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.

Don’t Conflate The Michael Brown And Eric Garner Cases

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Paleolibertarianism, Race, Racism

Not only the “basics of anatomy and breathing,” in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, were flouted in “taking down” of Eric Garner, who was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him.

Flouted too was the humanity, empathy and the most primitive, basic intelligence in dealing with a man who was struggling to breathe. As a mother of an asthmatic, I know that you do not mess with a person’s oxygen supply. Garner’s manner of death, by the way, conjures the manner in which the fragile Carol Anne Gotbaum (a petite 45-year-old, who weighed 105 pounds) met an untimely demise. Gotbaum was likely asphyxiated in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor by a few corpulent cops.

That said, here are the salient factors to bear in mind:

* The cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner: never the twain shall meet. On the facts, the incidents are entirely different. This the tape of Eric Garner’s last moments shows in abundance. The evidence of police wrongdoing there is incontrovertible. Evidence shows exactly the opposite in the case of Brown.

* Garner was a victim of the police (not so Brown). But racism? Nonsense on stilts! Racism is the cudgel with which the “Racism-Industrial-Complex” hits whitey about the head to keep sissified WASPs in line. For the most, the masses marching against the Garner homicide are, as interviews demonstrate, so dumb, they can’t much articulate why they are marching.

* Cops are equal opportunity offenders: They aggress against whites more or less equally, factoring into account the disproportionate representation of blacks among the population of law-breakers. (Except that whites don’t march.) Warns John Lott:

If you’re going to correctly compare the rates at which police kill black and white male teenagers, you have to compare teenage crime rates. You can’t just compare crime rates among the entire black and white populations. The rate that these teenagers commit murder, not including rape and other less serious crimes, also provides a somewhat better measure of the perceived threat that they might pose to police.
Among blacks, teenage crime is much more prevalent. Based on the most recent available FBI crime numbers, black male teenagers were nine times more likely to commit murder than were their white counterparts. That’s right, nine times, and the gap in these urban areas is undoubtedly even larger.
After adjusting for murder rates, black male teenagers are still killed by the police 2.3 times as often as whites. This is a considerable difference — but again, over-representation of urban areas in the data set could be a big part of the explanation.

* Whites practice universalism. They march against injustice, real or perceived, perpetrated against blacks. Not so blacks. Blacks are the quintessential tribal racialists.

* Laws that criminalize naturally licit trade kill. Garner was selling his own loose cigarettes on a street corner. (He had just “helped to break up a fight on [that] busy street in Staten Island.” ) Such items are contraband in the City:

Last January, the city passed stronger penalties for selling loosies and other illegal cigarettes and in early July, reports the Daily News. The NYPD’s Chief of Department, Philip Banks, specifically called for crackdowns on loosie sales in Staten Island. “Among the specific public complaints of illegal activity in that area included the sale of untaxed cigarettes as well as open (alcohol) container and marijuana use and sale offenses,” an NYPD spokesman told the News.

MORE.

Had Garner’s conduct not been criminalized by the criminals of today’s Tammany Hall, he’d be alive.

Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon

Economy, Education, English, Literature, Objectivism, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture

“Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND. The WND version has been scrubbed of the “salacious sex scene,” excerpted below, which happens to be required reading in some kids’ English class:

The fraught relationship between state and society carries over into classroom and town hall. Something of a commonplace in police state USA is the scene in which a citizen is arrested for speaking his mind to a public official, pedagogue or politician.

Our story begins with a dad, William Baer, a lawyer, I believe, who resides in New Hampshire, the state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” For speaking out of turn at a school board meeting, Baer was cuffed and carted out of a forum of educrats and obedient parents, herded together at the Gilford high school. An arrest and a charge of disorderly conduct followed—Baer, after all, had exceeded the talk time allotted to him.

“It was basically, you make a statement, say what you want and sit down,” the dad told a local television station. “‘Sit down and shut up’ … [is] not how you interact with adults.”

In the background to the online YouTube clip of the event one can hear the dulcet voice of a female emcee, delighting in the petty abuse of power over a powerless parent.

Mr. Baer was protesting a novel which was required reading in his 14-year-old daughter’s English class: “Nineteen Minutes” by home girl Jodi Picoult. (One of Australia’s finest writers, also the copy editor of this writer’s last book, relates that every time he gets on a train or a bus, there seems to be some female or three reading a Jodi P. “masterpiece.”)

Easily more offensive than the salacious sex scene on page 313 of Picoult’s novel is the rotten writing throughout:

“‘Relax,’ Matt murmured, and then he sank his teeth into her shoulder. He pinned her hands over her head and ground his hips against hers. She could feel his erection, hot against her stomach. ”
… She couldn’t remember ever feeling so heavy, as if her heart were beating between her legs. She clawed at Matt’s back to bring him closer. “‘Yeah,’ he groaned, and he pushed her thighs apart. And then suddenly Matt was inside her, pumping so hard that she scooted backward on the carpet, burning the backs of her legs.
… (H)e clamped his hand over her mouth and drove harder and harder until Josie felt him come.
“Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her.”

The book’s titillating topics—bullying, school shootings, teen sex and pregnancy—verge on the political. Inculcating kids early on with these cumbersome, constricted constructs serves to stunt young minds. The young reader is intellectually disemboweled, as he is steered into thinking along certain narrow, politically pleasing lines. …

… Without the literary canon, young minds are doomed to become as dim and sclerotic as those of the educators who assign them the piss-poor reading material aforementioned

… Read the rest. “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND.

Who You Gonna Call? Oath Keepers

Business, Free Markets, GUNS, Judaism & Jews, Private Property

If there’s something strange
in Ferguson
Who you gonna call?
Oath Keepers!—adapted from Ghostbusters

Sam Andrews, “Yale-educated attorney and former army paratrooper,” is the heroic founder of “The Oath Keepers,” which “claims to have active chapters in all 50 states, as well as an estimated 40,000 members – which,” according to Yahoo News, “would make it one of the fastest growing far-right organizations in the world.”

Sam and his merry men rescued damsel-in-distress Natalie DuBose, proprietor of “Natalie’s Cakes and More,” which “was broken into and looted” in Ferguson.

“I didn’t have the extra savings or extra money to replace everything that was destroyed,” she told ABC News following the vandalism. “The threat of not being able to take care of your children makes you feel like less than a human being.”
DuBose’s story caught Andrews’ attention. He was watching the news at home 40 miles away.
“I can’t even imagine a governor that would leave a woman like this and her business to burn, like they did,” Andrews said. “But I value this woman as much as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Dressed in full camouflage and armed with an assault rifle and handgun – [Sam] climbs to the roof of a dentist’s office to begin his nightly surveillance. … the Oath Keepers …is … taking up armed positions on the streets and rooftops with the intent of protecting local businesses.”

He says he’s here to defend “the best part of America, the creative part, the small businesses, the hardest working people in the United States of America. To defend them from arson.”

Oath Keeper Sam Andrews sounds right, not far right, as Yahoo “News” would have it.

… What separates the Oath Keepers from other militia groups is that they recruit men and women of the military and law enforcement – vowing to disobey “unconstitutional orders” from what the group sees as an increasingly tyrannical president and government.

But what do you know? More often than not, the police is not on the side of private-property owners and their protectors.

St. Louis County Police declined an interview with ABC News, but confirmed that it is investigating whether the Oath Keepers are breaking the law by providing security without a license.

This must lead one to a sneaky suspicion that with government controlled law-enforcement, serving and protecting private property is secondary to monopolizing the production of defense.

St. Louis County Police has an illiberal partner in who else but the “Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.” It “called the Oath keepers an ‘extremist, anti-government group.’”

What’s new?!

“Everything that they say [they] stand for is based on this notion that the world and the government is going to become a dictatorship to try to prevent Americans from having their freedoms,” said director Oren Segal.

Blah, blah, blah.