Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 4, 2010

Whatever else can be said about Officer Adil Polanco of the New York Police Department, his disclosure of arbitrary arrest quotas makes him an authentic hero.

Officer Polanco told WABC News that he and other officers in the NYPD?s 41st Precinct are under severe pressure to make needless arrests and issue unnecessary summonses.

?Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them,? Polanco explains.

In a recording obtained by WABC, a supervising officer describes the quotas to his subordinates and tells them that ?until you decide to quit this job and go to work at a Pizza Hut, this is what you?re going to be doing till then. Do you understand??

One case described in the report involves two young men needlessly arrested and held in jail overnight before being released without charges ? simply to meet a quota.

NYPD officials describe this kind of thing as police being ?productive.? The word ?predatory? makes a better fit.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 3, 2010

Elizabeth Cheney is the daughter of the former Vice President and a former Bush administration official herself. Bill Kristol is publisher of the Weekly Standard magazine. Cheney and Kristol have launched a pressure group called ?Keeping America Safe,? the purpose of which is to promote the use of torture as an interrogation tactic, defend those who institutionalized the practice, and defame those who oppose it.

A recent ad run by that group describes a group of Justice Department attorneys as the ?Al Qaeda 7? because they acted as defense counsel for people detained at Guantanamo. The implication here is that anyone who defends an accused terrorist must himself be considered one, rather than an attorney carrying out a vital constitutional function.

Those who defended Gitmo detainees include many decorated military attorneys who swore an oath to defend the Constitution and pursue justice. Presumably they, too, would be considered al-Qaeda sympathizers by Cheney, Kristol, and their ilk.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 2, 2010

In his book Lost Rights, James Bovard observes that in the old Soviet Union, the operative principle of the law was that whatever was not explicitly permitted by the government was forbidden.

Police in Twin Falls, Idaho recently acted on this same principle when they raided a nursing home to break up a long-running poker game.

For at least five years, about twenty residents of the Twin Falls Senior Center had run a poker game with a $20 buy-in, with the pot split evenly among the top chip holders. Obviously, all of the participants were consenting adults, and there is no record of gunfights or other violence erupting over a disputed hand.

Yet some sanctimonious scold, inspired by a Soviet-style vision of civic rectitude, anonymously reported the game to the police. The department defended the raid by claiming that ?nothing in Idaho law permits gambling at any age.?

This will surprise people who routinely cough up money to participate in the government-sanctioned gambling called the Idaho State Lottery.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 1, 2010

An entrepreneur wanting to make business for himself offers a new product or service, or improves an existing one. This benefits both the businessman and his customers.

A bureaucrat wanting to make business for himself devises some way to intrude on the property rights of others. This enhances the job security of a handful of tax-fattened parasites while producing no public benefit.

One splendid illustration is offered by the seizure of 30 toy machine guns by the officially sanctioned criminal syndicate calld the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (or ATF).

According to ATF functionary Kelvin Crenshaw, the shipment of Airsoft BB guns from Taiwan was seized because they could be ?retrofitted? into machine guns. Oregon business owner Brad Martin, who paid for the merchandise stolen by the ATF, points out that this is a mechanical impossibility. Yet the ATF is determined to destroy the entire shipment.

It?s long past time the ATF was put out of business ? permanently.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 26, 2010

According to a study published by the Pew Center, state governments are $1 trillion short of the funds necessary to cover benefits promised to their employees.

In some cities, such as Tracey, California, municipal governments are preparing to impose special surcharges and fees for emergency services that are already funded by taxation. These new fees are supposedly necessary to cover a $9 million budget shortfall ? the exact amount, as it happens, that is spent each year in Tracey on employee pensions.

In Albany, New York, the police officers union is demanding raises even if that means hiking taxes in the teeth of a depression. Chris Mesley, the chief thug in charge of that union, bluntly declares: ?If I?m the bad guy to the average citizen ? and their taxes have to go up to cover my raise, I?m very sorry about that, but I have to look out for myself and my membership.?

Such open, predatory contempt for the public suggests that revolution is not only likely, but imminent.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 25, 2010

Joseph Stack?s murder-suicide attack on an IRS office building in Austin, Texas was an act of irrational criminal violence. A lawsuit filed against Stack?s family by the widow of his victim, IRS employee Vernon Hunter, make result in lethal collateral damage to individual rights.

Before his attack on the IRS office, Stack had become sufficiently threatening to his wife Sheryl that she and the couple?s daughter fled their home and spent the night in a motel. Valerie Hunter has sued Mrs. Stack, claiming that she had a duty to ?avoid foreseeable risk of injury to others,? including Hunter?s late husband, Vernon.

It isn?t clear how Mrs. Stack could have carried out that supposed duty unless she was either clairvoyant or a co-conspirator ? and there is no evidence that she was either. The legal principle advanced in the lawsuit would require that family members contact the authorities when relatives give voice to anti-government opinions ? a genuinely totalitarian assumption.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 24, 2010

Much like serfs who were permitted to live on land owned by a feudal lord who could evict them at his pleasure, residents of the western United States can be dispossessed at the arbitrary whim of a distant ruler.

Most western land is controlled by the federal government, which has no constitutional warrant to own or control any property beyond the minimal amount necessary to carry out its limited legitimate functions.

In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton signed an order seizing more than 1.7 million acres of land to create the Grand Staircase-Escalate National Monument . In doing so Clinton locked up huge supplies of clean-burning coal as well as vast reserves of other valuable resources. That whimsical decree inflicted immense economic harm on southern Utah.

A leaked Interior Department document lists 14 sites in 9 states as possible targets for similar seizures, which can occur by the stroke of the presidential pen. Such dispossession by decree is a hallmark of feudalism, not freedom.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 23, 2010

People who reside in and around San Antonio have been warned that another ?Warrant Roundup? has been scheduled for early March. Police will fan out to execute some 300,000 outstanding warrants, most of them for unpaid speeding tickets and similar infractions.

A large number of people threatened with arrest and imprisonment, however, are the subject of code compliance violations involving the use of their own property without government permission. Among the so-called scofflaws targeted for abduction at gunpoint by police are people who held supposedly illegal garage sales, stored non-operational vehicles on their property, or let their grass grow higher than code enforcement busybodies would allow.

According to Code Compliance Director David Garza, such trivial violations of the city government?s presumptuous regulations ?are just as important as anything else? covered by arrest warrants, despite the fact that they have nothing to do with offenses against persons or property. Shakedowns of this kind will grow much more common nation-wide as sales and property tax revenues dry up.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 22, 2010

No reasonably well-informed person should be surprised to learn that the doctrine of unaccountable presidential power set out during the Bush administration includes the supposed authority to engage in undisguised mass murder.

John C. Yoo, who crafted the Bush administration?s legal defense of those supposed powers, committed to writing the idea that a president and his agents could engage in torture, despite the fact that it is banned by both federal law and the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In a public debate Yoo endorsed the idea that a president could order the sexual torture of a suspected terrorist?s child in order to compel the parent to cooperate with interrogators.

The newly released report of the Justice Department?s Office of Professional Responsibility documents that Yoo, in a conversation with that office?s investigators, agreed that it was within ?the commander-in-chief?s power over tactical decisions? to order the massacre of an entire civilian village.

Does it make you feel safer to know that the president can slaughter innocent people on a whim?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 19, 2010

The incurable anger and despair that prompted Joseph Stack to fly his private plane into an IRS office building in Austin, Texas grew from a small but critical change in the tax code enacted in 1986. That revision effectively ruined Stack?s career plans.

It takes an utterly predatory and amoral agency to enforce the vast and largely inscrutable income tax code.

In his memoir Confessions of a Tax Collector, former IRS official Richard Yancey recalls an early training session in which his supervisor declared: ?This is war.? On another occasion, Yancey witnessed a supervisor indulging in a profane harangue about taxpayers that ended with the observation: ?[I]f it were up to me, I?d line ?em all up against a wall and shoot them.?

Former IRS officials have admitted under oath that their agency routinely targets innocent taxpayers.

What Stack did was wrong, but his crimes hardly eclipse the criminal violence carried out every day by the IRS.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.