Government

I am in favor of the death penalty in theory, but after seeing the innocence project and the Duke Lacrosse case, I am of the opinion that our legal system is too corrupt to ensure that we are not executing the innocent. I first made this post 13 years ago:

Maurice Patterson was convicted of murder in 2002 for a fight where the victim was stabbed 14 times. Three people witnessed the fight, fleetingly and in the dark, and a fourth witness claimed to have seen a man with blood on his hand hiding from the police. All four witnesses identified Maurice Patterson in a live lineup weeks after the attack,
but they only testified regarding these identifications after being threatened with Contempt of Court.

A bloody knife was found near the scene and sent to Orchid Cellmark for DNA testing. Test results excluded Patterson, indicating a mixture of the victim’s profile and an unknown profile. Comparison to the State CODIS DNA database revealed that the unknown profile belonged to a drug addict with a history of violence. Though the State Police Forensic Science Center had been notified that the sample included the victim’s blood, this information was never directly communicated to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors continued with the case against Patterson despite the exculpatory results.

Robert Wilcoxson and Kenneth Kagonyera served almost 10 years in North Carolina prisons for a murder they didn’t commit before a three-judge panel overturned their convictions on September 22, 2011, based on DNA evidence proving innocence.

In this case, a man was killed during a home invasion, and police managed to secure confessions from the two defendants. Three bandanas and two pairs of gloves were located on the side of the road near the Bowman residence and were collected by deputies as evidence in the case. The bandanas and gloves found near the crime scene
were submitted for pre-trial DNA testing. Results excluded all six co-defendants, however this information was never turned over to Kagonyera or Wilcoxson’s attorneys.

There was the Duke Lacrosse case, where a woman accused a Lacrosse team of gang rape. Dennis Nifong, the state prosecutor, had DNA test results in his possession that showed the team was innocent. He didn’t disclose the existence of this evidence to the defense team.

Sure, we have DNA and such, but when the system is so corrupt that exculpatory evidence is “lost” or buried, we are executing the innocent. Knowingly allowing a flawed and corrupt system to kill people makes our entire society guilty of murder. I just can’t support giving the government the power to decide who lives and who dies. Even if the law were to be changed to punish crooked prosecutors, it will never be used. For that reason, I just can’t get behind the death penalty.

I promised a post on fire departments, and here it is. Fire departments are a necessary government service, and no, they aren’t socialism. Some people wrongly believe that anything the government does is socialism, and they are retards for thinking that.

Whether or not it is worth having a fire department, what kind (volunteer or career), and how much service it will offer is something that is largely dependent on the particulars of each community.

It costs a bit over $2 million per year, per fire station to maintain a career fire department. There need to be enough stations so that all houses are within 5 miles or less of a fire station. A small city of 100,000 people that is about 20 square miles in size will cost you about $10 million a year. For that price, you will get a fire department with an ISO rating of 1, and this will save big money on fire insurance for commercial and industrial structures. A town this size will have 100 or so residential and 3 or 4 commercial/industrial fires per year.

A volunteer department covering 100 homes and a population of 500 or so will cost about $50,000 a year. If they have one or two fires a year, it’s worth it.

The average total fire loss in the US for a fire is about $85,000. (Direct losses about $25,000, the rest indirect losses) If your community is small enough that it only has 1 fire a year on average, it doesn’t make sense to have an expensive paid department.

Any department with an ISO rating over a 4 is spending a large amount of money to defend commercial properties. Residential property and their insurance rates don’t really benefit from a department better than a 4.

So my opinion is this:

An area that is mostly rural with low density doesn’t need much in the way of a department, with the largest benefit being a reduction in insurance rates. A volunteer or part-paid system will likely do well. Still, running such a department costs money, and that will likely mean taxes to pay for at least a portion of it.

A smallish city will benefit from a more expensive department, but the largest beneficiaries will be commercial real estate. In those cases, fire fees for commercial property should be what pays for the more expensive ISO 1 through 3 department.

In many cases, it is cheaper to reimburse those who lose a home than it is to pay big money for a fire department. Paying $5 million a year to a department that puts out less than 30 fires a year is a waste of money. It would be more cost effective for that district to be self insured.

You own things, and ownership of property was originally one of the three ‘inalienable rights’ mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Yep, it was originally ‘life, liberty, and property’ before it was ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.’ To own something means that you, as the owner, get to decide what is to be done with it, whether or not you keep or somehow dispose of it, and how much you will get for it if you should decide to dispose of it.

The thing that I ultimately own is my life. I can sell parts of it in exchange for things, for money, or for the services of others. That’s what labor ultimately is- the trading of portions of my life for things. I can make those portions worth more or less, depending on what I do with them. If those portions of my life are spent doing things that anyone else can do, that time is worth less than if I am the only one who can perform a certain task AND that task is one that others need or want done. That’s why Michael Jordan was paid as much as he was to play basketball, and why people who push brooms for a living don’t make much at all.

I can also own things. Those things can be acquired by selling my labor, they can be gifted to me, or I can trade for them.

I can sell or trade those things (or my labor) to others and use the proceeds from those trades to acquire the goods and services of others. The free trade of goods and services is a representation of free trade.

There is, of course, another way to acquire things. We can take them, either through deceit, through fraud, theft, or even through force. It doesn’t matter if I take them myself, or I coopt others into doing the taking for me, it is still not free trade.

Governments, as the paper says, are instituted among men to defend your right to ownership, with those governments deriving their just (moral) powers from those who would be governed. For many of you, you will recognize the preceding paragraphs as the philosophies of John Locke, referred to as Lockian Liberalism, or classical Liberalism if you prefer. For those of you who know the philosophy, you also know that it was this philosophy that was the basis for the founding documents of this nation.

The reason this is important to me is that, like our Founding Fathers, I believe that the main purpose of government is to defend people and their right to ownership. That ideal is one that our nation has unfortunately moved far, far away from.

There are even readers of this blog who somehow feel that the government’s job is to help them acquire the property of others at gunpoint. For example, the landlord who charges market rates for the temporary use of their property. Some feel that the law should force a property owner to rent it for some other rate, a rate that is inevitably to the benefit of themselves.

Likewise, their labor, the labor of others, and other goods. People will nearly always find a way to rationalize taking someone else’s property by force, especially when that force is being applied by an agent of government. After all, when a police officer does violence on your behalf to force a property owner to sell at a lower rate, it doesn’t really feel like robbery, does it?

Now that doesn’t mean that a landlord can cheat you. The contract (lease) should lay out the circumstances under which things will be handled. Air conditioning? The amount of rent? Who pays utilities? All of these are laid out in the contract. The only role that government legitimately has in such a situation is to ensure that both parties follow that contract.

This is true of other goods as well. If a seller represents a gold ring as being 22 grams of 22 karat gold, but it turns out to be merely gold plated pot metal, then the government has a role in regulating that fraud.

Try using that yardstick anytime you find yourself saying “there ought to be a law,” and see if your statement is morally correct.

I can already hear the argument that “what if no one will sell me that product for a price I want to pay” or “what if all properties’ rents are higher than I want to pay?”

Well, one of two things will happen-

1. no one will buy or rent those goods, which will eventually force sellers to lower their prices or face being stuck with a product that isn’t selling
2. someone else will buy or rent that property, proving that someone else thought it was worth it

So if you can’t afford a good or service, you either have to come to the realization that you need to lower your expectations, or you need to come up with more money.

That is true whether you are dealing with renting an apartment, hiring a lawyer, or buying a gold ring. You sell those things for the most you can get, and buy them for the least that you can. That’s how markets work, unless you are willing to lie, cheat, or use force to acquire them.

Which is, of course, not free trade.