MLLG

Liberty: Death by A Thousand Cuts

State and local governments routinely assault our liberty in countless ways.

Liberty: Death by A Thousand Cuts

By: George Noga – May 29, 2022

MLLG usually focuses on issues of national scope; however, Americans are more directly affected by local and state government laws, taxes, regulations and actions. Throughout the USA, local governments assault our liberty in thousands of ways; this post describes some of the most egregious. Fortunately, the Institute for Justice (IJ), a public interest law group, ferociously defends liberty in many of the following cases.

Legal Marijuana: Pre-legalization, marijuana (1) enriched criminal cartels; (2) created powerful economic incentives for distributors; (3) spawned turf wars resulting in murder and mayhem; (4) corrupted police, judges and entire governments; and (5) made drug dealers into role models. The purpose of legalization was to end all these horrors as it did with alcohol. Instead, local governments, particularly in Colorado and California, imposed such high taxes and onerous regulations on legal growers and sellers that the illegal trade still is profitable. To top it off the craziness, the Biden Administration is proposing a 163-page bill imposing an added federal 25% tax and voluminous new federal regulations. Now we have the worst of both worlds.

Occupational licenses; barriers to entry: The impetus for licensing comes from industry groups with vested interests in preventing competition. California prohibits anyone without a high school diploma from attending vocational school unless they pass a government exam. Sale of home baked goods require commercial grade kitchens. A Texas town refused to issue a license to a one-man business without adding 28 parking spaces. To become a barber in 20 large cities requires over a year of training and compliance with costly regulations. Any barber who wants to open a shop must navigate a mind-numbing array of zoning, permits, taxes, inspections and licenses. All together, this costs over $3,000, requires 16 forms and over 55 steps before opening.

Asset forfeiture and policing for profit: Police in many states confiscate cash from citizens during routine traffic stops without charging them with a crime. They use this money for their own benefit, giving them a nefarious motive. In Philadelphia alone, there have been 30,000 such cases. In one Alabama town, police pull over residents for spurious reasons, handcuff the drivers, search the cars and have them towed and impounded. Owners are forced to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to recover their cars. As always, most victims are from disadvantaged communities. Shakedowns just like this take place every day in cities and towns across America.

More Examples of Death by a Thousand Cuts

There are many other instances where state and local governments stifle liberty. Due to space constraints, we can only summarize the most egregious ones herein.

Guardianship laws: In many states older people often are declared incapacitated with little or no due process. They lose the right to drive, vote, marry, hire an attorney, travel, consent to treatment and even choose with whom to talk or visit. Young people are free to make poor life choices without consequence; why not older people?

Food trucks: Many locales enact restrictions that make it impossible to operate food trucks, denying owners the right to earn a living.

Pandemic issues: States and cities imposed unconstitutional, arbitrary and capricious emergency edicts. It was okay for liquor stores to be open but not churches. Children lost one or two years of learning. Many lives were needlessly uprooted or harmed.

Property rights: Local governments disrespect property rights. They prohibit small homes by mandating minimum size, ban working from home, outlaw front yard vegetable gardens and ban businesses from placing signage in their own windows.

Fourth Amendment: Unreasonable and illegal searches, seizures and surveillance take place routinely in many jurisdictions. In Tennessee they enter private property to install cameras to search for hunting violations. In Florida, police harass families because a computer algorithm predicted a family member may commit a crime in the future.

School choice: Governments beholding to teacher unions restrict charter schools, teach CRT, gender dysphoria, the 1619 project and indoctrinate students in a state religion that directly conflicts with parental values. They oppose choice in every way possible.

We conclude with the story of Jaime, who has been a model citizen his entire adult life. He was hired for his dream job of an ocean rescue lifeguard, which required EMT certification, 200 hours of coursework and an exam. After meeting all of the requirements and passing the exam (on his first attempt), Jaime was denied a license because of a youthful non-violent drug conviction 20 years ago. His appeal required mounds of documents and time-consuming bureaucracy. Jaime’s story has a happy ending only because IJ took his case and ultimately prevailed. However, there are thousands and thousands of other cases like Jaime’s out there that cry out for justice.

The state and local government abuses of power described herein are but the tip of the iceberg. There is one, and only one, way to remedy this government lust for more power and that is – you guessed it – more liberty and less government.

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“California Screaming” leads off our next post which covers multiple topics.

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More Liberty Less Government – mllg@cfl.rr.com – www.mllg.us
MLLG

Run Forrest Run . . . You Won the Election; Now What?

Forrest persisted despite heat, humidity, pit bulls and vicious personal attacks.

Run Forrest Run . . .

You Won the Election; Now What?

By: George Noga – November 7, 2021

On November 2, 2021 many Americans won political office for the first time. This is the story of a man named Forrest, who was elected a few years ago. It is about what happens when well-intentioned people encounter the realities of politics.

Forrest Runs for Office

Forrest had fervent views about many political issues and was motivated to seek office to make his community better. He began at a huge disadvantage versus his incumbent opponent who had name recognition, fund-raising prowess and knew the system. Forrest began early and devoted every spare minute to walking neighborhoods to meet voters. He persisted through heat, humidity, downpours, rudeness and vicious dogs.

Forrest made 50 fund-raising calls daily despite his discomfort with asking for money. Many who contributed wanted something in return – same with endorsements. He had to master every issue and respond to personal attacks. Everything in his (and his wife’s) past and everything he had ever written or posted on social media was scrutinized, distorted and used to attack him. Nonetheless, Forrest worked incredibly hard and a week before the election pulled even with his opponent. Then the bombshell dropped.

A politically motivated former coworker accused Forrest of sexual harassment and revealed some intimate text messages. This incident occurred before Forrest’s marriage and he claimed the relationship was consensual. The media printed the most salacious portions of the texts and his opponent used them in a vicious hit piece mailed to all voters immediately before the election. Forrest’s wife was mortified and his children were taunted at school. His campaign was out of money and could not respond. The negative mailers worked; Forrest’s support waned and he lost by a few points.

Forrest Runs Again

Encouraged by his earlier strong showing, Forrest decided to try again, this time vowing to win whatever the cost. He raised megabucks from special interests, giving the impression he supported their agendas – same with endorsements. He dug up dirt and attacked his opponent. He worked even harder then before walking neighborhoods despite being bitten by a pit bull. When his opponent resurrected the sexual harassment canard, Forrest was prepared with his own direct mail savage hit piece.

The final week before the election, the race was a tossup. Forrest urgently needed money for more media, robocalls and another direct mailer. He and his wife took out a $50,000 mortgage on their home to loan to the campaign. It worked. Forrest won but had to continue raising money to repay the mortgage. Since Forrest had won, many donors were eager to contribute – provided of course that he consider their positions.

Forrest Takes Office

Forrest met with many constituents, all of whom wanted something from government. Every committee hearing was an urgent plea to fund a particular cause or project. Government employees and lobbyists fawned over Forrest, constantly inflating his ego. There were no voices urging restraint. And then there were all those promises Forrest had made and the debts he incurred to raise money and to obtain endorsements. Forrest found himself increasingly focused on doing what was necessary to get reelected.

Forrest sought public office to better his community, but he soon became seduced by power and metamorphosized into an archetypical politician. He relished the power and felt entitled. After all, he had worked himself to exhaustion, been attacked by a pit bull, mortgaged his home and endured vicious personal attacks. Therein lies the problem.

How do we get all the Forrests of this world to understand that America neither needs nor wants more laws, regulations, government programs, taxes, debt or spending? In the overwhelming majority of cases, the correct thing for Forrest is to do absolutely nothing. What America needs is more liberty and less government!

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Our next post is about political correctness and the use of language.

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Why I Write This Blog

Are societies of men capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or are they forever destined to depend on accident and force?  (Hamilton)
Why I Write This Blog
By: George Noga – January 28, 2018

      This personal narrative is the first of several intermittent posts on the relationship of man and the state. Periodically, I must remind myself and my readers why I have spent thousands of hours over 10 years writing 400 posts filling 1,000 pages. This post answers that question. The Hamilton quote (above) from the Federalist poses an eternal question – the answer to which, my friends, still is blowin’ in the wind.

       Whether any society of men gets its politics right or wrong affects every aspect of life, and even life itself. If we get politics right, we live our lives in freedom, prosperity and pursuit of our dreams. If we get politics wrong, liberty, happiness and property are forfeit and life is brutish and brief. Since man first walked upright, there have been 110 billion homo sapiens of whom less than 1% lived their lives in liberty. Even today, only about 10% of the 8 billion humans extant live in relative freedom.

       I promised a personal narrative and here it is. Following are but some of the ways my life has been directly impacted by failure to get our politics right.

* Both world wars and Korea resulted from political ineptitude, appeasement and failure to heed existential threats. I was fatherless during WWII and Korea.

* I was the victim of an execrable education in government schools for 12 years.

* I was subject to a mind-numbing array of taxes including income taxes of 94%.

* Throughout my lifetime and continuing to the present, the Federal Reserve unleashed numerous cycles, bubbles, panics, meltdowns and economic disasters.

* The politically micromanaged Vietnam War totally discombobulated my life for many years including 6 years I served in the military. I could have been killed.

* Government-spawned inflation reached 14% and interest rates exceeded 20%. That and the ensuing correction massively disrupted my personal and financial life.

* It requires $20,000 today to buy what cost $1,000 when I was born due to intentional currency debasement by the government.

* Unnecessary hyper regulation made owning my regulated business for 35 years a living hell. Instead of protecting the public, regulation caused them great harm.

* A lifetime of hard work and thrift has been diminished by chronic negative real interest rates to protect a feckless government from its ongoing debt and deficit binge.

There is more – much more – but you get the drift. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end with me. My children are doomed to a poorer and more dangerous future; they will be a lost generation leading lives of quiet desperation. They will pay for our debt binge and intergenerational theft with vastly reduced opportunity. They will inhabit a Clockwork Orange world where nuclear arms proliferate in places committed to our destruction. The gods of the copybook headings, with terror and slaughter, will return.

The horrors listed herein occurred during my lifetime. They were promulgated by a government most consider to be among the best in the world and one of the best in history. Although government has wrought great harm to me throughout my life, the root cause is not a failure of government; it is simply government being government. History teaches it is foolish to believe we can control government; we can only limit it.

The solution therefore lies not in more government or even in better government. The solution lies in more liberty and less government. And that is why I write.


The next post traces my epiphany resulting from the Alar mass hysteria.
MLLG

Letter to Liberals

Defining Liberalism – Part 4

By George Noga – November 22, 2014

Dear Liberal Friends:

Although I find liberal ideas (to the extent such exist) jejune, vapid and repugnant, I always have accorded you personal respect and dignity, a courtesy few of you have reciprocated. This is akin to the Christian concept of condemning the sin while loving the sinner. Most of you have been quick to call me racist, evil and other vile epithets but I do not reciprocate, again defaulting to a Christian concept, turning the other cheek. Although I have many liberal readers, my blog is not aimed at those impervious to truth and logic. This post is an exception and is expressly for you, my liberal friends.

Our personal lives, dreams and hopes are not dissimilar; we all want a brighter future for our children and a healthier planet; we live within our means; we assist those in need; we consider ourselves moral and try to do the right thing. We live-and-let-live, which interestingly is a libertarian principle. We enjoy similar pursuits and generally get along very well together. When politics rears its head however, it seems we are from different planets – make that different galaxies.

“Your credo is sentio ergo sum – I feel therefore I am.”

I view your liberalism as an emotional state in which obvious contradictions, disdain for facts, utopian fantasies, obsessive desires to control and to take from others and antipathy for all who differ – in various degrees and patterns – come to dominate your thinking. It seems that you feel rather than think; hence your credo is Sentio ergo sum, i.e. I feel therefore I am. Notice I say liberalism is an emotional state; I do not, as do many others, term it a mental illness. Churchill described your liberalism poignantly as: “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.”

Perhaps your liberalism was caused or exacerbated by fluoridation, EMT, the ozone hole, acid rain, GMOs, Thimerosal, dioxin, PCBs, acrylamide, BPA, pink slime or any combination of these and the 50 other instances of junk science in which you once believed – and perhaps continue to believe – and all of which have been proven false or grossly exaggerated. Did I mention anthropogenic global warming and organic foods? You embrace unreason because your progressive dogma is antithetical to objective reality and you prefer the ersatz comfort of mythology to the real world.

“Your liberalism is a lie.”

You believe the darndest things – many of which are contradictory. It is okay for a very young girl to have an abortion without parental knowledge or consent but not for her to sell lemonade in her front yard. Gender specific abortion is fine because we must kill females in order to protect their rights. Fifty million abortions are good but 1,300 executions are evil. Choice is your gold standard but you believe a woman cannot choose where to school her children, to own a gun and whether or not to buy medical insurance or to join a labor union. You believe more money improves schools, raising the minimum wage helps the poor, voter ID laws suppress minority voting, there is a war on women, government creates jobs,ad infinitum. Such modern day witchcraft inevitably leads to the syllogistic conclusion that your liberalism is a lie.

Most of you live inside a plastic bubble with other bien-pensant libs, in intellectually isolated and segregated enclaves; you live your lives without ever conversing with an evangelical Christian, conservative, libertarian or anyone from fly-over land. You attended government schools with a liberal curriculum using liberal textbooks written by leftist professors and taught by progressive unionist teachers in a milieu of political correctness.You are taught there are no values except that there are no values. There are no winners or losers because no one keeps score and everyone is above average. The media, pop culture and even religion reinforce your liberal mythology. If you ever venture outside your plastic bubble and perchance encounter truth, your first instinct is to deny it; your second is ad hominem attacks.

Your last liberal refuge is compassion and good intentions about which you never tire of regaling me. However, recent scholarship exposes your ersatz compassion as pathological altruism in which your attempts to promote the welfare of others, instead results in harm. The entire point of your falsetto compassion is for you to feel better when another’s suffering provokes unease; but this does not assure the sufferer of relief. Your interest is in accruing compassion points that you and others will admire. If you’re trying to prove your heart is in the right place, it isn’t. You regard your compassion as the central virtue that makes you good as distinguished from mean-spirited folks like me. But to bolster your rush of pious, pompous reaction, you need more victims in exactly the same way an addict needs more drugs.

“If you’re trying to prove your heart is in the right place, it isn’t.”

If you are so anguished about others’ suffering, why are you so disinterested in wasteful, misdirected and ineffective government programs? It is because you care much less about actually helping than you care about caring. Hence, it is more important for you to say or to do something rather than to accomplish something. Once you have written, spoken or even held forth at a social gathering about some government program, your work is done and you can bask in your own pious reaction. You always want a bigger welfare state for self validation rather than for helping others. That’s precisely why your mantra always is to spend more – it is really for your benefit for you to feel better about yourself.

To conclude dear liberal friends, you are all about feeling rather than thinking. You bought uncritically into every bit of junk science in your lifetime. You routinely accept grotesque contradictions as dogma. You believe so much that simply isn’t true, the only possible conclusion is that liberalism is a lie. You live in a plastic bubble where your myths are constantly reinforced. If you ever experience a conflict, you first deny the truth and then default to vicious and ugly ad hominem attacks. Unsurprisingly, studies show liberals hate more than any other group, a fact to which I can attest.

Even your compassion is phony; your tears are crocodile tears. If you really cared about the poor more than pumping up your self image, you would be more interested in the effectiveness (results) of programs intended to assist them rather than forever mindlessly spending more and more of other peoples’ money. By the way, study after study shows you talk a good game but don’t deliver; folks like me donate far more to charity than folks like you. You take great pride in your compassion and pristine intentions which you wear on your sleeve for all to see. Everything you do is to show your heart is in the right place; but if you’re trying to prove your heart is in the right place, ipso facto, it isn’t!  Have a nice day.

Acknowledgment and credit are due for the ideas presented herein dealing with the nature of liberal compassion. The books Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State and The Pity Party both by William Voegeli, as well as his summary in Imprimis, were sources for this posting.