting a week ago Tuesday on potential new provisions of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, and the outcome was very disquieting.  Richard Littlehale, of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, made this recommendation, and he was serious:

Billions of texts are sent every day, and some surely contain key evidence about criminal activity.  Text messaging often plays a big role in investigations related to domestic violence, stalking, menacing, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking.

The subcommittee wound up suggesting longer retention times of interpersonal electronic messages as well as the creation of expedited federal access to these databases.

That’s the ticket: we need to start prying into everyone’s personal business because someone, somewhere, might be thinking about committing a crime.  Our 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments need to by federally regulated.  Sure.  That’s the story, and they’re sticking to it.

Already, many of the message transporters and facility providers retain copies of our electronic correspondence for inordinately long times: Verizon, for instance as recently as 2010, kept customer text messages on file for three to five days, while Virgin Mobile stored them for 90 days.

Other providers haven’t been so cavalier with our private correspondence.  AT&T (then Cingular Wireless in the text-messaging arena), Sprint, and Nextel didn’t hang onto any of it for any length of time.

Of course, that means these…persons…in the House need to standardize message handling.  All for the convenience of government.  Littlehale talked about this, too.

We’re at the mercy of the service providers to determine how long it’s going take them to comply with that request [for the customer’s messages].  I would suggest whatever the level of standard of proof, the thing that really matters most to us at state and local law enforcement is prompt response.

Well, I would suggest that this is a textbook example of why none of the providers should retain this information at all, for any length of time.

And this from Republicans and Conservatives.

The Aftermath Begins

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Spiegel Online International is describing it, albeit with some misconceptions.

Not even savings accounts are safe, as was recently seen in Cyprus. Such deposits are actually guaranteed to up to €100,000, but the euro rescuers cared little about this as they desperately searched for funds.  Cypriot small savers may have escaped this time around, but the realization remains, even beyond Cyprus, that a state teetering on the edge of bankruptcy will resort to all available means to raise money—and a guarantee is only worth something as long as the entity that stands behind it remains solvent.

Nothing is safe from being seized by the state, no savings account, but also no house or apartment.  …  Governments have even banned the possession of gold during currency crises, forcing citizens to exchange the precious metal for the national currency.

That’s the nub of the aftermath.  No one’s private property is safe from an overweening government.

Those paragraphs, though, carries SOI‘s first misconception: the original demand to expropriate private savings came from the Euro Group, not Cyprus.  Cyprus’ Parliament rejected it at the start.  However, Cyprus’ government, including its Parliament, is complicit in the present theft—it could have rejected that attempt, too.

Then there’s this:

Greece and Cyprus have millionaires and billionaires of whom many profited from the artificial boom fueled by low interest rates after the introduction of the euro—a boom that subsequently went bust.  Why shouldn’t they help finance efforts to deal with the aftermath?  Is it fairer to place the burden on the euro bailout fund, and thus distribute it among the taxpayers of other countries?

Why shouldn’t they?  The question is a demonstration of the lack of understanding.  Why should folks who played by the rules placed before them, and with no other responsibility for the companies, have to pay for the failures of the companies, at least as part of the first resort?  Why should not the companies’ investors and creditors be the only ones to suffer the consequences of the failure of their investments and loans—or at least be wiped out entirely  before depositors—those not responsible at all—suffer any loss?

Is it fairer to place the burden on the euro bailout fund?  To ask this is to demonstrate, again, a lack of understanding.  The euro bailout fund should not exist at all.  The taxpayers of other countries should not even be under consideration of paying for the failure of one country.

Finally, this:

A levy on assets would immediately reduce the debts of crisis-stricken countries, whereas bailout packages pool risks and shift them to the future.

Those risks can become dangerously explosive.  The more countries that have to be bailed out, the fewer countries remain that have to bear the burden—as long as they are able to.  This could even prove to be too much for Germany at some point.

The second answers the first, but only partially.  A levy on assets does not cure the reason the crisis-level debts exist in the first place, but it does destroy property rights.  Neither does any bailout address the underlying causes.  Levy or bailout, they merely perpetuate the situation—as we’re seeing in the euro zone and in the US.

This is Backwards

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Here’s another case of government’s men who should know better, not knowing.

From the New Jersey Law Journal comes a description of a court considering the (mis)use of one law to feed the impact of another.  Sorry about the paywall; here’s a summary [emphasis added].

COURT TO DECIDE IF SEAT BELT LAPSE CAN SUPPORT A CRIMINAL CONVICTION The New Jersey Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether violation of the 1984 law that made seat belt wearing mandatory can support a criminal conviction under another statute.  To be reviewed is an appeals court holding that not wearing a seat belt can be a predicate offense for N.J.S.A. 2C:40-18, which criminalizes “knowingly violat[ing] a law intended to protect the public health and safety” through reckless conduct that injures another.  In State v. Lenihan, A-4667-10, the Appellate Division found the statute’s language gives no indication the Legislature would object to how it is being applied in this case, where the unbelted driver’s passenger was killed.

Leaving aside the question of how far a court—or any other government branch—should reach in order to criminalize an activity, giving no indication of objection is not the same as positively approving.

The principle embedded in our Federal Constitution in the 9th and 10th Amendments is this: negatively, enumeration in the Constitution does not limit or deny the not-enumerated to the people, and positively, powers not delegated to the United States are, in their remaining infinite entirety, left wholly to the States and to the people.  Moreover, these Amendments are to a Constitution that was written by We the People—an acknowledgment of the sovereignty of the members of our social compact over the government we members, we citizens, hire to administer and to protect our rights.

If that principle is valid, though, it’s valid everywhere.  The citizens of each State of these United States are sovereign over each of their State governments, also.  Hence, here, too, positive action must be taken to proscribe a thing.  Absent active proscription, that thing must remain within the province of the individual, either acting alone or in concert with (some of) his fellows, to do or not do.

Thus, unless the New Jersey (or any other State) legislature definitively states, in the present case for instance, that not using a seat belt criminalizes other behavior under other law, it cannot be so used by a court.

Bias

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The lesson in a Florida Atlantic University class involved the professor instructing his students to write Jesus’ name on a piece of paper, put the paper on the floor, and then stomp on it.  A student refused to do the stomping,

I said to the professor, ‘With all due respect to your authority as a professor, I do not believe what you told us to do was appropriate.  ‘I believe it was unprofessional and I was deeply offended by what you told me to do.’

The student also went to the professor’s boss, who then suspended the student for refusing to comply with the professor’s instruction.

The lesson itself reasonable; here’s the lesson syllabus:

Have the students write the name JESUS in big letters on a piece of paper.  Ask the students to stand up and put the paper on the floor in front of them with the name facing up.  Ask the students to think about it for a moment.  After a brief period of silence instruct them to step on the paper.  Most will hesitate.  Ask why they can’t step on the paper.  Discuss the importance of symbols in culture.

The instructions in the syllabus are intended to build a feeling about the action in the student so the student can reflect on it—at no point did the syllabus expect the student actually to carry out any step of the lesson.

It’s clear from the description of the incident (and for this post, I’ll assume the description to be accurate) that FAU reacted wrongly in a number of ways: it overreacted to the student’s protest, and the reaction it had was in the wrong direction.  Suspension was both too much (no opprobrium of any sort was appropriate), and if the school were to react in any way, it needed to act on the professor’s handling of the lesson.

The other error that FAU made was that its reaction violated the clear intent of the syllabus—to make the students think about an action, not to force the student to do that act.

Paul Kengor, Executive Director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College in Grove City PA:

Gee, I wonder if the instructor would dare do this with the name of Mohammed[.]

Indeed.  And so there’s a third error by FAU: Mohammed, Buddha, Brahma, and so on, should have been subjects of this lesson, also.  The broad range of reactions to a suggestion to desecrate these deities would have added immensely to the lesson’s outcome.

In the end, FAU “apologized” for the lesson.  The university also said the lesson will never again be used.

We sincerely apologize for any offense this has caused.  Florida Atlantic University respects all religions and welcomes people of all faiths, backgrounds and beliefs.

Not “our offense.”  A cynically amorphous “any” offense.  And apparently not a word of apology to the student for the university’s treatment of him for his objection.