Category: crime and punishment

Minneapolis Burning

Minneapolis is up in smoke, after protests became rioting became looting became conflagrations became nightmare. At issue is the police killing of civilian George Floyd.

It was the biggest story in the news, this week, and you can see why. Watch the video of a white policeman with his knee on the neck of a black man, Mr. Floyd, as he pled for his life — as bystanders pled for his life.

It is harrowing.

Scott Adams notes that this became a race issue . . . in which everybody agrees that the police were in the wrong. The best kind of race issue?

Except it shouldn’t be merely a race issue. It should also be an issue of accountability. There are too many killings by police where the perpetrators face zero accountability.

Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, advocates a direct, practical approach for restoring police accountability: End what is known as “qualified immunity.”

That’s where police and other public officials are held to a lesser legal standard when it comes to court cases charging them with violating our rights. This is the reason, argues Schweikert, that “members of law enforcement routinely get away with horrific misconduct.”

There are several petitions currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that could lead to a legal reconsideration of the idea.* But without regard to any legal judgement, lawmakers in legislatures and citizens by petition can expressly repeal qualified immunity.

And should.

Without police accountability, what freedom is there?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “[Q]ualified immunity is a legal doctrine that was invented from whole cloth by the Supreme Court,” Schweikert explains, “in open defiance of Congress’s decision to provide people with a federal remedy for the ‘deprivation of any right[]’ at the hands of a state actor.”

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Photograph by mpeake

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Tags police brutality

crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Pocket Prohibition?

vape, backpack, authoritarianism, surveillance,

Should the FDA outlaw backpack pockets?

Trick question.

Oh, you said “no”?

Okay, not that tricky . . .

But a little tricky. The FDA doesn’t want to prohibit backpack pockets as such. Only backpack pockets that can hide vaping equipment, like an e-cigarette.

Such pockets could presumably also hold a pen, thermometer, stick of beef jerky, perhaps even a plastic straw or spindled dollar bill. The list of cacheable contraband is endless. But it’s the thoughtcrime that counts.

The FDA wants to deploy its power to regulate food and drugs to also bully makers of pockets and other things that facilitate peaceful actions of which FDA officials disapprove. For now the agency is sending stern letters to sellers of legal products.

Tomorrow it may send SWAT teams.

“The FDA is especially disturbed by some of these new products being marketed to children and teens by promoting the ease with which they can be used to conceal product use,” frets Mitch Zeller, king of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. (It’s not an emporium.)

Various products that could help a person vape furtively are on the FDA’s hit list. Many of these products never hurt a fly. Backpack pockets in particular are getting a bad rap. I’m a fan of backpack pockets and hope the production of every kind of backpack pocket will continue unabated.

So, regardless of any animus that certain functionaries may feel about the covert carrying of e-cigarettes, pencils, or swizzle sticks, let them leave backpack pockets alone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags authoritarianism, backpack, surveillance, vape

crime and punishment general freedom too much government

The Wisdom of Freedom

“Salon À la Mode owner Shelley Luther was sentenced to seven days in jail for criminal and civil contempt and a $7,000 fine,” the Dallas-Ft. Worth CBS affiliate reported Tuesday, “for defying Governor Greg Abbott’s stay-at-home rules.”

She dared to open her beauty salon . . . and tore up a county judge’s related and official-looking cease and desist order.

Another judge offered to spare her jail if she would confess that her “actions were selfish” and, the judge lectured, “putting your own interest ahead of those in the community in which you live.” Luther responded decisively: “Feeding my kids isn’t selfish.”

Calling for Luther’s “immediate release,” Attorney General Ken Paxton articulated smart policy: “The judge should not put people in jail like her who are just trying to make a living.”

That should be written in law — sans the “like her” part.

The agile Governor Abbott, the rule’s originator, ducked responsibility with “surely there are less restrictive means to achieving [public safety] than jailing a Texas mother.”

Then, governor, why the command?

“I am modifying my executive orders,” Abbott declared yesterday, “to ensure confinement is not a punishment for violating an order.”

The Lieutenant Governor paid her fine.

Shelley Luther was “free” — and on Fox News last night.

But have we learned anything?

Why not provide the public with the best information available and allow people to make their own decisions? No orders. Businesspeople would be free to do what they think is best. At-risk folks would be free to be very careful.

Obviously, governments can help. But best through persuasion, remembering they work for us.

Free people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: In The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki posited that “a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals” can make complex decisions better than the experts. Exactly.

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Tags coronavirus, freedom, lockdown, pandemic, virus

crime and punishment general freedom

Action Ensued

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio seemed proud of his new initiative. To fight coronavirus, he thinks — and he is joined by a whole lot of other people — that everyone should stay at home indoors. And wear masks, gloves, etc., when going out for essentials only.

But since not everyone will cooperate, what to do? Apply social pressure, such as eye-rolls and a few tsk-tsks?

Well, not this Big Apple mayor.

Better get the police power involved!

De Blasio’s notion has been called a “snitch hotline.” In the spirit of “see-something/say-something,” he asked New Yorkers to snap photos of the scofflaws:

Text the photo to 311-692
and action will ensue.

And boy, did he get responses!

Immediately.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail explains that “the service was inundated with prank calls, pictures of genitalia and memes likening de Blasio to Adolf Hitler.”

My favorite “meme” sports a photo of the Führer captioned “TO THOSE TURNING IN THEIR NEIGHBORS AND LOCAL BUSINESSES / YOU DID THE REICH THING.”

And while Stalin analogies might be more apt for the quasi-commie mayor, Hitler references sting more.

John Nolte at Breitbart, referencing George Orwell’s 1984, called the responses “glorious” and “freakin’ awesome.”

The city closed down the hotline for a while to set up a filtering service before sending out leads to the police departments.

In New York City, as in most places in America, if you attempt to establish a Big Brotherish snitch-line, you will get a free-wheeling re-action.

Is this a great country or what?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Bill de Blasio, coronavirus, snitch

crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard The Draft

Draft Mom or Not?

draft, registration, selective service, woman, women, female, barbed wire,

“The biggest piece of opposition” to extending draft registration to women, former Nevada Congressman Joe Heck told The New York Times, “was, we are not going to draft our mother and daughters, our sisters and aunts to fight in hand-to-hand combat.”

Yet, that seems precisely what the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service, chaired by Heck, called for in its just released report, urging Congress to make our daughters sign up for the military draft and to be equally conscripted in any call-up.

Or in a new compulsory military will draftees be able to say, “No thanks, I don’t feel like engaging in hand-to-hand combat”?

Today, women comprise nearly 19 percent of 1.2 million active-duty soldiers. They rightly have all combat jobs open to them — the very positions a draft has traditionally been used to fill.

So, in the name of equal rights are we forcing mom into a foxhole or not?

It seems . . . complicated.

“Women bring a whole host of different perspectives, different experiences,” offered Debra Wada, a commission member and former assistant secretary for the Army.

Since when does the military conscript people for their “perspective”?

“[B]eing drafted does not necessarily mean serving in combat,” The Times paraphrased Wada. “In a time of national crisis, the government could draft people to a variety of positions, from clerical work to cybersecurity.”

This doesn’t seem to be about actual equality of service —or equality of risk — at all, but instead about a bigger pool of possible forced labor.

“If the threat is to our very existence,” Wada rhetorically inquired, “wouldn’t you want women as part of that group?”

Yes! Certainly.

Of course.

But as volunteers, not as conscripts — and the same for men.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom The Draft

A Policy Misadventure

draft registration, women, female, soldier, selective service, draft,

The National Commission on Military, National and Public Service released its report today, advocating that Congress should force our daughters to register for the military draft.

“The commission recommended that the United States keep a draft option in place,” explains The New York Times. Commission chair and former Nevada Congressman Joe Heck called it a “low-cost insurance policy against an existential national security threat.”

But that flies in the face of former Selective Service Commissioner Bernard Rostker’s testimony: “there is no need to continue to register people for a draft that will not come; no need to fight the battle over registering women, and no military need to retain the MSSA [Military Selective Service Act].”

And speaking of “an existential national security threat,” the scenario Heck put forth at one hearing was a simultaneous invasion from both Canada and Mexico.

Puh-leeze.

“This is a necessary and fair step,” states the 255-page report, according to Politico, “making it possible to draw on the talent of a unified Nation in a time of national emergency.”

It has always been possible to draw on the talents of the American people — both men and women. Just not to draft folks against their will.

Legitimate arguments for fairness and equality* must not obscure what we are talking about: A step closer to using force to fill the military’s ranks.

There is only one reason for a military draft: the inability of a nation to persuade citizens to voluntarily defend their country. Yet, as I told the commission last year, never have Americans failed to rise to their country’s defense.

Conversely, too often our “leaders” have substituted foreign misadventures for actual national defense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* More soon on the sort of “equality” being envisioned in the next military draft.

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