Category Archives: Law

A Nanny State Idiocracy: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on February 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

We’re drowning in laws, regulations, and nanny state depredations. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.

For instance, an animal welfare bill introduced in the Florida state legislature would ban the sale of rabbits in March and April, prohibit cat owners from declawing their pets, make it illegal for dogs to stick their heads out of car windows, force owners to place dogs in a harness or in a pet seatbelt when traveling in a car, and require police to create a public list of convicted animal abusers.

A Massachusetts law prohibits drivers from letting their cars idle for more than five minutes on penalty of a $100 fine ($500 for repeat offenders), even in the winter. You can also be fined $20 or a month in jail for scaring pigeons.

This overbearing Nanny State despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

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CBDCs — The good, the bad, the ugly, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on February 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

The good is not all that good, the bad is very bad, and the ugly is extremely ugly. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

There has been much comment over the likelihood that central bank digital currencies will be introduced. I conclude they are unnecessary — a red herring. But it does allow us to discuss their possible relevance to a new Asian super-currency.

Earlier this month, the Bank of England in partnership with the UK Treasury produced a white paper on the subject, which waters down the objectives identified by the Bank for International Settlements considerably. The British proposal is a bad idea because it is pointless and I explain why. 

In this article, I describe how a new gold-backed currency can do away with the US dollar for trade settlements and commodity purchases entirely between participating nations in the Russia China axis. Some informed commentary on the topic suggests that a blockchain will be involved, and Sberbank, the Russian state-owned lender has already issued a gold-linked fund designed to be available to the public by being compatible with ethereum. Perhaps it is front-running developments…

The ugly side in our title is found in the BIS’s dystopian proposals, which sees CBDCs as an opportunity to allow central banks to double down on their attempts to manage economic outcomes while restricting personal freedom. 

Messing about with fiat currency alternatives such as CBDCs could end up revealing the formers’ fragility.  CBDCs will take years to implement in any major currency anyway, during which fiat currencies led by the dollar are likely to fail anyway.

Introduction

It is not clear what encouraged central banks to think about introducing their own digital currencies, other than possibly a feeling that if they didn’t do something, then private sector money could threaten their monopoly. 

Initially, bitcoin was touted as sound money with a hard stop of 21,000,000 coins and proof of ownership recorded on a blockchain. Bitcoin’s strength was to be the opposite of fiat currency weakness, whose expansion is the primary means by which a central bank stimulates an economy. But if central banks think that bitcoin could overturn fiat currencies, they merely exposed their own ignorance about the nature of money and credit.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Governments, History, Law

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War and the Constitution, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Constitution isn’t perfect, but it once stood imperfectly between citizens and pure tyranny. No more. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Can the president fight any war he wishes? Can Congress fund any war it chooses? Are there constitutional and legal requirements that must first be met before war is waged? Can the United States legally attack an ally?

These questions should be front and center in a debate over the U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Sadly, there has been no great debate. The media are mouthing what the CIA is telling them, and only a few websites and podcasts — my own, “Judging Freedom” on You Tube, among them — are challenging the government’s reckless, immoral, illegal and unconstitutional war.

All power in the federal government comes from the Constitution and from no other source. Congress, however, has managed to extend its reach beyond the confines of the Constitution domestically by spending money in areas that it cannot regulate and purchasing compliance from the states by bribery.

Examples of this are the numerical minimum blood alcohol content to trigger DWI arrests, and maximum speed limits. In both instances, Congress offered money to the states to pave highways provided they lower both numbers, and the cash-strapped states accepted the money along with congressional strings. These are bribes from the criminal consequences of which Congress has exempted itself.

The same takes place in foreign policy. Congress cannot legally declare war on Russia, since there is no militarily-grounded reason for doing so. Russia poses no threat to American national security or American persons or property. Moreover, the U.S. has no treaty with Ukraine that triggers an American military defense. But Congress spends money on war nevertheless.

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why eliminating the FDA and CDC would probably make the public safer, by el gato malo

Posted on February 21, 2023 | 1 comment

The marketplace and the flow of information have always been the best regulators. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

A false sense of safety is more dangerous than knowing you’re at risk

i’ve used this analogy before, but it remains germane, so bear with me while i frame this:

playing NFL football is dangerous.

playing NFL football without a helmet (when everyone else has one) would be far more dangerous.

but most dangerous of all is this: playing while THINKING you have a helmet when in fact you do not.

that is going to get you killed.

like, immediately.

even if you had no helmet, knowing it would change the way you behaved, the risks you took. maybe you wouldn’t play at all.

but thinking you’re protected when you are not? that’s how you make your very last bad choice…

having a fake helmet made of paper mâché is a literal recipe for quadriplegia.

pretty much anyone can see that.

and yet oddly, very few people seem willing or able to rotate this shape and ask “hey, are our regulatory agencies maybe working just like that?”

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Did a Government Intel Asset Plant Key Evidence inProud Boys Case? By Julie Kelly

Posted on February 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Do you call the January 6 judicial proceedings kangaroo courts or show trials? From Julie Kelly at amgreatness.com:

We should be suspicious of weird coincidences.

It’s week five of the Justice Department’s most high-profile—and high-stakes—criminal trial related to the events of January 6, 2021. Five members of the Proud Boys face the rare “seditious conspiracy” charge. Guilty verdicts—almost certain given the government’s near-perfect conviction rate for January 6 defendants—would build legal momentum for a similar indictment against Donald Trump. (The trial is so crucial that Matthew Graves, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia responsible for prosecuting every January 6 case, has shown up in the courtroom on at least three occasions.)

Trump is a major figure in this trial, an unindicted coconspirator of sorts. Last week, Judge Timothy Kelly allowed prosecutors to play a clip of Trump’s extemporaneous comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark uttered during a presidential debate in September 2020 more than three months before the Capitol protest. The Justice Department wants to portray the comment as a call to arms, tying the alleged “militia” group to the former president.

The clip is just another thin reed of evidence in the government’s landmark domestic terrorism case. In fact, much of the “evidence” amounts to nothing more than worthless trinkets, braggadocious group chats, and otherwise protected political speech. 

It now appears that one key piece of evidence was not the work of any defendant in this case but rather written by a one-time government intelligence asset with unusual ties to both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, another group involved in January 6.

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Department of What We’re Not Allowed Here, by Eric Peters

Posted on February 16, 2023 | 1 comment

Many fine vehicles are kept off the U.S. market by arbitrary U.S. regulations. From Eric Peters ate ericpetersautos.com:

To get some idea of what we’ve lost, it’s instructive to consider what we never got. 

For example, the ’96 Toyota Hilux Surf a friend of my old college buddy’s son bought recently. You have probably never heard of the Hilux – even though you have probably heard of the 4Runner.

They are both the same thing, except for one very important thing. 

The Hillux Surf is powered by a 3.0 liter diesel engine and is capable of better than 40-miles -per-gallon. This is about twice the mileage you’d get out of a 4Runner, which was only available – in the United States – with a gas engine. 

You might ask, why? – given the pretended governmental obsession with high fuel economy uber alles, the foundational justification for the federal government’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy regime. Well, because it is just that.

Pretended.

Or rather, it is the excuse.

CAFE – as it is known in acronym-speak – has been around since the ’70s, when the federal government first got into the weird business of dictating to the car industry how much fuel the vehicles built for sale could use – on the assumption that the people who bought vehicles could not direct the course of that via their dollars. 

How it is that the government – how is it that the regulatory apparat – acquired this power is itself an interesting question as well as a weird thing as there is nothing in the Constitution endowing the federal government with the power to decree how many miles-per-gallon the cars people buy must get. And which the companies that build cars are punished for not building, via fines that act as the “incentive” to not build them, in spite of people wanting to buy them. Viz, the soon-to-be-cancelled Dodge Charger/Challenger and Chrysler 300, all of which sell well but which use “too much” gas, for the government’s liking.

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Freedom of Speech and Religion Have Nothing To Do with It, Laurence Vance

Posted on February 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Discrimination is choice and in a free society people are free to choose. From Laurence Vance at lewrockwell.com:

The state of Colorado has relentlessly waged war against a Christian baker for ten years now.

In 2013, Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver was accused by Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission (CCRD)—which enforces the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA)—of discriminating against a homosexual couple because—based on his religious beliefs—he refused to bake them a cake for their “wedding.” Two state courts affirmed the Commission’s charge of discrimination.

(It should be noted that in 2014 when a man requested from three different Colorado bakeries that they make him an anti-gay-marriage cake with Scripture verses on it and they refused, the CCRD found that the bakeries did not discriminate based on the man’s religious beliefs.)

A petition for a writ of certiorari was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016, and was granted in 2017. The Court, in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), ruled in favor of Phillips because “the Commission’s actions here violated the Free Exercise Clause.”

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U.S. Government Sold Your Right to Jury Trial — to Insulate Big Pharma From Liability, by William Spruance

Posted on February 12, 2023 | 1 comment

The government pays big pharma for their products and shields them from liability when those products harm people. It’s the perfect business model for executives and shareholders without a shred of conscience. From William Spruance at childrenshealthdefense.org:

The federal government sold the Seventh Amendment, designed to protect your right to a jury trial, to the largest lobbying force in the country: Big Pharma.

On Feb. 24, 1985, The New York Times published “Glory Days End for Pharmaceuticals.” The article cited growing competition and legal liabilities as signs that “the big drug companies have suddenly found themselves mired in the same sort of troubles that have plagued less-glamorous industries for years.”

“Inevitably some [companies] will face staggering liabilities and lengthy court cases on approved drugs that later turn into flops,” journalist Winston Williams wrote.

Of course, the glory days did not end for Big Pharma.

From 2000 to 2018, 35 pharmaceutical companies reported cumulative revenue of $11.5 trillion. A study found that this was “significantly greater than other larger, public companies in the same time frame.”

Pfizer’s annual revenue jumped from $3.8 billion in 1984 to a record $100 billion in 2022. The company’s COVID-19 products, including its vaccine and Paxlovid accounted for $57 billion of that income.

The U.S. Government provided a steady stream of taxpayer dollars for Big Pharma’s revenue and shielded the benefiting companies from the cost of litigation.

Federal purchases of Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have totaled more than $25 billion. The government paid Moderna $2.5 billion of taxpayer funds to develop the vaccine, and President Biden called on local leaders to use public money to bribe citizens to get the shots.

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Posted in Business, Cronyism, Government, Law, Medicine, Uncategorized

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Would a ‘Climate Emergency’ Open the Same Door to Authoritarian Governance as the ‘COVID Emergency?’ by W. Aaron Vandiver

Posted on February 10, 2023 | 2 comments

They’re already planning to declare a climate emergency, and you can bet we’ll get all the same horseshit that we did Covid. From W. Aaron Vandiver at childrenshealthdefense.org:

There are better ways to address climate change than insisting federal lawmakers declare a national “climate emergency” — including building a left-right coalition that can work together to build resilience to the environmental challenges of the 21st century while preserving democracy, civil liberties and human rights.

In February 2022, 1,140 organizations sent President Biden a letter urging him to declare a “climate emergency.” A group of U.S. Senators did the same, in October 2022, and a House bill, introduced in 2021, also called on the president to “declare a national climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act.”

Biden has considered declaring such an emergency, but so far he has declined, to the disappointment of many progressives.

The United Nations (U.N.) has urged all countries to declare a climate emergency. The state of Hawaii and 170 local U.S. jurisdictions have declared some version of one. So have 38 countries, including European Union members and the U.K., and local jurisdictions around the world, together encompassing about 13% of the world’s population.

Hillary Clinton was reportedly prepared to declare a “climate emergency” if she had won the 2016 election.

A “climate emergency” is in the zeitgeist. Those words were surely uttered by the billionaires, technocrats and corporate CEOs attending the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos.

But what does it actually mean for the president of the U.S. to officially declare a “climate emergency”?

Most people don’t realize that under U.S. law, a national emergency declaration triggers a set of emergency powers that allows a president to act without the need for further legislation.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Environment, Governments, Horseshit, Law, Liberty, Politics

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Distract, Divide and Conquer: The Painful Truth About the State of Our Union, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on February 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

Biden can and does say whatever he wants, but the state of the union is not good. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, Law, Tyranny

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