“Local Moralist Doing His Part to End Income Inequality”
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Category: crime and punishment
Would your favorite presidential candidate force women to register for the military draft?
A federal court case, National Coalition for Men v. Selective Service System, is bouncing around the Ninth Circuit. It challenges the male-only draft registration program as discriminatory against men.
Thirty-five years ago, when yours truly was fighting the draft, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a male-only program because women were then barred from combat. Now the All-Volunteer Force has opened all military fields to women, including combat roles. It follows that the federal courts will likely strike down male-only registration.
What will Congress do? What will the next commander-in-chief advocate? Allow the program to end — or mandate that both young men and young women register?
Hillary Clinton answered this question in 2008, during her first run for the presidency: yes, register women for the military draft.
What about the other presidential hopefuls?
Back in 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan pledged to end it, saying that conscription (and registration for it) “destroys the very values our society is committed to defending.”
Sadly, President Reagan continued draft registration, prosecuting me and others.
“The question is nothing less, than whether the most essential rights of personal liberty shall be surrendered,” the great Daniel Webster railed against conscription, “and despotism embraced in its worst form.”
Men and women have an equal right to freedom — not conscription. Free people will always volunteer to defend their country.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Why did Dr. Ben Burris give up his orthodontic license? Where did he go wrong?
Dr. Burris broke the law. He flagrantly violated the hallowed precepts of the Arkansas Dental Practices Act. Let me rinse and spit out the truth: This dentist illegally cleaned people’s teeth.
Not just once — he did it again and again. Often twice a year per patient — or victim, depending on your viewpoint.
Plus, brace yourself, he didn’t merely scrub their choppers, he did so — get this — at very low cost.
We need strong laws to stop such scoundrels.
That bastion of wisdom, the State of Arkansas, has no qualms about Dr. Burris’s qualifications to remove plaque from our incisors, canines and molars, having licensed him to practice dentistry. The problem is actually that Dr. Burris is over-qualified.
Especially to charge low prices!
Burris got licensed in a specialty: Orthodontia. You see, according to state law, a dentist so licensed “must limit his or her practice to the specialty in which he or she is licensed except in an emergency situation.”
Only after terrorist attacks or earthquakes can society risk allowing Orthodontists to daringly and brazenly polish people’s teeth. For less.
This particular statutory tyranny aims to close healthcare markets, minimize patient choice and keep dental costs artificially high. Luckily, beyond being maliciously wrongheaded, Arkansas’s dental law is absurdly foolish.
Dr. Burris dropped the federal court challenge being litigated by the Institute for Justice. Why? He discovered that by simply relinquishing his orthodontic license, he could legally practice orthodontics and clean people’s teeth at low cost.
He just can’t call himself an Orthodontist — but can call the law an ass.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
In The Mouse That Roared, a 1955 comic novel by Leonard Wibberley, a tiny English-speaking country in Europe loses market share for its only export, a wine label, to a cheap American knock-off. Seeking compensation for the loss, the duchy decides to do the only rational thing: declare war on America, and then, after the inevitable defeat, reap the rewards of reconstruction financing.
I was reminded of the book when reading about another of the Obama Administration’s subsidy programs, uncovered by Sen. Rand Paul. The program gives money to illegal aliens deported to their country of origin, El Salvador, to start small businesses.
Sort of a Small Business Administration program for deportees.
But Congress’s involvement is nil, and the SBA has nothing to do with it, either. The program, according to the Rand Paul press release, “is administered by the non-profit Instituto Salvadorno Del Migrante (INSMI — translated to Institute of Salvadorian Migrants) and funded through a $50,000 grant from the taxpayer-backed Inter-American Foundation.”
It is not big money, certainly not by profligate Washington standards. Nor is the premise of the program likely to win it praise from anyone looking for a solution to illegal immigration. Indeed, the best way to describe the program is how Rand Paul’s team did describe it: “absurd.”
In The Mouse That Roared, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick makes a crucial mistake in its plan to profit from American largesse: it wins the war.
But some things haven’t changed since then. The American government throws around money absurdly.
And little countries make fools of Big America.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“The Department of Justice announced [last] week that it’s suspending a controversial program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers,” reports the Washington Post.
The Feds call the paused program “equitable sharing”; as I explained last month, I call it “equitable stealing.”
Even when state and local laws prohibit it, local police have been using this federal program to continue taking people’s money and property without ever convicting them of a crime.
The loophole? They split the loot with the Feds.
Now that has ended. According to the Post, this is the result of “budget cuts” in the recently passed omnibus spending bill; the Wall Street Journal calls it a “reallocation of funds.”
Either way, Happy Holidays!
Yet, sadly, the return to freedom, justice and the American Way may be short-lived.
“The Department does not take this step lightly,” wrote M. Kendall Day, the chief of DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section. “We explored every conceivable option that would have enabled us to preserve some form of meaningful equitable sharing. . . .”
In his letter, he proclaiming a commitment to the principle of guilty-until-proven-innocent and to grabbing people’s stuff, telling state and local and tribal police departments, “We will take all appropriate and necessary measures to minimize the impact of the rescission and reinstate sharing distributions as soon as practical and financially feasible.”
As the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Congress should make sure that never happens.”
Of course, Congress will likely need a mighty nudge from us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
While crime was plummeting throughout the country, last year New Orleans experienced a surge — rapes up 39 percent and armed robberies up 37 percent.
Having reduced its police force by 500 officers due to budget problems, the Big Easy called in Louisiana State Troopers to assist a force “historically mired in corruption.” Yet, there was scant progress in keeping citizens safe.
Then crooks broke into Sidney Torrez’s home and Torrez, known as the “trash king” because he made a fortune hauling trash out of the city after Hurricane Katrina, responded with a $100,000 television ad campaign. “The French Quarter is under siege by criminals,” his TV spot declared; it encouraged citizens to “hold the administration accountable.”
Mayor Mitch Landrieu wasn’t pleased, shooting back that, “If it’s so easy, maybe [Torrez] should just take some of that money and do it himself.”
So, Torrez did, teaming up with Bob Simms, a retired aerospace engineer.
In no time, they developed a downloadable app for smartphones, allowing folks to contact police much like we use Uber to contact a car ride. Torrez donated $500,000 and the Batman and Robin-esque duo hired off-duty policemen outfitted with Polaris golf carts to patrol the French Quarter, the city’s “golden goose.”
Other private donations arrived to support the effort. In just months, crime dropped 45 percent in the Quarter. Now the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau is paying the monthly cost.
Torrez notes that the effort allows “the community a way to self-police,” adding, “I think it can work anywhere.”
“It’s not rocket science,” says Bob Simms . . . the former rocket scientist.
It’s citizen-led government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
America’s would-be gun-grabbers, chiefly in the media and “on the left,” don’t know much about guns.
But they know what they hate.
After the horrific terrorist shooting spree in San Bernardino, MSNBC and CNN went on a shooting-their-mouths-off spree, relentlessly pushing the need for stricter gun control. President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats echoed the theme.
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks went full accelerando, unleashing a foul rant about how “we” are the terrorists and “we” are letting “us” get away with mass murder “every week,” ignoring the statistics that murder rates have gone down, are still going down, and that the rest of the world is being hit with mass shootings too, mainly from Muslim radicals.
When the news came out that the perps were, indeed, Muslim, the barrage of anti-gun talk didn’t stop, though their intellectual ammunition had fizzled.
The president went further off his rocker, calling the guns he wanted to ban “powerful” — though they are of lower caliber than many handguns — while Hillary Clinton talked about the need to ban “assault rifles.”
As has been noted by others, “assault rifle” only means what anti-gun folks say it means, and what they designate as assault weapons are not (contrary to their constant implications) the equivalent of machine guns (which have been illegal for citizen ownership for a long, long time).
Being scared of scary-looking guns is no excuse not to be able to define them. While it would be good to reduce incentives for folks to “go postal” or to commit terroristic acts, we aren’t going to prevent mass shootings by a simple prohibitionary or mere regulatory regime.
That’s for scare-mongers to push. And us to resist.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
If you try to compare those police who take people’s money and property through civil asset forfeiture laws to burglars, who rob folks in more traditional ways, you are just not being fair.
To the burglars.
The Institute for Justice recently released an updated Policing for Profit report showing that federal asset forfeiture topped $5 billion in 2014. The FBI disclosed that in that same year $3.5 billion of value was lost in burglaries.
Then, folks did the math.
Steven Greenhut’s piece at reason.com was headlined, “Cops Now Take More Than Robbers.”
At The Washington Post Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham explained there was an especially big haul in seized assets in 2014, including $1.7 billion from Bernie Madoff. Moreover, the dollar figure for burglary doesn’t include larceny, motor vehicle theft, etc. All such theft combined totaled more than $12 billion that year.
So, law enforcement isn’t stealing quite as much from citizens as the criminals they are supposed to be protecting us from are. Sort of a backhanded compliment, though.
Recent polling finds more than 70 percent of Americans opposed to seizing assets without a criminal conviction, i.e. innocent until proven guilty, but taking cash and cars and stuff from folks never charged with or convicted of a crime has become a big business for “our” government.
When legislation to mildly reform civil forfeiture failed recently in California, Mr. Greenhut called legislators’ votes “about money, not justice.” Ferocious lobbying by the California District Attorneys Association and the California Police Chiefs warned money-grubbing legislators that budgets would take an $80 to $100 million hit.
Theft is apparently quite lucrative. Who knew?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Is freedom a simple matter of drafting a lofty document about respecting the rights of citizens?
Alas, no.
Our Constitution does that, as does Turkey’s and, for that matter, so did the now-defunct Soviet Constitution. Obviously, vigilance is also required. Keeping powerful government agencies respectful of the law — our liberties — and, when not, fully accountable for transgressions, is crucial.
That necessary vigilance is lacking here in America, today.
Your local police — the guys and gals who might respond if, heaven forbid, your home were broken into, or come upon your spouse broken down on a dark, rainy highway — are being encouraged to take people’s stuff . . . for “profit.”
It’s called civil asset forfeiture. This “legal” ability to stop people and snatch their money (or car or what-have-you) without ever charging anyone with a crime forces victims to hire a lawyer to sue the government to prove their stuff is innocent.
Last Friday, I heralded a new Institute for Justice report on the growth of this dangerous practice of official police thievery. At Townhall on Sunday, I pointed out that even when reforms are enacted at the state and local level, federal law enforcement still facilitates civil forfeiture. The Feds encourage locals to continue taking stuff through a federal program known as “equitable stealing.”
No, my bad, it’s actually called “equitable sharing.”
But it’s the same thing, just with the Feds and locals splitting the loot.
We need new laws at the federal, state and local level that abolish forfeiture without a criminal conviction. If our “leaders” won’t act, we can petition at the local level to end this pernicious policy, forbidding any involvement with the Feds.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The Institute for Justice’s new report, Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture, details a “big and growing problem” that “threatens basic rights to property and due process.”
Through both criminal and civil forfeiture laws, governments can seize property used in — or the proceeds of — a crime. Criminal forfeiture requires that a person be charged and convicted of a crime to transfer title to government. Civil forfeiture, on the other hand, allows governments to take people’s stuff without being convicted — or even charged — with a crime.
No surprise that 87 percent of asset forfeiture is now civil, only 13 percent criminal. And governments are grabbing more and more. The federal financial take has grown ten-fold since 2001.
“Every year,” IJ’s researchers document, “police and prosecutors across the United States take hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, cars, homes and other property — regardless of the owners’ guilt or innocence.” Then, the innocent victim must sue the government to have his or her stuff returned.
Incentive to steal? “In most places, cash and property taken boost the budgets of the very police agencies and prosecutor’s offices that took it,” an accompanying IJ video explains.
IJ’s report concludes that, “Short of ending civil forfeiture altogether, at least five reforms can increase protections for property owners and improve transparency.” Those five reforms are improvements, sure, but let’s end civil forfeiture completely.
It’s the principle!
Two principles, actually.
Civil forfeiture laws pretend law enforcement is taking action against our property, and that our property has no rights. But what about our property rights!
We’re innocent until proven guilty, too . . . and so is our stuff.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
