I grew up in Auburn, and went to college there. It’s a tiny town where almost no crime is committed. (I never locked my car door for the 8 years I had a car there, and have left my front door wide open by accident over the weekend) Most of the time the police are trying to catch drunk drivers.

Don’t even try to portray Auburn police as draconian inquisitors.

Please shutup.

At the time, I was living in Tyler, an East Texas city of about 90,000 population. On the surface, Tyler appears to be an inviting place (piney woods & lakes, branch campus of UT, annual rose festival, etc.) However, the “underbelly” is notoriously evil.

Because I had lost practically every dollar to those con artists, I was unable to afford car registration and insurance. Yet I needed my car to get around to find employment, because I was living six miles out of town, and no mass transit existed.

Anyhow, I received a ticket for not having insurance, and it escalated into a $400 fine, which I definitely couldn’t afford to pay, seeing as how I had no job! So… you guessed it… I was driving down the road on the way to a job interview, and get stopped for having expired tags. As expected, the policeman’s computer flagged me as having an outstanding arrest warrant, and I got hauled into Smith County jail for four days.

While in the holding cell area for the first two days, I was able to make a couple phone calls (after begging repeatedly and persistently to use the phone). Neither my wife nor my family were able to help. (My wife didn’t have the bail money, and my family lived in another state).

The holding cells have cement floors and are so small that you can’t get more than four feet away from the toilet — with all the filth, stench, and potential for disease. No blankets there. You get to sleep on the floor, or on the limited space on one of the narrow wood benches.

I was then transferred to a facility north of town, because the jails in Tyler are running out of space. (I wonder why???) If I remember right, there were 12 bunk beds in each cell, and it was certainly more comfortable than a holding cell.

However, I had the misfortune of being in the same cell with some very intimidating ghetto types. Luckily, I was finally released without getting beat up (or raped). I then walked to my car (about an hour and a half walk!) and drove home. I suffered from post-traumatic stress from this incident for months later, and kept waking up in the middle of the night thinking that I was back in jail!!!

J.B. Smith is the sheriff in Smith County, and is one of the most corrupt people you could ever meet. He’s a completely pathological character, and is heavily involved in drug running, bootlegging, prostitution, gambling, and every other illicit business known to mankind.

While I realize that jail is not supposed to be like the Waldorf Astoria, J.B.’s jails don’t even deserve a Mobile one-star rating!

Blame all this on the evils of small-town injustice and/or corruption, but it’s all part of a much bigger picture, going all the way up to the top echelons of world power and domination (illuminati, Bilderbergers, etc.)

These sick tapeworms are occult/satanists who thrive on human misery, and are the most filthy, underhanded and conniving vermin you could imagine. Their hidden (or maybe NOT so hidden) agendas are increasingly being revealed for what they are.

I can tell you it’s no coincidence that America has the highest percentage AND highest number of incarcerated citizens of any country in the world. Even more than Communist China!!! Crime has become incentivized, and private for-profit companies such as CCA and Wackenhut are now heavily involved.

If you can imagine, the conditions inside these private prisons are reputed to be even worse than government-run prisons. (Hard to imagine, isn’t it???) Also, these private prison corporations lobby Congress to increase sentencing for minor crimes (such as marijuana offenses) so that prisoners will stay longer in their facilities ($$$), Talk about conflict of interest! Welcome to the new prison-state Amerikkka!

This post has gone on a bit long, but here’s something else to consider long and hard…

Many decades ago, before attorneys took over, America’s legal system was based on the common law. The common law was quite straightforward and simple for the lay person to understand. If you could understand the Ten Commandments, you could understand the common law. Basically, a criminal was defined as somebody who caused damage to other persons and/or property. Really simple. Conversely, if somebody did NOT cause damage to other persons and/or property, that person was NOT a criminal. Right? Okay then.

So now enter the “statutory legal system” which has largely supplanted the common law. It is exceedingly complex, convoluted, vague, and nearly impossible for a lawyer, much less a lay person, to understand. The powers-that-be LOVE it just that way. Why? Because now they can criminalize practically ANYBODY at will for violating any of the literally MILLIONS of incomprehensible statutes. And under the statutory legal system, the government has no obligation to produce an aggrieved person or party.

For example, if a driver chooses not to put on their seat belt, and a police officer pulls over that person and issues a citation, where is the aggrieved party? In other words, WHO was damaged as a consequence of that person that being buckled up? NOBODY…… except for a legal fiction known as the CITY OF ______, COUNTY OF _______, STATE OF ______, etc. These capital letter entities are nothing more than revenue-making CORPORATIONS. They are merely divisions or instrumentalities of the federal corporation!

The difference between a government corporation and a private corporation is that the enforcement arm of the government corporation (police, courts, etc.) is vicious, brutal and unrelenting. Make no mistake about that fact. If you have any doubts, just look at all the incidents in recent decades where cops are quick to taser citizens with very little or NO provocation.

Bottom line. It’s all over here in the U.S., at least for anybody who doesn’t want to live in constant fear! The previous poster from Brazil pretty much summed up the current situation in the U.S., a country which is increasingly emulating the worst Communist and fascist regimes on the planet!

Jeffery Tucker: Your article really hit a nerve with me. This past summer, I was working at my computer late at night and a knock sounded at the door. It was three Sheriffs and they were here to serve a warrant on me. It was a nationally extraditable warrant for grand theft, a serious matter. I asked to see the paperwork to get some idea of what they were speaking. They acted oddly and reluctantly gave me the paperwork. I looked it over and it was from Florida and had NO judge’s signature, NO magistrate signature, NO oath or affirmation, NOT even a notary stamp on it. It was a blank piece of paper with my name on it and a charge and that was all.

I was taken to jail on this mystery warrant and the Sheriffs said they were sorry and they had never seen anything like this before, but, “They were only doing their job.” To which I replied, “That is the Nuremberg defense and you know what they got the Nazis don’t you.”

I was booked and repeatedly asked questions concerning terrorism, whether or not I had attended college in Moscow, and other ignorant questions. Then I was issued the obligatory paper-thin suit and plastic sandals and sent to a cell. They took away my medications I brought with me to the jail and after I had missed my evening dose, I started having chest pains and distressed breathing and was getting sick. I called for the jailer and he came so I asked him for my meds so I wouldn’t have a heart attack. He drew his taser gun and said, I’ll give you something to have a heart attack over you son of a bitch”, then he entered the cell, which is against the rules of conduct. I withdrew and begged him not to shoot me and he said, “Then shut your fucking mouth.”

I was on a floor that was allowed afternoon phone privileges but in the midday I was transferred to a floor where we got morning calls and I had just missed the time out. It wasn’t until the next day that I got my phone call. Then it was just as you said, Prison phones don’t work in prison.” Also, I don’t remember numbers well and didn’t have my wallet so I couldn’t remember anyone to call as I was in shock. I finally remembered the number of the nursing home where my 83-year-old Alzheimer’s patient father resided and I got a nurse to accept the $2.75 collect call. She was kind and helped get hold of my ex wife who attempted to help me but they wouldn’t allow bail as the “formal” paperwork had not come in from Florida. I spent 5 days waiting for Florida to get off their asses. In the meantime, my dogs were locked in the house and starving. My employees didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t leave a message on the answer machine because it wouldn’t accept the collect call.

While on the inside, there were a lot of sadistic cops and one named Hamblin was griping about how he wasn’t allowed to taser a man who was obviously mentally ill and had doused himself with gas. Hamblin was mad because he wasn’t allowed to, “Light him up.”

The jail was filled with Mexicans and I was one of the very few whites. They took my food and it was three days before I was allowed a bath and 4 days before I got a change of clothes.

When I finally got in front of a Judge, she said this paper would never fly and let me out on my O.R.. Then I had to drive from Washington State, 3500 miles, to Florida, surrender to the Florida cops and this time I took the bail bondsman with me, and went in the front door and out the back door. This is what it took to get this paper on the prosecutor’s desk. When he reviewed the charges, he found they had no merit and threw it out. I found out that the disgruntled daughter of my fathers deceased girfriend, with whom he lived for 25 years in Florida, was mad because I had taken my dad from Florida to Washington to live with me due to the Alzheimer’s condition. I grew suspicious so I ordered all his banking records only to find she had embezzled over 80K dollars from my dad’s accounts and was mad because I thwarted her retirement account so she made a false report/claim that I had robbed her mothers estate. This was the basis of why I was arrested. No evidence, no proof of any kind, just the ravings of an old woman who was already rich and lived on Marcos Island, the fifth richest neighborhood in America.

This all cost me five days of my life/freedom, almost got me tasered, deprived of medication for two days and was sick for a week afterward, and $8,000.00 dollars in bail bonds and travel expenses all while my business languished for three weeks during my peak sales season. The woman who caused all of this has not been charged, and I am told they will not charge her but her word alone caused me this huge penalty… to be GUILTY until proven INNOCENT… and on my dime.

This proves without a doubt that Justice is blind as well as stupid, malicious, conniving, and sadistic. Oh…did I mention the $3500.00 I spent on a criminal defense attorney to handle this while I returned to Washington and attempted to get my business back on track and put this behind me. Yep, this is how I spent my summer vacation in the land of the brave and home of the free!

John “madder than hell” Duty

The present discussion presents ample evidence as to how well that function is being performed. It is clear that coercive bureaucracy is just as awful at that task as it is at everything else.

I agree with the statement above that what we are seeing is the direct result of politicians, the supposed watchdogs, taking every opportunity to ignore what problems do leak out because of a fear of being seen as “soft on crime”.

As Ralph makes so clear, very little “Law Enforcement” has anything to do with “crime”.

“Worse, any power capable of magically enforcing Rothbardian ethics could also enforce the Catholic Catechism or even Islamic Sharia. Are you sure you want the market to find such a power.”

Your statement embodies a straw man, “magically enforcing”, and then using that statement to “prove” the development of enforcing catholic catechism or Islamic Sharia.

The present system does enforce certain behaviors in accordance with the state by centralizing the banking system(though it claims this is not so) and using the government as a process by which Federal reserve Notes are issued as a result of debt created by a loan to our federal government. No citizen voted on his/her willingness to repay that loan, yet it is thrust upon all of us in taxes or inflation. That is “magical enforcement” which I have yet to see in any concept of Rothbardian ethics.

In order to “magically enforce” catholic catechism or islamic Sharia, both catholic and Muslim religions would have to control the issuance of currency so that their particular belief system would make all economic transaction dependent on their approval.

In the United States, even with the First Amendment, all religious freedom is reduced to impotence because all behavior is subject to the control of the issuance of currency. We are “free” to believe as we wish, so long as we pay our taxes and allow the system to continually create debt and inflation, robbing us gradually of any religious truths to guide moral behavior.

OTOH, if religions could all control issuance of currency with free competition among currencies, the economic AND moral value of all religion would greatly improve, thus providing both greater justice and morality, which you say the economic system is incapable of supporting.

The profit motive is definitely there–to line their own pockets with tickets!

I’m also in a small town (less than 3k), and there’s over a dozen cops. It’s the local industry. I got a $280 ticket I couldn’t pay, so now I’m without a license.

Then you and I will not do business together.

The problem with the interventionist state is that there is no room for dissent. I may not disagree and not pay for programs I don’t want, I may not say “no” to the police man who “asks” to see my drivers license.

Your “Anarchy is to be without principle” is a non-sequiter. I have principles, you have principles, everyone here has principles. We agree to interact voluntarily, based upon our own principles. What is missing is coercion, and therefore this forum itself is a perfect example of anarchy.

I routinely drive through “revenue traps” where four or more county cops will hide in the bushes at an intersection to make sure drivers are wearing their seat belts. When they spot one, they swarm the car from every angle as if the driver was wanted for murder. My city even has “seat belt checkpoints” posted at major roads into the city during rush hour to catch seat belt law violators. The same is true for cell phones and infant seats.

As I drive to work I pass red light cameras that are owned by a private company that gets a percentage of each ticket. Independent groups have found that the length of the orange light has been deliberately decreased in many cities where these cameras have been installed to unfairly ensnare more citizens. If you dare to go to court over one of these warnings you will be told by the judge before your trial begins that “If you’ve received a red light camera ticket you’re guilty.” Research has found that injuries actually rise at intersections that have these dubious “crime fighting” devices installed, yet the race to put up more of them continues unabated.

After I’ve made it past the poltroons hiding in bushes and Orwell’s Panopticon I pass the ever-growing state prison. I wonder who it is that they’re locking up in there that they need all that space. I guess between the War on (some) Drugs, the War on Guns (which is disguised as the War on (some) Drugs), the War on Terror, the War on Crime, and various other wars we’re fighting there’s always a need for more prison space. But lately the jails are run by private corporations who are contracted by the state. They are set up in business where prisoners are forced to work almost for nothing. If the prisoner misbehaves, the private company can just add more time to his sentence and have him work longer (better for them any way you slice it). Given that so many of the prisoners are black, I wonder why nobody has ever brought up the obvious parallel between this system and slavery. Worse yet, as the Bush administration is trying now (or has already succeeded in) expanding this prison labor program for the war on terror, I wonder why the silence is so deafening. And I wonder why the war on terror needs prison labor. Finally, I’ve heard that a very high percentage of prisoners are there for victimless drug posession, which makes me wonder why we need to lock them up at all.

I also wonder why every cop in every Podunk little town in America has to have a black ninja suit, bullet proof vest, and an M-16. I wonder why we have allowed the police to routinely use precussion grenades when entering the homes of our neighbors and executing search warrants looking for dreaded drugs. Such raids are usually based on informant information which is usually coerced from them in return for a reduced sentence. It seems like every week I read a new story about police killing an innocent victim in such a way. Why doesn’t anyone object to that? Why can’t they just knock on the door? Why do they have to wear masks over their faces? Aren’t they proud of what they’re doing?

I could go on and on for hours. And if a picture is worth 1,000 words what are two videos worth? The first video linked below shows the finest poltroons money can buy beating and harassing kids at an outdoor rave. Were there drugs there? Probably. Did they need to send in Rambo to rappel down from a helicopter to beat and arrest these kids? I think not. The second video shows beat cop – the worst and the dumbest. He goes to Wendy’s and is convinced that the clerk short changes him. Not content to speak with the manager about the problem, he decided to go behind the counter and mace the girl before arresting her. Where is t he manager during all this? Protesting that the officer had not been short changed at all.

So what’s the bottom line? We have built a police mechanism that is so big and so powerful that if we don’t dismantle it, it will dismantle us.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/230805utahrave.htm

http://www.thatvideosite.com/view/440.html

What a market can never do is change human nature.

Nor can a market create anything that violates the law of noncontradiction.

Invest time and money to create a nonemotional human? The closest thing I can think of to that however is a serial killer.

Invest time and money to find something so that we can have inflation in the money supply but no malinvestments nor price increases? No.

The market is not magic nor alchemy. It can only do things with what it is made of – real human beings in a physical world with physical laws.

The market is very powerful, but only within its own realm. It has no power to do what it cannot by its own nature accomplish.

Justice is not part of that. Or if it is, why not start with other virtues. Why do people still pay for prostitutes instead of imbibing X which would free them from the desire? Why do people – even prosperous ones shoplift? Where is the market fix to evil? Couldn’t someone have outbid the 9/11 sucidal hijackers even though they didn’t care to save their lives?

I wish it were so. It is not. The market cannot cure evil so it, or some agency other than the market must deal with evil.

Worse, any power capable of magically enforcing Rothbardian ethics could also enforce the Catholic Catechism or even Islamic Sharia. Are you sure you want the market to find such a power.

And that is the contradiction with Anarchy – it is usually bracketed with an assumption that everyone would just go along with something like the non-initiation of force principle, but it cannot do so. Anarchy is to be without principle, or anything superior to the individual, so what happens if I don’t “volunteer” to follow your principle?

There actually is a very good reason to suspect that a anarcho-capitalist society would be better off with regard to excessive punishment than the present society.

The state, by its nature, infringes on rights (including those in the prison system). While it may claim to reduce aggression by others, it must necessarily aggress itself, and it must do so to a greater degree than any other aggressors to maintain its geographical dominance.

A state free (anarcho-capitalist) society is, by its nature, non-aggressive. The problem is that a perfectly anarcho-capitalist society is impossible. There will always be aggression, and so anarcho-capitalists do not profess to erase agression entirely. What they do profess is a system which would try to erase aggression entirely. Just like no (reasonably large) society that is free from murder is possible, and yet the best society (with regard to murder) is that society which attempts to stamp out murder, so it is with aggression.

Aggression will, of course, occur in an anarchist society. The important difference is that aggression runs contrary to the nature of an anarchist society, but it is not in conflict with the nature of as state governed society. The violation of human rights is to be opposed in an anarcho-capitalist society, while it is absolutely necessary in a society with a state.

But your question is not about principle, it is about utility. There is nothing wrong with this, as long as the question of utility is asked after — and subordinated to — the question of moral principle. First you should ask: “Should the state exist,” and then it is appropriate to ask: “Would I, my family and my friends, benefit from a state not existing.” I would tend to say that if the state is in fact immoral, then everyone would benefit from its non-existence. That is based in a confidence that what is right is best, the Socratic conviction that if a person obeys the rules of morality, ultimately that person will be better off for it. However, I don’t think at this time I could provide an airtight argument for that; it may just be naive optimism.

There really is no straightforward empirical evidence to show that an anarchistic society would respect human rights more than the present society. Just as I could not argue that a society would be better off without a state, you cannot argue that it would not be. There is insufficient empirical evidence to support either claim. However, the facts that the nature of the state is to aggress, and the nature of an anarchist society is not to aggress, would strongly indicate that an anarcho-capitalist society (to the extent that it may be made actual) would be better off, in terms of aggression, than a state controlled society such as ours. Furthermore, one may infer from the general fact that in areas with more powerful states there is more aggression than in areas with less powerful states, that areas with no state at all would suffer the least aggression.

In any case, I think it one should act on moral principle, and not on utility. To illustrate this point, let us think of a specific type of aggression: rape. Rape has always existed in societies, we do not know what a society without rape would be like. But I have confidence that, because of the grossly immoral nature of rape, a society without rape would be better off, however I do not know this empirically. I may even be sure that no rape-less society could possibly. My vision is for a utopia. However, I am obliged to do what I can to bring about a rape-less society based on moral principle. And I am right in doing so.

Just fill in any particular type of state aggression for rape. It is no different.