We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
The New York Times startles today with an editorial that is all in favor of personal responsibility rather than legal diktat. The topic: speed limits.
With the conviction Monday of Representative Bill Janklow of South Dakota for vehicular manslaughter, the West’s fondness for fast driving is again in the news, this time as part of a tragedy. Mr. Janklow sped through a stop sign near his hometown, Flandreau, S.D., last August and killed a motorcyclist. He has resigned from the House and faces up to 11 years in prison.
Mr. Janklow’s very conviction is proof that Westerners’ love of speed has its limits. But the limits are those dictated by duty and personal responsibility, not by law.
Western attitudes about speed limits have always been misconstrued: we do not encourage deviant behavior so much as personal responsibility. It’s an antiquated stance, this resistance to limiting individual freedom, and it is often used as evidence of our irresponsibility.
We can hold individuals accountable for bad choices without limiting everyone’s freedom.
Needless to say, the author is not a regular staff writer for the NYT, but nonetheless, the publication of these thoughts without a single sneer of condescension by the panjandrums of the Upper West Side is worth recognizing. It is almost impossible to find criticism of the nanny state in the Times, but here it is.
Hat tip to Samizdata reader Mr. Haas for the pointer.
Today, the US Supreme Court issued a decision that will live in infamy. It upheld the core provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. I confess I have not yet digested the full 300 page turd dropped on the Constitution by our masters at the Supreme Court, but I would observe that any decision of this length is bound to be flawed. It does not take many words to apply the simple phrase “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” to overturn legislation; it does, however, take many, many words to obfuscate the meaning of that phrase sufficiently to uphold legislation that, in part, prohibits the airing of campaign commercials in the weeks before an election.
I will address one of the fundamental flaws underlying the entire project of regulating campaign finance – the claim that money does not equal speech.
First, though, allow me to state that it is perfectly consistent with freedom of speech to outlaw bribery and other permutations of the quid pro quo that may crop up in connection with campaign finance activities. Outlawing bribery in such circumstances is no more a restriction on freedom of speech than outlawing the fencing of stolen property is a restriction on freedom of contract.
It is a fundamental premise of campaign finance regulation that such laws do not restrict speech, but rather restrict only the raising and spending of money.
This distinction between speaking and expending resources on speaking is utterly fallacious, unless you believe that guarantees of free speech extend only to the fine art of conversation. Any attempt to distribute your thoughts to persons who are not in the room with you when you utter them requires the use of resources, and thus the expenditure of money. Allowing the state to prohibit the use of resources to broadcast or distribute speech means that freedom of speech is no more than freedom to converse.
Speech, for all practical purposes, is the distribution to an audience of your thoughts. In the political realm (and most others as well) this distribution cannot be made to any meaningful audience without applying resources, that is, spending money. You cannot print a newspaper, distribute a flyer, operate a website, or stand on a streetcorner ranting through a bullhorn, without using money to distribute your speech. Even bullhorns cost money, after all. The use of resources, the expenditure of money, to distribute your speech, is an absolutely indivisible part of freedom of speech.
Yet campaign finance regulation is nothing more than state limitations on the use of resources to distribute political speech, which is to say, state limitations on political speech. No one would say that a prohibition on expenditures by a publisher to print and mail a magazine, or on a publisher charging for subscriptions or advertising, are consistent with freedom of speech, yet these limitations are closely analogous to the campaign finance restrictions now blessed by the Supreme Court.
UPDATE: I was grousing about this to one of my partners, and he pointed out that apparently the Supreme Court was just being somewhat over-literal. The Constitution protects “free speech,” and they thought that meant it protected FREE speech. If you see what I mean. Sadly, that seems to be about the level of comprehension on display in the opinion.
Sorry, Natalie, but I am in a profound depression triggered by the US Supreme Court’s decision to jettison the First Amendment (which protects, or used to, freedom of speech and of the press). After I am suitably medicated (less than half a bottle of Laphroiag to go), I will have some thoughts on one of the fundamental flaws in the whole campaign finance debacle.
Gabriel’s last post brought irresistibly to mind another letter that was orbiting the planet via email several years ago (this was before the Planet Blog emerged from ether). As with Gabriel, I apologize if you have already seen this, but it is not only hilarious, it is funny in such a kind and gentle way that I have used it in several classes as an example of how to write a letter in which you are saying “no, no, a thousand times no!” while making a new friend.
The letter, from the Smithsonian Institution to a backyard archaeologist, follows: → Continue reading: Courtesy costs little II
I rarely add a new blog to my list of daily visits, but Belmont Club makes the cut.
What does Belmont Club bring to the blog party, you ask? Adamantine analysis of the military situation in Iraq, for one thing, as well as a very interesting look at the pending takeover of the European left by radical Islamists.
As for the Iraqi situation, Mr. Wretchard thinks that the Baathists and Islamists are getting their asses handed to them,
and backs it up with trenchant strategic analysis.
→ Continue reading: First-rate analysis
For a textbook example of rent-seeking, look no further than that pustulent petri dish of corruption, Illinois, for a dandy look at how it is done with affirmative action, casino licensing, and (of course) political connections. It has to do with the troubled Rosemont casino, which would have been located just outside of Chicago. (Sorry, this post has been rattling around in draft long enough for my links to rot. You’ll just have to take my word for it).
The State of Illinois licenses casinos, generally under terms that skim off obscene amounts of the profit to various appendages of the state. I suppose the State earns its money; since Illinois licenses very few casinos (Rosemont would be the 10th), it suppresses competition and thus enables those high profits to a significant degree. Regardless, I defy anyone to distinguish this racket from the more straightforward protection racket run by organized crime. Let the record show that the State of Illinois, through its protection racket for casinos, is perhaps the uber-rent-seeker in the whole sordid arrangement. → Continue reading: Rent seeking
I got dinked out of posting on a Mark Steyn column earlier this week. Fortunately, the prolific Mr. Steyn has lobbed another one my way, this time ruminating on the endemic corruption of Canada’s one-party state in response to a reader inquiry. His thoughts are well worth the read, as they explore the many, many byways of political corruption in what is by all accounts a relatively law-abiding liberal democracy.
It’s certainly – how shall we put this? – striking that a fellow [Prime Minister Chretien] who’s spent 40 years in the House of Commons with the exception of a brief time-out in the late Eighties is, by Canadian standards, so phenomenally wealthy.
Let’s just pause there for a moment. In the modern Canadian state, it is not necessary for M Chrétien to do anything illegal. As he has said, after years in government, he’s a well-connected guy with a fat Rolodex who knows the wheels that have to be oiled: he can tell his clients “what is necessary for them to do”. That’s something folks will pay for, as out-of-office politicians in many western democracies have discovered. But very few have the opportunities of patronage that exist in Canada: unlike M Chrétien with Senator Fitzpatrick, Mr Bush cannot install a boardroom buddy from his ball-team days in the US Senate.
Third, it’s interesting to see how M Chrétien’s business deals – like the Grand-Mère – circle back to the government, in the form of one agency or another. He was able to tell M Duhaime “what it is necessary for him to do” – ie, put him touch with the BDC – and also able to tell the bank “what it is necessary for them to do” – ie, pony up the dough to M Duhaime. In a one-party state, he is in the fortunate position of being able to tell all parties “what it is necessary for them to do”.
Canada’s “national identity” is supposedly to be found in its “social programs”; Canadians are supposedly willing to pay higher taxes in order for a more equitable society. Quite where the 50% of income the government takes winds up is hard to see: I can’t help noticing that I see far more beggars on the streets of Toronto and Montreal than in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other American city I’ve been in recently, whether run by Republicans or Democrats. The hospitals in Canada are so overloaded they’re unable to observe even basic hygiene procedures, a basic failing which covers everything from the Ontario health system’s incubation of SARS to Labrador’s gift of Chlamydia to its gynaecological patients. M Chrétien lectured Wall Street that, while Canada had fewer millionaires than America, it also had fewer poor people. But what you can’t help noticing is that the plutocrats we do have are almost all well-connected Liberal Party types or businessmen whose businesses are either subsidized or regulated by the government. That’s why in the one-party state we wind up not just with one party but one bookstore chain, one media chain, etc. Meanwhile, the gap in income between the governing class – in its broadest sense – and the governed grows ever wider. After 40 years as a guy who knows “what’s necessary” for others to do, M Chrétien is merely the most prominent exemplar of the system.
There are words to describe the kind of society that kicks veterans’ widows out on the street while giving the former riding secretary who approves the decision a $160,000 expense tab, that lavishes billions on corporate welfare on Lib-friendly businesses but can’t wash the instruments between pap smears: “Welfare state”? “Just society”? Try “kleptocracy”.
I find myself with very little to add.
I am pleased to offer a shout-out for a dandy new informational website, the Bellicose Women’s Brigade, put together in part by regular Samizdata commenter analog kid. The term was originated, I believe, by the Ubiquitous One in response to the decidedly militant response to the 9/11 attacks by women in the US. One interesting side effect of this attack on American soil was a change in the attitude of many women towards aggressive self-defense, both in the international and domestic spheres. Women began buying guns and taking self-defense classes in unprecedented numbers.
This is where the BWB website comes in. It is a resource for people who are new to the self-defense and guns thing. My quick review of its contents shows a nice selection of accessible essays on the essential topics (gun safety, gun selection, and so forth). Gun geekery is kept firmly in the background.
Sadly, this information is mostly academic for our British cousins currently laboring under a most atrocious denial of their right to own and use guns for self-defense. Still, for those of us living in more enlightened realms, this looks like a good place to send someone who is thinking about buying a gun for their own security, but wants good information they can review in the privacy of their own home.
Glenn Reynolds has a blistering post at his other blog (sheesh – I can barely hold up my end at a group blog, and Reynolds has two of the damn things) about the “anti-war” activists and their willing accomplices in the media.
The picture he paints (and documents) of traditional media outlets is horrifying. Groups raising money to fund the guerrilla/terrorists are “anti-war militants.” Western reporters have hired their former Saddamite minders as interpreters. Massive pro-American protests in Iraq go unreported in the elite media. I would add the major media blackout on the Hayes report discussed below, and the near blackout of the interim WMD report confirming to a large degree Saddam’s WMD capabilities. Punchline:
It certainly seems to be the case that neither Americans nor Iraqis are being well-served, as the press bends over backward to characterize terrorist sympathizers as “anti-war” while doing its best to minimize Iraqi support for peace and reconstruction.
As the man says: Indeed, and, Read the whole thing.
George Will, of all people, plants a couple of barbs in the leviathan in this column.
On May 24, 1945, just 16 days after V-E Day, Britain’s socialists were sanguine. A Labour Party firebrand, Aneurin Bevan, anticipating the Labour victory that occurred five weeks later, said privation would be a thing of the past because essentials would soon be abundant: “This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.”
But socialism rose to the challenge. Two years later, the coal industry having been nationalized and food still rationed, coal and fish were scarce. There are indeed some things that only government can do.
The segue into campaign finance reform is well done:
The government, by its restrictions on the amounts and conduits of political giving, has turned something that exists in wild abundance in America — money — into a scarcity. As the postwar Labour government did with coal and fish.
Speaking of fish, as in barrels, shooting in, the punchline is of course the hypocrisy of candidates bleating against the exercise of free speech and free association, via campaign contributions, of their opponents, while doing exactly what they decry.
So now [Dean] says that unless he abandons public financing, his money will be gone when the primaries are over. Then Bush could spend to speak to the nation all summer, while he, Dean, would fall silent until after the Democratic convention, when he would get a fresh infusion of public money.
But notice that Dean’s argument concedes what campaign finance regulators deny — that money is tantamount to speech, and therefore limits on political money limit political speech.
The fact that political speech, the very adamantine core of the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and association, is very highly regulated, with the blessing (to date) of the Supreme Court, is perhaps the single most damning indictment of the utility of written Constitutions as a protector of individual rights.
James Lileks’ Bleat, usually devoted primarily to domestic bliss, today gets a little screedy. James has peeked inside the sausage factory that is the US Senate.
The spleen, she hurts. I think it had to do with listening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, and wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world’s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we’d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.
Unicameral house! Two year term! One term limit!
There’s more, on such perennial faves as the French, Michael Moore, and the angry anti-war lot. I started to excerpt, but when your cursor is hovering over “Select All” it is time to just say “read the whole thing.”
Well, well, well. The usually flaky and oft-overturned 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (the regional appellate court in the US that includes California and sits one notch below the Supreme Court) has lobbed a high hard one at the Supremes, a direct challenge to one of the linchpins of jurisprudence permitting the federal government to exercise almost unlimited “police” powers.
The 9th Circuit just ruled that the federal government has no power to outlaw homemade machine guns, because homemade guns are not in interstate commerce. The extraordinarily broad readings of the Interstate Commerce Clause, which permits the federal government to regulate interstate commerce, were adopted in a New Deal era case in which a farmer challenged federal rules dictating how much wheat he could grow. The case was beautifully positioned, with the wheat in question being fed to the farmer’s cattle and thus never leaving his farm, much less entering into commerce at all, never mind interstate commerce. The Supreme Court would have none of it, though, and ruled that this wheat was nonetheless in interstate commerce and thus subject to federal control.
Under this reading of the Interstate Commerce Clause, I don’t see how a homemade machine gun is not in interstate commerce. After all, it affects the global supply and demand for machine guns in exactly the same way that the wheat did. This case mounts a pretty direct challenge to one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. Its a rare day when I root for the 9th Circuit, but all things come around in time, I suppose.
The Volokhs have a little more detail. The case (or another on the same principle) will almost certainly have to be taken up by the Supremes, as there is now a conflict between appellate courts on the issue.
The Instapundit, that wag, notes that, while he hasn’t read the opinion, any position is defensible with enough homemade machine guns!
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
