Minutes before a 13-member SWAT team barged into the house, Lafortune had told the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, “I’d like to go out and take a ride and get some air.”

The Biddeford police obligingly took Dorothy Lafortune for a ride to the District Court, where she was charged with criminal trespass for refusing to vacate her house and released on her own recognizance, barefooted, into the refreshing, wintry New England air.

A nearby elementary school had been closed for nearly a week pending Lafortune’s removal from the house she owned on Graham Street. It was a precaution taken by the authorities just in case bullets and tear gas started to fly and lest the small southern Maine community of Biddeford would become notorius alongside the names of Ruby Ridge or Waco.

But it was a peaceful, if prolonged, eviction. Pretty much went off without a hitch.

There had been some Usenet and Yahoo Group chatter about Lafortune for months. Alabama militia men had feigned a vaguely implied action on her behalf and the Sierra Times ran sketchy coverage of the story during the run-up to the inevitable eviction on Nov 20th.

I, most likely, would have never taken notice of it, but for my drowsy perusal of the Portland Press one morning at work. I felt, of course, that Lafortune owed no taxes and that her property was hers to keep. The city stole Dorothy Lafortune’s house from under her and deeded it to another indivdual. Even so, I wouldn’t muster much excitement about it because I knew what was about to ensue.

It’s my pleasure to be spending the last months of this year in Southern Maine working near a town called Wiscasset among a people I’ve found to be the most affable, decent, and independent sort on this earth. It is from this vantage point that I observed that the whole Lafortune thing was barely more than a yawnfest.

WGAN, the talk radio staple here, featured callers and talk show hosts who differed insignificantly when it came to Dorothy Lafortune. They argued a little about whether she was merely a wingnut troublemaker or if she was a respectable citizen, but nearly every last one of them were of a mind that Lafortune got what she had coming. Most agreed that taxes are too high, but “ya gotta pay them.” One caller declared that people shouldn’t be taxed at all, but, “She didn’t pay her taxes so she’s getting what she deserves.”

It was, as my co-editor often says, a pink nightmare - an otherwise sensible and libertarian people gathering to decry taxation, yet saying not a thing in favor of a woman who walked the walk regarding it. In fact, I detected a small amount of satisfaction in their voices in knowing that the proper authorities would sort it out and life would go on, only temporarily obstructed, by yet another tedious city hall fighter.

It was disturbing, but not crushingly so. As I mentioned, I had already known what the outcome would be, including how Dorothy Lafortune’s fellow “prisoners” would react when faced with the prisoner’s dilemma. They would leave her to sway in the breeze because, for them, there is no comfort, and certainly no inspiration, in the spectacle of a fellow prisoner rushing the fence.

They, at best, turn away or point their fingers and shake their institutionalized heads and comment, “Look at that dumbass hanging from the barbed wire. Should have known what would happen. Got just what she deserved. Anybody up for a game of checkers?”

The case of Dorothy Lafortune proves, yet again, why it’s useless to appeal to the masses for freedom. They will only act in their own perceived best interest and, for the most part, their perception is clouded mightily by their institutionalization. I can only reiterate what I’ve said for sometime now. You can’t rely on others to help secure your freedom. To jump on a grenade thinking others will follow to make a better world is a losing strategy. You’ve got to work it out on your own. Do it now.

I’ve been working on the same blog entry for the last week. Much like what I did with this one, I would write a paragraph, delete it, then repeat. In the meantime I’ve been rereading a brilliant book. The book is Kangaroo by Yuz Aleshkovsky, and it is quite brilliant, as I believe I mentioned. It’s hard to give a plot summary, but I can try. Fan Fanych is a career criminal in the Soviet Union who is accused of a crime which no decent person would mention. The crime he is accused of is the rape and murder of a kangaroo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905. The book is published by Dalkey Archive Press, which publishes a lot of great books (check out some Flann O’Brien while you are there). Anyway, I bring this up, because I am going to do a cheat blog, which I learned from shonk. A cheat blog is just blogging a quote from a book you are reading. So here it goes:

I got up. Went to the john. A dear tiny little john. On the door somebody had scratched: “Workers of the world, unite. History will sentence the internal enemy yet.” You stupid jerk, I thought, history sentenced you already! You want extra time? You’ll get it. Don’t make waves, and you’ll get it, no problem. You go to the gate, stick out for face for your release ship, and you get another five or ten on the kisser from Mother History, steaming along with the momentum you gave her yourself, before your pals caught you on the barricades. You should be enjoying in a john like this, you poor sucker, not making appeals to the workers.

…natch, but since my love life already fully expresses my highest values I’m going to have to hand them off to Sabotta for any prospective snogging tryouts.

After all, it was Sabotta’s piece Arms for Venus de Milo that I sent them and Sabotta assures me that he is indeed “nice”.

A Nice Libertarian Man“>

A Nice Libertarian Man

Tibor Machan gives them too much credit. Mises’ economic calculation argument, reiterated in the article, explains why socialism can’t work, but I don’t think it says what Machan wants it to about budgets. After all, a car thief can balance his household finances, despite making his living through coercion. A government could, in principle, spend only money actually collected (stolen) last year when enacting this year’s budget.

The real reason that government officials do not balance budgets is that they have no motivation to do so. The politician’s personal share of any government debt/future taxes is tiny relative to the political benefit he gains when spending tax money, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. That is the nature of the incentive structure of coercive government: the benefits are shared by few, while the pain is spread among many.

These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. After long enough, you get so you depend on ‘em. That’s “institutionalized.”
- Red, in The Shawshank Redemption

David Brooks has written a piece extolling the virtues of marriage:

Marriage joins two people in a sacred bond. It demands that they make an exclusive commitment to each other and thereby takes two discrete individuals and turns them into kin.

Few of us work as hard at the vocation of marriage as we should. But marriage makes us better than we deserve to be. Even in the chores of daily life, married couples find themselves, over the years, coming closer together, fusing into one flesh. Married people who remain committed to each other find that they reorganize and deepen each other’s lives. They may eventually come to the point when they can say to each other: “Love you? I am you.”

To say marriage makes us “better than we deserve to be” goes too far since we can only be what we deserve to be, but his heart is in the right place. Surely marriage helps some be better than they expected to be and “I am you” can be taken as an expression of the sense of identity that accompanies deeply shared understanding.

Some take issue with this:

Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.

Brooks is really describing flight from self and not selfishness. He is essentially agreeing with Ayn Rand that one’s love life ought properly be an expression of one’s highest values.

However, he makes his categorical error here:

Still, even in this time of crisis, every human being in the United States has the chance to move from the path of contingency to the path of marital fidelity - except homosexuals. Gays and lesbians are banned from marriage and forbidden to enter into this powerful and ennobling institution. A gay or lesbian couple may love each other as deeply as any two people, but when you meet a member of such a couple at a party, he or she then introduces you to a “partner,” a word that reeks of contingency.

This is how an “Institutional Man” thinks, as Red explains in The Shawshank Redemption when he speaks of his difficulty in coming to grips with freedom upon his release from prison:

Thirty years I’ve been asking permission to piss. I can’t squeeze a drop without say-so. There is a harsh truth to face. No way I’m gonna make it on the outside.

You can hear the same complaint from gays who, like Brooks, assume that one cannot marry without the permission of the state. If marriage is truly a sacred bond, as Brooks claims then what power can the state have over it? Why would you go to the state for the sacred? Why not simply marry your beloved and introduce him as your husband, the state be damned? Or else recognize that you are an Institutional Man.

Brooks complains:

When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote. Marriage is not voting. It’s going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination.

But what does the state have to offer aside from benefits? The state has nothing sacred or even moral to impart. The state has only carrots and sticks and any carrot it might offer you was taken from someone else by way of a stick. You can only defile that which is sacred or intimate in your marriage by inviting the state to take part in it.

It’s a core belief that dwells in the hearts of collectivists, liberal and conservative alike, that if they can, by force of law, dabble here and tweak there, then goodness and morality can be dispensed from the floors of state assemblies, legislatures, and city halls everywhere. Working from such a premise makes it nearly impossible to realize that there is nothing by way of grace or moral legitimacy that the state can bestow on anything.

Inviting the state into your marriage affords you no sanctity that you wouldn’t otherwise have in a private, non-state recognized marriage. Brooks bemoans the omission of a moral argument in favor of state sanctioned gay marriage, but no moral argument can be made because the state cannot produce or dispense morality. Government only dispenses incentives and penalties, so the left is quite strategically correct in limiting its arguments for government gay marriages to the realm of discussing it as a benefits plan. That’s all state marriage can ever be.

Advocates of state-marriage for gays argue correctly that it is not fair or moral for the state to grant heterosexual couples benefits that are denied homosexual couples. Yet, in doing so, these same advocates insist that homosexual couples be granted benefits that would be denied single individuals: They don’t object to social engineering, they just want to be the social engineers.

Some libertarians, like Wendy McElroy and Radley Balko, correctly argue that marriage is not properly a matter of public policy. The only problem is that they tend to argue this as a matter of public policy: The remedies they seek are remedies of public policy.

The Sovereign Individual argues instead, that one must simply evict the state from one’s own marriage. Your marriage is not properly a matter of public debate so don’t treat it as one. Take and keep private what ought to be private. And all of your life is your private affair.

Leave the institution of marriage to the Institutional Man.

Sovereign Individuals are the Makers of Manners:

P.K. Koenig’s website The O.T.O. Phenomenon has many delightful examples of Eurotrash sexcult absurdity. One of these examples is an excerpt from Pouillet’s “L’onanisme chez la femme” (Paris, 1880). (If you don’t know what “onanism” is, look it up.):

There remains “before all things the sewing machine is the great seductress to lonesome sensuality”, Herman’s citation from Pouillet’s “L’onanisme chez la femme”…(scene: a factory for military uniforms):

“In the midst of the regular whirring of about 30 sewing machines, I suddenly heard a machine running at a much higher tempo. I turned to the relevant seamstress, a brunette of 18 to 20 years. While automatically tending to the piece of work she was sewing, her face brightened, her mouth fell open slightly, her nostrils trembled, her feet moved the pedals with steadily increasing speed. Shortly thereafter I noted a fixed gaze, her eyelids sank, her face became pale, and she threw back her head. Hands and feet suddenly paused and stretched themselves: a suppressed cry, followed by a deep sigh, lost itself in the noise of the surroundings.”quote>

Sigh. Dear Karen DeCoster - a jug of wine, a sewing machine, and thou beside me, vibrating in the Wilderness - oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Patri Friedman writes:

Murray Rothbard blasted Milton Friedman for “proposing not measures on behalf of liberty, not programs to whittle away the Leviathan State, but measures to make the power of that State more efficient, and hence, at bottom, more terrible.” Yet given the Leviathan’s tremendous ability to endure and grow, the simple truth is that reducing the damage may be the only positive impact available. Friedman’s proposals at least help blunt a few claws (ie our move away from the draft to an all-volunteer army), while Rothbard’s targeting the monster’s heavily armored heart results in nothing but a gigantic heap of essays at its feet.

[…]

We will not bring about a more efficient, libertarian world without finding ways to change societal equilibria and design systems that are efficient *and* stable. Making converts is not the solution, since even if we convince people to try a libertarian system, it will devolve like all the rest. We have to admit that big government is an equilibrium, understand why, and figure out if there are feasible equilibria that are better.

Radley Balko explains that reductio ad absurdum is politically useless since politics freely embraces absurdity.

Here it is. You guys were supposed to send the pictures for publication at NT, though. The pictures are a bit more in line with Kennedy’s request than mine, I think.

Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood,
Thou art the grisly terror of our age.
“Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude,
“Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.”
O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven
The truth that lies behind a word to find,
To them the word’s right meaning was not given.
They shall continue blind among the blind.

But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.
I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.
Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill?
I cannot tell—but it the earth shall see!
I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

– JOHN HENRY MACKAY (1864–1933), “Anarchy”.

D.W. MacKenzie rebuts the myth of the Marshall Plan. The economies of Germany and Japan did not recover because of financial aid from the United States:

Following the Second World War, West Germany, Hong Kong, and Japan were in worse shape than Iraq is today. Unlike the recent war in Iraq, cities in these nations were nearly leveled. Indiscriminate bombing by the United States, Royal, and Soviet air forces left these nations in ruin. These nations had very little in the way of natural resources to sell to begin with, and the war devastated much of what had been built.

Hong Kong rebuilt with minimal governmental interference (Rabushka 1979). This resulted in rapid economic development and a steadily rising standard of living for the people of Hong Kong. This progress benefited not only highly skilled upper income workers, but also low paid unskilled workers.

This success came to the people of Hong Kong because of low taxes, minimal tariffs and regulations, and without the redistribution schemes of democratic welfare states or large-scale foreign aid. The key source of foreign aid came from English authorities who provided security to Hong Kong, but left the people of this place to sort out their own personal affairs in private markets.

West Germany rebuilt itself in a similar fashion. Marshall Plan aid consisted of only a tiny percentage of German GDP. Also, the money that West Germany paid in reparations offset Marshall Plan aid. West Germany received military defense from the U.S. and England, but paid substantial fees for this service. The German Economic Miracle began with a radical program of privatization and deregulation, beginning in 1948. This ended the regulatory controls and elaborate tax system imposed by Hitler and his National Socialists.

Foreign aid had, at best, minimal influence on the West German revival. A free and nondemocratic Germany experienced a strong recovery. If there was anything wrong with the German approach, it is that it allowed for future extensions by the government into private markets.

Japan also experienced great success due to a relative lack of governmental interference (Henderson 1993). Low taxes and high savings rates translated into strong economic growth in postwar Japan. Once again, foreign aid and intervention were too small to have accounted for this success. Japan did not need massive intervention to recover, even though it lacked the natural resources that Iraq possesses in its oil fields.

…that this happens:

THE SCENARIO, as sketched by this hard-boiled insider, calls for Clinton to make an entrance as healer and unifier at the end of the primary season in May or June in the unlikely—but not impossible—event that none of the existing contenders has amassed a majority of the convention delegates.

One candidate will have the nomination wrapped up before the convention. If Clinton wants to run she’ll have to be in the New Hampshire primary and she’ll have to finish at least second. And she can do that.