There may be some debate over what weapons this group of people were carrying, but there is no debate over what happened after U. S. helicopters opened up on them with 30mm cannon fire.  They then proceeded to shoot unarmed civilians, including children, trying to evacuate the wounded.  At least 12 people were killed and the two children wounded.

Perhaps most sickening were the comments on the radio after the engagement, urging one of the wounded, Reuters driver Sameed Chmagh, to pick up a weapon (if indeed that’s what he was doing) so he could be shot again, or that it was these people’s fault for “bringing their children into battle”, never mind that they weren’t looking for battle; the Army helicopters shot them without warning as they tried to assist the wounded.

Perhaps someone can explain how we’re any more free now, because I’m having difficulty seeing it.  In fact there’s no rational explanation for how these wars, or any wars, have ever helped us maintain our freedoms.  We seem to be less free now than at any point in the past 200 years, and it’s not because radical Muslims hate our wealth and decadent culture.  It’s because our rulers must continually find “enemies” to threaten us, from within and without, to maintain their authority.

These wars were started by the last regime, and this atrocity occurred on George W. Bush’s watch; yet Barack Obama has made no real effort to reduce American troop presence in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the latter case has even escalated military operations.  Yet Obama campaigned on promises to get troops out of Iraq and harshly criticized Bush’s handling of both wars.  The president has changed, the party has changed, but the regime has not.  Nor has the rhetoric to justify the continued prosecution of overseas conquest.

Republican wars, Democrat wars — it hardly matters anymore who is to blame for them.  They are now just imperial campaigns, with all the horrors and enormous cost in blood and treasure they entail.  But empires inevitably fall.

[Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard]

Ramon Espinosa / AP

When can you trust the state?  Never.  It’s a hard lesson to learn, made even more terrible by circumstances beyond anyone’s control.  Nearly five years after Hurricane Katrina, I still remember how cops manhandling an elderly woman and confiscating her gun — her only means of self-defense in a city gone mad.  And then there was the murder of two unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge, which the New Orleans police later tried to cover up.

You can’t trust the state, even when it appears no one else can save you.   And now survivors of the terrible earthquake in Haiti are learning the same, painful lesson:

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

These are not criminals — just people overwhelmed by the quake and subsequent aftershocks, looking for food, water and shelter.  When the Marines evacuated them, they were under the impression that they could join relatives already in the U. S., but instead they were immediately arrested and held for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — despite a current suspension of deportations to Haiti.  All of this, because they didn’t already have a piece of paper from the U. S. government granting them permission to come here.  And yet more immigrants have all but disappeared into ICE’s detention center network, with family unable to find them.  Some that were lucky enough to be freed were granted tourist visas, allowing them to stay for a short while, but not to work.

But even when their loved ones are put in cages for no reason by the government, people can’t seem to let go of their implicit trust of the state:

The government’s actions have been especially bewildering for the survivors’ relatives, like Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen who keeps an Obama poster on his kitchen wall in Norwalk, Conn.  Mr. Ulysse said he could not explain to his nephews, Jackson, 20, and Reagan, 25, why they were brought to the United States on a military plane only to be jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.

The cognitive dissonance of that paragraph is almost dazzling: an Obama supporter who doesn’t understand why the Obama-led government jailed his nephews.  Even with the boot on their neck, people still look to the state to save them.  Will they ever learn?

Never trust the state.

[Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard]

I’m pleased to be part of this venture and plan to be active in contributing to it.  I also hope it will stimulate my muse so that I post more on this blog, which has lain dormant for far too long.  So please subscribe to both!  And look up The Libertarian Standard on Facebook and become a fan.

The penalty [for not carrying insurance as required by the new health care bill] is assessed through the Code and accounted for as an additional amount of Federal tax owed. However, it is not subject to the enforcement provisions of subtitle F of the Code. The use of liens and seizures otherwise authorized for collection of taxes does not apply to the collection of this penalty. Non-compliance with the personal responsibility requirement to have health coverage is not subject to criminal or civil penalties under the Code and interest does not accrue for failure to pay such assessments in a timely manner.

So the IRS might gaze at you sternly and maybe wag a finger or two, but there’s nothing they can do at this point to collect the non-compliance penalty. Megan McArdle lays out the possible consequences:

It would mean that in practice the mandate would only apply to people who get tax refunds; otherwise, just write the IRS a check for everything except the mandate. And since you don’t have to get a tax refund–you can have your employer change your withholding–anyone who doesn’t want to pay it, wouldn’t have to.

But it’s not clear that this is what’s actually going to happen. If the IRS can reorder the priority of the tax dollars they take from you, then they can simply put any funds towards the mandate first. That way, if you attempt to go without insurance and then pay the IRS everything except the mandate penalty, you’ll end up with a tax liability the exact size of the mandate penalty . . . for which they can now garnish your wages, put tax liens on your house, and otherwise do all the nasty stuff that they are authorized to do under Subtitle F.

Naturally I’m all for not providing government revenue agents with more authority to steal money from me, although I suspect that the enforcement problem will be fixed sooner than later (the personal responsibility clause itself doesn’t begin until 2014).  But just imagine how much revenue the IRS would collect, if it could not threaten taxpayers with imprisonment.  It might just be enough to cover the printing costs on Obama’s health care bill.

In the meantime, to paraphrase Captain Barbossa, consider this rule more like…a guideline.

(Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard)

My youngest daughter was watching Ni Hao, Kai-Lan on Nick Jr. tonight, and in one episode Kai-Lan and her friends make hats to wear in a parade.  Rintoo (the tiger) has made a hat of flowers, twigs and pine cones, which Ho-Ho (the little monkey) copies almost exactly; the only difference is that Ho-Ho’s hat has two pine cones while Rintoo’s has three.  When Rintoo sees Ho-Ho’s hat, he yells at Ho-Ho to take the hat off, and then stomps off and says he doesn’t want to be in the parade anymore because he wanted his hat to be “special”, and that no one else should have a hat like it.
 
So Kai-Lan takes Rintoo to a bakery where Mr. Fluffy (the baker mouse) has baked a special cake for the parade, only to find out another friend has baked a cake just like it because she liked how it looked.  Rather than become angry, Mr. Fluffy is very happy that someone liked his cake so much that they wanted to copy it.  So Rintoo learns that there’s nothing wrong with Ho-Ho copying his hat.  In fact Rintoo thinks his hat is even more special because Ho-Ho wanted one just like it.  He even finds a third pine cone for Ho-Ho’s hat so they match exactly.
 
A gentle but effective lesson in how ideas can be shared without hurting anyone else.

As a visitor I could only experience the awesome nanny state that is California in very limited doses.  It is unfathomable to me what it must be like to live there, let alone during a monumental economic crisis.

But it hits you as soon as you cross the border: just a mile or two in on I-80, you must stop at an Agricultural Inspection station and declare any organic material brought with you, such as fruits and vegetables or house plants.  Depending on their source, some products are banned entirely from entering California, ostensibly to protect the state’s agriculture from damaging pests, but more likely serving as a form of protectionism for the state’s farmers.  Not that we let it bother us; all we had were some apples we had bought for the trip, and we told the bored-looking inspector “no” when he asked us if we had any fruits or vegetables on board.  Civil disobedience!

Then there was the task of finding a supermarket near our hotel so I could pick up some milk and a few other items.  It should have been easy enough; there’s a Safeway almost literally around the corner from the hotel, but I drove past it twice without seeing it.  Why?  Because there were no visible signs near the road identifying the store.  It had a marquee sign on its façade, but the trees lining the boulevard obscured it.  That led me to notice that there were virtually no freestanding signs anywhere in the surrounding business areas.  Just a coincidence, or the inevitable result of burdensome regulations?  Whatever the case, it made a simple economic transaction more difficult than it should be.

(On the other hand, I have to say that California probably has the best-landscaped freeways in the country.)

These are mere nuisances for visitors, however.  My brother-in-law, who is executive chef at an Italian restaurant in San Mateo (and I can’t recommend the place highly enough–the food there is sublime; try the sanddabs if they’re available!), has to deal with far greater licensing and regulatory headaches.  Some of them his restaurant has been able to avoid because it’s been around for nearly 20 years and is exempt from some regulations, but if he had to start that same restaurant today, the cost of regulatory compliance would be nearly prohibitive.

And then there’s the higher-than-average taxes, the near-strangulation of the auto industry by agencies such as CARB, the implosion of the long-overvalued housing market. . . .

Yet there is a lot I like about California.  The cultural attractions are first-rate, even while recognizing many of them enjoy large tax subsidies (this is true just about everywhere, of course).  We especially enjoyed the Exploratorium, an interactive science museum, and the Asian Art Museum, with its incomparable collections of sculptures, paintings, metalwork and jewelry.

But what stood out most for me was the simple ability to walk into any grocery store (or even convenience stores, at least in Nevada) and pick up a bottle of wine or distilled spirits.  You can’t do this in Colorado.  The independent liquor store lobby has squashed every attempt to allow more options to consumers, because naturally they fear being undercut by the big stores.  Like California’s border inspection stations, this type of protectionism only helps specific classes while hurting everyone else.

So California, at least for now, falls into that “nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there” category.  It was good, relatively speaking, to return home and deal with the familiar nuisances of Colorado’s nanny-state laws rather than the unfamiliar rat’s nest of the Golden State.

(The Daily Cuts will return tonight!)

After a near-eight-month hiatus, I don’t think an extra week will make much of a difference.  See you next weekend!

Allow me to toss a glass of cold water on these hopeful musings.

It’s true that D. C.’s gun ban did nothing to reduce its murder rate.  Chicago, which banned handguns in 1982, continued to see its murder rate rise, reaching a peak of 33.9 per 100,000 in 1992 before dropping (and it has dropped dramatically, to as low as 15.6 per 100,000 in 2004).  But it’s still nearly three times the national average.  And the large drop in the murder rate has been attributed more to intensive policing tactics in high-crime areas than to the gun ban.

Conversely, it’s inconclusive that lifting restrictions on guns acts as a deterrent to violent crime, at least in urban areas.  Texas has perhaps the most relaxed gun laws in the nation, but its largest city, Houston, saw a dramatic spike in its murder rate following an influx of refugees from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (but it has started to decline this year).  Michigan liberalized its permit requirements in 2002, but Detroit ranks first in the country in homicides, at more than 47 per 100,000.  Whether in the hands of law-abiding citizens or criminals, it isn’t the presence of guns that drive violent crime.  It just happens to be the tool of choice for those who perpetrate crimes, and where legal, those who wish to defend themselves.

Dreaming about a substantial drop in D. C.’s murder rate as a result of Heller, then, ignores all the other factors that can contribute to crime: high population densities, low incomes, crumbling public infrastructure, poor educational systems, family deterioration, drug addiction, etc.  Solving these problems requires a far more nuanced policy approach than simply banning guns or allowing them anywhere.  And the statistics do make clear that of all the tools state and local governments have to fight crime, restrictive gun laws are among the least effective.

Other approaches, such as the “broken windows” tactics used by police in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver, have had a lowering effect on those cities’ violent crime rate, though not always on murder itself.  But that, too, comes at a cost of civil rights violations and even more disturbing, the rapid militarization of local police departments.  Former NYC mayor and Presidential also-ran Rudy Giuliani often touts his “get tough” attitude on crime, ignoring the fact that arrests for petty drug offenses skyrocketed during his tenure, and disproportionately targeted minorities, among other abuses perpetrated by city police.

What, then, can we really expect as the fallout from Heller?  Probably not a magical drop in crime in the country’s inner cities, and certainly not over the short term.  There are still many policy issues regarding gun regulation to sort out, and it will probably take many more years of litigation to resolve them.  None of the solutions to fighting violent crime will come easily.  But the simplest policy, the one that politicians grasp for when they need a populist feather for their cap—abrogating an individual’s right to self-defense which has existed long before the Second Amendment was enshrined in the Constitution—is the worst solution of all.

80. Aside from the top-secret Camp 7 within the Gitmo terrorist camp, it’s now possible that detainees convicted of terrorism could face the death penalty and be executed on Gitmo, which would be “largely beyond the reach of U. S. courts”.

81. Voter confusion over a poorly-designed ballot in Los Angeles County may have led to as many as 776,000 “Nonpartisan” ballots to be ignored in the vote count.

82. Do you have any undeclared vegetables, plants or hard drives?  Customs agents are seizing computers and other electronic devices, without a warrant or even probable cause, from international travelers and copying any data found on them.

83. The smell of drug money: an Oregon man is busted for running an indoor marijuana farm after a bureaucrat notices that the money he used to pay a tax bill smelled like pot.

84. Narcs for the New World Order, unite!  United Nations anti-drug bureaucrats claim that new marijuana vending machines in California violate international drug treaties and should be shut down.  And the DEA threatens San Francisco landlords with property seizure if they continue to rent to medical marijuana dispensaries, even though they are legal in California.

85. The Feds seize cash, computers and financial records of a Denver business which they say operated a high-end prostitution ring, but have not arrested or charged the owner or employees with a crime.

86. It’s for the children, pt. 2: Boston cops go door-to-door in poor neighborhoods, “asking” if they can search the house for illegal guns.

87. In the wake of a Lima, Ohio SWAT raid in which a young woman was shot to death and her one-year-old son wounded, protesters at the Lima City Council meeting are greeted by SWAT snipers on the rooftops.

88. A Barstow, Calif. man is also greeted by SWAT, in the form of a flash-bang grenade thrown into his home, causing second- and third-degree burns.  They then drag the disabled man out on his porch, where he is kicked and beaten.  “They weren’t acting like professional policemen,” observed a neighbor. “They were acting like thugs.”