Let me tell you how I fought and won my most recent parking ticket. The ticket was for parking across two seperate spaces, of which I was guilty as charged. This was one of those weird parking lots that was obviously laid out at 4:00 on the Friday afternoon before the big ball game. The particular spaces I was occupying were situated in an odd corner of the lot, where if you park properly, other cars will block you in when they park properly. So you don’t park inside the lines, you park at a 45-degree angle. Everyone does this, but I got the ticket.

Well, I took that little slip of paper out from under the wipers and I wrote them a nastygram on the back. It went something like: “What’s this nonsense? I parked across two spaces because you have to. This parking lot is laid out such that…”, followed by a detailed explanation. I carefully refrained from profanity, but otherwise I let them have it for giving me the ticket. I then delivered said ticket with said nastygram to the office of the cognizant authority and washed my hands of the matter.

Next day, at work, I get a call from said authority. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “This is John.”
Authority: “Hi John, this is Susan. We’re very sorry for the parking ticket, it won’t happen again. There’s a new officer on patrol and he’s trying to make a good impression.”
Me: “I understand. Thanks.”

That’s right: the agency that issued me that ticket got it stuffed right back into their collective face and then apologized to me. Matter of fact, some months later the lot was re-painted with diagonal spaces, as it should have been all along. Now that’s how you fight a parking ticket.

Does this story seem a little implausible to you? Hopefully it does, because I held back one key detail: The authority mentioned above wasn’t the local government, it was the management of my apartment building.

You can contrast this with a city parking ticket. Can you imagine what would have happened should I return one of those with a nasty note written on it? I’d be lucky not to have an additonal fine tacked on for smart-mouthing the meter maids and/or not be charged with some sort of crime.

And so that’s how you fight a parking ticket: you make sure that the agency that issues it answers to you. In the case of the apartment building, they very much answer to me: they’re the vendor and I’m the customer and they have a financial motivation to keep me happy. Pissing off your customers with bullshit parking tickets is not a sound business decision. As for fighting a government ticket, well, since they can bring overwhelming force to bear on me should I choose to resist them, it’s a pretty good bet that I’ll be meekly paying for any ticket that’s sent my way.

Beck is puppy-sitting his sister’s boxer. I laughed right out loud reading his first morning:

Let me only say that I am far from accustomed to waking up to a three year-old eighty-pound Boxer jumping-ass up in my bed and whining in my face. The horrible beast.

Hilarious.

Look; I really have nothing against this animal. She’s really not bad at heart, at all. I just don’t understand why she has to be so… enthusiastic about everydamned thing. She hasn’t been taught how to be cool yet.

(emphasis his)

I have bad news for Uncle Billy. Boxers aren’t cool. They love life with unbridled passion. When you walk out to get the mail and come back, you will be greeted as if you were a long-lost brother. Every moment for them is TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME!

I try to live that way, to make every moment TFA. Fortunately, for the sake of productivity, I’m still not flexible enough to lick my own balls.

After pointing out (fairly) that many people are dishonestly accused of homophobia and racism, David Friedman goes on to argue that libertarians use certain words dishonestly:

The pattern is not limited to people whose politics I disagree with. Libertarians do the same thing. In our context, the question is how to label people who disagree with libertarian views, on particular subjects or more generally. The two popular choices are “statist” and “collectivist.”

Both are wrong. There are lots of reasons why someone might favor the draft, or minimum wage laws, or price controls, or the war on drugs. Worship of the state is no doubt one possible reason, but certainly not the only one. Belief that what really matters is the collective and not the individual is one possible reason but not the only one. Each of those views could readily be held by someone who agreed on the whole with libertarians about values, outcomes they wanted, but disagreed about the consequences of particular policies. Most obviously, someone might favor the draft because he believed it was necessary in order to defend the U.S., and want to defend the U.S. precisely because he was in favor of freedom and thought the U.S. was much freer now than it would be if someone else conquered it.

In each of these cases, the pattern is the same. We have a conclusion that might be reached for any of a variety of reasons. Someone who wants to attack the conclusion does it by picking one reason he considers particularly unattractive and indefensible, using that reason to label the conclusion, and thus (dishonestly) implying that anyone holding the conclusion does it for that reason.

This is of particular interest to me since, since Pete Bessman gets one thing right - I do identify a lot of people as collectivist and statist.

In a comment to Friedman I point out that he has called taxation robbery and robbery is widely considered unattractive and indefensible. Does this mean that in using the word “robbery” Friedman dishonestly mischaracterized the motivations of all who support taxation? No, he correctly characterized the act of slavery.

In another comment I ask Friedman about his example of someone favoring a draft:

What’s dishonest about calling someone collectivist because they favor sacrificing individuals for collective liberty?

He responds:

In the case we are discussing, someone favors sacrificing individual liberty in order to get more individual liberty. The supporter of the draft, given his factual beliefs, could reasonably enough accuse the opponent of wanting to sacrifice individual liberty–the liberty of all the people who will be enslaved when the country is conquered.

There’s a lot wrong with that answer.

But it’s obvious that “the liberty of all the people who will be enslaved when the country is conquered” is a collective standard. And this is precisely how I identify collectivists, by the standards they use to justify force. A libertarian individualist such as myself holds that force is only justified in the defense of peaceful individuals. Collectivists hold that force against individuals can be justified when it benefits the larger group. The hypothetical argument Friedman gave for conscription is collectivist because it applies a collective standard, the liberty of the group. Conscription is collectivist just as taxation is robbery, and the motivations of the supporters of conscription and taxation are irrelevant.

As to motivation - I do not say that all collectivists desire to do wrong; I say that what all collectivists desire to do is wrong. Specifically I don’t say that all supporters of conscription and taxation desire to do wrong. I say that what all supporters of conscription and taxation want to do is wrong.

I’m curious as to why David Friedman would think any of this is dishonest.

That’s what one Justin Cook, credentialed photographer for the Durham Police Department’s SWAT team, had to say about this heartwarming photo. Radley Balko directly quotes the photographer like so:

There is not much for me to say other than that during a chaotic day, this one moment was an ironic sliver of compassion and humanity.

Of course there isn’t so much compassion and humanity present that it deserves to actually stay in public view, or anything. At this time, it appears that the links to the photo and to the original post aren’t working. “Caption witheld at request of photographer.” says yet another reference. In addition, Cook apparently accused Balko of libel(!) merely for publicizing the photo at all. It seems clear that the photographer is attempting to bury his own photograph.

Who attempts to bury a prize-winning photo that they judge captures a moment of compassion and humanity?

The photo captured a tender moment of compassion, it doesn’t exist anyway, and you’re libelous if you mention it besides. How much more clear do we need to be that there is absolutely nothing to see here, Citizen?

Lewrockwell.com’s Stephan Kinsella recommends John Derbyshire on immigration. Derbyshire lectures libertarians thusly:

As to why I think libertarians are nuts to favor mass uncontrolled immigration from the third world: I think they are nuts because their enthusiasm on this matter is suicidal to their cause. Their ideological passion is blinding them to a rather obvious fact: that libertarianism is a peculiarly American doctrine, with very little appeal to the huddled masses of the third world.

Kinsella echoes Derbyshire at the LRC blog that

… libertarians are nuts to want a more open immigration policy, since it’s self-defeating.

What Derbyshire and Kinsella both miss is that libertarianism has very little appeal to Americans in the first place. Forget about immigrants for a second: how well has the American public been swayed by this “peculiarly American doctrine”?

Answer is not at all, collectivism has won on all fronts and continues to be a landslide winner every election. Even counting every Libertarian Party candidate, even the ones clamoring for more taxes, as a “libertarian”, it’s clear that libertarian ideas have been handed decades of resounding defeats. The open borders issue isn’t self-defeating for libertarians because libertarians have already lost.

For clues as to why, we don’t need to look further than the fact that Kinsella and Derbyshire themselves are arguing for nothing more than a particular collectivist public policy on the grounds that this policy will advance the libertarian cause. Our self-appointed libertarian strategists are proceeding on the assumption that more collectivism now will manufacture more libertarianism later, and they can still talk about “self-defeat” with a straight face.

I work in a small town, where the municipal building and the post office are connected. I ran to the post office today for the second time, and, just like the first time, it felt really strange.

This time, though, I figured it out: the number of signs. I quickly counted the number of signs in the parking lot, which was 17. Then I counted the number of parking spaces, which was 49. That’s right, there was a sign for every three parking spaces: yield signs, stop signs, no parking signs, handicapped parking signs, and street signs (in a fucking parking lot). Worse yet, I was there on the lunch hour, and there were maybe a dozen cars in the lot, three signs for every two cars.

They don’t trust that you can figure your way around a parking lot the size of a small backyard. Do you think they’re going to trust you with your life, citizen?