Charged with no crime, but imprisoned anyway:
“Like the movie Minority Report.” In this case, though, it was Thomas Szasz who saw this coming.
Author: Redactor
What if they threw a rebellion and everybody came?
Anything you do these days can get you in trouble with regulators, from serving water without the proper liquor license to (I kid you not) throwing a birthday party without the proper happiness-making license.
But being harassed for doing peaceful things with your own property isn’t about whether you’ve obtained the many licenses “required” to do them. It’s about whether you’ve caught the attention of some vindictive and cortex-deficient bureaucrat.
When Martha Boneta hosted a birthday party for a friend’s daughter on her Virginia farm, she forgot to get a birthday-party-for-little-girls permit; the county noticed; the county threatened fines. Zoning Adminstrator Kimberly Johnson went further, though, ordering Boneta to stop selling produce grown on her land.
Boneta finds it “rather odd” she’s being singled out, when so many Virginia farmers do likewise. Actually, she’d obtained a permit to sell produce, but since then the county’s regulations have grown more complicated. (Bureaucrats can grow things too!)
Supportive local farmers conducted a “pitchfork protest” outside the Board of Zoning Appeals. Alas, Boneta lost her appeal, but will pursue the case with the farmers’ help and that of the Institute for Justice. The travesty has also caught the attention of a local Tea Party group. Indeed, several of the “pitchfork farmers” are also members of the Tea Party chapter in Northern Virginia.
I didn’t obtain a permit to wish them all Good Luck, but I wish it anyway.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jorge Luis Borges
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
In these United States, must you pay $60,000 for the “crime” of publicly telling the truth about someone?
What if you’re a mere blogger rather than a network news anchor?
Back in March of last year, a jury decided that Minneapolis blogger John Hoff must pay $35,000 for lost wages plus $25,000 for emotional distress to Jerry Moore because Hoff had blogged, in 2009, that Moore was involved in mortgage fraud. After Hoff’s post hit the cyberwaves, Moore was booted from the University of Minnesota.
The jury did not find that Hoff had libeled Moore. Instead, Hoff had supposedly committed “tortious interference” with Moore’s employment, presumably by giving the university information that it found convincing and relevant. (Hoff didn’t fire Moore. The university did.)
Luckily, this verdict, though horrific, didn’t provide the final word. The Minnesota Court of Appeals has just overturned it, arguing, in part: “Because truth is an absolute defense to a claim for defamation, truth should also be a defense to a claim for tortious interference with a contract arising out of an allegedly defamatory statement.”
Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy judges the case a “big victory for free speech.” Apparently, the First Amendment can take a licking and keep on ticking.
It’s unfortunate, however, that this truth had to be affirmed at the cost of three years of time, trouble and anxiety for Mr. Hoff.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Bolesław Prus
For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others.
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Alexandre Dumas
Nothing succeeds like success.
There are few things less inspiring than listening to Republican and Democratic Party candidates and their flunkies discuss entitlement reform.
Last weekend, the Romney camp defended its newly acquired reform high-ground from assaults by the current administration. Rep. Paul Ryan had famously charged that the Democrats’ health care reform package of 2010 had “raided” nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars to help extend Medicare-like benefits to younger populations. The Obama camp swears on a stack of, uh, Bibles, that all it did was cut waste and fraud and, yes, expanded services to seniors in the process and . . .
I don’t have the heart, or stomach, or liver (which organ is it that deals with bile?) to diagnose all this with scientific scrutiny, but I will say, off-hand, both sides look pathetic.
Who can believe that politicians and their hangers-on in the bureaucracies have actually honed in on — much less will actually cut —nearly a trillion dollars of waste, fraud and abuse?
Not that they aren’t there. It’s just that waste and fraud seem awfully stubborn, given that even those spending a lifetime in politics have made no progress against them.
Except during campaign speeches,
Washington politicians seem much friendlier to the wasters, fraudsters and abusers than to taxpayers. And the former are better organized, too.
It’s all preposterous.
And the supposed Republican reformers? They are “defending Medicare” so that older people don’t have to lose anything. But if the system is falling apart, it may be that the only fair thing is for every current recipient to lose something, so as not to lose everything.
The unmentionable truth? Waste is part of the system, and the programs are themselves fraudulent and abusive.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Bolesław Prus
Let people be happy according to their own lights.
It’s hot out, and I’m thinking of ants.
Specifically, I’m thinking of the City of Phoenix functionary who told Dana Crow-Smith and her fellow Christian proselytizers that they could not hand out bottled water in the 112-degree heat. She and her fellow “good Samaritans” lacked a permit for vending.
Though, as Brian Doherty noticed on Reason’s website, she wasn’t vending. She was giving.
One needs a vendor’s license to give?
Thankfully, lawyers have come to the rescue, claiming that the city has violated the good Christian lady’s “First Amendment right to freely exercise her religion, her Fourteenth Amendment due process rights, as well as Arizona’s Free Exercise of Religion Act.”
Specifically, Ms. Crow-Smith demands a formal apology from the city, hoping, she says, to avoid a lawsuit. She just wants to be able to hand out water as she spreads the gospel. “I don’t think it’s even about religious beliefs.” she said. “I think anybody should be able to give away water on the sidewalk to anybody.”
Anarchy! Chaos!
Government isn’t about freedom, or even “nice.” On the one hand, governments increasingly force people to behave like the Gospel’s Good Samaritan; on the other, if you spontaneously take on the role yourself, government folk want you to get permission, first.
Call it insect logic. Above the ant colony in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, there is written the ants’ totalitarian motto:
EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.
Hot or cold, we must not let our governments take such insectoid philosophy as a principle. (Oh, and Phoenix? Apologize.)
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Bolesław Prus
A scoundrel will be a scoundrel, even with two university degrees.