Hi Folks! Lenore here from Free-Range Kids and yes, that headline is the REAL TITLE of a column by some hack in The Telegraph who was sick of the “no males allowed to sit next to unaccompanied minors” deal, back in 2006, on British Airways.

Oh wait a sec — that hack is Boris Johnson, NOW THE MAYOR OF LONDON!

He was asked to move his seat because he was next to two kids — his own! Once the stewardess realized her error,  he was allowed to stay. But the feeling of being presumed a perv occasioned this column.

Can you imagine someone getting elected HERE who dared to say enough with this overblown  fear for our kids? Can you imagine your OWN mayor writing:

To all those who worry about the paedophile plague, I would say that they not only have a very imperfect understanding of probability; but also that they fail to understand the terrible damage that is done by this system of presuming guilt in the entire male population just because of the tendencies of a tiny minority.

There are all sorts of reasons why the numbers of male school teachers are down 50 per cent in the period 1981 to 2001, and why the ratio of female to male teachers in primary schools is now seven to one. There are problems of pay, and the catastrophic failure of the state to ensure that they are treated as figures of authority and respect; and what with ‘elf ‘n’ safety and human rights it is very hard to enforce discipline.

But it is also, surely, a huge deterrent to any public-spirited man contemplating a career in education that society apparently regards all adult male contact with young people as being potentially a bit dodgy, a bit rum, a bit you know…

It is a total disaster.

Wow! Boris! And the Olympics, too. You rock! – Lenore (from Free-Range Kids)

Hi folks! Lenore from Free-Range Kids here, with a heartening story: A 10 year old British boy, rowing around in his dinghy, rescued two canoeists who’d been in the water for 45 minutes. (Sad to say, one of them was a “canoe instructor.” Maybe the other one might want to ask for a refund?) Anyway, all the boy had with him was 4 feet of rope, which he used to tow the two the half mile. They couldn’t climb in the dinghy because they realized they might capsize it. (Score one for the canoe instructor!)

Contrast this boy’s actions, with what some laws and bureaucrats believe a child his age is incapable of. Let’s see, there’s the story of a  mom arrested for letting her kids, 11 and 7, walk to the local pizza shop. So I guess the dinghy boy shouldn’t have been on his own for another couple of years, at least. (Sorry, drowners.) And there was this school, where the principal  suddenly prohibited 5th graders from going to the village green after school, unsupervised, as they’d done for decades. (Media attention and general outrage reversed this.)  Then there was the Aussie mom chided by police for letting her 10-year-old daughter catch a bus, solo. How dare she let her kid be competent! And here in America, any 10-year-old, hero or no, is  no longer allowed to ride Amtrak without an adult by his side. Thirteen is the age kids can travel as “unaccompanied minors.”

And yet, somehow the boy was perfectly fine, alone on the water, saving two adults’ lives.

Hmmm.  - L.

If any Agitator fans want to join, I’ll be speaking to Denver’s Liberty on the Rocks this Wednesday about asset forfeiture. Join us at 6pm-ish and I begin speaking at 7:15. Here is the facebook event. Many thanks to the excellent Amanda Muell, who organizes LOTR. I’ll try to livestream or record it in some fashion.

Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform

Hi Folks — It’s Lenore from Free-Range Kids, where I get letters like this one with shocking regularity (check my blog and you’ll see a new one there right now!).  CPS must do some good. I’m sure it has saved a lot of kids in danger. But it also has a lot of power, which sometimes it uses to threaten, or even destroy families. Parents who are confident in their kids, their community and their own parenting often allow their children to have some independence. They even — if you can believe this — allow them to play outside! For this, they are sometimes (too often!) hounded. – L.

Dear Lenore: A neighbor of mine called the Texas CPS (Child Protective Services) and the Police on my wife and I because we allow our children, ages 6 and 8, to play in the courtyard directly in front of our apartment. CPS has been investigating my family since April 4th 2012, it is now August 12 2012, and all they have come up with is the one report to Police about my 6-year-old being outside in front of his home. Now we are dealing with the courts in a “Negligent Supervision” case, which makes absolutely no sense because my child wasn’t hurt or asking anyone for help. I was outside with my son when the Police arrived, but the CPS caseworker insists that I take drug tests and parenting classes. People are not neighbors anymore, they are just @$$holes. – A Texas Dad

The Nashville benefit for musician Chris Tapp, the guitarist and singer for the Cold Stares, is this Thursday night.

We have a great lineup of artists, including Matthew Perryman Jones, Thad Cockrell, Erin McCarley, Jeremy Lister , Emily West, Mark Huff, Betsy Ulmer, Jason Eskridge, Jill Andrews, and Maile Misajon. There may also be a couple surprises.

If you live in or around Nashville, the show will be at 3rd & Lindsley, this Thursday night at 8pm.

As I mentioned, Tapp is very talented blues/rock/roots musician who was recently diagnosed with melanoma. He’s currently undergoing an intense, year-long treatment of radiation and chemotherapy. We’re hoping to help him, his wife, and their two kids out with their finances and medical bills so he can focus on getting treated, getting better, and getting back to making great music.

If you’d like to donate to help out, send a check to:

The Chris Tapp Fund
c/o Brian Mullins
Old National Bank
P.O. Box 718
Evansville, IN 47705-0718

If you send $25 or more, they’ll send you a signed copy of the band’s new CD. But send that check here:

Chris Tapp Fund
c/o Brian Mullins
P.O. Box 2566
Evansville, IN 47728

More background on all of this here. My Huffington Post profile of the Cold Stares here.

Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform

This article titled “The Slow Motion Coup: Militarization and the Implications of Eisenhower’s Prescience” is certainly one of the most important articles I’ve read all year; the author is William J. Olsen, Chairman of the Department of Strategic Studies at the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University:

President Eisenhower made these observations on the eve of leaving office in 1961.  Close on fifty years ago he warned of the dangers to America—heart, body, and soul—of a threat from the militarization of US social, economic, and political life.  Little heeded, the concern he raised then has had two generations to work its work ever more surely than he foresaw.  The consequence today is the militarization of our foreign policy and the dominance of the military in planning and implementing broad areas of domestic policy as well.  It is, in effect, a slow motion coup in which increasingly military officers and military counsel dominates strategic thinking and significant parts of the political agenda, in a reversal of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is an extension of politics.  Unlike most military coup d’etat, however, this is not the result of a small cabal of military officers plotting, ala Seven Days in May, to seize the government in a bold, overnight military take over.  Instead, it has been years in the making and is the result of contributions from a broad spectrum of politicians, businessmen, think tanks and lobbyists, a complacent public, and the military responding to real and genuine threats to national survival for over 70 years.  This is not a story, yet, of sinister conspirators.  The question is, is there any way to undo what is done and walk back from a situation that so concerned Eisenhower for the fate of the country he served so long and so well.

The rest of the article is hard to excerpt, but:

There is no shortage of advice, but advice will not help in this situation…

Take just one simple question: Does the United States need a military establishment as large as it now has?  Two simple answers: yes, which is the default position that will be pushed by those with a stake—and they are legion—in the answer; and no, which is the subject matter for an intense and excruciating soul searching that goes all the way down leaving nothing untouched.  But, on what criteria would an answer be based?  Interest in the outcome or concern by itself are not adequate.  And how does one establish any sort of consensus on the necessary criteria?  Or establish convincingly that any analysis arriving at the criteria is not self-interested, biased, or partisan?  And who is the best source to bring such an issue to the table?  There is no shortage of opinion.  But where does wisdom lie?  And how to know it?  It is a simple question.  There are no easy answers.  To ask it is only the beginning.

To take one example.  If ‘small wars’ are the most likely circumstance for the future of conflict, these, of necessity, require ‘small’ responses.  Not just an appropriate force structure but a support establishment short of the scale and scope of the current Department of Defense with all its rococo embellishments.  There is a need for specialized, scaled components specific to the need and not large, general purpose forces.  But if this is the case, then promotion opportunities, justifications for large, regular military formations and the resources necessary are likely to follow the requirements of a much reduced overall force structure.  The system as outlined above, however, is not only not geared to such a need but is designed to resist any effort to reduce the current establishment or to accept missions that suggest such a course.  This is one reason why China is increasingly seen as a military threat.  It putatively offers a threat of a ‘regular’ sort on a scale to justify a large force structure, which, according to the argument, is then more than capable of dealing with ‘lesser’ threats.  Whether this is strategically valid is less a consideration.  And the shift is itself not part of a politically considered strategy but a process driven by the military and its imperatives that now drives the process.

The current military establishment rejects the logic of small responses expect as ‘other duties as assigned’.  Such a mentality, which pervades military leadership, leads to an insistence on wars that will employ large, regular forces or turning lesser circumstances into those wars it is equipped to fight, creating a capability-requirement mismatch.  Thus, for example, although the United States was engaged in Iraq for almost ten years, the military that the US took to war was only trained and equipped for the first eight weeks of the ten years.

Or another simple question: Why do we have Combatant Commanders?  This is a model drawn from WWII, made formal and deeply rooted as the result of the Cold War.  Both are over.  Why does the establishment linger?  And if we are to have a pro-consul per region, why a military officer?  Why not a senior civilian with a military adviser?

Despite the comment above on commissions, there is one commissioner that needs to engage to follow up on the dialogue that President Eisenhower began.  To echo Cohen’s argument, that commissioner is the President, now and all his colleagues as former presidents.  The immediate demands of the office generally overwhelm the ability of presidents to deal in grand issues, which is one reason why Eisenhower made his observations at the end of his tenure.  It needs to begin the tenure and sustain itself through successive presidents, regardless of party.  It needs presidents to engage members of Congress in the discussion.  It needs leadership and patience and a serious, sustained dialogue with the public.

Hi Folks : It’s Lenore from Free-Range Kids, already upset by the post below this one – William Anderson’s piece about kids in a  Mississippi town being incarcerated for “crimes” like violating the school dress code, or even flatulence!

Which reminded me of today’s “happy” story in the NY Post about a young man who’d been given a $100 ticket for riding his unicycle on a Brooklyn sidewalk — even though he offered to show the cop a government web site on his iPhone that stated it is NOT a crime. The cop didn’t care. Worse — when he got to court, at first the judge refused to listen to him.

[Judge] Delury also warned him not to ride his bicycle on the sidewalk again “or I’ll put you in Rikers.”

Isn’t that a little FLIP? A high school student rides a unicycle on the sidewalk (incidentally NOT breaking the law) and the next thing you know a judge is threatening to send him to JAIL?

Eventually the judge backed down — but only after the kid had the guts to request a second appearance in front of him to ask for a jury trial. By then the judge had finally DEIGNED to read the ACTUAL LAW. He then declared the issue “dismissed.”

What a lucky break! The kid is not going to do hard time for not breaking a law! – L

Hi Folks! I’ts Lenore from Free- Range Kids, where “flying while male” is not a new issue to us (see this post)  just a new airline: Virgin, in Australia. In today’s story, a man named Johnny McGirr, 33, was seated next to two unaccompanied minors — boys, about ages 8 and 10. He was supposed to sit next to the window, but switched to the aisle to let the boys look out, because he’s a nice guy.

That, however, is not how the airline saw him. When the stewardess came by she saw only that he was — accckkkk! — a MALE, and she made him move. The reason? Company policy: A woman can sit next to unaccompanied children, but not a man.

The fellow — a fireman — spent the rest of the trip embarrassed and angry. Eventually, he blogged about it, pointing out quite rightly that the assumption seems to be that every male is at least a  potential pedophile, even in public, on a plane, with people going up and down the aisles. This is what I call “Worst-First Thinking” — thinking up the very WORST case scenario and proceeding as if it is FIRST on the list of likely possibilities.  The airline excused itself by saying, “Most guests thoroughly understand that the welfare of the child is our priority.” As if it’s only a deviant who’d question this practice.

But the airline is wrong. Many people do NOT understand this panicked prejudice anymore. The buzz in Australia is that there is now a “public backlash” that has Virgin (and Qantas, and Jetstar and Air Newland) re-thinking its men-must-move policy.

Let’s hope they get it right this time, as British Airways finally did. Making people sit in a certain place because of  their DNA is something Rosa Parks fought a long time ago.  - L.

Look! Up in the air! It’s predator panic!

For those of you on Twitter, you should follow Americans for Forfeiture Reform at @ForfeitureAbuse.

Also, I’m working on a series of posts about particular forfeiture cases for next week; if you have a particular request or question you’d like me to cover please leave a note in the comments or email Eapen@ForfeitureReform.com

And we are still looking for forfeiture victims from Colorado, if anyone has a lead!

Many thanks,

Eapen Thampy

Hi — ‘Tis Lenore from Free-Range Kids again. Here’s one that’ll make you (verrrrrry carefully) bang your head against the table: A dad noticed that the medals a school was giving out as prizes were not made out of fur, or cotton, or silk. They were, in fact, made out of metal, with a point at one end!  According to this article on the website Kent:

The father-of-two said: “What on earth were these idiots thinking, handing out something like that to children? It does make you wonder how in these health-and-safety days, these slipped through the net. The people who organised it obviously didn’t see them like that but they’re so sharp, I just pushed one into a wooden table.

“I can’t believe someone’s allowed these to be given out.”

The technician, who is in his late 50s, spotted a friend’s ten-year-old son wearing one of the bronze medals last week and immediately confiscated it.

He said: “He was proudly wearing it round his neck and I thought, ‘My God, he’s going to stab himself with that.’

Let’s hope no one ever hands any kids he knows a cross or a Star of David! The horror! – L.
​

Folks — It’s Lenore Skenazy from Free-Range Kids again, where we are sick of a world distrusting all men as potential perverts. On my blog I’ve written about a parenting magazine that endorsed not allowing your kid to sleep over at the home where a divorced dad lives with his kids, because without a mom a dad could attack! And I’ve written about day care centers that don’t trust males to change diapers, because men are never to be trusted around bare baby bottoms! But here’s one of the wildest stories yet:  An indoor play space in Birmingham, England has restricted itself to women and children only. Dad cannot bring his kids to play there. Even 3rd grade boys and up are banned. Sorry, little buddy. Get out.

Here’s the piece.

Are we really supposed to not trust any sons, husbands or dads around kids?  Are you cute at age 8 and a predator at age 9 if you’re male? What if a kid has a dad (or two!) and no moms? No can play? — L.

by Jason Kuznicki

This story seemed appropriate in light of this month’s Cato Unbound on mental health’s coercive side:

The night before Susan and Rob allowed their son to go to preschool in a dress, they sent an e-mail to parents of his classmates. Alex, they wrote, “has been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows).” They explained that Alex had recently become inconsolable about his parents’ ban on wearing dresses beyond dress-up time…

Many parents and clinicians now reject corrective therapy, making this the first generation to allow boys to openly play and dress (to varying degrees) in ways previously restricted to girls — to exist in what one psychologist called “that middle space” between traditional boyhood and traditional girlhood. These parents have drawn courage from a burgeoning Internet community of like-minded folk whose sons identify as boys but wear tiaras and tote unicorn backpacks. Even transgender people preserve the traditional binary gender division: born in one and belonging in the other. But the parents of boys in that middle space argue that gender is a spectrum rather than two opposing categories, neither of which any real man or woman precisely fits.

Yes, parents often face a stark choice — either coerce the little ones or stop being parents. Libertarian theories about coercion and rights and such were designed for a community of adults, and they don’t translate so easily into advice about parenting. They weren’t intended to.

But if parental coercion isn’t necessary, then why shouldn’t it be rejected? There are few things less obviously harmful to a child than wearing a dress. I mean, my daughter does it all the time… when she’s not wearing a skirt, or pants.

Anyway, the story’s a long read, but I’d be very interested to discuss it with the other guest bloggers and commenters here.

One of the constant themes in both movies and television shows dealing with crime and the courts is the use of shortcuts by the authorities to nail someone who obviously is guilty. Messy things like due process of law and rights of the accused are so 1787 and have no place in modern society where outcomes are more important than the way one reaches those ends.

The ends can be frightening. The New York Times reports that one of the reasons that more than 94 percent of criminal charges in both state and federal cases end in plea bargains is that prosecutors can hang the prospect of stiff sentences over the heads of anyone who decided to go to trial and is found guilty, a situation that led Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to note that the American criminal justice system has become “a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”

Innocent people often are swept up on that tide of guilty pleas. Regular readers of this blog may understand this is so, but most Americans are incredulous. Why in the world would innocent people agree to plead to something they had not done? Is it not the situation in the USA that if you have done nothing wrong, you don’t have to worry about being charged or convicted?

Unfortunately, one of the things I hear most from people wrongfully accused of crimes has been, “I didn’t know this was happening in America.” Well, it does and much more often than one would think, especially with federal prosecutors, who have weapons at their disposal that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have considered utterly barbaric.

Not only has federal criminal law essentially done away with the bedrock of Anglo-American law, the mens rea requirement, but federal prosecutors can pile charges upon charges, taking the same alleged act and fashioning multiple offenses from it. For that matter, federal prosecutors are not even required to know the laws they supposedly enforce and prosecute and when they are wrong, they pay no price and innocent people remain in prison.

In a shocking article, USA Today recently reported on a horrific situation in North Carolina in which federal prosecutors went after “scores” of innocent people for acts that were perfectly legal. According to the newspaper:

Terrell McCullum did not commit a federal crime by carrying a shotgun and a rifle out of his ex-girlfriend’s house.

But he is serving a federal prison sentence for it. And the fact that everyone — including the U.S. Justice Department— agrees that he is legally innocent might not be enough to set him free.

A USA TODAY investigation, based on court records and interviews with government officials and attorneys, found more than 60 men who went to prison for violating federal gun possession laws, even though courts have since determined that it was not a federal crime for them to have a gun.

Many of them don’t even know they’re innocent.

Lest one think that prosecutors even care about what they have done, think again. While the U.S. Department of “Justice” worked hard to put them into prison (mostly on plea bargains, of course), it refuses to lift a finger to right the wrong:

Still, the Justice Department has not attempted to identify the men, has made no effort to notify them, and, in a few cases in which the men have come forward on their own, has argued in court that they should not be released.

Justice Department officials said it is not their job to notify prisoners that they might be incarcerated for something that they now concede is not a crime. And although they have agreed in court filings that the men are innocent, they said they must still comply with federal laws that put strict limits on when and how people can challenge their convictions in court.

“We can’t be outcome driven,” said Anne Tompkins, the U.S. attorney in Charlotte.

For Tompkins to make that quote is especially rich, because federal prosecutors in the federal Western District of North Carolina for years have been nothing but outcome-driven. After her office secured a counterfeiting conviction against Bernard Von NotHouse, who had minted silver coins, Tompkins announced that NotHouse was a “terrorist” who threatened “the economic stability of this country.” (One is left asking how the inflationary policies of the U.S. government create stability.)

Tompkins and her colleagues in the Western District also have another weapon they use to try to force innocent people to plead guilty: the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, which also is used as a federal lockup. To put it mildly, conditions in that jail are horrific, and they violate all human decency, and that works to the advantage of prosecutors.

Prisoners there get only a small cup of water each day, the food is especially bad, with dinner in some cases being nothing but a stale piece of cornbread. Authorities do not give prisoners underwear changes, deny them soap, and because bathrooms are not located in cells, prisoners must ask permission to use the facilities, requests that routinely are denied. Forget having soap for showers, and prisoners who are on prescription medications often find those meds either withheld or given in irregular doses at irregular times.

It is not difficult for federal prosecutors to find ways to hold people in lockups indefinitely. They can claim flight risk, or danger to society, or a thousand other things, most of which are not true but federal prosecutors long ago decided that truth was irrelevant to their outcome-driven missions.

Not surprisingly, people held for any length of time in these conditions become malleable to plea agreements. When someone is denied medications, thought processes may become irregular or skewed, and by actively working to destroy both the physical and mental health of people accused of committing federal crimes, prosecutors are easily able to hold out promises of better living condition — as long as the accused give prosecutors what they want.

It is difficult for someone to maintain innocence while being brutalized by the system, and when prosecutors are able to hold out the unhappy prospects for someone to face such horrific living conditions for decades, we should not be surprised that so many people will plead to something — anything — just to get out of their present circumstances.

Such conditions are not limited to Charlotte, although federal prosecutors in the Western District are notorious for using any tricks, including lying to judges and the media, in order to get what they want. The culture of lying and brutality that has been embedded in the U.S. Department of Justice for many decades is alive and well in North Carolina.

Hi Folks — It’s Lenore Skenazy from Free-Range Kids. Pretty much all day long we advocate for parents being allowed to let their kids actually grow up — without the cops, courts or CPS crying, “That’s negligence!” Without busybodies, too. Here’s a case that’s been burning up the wires (Pixels?) on Reddit: Dad lets his 12-year-old play outside and everyone’s up in arms like he sent the young man out to dodge sniper fire.  At least in this instance, the police agreed the dad was not doing anything wrong. Here’s a parent who was less fortunate. Heck, here’s another.  Plenty more where those came from (just go to my blog). Let’s fight the criminalization of parents who believe in their kids and their communities. – L.

Gracious! Why are these children outside without a security detail?

I’m on my way to Denver, Colorado…any food or experience recommendations are appreciated.

Also, I’m looking for Coloradans who are victims of asset forfeiture…if this fits your description, send me an email at Eapen@ForfeitureReform.com.

Thanks

Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform

by William Anderson

This morning I spent time with a some men aged 80+ at a small roundtable discussion, and the topic dealt with the modern application of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon’s dictum that “the government of men must be replaced by the administration of things.” While the topic of discussion dealt mostly with the Obama administration’s health care law, nonetheless I could see how it fits exactly into the modern American “justice” system and how it swallows millions of people while many of us watch in horror.

Saint-Simon believed that modern society should be governed by bureaucracies guided by the principles of science, and he certainly found kindred souls within the Progressive Movement in the United States about the turn of the 20th Century. Progressives pictured a state in which wise, science-guided bureaucrats led a system that would replace the entrepreneurial, commerce-driven American society, placing administration into the hands of selfless “experts” who would “professionalize” various occupations and rid the economy and greater society of the messiness that presently engulfed it.

The system of justice did not escape the desire of Progressives for “the rule of things,” and over the years, the “experts” have “captured” the governing apparati. Professional prosecutors supposedly trained in all things pertaining to “scientific justice” rule the grand juries, trials, and then are “promoted” to the office of judge. For the most part, things are long decided any case ever goes to a jury (if it ever is heard by a jury), as juries tend to be “ignorant of scientific principles” and are anachronisms at best. While the district attorneys in the state system are elected and U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president, the nuts-and-bolts of criminal justice is in the hands of assistant prosecutors who essentially have lifetime tenure, are protected from liability from any wrongful actions that might victimize innocent people. If any group of people reflect Saint-Simon’s “the rule of things,” it is the assistant prosecutors that relentlessly grind the gears of the system and grind people into oblivion in the process.

Social scientists have various theories to explain why systems created with checks and balances ultimately degenerate into something a bureaucratic near-dictatorship that supposedly was to be prevented by those same checks and balances.  As I see it, we are observing an extension of what economists call “Capture Theory,” in which the regulatory apparati are “captured” by the very entities that are supposed to be regulated. Economist Murray N. Rothbard and others from the Austrian School have added that monopolies tend to be “captured” by their employees, and government certainly qualifies as a monopoly. (I do find it interesting and disconcerting that many economists even today stubbornly believe that the monopoly called government can effectively regulate what it calls economic monopolies and force them to operate as “competitive” entities. Just step back and think about it.)

Prosecutors have had plenty of help as they have quietly and brutally “captured” the “justice” system. Anglo-American law that was here at the founding of this country, with its emphasis upon “due process of law” and “the rights of the accused,” not always is effective at nailing those who are guilty of wrongdoing. The public has dealt with the perception that “loopholes” in the law allow some guilty people to go free by making it harder all accused people to be able to fight charges against them. Politicians, who have found that being “tough on crime” also enhances their changes of be elected and re-elected, have created thousands of new “crimes,” most of them fitting in the category of the failure of an individual to carry out a “public duty” — as defined by politicians and other Progressives.

Obviously, when politicians eliminates the checks and balances and hand authority to tenured and careerist bureaucrats, the system that will come about is one that ultimately will benefit the bureaucrats, and we clearly see that in American justice today. People who are charged with crimes either must use their own resources to fight charges or depend upon court-appointed lawyers who more than not are going to want to curry favor with prosecutors and judges. The monies these lawyers are allotted generally cannot come close to covering the cost of a trial, so the only way for these attorneys to cover their own costs is to quickly plead out their clients, which is one reason that 97 percent of federal cases and 95 percent of state cases end in plea bargains.

Prosecutors, on the other hand, tend to capture the personal benefits of a conviction or guilty plea. (No, it is increasingly rare that “society” shares the benefits, unless one believes that incarcerating non-violent offenders such as drug users confers a “benefit” upon a society that now must pay to house and feed them.) High conviction rates lead to increases in salary, promotions and prestige. Often, they lead to higher political office or a slot with a prestigious (and well-paying) law firm.

As for the “experts” that were supposed to “modernize” investigations and enable prosecutors to better pinpoint proof of guilt, all too often we have seen agents of the government who supposedly were “doing science” actually engage in outright quackery. Radley’s exposure of Mississippi “forensic pathologist” Steven Hayne and “forensic dentist” Michael West as being people who would come up with unbelievable theories to support whatever prosecutors wanted is only a tiny part of the fraud that government “experts” have perpetrated. The highly-publicized problems with the FBI Crime Lab, and corruption in state and even private labs demonstrate once again that the so-called “experts” are not what Progressives want us to believe that they are.

In the end, what occurs is an outright conviction machine that swallows the guilty and the innocent. The Progressive vision was not supposed to turn into this sort of thing, nor was the “administration of things” supposed to morph into a system of institutionalized injustice. Yet, here it is.

I also would like to comment on Lenore’s earlier post on the woman’s conviction because her child drew images with chalk. A bureaucratic system based upon “the administration of things” is going to employ people in positions of authority who operate with a bureaucratic mentality in which rules become those things of highest order. A rule was broken; someone must be punished. Unfortunately, the few people who wish to take a hard look at the wreckage created by this mentality are written off as being “soft on crime.”

Throughout this month, I will highlight cases in which I have been involved that I believe have become travesties of justice. Along the way, I will explain how federal prosecutors use horrific conditions in the Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, jail and federal lockup to pry guilty pleas from people who are in near-shock after being arrested and incarcerated before trial. Yes, there are “good” people in the justice system, but, to paraphrase the great economist F.A. Hayek, in governmental systems, the worst tend to rise to the top.

Hi Folks — It’s Lenore from Free-Range Kids, alerting you to the fact you should set down your coffee cup before reading any further, lest you feel compelled to take a bite out of it in sheer frustration. That’s because a mom in Richmond, Va. was just given 50 hours of community service (which really sounds like more than 50 hours if you listen to what she is expected to do) for letting her kid draw with chalk on some rocks in the park.

Apparently chalk is the gateway drug to graffiti.

“It is all the same thing,” said James River Park Systems Park Manager, Ralph White. “A couple of weeks ago, I was covering over pornographic drawings done in chalk. It doesn’t matter what the medium is. It’s offensive.”

Yes, he just compared chalk to paint…and a 4-year-old’s drawings to porn. Here’s the rest of that article.

I wrote a little bit more the case on my site. What I forgot to add there that I’ll add here is that the mom is not even allowed to enter a park until she completes her service. As if she’s a terrifying criminal.

I guess in the eyes of the law, she is. Anyway, the debate raging over by me is about the fact that the mom was convicted two years ago of doing REAL graffiti– with paint — on the same rocks. So maybe that makes her a recidivist? And also the fact that when the cop came to arrest her for the chalk crime this time she allegedly said, “You must hate your f***ing job.”

Does that really equal the punishment? – L.

by Jason Kuznicki

If you can bring yourself to advocate a policy that runs against your personal interests, we can infer two very interesting things. First, the policy is probably especially good for the public; it would not otherwise overcome the personal interest. Second, if you have to “bring yourself” to advocate it, then you are probably under-advocating. You should talk about it more often, not for your own good, but for the good of the country.

Here are some of mine:

• Phase out the mortgage interest tax credit. My family would suffer directly if it disappeared. That doesn’t make it good policy. The mortgage interest tax credit distorts the housing market and unfairly privileges the upper middle class, of which I’m a member.
• That goes for the adoption tax credit, too. I doubt very many adoptive parents are swayed on the margin, and those who are probably shouldn’t be adopting anyway. As an adoptive parent, I say we should eliminate it.
• Just eliminate all tax credits and drop the marginal rates to compensate. Doing so would make compliance easier and eliminate a whole lot of deadweight loss and fraud. The downside for me? It would make policy wonkery a whole lot less fun. That’s not a public interest; that’s a private interest particular to my tribe. Reducing nasty complicated IRS audits? That’s a public interest, because it potentially benefits almost anyone.
• Privatize NASA. This could mean ending almost all of it, including my husband’s high-paying job as an aerospace engineer. I almost deleted this item. Then I reread my first paragraph. I hope he’ll forgive me.
• Drastically reduce the length of copyright. There is a good chance that I will write a book one day, and cutting copyright terms will hurt my royalties. But lengthy copyright is bad for consumers and bad for our culture. “Life of the author plus 70 years” is preposterous, but the people who write the most about copyright are… well… writers. Thus the policy we have.

Now I challenge my fellow wonks: What policies do you support that run directly against your personal interests?

It would be extraordinarily improbable if impartial reasoning about public affairs never led you away from your personal interests, wouldn’t it? So when was the last time that you advocated against them? As Eliezer Yudkowsky says, relinquishment is a virtue.

(And yeah, I’m aware that this post can be metagamed ad infinitum. Do your worst. That’s part of the fun of it, no?)

Sancho asks:

Why do you think self-identified libertarians skew so much to the right?

I’m in Australia, where political-ish people tend to grab leftover ideology from the dominant superpower and treat it like original thought (I’m probably as guilty as anyone), and where “libertarian” means, in almost all cases, far-right wing beliefs including support for massive government intervention in pursuit of traditional conservative ideals. It’s the classic case of conservatives who like pot choosing to repackage themselves as iconoclasts.

I don’t know much about libertarians in Australia, but some American libertarian history seems in order. I hope Sancho can offer more of his own experiences to help complete the conversation. (more…)

He failed a key exam, and a few hours later, he bought a high-powered rifle. I think you can guess who “he” is — the accused “Dark Knight” madman, James Holmes. But can you guess why he did it?

The explanation haunting me is this: He’s a product of the “everyone gets a trophy” generation.

Now, let me hasten to say that I have no degrees in psychology, nor have I examined the man. Let me add that the vast majority of kids, even those with shelves full of meaningless trophies, do not end up shooting theaters full of people.

Nonetheless, as founder of the book and blog “Free-Range Kids,” I’ve spent a lot of time watching our culture trying to convince today’s kids that they have not failed at anything, ever.

There are schools that have outlawed using red pens for corrections, for fear it’s too traumatizing. In Canada, a veteran science teacher was just fired for giving kids a zero on homework they didn’t hand in. Closer to home, my own son brought home a bright, shiny trophy for coming in eighth place in his bowling league.

Out of nine teams. (See below!) Apparently, the league hoped my boy never would notice that when it comes to bowling, he stinks.

Our generation is shielding our kids from failure because we don’t think they can handle it — even though kids always have. Sure, it feels bad to lose a game or get a bad grade, but it is only recently that teachers, parents, principals and coaches decided that kids are too sensitive to bounce back from a single setback.

And then we wonder why kids can’t bounce back from a single setback.

In no way am I excusing James Holmes of the heinous crimes he will be charged with. But we do our kids no favors by shielding them from the fact that they’re not always winners. In fact, we may be turning them into losers.

Greetings to readers of The Agitator, which happens to be my favorite blog. I am William Anderson, and I am a professor of economics at Frostburg State University. (I’m also coordinator of our MBA program.) I first want to thank Radley for giving me blogging privileges for August, and I hope that my posts will be informative and interesting.

Before I go into the subjects on which I write, I’ll give a bit of personal information. I’m 58 and have five children and two grandchildren. Four of my children are adopted from overseas, including two boys from Ethiopia, a girl from Guatemala, and a girl from Latvia. All four are teenagers, and this last comment is self-explanatory. My wife, Johanna, and I have our hands full, although all four of them really are wonderful kids and we are proud of them.

I place myself in a very tiny category, being a theologically-conservative evangelical who is libertarian. I am against the Drug War and I don’t believe that the modern state can define or should control marriage any more than it can define and control the weather (although it tries to do it). The modern American State, I believe, is a major threat to liberty at both home and abroad, and I cannot say that I am enthusiastic about political and legal developments in this country, and I am not hopeful about its future. Because of my particular stands on things, I have lost a lot of friends from the evangelical subculture in which I grew up.

While I have written on many different subjects in both popular and academic publications, I tend to concentrate now on economic and criminal justice issues. About 10 years ago, I became alarmed at the development of federal criminal law and, if anything, I am more alarmed today at the absolute power that is in the hands of federal prosecutors, who face almost no legal constraints upon their behavior. As one might predict, people who are not held accountable (thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court) are more likely to run off the rails, and there is no greater threat to individual liberty in this country than an out-of-control federal prosecutor.

State courts and prosecutors also face few, if any, sanctions and because of federal intervention into state legal matters, we are seeing more and more false accusations and wrongful convictions. Radley’s stand on these matters has been both admirable and very effective, and I consider him to be perhaps the most reasoned and accurate voice on the state of police and the courts in this country. Just his debunking of fraudulent government witnesses in Mississippi alone was a major accomplishment, and he is one of the few people out there who is willing to take on the government’s junk science that invades the courtrooms.

One of my areas of interest regarding state courts has been in what might be called the proliferation of “sex crimes.” Because of two federal laws, the Mondale Act of 1974 and the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, it has become very easy for people to make false accusations of child molestation, rape, and sexual assault, and I believe that it has resulted in the wrongful convictions of thousands of people. Not only do these law promise huge amounts of federal dollars for the pursuance and “prevention” of these crimes, but they also forced states to rewrite the rules of evidence and to eviscerate due process of law when people are accused of such wrongdoing.

The unfortunate result is not just wrongful convictions at trials (which often resemble kangaroo courts), but also with guilty pleas, as it is very difficult for people to be able to afford adequate representation, especially when the authorities already have rigged much of the system. I have written a lot about this unjust situation both in my own blog, and also in the blog run by Lew Rockwell.

Two cases on which I wrote heavily were the Duke Lacrosse Case of 2006-07, and the trial of Tonya Craft in 2010. The North Carolina attorney general declared prosecutor Michael Nifong’s charges against three lacrosse players from Duke University for allegedly raping an African-American stripper and prostitute to be a fraud, and Craft was acquitted after a month-long trial after being accused of molesting three young girls, including her own daughter. In both situations, the authorities tried to rig the system, they lied, broke the law, and charged people with crimes that never happened. Yes, the “system” allegedly worked, but only after the defendants were forced to spend millions of dollars in order to debunk charges that never should have been brought in the first place.

On economic matters, I have my own blog that mostly deals with the latest missives from Paul Krugman. Yes, he is a Nobel winner, but as an economist in the Austrian tradition, I believe that when a decorated academic economist calls for inflation and massive taxation and regulation as a “cure” for economic depressions, then what he writes should be fair game.

Again, thanks to Radley for asking me to blog this month. I look forward to writing and hearing from readers.

My intern Dan Wang has just published a terrific piece of reporting.  Mount Holly, New Jersey pulling out all the stops to uproot a working class neighborhood from their homes. That includes demolishing vacant row houses even as families still reside in the houses next to them. The township, of course, wants to hand the land to a private developer.

This is Dan’s first major publication, and it’s a damned good one. One day, I’ll have trained an army of interns to regularly report stories like this one.

No groin in America will be safe.

–Radley

Hi Folks — It’s Lenore here, from Free-Range Kids. So why am I posting about a sex offender and a dog? It’s sort of a long story, but it boils down to this:

At Free-Range Kids we LOVE safety…we just don’t believe that our kids are in constant danger. Lately, though, a lot of society has decided they are. That’s why, for instance, many schools won’t let the school bus drop a kid off at the bus stop unless there is a PRE-APPROVED GUARDIAN waiting there to escort him or her home. Even if the parents say, “It’s ok! I trust my kid to walk a block!” — no dice.

That same kind of fear of everyday life has come to pervade many adult-child interactions. The idea being: WHY does this adult want to be around a child? PERHAPS HE’S A PERVERT! In this state of panic, our country has passed laws that have little to do with keeping our kids truly safe and lots to do with suspicion of adults. Particularly egregious is the Sex Offender Registry. Instead of it listing adults who pose a big threat to kids, it is littered with people who did things like peeing in public, or going to a prostitute. You can get on the list if you’re a high school senior, age 18, and you sleep with your freshman girlfriend, age 14. Here’s a great article about the whole mess. 

And here, at last, is the article about a man on the registry for coming to help a neighbor with an ailing dog.It’s from 2010 but I just saw it today. And wept.

I feel the way this guy looks.

I’m Jason Kuznicki, editor of Cato Unbound at the Cato Institute.

I sometimes write policy analyses and blog for Cato. I teach intern seminars on political theory, and I do internal review for lot of material that Cato publishes (or declines). As a side project, I blog at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. And I tweet.

I’m married to a guy. We have an adopted daughter who is almost three. I’m a foodie, a homebrewer, and a long-distance runner. I’m a francophile who would trade Washington for Paris on the shallowest of pretexts. I should probably translate more French poetry than I do.

Every month Cato Unbound recruits four very smart people to discuss with one another. Choosing the topics and the authors is a major part of my job, and I shamelessly enjoy my work.

I am, alas, a generalist. In any area of public policy, a specialist will always know more than I do. I’m bothered by this, and it’s a big reason why I don’t write more “serious” pieces, but I do try to make the best of it. Generalism is itself an increasingly rare specialty, and someone should probably stop and think about how all the rapidly moving parts fit together.

As I once wrote, I’d love to have Michel Foucault’s old job: Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. I think most systems of thought are arbitrary, brought together by culturally mediated intuitions, signaling, and the vagaries of luck in politics and/or the battlefield. I despise battlefields.

If we’re going to play the libertarian labels game, I am a Hayekian thick libertarian who is increasingly agnostic on the question of philosophical anarchism. I’m an atheist and a transhumanist. Unlike many libertarians, my reflexes twitch left; I ascribe this to the abject insanity that followed September 11.

But the chance that either major political party is substantially correct seems astronomically small to me, particularly once we consider the venal, self-serving ways that their positions are really generated, and the voters that they are forced to satisfy. Virtually anyone standing outside this awful process is more likely to be right, just by that sheer fact alone.

If anything saves libertarianism from being yet another a bunch opportunistic, thrown-together political positions, it’s that we libertarians are far removed from the corrupting cesspools of power. We aren’t going with the historical flow. And we certainly aren’t obeying the interests of any economic class.

That said, many so-called privatizations and “free-market” reforms aren’t anything we should cheer for. Many who claim to champion the market process don’t seem truly to understand it. I think we all still have a lot to learn about politics, and not one of us would recognize Utopia if we stumbled onto its gold-paved streets.

I’ve gone on long enough. A better way to approach guest blogging is maybe just to open the floor to questions, then start answering them. Which I will do right now.

It is an honor to be asked to guest-blog here during the month of August (thank you Radley!), so let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Eapen Thampy; I am the founder of Americans for Forfeiture Reform (Facebook page here), a nonprofit that advocates for the reformation of America’s asset forfeiture laws to protect individual rights to property, due process, and equal protection. In other words: Private property is important, and the government shouldn’t be able to steal what belongs to you.

I founded Americans for Forfeiture Reform two years ago, when I was living in Columbia, Missouri. Some of you might remember the infamous Kinloch marijuana SWAT raid conducted by the Columbia Police Department; at the time, I lived about 3 miles away, and participated in much of the citizen activism that emerged as a response. Certainly it was a good opportunity to insert asset forfeiture into the discussion on paramilitary policing that followed. I am glad to say that we were able to at least partially succeed in moving the ball: thanks to an engaged and active citizenry, along with a responsive police chief, Columbia does not see the SWAT team deployed for ordinary search warrant service.