Monthly Archives: March 2008

“PATRIOT” Act used against Spitzer

It was indeed the so-called PATRIOT Act that brought Elliot Spitzer down:

When Congress passed the Patriot Act in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, law-enforcement agencies hailed it as a powerful tool to help track down the confederates of Osama bin Laden. No one expected it would end up helping to snag the likes of Eliot Spitzer. The odd connection between the antiterror law and Spitzer’s trysts with call girls illustrates how laws enacted for one purpose often end up being used very differently once they’re on the books.

The Patriot Act gave the FBI new powers to snoop on suspected terrorists. In the fine print were provisions that gave the Treasury Department authority to demand more information from banks about their customers’ financial transactions. Congress wanted to help the Feds identify terrorist money launderers. But Treasury went further. It issued stringent new regulations that required banks themselves to look for unusual transactions (such as odd patterns of cash withdrawals or wire transfers) and submit SARs—Suspicious Activity Reports—to the government. Facing potentially stiff penalties if they didn’t comply, banks and other financial institutions installed sophisticated software to detect anomalies among millions of daily transactions. They began ranking the risk levels of their customers—on a scale of zero to 100—based on complex formulas that included the credit rating, assets and profession of the account holder.
[…]
The new scrutiny resulted in an explosion of SARs, from 204,915 in 2001 to 1.23 million last year. The data, stored in an IRS computer in Detroit, are accessible by law-enforcement agencies nationwide. “Terrorism has virtually nothing to do with it,” says Peter Djinis, a former top Treasury lawyer. “The vast majority of SARs filed today involve garden-variety forms of white-collar crime.” Federal prosecutors around the country routinely scour the SARs for potential leads.

One of those leads led to Spitzer. Last summer New York’s North Fork Bank, where Spitzer had an account, filed a SAR about unusual money transfers he had made, say law-enforcement and industry sources who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the probe. One of the sources tells NEWSWEEK that Spitzer wasn’t flagged because of his public position. Instead, the governor called attention to himself by asking the bank to transfer money in someone else’s name. (A North Fork spokesperson says the bank does not discuss its customers.) The SAR was not itself evidence that Spitzer had committed a crime. But it made the Feds curious enough to follow the money.

I’m glad to see that the PATRIOT Act is being used to stop such crimes so detrimental to the national security interests of the United States.

Bob Barr For President ?

Once again, there’s speculation that former Congressman Bob Barr may be running for President as a Libertarian:

Bob Barr for president? According to the Washington Times, the former Republican congressman from Cherokee County confirms he is considering a run for the White House as a Libertarian.

“There is great deal [of] dissatisfaction with the candidates for the two major parties, particularly among conservatives, but also a great deal of Internet and other support for a candidate like Ron Paul who advocates libertarian and true conservative principles,” Barr, who is now a Libertarian, told the newspaper.

Unlike last time, Barr is not denying the rumors either:

Former Congressman Barr has been receiving numerous calls for him to consider seeking the nomination of the Libertarian Party for the presidency of the United States. He understands this reflects in part the deep dissatisfaction prevalent among voters with the candidates of the two major parties. Congressman Barr is grateful for the many and continuing expressions of support for his potential candidacy. He has, however, made no decision in that regard.

In other words, he’s seriously thinking about it.

H/T: Jason Pye

There’s a word for Energy Independence: Poverty

One of the hot topics in this campaign is a call for “energy independence”. All the candidates for president, with the exception of Ron Paul are for it. The vast majority of the candidates for Congress are for it too.

Essentially, the proponents are arguing that if people living in the U.S. bought less oil from people living outside the U.S., there would be much less reason for American soldiers to be sent to go fight in the Middle East, and Middle Easterners would have less money with which to fund attacks on Americans. Additionally, the supporters all seem to believe a largely unspoken mercantilist argument that by not buying oil from foreigners, Americans are better off since wealth stays within the borders of the nation.

The supporters argue that to achieve this, the U.S. government should, through a mixture taxes and subsidies, encourage people to either produce oil domestically, or to develop alternate sources of energy.

Let us examine this idea using a reductio ad absurdum. Imagine we did not simply stop at energy independence for the United States, but rather required each state to be energy independent. Imagine if the Federal Government outlawed the transport of any electricity, any fuel oil and any wood across state lines. What would be the result?

At least they aren't dependent on foreign oil.

At least they aren’t dependent on foreign oil.

Well, California and Alaska would be awash in cheap energy, but what would people in Vermont do? Should they send children out in to the forest every day to collect the days firewood? Should they huddle in their homes through the harsh winters carefully rationing out the year’s chopped wood so that they can survive through to the spring thaw?

Why stop at energy? Why not make people be clothing independent? Surely we need to become food independent as well?

Why stop at states? Why not continue to make people freer by making them independent of each other? Why not make each person responsible for producing their own food, their own clothing, their own energy?

Of course, people living in Alabama would have to give up maple syrup, and we living in New England might have to limit our consumption of table sugar and salt to very special occasions as they would become ultra-rare luxury goods. Once again the poor would be reduced to going bare-foot, and clothing would become precious again.

So called “self-sufficiency” has been proposed many times in various guises; The North Korean juche program, the American unions’ “Buy American” campaign of the 1980’s leap to mind. In every case it leaves the practitioners worse off. Deprived of purchasing goods from the lowest cost producers, people are forced to go with higher cost producers, thereby limiting the purchasing power of their own production. The extra cost results in everyone (except for the lucky guy whom people are forced to do business with) being poorer. Their hours of labor buy them fewer goods and services. It is no accident that countries whose economic policies are intended to foster “economic independence” tend to be very poor.

Even though the politicians are not attempting to outlaw oil imports outright, the subsidies and economic interventions they are proposing are destructive. The ethanol subsidies are destructive to farmland and are raising the price of food. The government grants for energy research divert money out of the financial industry that would otherwise be invested in more profitable uses. The result is that what is produced is not as closely aligned with what people want to consume.

There is nothing wrong with the proponents of energy independence calling for people to voluntary avoid consuming petroleum products. There is nothing wrong with the proponents advocating for research and development of new forms of energy to replace the petroleum industry. But in using violence inherent in government action to force people to follow their commands, they are making their countrymen worse off.

We should not be supporting the politicians who pander to this movement.

I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.

Free Speech And Fraud

An interesting case-in-point raised by this article in The New York Times:

When Xavier Alvarez was asked to say a few words about himself at a meeting of a California water board last summer, he decided on these: “I’m a retired marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy. I’m still around.”

Only the last three words were true. Mr. Alvarez never served in the Marines and was certainly never given the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor in action against an enemy force.

He is, then, a liar. Is he also a criminal?

Mr. Alvarez is scheduled to go on trial next month in federal court in Los Angeles for violating the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which makes it a crime to lie about having received certain medals.

Craig H. Missakian, the prosecutor in the case, is a brainy and literate fellow. “It’s a superinteresting area,” he said, beginning a discussion of Pericles’ funeral oration and the importance of honoring the legacies of those fallen in battle.

“You don’t want to stifle speech about opinions and ideas,” Mr. Missakian said. “But Congress, and rightfully so, recognized the great sacrifice that people awarded the Medal of Honor made on behalf of their country. To the extent we have phony Medal of Honor winners running around like Alvarez, it dilutes the value of their sacrifice.”

That rationale is reflected in Congressional findings. The law, Congress said, is meant “to protect the reputation and meaning of military decorations and medals.”

As one law professor notes, there is a First Amendment concern here:

“If the government cannot under the First Amendment compel reverence when it comes to our nation’s highest symbol,” asked Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington, “why then can it compel reverence when it comes to lesser forms of symbolic expression?”

Eugene Volokh, though, says that the law isn’t really on Alvarez’s side:

“On the other hand,” Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote on his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, “the legal issue is not as clear as one at first might think.” He cited the somewhat muddy Supreme Court jurisprudence in this area and an October decision of the Washington Supreme Court that struck down a state law making it illegal for politicians to lie about candidates for public office.

“The best remedy for false or unpleasant speech is more speech, not less speech,” Justice James M. Johnson of the Washington Supreme Court wrote. It is hard to muster much sympathy for Mr. Alvarez. But it is easy to envision cases in which laws to protect symbols are misused.

The more important question, as I see it, is what harm has Mr. Alvarez actually caused here ? Yes, he’s a jerk and yes he offended veterans, but, based on the facts presented, its clear that nobody lost money because of his misrepresentations, nobody had any of their rights violated or was deceived by him in a way that caused them to suffer a quantifiable case.

Given that, why should he be subject to a criminal prosecution for being stupid ?

A Presidential Candidate We Can Believe In

His policy statements are vague, he’s got no experience and I’m about 80% sure he’s still on drugs, but damned if he isn’t a likeable scamp who can belt out a good tune, so I’d consider tossing the man a vote.

It’s time for America to drink from the hose once again (and barbecue on Tuesdays).

H/T:  Reason Hit & Run

I Can’t Think Of A Catchy Title

I suppose the best way to describe myself would be to say that I have a problem with authority. I’ve always disliked when people told me what to do, even as a young child, and I’ve always preferred to find my own path through life and make my own decisions, even if it occasionally went against the conventional wisdom and sometimes worked to my short-term disadvantage. My dad said I inherited it from him, but that I’ve taken it to a whole new level. When I was young I wanted to be a journalist, until I got to college and realized that journalism was less about the search for objective truth than it was about writing the stories that best suited your employer’s interests, whether they were true or not (which didn’t sit well with me at all). So I drifted aimlessly through a couple of years of college as an indifferent (often drunk) student, unsure of what to do with myself until one of my fraternity brothers gave me a copy of “The Fountainhead” and I got hooked on the ideas that success and a refusal to conform to societal standards were not mutally exclusive, and that the greatest evil in the world was society and government’s failure to recognize or accept individuality and individual freedom as a strength, not a weakness. So I threw myself into studying politics and history, worked in a few political campaigns after college, had some success, and thought about doing a career in politics until I realized that most of the people I knew who had never had a career outside of politics had no comprehension of how the real world actually worked and tended to make a lot of bad, self-absorbed decisions that rarely helped the people they claimed to be representing.

That didn’t sit well with me either, so I decided to put any thoughts of going into politics on hold until I’d actually had a life and possibly a real career, and I spent the next couple of years drifting between a series of random yet educational jobs (debt collector, deliveryman, computer salesman, repo man, dairy worker) that taught me the value of hard work, personal responsibility and the financial benefits of dining at Taco John’s on Tuesday nights (2 tacos for a buck) when money got tight.

After awhile, however, the desire to see the world (and the need for a more consistent and slightly larger paycheck) convinced me to join the Army, where I spent ten years traveling around the world on the government dime working as an intelligence analyst. I generally enjoyed my time in the military, despite the aforementioned problem with authority (which wasn’t as much of an issue in the military as many people might think it would be), and I got to see that the decisions our political leaders make were sometimes frivolous, often ill-informed, and always had unforeseen repercussions down the road…especially on the soldiers tasked with implementing those decisions. I was fortunate enough to spend most of my 10 years in the military doing jobs I enjoyed, traveling to countries that I always wanted to see (Scotland is the greatest place in the world to hang out, Afghanistan is very underrated) and working with people I liked and respected, until I finally decided that at 35 it was time to move into a job where I didn’t have the threat of relocation lying over my head every two or three years, where I didn’t have to worry about my friends being blown up, and where I didn’t have to work in any capacity for George W. Bush.

I work now for a financial company in Kansas where I’m responsible for overseeing, pricing and maintaining farms, commercial and residential properties, mineral assets, insurance policies, annuities, etc. In my spare time I like to read books on economics, history, and politics (I’m preparing to tackle Murray Rothbard’s “Man, Economy & State” and Von Mises’ “Human Action”…should take me about a year at the rate I’m currently finishing books), watch movies, and destroy posers on “Halo 3” (where I’m signed in under “UCrawford” for anyone interested in taking a shot at me some time). I used to play rugby until age, inconsistent conditioning, and a string of gradually worsening injuries finally convinced me to quit. I’m a rabid fan of the Kansas Jayhawks in general and their basketball and football programs in particular and I’m also a devoted fan of the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. I’m also fond of going online and debating/picking fights with people on the merits of the philosophy of individual freedom…sometimes to the point of being an asshole (but hopefully a reasonably well-informed asshole). I’ve been a big fan of The Liberty Papers ever since finding it online, I respect the body of work they’ve put out, and I’m honored that Brad Warbiany invited me to join his jolly band of freedom fighters. So cheers, Brad, and to everyone else I look forward to reaching consensus or locking horns with you in the near future.

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