Quotulatiousness

July 27, 2009

Audax toujours

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 14:12

Thaddeus Tremayne may appear to have gone off his medications when he proposed this:

I think it behooves us to begin spreading this idea: that people who work in the public sector should be exempt from having to pay tax. All tax.

But he really does have a valid and interesting point:

No, what I am proposing is the stripping away of a fig-leaf that disguises the very important distinction between tax-payers and tax-consumers.

Currently, only those who earn their living in the private or voluntary sector are tax-payers and while public sector employees do file tax returns and, on the face of it, pay their taxes too, this is a mere bookkeeping fiction. They are the recipients of tax, adding nothing to the public purse. The number of people who fail to understand this distinction, holding instead that “we are all taxpayers” is alarmingly high. By forcing the public sector to lead tax-free lives, we make their true status not just clearer but undeniable.

Consider the meme-spreading to have started.

More on the Gates-Crowley affair

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:44

Radley Balko says that this affair is newsworthy, but not for the reasons you might think:

The arrest of Harvard African-American Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates has certainly got everyone talking. Unfortunately, everyone’s talking about the wrong issue.

[. . .]

The conversation we ought to be having in response to the July 16 incident and its heated aftermath isn’t about race, it’s about police arrest powers, and the right to criticize armed agents of the government.

By any account of what happened — Gates’, Crowleys’, or some version in between — Gates should never have been arrested. “Contempt of cop,” as it’s sometimes called, isn’t a crime. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The “disorderly conduct” charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults. Crowley is owed an apology for being portrayed as a racist, but he ought to be disciplined for making a wrongful arrest.

He won’t be, of course. And that’s ultimately the scandal that will endure long after the political furor dies down. The power to forcibly detain a citizen is an extraordinary one. It’s taken far too lightly, and is too often abused. And that abuse certainly occurs against black people, but not only against black people. American cops seem to have increasingly little tolerance for people who talk back, even merely to inquire about their rights.

There are undoubtedly good interactions between police officers and “civilians” (as the police tend to refer to non-police), but much of the interaction is related to actual or perceived violation of the law . . . which means the interaction is fraught with tension, fear, and potential altercation. The police officer feels the need to have the visible signs of respect from “civilians”, yet the more contact “civilians” have with the police, the less that outwardly subservient attitude will be displayed.

Police over-reach

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:36

A story of rather amazing police pursuit of Krister Evertson, a criminal mastermind who failed to put a federally mandated safety sticker on a package he sent:

Krister never had so much as a traffic ticket before he was run off the road near his mother’s home in Wasilla, Alaska, by SWAT-armored federal agents in large black SUVs training automatic weapons on him.

Evertson, who had been working on clean-energy fuel cells since he was in high school, had no idea what he’d done wrong. It turned out that when he legally sold some sodium (part of his fuel-cell materials) to raise cash, he forgot to put a federally mandated safety sticker on the UPS package he sent to the lawful purchaser.

Krister’s lack of a criminal record did nothing to prevent federal agents from ransacking his mother’s home in their search for evidence on this oh-so-dangerous criminal.

The good news is that, in spite of the aggressive attempt to gather evidence, Krister was acquitted. But apparently the American justice system has managed to get rid of the whole pesky concept of “double jeopardy“:

So he was convicted of “abandoning” the hazardous materials in Idaho because he was in an Alaska jail awaiting trial on the bogus safety sticker charge for which he was acquitted. But he wasn’t allowed to use that in his defense. Nor were prosecutors required to prove that the materials he didn’t really abandon were actually waste. Note too the ridiculously paramilitary confrontation and arrest for the non-crime of failing to affix a safety sticker to a UPS package.

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