Government responsible for most U.S. crime
It's official. As reported by the government itself, gangs are responsible for as much as 80% of crime in the United States. The article reports that "criminal gangs in the USA have swelled to an estimated 1 million members" and notes that gangs thrive on illegal drug trafficking and other activities prohibited by the government. This is exactly right. Gangs gain most of their power and wealth by taking advantage of the U.S. government's (and state governments') wars on drugs, guns, prostitution, and gambling, just like alcohol was organized crime's primary source of power during Prohibition. Government-created black markets are always dominated by violent thugs.
So we have a double injustice here. In the first place, the government comes along and prohibits items, substances, and activities that are not inherently bad (though perhaps frowned upon by a certain vocal portion of the population). By doing this, the government is agressing against innocent people. On top of that, the demand for such things cannot be eliminated, so enterprising individuals seeking to profit (again, something that's not inherently wrong) act to provide consumers with what they want. Of course, since they're forced to conduct business in secret and settle disputes outside the normal institutions, violent elements come to dominate. The move toward violence is compounded by the necessity for these individuals to defend themselves from the force initiated on them by the government because of the 'illegal' nature of their business.
Government prohibition of drugs, prostitution, gambling, and guns -- and even disproportionate taxation of such things -- has led inevitably to a flourishing of criminal gangs. These gangs, funded by a combination of artificially high prices and (often) protection payments, do battle with each other for control of lucrative territory, as well as with the government itself. The territories, usually inner cities, are devastated by the warfare. Even non-violent offenders, whose only crime is to use a substance that someone else decided was bad for them, are often thrown in jail or prison. The resulting broken families and deteriorating schools increase the attractiveness of gang life to children, and the trend continues. Increasing resources are expended by both the gangs and the government to beef up personnel and firepower until you virtually have military forces laying waste to American cities, all over our government's decision to declare certain things illegal to appease a bunch of moralistic busy-bodies.
And even beyond all that you have the economic destruction caused by taxes the government collects to wage its war and imprison hundreds of thousands of people caught up in it (people, who might otherwise be creating vast amounts of wealth in the economy). The resulting government-induced poverty yet again enhances the power of criminal gangs and leads to calls for even more government programs to "do something."
It's truly difficult to contemplate how much richer and safer and more peaceful we'd be as a country if not for the actions of our government.
And if you think it's bad now, just wait until they ban caffeine.
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Obama’s Culture of Service adds insult to injury
One of the things President Obama has been touting is his idea of a "culture of service" in which we all do something to "give back" and help the country.
What? Seriously?
Last I checked, most of us spend the first several months of the year serving our local, state, and federal governments. The average person doesn't start earning more than his annual combined tax bill until March or April (for the country as a whole, it's known as Tax Freedom Day, and the date was April 23rd last year).
So in addition to the involuntary service government extracts from us under threat of violence, the Prez has the gall to ask us to give up even more of our life to serve the country? Talk about adding insult to injury. And on top of that he wants to use the money his agents confiscate from us to fund national service programs! Is there a better definition of insanity?
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for volunteer work to do those things in our communities that just wouldn't get done by for-profit entities. But the best way to facilitate more of that would be to reduce our taxes and end the inefficient and malincented government programs that purport to do those same things (like welfare, Medicare, Social Security, the various service programs, etc).
When many Americans are struggling just to feed their kids and keep their water and power on, they don't need the government's Enforcer-in-Chief telling them to sacrifice even more. They need that 20-30% of their paychecks that is stolen from them.
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No Bible for Obama’s Mulligan Oath
I woke up this morning to the Drudge Report headline screaming at me, "No Bible Used at Obama Re-Swear," in huge red letters. Apparently, Matt Drudge is disturbed that more than 230 years after the founding of the world's first secular republic, the guy taking over as its head honcho recited the oath of office without his hand on a religious text (although he did use one the day before when they screwed up the oath).
Also, Obama does not appear to have said "so help me God" during the oath do-over. Oh, the horror!
It seems to me that Drudge and anyone else upset by the absence of mystic overtones in the transition of power in a secular state should be thanking whatever magical beings they believe in that we may finally be moving toward living out the ideal of a country that doesn't mix religion with government. Not only would that better adhere to the 1st Amendment and end the abhorrent practice (as Jefferson wrote about long ago) of using non-Christians' tax money to endorse Christianity (or non-believers' tax money to endorse supernatural belief in general), but it would protect those particular Christians' delicate sensibilities in the possible future instance of someone outside the non-dominant religion becoming President. After all, what would they think if a Muslim President was sworn in on a Quran or if a Satanist President (okay, that's an unlikely scenario) was sworn in on whatever book Satanists follow?
Update: someone has just informed me that they saw the video on CNN, and he did once again include the "so help me God" thing.
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Zero-Sum Politics?
So, we've got ourselves a new ruler...er...president. I was sitting there this morning, half asleep, feeding the baby, and watching one of those CNN guys interview Colin Powell. The interviewer was musing about Obama's "bipartisan" overtures and the implications for the way national politics is viewed and conducted, and he made some comment about politics being thought of as a zero-sum game in recent years, to which Powell replied, "I win, you lose. That's all there is to it. But that's not what the Founding Fathers had in mind, and that's not what makes a democracy work."
The weird thing is that politics is, by definition, a zero-sum game. It's the antithesis of the economic process, which is not a zero-sum game. Politics, even in a democracy (or a democratic republic), is based on the use of force. It really can't be anything other than a zero-sum game, because if all parties to a transaction were benefiting, it would be because no one was being coerced--it would be an economic process rather than a political one. Politics comes in to play when one or more individuals or groups decide to appropriate more power/wealth than they could acquire through voluntary market interactions. They use force to do this, whether they call it monarchy, despotism, communism, or democracy. And whenever coercion is involved, there are necessarily winners and losers, with the winners gaining at the expense of the losers.
Consider: when some people get together and decide to improve their community by organizing a voluntary campaign to get homeless people healthy, cleaned up, educated, and off the streets, everyone wins. Even if those doing this work give up their time and money, they're doing it by choice, which means they're better off than if they hadn't done it (otherwise they wouldn't do it). However, when a group of people get together, declare that they have the legitimate authority to initiate force, and then proceed to go door to door confiscating money from people under threat of violence for the same purpose of helping the poor (while also keeping some of the loot for their troubles, of course), there are necessarily winners and losers. The winners are most definitely those who do the looting (we know them as politicians), and, if they're lucky, the homeless might get a portion, although without the strings of community pressure and encouragement attached (with the predictable result that many of them do little to move toward improving their situation). The losers, of course, are everyone who was looted at gunpoint. To make matters worse, the looters can claim that the lack of improvement in homelessness necessitates further action on their part, which means more looting and using part of that loot to hire more of their fellow community members out of their wealth-creating jobs in the free market and into the business of being looters, all for the supposedly noble purpose of the 'public good' or the 'general welfare.'
But then it occurs to me that I've misunderstood what Powell and the news guy were getting at. They weren't really saying that the political method of goal achievement--with looters gaining at the expense of the looted--was inappropriately regarded as zero-sum. No, I'm sure they must know that that's a perfectly apt description. What they meant was that the looters of Party A and the looters of Party B should stop fighting amongst themselves in zero-sum fashion, realize they're on the same team, and get their act together so they can unite to more effectively (and democratically?) loot the rest of us.
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