Privacy as Property Right

In 1993, while working at the Cato Institute, I published an article in the institute's Policy Report that is relevant to discussions occasioned by the death of Antonin Scalia. "Dissolving the Inkblot: Privacy as Property Right" attempts to show that the conservative and progressive constitutional approaches to the right of privacy are both flawed and proposes an alternative approach rooted in the right to property, beginning with self-ownership.

Enjoy!

TGIF: Obama Suspends TV Coverage of Middle East

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced today that the government will forbid the television news media from covering the conflict in the Middle East because "displays of U.S. military operations there have the potential to radicalize Americans against the Obama administration's foreign policy and provoke terrorism in the United States."

End, Don't Extend, Draft Registration

This past week demonstrated with blinding clarity that 1) Republicans, contrary to their rhetoric, oppose individual liberty, and 2) the establishment news media really couldn't care less about the presidential candidates' views.

After the last Republican debate, the media continued its obsession with the reality-TV and horse-race sides of the election. News readers, correspondents, and "analysts" droned on about Marco Rubio's robotic repetition during the debate and the insult swaps by Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. You had to read the cable channels' "news tickers" running right to left along the bottom of the screen to find out that at least some Republican candidates think young women should have to register with Selective Service in case the military draft is reinstituted. On CNN, at least, this story was not deemed worthy of further attention.

Which is more important? Rubio's short-term memory problem, the Trump-Bush mud-wrestling match, or registration for the draft?

Here's a clue: the draft is slavery. It is short-term slavery at best, but it's possibly debilitating and even fatal. Thus registration with Selective Service is -- surprise! -- registration for possible enslavement. Anyone who supports individual liberty against state power would oppose conscription. This is no close call.

The draft ended in 1973 during the Nixon administration. (Classical-liberal economist Milton Friedman played a key role in its demise.) In 1980, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter signed a proclamation requiring 18-26-year-old men -- but not women -- to register with Selective Service, supposedly as a signal to the Russians that Carter had noticed their invasion. But the draft was not revived. (We later learned that the Carter administration helped to provoke the invasion by aiding jihadis, hoping Afghanistan would be the Soviets' "Vietnam." The 9/11 attacks were blowback from Carter's operation, and Afghanistan would become America's second "Vietnam.")

Ronald Reagan, Carter's opponent in 1980, criticized draft registration on grounds that it "destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending," but in office Reagan changed his mind because "we live in a dangerous world."

According to Selective Service: "Failing to register ... is a felony punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 or a prison term of up to five years, or a combination of both." (Counseling "another to fail to comply ... is subject to the same penalties.") Failing to register can also result in loss of government benefits, such as student aid, federal jobs, and job training. 

With military combat roles now open to women, the question of extending compulsory draft registration to them has come up. The New York Times reports that "the Marine Corps commandant, the chief of staff of the Army and one of the top Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee [Claire McCaskill] said ... that women should be required to register. Two days later, two Republican members of the House who are military veterans -- Duncan Hunter of California and Ryan Zinke of Montana -- introduced legislation that would require women to register."

That set the stage for the question at the Republican debate. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie endorsed compulsory registration of women. Christie, strangely, said not forcing women to register constituted discrimination against them. Bush said he did not expect the draft to be resumed, but hastened to add that he opposed ending registration.

The remaining candidates said nothing. No one objected to registering women. (Later Ted Cruz said the idea is "nuts." More revealing, no one called for ending draft registration for men. The candidates of the party that insists it alone favors liberty and limits on government power favor draft registration!

Few people call for a new draft; military leaders reportedly oppose conscription because it fills the armed forces with people who prefer to be elsewhere. So why continue draft registration? The usual answer is that it would promote readiness in an emergency. But that is no reason to violate liberty. The practical value of a quickly dated list of registrants is also doubted.

Some misguided people will argue that if men must register, then fairness dictates that women must register too. It's an odd notion of fairness or justice, however. Compulsory draft registration is unfair because it violates young people's rights. Therefore, extending the unfairness cannot be fair. The only fair measure would be to abolish registration and never draft anyone again.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a patron today!

Again?

The Distinguished Woman Stumping for Hillary Clinton

President Bill Clinton later promoted Madeleine Albright from ambassador to the UN to secretary of state, the first women to hold the office. While speaking on behalf of Hillary Clinton recently, she said "there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other."

Clinton's Wall Street Red Herring

In response to Bernie Sanders's stigmatizing her as an establishment candidate who takes big bucks from Wall Street, Hillary Clinton challenged Sanders to show that she ever changed a vote or a position because of a campaign donation or speaker's fee.

That's a red herring.

Sanders's concern presumably is not that she was or is for sale, but that Wall Street operators see her as already friendly to their interests. If so, they did not need her to change her position or disposition. Rather, they like what they see and want her in charge.

For some reason, Sanders is reluctant to go in for the kill. Maybe he's not very sharp on his feet.

TGIF: Justice, Not Amnesty, for "Illegal" Immigrants

It speaks volumes that the dirtiest word in the Republican and conservative lexicon is amnesty. At a minimum, it exposes as a flagrant lie the claim that Republicans and conservatives want to expand liberty and limit government power. One cannot consistently praise the principle, central to the supposedly beloved Declaration of Independence, that "all men [that is, persons, not only Americans] are created equal" while also demanding that the government control some people's freedom to move.

Cruz and Rubio: Heirs to Bush-Obama Militarism

I see no point splitting hairs over whether Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio is the more egregious warmonger. Both love the bloody and costly U.S. empire. Both believe in American exceptionalism. (Rubio arrogantly calls for a "New American Century.") Both want to make war in the Middle East (and beyond) and "stand behind Israel," though such policies provoked the 9/11 attacks. Both want to pour money into the military, as though America were militarily threatened. (The U.S. military budget equals the budgets of the next seven highest spending nations.) Both want to prevent detente with Iran, which poses no danger. Both hype terrorism as an existential threat. Both want the government to spy on Americans, especially Muslim Americans. Both want to "control the border," code for violating the natural right of people to move freely and make better lives without government permission.

TGIF: The Bill of Rights Revisited

Drawing on work by historian Gordon S. Wood, I recently suggested that we see the U.S. Constitution not as a landmark in the struggle for liberty, but rather as a move to introduce elements of monarchy and aristocracy into an American political system that had become too democratic -- among white males with property -- for America's upper crust. As Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: 1789-1815, "Benjamin Rush [a signer of the Declaration of Independence] described the new government in 1790 as one 'which unites with the vigor of monarchy and the stability of aristocracy all the freedom of a simple republic.'" But is that union actually coherent?

Trump & the Conservative Establishment Deserve Each Other

No one should need National Review's advice to steer clear of Donald Trump. For one thing, the messenger is a curious one indeed. Although Trump doesn't talk like a neoconservative Wilsonian, he has not cleanly separated himself from that faction either.

Make America Grate!

TGIF: The Constitution Revisited

I am mystified that so many libertarians still see the U.S. Constitution as a landmark achievement in the struggle for liberty. On principle alone, they should have become wary in time. A document that is adored at virtually every position in the political firmament should arouse suspicion among libertarians.

Why Won't Iran Act Like Our Enemy?

What a bad week for the war party. Darn you, Iran! The country that the armchair warriors most love to hate refuses to play the villain's role assigned by the neoconservatives, "humanitarian" interventionists, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the establishment media.

MLK Day

"Visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. at the peak of the civil rights movement, the journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. 'Just for self-defense,' King assured him. One of King’s advisors remembered the reverend’s home as 'an arsenal.' Like King, many nonviolent activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the civil rights struggle has been long ignored."

--Charles Cobb, That Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Shamefully but unsurprisingly, Cobb's book has been ignored by the establishment media. But see this.(Also see my earlier article here.)

Someone Saw the Neocons and Trump Coming

 

A nation which makes greatness its polestar 

can never be free.

--Abraham Bishop (of Connecticut), 1800

TGIF: The Pernicious State

Government is more than a territorial monopoly on aggressive force. It's also the heir to a centuries-old manufactured mystique, reinforced through its schools and other institutions, regarding its sanctity and sacrosanctity. The mystique is generated by and tends to manifest itself in the dogma that one's State is uniquely virtuous and deserves to be judged by standards applicable to no one and nothing else. This is hardly less true of secular states than it was during the time of the divine right of kings. In some important ways, people have not gotten over that principle.

Hillary Clinton: Least Fit of All

Even considering that no one is fit to be president -- in that no one should be able to command a state, which rules by threatening and committing violence against innocents -- Hillary Clinton is especially unfit. No one who has done what she has done as a government official should be rewarded with power.

Clinton or Sanders?

If we have to have a president, whom would you prefer: someone who voted for the Iraq war or someone who voted against holding gun manufacturers and gun dealers liable per se for criminal shootings?

Will Grigg on Northern Paiute Claims in Oregon

As to be expected, Will Grigg sheds needed light on the Northern Paiute claim to the government-held land now occupied by the so-called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. Be sure to read Grigg's "'This Is Government Land': The Eternal Refrain of the Federal Occupiers."

General Crook, the U.S Army’s most accomplished Indian fighter, candidly admitted that the Bannock War was provoked by the government he had served with such distinction.

"It cannot be expected that they will stay on reservations where there is no possible way to get food, and see their wives and children starve and die around them,” Crook wrote of the Paiutes and Shoshones. “We have taken their lands, deprived them of every means of living…. Our Indian policy has resolved itself into a question of warpath or starvation; and, merely being human, many of them will choose the former alternative where death shall be at least glorious.”

Whatever's Going on in Oregon, It's Not Terrorism

A key to understanding the political world lies in realizing that the words terrorism and terrorist are inherently political terms. This has been clear in international affairs, but we now see this in domestic matters, specifically the case involving ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond and the takeover of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service building in Harney County, Oregon.

The Hammonds have been imprisoned under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, an ostentatiously get-tough bill -- passed after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building -- favored by congressional Republicans and signed by triangulating Democratic President Bill Clinton, who was seeking reelection that year and whose wife, the hawkish Hillary Clinton, is seeking the presidency today. Among other things, the Act limits habeas corpus relief in federal courts for those claiming to have been unlawfully imprisoned.

The words terrorism and terrorist are also used to describe the people now occupying the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in sympathy with the Hammonds. CNN reports that "progressive" opponents of the occupiers refer to them as "YallQaeda" and "vanilla ISIS." Some urge government violence against them.

Is this description fair? One can answer this question regardless of what one thinks of the Hammonds and the occupiers. If terrorism has any reasonable referent, it is the use of violence against noncombatants for a political purpose. The point is to terrorize by killing or injuring noncombatants, or destroying their property, in an effort to effect change.

Nowhere do we see such violence in either the Hammonds' case or the occupation of the government building. The actions that brought criminal charges against the Hammonds consisted in setting two fires on their own land in 2001 and 2006, the first to destroy invasive vegetation, the second ostensibly to protect against a wildfire on adjacent land controlled by the central government. On both occasions the fires unintentionally spread to the government-controlled land. The Hammonds put out the first fire; the second fire reportedly endangered government firefighters, whom the Hammonds knew were in the vicinity.

Even if we grant the worst allegations -- that the Hammonds wrongfully declined to inform the government that it would be setting the fires and that one fire was allegedly set to cover up poaching -- the actions look nothing like terrorism. No one was intentionally threatened, and no one was injured or killed. So why were the cases prosecuted under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years? (The trial judge refused to impose the mandatory minimum, but the government appealed after the Hammonds had served their terms and they were returned to prison, sparking the protest.) Even if we make the dubious concession that the Act was a good-faith attempt to fight bona fide terrorism, what does it have to do with the Hammonds?

As for the occupiers of the government building, who now call themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, again, where's the terrorism? Yes, some occupiers are armed. But the building was unoccupied when they entered it, and no one was threatened, much less harmed or killed. It's reported that roads around the building are open. The news media come and go at will.

In neither case was anyone terrorized. To be sure, the occupiers have a political objective, to pressure the central government into giving up control of its massive land holdings. Terrorism, however, requires a particular kind of violence along with a political motive. Critics describe the occupiers as white supremacists. I don't know if they are, although John Ritzheimer, a spokesman for the occupiers, is an anti-Muslim activist. But regardless, their conduct in Burns, Ore., does not constitute terrorism, and no constructive purpose is served by promiscuously throwing that inflammatory word around.

I'll leave for another time the controversy surrounding the government's landholdings except to say that one need not regard all governments as illegitimate (as I do) to see something wrong in the U.S. government's control of so much land, especially in the West, holdings acquired through forcible preemption. While white ranchers and anti-U.S. government activists claim that their rights and the state of Oregon's "rights" have been usurped by the central government, largely overlooked is the solid claim of the Northern Paiute.

According to the Indian Country Today Media Network, "Ironically, the 'legal' basis for [the occupiers'] starting a fight with the federal government is that sovereignty 'really' belongs to Oregon rather than the Paiutes, who have seen their federal trust land shrink from over one and a half million acres to a tiny remnant of 760 acres in Burns, Oregon, where this current armed standoff began." It adds, "President U.S. Grant established the Malheur Indian Reservation for the Northern Paiute in 1872.... White settlement nibbled at the Malheur Indian Reservation until the Bannock War in 1878, which ended with surrendered Paiutes and Bannocks on the reservation being removed, officially to the Yakama Reservation in Washington Territory." (See more on the Northern Paiute claim here, here,  here, and especially here.)

Citizens for Constitutional Freedom is right that the national government should vacate the land. But it's wrong about who should have it. It was stolen from the Northern Paiute, and therefore it should be returned.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society. Become a patron today!