Wisconsin seems to be a leader in the race for becoming a full fledged police state. Earlier this year I posted on the fact that in Wisconsin police can attach a GPS device on citizens’ cars without a warrant.

Now we learn from the LaCrosse Tribune that police apparently used deceit to friend students on Facebook then, based on photos in their Facebook network, cited them for underage drinking.  One can’t help but wonder if this was a fishing expedition for increased municipal revenue.

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer has nearly 400 friends on Facebook. He got an offer for a new one about a month ago. “She was a good-looking girl. I usually don’t accept friends I don’t know, but I randomly accepted this one for some reason,” the 19-year-old said.

He thinks that led to his invitation to come down to the La Crosse police station, where an officer laid out photos from Facebook of Bauer holding a beer — and then ticketed him for underage drinking.

The police report said Bauer admitted drinking, which he denies. But he did plead no contest in municipal court Wednesday and will pay a $227 fine.

He was among at least eight people who said Wednesday they had been cited for underage drinking based on photos on social networking sites.

Hopefully these students have learned some valuable lessons:

• The role of police officers is not to protect.  They are law enforcement officers.
• The police can and will lie.  (One of Wisconsin’s finest is quoted here as having aspirations of getting better at it.)
• Never talk to the police.  Let your lawyer do the talking.

(HT to David Kramer and Southern Bread)

“Long live Christ the King!”  The last words of Father Miguel Pro, S.J. before being executed by firing squad for his faith.

One day after the Feast of Christ the King Catholics celebrate today the Memorial of Blessed Miguel Pro, Jesuit priest and Christian martyr, executed November 23, 1927, on the orders of Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles.  Falsely accused and convicted without trial, his crime was his refusal to submit to the laws outlawing the practice of his Catholic faith.

A master of disguise, the photograph above shows him disguised as a mechanic, his attire for a conference with cab and bus drivers.

The president’s desire to make a spectacle of his execution has given us a treasure of photographs from that day.  Below Fr. Pro walks towards his execution.  Center, he prays before his execution.  At bottom, barely moments before the executioners’ bullets hit.

I’m convinced more than ever that we live in a lawless land.  The only law being that of the whims and power of those in positions of authority.

In 1850 Frédéric Bastiat wrote The Law to warn of the detrimental effects of perverting the law and using it to plunder your neighbor, that is use the law to do to your neighbor what you yourself could not legitimately do.  Although written in the context of 19th century French socialism it still applies today.  Here’s a bit of what Bastiat had to say:

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.

In the first place, it erases from everyone’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it.

I’m convinced of another thing too.  Our acceptance of  this idea of plunder has opened the way for the law to be used, not only against our neighbor to redistribute his wealth, but also against our neighbor and ourselves to fund the state in ever more unjust and evil ways.

This past week the Detroit News ran a three part series on the increase use of asset forfeiture laws by local jurisdictions (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).  Apparently, these laws are becoming an effective way to replace lost tax revenue in a down economy.  Despicable on many levels, one of the worst is that officials are preying on the very people they claim to serve and protect.

The way Krista Vaughn sees it, Wayne County fined her $1,400 even though police and prosecutors admit she broke no laws.

Vaughn, who has no criminal record, was required to pay for the return of her car, which was seized by police after they mistook Vaughn’s co-worker for a prostitute. Even though prosecutors later dropped the case, Vaughn still had to pay.

Vaughn, who works in an American Red Cross supply warehouse, dropped off her co-worker, Amanda Odom, at a Detroit bank the afternoon of Feb. 11, 2004. Both women were still wearing their Red Cross badges.

Officers from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Morality Unit accused Odom of solicitation after they saw her make eye contact with passing motorists while waiting for Vaughn to pick her up from the bank. On the strength of that observation, officers ticketed Odom and seized Vaughn’s 2002 Chrysler Sebring.

“We obviously weren’t doing anything wrong, but the cops wouldn’t listen,” Vaughn said.

The charges against Odom were eventually dropped, but Vaughn still was out $900, the usual fee prosecutors require to return seized vehicles. She also had to pay another $500 in towing and storage fees, because it was several days before she could raise the money to get her car back — plus another $400 to repair an oil pan she said was damaged when her car was towed.

In the report some officials spoke against the practice.  Now a defense attorney, former Macomb County Prosecutor Carl Marlinga said, “Forfeiture laws are being abused by police and prosecutors who see only dollar signs.  It’s a money grab, pure and simple; a sneaky way of getting a penalty on something prosecutors can’t prove. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”   Fraser Public Safety Director George Rouhib likened it to “legalized extortion.”

Other officials were unrepentant:

“We’re trying to fight crime,” said Police Chief Mike Pachla of Roseville, where the money raised from forfeitures jumped more than tenfold, from $33,890 to $393,014.  “We would be just as aggressive even if there wasn’t any money involved.”

And another:

When Romulus saw a 118 percent jump in forfeiture revenues from 2003-07, the increase was not the result of more criminal activity, Chief Michael St. Andre said.  “It’s because our forfeiture efforts have ramped up in the past few years,” he said.

This is what happens when you criminalize immoral behavior and legalize criminal behavior.  Lord, have mercy!

A new twist on a chilling phrase.

Last night I had the good fortune to attend a book launch for a new book entitled Spread the Wealth, authored by Mr. David R. Breuhan (The title is ingenious, sure to attract many of today’s coercive spreaders and spreadees).  I’ll have more details on the event later.  In the meantime, peruse the site and pick up the book.  Mr. Breuhan offers a prescription for our economic ills.  And you’re part of the medical team.

Frankly, I don’t know whether to believe it or not.  Hat tip to Casey’s Daily Dispatch.

Sophism is not a word often read or heard by the eyes and ears of the twenty-first century. It is a word, however, we would do well to become more familiar with. At its root lies wisdom, but the Sophists of the fifth century BC damaged that root for all time; so that rather than relating to wisdom, it is now used to indicate a “plausible but fallacious argument”. It is this fallacious meaning that Frédéric Bastiat had in mind when he titled his collection of essays Economic Sophisms (pdf version here). And while the term in modern use can also indicate an intention to deceive, Bastiat mostly thought the best of his intellectual opponents and assumed that they were not the authors, but rather, the victims and unwitting propagators of the deceit inherent in economic fallacies.

Sophisms, praised as the “…best literary defense of free trade available…” is a collection of two different series of essays defending free trade against the economic fallacies of mid nineteenth century France. In the First Series, a collection of twenty-three essays first published together in 1845, Bastiat examines free trade from many different perspectives employing a variety of writing styles. Most of the essays are written in a conversational prose with an occasional one being satire or story. The Second Series of seventeen essays was originally published in 1848. In terms of style this series differs from the first in that over half of the essays are stories, dialogues or satire with only a few being written in prose.

On the first read, the essays in Sophisms may appear to be repetitious. Even Bastiat admits as much when he says that repetition, “…the inherent defect of this little work…” is also “…its principal utility.” There is, in fact, much repetition, but it is intentional.  Bastiat is following the advice of Jean-Baptiste Say, who was a major influence on his economic formation. In his Introduction to A Treatise on Political Economy, Say states:

To obtain a knowledge of the truth, it is not then so necessary to be acquainted with a great number of facts, as with such as are essential, and have a direct and immediate influence; and, above all, to examine them under all their aspects, to be enabled to deduce from them just conclusions, and be assured that the consequences ascribed to them do not in reality proceed from other causes. [Emphasis added]

And indeed, Bastiat does examine the facts under all aspects. In every case, whether the satirical petition to the king to have the right hand of all his subjects cut off or the passionate warning of the perversion of the meaning of words, Bastiat examines the facts of protectionist economic policies and exposes the fallacies upon which the policies are built. In each case he follows more of Say’s advice to “…discover the chain which binds them [facts] together, and always, from observation, establish the existence of the two links at their point of connexion (sic).” In his own Introduction Bastiat echoes Say with an explanation of the complexities of mounting a defense against the simple half-truths of his opponents:

… we cannot limit ourselves to the consideration of a single cause and its immediate effect. We know that this effect itself becomes in its turn a cause. In order to pass judgment on a measure, we must, then, trace it through the whole chain of its effects to its final result. In other words, we are reduced, quite frankly, to an appeal to reason.

Thus his reasons for repetition.

Free trade is the obvious theme of the Sophisms, but it’s addressed through many different fallacies. Some of the fallacies include, imports destroy the country’s wealth; high prices increase the country’s wealth; a favorable balance of trade increases wealth; general welfare is incompatible with justice and peace; economics is based on theory, not real life, and more. His most famous essay in Sophisms, “A Petition”, is a fictitious request for a law to forbid sunlight indoors. To do so would increase jobs and industry including whaling, shipping, agriculture, manufacturing and more. Not a Frenchman would miss out on the prosperity. Of course, the request is absurd, but, as in many of the essays, he uses the absurdity to point out the harm brought to consumers in order to create or protect jobs and industry.

And it is the role of the consumer that is Bastiat’s main point through and through. His mission is to show the reader the many and varied ways that the sophisms bring him harm:

In regard to the question that I have been dealing with, each sophism doubtless has its own phraseology and its particular meaning, but all have a common root: the disregard of men’s interests in their capacity as consumers. To show that this sophism is the starting point for a thousand roads to error is to teach the public to recognize it, to understand it, and to mistrust it under all circumstances.

A nation is free, when it is bent on freedom; and the most formidable obstacle to the establishment of civil liberty is the absence of the desire for it.

Jean-Baptiste Say, from a footnote in A Treatise on Political Economy, Book III, Chapter VIII, Of Taxation

“If you’ve been diagnosed “probable” or “presumed” 2009 H1N1 or “swine flu” in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all.”

So begins the CBS report, Swine Flu Cases Overestimated? A report that all should read.  CBS reports that that fever and cough you or your child recently had not only probably wasn’t the H1N1 flu, it also wasn’t likely to have been the seasonal flu.  The report also reveals the sinking sand on which the government’s case is built: The CDC is not counting H1N1 cases, has recommended that states no longer test for the virus, and most cases tested before individual testing was halted weren’t even the flu, of any type.  (Of course, you should still get the vaccine.)

We asked all 50 states for their statistics on state lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in July. The results reveal a pattern that surprised a number of health care professionals we consulted. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico.

It’s unknown what patients who tested negative for flu were actually afflicted with since the illness was not otherwise determined. Health experts say it’s assumed the patients had some sort of cold or upper respiratory infection that is just not influenza.

Further galling is the stonewalling by the CDC:

When CDC did not provide us with the documents…

More than two months later, the [FOI] request has not been fulfilled.

The CDC did not response to questions from CBS News for this report.

One doesn’t have to believe in conspiracies to think something bigger than the flu is going on during this year’s flu season.

I’ve been reading A Treatise on Political Economy by Jean-Baptiste Say.  In a discussion on money and the “unfixing” of its value from silver Say notes (63) that at first the practice was opposed by the Law, saying, “Law strenuously opposed the innovation…”.  He continues, however, “…but principle was compelled to give way to power; and the crimes of power, when the consequences began to be felt, were confidently attributed to the fallacy of the principle.”

How’s that for a one sentence summary of 21st century political economy?