Progressive Libertarianism

“* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.

* The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.

* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.

* The 100 protesters in my detainee group were kept handcuffed with their hands behind their backs for 7 hours, denied food and water and forced to sit/sleep on a concrete floor. Some were so tired they passed out face down on the cold and dirty concrete, hands tied behind their back. As a result of the tight cuffs, I wound up losing sensation in my left palm/thumb and still haven’t recovered it now, a day and a half after they finally took them off.” Read More

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The treatment of Bradley Manning is inhumane. The US government is essentially torturing a man for being a whistle-blower of their sinister activities. Read More

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The federal criminal code has grown so large it ensnares everyday citizens who have no idea they are violating the law, a bipartisan group of legal experts told a House panel. Read More

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By: Stephen Carter

When I was in high school I always stood and always recited the Pledge of Allegiance because that was what I believed we were supposed to do. It was all I had ever known and I was just following what everyone else did. Some other students refused to participate though and they caught a lot of hell for it and I often felt that they didn’t deserve to be berated by teachers for refusing to participate since that was simply them exercising their freedom of choice.

When I got older though and I began to look at life and government differently, I realized a few things. Read more…

Stephen Articles, PL Contributors

The REINS Act would require an up-or-down, standalone vote in Congress and the President’s signature on all new major rules before they can be enforced on the American people, job-creating small businesses, or State and local governments. Major rules are those that have an annual economic impact of $100 million or more. Read More

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US Attorney General Eric Holder is in hot water again over Operation Fast and Furious, in which federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives lost track of hundreds of guns they had encouraged firearms dealers to sell to suspected traffickers. It’s the big sequel to BATFE’s Operation Wide Receiver in which multiple guns were sold to suspected cartel buyers under BATFE surveillance in 2006 and 2007.

But the plot thickens, and goes in a direction that probably shouldn’t be surprising: Documents obtained by CBS News strongly suggest that BATFE agents had intended to use Fast and Furious guns to support their demands for tighter administrative regulations on gun sales, particularly requiring dealers to report the sale of multiple rifles to the same person within a certain time period.

Where to even begin unraveling this one? Read More

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What began as an attempt to restrain foreign piracy on the Internet has morphed into a domestic “kill switch” on First Amendment freedom in the fastest-growing corner of the marketplace of ideas. Read More

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So how has the Patriot Act fared as a defense against terrorism? The act has been used in 1,618 drug cases and only 15 terrorism cases. Read More

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Student loan debt is the latest economic crisis du jour. The standard pundit blames the students, and in some respects their vitriol has a semblance of validity. Read More

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It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be. Read More

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By: Stephen Carter

It just doesn’t seem like you get much justice when it comes to dealing with the government, especially when you’re defending yourself from it.

Most have experienced this before, whether they realized it at the time or not, and it is remarkable that we have not conceived of something better, at the very least cried out against the injustice. When the government gets you in its sights, often the easiest thing to do at the time is comply and hope it goes away. What exactly are we talking about here you ask? Read more…

Stephen Articles, PL Contributors

In sum, police departments are pressured to show productivity, and these kinds of arrests are relatively safe and easy, involving “clean,” high-quality arrestees. Moreover, these arrests provide good training for rookies, deliver overtime pay for cops, allow supervisors to account for their underlings, and act as a net to get as many people into the system as possible, all at a cost borne entirely by the victims — the arrestees. Read More

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An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State 2011 Edition

An evaluation of the U.S. federal regulatory enterprise by economists Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain finds annual regulatory compliance costs hit $1.752 trillion in 2008.

Given 2010’s actual government spending or outlays of $3.456 trillion, the regulatory “hidden tax” stands at an unprecedented 50.7 percent of the level of federal spending itself.

Regulations are killing the efficiency of the private sector.

Read the report here in pdf format

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We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason. Read More

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A bill put forward by Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) would do what libertarians and conservatives have long wished for: effectively end the Federal Reserve.

The National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act of 2011 would place the Federal Reserve, a private, qusai-governmental institution that controls the nation’s monetary policy, under control of the U.S. Treasury. It would also implement new rules for the financial industry, in hopes of ending the worst abuses that created the 2008 financial collapse and the ensuing recession. Read More

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Advocating for a controversial legal tactic known as jury nullification can get U.S. citizens prosecuted for jury tampering, according to one Manhattan prosecutor who’s pursuing that very charge against a 79-year-old former chemistry professor. Read More

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Border Patrol agents pursue smugglers one moment and sit around in boredom the next. It was during one of the lulls that Bryan Gonzalez, a young agent, made some comments to a colleague that cost him his career. Read More

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Protests are ramping up around the country and police are cracking down hard, as we’ve seen pictures and videos of police brutality and law-abiding protesters being arrested or sent to the hospital. We’ve even seen people who were doing absolutely nothing but sitting on a curb being pepper sprayed by the police. Journalists have been arrested while covering the protests as well. Read more…

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Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iranian mullah. Sitting crosslegged on your Persian rug in Tehran, sipping a cup of chai, you glance up at the map of the Middle East on the wall. It is a disturbing image: your country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is surrounded on all sides by virulent enemies and regional rivals, both nuclear and non-nuclear. Read More

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On Friday, a group of University of California, Davis students, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement on campus, became the latest victims of alleged police brutality to be captured on video. The videos show the students seated on the ground as a UC Davis police officer brandishes a red canister of pepper spray, showing it off for the crowd before dousing the seated students in a heavy, thick mist. Read More

The officer involved has now become quite the internet meme, one of them shown below.

Stephen Articles, Images

By: Stephen Carter

Supply and demand is a simple economic function that works on very basic principles that everyone should learn and know. Read more…

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Houses built from hemp have been found to use less energy, create less waste and take less fuel to heat than conventionally constructed homes. Read More

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A post-imperial virus has infected foreign policy. We’ve been here before, we know the human cost, and now we must stop. Read More

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Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does — carefully stored for further use at tiny “cooperative security locations,” known informally as “lily pads” (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military “sites” abroad. Read More

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FOR decades the legal industry has operated as a monopoly, which has been made possible by its self-imposed rules and state licensing restrictions — namely, the requirements that lawyers must graduate from an American Bar Association-accredited law school and pass a state bar examination. The industry claims these requirements are essential quality-control measures because consumers do not have sufficient information to judge in advance whether a lawyer is competent and honest. In reality, though, occupational licensure has been costly and ineffective; it misleads consumers about the quality of licensed lawyers and the potential for non-lawyers to provide able assistance.

Rather than improving quality, the barriers to entry exist simply to protect lawyers from competition with non-lawyers and firms that are not lawyer-owned — competition that could reduce legal costs and give the public greater access to legal assistance. Read More

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Being innocent does not matter. Not being arrested or convicted of a crime is no protection. With amazing ease, the government can take everything you own. And to recover it, you must prove your innocence through an expensive and difficult court proceeding in which a severely lowered standard of evidence favors the government. This is civil asset forfeiture. Read More

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Why the State Demands Control of Money

by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Imagine you are in command of the state, defined as an institution that possesses a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state and its agents itself, and, by implication, the right to tax, i.e., to unilaterally determine the price that your subjects must pay you to perform the task of ultimate decision making. Read more…

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A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas. Read More

– How many innocent people have been abused by corrupt cops? It won’t end until we stand up against these injustices.

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The eighth-grade students gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must

take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way. Read More

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The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found. Read More

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