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Steven Rhett gets pinched by the border cops at San Ysidro while he’s trying to peaceably move some marijuana across an imaginary line for some willing customers in the United States. Dale Franks, a California limited-governmentalist blogger who opposes drug prohibition, gets to sit in as Juror #1. If Dale Franks doesn’t vote to convict, the jury will hang and Steven Rhett will be able to go on living his life. After a short chat about the facts of the case, Dale Franks does his civic duty by voting to convict Steven Rhett on all charges, because that’s what The Law says. Back at QandO, Dale Franks blogs about his interesting experience. Meanwhile, Steven Rhett will be having an interesting experience in federal prison for the next ten years of his life.

Down in the comments, several anarchists ask Franks how he justifies directly collaborating in ruining a harmless man and robbing him of ten years of his life, when Franks himself doesn’t believe that anything Rhett did should be treated as a crime. Franks answers their objections decisively by getting into an argument with another limited governmentalist over whether or not the Constitution says it’s O.K., and what the word regulate meant in the 1780s.

If this is how the trains run around here, I’ll pass. I’m not interested in Dale Franks’s kind of railroading.

Hat tip to Anders Monsen for alerting me to this terrific interview with Prometheus-winning author Ken MacLeod. MacLeod talks about sci-fi, Left politics, market anarchism, and much more of interest to Libertarian Leftists. Here’s a taste:

“One of the problems I have with some on the Left is that they dissociate themselves from the past and present state-socialist regimes, but what they actually propose is, well, state socialism — but, of course, with more democracy, civil liberties and blah, blah, blah, which everybody knows wouldn’t survive the first real emergency (i.e. about day two of the revolution). Even the reforms they propose are statist. It would be much better, in my opinion, if they were to do the opposite: Take a bit more responsibility for the state-socialist past and propose something that is visibly different and institutionally unlikely to replicate the well-known defects of state socialism.”

I don’t know which is worse…

The painful irony of this sort of Dolchstoßlegende crap, considering the context, or…

The demagogic implication that Virginia Postrel is somehow the ideological plumbline of all who might dissent from the party line of the paleo-libertarian vanguardists.

I often feel overwhelmed with the outpouring of negative stories concerning the actions of various government entities. My cynical self tends to want to just write all of society off as hopelessly corrupt and crawl in a hole somewhere. I keep having to remind myself this isn’t a truly viable option.

Maybe I’m too idealistic (a charge directed at me rather frequently), or maybe I just expect too much from people, but I simply cannot understand how people can continue to defend the actions of government officials. Last week, I made some acquaintances aware of Roderick Long’s Petition to Abolish the Government of the USA. Here is one response I received:

Among the problems with abolishing government: in light of the human development that has occurred over the last few thousand years or so, it would in the short term at least take more bureaucracy to successfully dismantle government (and I would mark success or failure by death rates, starvation rates, homelessness rates, etc.) than to keep government running as it is. And then, in addition, miniature governments would simply spring up in the place of the big government that used to exist. Or, alternatively, the entire nation might turn into the Convention Center after Katrina.

The government is more than the IRS and the FBI. The government is your schools and your roads and your monetary system and your public housing - and once the government is gone, you’ve got to re-create all or some of that in a way that’s also profitable, because otherwise you have to implement a system of taxation - in other words, government. And if roads are built based on either where the tolls are profitable or where the citizens have enough wealth to build them out-of-pocket, and schools are built and run based on who can manage to construct, staff, and maintain them, then you still have a power system - it’s just a loose, uncheckable power system that ruins the lives of the rural and the poor.

I’m sure many would recognize this as another variation of the all-too-familiar argument, “Well government may not work that well, but it is better than any other ideas anyone has had.” But I am always left wondering how anyone knows this to be true, or more aptly: Do the supposed good things that government promotes (and, for the record, I think the benefits derived from any government program is very debatable) outweigh the bad things government does?

So, it is with this in mind that I read this story a friend pointed out in The Washington Independent yesterday.

You see, after the events of 9/11, the Bush Administration ordered the CIA to hone its interrogation skills, something in which it had not been particularly proficient prior to that time, with very questionable, if not disastrous results.

Despite having nearly no off-the-shelf experience, the CIA was tasked by President Bush to come up with a robust interrogation program for the most important al-Qaeda captives. So the agency turned to its partners for assistance in designing its interrogation regimen: Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia—all countries cited by the State Department for using torture—among others.

And the results of this misguided directive? It depends on who you ask:

In short, despite innumerable statements from the Bush administration about the value of the CIA’s interrogation program, U.S. interrogators are still mostly in the dark—in the dark not only about al-Qaeda, but about how to effectively elicit vital national-security information from the detainees in its custody.

Despite warnings that torture really isn’t a very effective method for getting prisoners to yield information, the mysterious members of the CIA who conducted the torture (”Also unclear is who exactly conducted the interrogations, and what skill sets they had.”) continued the practice, despite misgivings among many of the people in charge.

The former senior official in operations recalled taking his concerns about torture to colleagues at the agency. “I made it clear that I thought it was unwise,” he said. “To a senior level. This was no later than 2003. I am being candid—it’s not like there was an argument. Everyone was like, ‘We got into this goddamn thing, and there was not any choice.’”

Now, I can guess what you are thinking, “Oh, man! That is terrible. Bush & Co. are awful. I’ll be glad when they’re gone. What’s for lunch?” But the truly chilling part of this story is the long term effects.

Nearly seven years after 9/11, the Intelligence Science Board finds CIA interrogations are still on a poor footing. The legacy of torture will be with the U.S. in myriad ways for a long time: perhaps through a prosecution of Rodriguez, or even interrogators themselves; perhaps through innocent Iraqis tortured by U.S. officials who then become terrorists and seek revenge; perhaps through its effect on interrogators themselves. “You don’t torture people and lead a normal life afterwards,” the former senior Operations official said.

I implore you to think about that last paragraph. At least remember it the next time some “evil terrorists” try to blow up some innocent Americans, or you see a news story about some CIA-trained monster going on a killing spree.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this article last night while I watched the sickening spectacle that was President Bush’s State of the Union Address. And I wasn’t just disgusted by the words the President was saying; I was equally disgusted by the people in that room with him who stood and applauded after each “money line.” I finally gave up and went outside and stacked firewood.

Where is the moral outrage? How can anyone defend the actions of government?

I’m going to crawl back in my hole now.

Running a little late here (I wanted to give Kubby’s State of the Union address as much time up top as possible), but the usual format — first my unrealistic October prediction, then my final call.

From October, pre-Huckabee-surge, etc.:

1st - McCain (~55%)
2nd - Romney (~30%)
3rd - Ghouliani (~10%)
4th - Paul (~5%)

My final call:

1st - McCain (~38%)
2nd - Romney (~30%)
3rd - Giuliani (~15%)
4th - Huckabee (~12%)
5th - Paul (~5%)

Surprised / Not Surprised

- Surprised if Romney beats 30%.
- Not surprised if Romney nosedives to 25% or less.

- Surprised if McCain garners an absolute majority.
- Not surprised if McCain breaks 40%.

- Surprised if either Giuliani or Huckabee beats 15%.
- Not surprised if they switch places from my prediction — Hucks small base looks pretty solid, Giuliani’s was built on sand and has completely shattered.

- Surprised if Paul hits 10% or falls below 2%.
- Not surprised if Paul gets as much as 8% or as little as 2%.

From here on out, McCain runs the big-state table. Super Tuesday is anti-climax — Florida is where the deal is sealed.

I originally called Giuliani to win New York and New Jersey, but he’s already disintegrating in both those states and after today their walk away from him will become a stampede. His smartest move would have been to drop out and cut a deal before today. After Florida, McCain doesn’t need Giuliani and Giuliani doesn’t bring anything with him that can save Romney. The GOP nomination fat lady is warming up. Concert’s tonight.

I've been on the road and Free Association is one of the things I've neglected. Here's an attempt to catch up:

"It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing -- the water in the shallow end doesn't get any deeper."

That's how George Mason University economist Russell Roberts describes the logic -- rather, illogic -- of the economic "stimulus" proposals that everyone and his uncle are proposing.

The rest of last week's TGIF, "An Unstimulating Idea," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Republican presidential contender Ron Paul certainly deserves credit for putting the foreign policy of noninterventionism into the public debate. It’s about time. For decades U.S. presidents have sought to manage the world in behalf of what they call “American interests,” and all it has brought is death, mayhem, anti-Americanism, and a price tag that would blow the average citizen’s mind if he fully grasped it.

Yes, the time for this debate is long overdue. Unfortunately, the quality of the debate on the other side is pathetic.

The rest of my latest op-ed, "Pathetic Arguments for Foreign Intervention," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.

Third verse, same as the first.

Let’s say that you are trying to rebuild a once-prosperous country racked by years of tyranny, desperate poverty and near-constant violence. Corruption, terrorism, and warlordism are daily sources of terror. Most of the country is completely dependent on foreign aid. Grinding poverty is the norm all throughout the countryside, and farmers cannot support themselves on their usual crops. But there is one glimmer of hope: lucrative new opportunities to grow a traditional cash crop, which promises to lift many small farmers, currently on the edge of penury or starvation, into a much more comfortable standard of living. How should you react?

Well, according to the United States government, the best thing to do is to portray this lucrative cash crop as a fundamental menace to civil society, to shoot the farmers who grow it, and to poison or burn the fields they grow it in. We know this because they already did it in Afghanistan, in spite of the obviously hurtful consequences for Afghan farmers. Meanwhile, in southern Iraq, the same thing is likely to happen again soon:

The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.

Afghan with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north-east of Baghdad.

At a heavily guarded farm near the town of Buhriz, south of the provincial capital Baquba, poppies are grown between the orange trees in order to hide them, according to a local source.

The shift by Iraqi farmers to producing opium is a very recent development. The first poppy fields, funded by drug smugglers who previously supplied Saudi Arabia and the Gulf with heroin from Afghanistan, were close to the city of Diwaniyah in southern Iraq. The growing of poppies has now spread to Diyala, which is one of the places in Iraq where al-Qa’ida is still resisting US and Iraqi government forces. It is also deeply divided between Sunni, Shia and Kurd and the extreme violence means that local security men have little time to deal with the drugs trade. The speed with which farmers are turning to poppies is confirmed by the Iraqi news agency al-Malaf Press, which says that opium is now being produced around the towns of Khalis, Sa’adiya, Dain’ya and south of Baladruz, pointing out that these are all areas where al-Qa’ida is strong.

The agency cites a local agricultural engineer identified as M S al-Azawi as saying that local farmers got no support from the government and could not compete with cheap imports of fruit and vegetables. The price of fertilizer and fuel has also risen sharply. Mr Azawi says: The cultivation of opium is the likely solution [to these problems].

…

Initial planting in fertile land west and south of Diwaniya around the towns of Ash Shamiyah, al-Ghammas and Shinafiyah were said to have faced problems because of the extreme heat and humidity. Al-Malaf Press says that it has learnt that the experiments with opium poppy-growing in Diyala have been successful.

Although opium has not been grown in many of these areas in Iraq in recent history, some of the earliest written references to opium come from ancient Iraq.

It was known to the ancient Sumerians as early as 3400BC as the Hul Gil or joy plant and there are mentions of it on clay tablets found in excavations at the city of Nippur just east of Diwaniyah.

—Patrick Cockburn, CounterPunch (2008-01-24): http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick01242008.html

Cockburn, buying into the basic mythology of the United States government’s warped narco-diplomacy, bizarrely describes this rare chance for Iraqi farmers to lift themselves out of poverty with a traditional Mesopotamian crop, now extremely lucrative, as a menacing development, and immediately links it with warlordism and terrorism, rather than with the small farmers who are now able to get by on their new source of income. In fact, as far as I can tell, the upshot of the story is, in some parts of Iraq, because the government’s prohibitionist apparatus has more or less entirely broken down, many currently impoverished farmers are now menaced by the prospect of once again being able to make enough money to support themselves, and the only genuine dangers involved anywhere are the dangers that directly or indirectly result from the bullheaded commitment of the United States government and its client government in Iraq to destroying the opium farmers’ chance at a viable new source of income.

Just as it happened in Afghanistan, what will happen from here in Iraq is that U.S. officials will scream their heads off about the horrible menace of pain-killers being sold to willing customers, and then funnel money and military resources to the Iraqi government in order to launch chemical and paramilitary eradication programs—the primary effects of which will be to dramatically reinforce the power of terrorists and local warlords over the opium trade, and meanwhile to destroy the livelihoods of desperately poor farmers. Eradication, after all, forces illegal opium farmers to deal with whoever has the political juice necessary to do the smuggling, and in southern Iraq that mainly means gangsters, militia warlords, and influential jihadis. The farmers, on the other hand, will be forced to choose between living with the constant danger of having their lives and livelihoods ruined by government eradicators, or else going back to more-or-less guaranteed penury while they try to grow more of the same old unprofitable crops that they failed to make any money from before.

Meanwhile, this violent campaign on behalf of political corruption and mass starvation will be passed off by sanctimonious U.S. and U.N. narco-bureaucrats as a make-or-break struggle for democracy and freedom in Iraq, which, among those who have lost themselves in the twisted labyrinth of statist policy goals, have somehow become immediately and unquestioningly equated with adopting a particular set of policy outcomes in support of the United States government’s hyper-aggressive commitment to domestic drug prohibitionism.

This is statist nation-building on the march — with warlordism and grinding poverty dragging the country down into hell, the U.S., U.N., and U.K. gear up to enforce a political economy straight out of Mao’s Great Leap Forward on a nation of millions so that they never have to question their domestic policy initiatives. The United States government’s rabid pursuit of international narcotics prohibition, no matter what the predictable human consequences of their belligerence, reflects an absolutely deranged set of priorities.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-11-20: The tall poppies
• GT 2007-01-13: The tall poppies, part 2: food, drugs, and female sexual slavery in Afghanistan

Libertarian Tag by Roderick Long

The ‘Good War’ Is a Bad War by John Pilger

Libertarian Foreign Policy in the Hobbesian Crosshairs: A Reply to Bret Stephens by Robert Higgs

Ground Zero: On the Front Lines of a War Crime by Chris Floyd

An Imperialist Comedy by Chalmers Johnson

Friends Who Fuck by Marianne

Socrates held that no one counts a genuine judge unless he judges justly. He also held, as did Augustine, Aquinas, and Spooner, that no law counts as a genuine law unless it too is just.

A 75-year-old Florida grandmother has now found her way to the same idea. Asked why she didn’t “respect” a police officer’s demand that she move her car away from the spot where she had been told (by the owners of the parking space) to park it – a lack of respect that led to her being handcuffed and her car impounded – she explained: I guess I felt he wasn’t a police officer; he wasn’t there to help me, he was there to be mean to me.