The American Guesser

Illinois is sinking further and further into nanny-statism. Not only must common cold remedies be locked up, customers have to show ID to buy any. Can’t risk the possibility of of people using it to make meth.

The message in the media is, of course, that all law-abiding citizens should just bend over and take it.

Despite the inconvenience, most local pharmacists said customers are generally happy to oblige.

“For some customers it has been” an annoyance. “People have been used to it being on the floor,” said Jagruti Patel, a pharmacist at Cub Foods on Knoxville. “But it’s understandable as for what’s been going on.”

Gary Jones, a pharmacist at Bogard Drug Stores Inc. in South Peoria, said most people don’t seem to mind the restrictions.

“But we have had a few strange ones that look like they don’t belong, and they’re somewhat upset they have to ask for it and are limited in their purchases,” Jones said. “Those are probably the people we’re trying to stop.”

This reporter never talked to me.

Here’s an idea. Next time some state legislator comes into the drug store to buy cold medicine, send his sorry ass packing. Tell the fascist bastard that his ID looks phony. Better yet, call the drug cops on him. Tell the police that he looked like he didn’t “belong,” and that he irritation at being denied the medicine is evidence he planned to do something nefarious.

After all, if the politician wasn’t doing anything wrong, he doesn’t have anything to complain about.

Here’s another problem: It isn’t going to work. Meth heads will figure out how to get the stuff they need, or switch to something new. That means the Drug Warriors will have to come up with something even more draconian. Maybe door to door inspections. Or random drug tests at traffic stops.

Stop complaining. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to complain about.

I’ve always suspected that Rob Smith — the notorious Acidman — was both a libertine and a libertarian at heart. This post on numbskulls who want to re-establish a national speed limit provides the evidence:

If every driver on the Interstate is going 80 MPH, then going 80 MPH is a safe speed. Want to know who is DANGEROUS in that situation? The fucking dipstick doing 55 MPH in the left lane, that’s who. Or the flaming asshole who is oblivious to everything around him because he’s got a got-damn cell phone stuck to his ear. Or the pussy princess peering into her rear-view mirror while she applies makeup.

THOSE are the people who’ll kill you on the road, because they are unsafe at ANY speed. If we simply MUST have nanny-laws to protect us on the highway, let’s have one that might actually work.

Peoria Pundit Bill Dennis has been complaining about handicapped parking spaces for a while. This prompted C.J. Summers of the Peoria Chronicle to complain about another way the government makes things worse by trying too hard to help. In this case, it’s a new law mandating that all programs — including church service broadcasts — include closed captioning:

Now, I’m all for closed captioning. But the problem is that it’s expensive. The first thing you have to do is transcribe your program. You can do it yourself (labor-intensive) or hire a professional stenographer (or “stenocaptioner”) at $1.50 to $3 per minute, or $90-$180 per one-hour show. Then you have to get it into the video stream using an encoder. Encoder services can run you $300-$400 per one-hour show. Alternatively, you could buy encoding equipment and do it yourself, but then you have your own labor costs, plus equipment that can cost as much as $20,000. Your closed-captioning cost is now almost as much as the fee you’re charged to broadcast the program on a local TV station. So what do you think smaller operations are going to do? Stop broadcasting their programs, of course. Or at least remove them from some smaller markets, like one show in New York is doing.

What Mr. Summers is saying is that the government’s heavy-handed approach to increasing the number of closed captioned programs actually made is too expensive to produce programing?

The phrase “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” is pretty much the same as “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Damn you Matt Welch. I wish I wrote like this. I wish I thought like this:

There’s a thin, dangerous line between “we must be doing something right” and “we must not be doing anything wrong.” Or more relevantly, between that an “we may be doing some things wrong, but that doesn’t matter, because we’re doing The One Important Thing right enough.”

That latter mind-set led Goldwaterites down the rabbit-hole of Nixonian statism, just as the children of the Gingrich Revolution have grown up to become fluffers for the Executive Branch. Both cases, of course, also illustrate the miraculous change that occurs in some people when their political team holds the reins of power.

One of the worst evils being perpetrated by Bush apologists has been to spread the idea that anyone who disagrees with or disapproves of anything coming out of the White House is somehow disloyal or reckless. Brad Spangler says:

An example of one of those brainwashing tricks is the continuous debate over what the right “balance� is between liberty and security. The implicit assumption underlying that debate is that liberty and security are antagonistic; that one supposedly can not have more of one without having less of the other.

With all respect to Mr. Spangler, Ben Franklin said it best:

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.”

As a libertarian who only grudgingly supported the war in Iraq — I couldn’t bring myself to disagree with the idea of liberating so many enslaved people, and Sadaam never lived up to treaties — I have sat back and watched dissenters’ patriotism questioned by Bush’ surrogates. I could never agree with the torture and mistreatment, nor with the continued erosion of civil liberties.

The massive spying program in violation of FISA was the final straw for me. But I was surprised at the anger I saw from people who thought that because I supported the war I must be a die-hard Bush supporter. I laughed that off.

But the worst of the criticism was that I was somehow advocating a weakening of our national security. By insisting that the Bush administration needed to get a judge’s permission before they tapped a citizen’s phone line, I was in their opinion somehow expressing my lack of concern about terrorism. One person accused me or forgetting about Sept. 11, 2001.

To hell with that. I voted for the guy in 2004. I didn’t drink his Kool Aid.

Eugene Volokh foresees civil libery issues with the Feds doing radiation testing around mosques, but Tom Knapp, Libertarian-Democratic Commentator for the Free-Market News Network says he isn’t letting it weigh heavilly on his mind:

Monitoring for radiation on “public” property — including said property near mosques, Islamic centers, the homes of Islamic activists, etc. — reveals nothing about those places or the people who own or frequent them except whether or not radioactive materials are present in the locale. It doesn’t tell the FBI which imam is screwing around on his wife or which congregation member sneaks a ham sandwich in for lunch once a week, or even which — if any — people in the area might be affiliated with al Qaeda, sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, or anything else.

I reject out of hand the argument that this is a non-issue only on the basis of “well, of they have nothing to hide …”

I don’t want to be reduced to radioactive dust, and I know there are Islamic terrorists who want very much to do this. But, I don’t want to give the Feds the ability to sit across my house and scan my house just out of curiosity, either. So I guess I qualify as “disturbed” about this development.

I want safeguards. I want warrants.

My local daily newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star, used a libertarian-esque reason to oppose changes in how the Federal Communications Commission regulates cable companies, namely to require them to offer channels ala carte in addition to so-called packages:

Cherry-picking content might lower monthly bills, though it could have the opposite effect. In any event, a federally forced a la carte option does carry a price: unwarranted government meddling in the private market.

Trust me, this newspaper pushes a strong liberal/progressive message (just ask this guy). They are not ideologically libertarian.

The real libertarian position would be to call for the elimination of the FCC, or to at least drastically reduce the scope of its duties to assigning frequencies to radio and television stations.

None of it really matters anyway, because it won’t be that long before all our entertainment needs will be met via broadband Internet. What we need to do is fight like Hell to keep the Fed’s grubby hands off of it.

Wisdom like this 2002 article in slate is why I link to Eugene Volokh’s Volokh Conspiracy. Like most people, I’m glad that there’s technology that lets the Feds detect nuclear weapons — including dirty bombs — without having to rely exclusively on human intelligence and electronic eavesdropping.

I suspect that courts will find some way to allow searches for dirty bombs. If we distinguish these searches from normal law enforcement, then the tolerance for extra government power might be limited to these extraordinary cases. But if searches for radioactive material and searches for marijuana must be treated equally, then both kinds of searches will probably become equally permissible.

Turns out the Feds have been scanning mosques for radiation levels, and have been doing so without a warrants. Eugene Volokh says that legally, it’s no different than turning an infrared camera on a private home to detect the lamps sometimes used to grow marijuana indoors. Realistically, there’s a huge different between growing weed and building a dirty bomb. But Constitutional protections must apply the same to serious crimes and not so serious crimes, he says. He makes the arguments for creating different kinds of searches, the results of which can be used only for specific purposes.

Our current president has shown himself far too willing to violate the Constitution. And eventually, prosecutors would apply any weakened rules to crimes other than terrorism. Our Attorney General has written opinions that say it’s acceptable to torture prisoners. None of this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

It makes me wonder whether the Bushites are really looking for nukes, or are casting about for a court challenge. If the courts balk at challenging these radiation-based searches for nukes, then they can’t balk at using infrared cameras on your home and my home.

The lady or the tiger, anyone?

It’s not an easy choice, at least not for people who value their freedom as much as their safety.

We need a law like this in Illinois:

Michigan residents could fatally shoot someone who breaks into their home or vehicle without facing criminal or civil prosecution under new legislation.

A two-bill package introduced today would assume that a person who forcibly enters or intrudes in a home or an occupied vehicle intends to kill or hurt the owner or occupant. It is patterned after a law signed earlier this year in Florida.

The bills also would eliminate the requirement that people who are being attacked have to retreat before responding.

It is completely unreasonable for prosecutors to expect innocent homeowners to be able to discern whether the maniac crawling through their window at 1 a.m. is only a burgler and not a rapist and killer. Actually, anyone who feels comfortable breaking into an occupied home at night is already a sociopath.

I would add the following: Any person who uses or displays a firearm to defend her or her person or property shall be considered immune to prosecution for any law regulating firearm ownership, possession or licensing stemming from any police investigation of that incident.

In other words, when a homowner shoots a burgler with an unregistered handgun, they can’t haul away the homeowner for not having a FOID card.

Hat tip: Liberty 1st Blog.

Aaron’s Free Blog has a lesson about what happens when the government isn’t stifling free trade:

Somalia does not spring to mind as a good place to do business, but in telecoms at least it has something to teach the world. A call from a Somali mobile phone is generally cheaper and clearer than a call from anywhere else in Africa. The trick is the lack of regulation. Somalia has had no government since 1991. It was cut off for a while, but then private mobile companies moved in and found that the collapsed state provided a curious competitive advantage.

No government means no state telecoms company to worry about, no corrupt ministry officials to pay off (there is no ministry), and the freedom to choose the best-value equipment. Taxes, payable to a tentative local authority or strongman, are seldom more than 5%, security is another 5% (more in Mogadishu), and customs duties are next to nothing. There is no need to pay for licences, or to pay to put up masts. It is a vivid illustration of the way in which governments, for all their lip service to extending communications, can often be more of a hindrance than a help.

Obviously, I’m not saying Somalia is a better place to live than the good old U.S. of A.

But this is a lesson to statists in America who see free trade as the enemy.

But there’s an inherent drive in the human soul for telling other people to how to live their lives.