Archive for law
Hands Off My Home
Posted by: | CommentsThis article is #9 of a weekly series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by my friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct ways.
Thanks in large part to the work of the Institute for Justice and the 2005 Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London, eminent domain (the taking of private property by the government) has caused much grassroots and legal activity. Why we oppose eminent domain:
Eminent domain is theft. Seizing private land for public use, even under the guise of economic development—is a violation of property rights. It does not matter how many people benefit from such a taking or that the government offers “just compensation.” A forced sell is not voluntary—there is no just compensation for an owner when he does not want to sell his property in the first place and has no choice about whom to sell it to. Eminent domain negates property owner’s rights to control its use, benefit from it, transfer or sell it, and exclude persons from it.
Eminent domain is arbitrary. Government actors steal property for “public use.” But what constitutes public use? And who qualifies as the public? If by “public” is meant the majority of people within a given jurisdiction, no individual’s property is safe since a majority can always decide that somebody else would make better use of the property for the majority than the individual from whom they wish to take it. If “public” merely refers to some people within a given jurisdiction, then the group with the most political pull will decide how property is allotted and used. This is nothing but an exercise of force.
Eminent domain stifles the free market. Eminent domain is based on the rationale that an individual (a bureaucrat) or group of individuals (a government board or agency) has the knowledge of how best to allocate scarce resources. This individual or group supposedly can determine how a greater benefit can be derived from that property better than the person to who rightly acquired it by his or her own efforts and by trade. As people such as FA Hayek demonstrated, there is no way that an individual or group can possess the tacit knowledge, or know the subjective preferences, of another group of people.
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Tags: economics, eminent domain, law, liberty, memes, theft
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How can we have such a skewed perspective on sin?
Posted by: | CommentsShamus over at the Brains Are Delicious Blog posted something very insightful the other day:
Consider two people:
1) Allen is gay and is in a monogamous relationship with a man.
2) Brad married a woman at 24. He does very well for himself over the years, and after building a fortune and a family he divorces his wife at 40 and marries a woman who is 24.
Both men are guilty of breaking from God’s plan for marriage and his intent for human sexuality. But Brad is also guilty of inflicting emotional damage to his kids, hurting his wife, breaking his oath oath to God to remain true to her, and forcing her to choose between late-life marriage and solitude. It’s also worth noting what temptation the men faced. Allen is only attracted to men, so obedience to God might well have meant a life of loneliness. Brad faced no such choice, because he already had a mate. Allen has sinned to avoid a life of being single and frustrated. Brad has sinned and left a trail of emotional damage in his wake so that he could bang a girl with a skinny butt.
Yet where do Christians stand on these sins? Allen’s sin is usually viewed as far worse. “Perverted.” “Deviant.” I’ve sat through many Sunday sermons where the pastor took a few minutes to decry the rampant homosexuality in our society and how it will lead to God’s judgment. Christians go so far as to support making it illegal for Allen to marry. Some would make it illegal for him to have gay sex at all. But Brad sort of gets a pass. No Christian I’ve ever encountered has supported outlawing divorce. Most protestant churches allow divorced & remarried men to attend, and many even allow them to hold positions of authority.
Why is this? Why is one crime seen as a horrific offense against God so dire that it shouldn’t be allowed, and another offense – which actually hurts people – is seen as something so minor that it shouldn’t prevent you from having authority within the church?
This isn’t a hypothetical question. I’m really curious as to why these sins are weighted this way.
Thanks, Shamus, for writing such thought-provoking words! I’d like to share with you my comments on this post:
It’s one thing to consider homosexuality a sin, it is entirely another to consider outlawing the practice of homosexuality. Homosexual individuals have just as much a right to behave in non-coercive ways as heterosexuals. And why? Because they are human beings.
Christians, and in particular evangelical Christians, have a tendency to elevate the status of private sins as the pinnacle of evil while condoning public injustice and aggression in the name of meta-goals such as “preserving the family.” It is ironic that often enough their actions have the unintended consequences of destroying families rather than accomplishing that meta-goal at all.
Christians say, “hate the sin, love the sinner” but rarely practice the principle. Instead, they frequently look down upon and ostracize those they don’t like. Jesus could touch a leper, but some Christians can’t even be in the same room with a homosexual.
On the other hand, some Christians need to learn to hate the sin in their own lives a whole lot more. It is quite helpful when trying to ignore your own personal sin to have a group to demonize. Perhaps this is why some of the most public and vocal anti-homosexual demagogues speak the way they do. We all know of the stories of those people, they preach one thing yet practice another.
We all are living out a life of transformation; may our minds be renewed by the God who loves all and is constantly seeking us. May we take our Lord’s example for ourselves as well, to love all men and seek to serve others in ways that show the love of God.
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Tags: homosexuality, law, sin, theology
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Barrel ‘monster’ gets student arrested
Posted by: | CommentsFrom the Police-arresting-people-for-stupid-reasons department…
Barrel ‘monster’ gets student arrested – Weird news- msnbc.com.
When Joseph Carnevale chopped up three stolen orange and white traffic barrels from a construction site to create a massive sculpture of a roadside monster thumbing a ride, the North Carolina college student said he saw it as a form of street art.
Raleigh, N.C., police just saw vandalism…
Hamlin Associates, the construction company whose barrels were turned into a monster, doesn’t want to press charges.
“We’ve had a fair amount of vandalism, but never anyone turn it into art,” Company President Steven Hussey said. “I actually thought it was pretty neat.”
Hussey said the value of the publicity his company has received is well above the $365 cost of the traffic barrels that Carnevale used.
“It’s been positive publicity for us,” he said. “If we’d known he’d do that good of a work, we’d have given him the barrels.”
Carnevale said he’s weighing Hussey’s offer to reconstruct the monster for the company’s offices in Climax, N.C., possibly for pay. Meanwhile, at least three Facebook support groups have formed to support Carnevale, including “Don’t Charge Joseph Carnevale,” boasting more than 800 members.
Raleigh police spokeswoman Laura Hourigan said the charges won’t be dropped, despite the company’s stance.
This is pretty outrageous, if you ask me. The company loves it, so for justice sake get off the guy’s back!
The thinking Christian must understand that where no harm is committed, no crime has been committed. This is a clear case where even the supposed plaintiff agrees there is no harm. Free Carnevale!
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Free Market Law
Posted by: | CommentsFollowing up yesterday’s very popular podcast, I want to direct your weekend reading to three excellent articles by my good friend Daniel Krawisz from the Libertarian Longhorns. He is well into the process of writing an entire book on natural law, ethics, and the free market provision of law, and I am very impressed by the work he has done so far. I hope you’ll take some time to check them out. Obviously, they are not peer-reviewed publications yet, but Daniel has given us some great things to consider in this series and he is very kind to share these words for our benefit. I sincerely hope that his book makes a great impact upon libertarians in the future. Here are the article links with some quotes…
Libertarians sometimes try to derive solutions from the basic axiom of libertarian law requiring consent between both parties in every human interaction, but this cannot be the correct method. When there is a dispute over rights, there is automatically something non-consensual going on; to use the axiom of consent yet hypothesize a situation that already violates it is a contradiction and hence can lead nowhere. All we can say is that given some dispute, something must happen so that everybody agrees on who owns what; of what that something may be the axiom of consent says nothing other than to constrain it in the same way it constrains all human interactions. However, with a little imagination possibilities occur readily. First it is necessary to find an arbiter for the dispute and for both parties to agree to abide by its ruling. This arbiter would have to be some third party, because if it didn’t, then there would be no dispute in the first place. Unlike our government monopoly system, anybody may offer arbitration services simply by advertising such services. These services would likely charge by the ruling, and they would have a strong incentive to be seen as fair, unbiased, and efficient.
Part 2: The Foundations of Rights and the Capitalism of Law
Theories of the state assert that there can be no establishment of rights without the existence of such an organization, though rights may still exist in a purely theoretical sense. The libertarian theory of justice addresses the more general case where there is no state. There are certain rules for the justification of rights that distinguish themselves over all others in that they are neither arbitrary nor patently absurd, and such that if there is no agreement on these rules then there can be no agreement at all.
Part 3: The Violation of Rights
The axiom of law is often called the nonaggression axiom, and stated as, “it is wrong to initiate aggression.” I prefer to call it the axiom of consent and state it as, “everything should be consensual.” Neither of these statements says anything about the proper response to aggression. They neither permit, nor prohibit, any form of self-defense or punishment. From the way the axiom was derived before, we can also see that the proper response to aggression is an open question: the axiom is the absolute minimum required to have any system of law in the first place, and no theory of punishment is strictly necessary. Settlers who first make contact with one another must assent to the legitimacy of consensual exchange between any of them, but as long as they continue to interact peacefully with one another, they have no need to agree upon the proper responses to the violations of the law. Principles of self-defense and punishment, therefore, are not an a priori part of law, but must instead develop as needed within a system of free market law.
And by the way, Daniel in Part 3 slams Rothbard, Kinsella, and Rod Long. That takes some guts. Please give him some insightful comments (or compliments) and encourage his work. I know he will appreciate it!
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Tags: economics, law, natural law, The State
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On Transportation Pollution: My first peer-reviewed publication
Posted by: | CommentsIn the world of academia, one of the things you regularly try to do is publish your research in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewing is the process of having your work evaluated by experts in a field. The process has its benefits and drawbacks, but overall it has worked well for quite a while.
Libertarians can have a difficult time publishing because our work often goes against the deeply held beliefs of academics, many of whom advocate for more government intervention and are completely against the free market. Although some journals truly are dedicated to libertarian scholarship, such as the newly established Libertarian Papers, getting libertarian ideas into mainstream academia is not the easiest thing in the world.
Nevertheless, we do have a lot to add to the academic arena, for example the area of pollution. A little over a year ago I wrote a paper about transportation pollution, and I presented it at the Austrian Scholars Conference in 2008. Under the advisement of Walter Block, I began submitting the paper to journals for publication. This morning I received word from the editor of Ethics, Place, & Environment that my article, Can the Government Solve Transportation Pollution?, has been accepted for publication in their next issue! This is very exciting for me, as it is my first publication ever in a peer-reviewed journal.
I’ll summarize the paper briefly for you. First off, here’s the abstract:
Most people presume that government is always responsible for providing solutions to pollution problems, including transportation pollution. This paper examines the validity of this argument from a minarchist libertarian, property rights principles perspective, and concludes that government cannot solve these problems using command-and-control legislation. The primary policy suggested for government to adopt is the strict adherence to property rights protection and enforcement regarding polluters, including themselves. Further encouragement of market forces could be accomplished by stopping interference within the market at critical points, namely the production of roads, production and sales of automobiles, and the subsidization of alternative fuels.
The thesis of the paper is that the free market is a much better preventer of pollution than the government, and in fact that government actually exacerbates pollution problems through regulation and lack of adequate property rights protection:
Experts disagree on whether or not global climate change will actually be detrimental to the world as a whole over time, but let us presume for a moment that the “inconvenient truth” of Al Gore really is happening and that humans really are in danger from excess carbon emissions. Can government intervention actually make a difference? Why is it so commonly accepted that the free market cannot handle pollution? Are there any relevant examples in the past that we can examine? This paper demonstrates from a libertarian perspective that the free market can and will handle pollution when property rights are justly enforced, and that the free market will do so better than government ever could.
I outline the arguments for the free market as opposed to command-and-control socialistic regulations, and show how governments are actually much worse polluters than private industry. The rest of the paper is spent advocating various free market solutions to pollution problems – and basically the message is get the government out.
Here’s a list of some of the measures I mention, some of which you already saw in the abstract:
- Politicians need to stop acting like the only thing standing between civilized life and total destruction is government intervention (not a “free market” solution per se, but necessary).
- Restore property rights protection regarding pollution. If you dump waste and hurt someone, you’re 100% liable.
- Allow for private road systems, and road owners are responsible for the pollution coming off the roads.
- Remove layers of government control on new vehicle production
- Eliminate taxes and tariffs on new vehicles, in particular those with high gas mileage ratings
- Eliminate taxes on existing vehicle repairs and upgrades
- Provide tax deductions for efficiency improvements on existing vehicles
- Quit penalizing entrepreneurs trying to figure out other solutions (like stopping vegetable oil vehicle drivers from being fined for breaking regulations)
- Quit subsidizing alternative fuels, especially bio-ethanol
I will try to receive permission to host the article on this website after the issue is released, but it depends on what I am permitted to do with it (copyright law, blech).
So all in all, a victory for the cause of liberty today in my book! 
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Tags: ASC 2009, Blog News, law, pollution
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