I call on all of our college campuses to open their doors to our [sic] military recruiters and the ROTC. It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation.

— President Barack Obama (25 January 2011), State of the Union speech

The more things Change….

• on the second anniversary of Obama's pledge to end torture... vikki, Gangsters in Blue (2011-01-24). Friday, Jan 21, 2011 Friends, Tomorrow is the 2nd anniversary of President Obama’s pledge to end torture. Given the conditions of prolonged solitary confinement and acute isolation many people face in the federal system along with at the US prisons at Guantanamo, Bagram, and elsewhere, we are a far cry… (Linked Monday 2011-01-24.)

• Decentralization of the Police Accountability Report. Nick Saorsa, Cop Block (2011-01-20). Keeping with Cop Block's decentralized theme, we have decided to open up the Police Accountability Report (PAR) to you, the listeners.  If you are aware of a local high profile incident of police brutality, unaccountable official(s), or an interesting activist program, you can now submit an audio clip to be… (Linked Monday 2011-01-24.)

• Written Communication Can Be Good Communication. DarianW, DarianWorden.com (2011-01-20). It has been said that the internet, or any text format, is not a good medium for discussion. But writing can be as good or better than verbal communication, particularly verbal communication where the other person is not seen (such as phone or radio). Of course, the internet also allows… (Linked Monday 2011-01-24.)

• How the iPhone Mail App Decides When to Show You New Mail Messages. John Gruber, Daring Fireball (2011-01-24). Details matter.  â˜…  (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-25.)

• November 8th, 2010. The Monkeys You Ordered (2010-12-24). A unicorn is here to see you. (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-25.)

• Literal Caption Contest: Winner! The Monkeys You Ordered (2011-01-25). Intellectual Monopoly Vs. Creativity and Humor (Cont’d.) (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-25.)

• OAuth Will Murder Your Children. Zach Holman (2011-01-25). Say there's a hot new startup that just launched today that you've just gotta sign up for and use immediately. It's that hot. I bet they even have a whiz-bang HTML5 website. Paul Graham is rumored to be in talks about funding it. John Gruber has already made a snide-but-poignant… (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-25.)

Here’s a view of the Southwest neighborhood in Washington, D.C., in 1949, before government planners came along to Develop it. The buildings are mostly small rowhouses, some of them dating back to the 18^th and 19^th centuries. A lot of the people living there were poor; most of them black folks or European immigrants. There were bustling commercial districts, grocery stores, a lot of little shops, and a movie theater.

Before.

Here’s a view of the Southwest neighborhood in 1963, after it got Urban Renewed. Every square inch on this map was claimed under eminent domain; this is what the award-winning urban planners and developers did with it.

After.

Wikipedia describes what happened in between the Before and the After as the 1950s rebuilding.

Here’s another photo from 1979, when the highway construction was complete and the government had finished some brutalist office and residential buildings, new office complexes for HUD and the EPA, and some government housing projects. Some of these developments were widely praised; some even won an award.

Thank goodness government is around to develop these neighborhoods for us. Just think of all the blight and unlivable neighborhoods we’d have if they just left it up to the people who live and work in a neighborhood to determine the conditions under which they want to live and work.

(Thanks to BeyondDC.com 2011-01-10.)

See also:

• GT 2008-11-24: How the local government in Las Vegas deals with the worst housing crisis in the United States
• GT 2006-06-14: Enclosure comes to Los Angeles

One of the Mises Institute Daily Articles for Thursday was Gary Galles’s Keeping the Liberties of the People Safe, a short article about Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), a pro-Independence member of the Continental Congress who later became an anti-Federalist in the debate over the United States Constitution. The body of the article itself mostly consists of a fragmentary list of pull-quotes about liberty, power, and government. But here’s the article summary (which you’ll see if you search for the article in Google, or if you read it in a feed reader):

Keeping the Liberties of the People Safe

Richard Henry Lee is best known for the June 7, 1776, motion calling for the colonies’ independence from Great Britain, which led to the Declaration of Independence. As a consistent advocate of liberty, he also opposed the Constitution.

As a consistent advocate of liberty, Richard Henry Lee also enslaved more than 60 men, women and children on the plantation he governed at Chantilly, Virginia.^[1]

Here’s something — quoted approvingly by Gary Galles in the Mises Daily article — that the slave-driving hypocrite Richard Henry Lee wrote about liberty while he was living off the forced labor of dozens of captive black slaves:

[W]e ought not to lodge [powers] as evidently to give one order of men in the community undue advantages over others; or commit the many to the mercy, prudence, and moderation of the few.

Well, yeah.

See also:

• GT 2008-04-18: Just shut the fuck up
• GT 2006-03-21: The humane slave-driver
• GT 2006-03-04: Republican virtue (or: the Man who would be King)

1. ^[1]Cf. J. Kent McGaughy (2004), Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: a portrait of an American revolutionary (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield), p. 61↩

Today’s question comes from The Agitator (2011-01-20), about a recent police raid on a medical marijuana dispensary in the suburbs of Metro Detroit:

Dear Dr. Anarchy:

Earlier this month, police in Oakland County, Michigan raided a medical marijuana dispensary in the town of Oak Park. The deputies came in with guns drawn and bulletproof vests, with at least one wearing a mask.

They made no arrests, but they did clean the place out. The confiscated all of the dispensary’s cash on hand and–in a particularly thuggish touch–also took all of the cash from the wallets and purses of employees and patients.

… Under Michigan’s asset forfeiture law, 80 percent of the cash the deputies seized will go directly to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department. The other 20 percent goes to the local prosecutor. Medical marijuana is legal under Michigan law but is of course still illegal under federal law. And apparently there’s some debate about the legality of dispensaries. All of which means this particular dispensary will have a hard time proving it earned the seized cash legitimately. I doubt the patients and employees will get their cash back, either. The cost of challenging the seizure is likely several times more than the amount of money most people carry on their person.

In light of all this, Balko asks, So how is this different from armed robbery?

The short answer to the rhetorical question is that it isn’t. The longer answer is that, aside from the gang colors, there are two differences between an official armed robbery like this one, and the stereotypical armed robbery carried out by freelancers.^[1] The first difference is that when gangsters without badges rob you, you could in principle go to the police about it and try to get the robbers arrested. But when the gangsters who robbed you are the police, and are happy to arrest you if you complain about the robbery, then who do you go to?

The second difference is that after gangsters without badges rob you, at least they usually let you go on your way; they spend the money on private indulgences, and leave you alone. But when gangsters with badges rob you, they take the money and use it to finance the more raids, more arrests, more brutality, and more efforts to control the behavior of people like you and force you to submit to their insane and arbitrary laws. As Spooner writes in No Treason 6.3.5:

The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a protector, and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to protect those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful sovereign, on account of the protection he affords you. He does not keep protecting you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.

So, the only difference between police forfeiture raids and the more stereotypical forms of armed robbery is that police forfeiture raids are worse.

1. ^[1]Stereotypical, not typical. Armed robbery by government officials is just as typical as armed robbery carried out by freelancers. It’s just not discussed to the same extent.↩