No Coercion Exploring the idea of a stateless society.

Casey Anthony and avoiding alpha error

Let me say up front that I haven't really followed the recent Casey Anthony trial and associated goings-on, so I apologize if I'm covering well-trodden territory or leaving out something important. I picked up a little from my wife (who follows that sort of news) and have read a few items since the acquittal, so I'm going to give my take based on that base of knowledge. I also want to stress that nothing I say here should be construed to mean that I'm defending the violent monopolization of law and justice to which we all are subject.

It seems what we have here is an instance of an individual whose child died; circumstances seemed suspicious to Nancy Grace, a bunch of emotional and easily manipulated Americans, and--most significantly--a government persecutor...er, I mean, prosecutor; and the state failed to prove its case that the accused killed her child. The result has been that many of those aforementioned Americans have become incoherent, bloodlusting, foaming-at-the-mouth animals calling for vigilante justice (which, when defined as a victim (or his assigned agent) seeking justice from his aggressor, I'm not necessarily opposed to but which is quite clearly not how it's being used here) and something they're calling "Caylee's Law," which would make it "a felony for a parent, legal guardian, or caretaker to not notify law enforcement of the disappearance of a child within 24 hours of the time that they know the child is missing."

What also happened is that the justice system actually sort of did what it was supposed to do--avoided the alpha error. In criminal justice, the alpha error (analogous to the more general alpha error in statistics) is the punishment of an innocent person. The absolute necessity of minimizing the alpha error is one of the great aspects of the American justice system (and yes, I feel like a need to shower after paying that system a compliment). It's why the accused is considered "innocent until proven guilty." It's what helps protect Nancy Grace and all her newly minted clones out there if ever they're accused of a crime they didn't commit. It's one of the foundations of Western law. The idea is that it's far better to allow 100 murderers to go free than send one innocent person to prison or the gallows. In this instance, the justice system stuck to that principle, and a good chunk of the American public is up in arms about it.

(I should note that Casey Anthony was acquitted of murder but was convicted of lying to the cops, something that Anthony Gregory argues---and I agree---should not be a crime: "The Right to Lie to the Cops".)

Radley Balko has a great piece on the irrationality of this Caylee's Law thing ("Why 'Caylee's Law' is a Bad Idea"). He gets right to the heart of the matter toward the end:

In a country of 308 million people, bad things are going to happen. We already have laws against murder, child abuse, and child neglect. When you pass laws that make it easier to imprison people in cases where the state doesn't have enough evidence to prove the crime everyone knows they're actually prosecuting, you undermine the integrity of the justice system. The "flaw" that led to the Casey Anthony verdict is pretty straightforward: The state failed to prove its case. And the government must prove its case, even when all of America is 100 percent certain of the defendant's guilt, because we want to be sure the state will always also have to prove its case when we aren't so certain.

So what it comes down to is that by requiring the presumption of innocence and demanding that the state actually prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to the satisfaction of a dozen different people, a guilty person may have gone free, but the falsely accused everywhere have been protected (to whatever extent that's possible under a forcibly monopolized justice system).

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Share your favorite liberating technologies

As governments continue to aggress against peaceful individuals and close off officially approved avenues of production and exchange (i.e. actions taken to improve one's well-being), it will become increasingly necessary to use every tool available to counter the state and build a free society. I believe that the rapidly advancing state of certain technologies could benefit individuals and distributed networks of freedom-fighters at the expense of the state. I consider these to be liberating technologies. It could include things like alternative currencies, online security, actual physical security tools, small-scale crop production, open source hardware for things like personal fabrication and construction of buildings, communications and counter-surveillance tools, recording/shaming of cops and politicians, seasteading, etc.

What I'd like to do is have my readers comment below, sharing your favorite liberating technologies---not just categories, but specific products and services, even if they're only hypothetical at this point. This is an area in which I feel quite under-educated, and I think everyone would benefit from the sharing and cross-pollination of ideas.

The more we are able to learn and the more of us who are able to incorporate some of these tools into our lives, the better off we'll be and the sooner a free society will evolve and crowd out the state and its banditry. Let the sharing begin!

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Do successes justify government science?

I just ran across this really interesting article about a NASA engineer who's devised (at least on the chalkboard) a method of aneutronic fusion that could provide post-launch propulsion 40 times more efficiently than modern ion engines. Now, I have friends who expend a lot of energy defending government funding of science and technology development, and they latch onto instances of success (even if only theoretical) like this to try to justify tax-funded science. They say, "See! A government scientist/engineer came up with something that could be of great value, so it's important to keep funding government science."

I have both an ethical criticism and an economic/praxeological criticism of this argument.  On the ethical side, I would point out that the ends never justify the means. Many scientists and engineers throughout history have, at the point of a gun, produced great discoveries and valuable inventions; the Nazi and Soviet regimes come immediately to mind. But I assume few people would say that these successes justify the forced labor that produced them. Likewise, I argue that taxation, which is a form of forced labor, cannot be justified by appealing to any successes that it ends up funding.

As for the economic/praxeological criticism, it's pretty straightforward. Yes, a government employee may have invented something valuable, but what discoveries and inventions would have been produced in the absence of taxation and government science programs? We'll never know; but we do know that the pressure to respond to actual consumer preferences would have been greater. Absent the particular technological path carved out by government confiscation of property/money, directed use of such property/money, and regulations closing off certain avenues of research and development, it's possible---I would even say likely---that whatever might have been the current state of the art in all the various fields of science and engineering, it would be better serving human needs and would be far more peaceful in nature. I often hear people ask, only partly tongue-in-cheek, where their flying cars are. Well, if the government hadn't restricted aviation development by taking over control of airspace and subsidized auto development by building huge amounts of roads and the interstate highway system, we all might well have had flying cars by now.

Now, at this point a defender of government science will sometimes chime in with a comment about how basic science is better funded by government because it usually has no obvious short run payoff but could have immense long-run value. The problem with this argument is that there is no reason to prefer research that could maybe have a big long-run payoff over research that is much more likely to have short-run or medium-run payoff. It's possible the short-run-payoff research will inadvertently lead to an amazing, highly valuable discovery and that the long-run-payoff research will never produce anything of value. Governments (for whom costs  are socialized and profit and loss inapplicable since their funding is not obtained voluntarily) have no possibility of rationally allocating scarce resources--it always ends up being arbitrary from the perspective of consumers. When it comes to the allocation of scarce resources among competing alternatives, the only person qualified to decide that allocation is the owner of the resources (for whom costs internalized) and only when he is paid voluntarily by those who believe they will gain by trading with him.

When governments allocate resources, they're using stolen money (behaving unethically) and acting without an ability to rationally choose among competing alternatives (behaving foolishly).

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