Government Against Morality And Freedom

Glenn Greenwald: Those irrational, misled, conspiratorial Muslims

….Given Blackwater’s history and the secrecy in which its conduct is shrouded, isn’t it more rational to worry about their conduct inside one’s country than to ignore it or assume it’s benign?  After all, if a foreign country were sending its military and intelligence services inside the U.S. to assassinate our citizens, drop bombs on us from robots in the air, and infiltrate our society with shadowy private contractors — as we’re doing to Pakistan — do you think we might be projecting intense hostility toward that country and expressing serious suspicions about what else they were doing inside our country?  Is it conspiratorial paranoia or rational self-interest that leads one to think that way?….

Walter Williams: Minimum Wage Cruelty

….Labor unions are the major supporters of increases in the minimum wage. Even though the overwhelming majority of their members earn multiples of the minimum wage, they spend millions upon millions lobbying for minimum wage increases. They do it because higher minimum wages protect their members from competition with low-skill, low-wage workers. Most other minimum wage supporters are decent people with a concern for low-wage workers, but their actions suffer from a misguided vision of how the world operates…..

Wendy McElroy: Due Process In Jeopardy

….The Supreme Court decision, however, endorsed the federal power by a vote of 7-2. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dissented. In the dissenting opinion, Thomas stated, “The fact that the federal government has the authority to imprison a person for the purpose of punishing him for a federal crime — sex-related or otherwise — does not provide the government with the additional power to exercise indefinite civil control over that person.”

Interestingly, the constitutional protections of due process contained in the Bill of Rights played no substantive part in the ruling. The decision stated, “We do not reach or decide any claim that the statute or its application denies equal protection of the laws, procedural or substantive due process, or any other rights guaranteed by the Constitution.”

Thus the most important issue for civil libertarians was not addressed: Does the continued imprisonment of a category of criminals who have served their sentence violate the due-process and equal-protection guarantees in the Constitution?….

Sheldon Richman: Is the Peace Movement Finally Awakening?

…..A more recent problem with the Left is Barack Obama. With a few exceptions, Obama’s election has silenced the critics of empire, invasion, occupation, Predator bombings, and civil-liberties destruction. Maybe they feel he is one of them, so they are giving him time to get settled in before he begins to dismantle the empire. Well, Obama is into his 17th month and there has been scant progress on that front. It’s safe to say that he has no intention of scaling back, much less liquidating the empire.

Maybe that’s why a group of prominent leftist intellectuals, activists, and actors has ended the ceasefire and has finally criticized Obama’s war policies. It’s about time. In a statement placed in the New York Review of Books, headlined “Crimes Are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them,” the group said, “Crimes under Bush are crimes under Obama and must be resisted by anyone who claims a shred of conscience.”…

Jacob Hornberger: The Confluence of Left and Right

….Consider all the regulatory and interventionist programs, including the ones that are racist to the core, such as the drug war and the minimum wage. (See my article “Why Do Daily Kos and Alternet Favor a Racist Government Program?” and “Free Teenagers: Repeal the Minimum Wage.”)

What conservative or liberal doesn’t wholeheartedly embrace them, notwithstanding decades of damage and destruction?

Ironically, both liberals and conservatives are now acknowledging, even if only indirectly and obliquely, that all this socialist and interventionist junk is bankrupting our nation, given the out-of-control federal spending necessary to fund it…..

Glenn Jacobs: Property Rights, Liberty, and Immigration

….When dealing with the topic of immigration, that is, the movement of individuals across political designations, this is where things get confusing. The State claims not only to be able to control who crosses the land that it owns, but also to control who enters land owned by private individuals. It also claims the authority to prohibit certain individuals from living within its borders, even if these individuals acquired their land rightfully (using the criteria above) by homesteading or through voluntary exchange. Those of us who believe that private property is the basis of a free society must ask: how was this authority engendered?….

Sydney Schanberg: McCain and the POW Cover-Up

….An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios, and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence…..

Mark Hendrickson: Positive and Negative Government

….Negative law tells us what we may not do; positive law tells us what we must do. Breaking a law incurs penalties. Under negative law, government penalizes someone for doing something that he isn’t supposed to do. Under positive law, government penalizes someone for not doing something he is supposed to do. The distinction is profound and crucial…..

….. The progressive ideology is predicated on the belief that it is up to government to make life better for individuals. There are two inescapable problems with the progressive philosophy:

1) Since government can give to one only what it has taken from another, progressivism inevitably breeds conflict. It tramples the rule of law and justice, whereby everyone receives equal protections, by replacing it with a system of privileges, whereby some benefit at the expense of the rights of others.

2) The scope of positive government is infinitely elastic. No matter how much government gives to some, human wants are unlimited, so there is always a demand for government to transfer even more wealth to its privileged beneficiaries. The culmination of this process happens when government completely absorbs the private sector and there is nothing left to appropriate…..

Judith Miller: When Germ Warfare Happened

….Only now that China has emerged as Asia’s leading power has it begun to highlight Japan’s biological crimes against it. The focal point of this effort is the Unit 731 Museum, just south of the city of Harbin in Manchuria. Built on the ruins of a cluster of ten villages known as Ping Fan, the museum occupies what was once the headquarters of Japan’s germ empire. Constructed by Chinese slave laborers in 1936, Unit 731, whose Orwellian cover name was the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit,” was a vast laboratory complex of 3.7 square miles with more than 70 buildings—laboratories, officers’ housing, a Buddhist temple, an airfield and railway station, three crematoria to dispose of experimentation victims, a prison, a power plant, and even a brothel to service the 3,000 Japanese scientists and guards who lived and worked there during its peak. Behind the complex’s high, heavily guarded walls, Major General Ishii’s scientists experimented on Chinese, Americans, Koreans, Mongolians, Russians, and others with some of the world’s deadliest germs…..