More Fun With Tasers

My brother offers up a nice post today on the growing threat tasers in the hands of police pose to our civil liberties. I enjoy his idea that we use surveillance against its traditional master, the state. The scary part, however, is that, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, you might get arrested and even charged with a felony if you try to record the police in action. Try to come up with a good justification for that one…

I’m Relieved

Remember how, a few weeks back at a John Kerry speech, police tasered a University of Florida student for being annoying? Well, the government announced today that it investigated itself and has cleared itself of all charges. Thank goodness that’s taken care of!

My favorite quote from the article: “‘They should have beat him with some batons while they were at it,’ Kaster [a UF student and religion major] said.”

So, according to Kaster, it’s okay not only to taser obnoxious people, but also to beat the hell out of them with sticks. I am curious whether she would change her opinion if she were to get a taste of her own medicine.

Oh, Hillary, You Make Me Laugh

Hillary Clinton says she “would launch a policy review as president with an eye towards giving up some of the executive powers accumulated by George Bush.” Riiiiight!

Should You Be Able to Kill Someone For Talking Smack About You?

Defamation occurs when one person says something about another person that (i) is untrue and (ii) harms the other person’s reputation. Defamation is legally actionable, meaning that we each have the legal right to protect our reputation by force. Why “force”? Because we can go to a court to seek damages and use the force of law to enjoin the defamatory activity. If the defamer ignores the injunction or refuses to pay up, law enforcement gets involved. If law enforcement is resisted, the defamer can end up dead or imprisoned.

So, if you talk smack about someone, he or she has the right to kill you – in a roundabout sort of way.

You may be thinking, “well, the defamer brought it on himself by not stopping the defamatory activity, or by resisting police!” However, if the defamer actually has the right (the natural right, if not legal one) to say whatever he or she wants to say (since it is not an act or threat of violence against the property or physical person of another), then law enforcement is actually initiating unprovoked violence against the defamer. The defamer has a right of self-defense… which, if exercised, results in a bad end for the defamer.

I’d suggest that the proper enforcement mechanism against liars is to harness the internet to share information about them. Of course, that’s impossible under our current legal system because of all manner of laws, including the defamation laws I talk about above, privacy laws, employment laws, etc.

If people knew that dishonest dealings could result in ostracism (e.g., reduced job opportunities, increased costs of doing business), they would be discouraged from such anti-social behavior far more than they would be by the threat of a lawsuit; because the legal system is so expensive and unpredictable, most people don’t bother with it unless the defendant has deep pockets that the plaintiff can plunder.

In other words, existing laws muck up what would be a free, self-organizing system, which prompts the passage of additional laws, which in turn muck up the system even more, which prompts the passage of more laws, so on and so forth ad nauseum. Of course, the same could be said about virtually every area of law.

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.

A Small Victory

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

We’ll see how long it lasts.