Tasers: Old and Busted

The new hotness: pain guns.

Somalia: Anarchy Without Chaos?

I strongly encourage you to read this fascinating article on the state of affairs in Somalia, a nation that has had no central government in over 15 years:

http://www.mises.org/story/2701

Criminal Law Should Be Abolished…

…or, more specifically, subsumed into the law of torts. The law of torts addresses aggression against a party’s person or property. Force is appropriate only in response to aggression against one’s person or property, which is the exact purpose and scope of the law of torts. In contrast, criminal law – despite ostensibly protecting individuals against aggression – also penalizes actions that do not invade anyone else’s person or property (e.g., sex between consenting adults; smoking marijuana; buying alcohol on Sunday). Criminal law also further victimizes the victim by forcing the victim to pay, through taxation, for trials and imprisonment that the victim may not have even wished for but had no right to control or prevent.

Part of the fundamental problem with criminal law is that no one really agrees on what the point of criminal law actually is. To make the victim whole? To rehabilitate the aggressor? To punish wrongdoing? To prevent future crimes? Needless to say, these are four very different goals that can be (and typically are) mutually exclusive. As you might expect, our criminal law demonstrates varying levels of commitment to all of these goals and accomplishes none of them. Victims are not made whole; they are merely expected to show up to provide testimony. Rehabilitation is rare and accidental. Punishment results mainly from the sexual and other abuse endured in prison – an especially dehumanizing form of torture that is tacitly approved of by voters, politicians, and jailers alike. Prevention of future crimes is a joke; if prisons were intended to protect us from those unfit for society, prisoners would never be let out – and if almost all prisoners are sent there with the expectation that they will eventually return to society, then what exactly is prison’s purpose?

Criminal law does not fulfill any hypothetical raison d’être. Instead of making victims worse off – and creating new victims along the way – criminal law should give way to a victim-controlled process that builds upon existing tort law. More on how that might be done another time.

More Thoughts on Property Rights and Pollution

Yesterday I posted about returning to a property-rights approach to analyzing pollution. Continuing on that theme, let’s suppose that Congress abolishes all federal environmental laws and regulations (including the right-to-pollute paradigm enforced by the EPA), and that the states, given this new lack of federal preemption, all decide to treat pollution like any other trespass or nuisance by letting state courts apply common-law principles to disputes. Let’s also assume that states do the right thing and treat all legal claims as freely transferable (if I own a legal claim against someone, why does anyone else have the right to prohibit my selling it?).

Environmentalists should wish for this to happen… they could go around buying the rights of property owners to sue polluters and make careers out of making factories and farms pay for their invasions of everyone else’s property.

Let’s stop depending on government to protect our property (a non sequitur if there ever was one) and start freeing property owners to protect themselves – they’ll find creative ways to do it.

A Different Way of Thinking About Net Neutrality

The US Justice Department issued a statement this morning in opposition to net neutrality:

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2007/September/07_at_682.html

This got me thinking about how most of the arguments floating around out there for or against net neutrality have been based on social utilitarianism or, more specifically, consumer welfare. Why does consumer welfare guide the debate? Just because I would be better off being able to buy a brand-new Audi R8 for $100 doesn’t mean I should be able to use the coercive power of the state to force Audi to sell it to me at that price. That would be a violation of Audi’s right to do with its property what it sees fit and its right to refrain from any bargain it does not wish to enter into. Certainly you as a consumer would not want Audi to be able to force you at the point of a gun to pay double the car’s sticker price.

You might be thinking that net neutrality is different from the bargain to buy a car. And you’d be right, of course – government has interfered much more in the market for internet access and traffic than in the market for cars. The government has created monopoly rights, subsidized the building of infrastructure, and passed other harmful regulations. For a cogent and succinct discussion of how this government interference is responsible for the problems at the heart of the network neutrality debate – and how to cure the disease instead of addressing its symptoms – I point you to a short piece by Tim Swanson:

http://blog.mises.org/archives/007100.asp

A Small Victory

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/09/06/ap4089011.html

We’ll see how long it lasts.

The Clean Air Act At Work

Once again, the law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head, this time in the realm of environmental legislation:

http://autos.msn.com/advice/article.aspx?contentid=4024974&GT1=10365

But what should we expect? The Environmental Protection Act, which created the federal Environmental Protection Agency, was not passed to stop pollution – it was passed to create defined rights to pollute. It’s sad to see how many environmentalists and conservationists actually think the EPA is on their side. Don’t be fooled.

Once upon a time, courts began developing the doctrine that pollution is like any other invasion of property – an actionable trespass or nuisance. This created quite the incentive for farmers and factories to avoid polluting, but legislatures everywhere (including, eventually, at the federal level) responded to lobbyists by creating safe harbors for polluters and by eliminating the right of property-owners to bring suit against polluters.

Put the power to fight pollution back into the hands of property-owners and maybe we’ll see some real progress.

The Ron Paul Principle Versus the Anti-Principle

GOP debates are so depressing – the audience (Ron Paul supporters aside) is always cheering at the wrong moments. For instance, when one of the blowhard candidates fires off a prepackaged soundbite promising to increase torturing of suspected terrorists. Or, like last night, when the moderator in the New Hampshire Republican Debate (sponsored by Fox News) spun Ron Paul’s acknowledgment of blowback in the Middle East as Paul wanting to take “marching orders from Al Queda.” Or, again from last night, when Huckabee said that the US can’t pull out of Iraq because it would dishonor the soldiers. Thankfully, Paul correctly retorted (and earned his own applause) by pointing out that it would be wrong to sacrifice more soldiers simply to save face.

Refusing to do what is in one’s best interests only to spite one’s enemies is childish – and refusing to stop doing what is not in one’s best interests only to avoid admitting defeat is equally so. Those decisions do not result from an application of reason, but from emotional reactions. The results can only be destructive.

Unlike any of the other candidates, Ron Paul is a man of principle. Specifically, he is a constitutionalist, meaning that he wants to return the federal government to the boundaries placed upon it by the US Constitution. Though the US Constitution is not the embodiment of libertarianism (i.e., the non-aggression principle), it represents a huge improvement over the status quo. Strict adherence to the Constitution would at least eliminate (or minimize) the federal government as a source of invasion in your life. I would take Paul over an unprincipled and unpredictable candidate (that is to say, any of the others) any day of the week.

Welcome

I’ve done it again. I’ve started a blog. This time, though, I may stick with it for more than two months. Unlike my last blog (which was fun until I used up the seven ideas I had for blog posts), this one relates to a topic near and dear to me – and one about which I am actually semi-capable of providing ground-breaking, thought-provoking, life-altering (insert your favorite hyphenated adjective here) posts. After all, for the last ten years I’ve studied law, libertarianism, and economics pretty seriously and, as a practicing attorney, I learn on a daily basis how our laws and legal system are subtle enemies of liberty.