Friendly Cops Are Still Cops

Marion Police Chief David Gilbert is a friendly guy. He has a big smile and a great sense of humor ( I can tell because he laughs at my jokes). He is a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and admirer of the Founding Fathers. He is the type of guy I would enjoy discussing the principles of liberty with over a beer and perhaps someday I'll get that chance. But as friendly as the chief is, and as good of a person as he may be, I still think it is important to remember that, as my uncle said, the policeman qua policeman is not your friend.

The policeman's job is often described as law enforcement and I think this is an appropriate term. They enforce the government's laws whether they be good or bad. And it seems like there are a lot more bad laws than good ones. Now, I can see that officers are put into a bit of a bind. On the one hand, they swear an oath to defend the Constitution. But on the other hand, they are hired to enforce every unconstitutional law that makes it onto the books. Luckily for them, no politician takes the Constitution seriously. So, it's a pretty simple choice. Uphold whatever law they tell you to uphold.

When a government comes up with a law that requires the police to confiscate certain kinds of private property because the government deems that people shouldn't possess it, the policeman complies. They complied when FDR made it illegal to own gold. They complied when it was made illegal to own marijuana. They have complied in many places where it was made illegal to be armed. The Constitution requires that the government follow due process and convict you of criminal activity before they seize your property. But if the government classifies the very possession of your property as illegal, then they will seize it outright.

Some people can see that most everything the government does is either stupid, wasteful, or downright evil. But those same people are quick to defend the local policeman as a brave first responder and protector of the citizenry. In many cases, this is certainly an accurate description. But I would ask those people to keep in mind the fact that government edicts, no matter how stupid, wasteful, or evil, would be completely harmless without the police there to inflict the government's will on the people. It's been noted that the police are to the government as the edge is to the knife.

And who out there feels relieved to see a policeman in their rearview mirror? Do you think, "Oh, good! A public servant has arrived to help make my trip more pleasant"? Or do you, like me, feel your heart sink into your stomach the second those lights come on? Perhaps you, a supposedly free individual, didn't put your seatbelt on. Maybe you didn't provide a booster seat for your 3rd grader. Maybe your vehicle exceeded the arbitrary speed posted along the highway. If so, beware. The policeman lies in wait like a roadside bandit seeking to plunder you on behalf of the government.

Since the government insists on virtually monopolizing the field of police work, we must encourage their defense of life and property even as we discourage their improper use of violence to enforce unconstitutional and harmful laws that basically amount to a transfer of wealth from the citizens to the State. I feel like I should note that as far as police chiefs go, Marion could do a lot worse than the gregarious Gilbert. Coming from a radical libertarian such as myself, this should be viewed as the ultimate compliment for a government enforcer.

Free People Read Mises

Ludwig von Mises was a genius. He was the man who advanced economics by applying the theory of diminishing marginal utility to money. He was the man who showed how monetary inflation directly leads to the boom & bust cycles that most economists had taken for granted. He obliterated all economic arguments in favor of socialism by explaining that a centrally controlled economy has no free market price system, and thus is irrational. But his greatest genius was in his ability to lift the veil from the eyes of those who read his writings. He had a knack for stating the truth in a way that not only helped you see the errors of opposing arguments, but also made you realize that you knew the truth all along. Reading his great works like Theory & History gives you the insight and ability to resist the false economic and political doctrines that are daily used in order to convince the masses to support, or at least not resist, the redistribution of their wealth and personal decision making to a select few.

I'll give you an example of how Mises uses logic to cut away those fallacies that obscure what should be obvious truths. Capitalism is often disparaged as a system that robs the working poor in order to enrich the barons of big business. The blood of the working man greases the wheels of industry. The rich get richer as the poor get poorer. The masses are merely slaves who labor so that the capitalists do not have to. But then Mises points out the obvious: "Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses." It's as if he has turned the closet light on and revealed that the capitalist bogies of socialist lore are not really there. He continues:

All the early factories turned out was designed to serve the masses, the same strata that worked in the factories. They served them either by supplying them directly or indirectly by exporting and thus providing for them foreign food and raw materials. This principle of marketing was the signature of early capitalism as it is of present-day capitalism. The employees themselves are the customers consuming the much greater part of all goods produced. They are the sovereign customers who are "always right." Their buying or abstention from buying determines what has to be produced, in what quantity, and of what quality. In buying what suits them best they make some enterprises profit and expand and make other enterprises lose money and shrink. Thereby they are continually shifting control of the factors of production into the hands of those businessmen who are most successful in filling their wants. Under capitalism private property of the factors of production is a social function. The entrepreneurs, capitalists, and land owners are mandataries, as it were, of the consumers, and their mandate is revocable. In order to be rich, it is not sufficient to have once saved and accumulated capital. It is necessary to invest it again and again in those lines in which it best fills the wants of the consumers. The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite, and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of profitable people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given by the public. But business, the target of fanatical hatred on the part of all contemporary governments and self-styled intellectuals, acquires and preserves bigness only because it works for the masses. The plants that cater to the luxuries of the few never attain big size. The shortcoming of nineteenth-century historians and politicians was that they failed to realize that the workers were the main consumers of the products of industry. In their view, the wage earner was a man toiling for the sole benefit of a parasitic leisure class. They labored under the delusion that the factories had impaired the lot of the manual workers. If they had paid any attention to statistics they would easily have discovered the fallaciousness of their opinion. Infant mortality dropped, the average length of life was prolonged, the population multiplied, and the average common man enjoyed amenities of which even the well-to-do of earlier ages did not dream.

I wonder how anyone promoting collectivism or interventionism can read such offerings as Liberty and Property, Liberalism, or The Free Market and its Enemies and not feel embarrassed about continuing in their destructive ideologies.

Ludwig von Mises, along with Frédéric Bastiat and Murray Rothbard, has had an immeasurable impact on my thinking. This great economist/philosopher/man should be on everyone's reading list. Knowledge poured from his pen and it is a shame that so many will never take the time to sop it up with their minds. If they did, the world would likely be a better place.

Who's the Boss?

As I was mowing my front lawn one day, I noticed a couple of large bikers stopped in the middle of my street. They seemed to be interested in what I was doing, but I figured they were looking for someone else's place, so I ignored them and continued mowing my lawn. When I made another pass and started heading back toward the street, the bearded men had moved their Harleys onto the sidewalk in front of my house. One had dismounted and it was clear they wanted to talk to me. I stopped the mower and approached them. "How's it goin'?" I asked in the most booming voice I could muster. The biker was holding some papers and alternated between looking confusedly at them and looking confusedly at my house. "Do you live here?" he asked. I replied that I did. He read my address from the paper he was holding and I confirmed that this was my address. "You ain't gonna like this", he said as he handed me the paper. It was a list of houses to be auctioned off in a tax sale which was to be held the next day. The burly bikers were checking out homes on the list and knew something was screwy when they found me in the middle of maintaining the property.

I was very confused because I knew that when we purchased the property the previous year we had arranged for our taxes to be included in our mortgage payment. And we had not missed a single payment. What the hell was going on here? One of the large men dialed up the county treasurer and I began trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. The person on the other end of the phone (not the actual treasurer) was very irritated that I was calling her late on a Friday. After some pleading on my part, she grudgingly looked up the info I was requesting. It turned out that my garage was on a lot that somehow didn't get included in my mortgage (apparently my house sits on 6 lots. It looks like 1 to me). They had the previous owner on the hook for the taxes and had been sending delinquent notices to our house. Since we don't read other people's mail, we would always put the envelopes back in the mailbox with the note "Doesn't live here" scrawled on them, never suspecting information we desperately needed was inside.

"Why didn't anyone warn us before it went up for auction?" I demanded. "We did send notification to the owner", she snapped back. I could almost hear her roll her eyes. I decided to try a different tack. "Ok, obviously there was some confusion and you guys are auctioning off the wrong house. You didn't know, but you do now. How can I get this auction stopped?" She responded that there was no way to stop the auction. "Is there any way to get it delayed?" Nope. Quite impossible. Especially late on a Friday afternoon. "Can you at least have it clarified that it is just the garage and not my house? People are going to bid thinking they are getting all of my property!" But her hands were tied. Absolutely nothing she could do. The county was completely powerless to do anything other than take my property away and sell it to someone else. So, my garage was auctioned off. The real estate company bought it from the winning bidder, put it in our name, and we were forced to pay back taxes on it.

Fast forward to this morning. My wife woke me in order to inform me that our van, which we had taken to a mechanic the day before, needed a part that the mechanic did not have in stock. Without this repair, we would have no air conditioning. It would take until tomorrow to get the part, and once they did get it, it would take 8 hours to do the job. This presented a huge problem because we are leaving for the Gulf Coast tomorrow! We cannot drag our small children (Ages: 10, 4, and 1) to the Deep South in the middle of July with no AC. I advised my wife to start calling other area mechanics to see if any of them had the part so that we could take the van there. Since I had worked the night before, and had only been asleep for a couple of hours by this point, I immediately returned to my slumber.

She reappeared after a time and woke me once more. She had been unable to locate any area mechanics who could help but she had called the dealership from which we had purchased the vehicle in the first place. They had sold us this van just last winter and assured us back then that the AC was working properly. We tried it out, and it seemed to work. Once the weather warmed up, my wife attempted to use the air conditioning on a trip to Cincinnati. It worked again...for part of the trip. It turned out that it was leaking freon. My wife was now calling to chew them out for putting us in this predicament. But they had some good news for us. They had the part in stock and could fix it in 2 hours. It would only cost $450. It made me wince to think about paying $450 to have them repair something they sold us as already functioning properly. But vacation looms and no one else can do it. Since the dealership is an hour away, and since I had to return to work in the afternoon, I got out of bed and watched the kids while my wife went and retrieved our van from one mechanic so that she could take it to another.

A couple of hours later, I received a text from my wife. She had more bad news. The dealership was claiming that they had run into further problems with the AC. They would not be able to finish the job until the next day and the new price was $650. My blood boiled. I had had enough. I called into the dealership and explained to them that I had no intentions of paying $650 and that I would instead pay the originally agreed upon price of $450. The customer service rep then launched into an explanation of what was wrong with the car and why we had incurred additional costs. I could tell he had no intention of lowering the price without a struggle. But unlike the lady from the treasurer's office a couple of years before, he was not rude. On the contrary, he remained extremely polite as I continually insisted that we would not pay a penny more than the $450 I already didn't want to pay. My tone was also different. Instead of fruitlessly pleading to the person on the other end of the phone to have mercy on me, I was giving the commands. 'You will fix the air conditioner. And I will only pay $450.' At last, the customer service rep agreed. I will only be charged $450. And I can now choose to cease business transactions with that particular seller.

Not so with the county government. The only way to escape the clutches of one thieving government is to run into the arms of another thieving government. The new government will have the same disconnect with consumers as the last. On the market, the customer is always right. But the various governments do not see you as a customer. They see you as a subject who must submit to their demands. If a business owner  makes a habit of displeasing consumers, he will lose his business. The government might change faces from time to time, but the machine lives on. It continues to thrash all who oppose it.

Conclusion: On the market, the customer is the boss. When dealing with the government, those same customers cow to the will of state officials. We must shrink the public sector and let the private sector grow in order to increase our control of society.

Welcome to Dystopia

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a dystopian novel...

 As I am driving down a country road with my windows down on a beautiful summer day, I am listening to the Cubs pregame show. The broadcasters are talking about the upcoming contest and even interview some players. Then it's game time. Cue the Federal Anthem. I reach over and turn the volume down and wait until I'm certain it is over before I return the volume setting to its previous level. I have seen and heard the Anthem played before a baseball game countless times. But I'm done listening to it. Why do they feel the need to play this government hymnal before sporting events anyway? Because they love their government country, comrade...

Recently, my family made the trek to the north side of Chicago to visit Wrigley Field. My grandparents, parents, two siblings, my wife, my kids, and myself. Once we arrived downtown, we all boarded a subway train that would eventually take us above ground and to our destination. As we sat on the train, inches away from a homeless man who was using the transit system as a mobile bed, we were continually alerted via speaker of the approaching stops. Between these announcements we were encouraged by the speaker to report any suspicious activities of our fellow citizens. I could almost hear George Orwell narrating my thoughts...

I discovered today, as I was reading the newspaper, that they have implemented "Blue Alerts" in Indiana. Evidently, it works like an Amber Alert by notifying the public that a policeman has been killed or injured. I would be far more interested in an alert that warned me of police officers who had just killed or injured a member of the public. Of course, that happens far more often. But what I really can't stand is the hubris of the government police force. They really do consider it more important to protect their brothers in arms than the people they are paid to protect, viz., the citizenry. This is just another step in the continual propaganda push to teach us that some animals are more equal than others...

Edward Snowden has become an enemy of the state for revealing to the American public that the U.S. government is spying on us and everyone else on the planet. Ironically, they are now charging him with espionage. It was revealed that the NSA has the capability to monitor every digital transaction of the public and is storing that information in case it ever wants to. Their reasoning is that any one of us could turn out to be a terrorist, so we all must be treated like potential enemies of the empire. They also would like for us to stop worrying that this information can or will be used for political purposes. I mean, it's not like some giant government department just admitted to using its vast powers for that very reason...

Sometimes I feel like I am living in a dystopian novel...

The Human Aspect of Budget Cuts

It would be difficult to drive through South Marion without noticing that it is, to use the recent words from a friend of mine, economically blasted. From downtown to 'The Village", vacant lots, dilapidated houses, and abandoned properties are commonplace. I grew up attending the Adams Street Christian Church on the corner of 32nd and Adams. My grandmother lived on 31st and Adams. I even lived in a rental on Adams between 31st and 32nd for a short time as a child, so I realize that the people in this area have been struggling for a long time. But it seems as though it has been getting worse over the last couple of decades.

Employment opportunities, especially in manufacturing, have retreated from Marion. Old stalwarts of Marion industry have packed up and headed for greener pastures...or just closed their doors forever. Many of these problems are not unique to Marion. On the contrary, it seems that much of America is stuck in an economic quagmire. The government has been very active in trying to assist those who find themselves unemployed while still supporting the chronically indigent. But welfare is a poor substitute for employment. What we need, what Marion needs, is an economic renaissance.

What can Marion's city government do to help bring about such a renaissance? They have tried many things in recent years. For example, Mayor Seybold has spent a lot of time in China purportedly in order to lure employers here. The city has also focused much effort on developing the I-69 corridor. Part of that effort resulted in Ivy Tech abandoning its old campus for the plush new digs it currently occupies. If I recall correctly, this was going to help educate the citizens of Marion who would in turn help build the economic infrastructure that would put the city back on track. You might argue that the government has confused cause with effect in this endeavor and that a citizenry that is able to create wealth and escape poverty is more likely to have the resources to educate themselves and their children, but you cannot argue that the government has not used the resources at its disposal in an attempt to combat these economic problems. So, why can't they seem to fix Marion? Because they do not possess the tools for the job.

Governments cannot produce wealth. They either redistribute wealth that has already been created, or they consume it. On the market, wealth is created whenever someone combines resources in a way that consumers prefer to the state in which those resources previously existed. This is expressed through profits that are reaped via free exchange. The government exists outside of the market and is completely dependent upon the the market for its survival. The government operates by confiscating wealth that is created on the market and then spending that wealth on resources such as roads, police, firemen, etc. So it should be clear that these government services are ancillary to the wealth created by the governed community. We cannot pay for these things if they have not been created in the first place. Nor can we pay for these things if we do not first make money with which to pay.

The only way the government can help is by decreasing its burden on the suffering public. As Henry David Thoreau said in his legendary essay which inspired both Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., "[G]overnment never of itself furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way". Ludwig von Mises seemed to concur over a century later when he penned, "All that good government can do to improve the material well-being of the masses is to establish and to preserve an institutional setting in which there are no obstacles to the progressive accumulation of new capital and its utilization for the improvement of technical methods of production". If the public has fallen on hard financial times, the government must shrink. It must return the resources it has taken from the public. Recently, the Marion city council has been attempting to do just that. But no one said it would be easy to remove these tax feeders from the public trough.

Apparently, these "public servants" spent several hours pleading for their share of the severely reduced revenue stream. Each one complained that the cuts were too severe and that their particular department was already underfunded. I don't blame them for being concerned about their jobs. I understand that they have families for whom to provide. But I also understand that unlike a market transaction, where entrepreneurs provide for their families by pleasing their customers, the interests of these government employees are at odds with the interests of the taxpayers. They want the taxpayers to have less so that they can have more.

It was recently inferred by my friend Aaron Pratt that I do not acknowledge the "human aspect" when I call for immediate and drastic cuts to the government budget. I think the assorted city department heads should go visit the human beings who reside in South Marion. I wonder if they would find any sympathetic ears if they complained to them about not having enough money.