leftlibertarian.org

My friend Jim has begun a new blog, "Disquisitions and Revolutions" on Blogger. I encourage everyone to read his excellent and latest blog post, "Middle Class Values", here. Also, it features a comment by me with a great new quotable quote.

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a post about the Cory Maye case. I’ve engaged in more than one online discussion of the case in varying contexts (racism, the drug war, forced entry by law enforcement) and have always promised a treatment in this blog. However, the tireless and diligent blogging of Radley Balko on the case - and his role in uncovering and publicizing critical details - has kind of dwarfed any sense that I could contribute something more valuable. So instead I’m going to link you to the writing of Balko and other sources so you can familiarize yourself with the case.

The paragraph summary: an informant’s tip resulted in a late night forced entry by rural Mississippi police into the home of one Cory Maye, who had no prior criminal record and was not even named in the warrant (though his duplex unit neighbored a known dealers’). Sleeping in a room with his baby daughter, Maye claims he never heard the police announce themselves and feared a break-in by criminals. When police entered the room he fired a shot that killed the son of the police chief. He was tried and convicted as a result of incompetent counsel and sentenced to death. All for defending his home as any of us would have done.

There’s a LOT more to the case, and I urge you to familiarize yourself with it. Here’s some materials:

• Balko’s Reason article summarizing the case up to a few weeks ago
• Since that article was published, the informant has been identified: a locally infamous racist who is probably one of the least credible people I’ve ever heard described.
• Here’s a local story on the recent hearing that threw out Maye’s sentencing for incompetent counsel.
• Balko just met Cory Maye; here’s his impressions.

I think it goes without saying that somebody with no criminal background and posing no immediate threat to anybody has a right to answer the door, view the warrant, and surrender his home in an orderly and respectful fashion. Anything else is subjecting citizens to a police state (a common criticism of the drug war in general). And while Maye has dodged one bullet, he’s not out of danger, as Balko explains:

…Cory’s life is far from saved. Thursday’s ruling was certainly a victory, but we’re still a long way from real justice in this case. There’s still the possibility he could be again get death at the new sentencing trial. I think odds are against that happening, for reasons I’ll get into later, but it’s still a very real possibility.

I’m also a little concerned that should Cory’s sentence be reduced to the death penalty to life in prison, his cause will lose some momentum. Life without parole doesn’t carry nearly the same sex appeal as a looming date with the death chamber. I hope that doesn’t happen — I hope the people who’ve done great work promoting this will case continue to write about it and call attention to it. An innocent life spent in prison isn’t a life saved. Cory’s two kids will still grow up without a dad. And a good guy will still wrongly waste away his life in a jail cell.

Tags: cory maye, radley balko

One of the reason why I haven't been so active here lately is because I have been very involved in creating a new website. Okay, maybe it's not that interesting for you since it's in German.

But what the heck. My new website is called Der freie Markt, which means "The Free Market". Original title, huh? It's subtitle "Libertär. Individualistisch. Egalitär." means "Libertarian. Individualistic. Egalitarian."

On Der freie Markt I'll try to comment on as many current events as possible from a left-libertarian perspective.

I'll have to find out if my web hosting service lets me endorse agorism, but since I'll comment on actual events, I don't think that I'm going to write that much about stragety.

My main goal is to introduce libertarianism to the Swiss since it is virtually unknown around here. I'll try to appeal both to classical liberals and to radical leftists.

So, tell all your Swiss friends about Der freie Markt. Oh, and comments about the layout are very welcome, even if you can't understand a word.

Tags: libertarianism, left-libertarianism

Last night I got a package from the Adam Smith Institute.  I opened it up and found one of these:

I don’t remember ordering one, but it’s funny (not sure if the ASI thinks it’s a joke, though). Thanks if somebody arranged for this to be sent to me.

Heh, shit, I just remembered who this could be.  Is this your work, Mr. Van Fleet?!?!

I don't think I was communicating well the last time I spoke about this so I'll restate my position a bit better I hope. I don't like terrorism one bit. Punishing civilians for the actions of their evil masters is a foul and despicable thing to do. If there really was a Global War On Terrorism, I'd be all for it. But the government of the United States engages in terrorism all the time. They'd

A quote from The Scotsman: "So pervasive is poor diet that reliance on individual choice as the prime ideology in shaping food supply is no longer an adequate policy or ideology." (adequate for whom?) Freedom is not an ideology, though an ideology can be built around an abstraction called "freedom". How close "freedom" and freedom come to each other will depend inversely on how densely extended

Those of you with an interest in moral theory and its relation to politics and policy questions should check out David Schmidtz's essay "Separateness, Suffering, and Moral Theory."

Two interesting quotes:

Theories often have implications other than ones they formally acknowledge. A theory can stipulate an action guide and an intended result. But a theory cannot stipulate that following its action guide will have its intended result, for that is an empirical matter. So it is with maximizing utility. One can say that trying to maximize utility actually tends to maximize utility, but saying it does not make it so. A simple maximizing strategy may tend to lead to the best possible outcome for beings like us in situations like ours. Then again, it may not. It has no history of doing so.

[. . . ]

A consequentialist theory needs to treat some topics as beyond the reach of utilitarian calculation. Rights can trump (not merely outweigh) utilitarian calculation even from a broadly consequentialist perspective. Why? Because, from a consequentialist perspective, results matter, and because, as an empirical matter, there is enormous utility in being able to treat certain parameters as settled, as not even permitting case by case utilitarian reasoning.

Unconstrained maximizers, by definition, optimally use any resources to which they have access, including their neighbors’ organs. To get good results in the real world, though, we need to be surrounded not by unconstrained maximizers but by people who respect rights, thereby enabling us to have a system of expectations and trust, which allows us together to transform our world into a world with greater potential (a world where delivery companies are willing to serve the hospital). When we cannot count on others to treat us as rights-bearers with separate lives, we are living in a world of lesser potential.

Two things that egoist and consequentialist moral theories usually get wrong:

1) That there are internal relations between means and ends. That is, as Roderick Long likes to point out, certain means are partly constitutive of their ends.

2) There can be good egoist and consequentialist reasons for actually becoming the kind of person who cares for others, who recognizes the separateness of persons, who knows when to respect a value and when to promote it, who doesn't act as a utilitarian calculator. Pretending to be this kind of person in order to promote the best consequences (for yourself and/or for others)is likely to fail even on purely egoist or consequentialist grounds.

1. Killing one or many innocents, regardless of one's grievances, is monstrous. This elementary principle would seem to apply to George Bush as much as to Osama bin Laden. Can someone say why it doesn't?

2. Despite all its guarantees -- contrary to its ideological justification for existing -- the state can't protect us -- even from a ragtag group of hijackers. Trillions of dollars spent over many years built a "national security apparatus" that could not stop attacks on the two most prominent buildings in the most prominent city in the country -- or its own headquarters. That says a lot. No. That says it all. The state is a fraud. We have been duped.

3. The shameless state will stop at nothing to keep people's support by scaring the hell out of them. (Robert Higgs writes about this.) That people take its claims about "why they hate us" seriously after 9/11 shows what the public schools and the mass media are capable of doing to people. But the people are not absolved of responsibility: they could think their way out of this if they cared to make the effort.

4. Blowback is real. Foreign-policy makers never think how their decisions will harm Americans, much less others. They never wonder how their actions will look to their targets. That's because they are state employees.

5. As Randolph Bourne said, getting into a war is like riding a wild elephant. You may think you are in control -- you may believe your objectives and only your objectives are what count. If so, you are deluded. Consider the tens of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqi and Afghanis. What did they have to do with 9/11?

6. No one likes an occupying power.

7. Victims of foreign intervention don't forget, even if the perpetrators and their subjects do.

8. Terrorism is not an enemy. It's a tactic, one used by many different kinds of people in causes of varying moral hues. Declaring all those people one's enemy is criminally reckless. But it's a damn good way for a government to achieve potentially total power over its subjects.

9. They say the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Maybe, maybe not. But it seems abundantly clear that the enemy of my friend is also likely to be my enemy. See the U.S.-Israel relationship for details.

10. Assume "your" government is lying.

(See Roderick Long's take here.)

Two very elderly, feeble men were sitting at the table next to me during lunch. I was taken aback when one said rather loudly to the other, "I don’t know why mine looks so big, and yours looks so little."

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I came up with this a few days ago, and figured what the hell, might as well post it. You code 16 functions, what do you get? another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Linus don't you call me, cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store. When you see me pinging better step aside, a lot of men didn't, their networks died. One hack of iron, the other of steel, if the syn flood don't