Thanks to EPJ for this:
Julie Borowski on Thanksgiving
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at
11:02 am
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Shock Statistic: Americans Freely Spend Twice The Amount On Private Security vs. Police
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at
10:53 am
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November 23, 2011
By michaelsuede
Seriously, this just blew me away.
William Norman Grigg writes:
According to the most recent available statistics regarding incarceration, however, people convicted of actual crimes compose a very small minority of America’s vast and growing federal prison population. As of 2009, crimes of violence accounted for roughly eight percent of that total, and property crimes contributed a bit less than six percent. More than half of all inmates were convicted of non-violent drug offenses, and thirty-five percent were caged for what are called “public order” offenses.
Libertarian activist Michael Suede points out that eighty-six percent of all federal inmates were punished for what are called “victimless crimes” – that is to say, offenses not properly described as crimes at all. It is reasonable to assume that similar trends exist at the state and local level as well.
There are instances in which police act in defense of persons and property. Those are genuinely exceptional, because rendering that service is not part of their formal job description: The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that police have no enforceable duty to protect individual rights. This helps explain why, as economist Robert Higgs pointed out roughly a decade ago, “there are three times as many private policemen as there are public ones.”
In choosing to pay for private security assistance, Americans freely spend more than twice the amount stolen from us each year to pay for the government’s armed enforcement caste. This is because the government that takes our money fails to provide the promised social good – protection of life and property.
Who’s on the Line? Increasingly, Caller ID Is Duped
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at
10:30 am
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By MATT RICHTEL
Published: November 22, 2011
Caller ID has been celebrated as a defense against unwelcome phone pitches. But it is backfiring.
Michelle Litvin for The New York Times
Julie Schultz of Chicago hired a lawyer after being peppered with calls from debt collectors that were wrongly identified.
Telemarketers increasingly are disguising their real identities and phone numbers to provoke people to pick up the phone. “Humane Soc.” may not be the Humane Society. And think the I.R.S. is on the line? Think again.
Caller ID, in other words, is becoming fake ID.
“You don’t know who is on the other end of the line, no matter what your caller ID might say,” said Sandy Chalmers, a division manager at the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection in Wisconsin.
Starting this summer, she said, the state has been warning consumers: “Do not trust your caller ID. And if you pick up the phone and someone asks for your personal information, hang up.”
Regulators in Wisconsin and many other states are hearing a significant jump in complaints about what is often called “caller ID spoofing” or “call laundering.”
License plate readers: A useful tool for police comes with privacy concerns
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at
10:27 am
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By Allison Klein and Josh White,
The Difference Between OWS and Anti-Vietnam Protests – by Jeffrey Tucker
Saturday, November 19th, 2011 at
7:56 am
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But consider the gigantic differences. The Vietnam protest movement had a clear goal. It wanted to end the war. It had a clear enemy: the politicians and bureaucrats who wanted the war to last forever. It had a clear message: this war is wrong. It had an intense motivation: the protesters were terrified of being drafted to kill and be killed. This is what standing up to power is all about.
So far as anyone can tell, the Occupy movement has none of this clarity. Ten thousand articles have been written on these people and there is still no consensus concerning what the issue really is. The goals of the movement are posted here and there, but not everyone among the protesters agrees with them. The motivation is just as amorphous and varied: unemployment, sinking job prospects, sinking incomes, blowback from the bailouts, the desire to slum around in a decadent sort of way, and the destructive urge to trample down the pea-patch of life itself.
Worse, from my point of view, is that the movement isn’t really standing up to power. It is standing in for power to urge that the state take on more responsibilities and control people’s lives even more than it does already. They imagine that they are demanding human rights, but the main agenda as listed in public websites amounts to a list of ways for the government to violate human rights, or at least intrude aggressively upon them.
Raising the minimum wage, for example, amounts to a limitation on the rights of workers to negotiate their own employment contracts. The minimum wage says: you have no right to offer less for your services than the state gives you permission to offer. Thus, the minimum wage not only promotes unemployment; it restrains the human right to associate on any terms of a person’s choosing.
Likewise, the demand to nationalize health interferes with the rights of doctors and patients to negotiate their own contracts. The demand for tariffs interferes with the rights of people to peacefully trade with anyone from around the world, and effectively entrenches the nation-state as the only permitted geographic range of economic associations.
The imposition of new taxes takes people’s property. This is property acquired through their own labor which is then forcibly taken by the state to use for political purposes. This demand is a prescription for further impoverishment.
The push for refunding domestic infrastructure denies private entrepreneurs the opportunity to use their resources and talents to rebuild on a for-profit basis and in a manner that that can actually be maintained. There is a reason that state infrastructure always seems to be crumbling: it is built by the state with all the inherent economic irrationality of most state projects.
The real problem with the OWS movement is its political naiveté. The protestors imagine that by attacking free enterprise and the capitalist system they are upholding the rights of the common man. The exact opposite is true. The only real alternative to free enterprise is an economy owned and administered by society’s most ruthless and cruel elements, who always seems to gravitate toward statist means.
If OWS is successful, it will wake up to a world that is lorded over by federal bureaucrats and jack-booted enforcement thugs. The entire world will be run like the Post Office, the TSA, the IRS, and the Customs Bureau. This has nothing to do with freedom and nothing to do with human rights.
For this reason, the OWS protest is not really a threat to the establishment. So far, its message has been that the state needs to be truer to itself, that the worst aspects of both the Democratic and Republican platforms need to be implemented with a vengeance. This is a movement the state can come to love. Indeed, the White House has drawn closer and closer to this movement, saying that Obama “will continue to acknowledge the frustration that he himself shares.”
Again, the contrast with the Vietnam protests of the 1960s cannot be starker. The White Houses hated these people. The politicians of both parties were terrified of what “people power” meant in those days.
If we had the equivalent movement as it relates to economics today, it would be calling for an end to the Fed, privatization of education, privatization of health care, the right to global free trade, an end to state robbery of persons and their businesses, and a right to keep what you own. In short, a truly radical protest movement would be calling for a consistent and authentic capitalism as a corollary to the peace agenda in international politics.
Now that would be radical.
Regards,
Jeffrey Tucker
The Black Market Always Wins… Even in Communist China
Friday, November 18th, 2011 at
8:55 am
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November 18th, 2011
Imagine you’re a 26 year old high-school dropout working as a factory grunt for a measly $100 a month. And that’s 2010 dollars, not some distant past when that was worth something. You’d probably be pumping your fist against the bourgeoisie in your Che Guevara T-shirt down at Occupy Wall Street right now. But what if you knew that just 6 years later, if you played your cards right, you’d be managing your own factory employing more that 100 people? And what if this wasn’t some economic miracle, but it was a normal occurrence for enterprising young entrepreneurs? Wouldn’t you want to know how it was possible? Well the answer is the black market.
See, that’s a true story. It happened to Cai Shuxian, and it happens to many entrepreneurs in Wenzhou, China where every road eventually leads back to the company that built it. The saying goes among the Wenzhounese, “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away” because for the past 30 years private citizens have virtually nullified government central planning simply by ignoring it, and the government just doesn’t have the resources to crack down. Private firms now build roads, bridges, highways, and even airports to bring their goods to market, and even though it’s not always pretty it is crudely efficient. There’s still a taxation bureaucracy, but tax evasion is typical, even routine. The primary role of local government has been to protect the city from higher levels of government.
When state-run banks became averse to lending to small private enterprise citizens of Wenzhou developed an underground financial system of their own. So called, “gray-market” lending, though technically illegal, is used by nearly 90% of individuals and 60% of companies according to official figures from the People’s Bank of China (China’s central bank). Non-bank lending of venture capital has been the single most important development to the economic success of Wenzhou, and that combined with a blasé disregard for regulatory laws has produced a business environment that borders on market anarchism.
“People are bad so we need a government made up of people…”
Thursday, November 17th, 2011 at
7:32 pm
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Interview of J. Neil Schulman – author of Alongside Night
Thursday, November 17th, 2011 at
7:09 pm
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Listen to this recorded interview with J. Neil Schulman, author of Alongside Night the “must read” novel
for anyone who cares about freedom and wishes to survive the coming economic collapse:
.mp3 file:
.wav file:
Here are a few notable quotes of praise for Alongside Night:
“An absorbing novel–science fiction, yet also a cautionary tale
with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future
possibilities.”
– Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in Economics
“I received Alongside Night at noon today. It is now eight in the
evening and I just finished it. I think I am entitled to some
dinner now as I had no lunch. The unputdownability of the book
ensured that. It is a remarkable and original story, and the
picture it presents of an inflation- crippled America on the
verge of revolution is all too acceptable. I wish, and so will
many novelists, that I, or they, had thought of the idea first. A
thrilling novel, crisply written, that fires the imagination as
effectively as it stimulates the feelings.”
–Anthony Burgess
“Alongside Night is terribly accurate. Whenever the American
crack-up boom happens, few libertarians would disagree with his
outline of the scenarios. But Neil went one step farther than
most of the libertarians of the time. He integrated the new
science of countereconomics and the economic philosophy of
Agorism, which I had only begun to develop in 1974…. When? You
decide, dear reader; but you are now well armed to see the signs
and know what actions to take. Thanks to Ludwig von Mises, a
small band of rational revolutionary students, and J. Neil
Schulman, artist.”
–Samuel Edward Konkin III
“One of the most widely hailed libertarian novels since the
classic works of Ayn Rand.”
–Reason Magazine
Download your FREE copy at:
For information on the movie project:
More on the MF Global Bankster Heist with Gerald Celente
Thursday, November 17th, 2011 at
3:00 pm
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Get your money out of the banks. Go to gold and silver bullion and pre-1965 U.S. silver coin.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Perhaps The Copyright Industry Deserves Some Credit For Pointing Out Our Single Points Of Failure
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 at
7:16 am
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by Rick Falkvinge
Through new legislation the copyright industry is trying to gain unprecedented control over the Internet. Very worrying plans that need to be stopped, but there is also something to learn from. Perhaps we should be grateful that the copyright industry, in their distorted sense of entitlement to the world, are pointing out crucial weaknesses that need to be fixed.
Yesterday’s column here on TorrentFreak on how the copyright industry keeps pushing its own interests into law was very worthwhile, and highlighted the endemic corruption of the current system quite well. I think the latest bill goes so far it would have unintended consequences, though — unintended for the copyright industry.
This latest bill in the United States, named SOPA (a Swedish word meaning “piece of utter garbage”, and I am not making that up), would essentially eliminate due process of law and right to defense. It would create a j’accuse!-style justice system, where anybody in the copyright industry could kill any company on the planet they don’t like.
Here’s how it is intended to work: The copyright industry gains the right to “notify” payment processors such as Visa that a company looks bad. Visa then gets the choice of cutting it off from payments, or becoming liable themselves in case the looking-bad company actually turns out to be doing something bad. This is a very sneaky, effective and outright evil method of extrajudicial justice.
Rather than risk liability, the payment processors would choose to lie flat and just drop these customers. It is not in Visa’s mission to push civil liberties at the expense of shareholder value. This is not wrong in itself; it is the legislators who shall make sure that extrajudicial punishment as proposed here is impossible, and the legislators are not doing their job at all.
You will note that everybody in the proposed system is completely rightsless. At the pointing of a finger, a business is dead.
Similarly, SOPA contains provisions for killing domains in the centralized DNS namespace, which was built on the assumption that bad guys don’t exist in the system and that everybody can be trusted. If it’s something we have learned by now, it is that the net must be resilient against bad guys on the wire.
What’s interesting here is that the copyright industry attacks chokepoints in the system — single points of failure that our civil liberties depend on. Perhaps we should be grateful that the copyright industry, in their distorted sense of entitlement to the world, are pointing out these weaknesses to us through this kind of despicable mail-order legislation.
Because, if there’s anything that entrepreneurs hate, as in thoroughly detest, loathe and despise, it is the situation where somebody else holds a master-key to your business and can take it over at an unknown point in the future when the entrepreneur has spent ten years of their life building it. That situation is fixed first, and only then is the business built. This fix has happened a few times before, when a united hive-mind-like industry has discarded a master-key liability like a bad habit and built something else to replace it.
In the early 1990s, a system of hyperlinked pages on the internet had become popular. People would browse those interconnected pages for information on everything from universities to businesses to people. Then, in 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it reserved the right to charge for commercial use of this protocol, Gopher, at some point in the future. It was dropped by everybody like a bad habit and replaced by HTML and the Web, which did a worse job initially but quickly replaced and outgrew Gopher.
The exact same thing happened with the standard format for image files, a format called Graphics Interchange Format, first used on BBSes and then moving on to the early Net. When UNISYS claimed that they somehow “owned” this format and would start suing people who used it, it was dropped from every usage all over the net in the blink of an eye and replaced by a fresh-new format named Portable Network Graphics.
Can you imagine the net collectively just dropping the use of JPEG today, in a consensus hive mind decision? That’s how large these watershed events are. Much larger than, say, Facebook replacing MySpace.
What’s preventing this from happening, in general, is the scenario where something works “well enough”. If something does its job miserably but is entrenched through the entire ecosystem, as long as it doesn’t kill you and you can build a business on it, it tends to remain because of network effects. It is only when it threatens each and every entrepreneur that the industry acts as a hive mind and throws it out.
Because there’s no doubt that MasterCard, Visa and Paypal are terrible for business. A middleman that skims between three and five per cent of every transaction? And, on top, makes it impossible to charge fractions of cents in this day and age? There isn’t an entrepreneur on the planet who wouldn’t love to throw them into the water at night with a pair of knee-high cement shoes. But, like a cancer, they have spread to every corner of the ecosystem. They work terribly, but “well enough”.
SOPA would change that. It would no longer work well enough; it would be a threat to the future existence of every business. Therefore, all of a sudden, we have a market incentive from the most entrepreneurial people on the planet to build a decentralized, unseizable, unstoppable financial infrastructure that lets them get paid — and lets everybody else transfer money anonymously, invisibly and unstoppable. It would be a dictator’s nightmare. And the copyright industry’s.
What SOPA does is to make sure that the net and sharing can’t coexist with Visa, MasterCard and PayPal. This means that only the stronger of the two groups will survive, and the copyright industry has their perception of the strength balance entirely wrong. The net and the human characteristic of sharing culture and knowledge are immensely stronger.
SOPA will neither kill the net nor the sharing of culture and knowledge. But it would kill Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, and it would kill centralized breakable DNS.
“But could this really happen?”, I hear people ask in scepticism. “Visa, MasterCard and PayPal are everywhere! Everywhere!” Yeah. They are. So were Gopher and GIF.
Dictators, too, depend on these single points of failure in the net for repressing the people in their countries. We see it everywhere, and it is spreading to the West at a much faster pace than I would like or had anticipated.
Perhaps the copyright industry deserves some credit for pointing out the single points of failure in the infrastructure supporting our civil liberties, so we can rebuild those parts.
That would be a trait they would share with the world’s worst dictators. Don’t get me wrong, I think the copyright industry is plain evil and that these proposed laws are abominations. Nothing new under the sun, there. But odd as it may sound, I would rather have the copyright industry prod the weaknesses of the infrastructure defending our civil liberties, than a future repressive regime doing so. At such a dystopic point in the future, it would be much harder to fix those weaknesses.
After all, the copyright industry can’t yet drag us off in black bags in the night.
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