Category Archives: Natural Law

UPDATED: Eric Garner: 100% Innocent In Libertarian Law (Note On Natural Law)

Free Markets, Justice, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law, Private Property, Regulation, The State

To the libertarian, the case of Eric Garner is as simple as it is sad. In libertarian law, Eric Garner is innocent as a newborn babe. It all boils down to the distinction between the natural and the positive law. Here again it is useful to contrast the Garner case with the case of Michael Brown (see “Don’t Conflate The Michael Brown And Eric Garner Cases”).

The good libertarian abides by the axiom of non-aggression. Michael Brown, the evidence shows, initiated aggression. He had aggressed against the store keeper and the policeman, who protected himself from this rushing mountain of flesh. In libertarian law, the individual may defends himself against initiated aggression. He does not initiate aggression against a non-aggressor.

Eric Garner, on the other hand, had aggressed against nobody. The “law” he violated was one that violated Garner’s individual, natural right to dispose of his own property (“loosies”) at will. When the enforcers of the shakedown syndicate came around to bust him, Garner raised his voice, gestured and turned to walk away from his harassers. He did not aggress against or hurt anyone of the goons.

“Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician [or policeman], unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, and even killed.” (“Tasers ‘R’ Us.”)

Garner obeyed the libertarian, natural law absolutely. He was trading peacefully and he attempted to walk away from a confrontation peacefully. (More evidence that goes to his character: Prior to his murder, Garner had broken up a street fight.)

The government has a monopoly over making and enforcing law— it decides what is legal and what isn’t. Thus it behooves thinking people to question the monopolist and his laws. After all, cautioned the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, “What is legally just, may not be what is naturally just.” “Statutory man-made law” is not necessarily just law.

Unlike the positive law, which is state-created; natural law in not enacted. Rather, it is a higher law—a system of ethics—knowable through reason, revelation and experience. “By natural law,” propounded McClellan in “Liberty, Order, And Justice,” “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”

Garner was on “public” property. Had he been trespassing on private property, the proprietor would have been in his right to remove him. However, Garner was not violating anyone’s rights or harming anyone by standing on the street corner and peddling his wares—that is unless the malevolent competition, which sicced the cops on him, has a property right in their prior profits. They don’t.

UPDATE (12/6): Natural law is an ancient philosophy rooted in very real, non-abstract civilizations, going back to ancient Greece, Rome; Ten Commandments, the Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, Thomists, English common-law, etc. (NOT Rousseau.) It has always been a bulwark against tyranny—that of monarch and mob.

UPDATED: Eric Garner, RIP: This is What Murder-By-Cop Looks Like (WRONG Decision)

Criminal Injustice, Law, Natural Law, Regulation, Taxation, The State

I will be appalled—so should you—if a grand jury decides against indicting the NYPD officers who murdered Eric Garner. A decision is nearing in the case of the New York entrepreneur who was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him.

The city medical examiner has ruled the death of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old father whose death in police custody sparked national outrage, a homicide, saying a chokehold killed him.
The medical examiner said compression of the neck and chest, along with Garner’s positioning on the ground while being restrained by police during the July 17 stop on Staten Island, caused his death.

William Norman Grigg documented and deconstructed the murder by cop of Mr. Garner, chocked to death by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, for being entrepreneurial; trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s “slave patrol” and “Comrade” Andrew Cuomo’s “Cigarette Strike Force.” As always, Grigg gets to the nub of the issue, and beautifully so:

“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me! I’m tired of it! It stops today!”

Eric Garner, a peaceful and productive citizen, had suffered years of pointless and unnecessary harassment by the costumed predators employed by the NYPD. He told one of them to leave him alone. Such impudence by a mere Mundane cannot be tolerated, so Garner was murdered in the street in full public view.

Several plainclothes officers were prowling Garner’s Staten Island neighborhood on the afternoon of July 17 seeking to harvest revenue by catching harmless people in the act of committing petty infractions. Police Commissioner William Bratton describes this as “stamping out petty offenses as a way of heading off larger ones.” in practice, this means authorizing police to commit actual crimes in their efforts to turn harmless people into “offenders.” …

The first fatal mistake Garner made was to act as a peacemaker. The second was to assert his self-ownership in the face of someone employed by the contemporary equivalent of a slave patrol. Within minutes, five police officers attacked him, one of them slipping behind him to apply an illegal chokehold. Garner died of cardiac arrest after being swarmed and suffocated in front of numerous horrified witnesses, one of whom captured the entire event – from first confrontation to homicide – on camera. …

“Eric Garner’s exasperated proclamation ‘It stops today!’ is cognate with ‘Don’t tread on me,’ and his murder by an army of occupation immeasurably more vicious and corrupt than the Redcoats could precipitate a long-overdue rebellion against the omnivorous elite that army serves. …”

UPDATE (12/3): WRONG Decision.

Manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide: Those are the counts that ought to have been easily authorized by a jury empaneled to decide if to indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who was responsible for Eric Garner’s death and oblivious to his helpless pleas for air.

Watch how the cops panic when they realize they’ve killed this poor, innocent (in natural law) man. Watch how they begin ordering observes to leave, so that no witnesses to the REAL crime remain. And observe the absence of any attempt to resuscitate Mr. Garner.

Tyranny Strives For Uniformity: The Onslaught Against Steve Hofmeyr

Free Speech, Media, Natural Law, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, South-Africa

South African media (even more illiberal than America’s) have almost nothing positive to say about Steve Hofmeyr, an immensely popular singer, songwriter, actor and Afrikaner activist. (In the new multicultural South Africa, Afrikaner identity is tantamount to a “racist” identity, naturally.) For speaking out of turn, the forces of tyranny have converged on Hofmeyr with the intent to silence him, and worse. Note the sovietized nomenclature used to bring one man to heel and to induce conformity: Hofmeyr is said to go against “nation-building,” to be “extremely abnormal,” to express a “startling sentiment.”

OMG!

A fellow named Brad Cibane, in training at the American Ivy League (which, increasingly, does not stand for true intellectual excellence) to excel as Conformity Enforcer in South Africa, illustrates his terrifying notion of allowable speech. Deploying somewhat specious distinctions such as the “vertical right to free speech vs. horizontal right to free speech”— Cibane does, however, make a valid point with respect to Hofmeyr’s court injunction against a clown called Conrad Koch. Both have a natural right to speak out of turn. Nevertheless, I do understand Hofmeyr wanting to use all arrows in his quiver because the deck—the state included—is stacked against him and his cause.

The libertarian imperative here is to deal with the meta-issues, leaving out the substance of the offending words: They are irrelevant. As this column has explained, policing what people say for political propriety is not a dance in which libertarians should partake—it is “a dance adopted by the political establishment to cow contrarians into submission. By going on the defensive—allowing themselves to be drawn into these exchanges—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from “polite” company.”

UPDATED: Don’t Get ‘Grubered’ By W’s Groupies

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Constitution, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media, Natural Law, Republicans

The current column, “Don’t Get ‘Grubered’ By W’s Groupies,” now on WND, is just in time for Barack Obama’s logically “broken” address on immigration is . An excerpt:

On Fox News’ “The Five,” one female host energetically involved in genuflecting to George Bush turned to another, a former prosecutor and lingerie model, to solicit her “constitutional take”—those are shudder quotes—on President Barack Obama’s impending executive amnesty. A better constitutional authority on presidential powers than Kimberly G-string is Jonathan Turley, professor of law at George Washington University. …

… Barack Obama’s cringe-factor has crescendoed—so much so that conservatives feel comfortable about dusting off an equally awful dictator, Bush 43, and presenting him and his dynasty to the public for another round. However, when James Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking not only of Obama.

“Speak softly but carry a big stick—the stick being executive power,” preached another Republican tyrant, Teddy Roosevelt. While Turley will be tackling the constitutional quagmire posed by Obamacare, immigration is the latest legislative stick with which Americans are being stuck.

Greg Gutfeld, the one and only neoconservative on that current-affairs show mentioned who entertains and occasionally edifies, is correct about the “broken” inchoate verbiage: “Our immigration system is broken” is a euphemism for the refusal to enforce immigration law (against certain ethno-racial groups). It is statist semantics; Orwellian Newspeaks; a linguistic trick to lead Americans to believe urgent action is required. …

Read the rest. The complete column is “Don’t Get ‘Grubered’ By W’s Groupies,” now on WND.

UPDATE: A reply to a critic, here:

The time to be a follower of Bush ditto-heads is over. Ask the Bush groupies why they ooze over and promote a mass murderer and his ugly art, on what is supposed to be a current-affairs program. This column was simply reporting what’s discussed on these multiplying panels of pig-ignorant loudmouths. (By the way, strong language is not vitriol.) Moreover, why confuse sexiness with smarts/ideas?! There is a reason Ann Coulter and Ms. Malkin don’t get a TV show: they are too clever for the cable master’s comfort. It is up to the consumer of this dross (“The Five,” “Outnumbered”) to know he is being entertained and not edified by most cable and nitwork shows. If he does—he should be OK.