Category Archives: Criminal Injustice

Addicted to that Rush

Criminal Injustice, Drug War, Media, The Zeitgeist, War on Drugs

It seems authorities are Addicted to that Rush; they can’t stop badgering Limbaugh about his consumption choices. Having arbitrarily decided that ingesting pain-killers is infinitely worse for individual and “society” than compulsive eating, bungee jumping, alcohol or tobacco consumption, the policy pinheads have proceeded to preemptively trample the constitutional rights of people like Limbaugh, before the foreseeable harm to “society” can occur.

Lysander Spooner, the great 19th-century theorist of liberty, held that government had no business treating vices as crimes. “Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another.”

This classical liberal thinks that “incarcerating people for their consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder. Moreover, if for harming himself a man forfeits his liberty, then it can’t be said that he has dominion over his body. It implies that someone else ‘government’ owns him.” (May 8, 2002)

Be mindful that law-enforced medical treatment must also be volubly opposed. The coercive, therapeutic state is a very poor substitute for the avenging state.

Having come up hard against the reality of it, you’d think Limbaugh would have at last leapt in to denounce the Federal government’s War on Drugs. Even National Review has done an about-face. But Limbaugh is too busy hobnobbing in Washington. (Read “Rush Goes to Washington clichés. You’ll want to barf if you’re my kind of person.)

The co-dependency Limbaugh has with the state is by far the more dangerous one.

Fierce, Fabulous Fallaci

Classical Liberalism, Criminal Injustice, Critique, Free Speech, The Zeitgeist

Here’s an interview with Oriana Fallaci in The New Yorker that doesn’t do her justice. Fallaci is unique in the annals of journalism. No superlative can properly describe the kind of irreverent grilling she subjected her interviewees to. The clubby, tête-à -têtes journalists conduct with their overlords are a disgrace—they’ll never come close to Fallaci’s skin-them-alive inquisitions.
Omitted from this interview is how Fallaci began her exchange with Qaddafi. It approximates the following paraphrase: “So your manifesto is so small and insignificant it fits in my powder puff. Why should anyone take you seriously”?”
When I attended journalism school, my teachers held her up as the iconic role model to emulate (of course, this would be unheard of in the left-liberal, groupthink dominated journalism schools of today). Thus one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received was Reginald Firehammer’s. In “The Passion of Principles,” his review of my book for the Randian Free Radical, he likened my passion to Fallaci’s. The passion, perhaps, but never the courage, the life-force, or the capacity for adventure.
The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot depicts Fallaci as pathologically anti-authoritarian. Is there any other way to be? Talbot, moreover, likes Fallaci’s classically liberal feminism, but flagrantly frames her crusade against Islam as a function of waning faculties. Yes, Fallaci is out of place in youth-worshipping America, where the lukewarm nonchalance of a Wonkette and her “Whatever” Generation is considered the ideal intellectual and existential temperament.
It would, however, be a grave mistake not to heed Fallaci’s warnings. This is an immensely cultured woman, steeped in the past. She understands history and the forces that shape it. More material, she has lived it.

Enron: Criminal Conviction Absent Proof of Intent

Criminal Injustice, Enron

As the Associated Press has reported, “Former Enron Corp. chiefs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted [today] of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud in one of the biggest business scandals in U.S. history.” (Curious about what Stephen Bainbridge has termed the Left’s penal philosophy? Check out “Bend over Kenny-Boy” at Air America. Foul and cruel).

Securities Fraud? Read “Communism in Capital Markets” to find out what I think of that charge. Wire fraud? Observe what libertarian economist Pierre Lemieux has to say: “Mail and wire fraud are just manufactured crimes by the Surveillance State—crimes that do not exist in civilized countries. Fraud, defined in its politically correct, anti-business, catchall sense of today, has come to mean what the state does not like.”

But mainly, has intent been proven? Have the self-righteous prosecutors, preening for the cameras, proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the men at the helm of this once-fantastic corporation intentionally made predictions that didn’t pan out? Or that their exuberant optimism, which translated—if my recollection serves me—into aggressive bookkeeping, was intended to deceive and defraud?

Has this been proven? Hardly. Even so, as Bill Anderson has repeatedly maintained, cases like this belong in civil court.

As for the market, it certainly doesn’t need the prosecutors or the regulators. The market punctured the dot.com hype, and it did the same to Enron. If you recall, the saga began when Enron came up with an innovative way to trade energy. Soon, other companies got a whiff of the initial exorbitant profits, entered the same market, and competed away the Enron advantage, putting the squeeze on the company’s margins.

When the company emerged as no more than hedge funds and hot air, the same self-regulating market saw companies wooing the wary investor with open accounting practices, offering transparent, cash-flow-based financial statements, as well as vouching that their auditors do not double up as consultants, ala Arthur Andersen.

However, the people were angry, even though many of Enron’s employees had made the kind of money off the company you and I will not see in our lifetimes. They hoisted their pitchforks, and Bush responded with regulation first (The “Sarbanes-Oxley Act” aka the Corporate Corruption Bill), and prosecutions later. All very sad.

Afghani Judiciary is Criminal, Not ‘Conservative’

Criminal Injustice, Islam, The State

In the matter of Afghanistan V. Abdul Rahman: Rahman faces the death penalty for converting to Christianity. The Christian Science Monitor characterizes the case as showing “the tension between the more Western approach being advocated by Karzai’s government, and more conservative elements in the country.”

Come again! Conservative elements? These are criminal, not conservative, elements.

By natural law standards, to kill someone for of his beliefs is a crime. Natural justice is immutably true; it is the ultimate guide to what’s right or wrong. The law of the state—any state—ought to be rejected and condemned when it conflicts with natural law.

Most of what Bush does is naturally illicit, but that’s another story.