Category: Civil Liberties

Megan McArdle posted about a SWAT raid, and included video. Go watch. She leaves us with:

I don’t know how anyone can watch that video, and think to themselves, “Yes, this is definitely worth it to rid the world of the scourge of excess pizza consumption and dopey, giggly conversations about cartoons.”  Short of multiple homicide, I’m having trouble coming up with anything that justifies that kind of police action.  And you know, I doubt the police could either.  But they weren’t busy trying to figure out if they were maximizing the welfare of their larger society. They were, in that most terrifying of phrases, just doing their jobs.

And in the end, that is our shame, not theirs.

It actually looks like a fairly professionally executed warrant. Shooting the family dog is often SOP for these kinds of operations. Just better hope they don’t serve the wrong house, or the warrant isn’t based on flimsy evidence.

From Marko, who notes that people are giving Major Caudill a major case of the gay phobia:

I’m rightly confused, I am.  If you think that the right to self-defense is a human right, and you don’t like the idea of a gay person exercising it, then it necessarily follows that you don’t think gays should be afforded the whole set of human rights.  If that’s the case, then please stay the f[**]^*k off my side.

If you don’t support the same freedoms for everyone, then you don’t support freedom.  Being in favor of freedom only for yourself and folks mostly like you is no virtue at all.  It requires no sacrifice, no tolerance, and no brainpower.  It will also cost you your pet freedoms sooner or later, once you find yourself as a member of the 49% whose cornflakes the other 51% vote themselves the right to pee on.

In the same vein there’s plenty of people out there who don’t give a whit until it’s their liberty on the line, even though they say they value liberty. I’ve met a few people who are adamite about both legalizing pot, and socializing the medical profession, all in the name of human rights, of course.

* Note the censorship of the language was mine. Not because I give a s**t about it, but because I understand it trips some people’s web filters who are reading from work, and causes the site to block until the offending word is cleared from the page. I will try in the future to be better about this. It’s also why I have the word p0rn in gun p0rn set with a zero in the categories. BTW, if your work uses those kinds of filters, I have sympathy for you. As an IT professional, I’ve refused on a few instances to censor web pages based on keywords. There are good business reasons not to do so.

Looks like they are caving on campaign finance reform, something they’ve long opposed:

The organization will now accept “reasonable” government limitations on contributions to candidates. The ACLU doesn’t say what “reasonable” means, so the government will doubtless supply the definition. This will inevitably benefit those who are already elected and disadvantage challengers. Indeed, for 35 years “reasonable” limits on contributions have demonstrably helped incumbents and suppressed insurgent candidates.

So ACLU gets on board with helping further entrench the Democratic Party. What a sad things they’ve become. I used to respect the ACLU even when I didn’t agree with them, but that’s passing.

David Boaz makes this excellent point at Reason:

Has there ever been a golden age of liberty? No, and there never will be. There will always be people who want to live their lives in peace, and there will always be people who want to exploit them or impose their own ideas on others. If we look at the long term—from a past that includes despotism, feudalism, absolutism, fascism, and communism—we’re clearly better off. When we look at our own country’s history—contrasting 2010 with 1776 or 1910 or 1950 or whatever—the story is less clear. We suffer under a lot of regulations and restrictions that our ancestors didn’t face.

But in 1776 black Americans were held in chattel slavery, and married women had no legal existence except as agents of their husbands. In 1910 and even 1950, blacks still suffered under the legal bonds of Jim Crow—and we all faced confiscatory tax rates throughout the postwar period.

I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery.

I guess Bob McDonnel needs to read this too. A state of liberty, natural law theory to the contrary, is not man’s natural state. It’s only through great effort and never ending struggle that we keep ourselves in this artificial state. This country’s history is about that very struggle, and as Mr. Boaz correctly observes, at various times in our nation’s history, liberty has had the upper hand. But which society would you rather live in?

[W]ould you rather live in a country with a department of labor and even an income tax or a Dred Scott decision and a Fugitive Slave Act?

I said that white Americans probably considered themselves free. But in retrospect, were they? They did not actually live in a free society. They were restricted in the relations they could have with millions of their—I started to say “their fellow citizens,” but of course slaves weren’t citizens—their neighbors. They lived under a despotic power. Liberalism seeks not just to liberate this or that person, but to create a rule of law exemplifying equal freedom. By that standard, even the plantation owners did not live in a free society, nor even did people in the “free” states.

Go read the whole thing.

Clayton Cramer talks about an article he wrote recently about decriminalization of marijuana. I would put myself firmly in Clayton’s first category, namely that I think the social costs of prohibition are higher than an increased incidence of schizophrenia, though the social cost of that is certainly nothing to dismiss. I’d have no problem funneling money we save on the war on drugs toward taking care of the mental illness that result from substance abuse. But I find Clayton’s fourth point interesting:

People arguing that marijuana laws don’t have any influence on behavior–no matter what the laws are, the same number of people will smoke pot. Yet, at the same time, they acknowledge that having it illegal drives up prices, attracting the violent criminals into the trade. Somehow, rising prices don’t affect demand or consumption.

Let me change that around a bit:

People arguing that gun laws don’t have any influence on behavior–no matter what the laws are, the same number of criminals will get guns. Yet, at the same time, they acknowledge that having guns illegal drives up prices, attracting the violent criminals into the trade. Somehow, rising prices don’t affect demand or consumption.

But I suspect that Clayton believes as I do, that the issue is a bit different. I don’t dispute that prohibition would drive the price of guns up, and the number of criminals able to afford guns down. But if I can’t have a gun either, it’s little comfort to me that the guy who robs me on the street threatens to shiv me instead of shoot me, or the guy breaking in my house threatens to beat me with a crowbar instead. Also, much like with Clayton’s argument about alcohol, we’re already an armed society. That genie left the bottle a long time ago. Of course, I also think, with respect to marijuana, that is probably also the case. It’s hard to prohibit something that you can grow in a closet with the right equipment, and if you think about what you have to do to stop something of that, it involves a police state. That’s why I’ll continue to be a proponent of decriminalization. Mental illness we can treat, a police state is a much harder nut to crack.

From Megan McArdle, who speaks of a horrific program by the government to poison the black market alcohol supply during prohibition:

I wish I could say I found it surprising, but it seem to me to be of a piece with too many other brutalities in American law.  We pass a law with the best of intentions, and find it doesn’t work, and so we pass new regulations and policies designed to crack down on non-compliance, until we are brutalizing the population all out of proportion to the original good we were pursuing.  Consider the way we have cracked down on pain medications, impeding the effectiveness of pain control for people in chronic agony out of the fear that somewhere, someone might be getting high.  Or the terrifying authority we’ve handed the IRS, because if anyone gets away with cheating on their taxes, the terrorists will have won, or something.

Gee. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Not what you think. Eugene Volokh has some pretty good coverage of the spying incident where school officials are alleged to have spied on students at home using laptop cameras. Apparently the School District is claiming the feature of activating the cameras was only in case the laptop was reported “Lost to Stolen.”  I guess law abiding gun owners aren’t the only people who are being victimized by this issue:

pon a report of a suspected lost, stolen or missing laptop, the feature was activated by the District’s security and technology departments. The tracking-security feature was limited to taking a still image of the operator and the operator’s screen. This feature has only been used for the limited purpose of locating a lost, stolen or missing laptop. The District has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.…

I guess we’ll find out in court.

UPDATE: Orin Kerr takes a detailed look at the legal issues.