For real:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to strengthen the rights of the American people against the taking of their private property, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to protect the rights of Americans to their private property, including by limiting the taking of private property by the Federal Government to situations in which the taking is for public use, with just compensation, and for the purpose of benefiting the general public and not merely for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken.

So now the government is only allowed to steal your property when they think they should, and if they do steal it then they have to pay you whatever they think they ought to. In fact they’ve gone so far as to write themselves a note saying that they have to do those things. And that note will remain in effect until someone writes another note.

Don’t you feel better, now?

“Fundamental rights aren’t subject to the democratic process.”

- Radley Balko

Granted I was just skimming but surely this announces Radley’s long overdue rejection of statism.

My wife and I are both ex-Catholics, raising two young boys without giving them particularly strong opinions on religion one way or another. It’s simply not something that comes up. Anyhow, my five-year old (”D”) came inside and had the following conversation with his seven-year-old brother, “G”.

D: I’m a Christian. (pause) What does that mean?
G: It means you believe in Jesus… and the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus. You know, “spirit stuff.”
D: Oh, yeah, I believe in that. And the Easter Bunny, too.

I’m going to be done laughing later tonight.

Wonderful, “liberal” Washington State has begun to bring the whip down on illegal recreation. Or anything that links to illegal recreation. Or has advice on illegal recreation. Or something. It’s hard to tell:

The first casualty in the state’s war on Internet gambling is a local Web site where nobody was actually doing any gambling.

What a Bellingham man did on his site was write about online gambling. He reviewed Internet casinos. He had links to them, and ran ads by them. He fancied himself a guide to an uncharted frontier, even compiling a list of “rogue casinos” that had bilked gamblers.

All that, says the state — the ads, the linking, even the discussing — violates a new state law barring online wagering or using the Internet to transmit “gambling information.”

Is it against the law to question the rather un-juicy odds printed on the back of the Evergreen State’s nice, legal scratch tickets? (”Grand prize [usually ten grand or less] may have already been won. Overall odds of winning are 1 in [several times 1]”) Is that implicitly transmitting “gambling information”? Maybe so, that’s why I’m not questioning those odds here. In fact I encourage our readership to remember that lottery proceeds go to “education“. Be a smart player, as the lottery commercials say.

On the other hand, is it against the law for the Washington State Lottery to provide “gambling information” (and let’s be candid: they are doing just that) via the internet? No, probably not, because the intent of this law isn’t to impose any sort of hurdles on revenue collection, the intent of this law is to prevent competition for gambling dollars. Even if the state’s lawmakers weren’t smart enough to write a nice exclusion for themselves, every cop-bot out there knows that the state’s lottery website isn’t to be touched.

The petty thievery and rank protectionism of the hick leglislature in question here is so common as to be almost not worth noticing. What will really be worth paying attention to is when it’s “discovered” that preventing people from gambling online is impossible without immense amounts of intrusion. Then it’ll be your privacy versus Washington State’s need for money. Yeah.

“What then? Who d’you think’s gonna fucking walk away from that one, Wu? Huh?” — Al Swearengen, Deadwood.

Kim DuToit expresses a mild dissent against my amusement regarding his faith in government:

I suppose it matters not to these frigging anarchists that government is sometimes capable of doing some things reasonably well (not always to our satisfaction, but when your binding purchasing criterion is always to go with the low bidder… well).

Government sometimes does some things reasonably well, y’know, for an organization that always goes with the lowest bidder. Now that’s a ringing endorsement.

But DuToit’s just getting warmed up, he’s not going to let the immigration issue get forgotten:

As for preventing the influx of illegal aliens across our southern border: well, I guess we could leave it up to Blackwater or someone to set up patrols—as long as their salaries and expenses could be paid by… whom, exactly? The border ranchers? Displaced native-born agricultural workers and housemaids?

DuToit carries this theme into comments at NT:

I await with interest to see how well the private sector manages to prevent Mexicans from flooding into the country.

The answer is of course that not only won’t the “private sector” prevent Mexicans from darkening DuToit’s neighborhood but that it’s the private sector (or “free market”) that’s drawing them here in the first place.

And this is a good thing.

A free exchange of values is what drives all of human progress. This is what first allowed people to spare enough time from tending to the business of staying alive to advance their own well-being. Everyone involved becomes richer as a result of a free exchange of values. For example, when Farmer Jim pays Jose Illegal to pick veggies, they both gain: Jose gains money from the work and Jim gains money by paying Jose less than it would have cost Jim to pick the crop. Jim can sell his crop to Safeway, and again they both benefit. And when Kim DuToit shows up and buys those vegetables in Safeway, he benefits too. Free exchange creates wealth: the more, the merrier.

But coercion works differently. DuToit’s IRS, for example. You know, the instrument with which he would pay for his border-closing scheme. They aren’t exchanging values, instead they’re presenting us all with the highwayman’s challenge: “Your money or your life”.

Every thin dime that this government confiscates is money that will be spent in a manner that doesn’t benefit all parties involved. In principle, as DuToit affirms above, it might be spent well (sort of) on things that (maybe) might be worth doing, kind of. In practice, most of it gets simply wasted. It’s potential wealth that gets lost, just as surely as if you take out a loan and burn the money rather than investing it.

And this is why I answer DuToit’s rhetorical question like so:

Mr. DuToit, closing the border oughtn’t be paid for at all. The free market isn’t my enemy, and it shouldn’t be your enemy either.

A young acquaintance of mine in the Marines just got busted down a rank, forfeited pay, and got punished in several other ways for suggesting, perhaps drunkenly, to a subordinate that he beat up one of his subordinates as a way of initiating him into a group. The Marines say that this was “hazing,” which is against the rules, and therefore dishonorable.

Of course, the Marines, and in fact all the branches of the armed forces, are not against hazing per se, at all. Rather, they just want to make sure that all the hazing is official and approved. They call it “boot camp.”

Ask anyone in the military what they went through at boot camp, and ask yourself, if a college Fraternity did the same thing to them, would it be considered “hazing?”

The Marines gave this young man a model of hazing when he first joined, and now they’re surprised he copied it.

On the upside, he was going to re-up his commission soon, and there is now “no way in hell” he’s doing that.

Among other dangers: trying so hard to score points during a publicity stunt that you fail to see how much of a fool you’re making of yourself.

Tim Eyman, in a stunt that was not wholly unexpected, arrived at the state elections division building Monday dressed as Darth Vader and wielding a plastic light saber. Missing were the petitions full of signatures in support of an effort to overturn the state’s new gay civil-rights law.

Memo to Tim Eyman: Darth Vader was the bad guy.