Roderick has a good post up called A Question for Critics of Ron Paul’s Critics, which does an excellent job of deflating one of the common rejoinders that Ron Paul boosters make to Ron Paul’s libertarian critics–specifically to those, like me, who consider Paul’s anti-libertarian position on abortion or immigration to be a poison pill. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

There’s a lot of interesting exchange going on in the comments. Here are excerpts from five different comments that oppose treating Ron Paul’s support for forced pregnancy as a poison pill:

David Miller:

Given the complexities of NAFTA (and the same is true of immigration and abortion), it does seem to me rather silly to use this as a litmus test, ….

Max Raskin:

Immigration, free trade, abortion, and cosmopolitanism don't really mean anything if any of the other candidates get elected and throw us into World War Five.

Rich Paul:

If I have to tolerate Kansas outlawing abortion in order for Kansas to tolerate New Hampshire legalizing drugs, then I think it a good trade.

Otto Kerner:

To me, personally, it seems clear that federalism and opposing the war are much more important libertarian issues than immigration and abortion.

Stephen W. Carson:

To those who support Paul but voice their criticisms of his positions on immigration, abortion, whatever... Hurrah! To those who don't support Paul, for whatever reason, I have only one question: What is your plan for stopping the killing?

Perhaps it is rude to point this out; perhaps it is even dirty pool. Certainly it is not a demonstration that their reasoning is flawed. Nevertheless, can you guess what all five of these commenters have in common when it comes to abortion?

If you’re baffled, try reading the first block quotation in Roe v. Wade Day #34.

David Gordon — a Rothbardian anarchist and frequent contributor to anti-state, anti-war, pro-market LewRockwell.com — wrote an Open Letter To Libertarians on Ron Paul in which he denounces the running-dog radical libertarians who oppose Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution. Here’s what he has to say about opposition to Chairman Ron’s position on abortion:

No power to regulate abortion is granted to the federal government. Some of course claim that the Fourteenth Amendment changes matters, but it requires very strained interpretation to conjure a right to abortion out of the text of this Amendment. One critic of Ron Paul has admitted that Roe v. Wade is bad law but thinks we should somehow get to the correct pro-abortion view. Is this not to surrender the possibility of constitutional limits on the federal government?

Yes. So what?

Anarchists don’t believe in constitutional government.

On Ron Paul’s support for an even more aggressive police state to enforce international apartheid:

Some object to Ron Paul because he does not support an open borders immigration policy. But why should one take this position to be essential to libertarianism? Hans Hoppe has raised strong objections to open borders; and Murray Rothbard, in his last years, abandoned the view. Free immigration combined with a welfare state is a dangerous brew: does it make sense to reject Ron Paul because he cannot accept it?

Yes.

Anarchists don’t believe in national borders and they don’t believe in a federal police state to enforce them.

It may be true that when you combine something fundamentally moral — free immigration — with something completely immoral — a coercive welfare state funded by expropriated tax funds — you’ll get bad consequences from the combination. But that’s a good reason to try to limit or eliminate the immoral part of the combination, by undermining or dismantling the apparatus of taxation and government welfare. It’s certainly not a good reason to try to limit or eliminate the moral part of the combination by escalating the federal government’s surveillance, recording, searching, beating, jailing, and exiling innocent people. Anarchists have no reason to accept the latter, either as a policy position, or even as a matter about which reasonable libertarians can agree to disagree.

Oddly, some of the same people who condemn Ron Paul for apostasy are themselves so devoted to left libertarianism that they subordinate libertarian principles to certain cultural values. They favor gender equality and are concerned lest we think ill of certain preferred minority groups. Libertarianism, they think, will best promote these values, and this fact is for them a chief reason to support libertarianism.

Since Gordon refuses to identify any individuals whose specific positions he is criticizing, it’s hard to tell whether he’s referring to the essay on libertarian feminism that Roderick Long and I co-authored, or whether he means to refer to somebody else. (If so, whom?) So it’s hard to know whom he expects to answer him when he asks:

Does not the question then arise, should libertarianism be subordinated to these values?

If he does intend to refer to my position, then he’s made two serious mistakes.

First, I don’t think that libertarianism should be subordinated to certain cultural values such as radical feminism. I believe that libertarianism, rightly understood, is both compatible with and mutually reinforcing with the cultural values of radical feminism, rightly understood. (For a more detailed explanation of the different kinds of links that there may be between libertarianism and radical feminism, see my reply to Jan Narveson on thick libertarianism.) The independent merit of radical feminism is one reason to support libertarianism as a political project (because opposing the patriarchal State is of value on feminist grounds), but that’s never been the sole reason or the primary reason I have suggested for being a libertarian. The primary reason to be a libertarian is that the libertarian theory of individual rights is true. From the standpoint of justice, the benefits that a stateless society offers for radical feminism are gravy. If there were some kind of proposal on the table to advance radical feminist goals by statist means, then I would reject the proposal, in favor of proposals that advance radical feminist goals by anti-statist means.

Second, libertarianism is not conceptually equivalent to actively supporting the most libertarian candidate in a government election. Libertarianism is a theory of political justice, not a particular political party or candidate. If one invokes feminist, anti-racist, or any other reasons not to actively support Ron Paul’s candidacy, those reasons may be good reasons or they may be bad reasons. But they are reasons for subordinating one particular strategy for libertarian outreach and activism — a strategy which, by the way, has basically zero empirical evidence whatever in favor of its effectiveness — to other concerns. But so what? There’s no reason for libertarians, and especially not for anarchists, to treat government elections as the be-all and end-all of libertarian principle.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-01-25: We put the Arch in Anarchy
• GT 2007-11-29: Res ipsa loquitur

(Via Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-11-08, Manuel Lora @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2007-11-08, and The Agitator 2007-11-08.)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies. They routinely force their way into places they have no business being, use violence first and ask questions later, and pass off even the most egregious forms of violence against helpless people as self-defense or as the necessary means to accomplish a completely unnecessary goal. In order to stay in control of the situation, they have no trouble electrifying small children, alleged salad-bar thieves, pregnant women possibly guilty of a minor traffic violation, or an already prone and helpless student who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers on hand. They are willing to pepper spray lawyers for asking inconvenient questions and to beat up teenaged girls for daring to give them lip over cleaning up spilled cake or being out too late at night. Whenever they are caught using harsh enough violence against someone who is so obviously innocent or helpless that the media takes notice, police administrators will wring their hands, say something noncommittal, make up some lies as possible excuses for the assault, promise an investigation, find that Official Procedures were followed, and then do nothing at all. Meanwhile a chorus of sado-fascist bully boys will reliably cheer the pigs and smear the victim in print media, talk shows, and the Internet. Both administrators and freelance police enablers freely employ the most tortured sorts of necessity excuses, in what seems to be a deliberate effort to obliterate any notion of restraints on the use of force in securing police objectives. Then they will sanctimoniously explain how cops need to be able to beat the hell out of you with impunity so that they can protect you.

For example, when the cops in Chicago aren’t too busy running elite criminal rackets, they have found another way to serve and protect the public: by forcing their way into an 82-year-old black woman’s apartment, and then grabbing a taser and serving and protecting the hell out her.

As shocking as it is that a Chicago Police officer Tasered an 82-year-old grandmother during a wellness check, it’s even more disheartening that so many of our readers believe the police action was appropriate.

By late Tuesday, 7,967 people had responded to the Chicago Sun-Times Web site poll question:

Should cops have Tasered an 82-year-old?

Sixty-three percent responded no.

But 37 percent, or 2,940 people voted yes — Lillian Fletcher, the elderly and mentally-ill grandmother who was Tasered by police who burst into her home, should have been Tasered because she was wielding a hammer.

That’s scary.

Mind you, Fletcher had not broken any laws, police were not executing a search warrant, and the elderly woman had not been threatening neighbors with the hammer. In fact, she didn’t grab the hammer until officers forced their way into her garden apartment.

After the Tasering, Fletcher, who suffers from dementia and schizophrenia, was hospitalized for five days and may have to undergo surgery for fluid on the brain.

Instead of condemning the police action, many of the people who shot me an e-mail blamed the elderly woman’s family for the fiasco.

What about the family that left their mother home alone knowing she had all these issues, said Dave M. Put the blame where it really belongs: on the family. Why don’t you stop by and visit good old granny and when she starts swinging a hammer at you just take your beating and give her a hug.

Well, Dave M., I did visit Fletcher at her home on Monday night, and she didn’t pull out a hammer. You know why? I didn’t push my way into her home. I rang the doorbell. When she ushered me into her kitchen and invited me to sit, I sat. And when our chat was over, I put on my coat, said Good night and made sure she locked her door behind me.

In other words, I respected her space — something police didn’t do.

As for her family, they aren’t the triflin’ people some of you are depicting. In fact, if anyone is to blame for what’s happened, it would be the city’s Department of Aging.

Fletcher, who can be belligerent, told a caseworker to go away. But instead of leaving, the worker called the police, and officers treated Fletcher like she was a criminal.

— Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times (2007-11-07): Cops wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer

So Ms. Fletcher decides that she doesn’t want a nosy social worker in her apartment and tells her to go away. Said professional busybody calls the cops on her so that they can force their way into her apartment against her will. When these armed strangers come breaking through the door, she naturally tells them to get out and tries to protect herself. So they knock her down with an immobilizing and painful electric shock. and hurt her so badly that she has to spend five days in the hospital. Normally, if armed strangers went busting into an apartment against the tenant’s will and then protected themselves by tasering their outraged victim, it would be called breaking and entering and assault and battery. But because the armed strangers are cops, and because their victim could safely be dismissed by the powers that be as old and black and crazy, this is called a wellness check. Apparently, it was necessary to taser the old woman in order to save her.

Since this story first hit the Chicago media, Mayor Daley feels embarassed, but won’t say anything bad about the cops who did it. He assures us that The Matter Will Be Investigated. Meanwhile, Alderman Isaac Carothers, the chair of the city council committee dealing with police matters, has this to add:

It’s very unfortunate that it had to result to that, but I certainly understand. I’m pleased that they decided not to shoot her and they decided not to tackle her and that they didn’t use the night stick, which may have been options if someone is swinging a hammer at you.

–Quoted by Fran Spielman, Chicago Sun-Times (2007-11-08): Tasering grandma displeases Daley — But he avoids criticizing cops

Well, yes, at least the pigs didn’t shoot her while they were at it. That’s mighty white of them.

It remains to be seen what, if anything, will happen to these cops. The Fraternal Order of Pigs, as usual, has their back. There’s an investigation going on by the so-called Office for Professional Standards. But somehow I wouldn’t be surprised if not a damn thing comes of it.

Which is precisely what happened in another case over in Pittsburgh, where a black 29-year-old man was tasered while he slept in his own home. He got in late and forgot to disarm a security device on the house, which issued a silent alarm to the police department. The cops showed up, found him asleep on the couch, surrounded him, jabbed a taser into his back, and shocked him while he was still asleep.

I felt a lot of voltage going through my body, Mr. Hicks said recalling the events of that late July weekend. That’s what woke me up.

Jumping to his feet, Mr. Hicks was aware of an intense sensation between the shoulder blades of his 150-pound body. It didn’t stop there. His whole body felt as if it were on fire.

When his eyes finally adjusted to the light, his heart skipped yet another beat. Two North Braddock police officers, Gerard Kraly and Lukas Laeuricia, were standing in his living room. To this day, Mr. Hicks still doesn’t know which is Kraly and which Laeuricia.

The shorter of the two officers did most of the talking. His mustached partner was a burly over-6-footer in his late 30s or early 40s. He held the Taser, the prongs of which were sticking in Mr. Hicks’ back.

The polite family newspaper version of what Mr. Hicks said in response to being electrified translates roughly as What’s going on here?

The shorter cop, whom Mr. Hicks remembers as blond, asked him to calm down.

The officer said that North Braddock police received a call from the security company monitoring Mr. Hicks’ home. They believed a break-in was in progress.

The cops had entered the home, turned on the light and found Mr. Hicks asleep on the sofa. If they identified themselves or ordered him to get up, Mr. Hicks said he did not hear it. He said he wasn’t aware of their presence until he was shot in the back with a Taser.

According to Mr. Hicks, the cops were skeptical. How do we know that you’re who you say you are? the shorter of the two cops asked.

At that point, the cop holding the Taser squeezed the trigger, sending Mr. Hicks into paroxysm of agony. It was not a short jolt like the first one he received. He fell to the floor. His screams woke the neighbors.

What do you want? Mr. Hicks asked. Please stop [shooting] me. The shorter cop helped him to his feet. Swaying unsteadily, he offered to show them his identification. They searched him and found his wallet. After inspecting it, they threw the wallet on the coffee table.

I told you I lived here and that I’m the legal resident, he shouted, believing he finally had justice, common decency and the angels of heaven on his side. A staff member at the African-American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania, Mr. Hicks counts himself on the side of the law-abiding citizen.

The cop with the Taser squeezed the trigger again, anyway. Mr. Hicks flapped his arms wildly, but didn’t fall. All he could do was scream loud enough to be heard all over the Mon Valley.

After removing the pellets from his bloody back, the cops handcuffed Mr. Hicks and led him out his front door to a police van. They did not read him his rights, Mr. Hicks says. The back of his shirt was soaked with warm, sticky blood.

Meanwhile, cops from six neighboring boroughs searched the house for other burglars.

Mr. Hicks’ mother, Arlene, arrived just as her son was being escorted out the door. She had Mr. Hicks’ 11-year-old daughter and a niece in tow. Why are you arresting my son? she asked. The taller of the two cops answered that he didn’t have to tell her anything.

When Mrs. Hicks persisted, he said her son was being arrested for being belligerent.

In the van, Mr. Hicks said he told the cops he needed medical attention. He says they told him he would wind up in county lockup if he insisted on it. Never mind, Mr. Hicks said.

Mr. Hicks sat in a holding cell until 5 a.m. The cops returned. We’re not filing charges, they told him. You’re free to go, but if you get into trouble in the next year, we will file charges.

Mr. Hicks staggered into the parking lot and began walking the 10 minutes to the Braddock hospital, refusing another officer’s offer of a ride home. He was examined and released that morning. Mr. Hicks filed a detailed police complaint the following Monday, but the case didn’t come to public attention until the New Pittsburgh Courier’s front-page story last week.

— Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2007-09-11): Tasered at his own home: the Shawn Hicks story

So once again, a gang of armed strangers break into a house in the name of protecting the people living in it from a suspected burglar. They taser first and ask questions later. They blast a completely innocent man — one of the people who they were supposedly showing up to protect — with a painful shock electricity while he is sleeping. While outnumbered, physically overmatched, and with a taser still jabbed in his back, he gets a bit upset, demands to know what is going on, and explains that he lives in the house they are supposedly protecting; they call him a liar and shock him again. After they find his wallet and confirm that he is, in fact, a legal occupant, they shock him again, arrest him for getting uppity, refuse him medical attention, and then give him a sanctimonious lecture not to get into any trouble. And because this gang of thugs were uniformed cops, and because the man they were protecting the hell out of could be dismissed as black and belligerent, precisely nothing has happened. There was no investigation at all until the media publicized the story months later. Last week the local D.A. announced that no charges would be filed against Gerard Kraly or Lukas Laeuricia. Another bunch of area cops Investigated the Matter and decided that there was no criminal matter to be pursued.

Shawn Hicks is planning to file a civil suit over the abuse. I hope that he sues the pigs personally and takes them for everything they’ve got. Unfortunately, if a suit is filed, what will probably happen is that the city government will settle the case out of court, then send the bill to a bunch of innocent taxpayers, while the thugs Kraly and Laeuricia will keep on terrorizing innocent people in the name of public safety.

If you’re baffled that cops could get away with these kind of outrages, it may help to remember that in a lot of American cities, there is no such thing as a civil police force anymore. What we have would be better described as thuggish paramilitary units occupying what they regard as hostile territory. Here as elsewhere, they are going to serve and protect us, whether we want them to or not, and if we don’t like it then they’ve got plenty of guns and clubs and cuffs and 50,000 volt human prods in order to make sure we get good and protected anyway.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-12-04: In five words or fewer #2: Michael McHale on the 50-shot police murder of Sean Bell
• GT 2006-05-11: Quidditative essence

There is no free market for healthcare in the United States.

Every aspect of medicine is tightly controlled by the federal government, and shot through with systematic subsidy and intervention. Federal, state, and local governments restrict who can practice medicine. They restrict where and how medicine can be practiced. They throw people in jail or hit them with massive fines for using the wrong label or practicing alternative forms of medicine or safely performing medical procedures which are considered above their government-licensed station. They tightly regulate which drugs can be produced and where you can get them and whether or not you can import them from somewhere else. They do this partly on the excuse that they know better than you and your doctor do what drugs you should be taking, and partly because they are engaged in a deliberate effort to enforce monopoly pricing for new drugs. The federal government created the circumstances that have forced most American workers either to live with no health insurance at all, or else to depend on their bosses for health insurance; the federal government created and actively subsidized HMOs in order to move more medical care over to a rationing (managed care) model; the federal government provides tax-funded subsidies for healthcare to select patients through Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP; some state governments are now moving to force everyone to participate in a captive market for medical insurance, with more tax-funded subsidies to those who cannot afford it. The health insurance market is in turn heavily regulated by the government and wrapped up as tightly as you can imagine in government-imposed red tape, which systematically constrains choices and suppresses competition. The whole damned thing is run by government bureaucrats, government-insulated corporate bureaucrats, and government-anointed experts.

Yet whenever state Leftists and Progressives call for expanding programs such as S-CHIP, or for thoroughgoing nationalization of healthcare, this is what almost invariably happens: they pick out some horrible thing that has happened, or very nearly happened, to somebody under the present state-corporatist system of healthcare, compare it to what would have happened under a more state-socialist system of healthcare, and then say that this proves that getting healthcare through a state-socialist system is better than getting healthcare on the free market. Since we don’t have a free market in healthcare, and the horrible things that happen, or very nearly happen, in the U.S. medical system aren’t happening in a free market, this is simply a red herring.

Thus, I completely agree with Myca at Alas, A Blog when she says that we need radical healthcare reform and that our current system is abso-fucking lutely sadistic and nonsensical. But I don’t know what any of that has to do with the free market. As I said over there:

Myca: If you oppose universal health care and you do not explain clearly by what mechanism you will give medical care to poor people, you will be banned.

Well, I will give medical care to poor people (other than myself) by continuing to do what I already do. I scrape by on about US $13,000 a year and I give about 1/3 of that to groups that provide direct economic and medical aid to other poor people (Direct Relief, abortion funds, Planned Parenthood, battered women’s shelters, rape crisis counselors, etc.). I’m able to give that much partly because I don’t have any children to care for and partly because I have wealthier family members that I know I could ask for help in an emergency. But even without those advantages, I’d be able to give this kind of money more comfortably if it weren’t for the government’s constant draining of my resources through taxes to pay for red tape, corporate welfare and armed thugs. In any case I do think that I, at least, am doing something more to own my beliefs than just waving my hands around. As for explanation and defense:

Myca: I've heard over and over again that our current system is not a free market, and that's cool, but then it's incumbent on the person claiming that a free market would provide healthcare to those without money to show precisely how that would happen, because I don't see it.

OK, but that’s not what’s been argued so far. What keeps happening is a comparison between something horrible that happens, or almost happened, under the U.S. state-corporatist system, and what would happen under some other state-socialist system of healthcare. But comparing the characteristics of one tightly-controlled government-regimented system of healthcare to those of another tightly-controlled government-regimented system of healthcare illuminates very little about how a free market would work, because neither of the options under comparison has very much to do with free markets. If you want to argue that state-socialism is better than state-corporatism, fine, but you should leave the free market out of it. If you want to argue that a free market in healthcare would still have features that make it worse than state-socialist healthcare, that’s fine too, but it requires some further argument that hasn’t yet been given in any detail.

As for the beginnings of an argument that you give in this comment:

Myca: Roughly, because the free market has no mechanism in place to provide health care to people who are unable to pay for it.

I’m not convinced. Because, well, of course it does. The mechanism is the same mechanism that exists in state-corporatist or state-socialist healthcare systems: people who are unable to pay for healthcare themselves can get it by getting other people to pay for part of it or all of it. The question is what means of getting other people to pay for it are available–and whether these means are voluntary or coercive.

Any State-run system of medical care that you happen to like could, in principle, be provided by voluntary mutual aid on a free market. The State has no special ability to make medical care free, or to summon up money from nowhere to pay for it; for the State to cover the medical costs it has to get money, labor, or supplies from somebody else, and whatever the State takes could be given voluntarily. Suppose that you like the way that money is collected and distributed in the French medical system; then on a free market, nobody is going to stop you from creating a nonprofit French Mutual Society for Medicine that uses the same bureaucratic mechanisms to collect, allocate, and pay out money. The only limitation is that, whatever system you cook up, you cannot force people to pay in, and you can’t force people to use your system for their own healthcare costs.

You might claim that unless everybody is forced to pay in, there wouldn’t be enough money to go around. But consider the billions of dollars that are voluntarily pissed away every two years trying to elect a slightly more progressive gang of weak-kneed establishment politicians, and what might happen if those resources were redirected towards direct action rather than electioneering and lobbying. Let alone the amount of money that might go to healing people rather than killing them if individual people, rather than belligerent governments, had control over the dollars currently seized in taxes.

You might instead claim that even if there is enough money to go around, this kind of model puts poor people at the mercy of donors for their healthcare. But I could just as easily respond that using the State to cover healthcare costs puts poor people’s at the mercy of the political process, which certainly offers no guarantees that the least powerful and least connected people in a society are going to get what they need, or even get decent human respect. In either case, people who aren’t very powerful need to organize and struggle to protect their interests from people who are more powerful than they are. The question, again, is what means of struggle are (1) morally preferable, and (2) strategically effective.

I don’t think it’s crazy to see voluntary, bottom-up mutual aid as both morally and strategically preferable to top-down political regimentation. Voluntary mutual aid may not actually produce a healthcare system that looks much like the nationalized healthcare systems common in western social democracies, but I think that the differences would largely be for the better: less bureaucracy, more alternatives, and more control in the hands of the patients themselves. Unlike the corporatist system in place today, medical costs would be drastically lower, thanks to the removal of the government-created monopolies and cartels that currently control every aspect of the insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. And unlike the corporatist system in place today, medical costs might be covered not only by charities or churches or bosses (gag), but also through grassroots associations such as mutual aid societies and labor unions. (There is some actual history here; lodge practice medical arrangements in the U.S., U.K., and Australia used to provide healthcare to working-class folks at a rate of about one day’s wages for one year of healthcare, before the growing trend was halted and obliterated by the politically-connected medical establishment, with the backing of the State.)

Hope this helps.

I’d also like to add that, in principle, I actually reject the claim that it's incumbent on the person claiming that a free market would provide healthcare to those without money to show precisely how that would happen, because I don't see it. I’ve said something about details here because I know something about the issue that might be illuminating, but generally speaking, part of the point of advocating a free market across the board is that in a free society you do not need to be an expert in everything. No individual person and no committee of people needs to plan out precisely how any social system will work–which is a good thing, because nobody has comprehensive knowledge and organizational skill and entrepreneurial creativity in every field of human endeavor. Advocating free markets for shoes or bread does not make it incumbent on you to spell out all the details of how enough of these will go around to keep people from going around shoeless or from starving in the streets, because that is really a matter that can be left up to the cobbler and the shoe-wearer, or to the baker and the eater–who can be expected to know a lot more than some policy wonk about how to handle their own business and meet their own needs.

Further reading:

• Roderick Long, Formulations (Winter 1993): How Government Solved the Healthcare Crisis
• Sheldon Richman, FFF Commentaries (August 2001): A Stupid Way to Get Health Insurance
• GT 2006-04-13: How physicians learned to stop worrying and love big pharma
• GT 2005-10-20: Patents kill, part II
• GT 2004-04-26: Patents kill
• GT 2007-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #34
• GT 2006-04-10: Bureaucratic rationality #4: State Ownership of the Means of Reproduction edition
• GT 2006-01-28: Bureaucratic rationality #3: Indecent Exposure edition
• GT 2004-11-22: For your own safety
• GT 2003-12-31: EC OTC in OZ

Governments — local, state, and federal — spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the plight of the urban poor. It’s never hard to find some know-it-all with a suit and a nameplate on his desk who has come up with a government program that will eliminate, or ameliorate, or at least contain, the worst aspects of grinding poverty, especially as experienced by city folks, and especially as experienced by black people, brown people, immigrants, or other people marked for the special observation and solicitude of the State bureaucracy. Depending on the frame of mind, these programs may be more aimed at doling out conditional charity to deserving poor people, or they may be more aimed at bringing more at-risk poor people under the surveillance of social workers and medical experts, or they may be more aimed at beating recalcitrant poor people up and locking them in cages. (Most programs involve a combination of at least two, and possibly all three.) But one thing that they will never, ever do is just get the fuck out of the way and let poor people do the sort of things that poor people have done from time out of mind to help themselves scratch by.

There are too many ways to list them all here. But one notable example is the way in which city governments constrain and control taxi cabs. In principle, anyone who needed to make some extra money could start a part-time cab service with a car they already have, a cell phone, and some word of mouth. That’s good money for honest labor providing a useful service to willing customers, all under the direction and control of a single independent worker, who can put as much or as little into it as she wants to in order to make the money she needs. And so what do the statesman in city governments do? They create tightly regulated, tightly restricted cartels on taxi service, impose arbitrary numerical limits and financial barriers to entering the cartel, and hit anyone they catch operating outside of the cartel with exorbitant fines or jail time.

One of the worst offenders is New York City, in which all taxi service are regulated by a central city commission, and the city enforces an arbitrary cap on the number of taxi cabs that can pick up passengers off the street. The licenses (medallions) for serving willing customers without John Law punching your head are closely controlled by the city government; a handful of new ones are occasionally auctioned off by the city, and existing ones can be bought and sold by existing license holders — usually at a cost measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lots of poor people have a car laying around that they could use; not a lot have a few hundred thousand dollars.

Just in case those expenses and legal barriers to entry weren’t enough, I find that Mayor Bloomberg has decided that your taxi needs high-cost high-tech GPS and payment systems — whether or not you, as a driver, wants to lay out the time, money, and lost work to install and maintain it, and whether or not you, as a rider, want to pay the fares needed to cover the expense. Why would they need that? Well, hell, why not? Bloomberg knows what you need or want to pay for better than you do, anyway.

Right after Labor Day, a slew of New York City taxi drivers protested plans to roll out credit- and debit-card payment systems in the back seats of all 13,000 medallion cabs.

They feared they would lose money on tips if passengers didn’t pay in cash.

But proponents, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, outnumbered the protesters.

Supporters say the ongoing program will better serve customers and actually help bring in more money for cabbies.

— Investor’s Business Daily (2007-09-06): Wireless, Cashless Payments Come To The World Of Taxi Drivers

So, thanks to the supporters, the cabbies will be treated like imbeciles who do not know how to conduct their own business, and also like conscripts who do not have any say in the conditions of their own labor. Well, in any case, somebody is sure to get a sweet deal:

It certainly will help bring in more revenue for San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone Holdings (NYSE:PAY) PAY. The company is a leading maker of point-of-sale terminals and wireless systems.

VeriFone — in partnership with MasterCard’s MA PayPass — was the first firm approved to provide the wireless systems in New York’s cabs. The systems make use of an ATM-style interface to accept credit and debit fare payments.

The company’s back-seat screen monitors also deliver news, weather and tidbits on restaurants, night life, hotels and other attractions. An extra bonus: Like billboards, they bring in revenue-generating ad money.

Every year, we find a free ride on a new segment of the economy that is going electronic, said Doug Bergeron, VeriFone’s chief executive.

— Investor’s Business Daily (2007-09-06): Wireless, Cashless Payments Come To The World Of Taxi Drivers

In this case, it is a free ride indeed. Who needs to actually go out and sell a product when you can get government cartels to force clients to come to you?

I wish the independent cab drivers well. If Bloomberg shoves this corporate welfare screwjob through, I would encourage them all to go on a permanent strike from officially-licensed cab driving. New York City already boasts a vibrant and growing fleet of gypsy cabs, and an influx of new labor and resources into the counter-economy would be something to welcome.

(Link thanks to Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-09-07: Unto Him Who Hath.)

Further reading:

• Fair Use Blog 2007-09-03: The history of the Black Metropolis, the inner city, and the underground economy in Southside Chicago (from Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books)
• GT 2007-05-29: Bentham quote for the day
• GT 2007-05-15: Cocaine sí ¿c?@c3;b3;mo no?
• GT 2007-01-13: The tall poppies, part 2: food, drugs, and female sexual slavery in Afghanistan
• GT 2006-06-14: Enclosure comes to Los Angeles
• GT 2004-11-20: The tall poppies
• GT 2002-05-19: Government and the pink-collar ghetto
• GT 2001-09-03: Barriers to independent farmers