Category Archives: The State

When Arms Of The State Wrestle, Citizens Rest

Crime, Government, Law, Regulation, The State

About the feud between the New York Police force and “Clintonian Mayor De Blasio,” Chris Rossini at Target Liberty has this to say: “[G]overnment vs. government battles should be cheered. The more they fight amongst themselves, the better off the rest of us are.”

The New York Times reports that as a result of the fight, the NYPD has been ignoring “low-level offenses” for the last two weeks: For the seven days ending Sunday, officers made 2,401 arrests citywide, compared with 5,448 in the same week a year ago, a 56 percent decline.

Hold on a second!!

Where’s the chaos?

Jeremy Bentham: Very Bad For Liberty, Indeed

Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, The State

The following columns make derisive mention of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The columnist (guilty) assumed (guilty again) that her readers, like many good libertarians (namely, natural-rights libertarians), would identify Bentham’s name as a synonym for statism and collectivism, to distinguish from liberty and individualism.

Libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett, I recall, particularly enjoyed this from “A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts” (7/6/2012):

“Why would George Bush care whether a judicial nominee can tell Blackstone from Bentham, when he can’t?”

“More of a Benthamite bureaucrat than a truth seeker” is from “PATRICIDE AND PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT” (September 11, 2002).

Remember Reno!” (9/8/2006) equated Benthamism with legal excesses, whereby the law, “intended as a bulwark against government abuses,” had become “an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the ‘greater good’—the founders’ Blackstonian view of the law” having “been supplanted by a Benthamism that encourages ambitious prosecutors to discard a defendant’s rights.”

“‘Mad Dog’ Sneddon Vs. Michael Jackson” (7/5/2005) mentions once again the Benthamite notion of “the law as an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the ‘greater good.’”

The Library of Economics and Liberty expounds a little more about Bentham the utilitarian, whose “publications were few,” and whose foundational belief was “that all social actions should be evaluated by the axiom, ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’”

In a word, utilitarianism, and by extension, statism and collectivism.

Counter to Adam Smith’s vision of “natural rights,” Bentham believed that there were no natural rights to be interfered with.

Trained in law, Bentham never practiced, choosing instead to focus on judicial and legal reforms. His reform plans went beyond rewriting legislative acts to include detailed administrative plans to implement his proposals. In his plan for prisons, workhouses, and other institutions, Bentham devised compensation schemes, building designs, worker timetables, and even new accounting systems. A guiding principle of Bentham’s schemes was that incentives should be designed “to make it each man’s interest to observe on every occasion that conduct which it is his duty to observe.” Interestingly, Bentham’s thinking led him to the conclusion, which he shared with Smith, that professors should not be salaried.

In his early years Bentham professed a free-market approach. He argued, for example, that interest rates should be free from government control (see Defence of Usury). By the end of his life he had shifted to a more interventionist stance. He predated Keynes in his advocacy of expansionist monetary policies to achieve full employment and advocated a range of interventions, including the minimum wage and guaranteed employment.

Jeremy Bentham was a thoroughbred statist; the quintessential bureaucrat and social engineer, who devised ways to tinker in oder to optimize the individual pawn’s common-good conduct.

UPDATED: Called On The Carpet By The Cops (Backs To De Blasio)

Government, Law, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Paleolibertarianism, The State

Once again, members of the grieving New York Police force, who turned out to mourn the two cops murdered, turned their collective backs on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. (See why.)

Understandable. And commendable. De Blasio is a crappy human being.

Libertarians fall into grave error when they condemn all policemen as an arm of the state. Structurally, this is indeed so. However, on the individual level, there are very many men who love their work, want nothing more than to serve their communities, and know nothing of the libertarian political philosophy. They simply want to fight the bad guys.

In as much as libertarians must be able to apply a cool head to police brutality and denounce it; they have to be able to comprehend the reverse.

Community policing is well-nigh impossible in a multicultural, fragmented, deeply divided empire, where a cop has little affinity with a community that is no longer his community, but an alien hodgepodge of humanity of DC’s design.

UPDATE (12/28): Backs To De Blasio. Awesome. A well-choreographed shaming of a shameful human being, as tens of thousands of “blue-uniformed police officers, state troopers, corrections officers and firefighters from across the country” turn their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio, in Queens, for maligning them collectively.

Torture A Fig Leaf For Greater Evil

Iraq, Law, Morality, Terrorism, The State

You’ll probably say this is a serious defect, but the CIA torture tempest has never been uppermost in my mind.

The Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the C.I.A.’s interrogation-and-detention program during the Bush era, just like the torture furor that erupted at the time, is nothing more than a foil and a fig leaf; a cover for complicit journalists, jurists, politicians and pointy heads, who all skirted the real issue:

In invading Iraq and vanquishing an innocent people—Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Kerry and the gonzo journos who backed them absolutely, prosecuted an illegal, immoral and calamitous war. Torture is a subspecies of a larger crime. Fussing about it in this context is like harping on a murderer’s traffic violations.