Tag Archives: freedom

Home Buying Down Payment Requirements

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The PRC is reducing the size of down payment it requires for a Chinese citizen to buy a home from 25% to 20% of the purchase price. For those who already own a home and haven’t yet fully repaid that mortgage, the mandatory down payment on the purchase of a second home is being reduced to 30% from 40%. This is that government’s attempt to stimulate a slowing economy by inducing more consumption and thereby growing jobs. Supposedly.

The moves, though, raise the question: why is the PRC government mandating this sort of thing at all?

Oh, wait….

More Disingenuousness in Government

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Mens rea is a criminal law concept that says in order to commit a crime, a man must have intended to commit the crime; he must have had a “guilty mind.” Lack of this guilty mind doesn’t mean the man didn’t do anything wrong; he may well have, and a trial and a jury can make that determination—it would be civil wrong, for which he still would be held accountable on that jury deliberation. He just didn’t commit a crime.

In addition to the current move in the Senate to reform sentencing and jail terms, some Senators want to clarify the specifics of mens rea in criminal law.

The House Judiciary Committee last year passed a bill on mens rea…reform that would create a default standard for criminal intent in instances when no standard exists. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte would like to see it pass along with sentencing reform.

However.

Both Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) and President Barack Obama (D) disagree with mens rea reform and for largely the same reasons, and they’re moving to block this reform.

Grassley is blocking it because

…strengthening the requirements for criminal intent would make it harder to convict corporations than under the current amorphous state of the law.

Obama wants to block it because

…a default standard of criminal intent would make it harder to prosecute companies for regulatory violations.

This is a cynical reading of Government’s role in trials. The purpose of bringing charges and having trials isn’t so prosecutors can get convictions and look good in the shower or otherwise have something to show for their taxpayer-funded paychecks. The purpose of standards of guilt or innocence in criminal law—or civil law, to stretch for a time the definitions of guilt and innocence—is not to stack the deck against the defendant.

The purpose of these things is to provide justice for the people wronged and for the people accused.

Full stop.

A Thought on Gun Rights

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The city of Lowell, MA, and its police chief have one. It’s dead wrong, too. The city’s new law, pushed by its Police Superintendent, William Taylor,

requires residents applying for a license to carry handguns to write “an essay” and pay upwards of $1,100 for training.

Aside from the outlandish cost being just another means of denying licenses to American citizens (training required in Texas, for instance, costs around $300), there’s this, from police department spokesman, Captain Timothy Crowley:

If you want a license to carry a firearm unrestricted wherever you want and whenever you want, the superintendent is just looking for some documentation as to why. That is not unreasonable to most people.

Yes, it is unreasonable to most people. It’s also wholly and cynically unconstitutional. Here’s what the 2nd Amendment says on the matter:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Notice that. There’s nothing in there that says, “Shall not be infringed unless Government disapproves the man’s reason.” There’s nothing in there that even grants Government a right to ask, much less to know, a citizen’s reason to keep and bear his Arms. Just for clarity’s sake, too, the Supreme Court has ruled that this is entirely an individual right, and not a collective one.

No. The only legitimate way to require licenses to keep and bear is, after training, on a will issue basis.

Full stop.

Arrogance of the PRC

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Tsai Ing-wen, of the staunchly pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, resoundingly won election to be President of the Republic of China. The People’s Republic of China was not happy; the PRC has long wanted to get the island nation back under the mainland’s thumb.

In keeping with that, Li Zhenguang of the PRC’s Beijing Union University’s Institute of Taiwan Studies is insisting that

Beijing would be in no rush to engage with Ms Tsai. Rather…”It’s up to Tsai Ing-wen to decide whether she needs to initiate dialogue with the mainland. It’s up to her to find a formulation on cross-Strait ties that’s acceptable to the mainland.”

PRC arrogance has led them to get this backwards. It’s up to Xi Jinping, PRC President, to decide whether he wants honest relations with the RoC. It’s up to Xi to develop a cross-Strait policy that works for the RoC.

A State Appellate Court Error

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The Maryland Court of Special Appeals has postponed the trial of a police officer charged with second-degree murder in the death of Freddie Gray last April.

That officer was Caesar Goodson, the second officer to go on trial. The putative reason for the delay is the hung jury on the first trial, of William Porter. The Baltimore prosecutor has said that Porter’s testimony at Goodson’s trial (and at the trials of a number of the other officers charged in Freddie Gray’s death) is central to their case. With Porter still under trial, and with a Federal case against Porter still possible, his testimony could be incriminating, and the appellate court wants to fully adjudicate the legitimacy of the prosecution’s forcing Porter to testify.

So, for the sake of government convenience, another defendant’s trial is delayed, that defendant’s 6th Amendment right to a “speedy…trial” is annulled.

Of course, the prosecutor is prepared to proceed with the trial, pretty much by definition, else she would not have charged the defendant. That she finds it difficult to proceed without Porter is irrelevant. There’s nothing in that 6th Amendment that says “speedy…trial, except when the government demurs.”

This delay is wrong.