Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies, and they routinely hurt people who pose no serious threat to anyone. People who complain about this kind of rough handling are treated like trash, as if any level of intimidation and violence whatsoever were obviously legitimate, and the victims are to blame for provoking whatever they get. Cops in America are also professional liars. They lie to obtain confessions; they lie to obtain consent for searches; they lie to intimidate; they lie to lull people into a false sense of security. They also lie repeatedly and extensively to carry on investigations, which is constantly necessary in the effort to enforce drug laws: since the so-called crime of selling and using drugs involves only willing parties, there’s no victim to file a complaint, so narcs have to lie and pose and infiltrate in order to even discover where drugs are being sold and by whom.

In La Pine, Oregon, here is how the DEA and the local narcs recently worked together to seize evidence from two people for a federal drug case without identifying themselves as cops, affording any opportunity to consult a lawyer, or even going so far as to get a warrant or talk to a judge.

On December 18, 2004, Ascension Alverez-Tejeda and his girlfriend were stopped at a traffic light near La Pine Oregon, and when the light turned green, the car in front of them stalled. Alverez-Tejeda stopped in time but a pickup truck behind him rear-ended him. When he got out to look at his bumper, the police showed up and arrested the truck driver for drinking and driving. The cops then convinced Alverez-Tejeda and his girlfriend to go to a nearby parking lot, ordered them out of their car and into in the back of the cop car for processing. While they were in the cruiser, a person jumped in their car and took off. The cops ordered the pair out and set off in full pursuit up the road. A few minutes later, the stolen car comes flying back down the road with the police cruiser in pursuit. The pursuing officer returns alone with the woman’s purse, telling the duo that the carjacker thrown it out the car window and escaped. The woman is so upset she hurls and the police put the distraught couple up in a motel.

But it was all a set up worthy of David Mamet. DEA agents were tracking a drug gang and had bought drugs out of the car months earlier, though not when Alverez-Tejeda was there. Using wiretaps and surveillance, the DEA learned that Alverez-Tejeda was using the leader’s car to transport illicit drugs. The agents then decided to stage something, perhaps even a carjacking, in order to seize the drugs without tipping off the conspirators. They never consulted a judge, but every person in the story, other than Alverez-Tejeda and his girlfriend, was a cop of some sort.

Once they got the car, the agents got a search warrant without telling the judge about the caper and seized cocaine and methamphetamines, as well as property belonging to Alverez-Tejeda and his girlfriend.

— Ryan Singel, Wired Blogs (2007-06-08): Appeals Court Rules Cops Can Steal Cars and Lie to Victims To Conduct a Warrantless Search

And here’s what happened when they took this evidence to court:

The government indicted Alverez-Tejeda but the district court in Washington found that the caper violated the Fourth Amendment, thus making the drugs inadmissable in court. The government appealed.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision Friday, finding that this police escapade was legal since the cops had probable cause already to seize and search the car, thanks to the vehicle exception to the Fourth Amendment created by the courts during the War on Drugs. Therefore, the court found, the police are allowed much latitude in how they seize the car and arrest the driver. The tap was considered only a minimal use of force, and the fake chase wasn’t considered to have put any civilians lives in danger.

The government here certainly had important reasons for employing this unusual procedure in seizing the car. First, the agents wanted to stop the drugs before they reached their ultimate destination — a patently important goal. Second, they wanted to protect the anonymity of the ongoing investigation — another vital objective.

— Ryan Singel, Wired Blogs (2007-06-08): Appeals Court Rules Cops Can Steal Cars and Lie to Victims To Conduct a Warrantless Search

To recap, two people who did absolutely nothing to violate anyone else’s rights or hurt anyone against their will, had their car rammed and then stolen. The narcs knew about the deliberate ramming and the theft but they lied about them–because, after all, they ordered them. They used this lie to seize property and obtain evidence without giving their victims any chance to assert their rights (since they were lied to, they had no idea that a search or seizure was even taking place), and without obtaining a warrant or submitting to judicial oversight of any kind. The narcs feel that they need to be able to do this kind of thing in order to do their jobs effectively, since snitch anonymity, which actually has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with systematically lying about who they are and what they do, is an essential tool in their efforts to lock harmless people in cages for the next several years of their lives. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, meanwhile, stands by and smilingly waves them on, once again under the excuse of necessity.

To prove, that these Sort of policed Societies are a Violation offered to Nature, and a Constraint upon the human Mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary Measures, and Instruments of Violence which are every where used to support them. Let us take a Review of the Dungeons, Whips, Chains, Racks, Gibbets, with which every Society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of Victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in Pride and Madness, and Millions in an abject Servitude, and Dependence. There was a Time, when I looked with a reverential Awe on these Mysteries of Policy; but Age, Experience, and Philosophy have rent the Veil; and I view this Sanctum Sanctorum, at least, without any enthusiastick Admiration. I acknowledge indeed, the Necessity of such a Proceeding in such Institutions; but I must have a very mean Opinion of Institutions where such Proceedings are necessary.

— Edmund Burke (1757): A Vindication of Natural Society

So who are the real criminals here?

Femapsychosis, n. – a personality disorder characterized by grandiosity, narcissism, and an acute break from reality in the face of natural disasters. A femapsychotic often believes that he or she is the only one who is capable of saving thousands or even millions of people, and cannot conceive that anyone would not want or would not need his or her help. They create and fixate on plans, believing that the only way to help any individual person in a disaster area is to create and enforce a one-size-fits-all plan to cover every person affected. This fixation can become violent, sometimes leading to roadblocks and preemptive attacks on anyone who intends to offer help to individual victims of the disaster outside the scope of the plan.

For a case study, see the remarks by Ron, John, Jammer, and Dan T., in a Hit and Run thread on Kansas Mutual Aid and the Greensburg relief efforts, for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from chapter 4, There Will Be No End of It, in Lynn Hunt’s new book, Inventing Human Rights: A History. The chapter has to do with the expansive logic of natural rights, and the way in which the universalizing ideal gradually (though, in the French case, fairly rapidly) to encompass demands for religious freedom, the emancipation of the Jews, rights for free blacks, the abolition of slavery, and the liberation of women. Unfortunately, in the end, the self-styled vanguard of the Revolution was more willing to recognize the rights of their brothers than they were with certain other of their siblings.

In September 1791, the antislavery playwright Olympe de Gouges turned the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen inside out. Her Declaration of the Rights of Woman insisted that Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights (Article 1). All citizenesses and citizens, being equal in its [the law’s] eyes, should be equally admissible to all public dignities, offices, and employments, according to their ability, and with no other distinction than that of their virtues and talents (Article 6). The inversion of the language of the official 1789 declaration hardly seems shocking to us now, but it surely did then. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft did not go as far as her French counterparts in demanding absolutely equal political rights for women, but she wrote at much greater length and with searing passion about the ways education and tradition had stunted women’s minds. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, she linked the emancipation of women to the explosion of all forms of hierarchy in society. Like de Gouges, Wollstonecraft suffered public vilification for her boldness. De Gouges’s fate was even worse, for she went to the guillotine, condemned as an impudent counterrevolutionary and unnatural being (a woman-man).

Once the momentum got going, women’s rights were not limited to the publications of a few path-breaking individuals. Between 1791 and 1793, women set up political clubs in at least fifty provincial towns and cities as well as in Paris. Women’s rights came up for debate in the clubs, in newspapers, and in pamphlets. In April 1793, during the consideration of citizenship under a proposed new constitution for the republic, one deputy argued at length in favor of equal political rights for women. His intervention showed that the idea had gained some adherents. There is no doubt a difference, he granted, that of the sexes [sic –RG] … but I do not conceive how a sexual difference makes for one in the equality of rights. … Let us liberate ourselves rather from the prejudice of sex, just as we have freed ourselves from the prejudice against the color of Negroes. The deputies did not follow his lead.

Instead, in October 1793, the deputies moved against women’s clubs. Reacting to street fights among women over the wearing of revolutionary insignia, the Convention voted to suppress all political clubs for women on the grounds that such clubs only diverted them from their appropriate domestic duties. According to the deputy who presented the decree, women did not have the knowledge, application, devotion, or self-abnegation required for governing. They should stick with the private functions to which women are destined by nature itself. The rationale hardly sounded new notes; what was new was the need to come out and forbid women from forming and attending political clubs. Women may have come up least and last, but their rights did eventually make the agenda, and what was said about them in the 1790s–especially in favor of rights–had an impact that has lasted down to the present.

–Lynn Hunt (2007): Inventing Human Rights, pp. 171–172.

So it seems that Glenn Reynolds noticed my first post about FEMA’s command-and-control-oriented relief project in Greensburg, Kansas. In particular, he noticed this bit from Dave Strano’s report about possible gun-grabbing by the federalis and the local police working under their direction:

In the immediate recovery after the storm, FEMA and local police not only worked to find survivors and the dead, but also any firearms in the city. As you pass by houses in Greensburg, you notice that some are spraypainted with how many weapons were recovered from the home. This is central Kansas, a region with extremely high legal gun ownership. Of the over 350 firearms confiscated by police immediately after the storm, only a third have been returned to their owners. FEMA and the police have systematically disarmed the local population, leaving the firepower squarely in control of the state.

Reynolds wanted to make sure that FEMA and the forces at their disposal know that any sort of post-disaster gun-grabbing would be a violation of U.S. federal law under the Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act passed in 2006. Now, the good news is that, although other developments in Greensburg were a lot less benign, it seems that here at least things were quite not as bad as it seemed at first; at least, the cops claim that they mostly returned the guns they collected as soon as the rightful owners came to claim them. But it’s risky to put too much faith in the cops’ willingness to return weapons to rightful claimants when they are surrounding the city with roadblocks and using the opportunity to turn everything they find over to the scrutiny of the BATF and other authorities. And the effects of disarmament remain as long as police don’t make active efforts to return guns to their rightful owners, whatever the cops’ intent may have been. Any way you slice it, it sounds like a pretty bad situation from the standpoint of gun rights.

Maybe we should make sure that there’s never any danger of FEMA or other government agencies seizing guns when natural disasters strike in the future. In light of the danger of government agents ignoring federal law, shouldn’t the gun rights community demand a Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act Protection Act in 2007?

You know, just to be sure.

By and large, I am not a fan of Jeremy Bentham. I think that his politics were middling at best, and his philosophical ethics are philosophically mistaken and both morally and politically corrosive. But I have been impressed by the early essay I’m currently in the middle of reading, in which Bentham argues against State control of the financial markets, which he provocatively if unfortunately entitled a Defence of Usury. Letter IV, on the Protection of Indigence, includes this wonderful response to the argument State command-and-control can or should be enlisted to protect the poor from their own decisions to seek credit from predatory lenders. As perfectly disgusting as I find most of the sharks who target poor people in money trouble, the problem has to do with laws that regulate and restrict formal-sector credit so as to make too little credit in too few forms available from too narrow a class of people. The proposed statist remedies — more bans and more restrictions — are worse than the disease. Here’s Bentham:

A man [sic] is in one of these situations, suppose, in which it would be for his advantage to borrow. But his circumstances are such, that it would not be worth any body’s while to lend him, at the highest rate which it is proposed the law should allow; in short, he cannot get it at that rate. If he thought he could get it at that rate, most surely he would not give a higher: he may he trusted for that: for by the supposition he has nothing defective in his understanding. But the fact is, he cannot get it at that lower rate. At a higher rate, however he could get it: and at that rate, though higher, it would be worth his while to get it: so he judges, who has nothing to hinder him from judging right; who has every motive and every means for forming a right judgment; who has every motive and every means for informing himself of the circumstances, upon which rectitude of judgment, in the case in question, depends. The legislator, who knows nothing, nor can know any thing, of any one of all these circumstances, who knows nothing at all about the matter, comes and says to him — It signifies nothing; you shall not have the money: for it would be doing you a mischief to let you borrow it upon such terms. — And this out of prudence and loving-kindness! — There may be worse cruelty, but can there be greater folly?

The folly of those who persist, as is supposed, without reason, in not taking advice, has been much expatiated upon. But the folly of those who persist, without reason, in forcing their advice upon others, has been but little dwelt upon, though it is, perhaps, the more frequent, and the more flagrant of the two. It is not often that one man [sic] is a better judge for another, than that other is for himself, even in Cases where the adviser will take the trouble to make himself master of as many of the materials for judging, as are within the reach of the person to be advised. But the legislator is not, can not be, in the possession of any one of these materials. — What private, can be equal to such public folly?

–Jeremy Bentham, Defence of Usury (1787), Letter IV.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to apply the same principles to parallel arguments against government-imposed wage floors, or against bans on so-called price gouging on essential commodities.