Category Archives: Private Property

UPDATED: Poignant Crime-&-Punishment Comments From Dr. Petit

Crime, Criminal Injustice, GUNS, Individual Rights, Justice, Law, Private Property

“Closure is a term invented by imbeciles” was one. I offered a precis of this particularly heinous case of home invasion (“all burglars are home invaders”) in the post, “You’re The First Line Of Defense For Your Family.” Even better were the biblical, ten-commandments comments of Dr. Petit’s father-in-law, which are not yet online (please send them along if you find them).

UPDATE: “Jennifer Hawke-Petit’s father, Reverend Richard Hawke, told reporters, ‘There are just some people who do not deserve to live in God’s world,’ in reaction to the death penalty sentencing.” Via Inside Edition.

It would be a great blessing if one of the Petit relatives or friends took up self-defense and Second-Amendment activism. Someone very close to me in South Africa watched two men enter his home on a Sunday afternoon, when the family was beside the pool, relaxing. He saw his wife flee, as in slow-motion. He rushed to the safe, where the gun had been kept. Then aimed at the invaders and yelled, “Get the hell out of my home.” They fled like the cowards they were. From then on, this man has carried his piece on his ankle. (The family also needed therapy.)

The sadistic letter the Connecticut killer and rapist Joshua Komisarjevsky wrote from prison makes clear that this is just what he and his accomplice, Steven Hayes (placed on death row today), needed.

“You’re The First Line Of Defense For Your Family”

Crime, Family, GUNS, Individual Rights, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property

I’m a hard-core propertarian. This is, in part, because I believe in the sanctity of life—not only in a man’s right to keep his earnings, but his right—even obligation—to defend his life and the lives entrusted to him with all his might. A right that cannot be defended is no right at all. This is why I’d go as far as to say that all burglaries ought to be considered potential home invasions from both the standpoint of the home owner and the law.

Confronted with a criminal breaking and entering, there’s precious little a homeowner can do to divine the intentions of the invader. It should be assumed that anyone violating another man’s inner sanctum, will be willing to violate the occupant.

A home owner ought to be permitted to deploy deadly force in defense of his home and family. In general, albeit with a growing number of exceptions, the Castle Doctrine proceeds from this premise.

Still, you’ll often find reporters calling a deadly home invasion a “robbery gone wrong.” As though the criminals who invaded the home were some modern-day Jean Valjeans. Or that unless the visitors announce their intentions to harm the homeowners, it must be presumed that they intend only to take a loaf of bread—like Victor Hugo’s protagonist in Les Misérables—sate their hunger, and then leave.

In this context, I was stumped when the always-interesting Lawrence Auster bristled because a news reporter used the more severe term for the crime of breaking and entering:

… burglary is when a person illegally enters private property and steals things. A home invasion is when people illegally enter a home in order to terrorize, harm, or kill the residents… If we start calling all burglaries “home invasions,” we lose the distinction between them.

All burglars are home invaders.

The less said about the 2007 invasion of the home of Dr. William Petit of New Haven, Connecticut, the better. I blogged about it at the time. Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky took great delight in raping mother Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her 11-year-old daughter Michaela Petit, after which they strangled the mom and set the home afire before fleeing. The two daughters died of smoke inhalation.

What killer and rapist Komisarjevsky wrote in a 40-page letter to some author is revealing:

“‘All were compliant,’ he wrote. “This time I took a risk, pulled the trigger, and the chamber was loaded. … The Petit family passed through their fears and into terror. … It was captivating, validating that this pain in me was real. … I was looking right at my personal demon, reflected back in their eyes. … Hayley is a fighter; she tried time and time again to free herself. … Mr. Petit is a coward; he ran away when he thought his life was threatened, and ran away to leave his wife and children to madmen…”

AND:

“I’m ultimately responsible for my own actions. … Had Mr. Petit fought back in the very beginning, I would have been forced to retreat. … You’re the first line of defense for your family not law enforcement.'”

[SNIP]

The fact is that these criminals entered the Petit home through an unlocked door. The least a man can do is lock the house before he retires, and if he refuses to arm himself, let him arm an alarm system.

I don’t mean to be “insensitive,” but skirting this indelicate matter simply will not do. Life is too precious.

UPDATE IV: Forclosure Fracas (Still About Deadbeats)

Business, Debt, Federal Reserve Bank, Law, libertarianism, Private Property, Reason

Vox Day, friend and fellow (libertarian) rebel on WND.COM, has objected to my comments about his bank foreclosure comments in the BAB post titled “Financial Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please).” Vox and I have been exchanging emails on the topic. Vox traces the arguments back-and-forth in his post “A dialogue with Ilana (UPDATED).”

Consider: You’re a homeowners. You have a mortgage with the bank. The title deed is yours; you have a legal right or title to the property. However, this obtains just as long as you honor your mortgage payments. The bank has a lien on the property until you pay-up the mortgage. If you pay your monthly mortgage installments, and the bank has cashed these payments, your bank account will reflect that. If you’ve met these conditions, and the bank, nevertheless, proceeds to foreclose on you—this is an error, and a legal and statistical anomaly; an outlier case.

It is my understanding that Vox refutes the above; says the latter scenario may be the norm, or could easily become the norm due to endemic fraud.

Distilled, I contend that it is almost always true that a necessary condition for a foreclosure is for the homeowner to have failed to make his mortgage payments. It is my understanding that Vox disputes this.

I told Vox that the one article he referred me to “began with a one-case study as its proof. This is statistically worse than insignificant. The article graduated to assertion. Then added another one-case study.” Vox may well be right, “but the data in the column he provided do not prove his case.

I have since Googled some of the terms Vox deploys in his post. One search led me to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. When Ezra does get something right it is only by accident. In any event, the Klein article does not support the Day case (as I understood it), namely that the foreclosed upon are being treated unjustly, even routinely robbed of their property.

Understand: I have no dog in the fracas other than the truth; am quite ready to find for Vox. So far, the hard evidence is missing.

Our debate might be delayed for a while, but it will continue. Stay tuned.

UPDATED I (Oct. 18): Difster’s comment hereunder is mostly waffle unless he is able to address what I wrote in the post: has the homeowner being foreclosed upon been paying his debt or not. He can’t. I really can’t abide argument that doesn’t cleave to reality and evidence. Bring me evidence of all the cases of paid-up homeowners who’ve been foreclosed upon. Present that here, please.

UPDATE II: Judging from this tale of woe, the lawyers for the defaulting borrower are themselves using what they consider irregularities of procedure to try and get their delinquent client’s debt forgiven. I am not saying that “MERS, the electronic mortgage tracking system,” and the banks that use it, are following the letter of the law, but what people seem to be skirting here, much to my horror, is that these borrowers owe money they borrowed. You don’t forgive someone’s debt because the debt-holder’s bureaucracy is bad, or even dubious. And you don’t accuse bankers as a group of robbing home owners of title to their homes, because of problems of paper trail. (As I pointed out here, to argue against the bankers, in this case, on the ground that they are, moreover, embroiled in the fractional reserve system is to make an error of logic, maybe even a categorical error. Along the lines of releasing murderers because justice system is corrupt, etc.)

Note too that nowhere do the delinquent borrowers deny that they have not paid their debts, only that they are struggling “to figure out who owns their loans, who can negotiate loan modifications with them, or even how to get a call returned.”

Also: Borrowers are deploying the very argument the bankers are using: it’s the bureaucracy.

What do you know, it seems that, as outlined in this BAB post, “the latest foreclosure crisis is indeed bureaucratic in nature.”

UPDATE III: The thing to take away from Vox’s WND column today is this line: “the law is very clear on the matter: ‘If the chain of title is broken, then the borrower’s loan is no longer secured by the property.'”

This is the positive law. The fact of the borrower’s debt is unchanged. A took from B in order to buy C. That’s another “chain” to keep in mind.

UPDATE IV (Oct. 19): STILL ABOUT DEADBEATS. From all the reports so far, FBN’s Gerri Willis’ being the latest, it is as I said. The defaulters owe boatloads of money. The bankers bungled the paper work in a manner that verges on the criminal. The reality, in as much as property rights go, comports with my distillation on this post and the one linked to it, “Financial Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please).”

Life In The Oink Sector Revisited

Free Markets, Government, Private Property, South-Africa, The State

“Life In The Oink Sector” detailed the cost to the private economy of the ever-growing public sector, likening the public-private sector relationship to that of “parasite vs. host. The first is sucking the lifeblood of the second. The larger the parasite gets, the weaker the host will grow.”

Now John Stossel takes on the public sector “bankrupting America”:

“NY Transit Union boss, John Samuelsen argues, we are the richest country in the world and can afford it. Really?

Here are some of the facts;

Public pensions have unfunded liability of $1 trillion [1] to $3.5 trillion [2]

Federal workers take home twice pay and benefits [3] as private workers. Local and state workers also make more [4].

Total Pay Benefits

Private $59,909 $50,028 $9,881

Local/state $67,812 $52,051 $15,761

Federal $119,982 $79,197 $40,785

— Average TWU union worker makes $60K without overtime or benefits.

— 25% took 15 or more sick days. Average was 8 sick days.

— Fox average 3 sick days (same for men and women)

— No FOX employee took 15 days

Relative Danger of Jobs (Deaths per 100,000 workers)

— Fishing 128.9

–Logging 115.7

–Iron workers 46.4

–Farmers 39.5

–Firemen 3.8

–Transit workers 1.4

(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, except Transit worker death, that is from interview with TWU Local100 President)

Some people argue that there’s no alternative to the government monopoly on municipal work, but Sandy Springs, Georgia, privatized most of it’s jobs in 2005. Now the city pays about ½ of what it used to pay. It enjoys a $14 million surplus, in addition to funding a $20 million reserve.”

[SNIP]

Incidentally, the most dangerous job—even more hazardous than fishing—is farming in South Africa. The mortality rate (due to murder) among Boers stands at 300 per 100,000.

It’s in my upcoming book (now lingering with the publisher).