LibertyMinute January 29 2014

  A crime is an act of conscious aggression against the person or property of another individual. An act that doesn't inflict a demonstrable injury is not a crime. Very few of the acts or omissions criminalized by the government meet that description. Indeed, existing criminal codes seem to have been created for the purpose of criminalizing the mere act of existence.

 Last November, Norman Gurley was arrested inOhiofor the supposed offense of carrying nothing in his automobile. Gurley had purchased the car from someone else, who had retrofitted the vehicle with several hidden compartments. TheOhiolegislature has banned such compartments on the grounds that they can be used to smuggle narcotics and other contraband. Nothing was found in the compartments in Gurley's vehicle, which were discovered during a warrantless and unjustified search carried out by a state trooper.

 The absurdity of arresting a man for the possession of nothing should have inspired the repeal of that Ohiolaw. Instead, it inspired a copycat measure in the Virginia Legislature, which would expand the evil practice of highway robbery by police in the form of ?asset forfeiture.?

 Criminally minded people are distressingly commonplace, but the most ruthless and successful are those found in politics and law enforcement.

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

Liberty Minute January 28 2014

 Buried beneath the tabloid-bait aspects of Justin Bieber's recent arrest is an illustration of the absurd ease with which police can turn harmless behavior into a criminal offense.

 In addition to a DUI count and related traffic infractions, Bieber was charged with ?resisting arrest without violence.? This supposed crime consisted of reflexively pulling his arm away when a police officer attempted to handcuff him.

 Police are trained to bellow ?Stop resisting!? the instant they put hands on a suspect, and to tack on a resisting arrest charge in the fashion of a football team kicking an extra point following a touchdown.. However, Florida is the only state whose criminal code explicitly criminalizes peaceful non-cooperation with police.

 In 2006 an Orlando ABC affiliate studied 4,000 cases in which resisting arrest was the sole charge filed. Most of those thus charged took a plea bargain. In one 2010 case, an innocent man needlessly assaulted by police was charged with ?resisting arrest? because he tried to cover his head while being beaten.

 The mindset that gave rise to that prosecution isn't much different from the one institutionalized in ancient Sparta, where the police had permission to kill slaves at their discretion.

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

Liberty Minute January 27 2014

 Like too many of their rivals on the Right, many on the Progressive Left hate their opponents more than they love individual liberty.

 Princeton historian Sean Wilentz produced a museum-quality exhibit of that mindset in a lengthy essay published by The New Republic magazine. Wilentz, who supports Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations, used roughly 10,000 words to dismiss Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's totalitarian surveillance program by denouncing Snowden's ideological transgressions. Wilentz insists that Snowden's support for Ron Paul's 2012 presidential bid, and his skepticism about government in general, invalidate his disclosures about the NSA's criminal activities.

 A similar perspective was offered by Zach Beauchamp and Ian Milhiser, who write for Think Progress. The writers denounce a growing bipartisan campaign by state legislatures to shut down the NSA's spying program by cutting off the agency's access to locally controlled resources, such as water and electricity. The problem, they insist, is that this assertion of state authority could threaten the entire post-New Deal apparatus of redistribution and regulation. For those progressives, living in an East German-style police state is the price we must pay to preserve the New Deal.

 Oddly enough, that analysis is correct ? which is an indictment of the New Deal, not an endorsement of the NSA.

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

Liberty Minute January 24 2014

 Kang Wong is an 84-year-old New York resident who doesn't understand English. Late in the afternoon on January 19, Wong was crossing the street when a police officer, believing the elderly man was jaywalking, ordered him to stop.

 Because of the language barrier, Wong didn't immediately respond. The officer escorted him to a nearby bank and attempted to write a ticket. Still not understanding what was happening, Wong started to walk away. The officer seized the octogenarian, who tried to shove the stranger's hands away. That provoked intervention by several other officers, who beat the confused man bloody and arrested him.

 A few weeks ago, 64-year-old Oklahoma resident Pearl Pearson, who is deaf and diabetic, was stopped by a state trooper for leaving the scene of an accident. Despite the fact that Pearson's vehicle has a placard explaining his hearing impairment, the trooper began to bark orders that the driver couldn't hear. Outraged that the elderly man didn't immediately obey orders he couldn't hear or understand, two officers ? Eric Foster and Kelton Hayes ? beat him for seven minutes, then arrested him for resisting arrest.

 In America, such unwarranted, barbaric police violence is routine. It's doubtful that this can be said of any other country.

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

Liberty Minute January 23 2014

 The United States of America was founded as a commercial republic. Since the end of World War II our country has metastasized into an empire ? a process that may have entered its terminal phase after 9-11. Over the past decade and a half, as Washington has engaged in unlimited power projection abroad, there has been a concomitant growth of government at home. Not surprisingly, this has led to a steady decrease in our country's economic standing.

 The annual Index of Economic Freedom, a joint project of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall StreetJournal, documents that for each of the past seven years, economic freedom has declined in the United States.

 The Index ranks 178 countries, which are classified as ?Free,? ?Mostly Free,? ?Moderately Free,? ?Mostly Unfree,? and ?Repressed.?

 According to the most recent ranking, the United States has fallen out of the top 10 of the countries surveyed. America comes in at 12^th place ? below Estonia, which until 1991 was ruled by a Communist regime allied to the Soviet Union. The supposed Land of the Free is found in the middle of the ?Mostly Free? category.

 As John Quincy Adams predicted in 1821, pursuing empire is destroying our liberty.

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

Liberty Minute January 22 2014

Redondo Beach, California resident David Perdue was nearly murdered by police on the way to the beach last February 7. Torrance Police Officer Brian McGee rammed his vehicle into Perdue?s truck and opened fire on the driver?s side without pausing to identify the driver, who he thought was former LAPD Officer Christopher Dorner, who had murdered a police officer and threatened to kill others.

When he spotted Perdue?s car, McGee told investigators, he was ?panicking inside, thinking if I don?t get out of this car seat, I?m gonna die. He?s gonna kill me. He?s gonna shoot me. I one hundred percent believe it?s him.?

Dorner was a large, heavyset black man. Perdue is a slender white man. Once those obvious differences had penetrated the blinding haze of panic that had enveloped McGee, he stopped shooting.

McGee?s attack inflicted $20,000 of damage to Perdue?s truck. The victim suffered head and spinal injuries that resulted in him losing his job as a baggage handler. McGee?s job is secure, and he has been cleared by the L.A. District Attorney?s office. According to the DA, McGee made a ?reasonable mistake? when he rammed Perdue?s truck and tried to kill him sight unseen.

If police are this afraid of each other, why should the rest of us trust them?

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

LibertyMinute January 21 2014

 Under totalitarian regimes like those that afflictedEast Germanyand Communist Cuba, citizens were expected and required to inform on each other. Too many Americans have embraced this mindset and eagerly look for excuses to turn in their neighbors. The tattle-tale impulse can sometimes be expressed in amazingly petty ways.

 In Lee's Summit, Missouri, an anonymous complaint drew the attention of city officials to a fort that had been constructed by a group of local children in a vacant lot. The kids had used scraps left over from local construction projects. A resident spied the fort and, acting in the best tradition of East German civic duty, filed a complaint with the building code bureaucracy.

 The children and their parents assembled for a pizza party to celebrate completion of the fort, and then watched as bulldozers were used to tear down the harmless but unauthorized edifice. One parent told a local TV news reporter that her six-year-old was so upset that she wanted to move to a different city.

 While this child's disgusted outrage is understandable, it's likely that she couldn't find a community in theUnited Stateswhose population hasn't been infected with the tattle-tale virus.

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

LibertyMinute January 20 2014

InCalifornia, a veteran actress named Maria Conchita Alonso was fired from a theater production after she made an advertisement endorsing a Tea Party-backed conservative candidate for governor. This decision wasn't made on her professional merits, nor was it dictated by market concerns. It was purely the product of political considerations: The producers and cast of the play wanted to shun Miss Alonso because of her supposed political heresy. If conservatives treated a liberal actress this way, the air would be rent with outraged criticism of a political ?blacklist.?

In New York, Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo used a recent radio interview to endorse the banishment of people he characterized as ?extreme? right-wingers. According to Cuomo, Republican Party candidates and voters ?who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? are ?extreme conservatives [who] have no place in the state ofNew York, because that?s not who New Yorkers are.?

These episodes illustrate the difference between toleration ? a willingness to endure disagreements and live with the shortcomings of others ? and what the collectivist Left calls ?tolerance,? which is a doctrine of conformity invoked to justify the suppression of viewpoints considered to be insufficiently progressive.

People who make a fetish of tolerance often do so to disguise a totalitarian disposition.

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

Liberty Minute January 17 2014

Some of Edward Snowden?s detractors criticized the NSA whistleblower for fleeing into exile, rather than facing trial for disclosing the agency?s illegal activities. One persistent theme in such criticism is that Snowden should have worked through established channels, rather than going public.

Several previous NSA whistleblowers had attempted to do so, and were either ignored or threatened with prosecution. There was no institutional recourse in a system that punishes whistleblowers and rewards criminals. And since the government that employed him engages in summary execution of US citizens the president designates as official enemies, Snowden is wise to put himself beyond its immediate reach.

Several Pentagon and intelligence officials interview by the Buzzfeed website clearly lust to murder Snowden. One of them described a scenario in which Snowden could be ?casually poked by a passerby? on the streets of Moscow, and die several hours later as a result of being poisoned.

That was the method used by the KGB and Bulgarian intelligence to murder exiled  anti-Communist dissident Georgi Markov on a bridge in London in 1978.

In what must be considered a painful historic irony, Edward Snowden fled to Russia because the political elites in Washington are the true heirs to the Soviets.

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

LibertyMinute January 16 2014

On January 14, the PBS program Frontline aired a documentary entitled The Secret State of North Korea Among the scenes captured in that documentary are two encounters between women and police.

In the first confrontation, a woman running a private bus service is accosted by an officer who attempts to issue a citation. She is angrily and openly defiant of the uniformed bully. She actually shoves him several times and treats him to a well-earned outpouring of verbal abuse before turning back to her work. The second incident involved a woman who refused to accept a citation for wearing pants in defiance of a mandatory dress code.

If these incidents had occurred in theUnited States, the women would have been beaten, tasered, and -- quite possibly -- killed.

American police taught to treat any act of non-compliance as ?resisting arrest,? a supposed offense that justifies the use of pain compliance and lethal force, if it is necessary to subdue the victim. Any incidental contact with the sanctified person of a police officer is treated as criminal battery or even aggravated assault.

Interestingly, this doesn?t appear to be the case in Communist North Korea.

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