From a recent submission to Reason’s Brickbats column:

Mark Chase got a federal court order allowing him to paint on Ocean City, Maryland’s boardwalk without a license. That didn’t impress Baltimore police, who arrested him for painting at the Inner Harbor without a permit. When Chase complained that the permit requirements violated his constitutional rights, and officer told him “Your constitutional rights have nothing to do with the law.”

And of course the officer was right. So: to hell with the law. And to hell with paper constitutions that can do nothing effective to restrain it.

You can quote your constitutional rights all the way to the station-house, but it won’t stop you from getting good and due-processed whenever a cop feels that you’re on the wrong side of The Law. Which, of course, means nothing more or less than on the wrong side of Law Enforcement. Paper constitutions don’t do anything to hold back police abuse; only a culture of popular resistance, social accountability for abusive cops, and hard-driving community activism do that.

Inasmuch as the Constitution was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such an one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

—Lysander Spooner (1870). No Treason No. 6. The Constitution of No Authority

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See also:

• GT 2010-12-13: Licentious policing
• GT 2008-09-17: The Statist We Don’t
• GT 2008-09-11: Ihre Papiere, bitte
• Globalize Liberation: 5 Stages for Social Movements

From Tim Cavanaugh, Steven Chu, Oh Where Are You? (Solyndra Roundup), at Reason.com:

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that a new poll indicates few Americans are paying attention to the Solyndra scandal, and most still support so-called clean energy initiatives … . More surprising than the continued support for solar power is the apparent support for spending taxpayer dollars on it, which the report from Public Opinion Strategies has at 62 percent, versus 31 percent opposed. However, I’m a little skeptical of the strongly leading questions:

There are thousands of successful and profitable clean energy and clean technology companies all across America; the failure of one California company should not stop us from continuing to make targeted public investments to help create American clean energy jobs.	62%
The collapse of Solyndra shows that investing taxpayer dollars in so-called green jobs is a waste of money; these businesses cannot compete or succeed on their own without government assistance, and we cannot afford to prop them up with government funding.	31%

I hope the remaining 7 percent answered, as I would have, Both of these options are stupid. I don’t want my taxes subsidizing private companies of any kind, and I’m aware that the amount of energy conventional solar power generates is modest. But how the hell should I know whether solar businesses can compete or succeed without government assistance?

The only way to find out whether these companies can work in the marketplace is to let them compete without government assistance.

—Tim Cavanaugh, Steven Chu, Oh Where Are You? (Solyndra Roundup), at Reason.com, 29 September 2011

See also.

• GT 2011-04-27: There’s No Right Way to Manage A Subsidy

A Knowledge Problem with Insider Trading Law. Brian Doherty: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-05-16):

Reihan Salam at The Daily is of course glad hedge fund villain Raj Rajaratnam was convicted for insider trading, blah blah, but spells out one of the perverse results of keeping those who know the most about companies (theoretically) from helping spread that knowledge and help bake it into the...

How the regulatory arm of the Money Monopoly -- in order to "protect" small investors from predatory insiders, natch -- ends up encouraging, nay demanding, faceless corporations with governance alienated from the enterprise and unaccountable to investors.

• So Long. Radley Balko: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-05-03). "I'm particularly excited about my final project here, a themed issue Jacob Sullum and I put together and co-edited. The July issue of Reason will take an in-depth look at the criminal justice system and the ramifications of America's massive prison population. Look for it in your mailbox or on newsstands at the beginning of next month." - Radley Balko (Linked Tuesday 2011-05-03.)

• Three Shalt Thou Count. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-08-30). The debates in the comments section of my Koch post have gotten me thinking about the different ways in which vulgar libertarianism operates. I think there are three. 1) First, there’s the use of libertarian slogans as mere rhetorical covering for corporatist policies. This kind of vulgar libertarianism is standard... (Linked Monday 2010-08-30.)

• C4SS in the MSM. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-08-30). Congratulations to Ross Kenyon, whose latest C4SS piece has been picked up by the Christian Science Monitor! (Linked Monday 2010-08-30.)

• The Cold, Crisp Taste of Koch. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-08-31). From Frank Rich's rehash of Jane Mayer's recent hit piece on the philanthropizin' oilmen Charles and David Koch: When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security,... (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Why does the Infrastructurist hate libertarians so much? rationalitate, Market Urbanism (2010-08-25). by Stephen Smith Among urban planners, libertarianism gets a pretty bad rap. Melissa Lafsky at the Infrastructurist goes so far as to call libertarianism “an enemy of infrastructure,” and dismisses entirely the idea that private industry can build infrastructure with a single hyperlink – to a poorly-written article on New Zealand’s... (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Argumentum ad un-Americanum. Will Wilkinson, Will Wilkinson (2010-08-27). This Forbes column by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins arguing that the government should stop subsidizing homeownership was skipping along predictably but just fine until… When the government encourages homeownership, the story goes, it strengthens individuals and communities and thereby fosters the American Dream. They’re wrong. A government crusade to... (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Why Do Futurists Get So Much Wrong? Steven Horwitz, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-08-25). The Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann once walked into the colloquium room at New York University, where the blackboard displayed this quotation: “When it comes to the future, one word says it all: You never know. – Y. Berra.” Having built much of his economics on the unknowability of the future,... (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Scary scary news scary! admin, This Modern World (2010-08-31). Scary scary news scary! (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)