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English Premier League soccer star John Terry has been accused of making racially abusive statements toward an opponent.
If he did it, (it is my understanding that there is audio or other “smoking gun” evidence), he needs our ostracism. He needs to be fined by the league. He needs to be suspended from playing games. He needs to lose endorsements. He needs to lose friends. He needs to lose respect.
He does not need to face criminal prosecution. But, indeed, he does. British prosecutors have charged Terry with a “racially aggravated public order offense.” Translating the Orwellian Newspeak into English, he has been criminally charged with name-calling.
I am thankful the First Amendment protects Americans from such criminal prosecution (at least for now). The British prosecution, however, is symptomatic of a pervasive belief in this country that all problems must be addressed by the government. Name-calling, especially of the most vile kind, must be condemned. It does not follow that it must be criminalized.
Prosecution for name-calling, no matter how vile, is a dangerous precedent. Where does it end?
==== postscript:
Here is the pertinent language of the statute at issue:
Harassment, alarm or distress.
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.
Public Order Act of 1986, Chapter 64
Thus, “a person is guilty … if he….. uses … insulting words… within the hearing …. of a person likely to be caused …. distress therby.”
Can you imagine trying to enforce such a statute at a Yankees’ game? Or a political convention?
I have seen several statist journalists criticize Texas governor and GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry for referring to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” in his book “Fed Up!”
There are many things for which to criticize Perry, but the Ponzi scheme comment is not among them. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. That this is an unusual notion to those that worship at the altar of the New Deal demonstrates the statist commitment to faith in government over actual facts about government. This faith in government rivals that of Billy Graham’s faith in Jesus, but without a virgin birth.
Make no mistake, the Cult of the New Deal is comprised of Republicans and Democrats, “conservatives” and “progressives.” For example, none of the current GOP field of presidential contenders has any intent on ending this fraud. That would make them apostates, and unelectable. And if you are unelectable, you can not get a prime sucking location at the head table at the Banquet of the Holy Government Teat
Apparently, if the prophet FDR said there was a trust fund, then by God there is a trust fund! But, unfortunately, there is not. FDR makes Bernie Madoff look like a penny ante amateur. And just like the victims of Madoff’s fraud, lots of people are going to lose lots of money. FDR’s fraud, however, affects far more than those personally duped by his lies. It affects everyone in the country, and will for generations.
Perhaps the most devout members of the Cult of the New Deal can be persuaded by the words of their deity, the benevolent federal government. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (just one of thousands of federal tentacles attached to the Vishnu of the State) a Ponzi scheme is
an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in opportunities claimed to generate high returns with little or no risk. In many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters focus on attracting new money to make promised payments to earlier-stage investors and to use for personal expenses, instead of engaging in any legitimate investment activity.
Social Security takes money from those currently working to pay off those no longer working. One would be hard pressed to come up with a better example of a Ponzi scheme. Except, of course, what the benevolent federal deity does is worse. A mere mortal charlatan must convince those with money to voluntarily part with it. The benevolent deity need not concern itself with such a pedestrian task. It simply takes the money from the victim before the victim ever gets to see it.
Reject the Church of the State. Reject fraudulent Ponzi schemes perpetuated in the name of benevolence. Reject the false prophets that preach only the State can provide bounty for its parishioners. Reject the fantasy.
Embrace freedom. Embrace reality. Freedom is dangerous and reality is scary, but pretending we live in a land where fraud is benevolence is fantasy.
Let me try to summarize, for my statist friends, why government “solutions” are immoral: The government can not accomplish any goal, no matter how well intentioned, without using force to make people act in a way they would otherwise not act.
Even if you completely disagree with libertarian thought, I hope you can at least understand from where we are coming. We are not heartless bastards that want to put grandma on the street. We understand that taking care of grandma is our job as feeling and caring individuals, not the job of a faceless, unfeeling and uncaring agent of the state – a bureaucrat.
The “good” of the collective, by necessity, always makes the interest of the individual subservient to that of the collective. When the individual is subservient to the collective, individuals are sacrificed when they disagree with the collective.
From Stalin’s Soviet Union, to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, to Mao’s China to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy – when the state is more important than individuals, individuals are killed. Always.
I am not comparing the United States with any of these regimes. I am pointing out the extremes so that we may stay as far away from the statist model as possible. For over a century, we have been moving closer to statism and farther away from liberty.
And that is a cause for concern.
Nuclear power is not acceptable to the Al Gore Cult of Global Warming because it does not require state control of individuals and their energy use. A Facebook user (and where else can one get good political discussions going short of a freshman government class?) objected to nuclear power because it merely postpones a problem – storing nuclear waste – even as it solves the man-made global warming fraud problem.
As far as postponing a problem, I thought that if we don’t act IMMEDIATELY on global warming, the ice caps will melt, polar bears will drown, New York, Houston and San Diego will be all be underwater in a matter of years and the oceans will nigh on boil. (You know, the standard, run-of-the-mill hysterical fear-mongering used whenever a group wants control over something).*
Doesn’t it make sense to push an old lady out from the way of a bus and deal with her broken hip later? Yes, if saving the lady is what you are really concerned about. Likewise, if Al Gore Cultists are really concerned about boiling oceans, they should be out with hammers building their own private nuclear reactors in their backyards. They can deal with the waste later. They aren’t building nuclear reactors, of course, because boiling oceans are mere pretext for government control.
We have cost-effective nuclear technology. (Insert gratuitous French joke here ‘”Hell, even the French can do it!”). We do not have cost-effective “alternative” technology like solar and wind. The fear-mongering cultists solve this problem by taking massive amounts of borrowed money and giving it away like political party favors. They have a euphemism for this transfer of wealth to their friends: they call it “investment.”
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and far more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2. Spending billions of dollars to curtail CO2 emissions – even if well intentioned – on the equivalent of spit in the ocean is not good policy.
Mars is also warming – I’m pretty sure our factories and SUV’s aren’t contributing to it.
If Al Gore were around during the last Ice Age, I’m sure he would have blamed that on humans, as well. * Conservatives use the same hysterical fear-mongering tactic when it comes to the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. But that’s a different topic.
Senator Claire McCaskill, (D-MO), in discussing her opposition to extending tax cuts, says the GOP is just “going to pout if we don’t give more money to millionaires.” (See the New York Times article “Tax-Cut Debate turns to Millionaires.“)
This is the perfect example of how “progressive” statists have the world backwards. She has confused letting people KEEP their own money with the government GIVING them money. Her basic belief, therefore, is that the government owns all productivity, and only allows people to keep it out of the government’s benevolence.
Ergo, in her world, allowing people to keep what they have earned is the same thing as a government gift.
(I know, I know: to the “progressive” statist, rich people haven’t “earned” anything. They have exploited the labor of others or they have simply stolen wealth from the proletariat. Therefore, the benevolent hand of government is necessary to correct the injustice. That is a different discussion for a different day. I merely suggest that F.A. Hayek addresses that contention and soundly shows its error in his book “ The Road to Serfdom.”)
Today’s dose of statism:
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, which I believe loosely translates to “City Council,” has banned McDonald’s from giving away toys with Happy Meals within the city.
They are not happy that parents are able to make decisions regarding their children’s diet and whether or not promotional items can be part of that decision. Therefore, they have mandated that parents can no longer make such a decision.
And who knows better than what your kid should eat than city leadership?
Freedom is dangerous, my friends. And that danger is what the state always uses as an excuse to take it away from you. The state treats its subjects like children with a pair of scissors – if we let them take away our scissors, we ARE children, subject to the whims of our parent – the state.
(”Oh, no! Dave, gays can’t have the freedom to love another! That’s TOO dangerous! Oh, no, Dave, grandmas that want marijuana to help keep their chemo down can’t have any marijuana! That’s TOO dangerous!”)
The Denver Post ran a front page article proclaiming “Ways to buoy the economy run thin.”
The article is not labeled “commentary,” “analysis,” or some similar designation. It should be. The basic premise of the author, Tom Raum, is that the government has done almost everything it can to “fix” the economy, but that partisan politics is blocking further government action.
It is a typical problem of the statists: when government intervention fails, they insist it is because they didn’t intervene ENOUGH. If one buys the premise, it is a win-win situation for the government. The more the government fails, the more power it needs. It is a black hole of failure.
Government interventionists, like Raum, think that continuously picking at the scab will help it heal. People that understand economics realize it is best to leave the damn thing alone and it will heal itself.
Statists have an incredibly poor view of mankind. They believe that the government must control the people from their basest instincts. They believe that if left to their own devices, they will rob, steal, rape and murder. They believe people must be controlled.
They fear freedom.
Jill Moring, of Pueblo West, demonstrates this belief in her letter to the editor of the Denver Post today.
The Colorado State University Board of Governors is now allowing guns on campus. I would not want to be the faculty member who has to tell the student with a gun in his backpack, “No, there is no way you can pass this course, and no, you will not graduate this year.”
Wow. Ms. Moring believes that people are so base, so mean, so nasty and so brutish, that a college student would shoot her professor for bad grades.
It is no wonder statists fear freedom. They believe people are evil and must be controlled.
Denver Post columnist Susan Greene is one of my favorite progressives. Her columns are uniformly thoughtful, even when I disagree with one of her statist positions.
In her column today, “ Apathy adds insult to injury,” she calls out the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) for its, well, let’s just call it ineffectiveness. (A blogger less polite than me might have used the word incompetence.) Greene describes how the state agency has “stonewalled” a legitimate complaint, “failed miserably to offer any recourse” and mocks DORA’s claim that “consumer protection is [its] mission.”
I can not see this as anything but a complete intellectual disconnect of a very smart person between (1) the recognition of the ineffectiveness of government programs and (2) the desire for more government programs.
Statists of every strip – “progressive” to “conservative” – regularly display this disconnect.
Greene demonstrates a “progressive” example. Some “conservatives,” however, regularly lambaste the government for its ineffectiveness when it comes to social programs, then jump into the government’s lap when it comes to issues like the Patriot Act, expanding police power to search citizens, warrantless wiretapping and the regulation of private consensual acts of adults.
Classical liberals (modern libertarians) understand that the state should have less power over the individual and not more – in every single solitary instance.
Classical liberals understand that individuals are imperfect – but that the state forces imperfection upon them.
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