Frankenstein’s Revenge

I was thinking of writing something deep and profound, but then I saw this cartoon. For those of us who love the IRS, it’s too good not to share.

Frankenstein periodically appears in political cartoons, including this Glenn Foden IRS cartoon and these Henry Payne cartoons about Romneycare and Obamacare.

Sort of makes you wonder why there’s so much discrimination against the Mummy, Count Dracula and the Werewolf? Maybe we can ask the EEOC to launch an investigation after they’re done trying to coerce businesses into hiring ex-convicts.

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It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…It’s Government Man!

I’ve used the Superman theme to make fun of Obama’s shallow understanding of the Constitution and to express disgust about a bureaucrat ripping off taxpayers.

Now there’s a well-timed Jim McKee cartoon that looks at government’s super intrusiveness.

Jim McKee is relatively new to me, but he does great work. You can see some of his other cartoons here and here.

Regular readers know that I’m very fond of cartoons that portray government as fat and bloated slob. For other examples, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

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Which Group Is More Despicable, IRS Bureaucrats or the Politicians who Created the Tax Code?

The title of this post is sort of like the age-old question of what came first, the chicken or the egg.

Should we blame politicians for our corrupt, loophole-ridden, abusive tax system?

Or should we focus our ire on the IRS, which seems to go above and beyond the call of duty to oppress innocent people?

I’ve generally directed my hostility to the politicians, but the latest IRS scandal is leading me to reassess my views.

This Lisa Benson cartoon captures the mentality of the tax collection bureaucracy.

The problem isn’t that the IRS wasted money at boondoggle conferences. Every government agency and department pisses away money in a frivolous fashion.

We should be far more worried about the IRS’s callous disregard of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

I’ve said many times that fundamental tax reform is the answer, but that’s only part of the story.

So long as we have a big and bloated government, the politicians are going to want some sort of oppressive bureaucracy to extract several trillion dollars of our money every year.

So if we really want to clip the wings of the IRS, we better figure out how to restore limited, constitutional government.

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Welfare Bureaucrat Figuratively Screws Taxpayers, Decides that’s not Enough

John Geary is not a good person.

He’s been a bureaucrat for about a decade, which almost surely means he’s over-paid and under-worked.

Not only is he a bureaucrat, but his job is to distribute welfare, which means he’s been screwing taxpayers and trapping poor people into government dependency.

But apparently he wasn’t satisfied with screwing taxpayers and poor people, at least in the figurative sense of the word. Here’s some of a report from a local CBS station.

A state welfare worker is facing charges after allegedly offering benefits in exchange for sex. …According to the police criminal complaint, Geary also repeatedly asked the woman to smoke crack with him on the weekends when his wife was working and his children were asleep in their North Versailles home. …Police think there may be more victims as Geary allegedly told the woman that he had done the same thing with women in the past.

Gee, he sounds like a really swell guy and a model husband and father, wouldn’t you agree?

P.S. Perhaps Mr. Geary should be the first non-recipient member of the Moocher Hall of Fame?

P.P.S. Furthermore, we could include this in the Great-Moments-in-Local-Government series. Previous versions can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Why the IRS Persecuted the Tea Party and How to Fix the Problem

Did President Obama and his team of Chicago cronies deliberately target the Tea Party in hopes of thwarting free speech and political participation?

Was this part of a campaign to win the 2012 election by suppressing Republican votes?

Perhaps, but I’ve warned that it’s never a good idea to assume top-down conspiracies when corruption, incompetence, politics, ideology, greed, and self-interest are better explanations for what happens in Washington.

Writing for the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney has a much more sober and realistic explanation of what happened at the IRS.

If you take a group of Democrats who are also unionized government employees, and put them in charge of policing political speech, it doesn’t matter how professional and well-intentioned they are. The result will be much like the debacle in the Cincinnati office of the IRS. …there’s no reason to even posit evil intent by the IRS officials who formulated, approved or executed the inappropriate guidelines for picking groups to scrutinize most closely. …The public servants figuring out which groups qualified for 501(c)4 “social welfare” non-profit status were mostly Democrats surrounded by mostly Democrats. …In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown. This is an environment where even those trying to be fair could develop a disproportionate distrust of the Tea Party. One IRS worker — a member of NTEU and contributor to its PAC, which gives 96 percent of its money to Democratic candidates — explained it this way: “The reason NTEU mostly supports Democratic candidates for office is because Democratic candidates are mostly more supportive of civil servants/government employees.”

Tim concludes with a wise observation.

As long as we have a civil service workforce that leans Left, and as long as we have an income tax system that requires the IRS to police political speech, conservative groups can always expect special IRS scrutiny.

And my colleague Doug Bandow, in an article for the American Spectator, adds his sage analysis.

The real issue is the expansive, expensive bureaucratic state and its inherent threat to any system of limited government, rule of law, and individual liberty. …the broader the government’s authority, the greater its need for revenue, the wider its enforcement power, the more expansive the bureaucracy’s discretion, the increasingly important the battle for political control, and the more bitter the partisan fight, the more likely government officials will abuse their positions, violate rules, laws, and Constitution, and sacrifice people’s liberties. The blame falls squarely on Congress, not the IRS.

I actually think he is letting the IRS off the hook too easily.

• It has thieving employees.
• It has incompetent employees.
• It has thuggish employees.
• It has brainless employees.
• It has protectionist employees.
• It has wasteful employees.
• And it has victimizing employees.

But Doug’s overall point obviously is true.

…the denizens of Capitol Hill also have created a tax code marked by outrageous complexity, special interest electioneering, and systematic social engineering. Legislators have intentionally created avenues for tax avoidance to win votes, and then complained about widespread tax avoidance to win votes.

So what’s the answer?

The most obvious response to the scandal — beyond punishing anyone who violated the law — is tax reform. Implement a flat tax and you’d still have an IRS, but the income tax would be less complex, there would be fewer “preferences” for the agency to police, and rates would be lower, leaving taxpayers with less incentive for aggressive tax avoidance. …Failing to address the broader underlying factors also would merely set the stage for a repeat performance in some form a few years hence. …More fundamentally, government, and especially the national government, should do less. Efficient social engineering may be slightly better than inefficient social engineering, but no social engineering would be far better.

Amen. Let’s rip out the internal revenue code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax.

But here’s the challenge. We know the solution, but it will be almost impossible to implement good policy unless we figure out some way to restrain the spending side of the fiscal ledger.

At the risk of over-simplifying, we will never get tax reform unless we figure out how to implement entitlement reform.

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Jim McKee vs the IRS

Notwithstanding the title of this post, this is not a story about a taxpayer fighting against the IRS. If you want that kind of story (and if you have a strong stomach), you can read about how an IRS thug named Robert Norlander tried to ruin the life of a guy named Charlie Engle.

Or, on a lighter note, you can read about Evan Mathis and his “encounter” with the IRS. But that’s not today’s topic either.

Instead, we’re introducing a new political cartoonist named Jim McKee, who came to my attention when a reader recommended his work in the comment section of a post featuring about 10 other cartoons about the IRS scandal.

As you can see from these cartoons, I’m very happy to be introduced to Jim McKee, particularly since he’s generating some great material about the IRS scandal. Let’s start with a cartoon he produced that calls attention to the fact that an IRS hack pleaded the fifth even though taxpayers don’t have similar rights when confronted by tax collectors.

And here’s another good one, which reminds me of the Glenn Foden cartoon in this post.

By the way, the IRS actually is concerned about its image. This is the bureaucracy, after all, that decided to squander $15 million of our money on a PR campaign.

Anyhow, McKee has given us some very amusing cartoons. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that we have a terrible tax code, which is enforced by some terrible people.

The politicians deserve most of the blame, but you can see from these examples that the IRS bureaucracy deserves scorn.

• It has thieving employees.
• It has incompetent employees.
• It has thuggish employees.
• It has brainless employees.
• It has protectionist employees.
• It has wasteful employees.
• And it has victimizing employees.

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Cartoonists v. the IRS

Call me perverse, but I’m enjoying this IRS scandal. It’s good to see them suffer a tiny fraction of the agony they impose on the American people.

I’ve already shared a couple of cartoons on the topic, and I also posted a photo from my newest sports hero that captures how most of us feel about the least-favorite part of the federal behemoth.

Now let’s enjoy some additional cartoons. Let’s start with one from Michael Ramirez, which appropriately mocks Obama for saying we shouldn’t fear the government.

Here’s Henry Payne’s contribution, which reminds me that the IRS actually expects us to believe they didn’t engage in political bias.

And Ken Catalino suggests that the federal government treats Americans with the same suspicion and hostility accorded to terrorists.

Though we should be happy that we’re not being targeted for drone attack. At least not yet.

Speaking of targeting, here’s another Catalino cartoon that recreates a meeting at the IRS.

I like this Glenn Foden cartoon, if for no other reason that it would be nice to see taxpayers march on Washington to slay the IRS monster.

Here’s another Foden cartoon, which I like because it has the same theme as this Jerry Holbert cartoon, showing big government as a destructive and malicious force.

These two Eric Allie cartoons (here and here) have a more charitable interpretation, implying that the damage is unintentional.

Here’s another gem from Ramirez, winner of my cartoonist contest.

Lisa Benson weighs in with a cartoon on the army of drones. Sort of like this very good Glenn McCoy cartoon.

Here’s another cartoon from Henry Payne, showing Obama’s faux scolding of the IRS.

Last but not least, this Chuck Asay cartoon may be the best of the bunch. When we get in trouble with the IRS (even if we’ve done nothing wrong), we’re guilty ’til we prove ourselves innocent.

Too bad we can’t exercise our rights, just like the IRS hack who just pleaded the fifth and refused to answer questions about her role in the scandal.

Now that I’ve shared all these cartoons, let’s remember that we should assign some of the blame to politicians.

And I’m not referring to the President and the culture of corruption and Chicago-style sleaze that seems to be engulfing the Obama Administration.

I’m talking about the constant legislative tinkering and the 74,000 pages of Byzantine complexity that has been created in the 100 years since the income tax was created.

However, there are many reasons why the IRS bureaucracy deserves scorn.

• It has thieving employees.
• It has incompetent employees.
• It has thuggish employees.
• It has brainless employees.
• It has protectionist employees.
• It has wasteful employees.
• And it has victimizing employees.

So let’s pass the flat tax, but never forget that a disproportionate share of bad people seem drawn to government.

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Let’s Thank President Obama for Reminding Americans that They Should Distrust the IRS

Last week, while writing about the latest IRS scandal, I noted that the IRS has a long record of abusive actions.

• It has thieving employees.
• It has incompetent employees.
• It has thuggish employees.
• It has brainless employees.
• And it has victimizing employees.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn that it also has politically biased employees.

But some Americans probably are shocked. So I want to be the first to publicly thank President Obama for – at the very least – presiding over a culture that gave IRS bureaucrats the green light to engage in this kind of misbehavior.

Why am I thanking Obama? For the simple reason that this scandal means that more Americans now understand that the IRS is a venal agency. And that presumably means that more Americans now realize we should junk the internal revenue code and implement a simple and fair flat tax.

Since I’m in an expansive and sharing mood, I think we also owe some appreciation to some of the good people who are helping to publicize the IRS’s despicable behavior.

Let’s start with George Will, who is predictably – and bitingly – critical.

…the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities. …we are told that a few wayward souls in Cincinnati, with nary a trace of political purpose, targeted for harassment political groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their titles.  …Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.

I also like that Will took the opportunity to criticize the worst (or at least close-to-worst) President in American history.

Time was, progressives like the president 100 years ago, Woodrow Wilson, had the virtue of candor: He explicitly rejected the Founders’ fears of government. Modern enlightenment, he said, made it safe to concentrate power in Washington, and especially in disinterested executive-branch agencies run by autonomous, high-minded experts. Today, however, progressivism’s insinuation is that Americans must be minutely regulated because they are so dimwitted they will swallow nonsense. Such as: There was no political motive in the IRS targeting political conservatives.

How painfully true. Sheep are not famous for their intelligence. And as the American people learn to be passively dependent on government, presumably we will acquire more sheep-like characteristics.

But the firestorm of protest leads me to think we’re not at that stage. At least not yet.

The lawless and abusive IRS even got Michael Gerson agitated.

…most Americans, myself included, become libertarians when a policeman is rude and swaggering during a traffic stop. Give me that badge number. It is precisely because police powers are essential to the public good that abusing them is so offensive. The same holds for overzealous or corrupt airport-security agents. And it is doubly true with IRS personnel who misuse their broad and intimidating powers. It is enough to bring out the Samuel Adams in anyone.

And here’s what my colleague Gene Healy wrote about the IRS’s history of political shenanigans.

Past presidents have found the IRS an extremely useful piece of federal machinery for that purpose. A lot of what we know about that sordid history comes from the Senate Select Committee on intelligence abuses, chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, in the mid-’70s. As Chris Hayes wrote in the Nation in 2006, “Church and many Democrats…soon found that presidents of both parties were culpable: “Secret documents obtained by the committee even revealed that the sainted FDR had ordered IRS audits of his political enemies.” In “The Lawless State,” his account of the Church Committee revelations, Morton Halperin noted that “the first organized political ‘strike force’ was formed within the IRS in 1961, and was directed against right-wing political groups.” In this case, I doubt there was ever a JFK or Nixon-style direct command from on high to harass the Tea Party. It’s more likely to be a case of “proactive” bureaucrats inspired by presidential railing against the Tea Party and Citizens United: “Will no one rid me of these meddlesome right-wing freaks?”

Let’s close with a couple of good cartoons.

The first one reminds me of the joke that “Service” is part of the IRS’s name, but only in the way that a bull services a cow.

The humor is a bit darker in this cartoon, but the message is the same.

P.S. Since I’m in such a good mood,  I’ll share some of my other IRS humor, including a new Obama 1040 form, a death tax cartoon, a list of tax day tips from David Letterman, a cartoon of how GPS would work if operated by the IRS, an IRS-designed pencil sharpener, two Obamacare/IRS cartoons (here and here), a sale on 1040-form toilet paper (a real product), a song about the tax agency, the IRS’s version of the quadratic formula, and (my favorite) a joke about a Rabbi and an IRS agent.

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Anti-Gun Zealotry Has Morphed from PC Silliness to Government Thuggery

Mostly for the humor value, I’ve shared stories about brainless anti-gun political correctness by America’s “educators.”

I realize this is a serious issue and I should be figuratively banging my fist on the podium and demanding negative consequences for these foolish teachers and school administrators.

But I share my outrage for stories like this one from New Jersey.

“Take him from his parents and send him to a foster home!”

New Jersey police and Dept. of Children and Families officials raided the home of a firearms instructor and demanded to see his guns after he posted a Facebook photo of his 11-year-old son holding a rifle. …The family’s trouble started Saturday night when Moore received an urgent text message from his wife. The Carneys Point Police Dept. and the New Jersey Dept. of Children and Families had raided their home.

Thankfully, this absurd exercise in government overreach met with stiff resistance.

Moore immediately called [his lawyer] Nappen and rushed home to find officers demanding to check his guns and his gun safe. Instead, he handed the cell phone to one of the officers – so they could speak with Nappen. “If you have a warrant, you’re coming in,” Nappen told the officers. “If you don’t, then you’re not. That’s what privacy is all about.” …“I was told I was being unreasonable and that I was acting suspicious because I wouldn’t open my safe,” Moore wrote on the Delaware Open Carry website. “They told me they were going to get a search warrant. I told them to go ahead.” …The attorney said police eventually left and never returned. “He has a Fourth Amendment right and he’s not going to give up his Fourth Amendment right or his Second Amendment right,” he said. “They didn’t have a warrant – so see you later.”

But let’s not be too optimistic just because this story ended well.

…the person who reported the false allegations of abuse cannot be held liable, she noted. “You can’t be prosecuted for making an allegation of child abuse –even if it’s false,” she said. Nappen said what happened to the Moore family should serve as a warning to gun owners across the nation. “To make someone go through this because he posted a picture of his son with a .22 rifle on his Facebook page is pretty outrageous,” he said.

We should all be outraged by this story. You don’t need a vivid imagination to see that this type of nanny-state-meets-the-jackboot- state thuggery could become more prevalent – and a lot uglier – in the future.

Raising my kids right

I’ll be taking my kids out to the High Lonesome Ranch in May, and we’ll be doing some shooting. And when they were much younger, my kids enjoyed their opportunity to shred some soda cans with an AK-47. I can only imagine what might have happened if I had taken some photos and posted them (not that Facebook existed in the primitive 1990s).

Let’s close by being thankful for the Founding Fathers. They bequeathed to us a Bill of Rights that includes a 2nd Amendment and a 4th Amendment. I know my conservative friends appreciate the former, but I hope this story helps them realize that the latter is also important as a bulwark against government thuggery. It’s for that reason that I once had the unusual experience of siding with Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Clarence Thomas!

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If the NoToMob Gang Is any Indication, there’s Still Hope for England

The spirit of 1776 is still alive in America. We see it in the Tea Party, which has forced real changes in Washington.

We also see it in little ways, such as the heroic actions of Jay Beeber, who single-handedly killed dangerous red light cameras in Los Angeles.

But I don’t want to be jingoistic. We also find pockets of rebellion against greedy and thuggish government elsewhere in the world.

So even though I’ve made fun of the English for statism and political correctness, I want to share some encouraging excerpts from a story in the UK-based Telegraph.

Meet the NoTo Mob, a group dedicated to fighting what they see as unfair parking tickets and charges. During the week they’re normal blokes (and the odd woman). …But on Saturdays they come together for a common cause. They follow council CCTV cars, or “spy cars”, then stand nearby holding signs to warn drivers about the presence of a CCTV vehicle and potential fine if they break the rules.Motorists pull over, wave or give the thumbs up in gratitude. Complete strangers have been known to hug them in support.

Freedom Fighters!

Having been victimized by revenue cameras (which inevitably are set up where speed limits are absurdly low), I would gladly hug one of these blokes if they operated in the United States.

These ordinary men and women fully recognize that these cameras are designed to generate more revenue for government, not to promote safety.

The group targets “honey pots” – high-ticket areas with confusing road markings or unclear signs where the CCTV cars are most likely to operate. …The NoTo Mob…feels motorists are being used as cash cows. “I was near a bus lane and asked drivers who pulled over, ‘Did you see that sign?’ They replied, ‘What sign?’ They didn’t realise. They’d have got a fine if they’d driven down it. “It’s exploiting the average motorist, it’s disproportionate and it’s plain wrong. It’s highway robbery.”

Since I’m praising our English cousins, I suppose it’s also appropriate to give credit to the English government for not outlawing the NoToMob.

In the United States, I’m embarrassed to admit, you can get in trouble for warning other motorists about speed traps.

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Is It Okay to Steal if You’re from the Government?

In early January, I shared a “libertarian purity test” based on 64 questions.

I was a bit disappointed that I only scored a 94 out of a possible 160, but my excuse is that it was really a test of anarcho-capitalism. And as I explained when sharing this amusing video, I’m only in favor of getting rid of 90 percent of government.

But maybe the simplest test of libertarianism (and also the simplest test of whether you’re a decent human being) is to see whether you’re upset by the following story.

It combines the lunacy of the drug war with the evil of asset forfeiture.

Here are some of the truly disgusting details from the OC Weekly. First we learn about the victims of this government abuse.

…he and his wife purchased the Anaheim building, which has suites for up to 12 offices, in 2003 and that her dental practice was located there. …Over the years, they’ve rented to a variety of tenants, from insurance companies to an immigration service.

This unfortunate couple rented space to a group that seemed to comply with federal and state legal requirements.

…on June 11, 2011, he began renting to a club called ReLeaf Health & Wellness. …Because of the Ogden memo, because medical marijuana was legal under state law, and because his tenants held business permits from the city, he figured he wasn’t doing anything illegal. “I am a law-abiding citizen,” he says. “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

But the city of Anaheim and the jackboots at the Drug Enforcement Administration targeted the tenant, and then decided to try and steal the property of the landlord!

…On Dec. 2, 2011, an undercover officer posing as a patient with a legitimate doctor’s recommendation for cannabis—something required of all entrants to the collective—”purchased 4.2 net grams of marijuana for $37.” The investigation ended there, but the single sale…was enough evidence for the DEA to argue that the otherwise-harmless computer engineer and dentist should lose their retirement-investment property. …The lawyer for the engineer and dentist who may be in the process of losing their nest egg is Matthew Pappas. …”The only evidence in this case is a $37 purchase of medical marijuana and an anonymous comment on a website that anybody could have written,” Pappas says. “For this, they want to take a $1.5 million building.”

You may be thinking that you missed something, that certainly the federal government wouldn’t steal an entire building simply because a tenant may have broken a silly drug law. Especially when it’s very ambiguous whether a crime actually took place.

But you didn’t miss a thing. This is pure, unadulterated, evil government.

And if you’re not already feeling some libertarian blood flowing through your veins, here are some additional examples of government thuggery.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• A family in legal trouble because it rescued a baby deer.
• A women jailed overnight because she let her kids play outside.
• Cops legally stole $17,000 from a man who committed no crime.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

Yes, this is why we’re paying taxes. And Obama just got one tax increase and now he’s asking for another tax increase!

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George Orwell Surely Would Be Amused by the Statolatry in the United Kingdom

I just finished up a trip to London.

In previous posts, I’ve expressed pessimism about the future of the United Kingdom, largely because all political parties have a statist mentality.

I criticized Gordon Brown, the former Labor Party Prime Minister, for being a compulsive redistributionist, big spender, and taxaholic.

But nothing’s really changed under Tory leadership. David Cameron is a vacuous statist, undermining the Conservative Party in the same way that George W. Bush eroded the brand name capital of the Republican Party.

This sign was on a train I rode today. It is sponsored by the UK version of the IRS,  and it pretty much symbolizes how the United Kingdom has turned into a predatory state.

The United Kingdom is in terrible fiscal shape. Government spending has reached record levels, and now consumes a larger share of economic output than the public sectors in failed welfare states such as Spain.

And what are taxpayers getting for their money, other than Orwellian signs?

Not much. They get an increasingly dysfunctional society filled with scroungers such as Natalija, Gina and Danny.

They also get a healthcare system that seemingly prides itself on maltreatment, and a tax system that is more designed to be punitive rather than to generate revenue.

Though the UK government does provide taxpayer-financed sex tours to Amsterdam, so at least a few people are getting screwed as a result of government rather than by the government.

But let’s close by contemplating the mindset of a government that would post such a sign. We already know that Prime Minister Cameron and some of his senior deputies think it’s wrong to engage in legal tax avoidance.

And this is a government that is brainwashing kids into becoming servile snitches, and is even considering a system that would have employers send paychecks to the state and then the government would decide how much to send to taxpayers.

Such a shame since so much of what is good in the Western World came from England.

P.S. This is also a country where they send innocent people to jail for shooting burglars.

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Private Schools in India Serve the Poor, but Can They Survive Attacks by Government?

I’m a libertarian because I believe in individual freedom and greater prosperity, but what really motivates me is the desire to protect people from predatory government.

So even though the economist in me wants to reduce the burden of government spending and implement a flat tax because such policies will boost growth and lead to higher living standards, I also want those policies because I don’t like it when interest groups use the coercive power of government to obtain unearned wealth.

And what gets me most upset is when those special interests use their corrupt connections with the political elite to screw the poor. That’s why I despise policies such as corporate subsidies, bailouts and minimum wage laws.

So you’ll understand why I’m particularly upset that the government of India is now trying to undermine opportunity for the poor by shutting down private schools

Here are some of the odious details.

Heera Ballabh walks his youngest son, Pankaj, to school through two kilometres of narrow lanes. He hopes a good eduction will propel the boy out of the cramped lower-class neighbourhood they call home and into middle-class life. But this aspiration hangs in the balance because legislation will force the privately run school Pankaj attends to close as it does not meet the requirements stipulated by the government.

The Ballabh family is not unusual. Because the government schools do a terrible job, there are millions of poor families who are sacrificing to send their kids to private schools.

…Pankaj attends the Pioneer Public School. It is among 2,000 low-fee private schools in Delhi facing closure, threatening to displace more than 500,000 pupils, most of them in primary school. Across India, about 300,000 schools, with an estimated 15 million pupils, may have to close, said Shantanu Gupta, the associate director of the School Choice Campaign with the Centre for Civil Society, a non-profit research and educational organisation.

Apparently embarrassed by the fact that so many millions of poor families would rather pay for good private schools than go to free state institutions, the government is  trying to regulate the private schools out of existence.

…The criteria for private schools to remain open include meeting a minimum requirement for the size of its premises, higher teacher salaries, and government certification. Mr Ballabh would rather pay several hundred rupees a month out of his meagre salary as a private tutor to send his son to Pioneer than to a government school. Although there are no tuition fees at state schools and textbooks and lunches are free, teachers are often absent and there can be up to 80 students per class, he said. Studies published by the Centre for Civil Society showed that schools such as Pioneer perform better than government schools.

Not surprisingly, the government doesn’t want to judge private schools on the basis of performance.

…Mr Gupta said…”The requirements should be performance-based instead of looking at how much land is available to build a school,” …One of the states that has managed to bridge the gap between the requirements of the act and the realities on the ground is Gujarat, said Mr Gupta, where the land requirement was done away with and schools are judged on pupils’ performance.

I’ve previously identified some truly despicable people on this blog (Robert Murphy, Michael Wolfensohn, Olga Stefou and the British moocher mom). Well, I think Ashok Agarwal may beat them in the contest to be the worst person in the world. He’s the one who launched the attack against so-called unauthorised schools.

…there are those who say such schools must be forced to close if the education system is to be improved in India. “We have an act that clearly defines what a school is and that must be respected,” said Ashok Agarwal, a lawyer and an education activist who filed a public interest litigation in 2006 seeking the closure of unauthorised schools.

Mr. Agarwal admits that the government schools don’t work, but he thinks he should have the right to decide what is best for other people’s children. What a disgusting human being.

“We admit our education system has been derailed but we are trying to fix it, and if you are unhappy with how government schools are run then pressure the government to make changes but don’t put your children in substandard schools,” he said.

The same issues exist in the United States. Children from poor families often are in neighborhoods where the government schools are a dismal failure.

Leftists want to use this horrible performance as an excuse to throw more tax dollars into a failing system, but this amazing chart shows that huge increases in staff and money have not helped the system.

School choice is one of the best ways of giving poor kids an opportunity for a brighter future. But the teacher unions are opposed, largely because they want to protect their privileged status.

That’s reprehensible, but understandable. What’s unforgivable, though, is when politicians like Barack Obama and groups such as the NAACP side with the unions, putting political power ahead of progress and opportunity for kids.

Shame of people in the United States who put government before kids. And shame on people in India who also put the interests of the state before the interests of children.

P.S. Here’s a video explaining why school choice is better than a government-run monopoly.

P.P.S. Read here how Chile has achieved great results with school choice.

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Great Moments in State Government: Pinhead Bureaucrats Threaten Family with Possible Prison Sentence for Rescuing a Baby Deer

As a public finance economist, I normally focus on big-picture arguments against excessive government.

If the public sector is too large, for instance, that undermines economic growth by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy.

The damage is then compounded by a needlessly destructive and punitive tax system.

But I’ve also discovered that it helps to personalize the analysis by pointing out examples of ridiculous and wasteful behavior by government.

From England: The world’s most useless sign

That’s one of the reasons I share horror stories as part of the U.S. vs U.K. government stupidity contest.

Some actions by government, however, belong in a different category. I’m not sure what word I would choose to describe them – perhaps venal, evil, despicable, reprehensible, or disgusting would be good options.

Am I being overly dramatic? Perhaps, but is there any other reaction when the government persecutes a family with possible jail time for rescuing Bambi?

Here are some absurd and disturbing details from the Indianapolis Star.

When Connersville police officer Jeff Counceller first encountered the baby deer, she was curled up in the corner of a front porch.It was clear the fawn was injured. Counceller could see the wounds… If left to its own, the animal would surely die… So the Councellers took in the deer, which they named Dani, cleaned and dressed its wounds and nursed it back to health, all with the intention of turning it out into the wild once it was big enough and strong enough to have a chance on its own. …she was unable to stand, and her maggot-infested wound was ugly. The Councellers contacted DNR at the time but were told to return the deer to the wild and let nature take its course. “It would have been a death sentence,” Jeff said.

So the family did what any decent people would do. They nursed the deer back to health. But decency and government often are in conflict.

Trouble is, what the Councellers did is against the law. Now, more than two years after rescuing the deer, more than six months after conservation officers began an investigation, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources wants them prosecuted. …DNR officials began an investigation that entailed half a dozen visits to their home and numerous calls to local authorities. In July, the agency issued an eight-page report and asked for a special prosecutor from another county to handle the case. Why the charges are being sought now — six months later — isn’t clear.

Bureaucrats wanted to kill this baby deer

I think the answer is obvious. The bureaucrats from the Department of Natural Resources are sulking because their imperious demands weren’t obeyed.

So they’re lashing out at an innocent family, as indicated by the following excerpts.

…when the DNR came calling, the Councellers say they were almost ready to release Dani back into the woods. They were just waiting for the summer drought to pass and the nearby corn crops to mature enough to offer cover and food for Dani. They say they weren’t aware it was illegal to keep the deer.

That’s when the bureaucratic nightmare began.

When the DNR began its investigation, the Councellers say the conservation officer suggested they obtain a rescue permit. But that was denied. Soon, the DNR said the deer must be euthanized, that it was a safety threat to humans.

Fortunately, an unknown good Samaritan intervened and freed Dani before the government could kill the helpless animal.

But on the day of Dani’s scheduled execution, the deer turned up missing, its enclosure left open. The Councellers say they didn’t arrange the escape or know how the deer was freed but acknowledge that they didn’t probe too deeply to find out.

But no good deed goes unpunished when spiteful bureaucrats are involved.

…there was nothing but silence from the DNR until the Councellers received notice of the charges earlier this month. They plan to fight the case, even though jail is unlikely and the lawyer costs — which could reach $5,000 — are significantly higher than a likely fine. It’s a matter of principle, they say. They don’t want to plead guilty for trying to help an animal and when they had no criminal intent.

Not surprisingly, the rest of the community is on the side of the deer (and the persecuted family). Indeed, there’s even a Facebook page for folks who want to register their displeasure with this example of government thuggery.

“People are outraged at the DNR and that the government has nothing better to do than harass these people,” said John Waudby, an Indianapolis man who created the Facebook page after hearing about the story. “Anybody in their right mind would have done the same thing.”

All things considered, this story from Indiana shouldn’t be part of the government stupidity and incompetence contest. Given the venality of the bureaucrats, it belongs with this list of horrifying examples of government thuggery.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• A women jailed overnight because she let her kids play outside.
• Cops legally stole $17,000 from a man who committed no crime.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

In a just world, a court will immediately dismiss the charges against the Counceller family.

I would urge that the family then be awarded damages, but that’s not the right response. The bureaucrats would merely shrug and let taxpayers pick up the cost.

The only good outcome is to unceremoniously fire every bureaucrat who played a role in this outrageous episode.

Like most bureaucrats, I suspect the pinheads at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources are overpaid. So losing their pampered positions would be genuine punishment and it would send a message to the rest of the paper pushers not to harass innocent and good people.

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For Nutty English Bureaucrats, Ideological Bias and Political Correctness Are More Important than the Well-Being of Children

Earlier this month, as part of my ongoing series comparing bone-headed bureaucracy in both the United States and United Kingdom, I wrote a post about a moronic green-energy subsidy program in the U.K. that was so convoluted that nobody in the entire country signed up for it.

Only government could be so bloody incompetent that it can’t even do a good job of giving away subsidies and handouts.

Since I’m a big believer if fairness (properly defined), I normally take turns in this series, first featuring an example of government stupidity in the U.K., followed by an example of foolish bureaucracy in the U.S., and so on and so on.

But I have to break the pattern. Check out these excerpts from a story about English bureaucrats deciding that a foster family no longer could take of kids because they support the United Kingdom Independence Party, which doesn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

The husband and wife, who have been fostering for nearly seven years, said they were made to feel like criminals when a social worker told them that their views on immigration made them unsuitable carers. …Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, described the actions of Rotherham borough council as “a bloody outrage” and “political prejudice of the very worst kind”. …The couple, who do not want to be named to avoid identifying the children they have fostered, are in their late 50s and live in a neat detached house in a village in South Yorkshire. The husband was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years and works with disabled people, while his wife is a qualified nursery nurse. Former Labour voters, they have been approved foster parents for nearly seven years and have looked after about a dozen different children, one of them in a placement lasting four years. They took on the three children — a baby girl, a boy and an older girl, who were all from an ethnic minority and a troubled family background — in September in an emergency placement. They believe that the youngsters thrived in their care. The couple were described as “exemplary” foster parents: the baby put on weight and the older girl even began calling them “mum and dad”. However, just under eight weeks into the placement, they received a visit out of the blue from the children’s social worker at the Labour-run council and an official from their fostering agency. They were told that the local safeguarding children team had received an anonymous tip-off that they were members of Ukip. The wife recalled: “I was dumbfounded. Then my question to both of them was, ‘What has Ukip got to do with having the children removed?’ “Then one of them said, ‘Well, Ukip have got racist policies’. The implication was that we were racist. [The social worker] said Ukip does not like European people and wants them all out of the country to be returned to their own countries. “I’m sat there and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is going off here?’ because I wouldn’t have joined Ukip if they thought that. I’ve got mixed race in my family. I said, ‘I am absolutely offended that you could come in my house and accuse me of being a member of a racist party’.”

What a disgusting mix of ideological bias and political correctness.

I agree that government officials shouldn’t place children in homes where there’s racism. So if the bureaucrats discovered that a household had people from the English equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan or the New Black Panther Party, then it’s understandable and appropriate that they don’t get to take care of foster children.

But I’ve met many people from UKIP and I keep close track of what’s happening in the English political world. From everything that I can tell, UKIP is a mainstream political party that seems most concerned about the loss of sovereignty to the European Union.

Are there some racists in UKIP? I’m sure that some exist, just as there racists in the Labour Party, Conservative Party, and Liberal Democratic Party. And, for what it’s worth, there are some racist Republicans and some racist Democrats. Like other collectivist impulses, racism is probably an inherent flaw in the human species.

But I’m digressing. The purpose of this post is to express disgust at bureaucrats in England who decided that belonging to UKIP automatically meant a foster family was racist. Even worse, these bureaucrats then took three children from this family, which means they put political correctness and ideological bias ahead of the best interests of the kids.

Let’s hope that those children aren’t now stuck in an orphanage or some other sub-standard form of institutionalized care.

P.S. If you want to be entertained and to learn more about UKIP, I’ve posted some remarkable videos of their MEPs as they speak at the European Parliament.

Farage is the head of UKIP, and he completely skewers the head bureaucrats of the European Commission in this speech.

His most famous speeches specifically eviscerated the “damp dishrag” of the European Commission.

Here’s Nigel Farage mocking European bailouts.

And since you know my favorite issue is tax competition, you’ll understand why I like these two short speeches by UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

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A Journalist’s First-Hand Report on the Corrupt Secrecy of an International Bureaucracy

As a taxpayer, I’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies. They consume a lot of money, pay themselves extravagant (and tax-free!) salaries, and generally promote statist policies.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is a prime example. Originally created for benign purposes such as gathering statistics, it now is a bloated bureaucracy pursuing an anti-free market agenda.

But international bureaucracies also have a nasty habit of operating in the shadows and using thuggish behavior to thwart critics. And I have the scars to prove it from my efforts to protect fiscal sovereignty.

• Back in 2001, the OECD threatened to boycott its own global anti-tax competition meeting because one of the low-tax jurisdictions had the nerve to make me an adviser to its delegation.
• In 2008, the OECD threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the “crime” of standing in the public lobby of a hotel and providing advice to representatives of so-called tax havens.

But it’s not just the crowd in Paris that doesn’t believe in openness and fair play. A journalist recently traveled to South Korea to report on a World Health Organization conference on tobacco.

This doesn’t sound like the type of event that would involve skullduggery, but here’s part of what the reporter wrote for the Korea Times.

A monumental session during the World Health Organization’s (WHO) convention on tobacco control turned into an alarming attack on transparency, accountability and press freedom. …delegates of the member countries of the conference stripped the media of the ability to cover the meeting and escorted public onlookers from the premises. The decision to meet behind closed doors occurred when a discussion began about efforts to decrease tobacco use by increasing the price of tobacco products. Specifically, the convention attendees were discussing the framework for an international tobacco tax. This is one of the most controversial topics for debate in Seoul this week.

This is what is called a “learning moment.” And the journalist clearly recognized both the WHO’s hypocrisy and its troubling policy agenda.

As a reporter covering this meeting, this was not only a frustrating stance, but it raises some serious questions about an organization that for years has operated largely behind the scenes and without the benefit of much public scrutiny. When is the media more necessary than when an unaccountable, shadowy organization that devours millions of tax dollars each year from people across the world debates getting in the business of issuing global taxes? This effort to silence the press is particularly chilling since it is in direct conflict with the U.N. — the WHO’s parent organization—claims to fight to advance “free, independent and pluralistic media” across the world. Apparently, U.N. and WHO leaders believe in media rights in all cases except when the media covers them.

And remember, you’re paying for this thuggish behavior.

If you want to learn more about the underlying issue, I wrote about the WHO’s push for global tobacco taxation back in both May and September.

All of which is consistent with the broader ongoing push by the United Nations to get worldwide taxing power.

Needless to say, any form of global taxation would be a terrible development, but governments are sympathetic to such schemes since they view tax competition as a constraint on their ability to pursue redistribution and thus a limit on their efforts to buy votes with other people’s money.

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Should Governments Be Allowed to Steal Your Property?

I’ve already written about the despicable practice of “civil forfeiture,” which allows governments to confiscate the property of innocent people who have not been convicted of any crime.

And I’ve cited great columns on the issue from George Will and John Stossel., as well a sobering report on the topic from the Wall Street Journal.

Now the Institute for Justice has a video that should outrage any decent person.

It’s examples of government thuggery like this that make me a libertarian. You should be one as well.

If you need more convincing, check out these horror stories of statist abuse.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• A women jailed overnight because she let her kids play outside.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

But let’s end on a happy note, with a few jokes about cops, one sympathetic, one mocking, and one political.

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Another Disgusting Display of Government Thuggery

When I first read this story about a woman getting arrested because her kids were playing outdoors, I figured it would be a perfect addition for my ongoing series that tries to determine whether the United States or the United Kingdom has the most incompetent, stupid, and/or venal government officials making the most brainless and/or thuggish decisions.

And when you read these excerpts from a newspaper in Houston, you’ll agree that venal and thuggish are very appropriate words.

A stay-at-home mom from La Porte has filed a lawsuit against the city’s police department, an unknown officer and one of her neighbors. Tammy Cooper said she was wrongly accused of endangering her children and was even forced to spend the night in jail, all because she let her kids play outside. …her children, ages 9 and 6, were riding their motorized scooters in the cul-de-sac where they live while she watched from a lawn chair in her front yard just a few feet away. ..a La Porte police car pulled up in front of her home. …He proceeded to tell me he had received a call from one of my neighbors that my kids were riding their scooters unsupervised. Cooper said she was handcuffed, put in the back of a police car and forced to spend the night in jail. …The charges against her were eventually dropped but she still describes the ordeal as humiliating and said her children were even questioned by police and terrified. …”I hope that what I went through doesn’t go unpunished – that there are consequences for a bad decision,” Cooper said.

But as I thought about the story, I got more and more angry. Heck, it’s the kind of story that should get everybody upset. So maybe it belongs in the this-should-turn-everyone-into-a-libertarian category. Sort of like these horrifying examples.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

Though I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding why any ethical person wouldn’t be a libertarian anyhow.

But I’m digressing. Returning to our topic, I very much hope that Mrs. Cooper wins her lawsuit. It’s not against the law for kids to play outside. Even if she was inside watching a soap opera, that shouldn’t matter.

If cops have nothing better to do in La Porte, then perhaps it’s time to downsize the police department. And a good place to start is by firing the thug that arrested a woman for no reason.

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Our Government’s Shameful Priorities: Heavier Punishment for Bank Account Reporting Miscue than for Child Porn

If you can read the following and not get upset, you are not a good person. Please move to France (where higher taxes are “patriotic”) and don’t come back.

I’m engaging in a bit of hyperbole, but you’ll hopefully understand after reading this excerpt from a very disturbing report posted on Zero Hedge.

Jacques Wajsfelner of Weston, Massachusetts is a criminal mastermind. Big time. Like Lex Luthor. But rest easy, ladies and gentlemen, for this nefarious villain is about to face some serious jail time thanks to the courageous work of US government agents. You see, Mr. Wajsfelner was finally caught and convicted of a most heinous crime: failing to disclose his foreign bank account to the US government. Note– he was not convicted of tax evasion. He was not convicted of failing to file or pay taxes. His crime was not filing the annual Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR). Because of his failure to disclose his foreign bank account, Wajsfelner is now looking at FIVE YEARS behind bars in a Day-Glo orange jumpsuit. Oh, one more thing– Wajsfelner is 83 years old. He was born in Germany during the global depression and rise of Adolf Hitler. The Wajsfelner family soon fled the Nazi regime and made its way to the United States.

Please note that Mr. Wajsfelner didn’t get convicted of not paying tax. He got convicted for the utterly trivial and victimless “crime” of not reporting a foreign bank account.

So the government is sending a completely harmless old man to jail for something that shouldn’t be illegal (and if we had a flat tax, there would be no double taxation of saving and investment, so it wouldn’t matter for tax purposes if your bank account was in Georgetown, Kentucky, or Georgetown, Cayman Islands).

Now let’s compare the treatment of Mr. Wajsfelner with the way some real criminals are treated.

Then there’s Eric Higgins of Port Huron, Michigan, who was recently busted for major possession of child pornography and engaging in sexually explicit conversations with juveniles online. He was given 20 months. Oh… and Mr. Higgins was a US Customs & Border Patrol agent. …Or Ricardo Cordero, another US Customs & Border Patrol officer who was given 27-months for personally smuggling 30 Mexican nationals into the United States, and assisting another smuggler to bring 15 Mexican nationals across the border. This genius even had the smuggler testify as a character witness at his divorce proceeding! Or Jon Corzine, former CEO of Goldman Sachs and member of the political elite, who presided over one of the largest plunders in the financial system ever seen during the recent MF Global collapse. He walks the streets freely to this day.

The article closes with a very accurate – but understated – assessment of the federal government.

It seems pretty clear where the US government stands: the victimless crime of failing to report a foreign bank account is far more egregious than, say, possession of child pornography, engaging with minors in online sex chat, bribery, extortion, fraud, and abuse of official power.

This horrifying example of government abuse is a good example of why I’m a libertarian. Yes, I get upset about bloated and counterproductive government spending. And I also get irked by our punitive and destructive class-warfare tax system.

But what gets me most upset is unfair tyranny against powerless people. If your stomach can stand it, here are some more examples.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.

Every one of the government officials involved in these episodes should be fired. And they should consider themselves lucky that tar and feathers are no longer a method of dealing with despicable bureaucrats.

P.S. The Zero Hedge website is also the source of the extremely funny and clever ethnic analysis of Europe.

P.P.S. While I utterly despise bureaucrats who engage in thuggish behavior, I’m not a big fan of bureaucrats in general.

P.P.P.S. The government’s grotesque treatment of Mr. Wajsfelner is part of the overall attack on tax competition. Heaven forbid people have the freedom to benefit from better tax policy in other jurisdictions!

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Read This Horrifying George Will Column and You Will – if You Have any Decency – Become a Libertarian

I periodically provide mind-blowing examples of individuals who have their lives turned upside down by evil bureaucrats.

You may think “evil” is too strong a word, but it sticks in my mind after perusing these examples of abusive actions by the federal government.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.

Now we have a George Will column that will get you very angry. At least if you’re a good person.

Will starts by describing the federal bureaucracy’s attack on an innocent woman for a non-crime.

…our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville’s Ahab, has crippled Nancy Black’s scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees — so far — and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled. Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale-watching ship, was with some watchers in Monterey Bay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at the humpback that had approached her boat, hoping to entice the whale to linger. Back on land, another of her employees called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ask if the whistling constituted “harassment” of a marine mammal, which is an “environmental crime.” NOAA requested a video of the episode, which Black sent after editing it slightly to highlight the whistling. NOAA found no harassment — but got her indicted for editing the tape, calling this a “material false statement” to federal investigators, which is a felony under the 1863 False Claims Act, intended to punish suppliers defrauding the government during the Civil War.

But it gets worse, because the federal jack-boots then raided her office (I don’t even know what “jack-boots” are, but they signify government thuggery, and that’s definitely a good description of what happened).

…after this bizarre charge — that she lied about the interaction with the humpback that produced no charges — more than a dozen federal agents, led by one from NOAA, raided her home. They removed her scientific photos, business files and computers.

This unfortunate woman has also been charged with another non-crime.

She has also been charged with the crime of feeding killer whales when she and two aides were in a dinghy observing them feeding on strips of blubber torn from their prey — a gray whale. To facilitate photographing the killers’ feeding habits, she cut a hole in one of the floating slabs of blubber and, through the hole, attached a rope to stabilize the slab while a camera on a pole recorded the whales’ underwater eating. So she is charged with “feeding” killer whales that were already feeding on a gray whale they had killed. She could more plausibly be accused of interfering with the feeding.

As an aside, Will notes that the NOAA bureaucrats have little regard for the Constitution.

Six years ago, NOAA agents, who evidently consider the First Amendment a dispensable nuisance, told Black’s scientific colleagues not to talk to her and to inform them if they were contacted by her or her lawyers. Since then she has not spoken with one of her best friends.

Most important, he concludes with the key point about how all of us are threatened by Leviathan.

In 1980, federal statutes specified 3,000 criminal offenses; by 2007, 4,450. They continue to multiply. Often, as in Black’s case, they are untethered from the common-law tradition ofmens rea, which holds that a crime must involve a criminal intent — a guilty mind. Legions of government lawyers inundate targets like Black with discovery demands, producing financial burdens that compel the innocent to surrender in order to survive. The protracted and pointless tormenting of Black illustrates the thesis of Harvey Silverglate’s invaluable 2009 book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.” Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, chillingly demonstrates how the mad proliferation of federal criminal laws — which often are too vague to give fair notice of what behavior is proscribed or prescribed — means that “our normal daily activities expose us to potential prosecution at the whim of a government official.” Such laws, which enable government zealots to accuse almost anyone of committing three felonies in a day, do not just enable government misconduct, they incite prosecutors to intimidate decent people who never had culpable intentions. And to inflict punishments without crimes. …The more Americans learn about their government’s abuse of criminal law for capricious bullying, the more likely they are to recoil in a libertarian direction and put Leviathan on a short leash.

Utterly disgusting. As Glenn Reynolds periodically suggests, “tar, feathers” would be an appropriate way of dealing with these hyenas.

By the way, government thuggery is not limited to the crowd in Washington.

• If you have a soul, you will be outraged by this example of a local government abusing poor people.
• If you have decency, you will be disgusted by this example of a state government persecuting someone who didn’t commit a crime.
• If you believe in basic rights, you will be horrified by this example of a foreign government seeking to outlaw political dissent and free speech.

P.S. For the second time, I feel compelled to apologize to Hyenas. They’re part of the natural ecosystem. Thuggish bureaucrats, by contrast, are a malignant and artificial force.

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England’s Despicable Political Class Pushes Soviet-Style Tax Tactics

I wrote last week about David Gauke, a simpering and unctuous statist who said it was “morally wrong” for people to pay cash for services because that made it harder for the state to seize a share of the proceeds.

And last month I condemned the country’s CINO (Conservative in Name Only) Prime Minister for saying that legal tax avoidance is “morally wrong.”

These nauseating examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The U.K. government also has proposed a scheme that would require employers to send employee’s paychecks to the tax police, giving the folks at Inland Revenue the authority to then decide how much can be sent to hapless workers.

Equally disturbing, the government even uses the tax authority and the education system to propagandize kids – even to the point of asking information about people they know who aren’t fully obedient to the state.

Here are excerpts from a report in the Telegraph.

HMRC has set up teaching modules to guide children through the hazards of pay as you earn and National Insurance contributions. Some of the modules – which can be downloaded from HMRC’s website – teach school children as young as 11 about paying their fair share of tax. …One lesson plan – targeted at 14 to 16 year olds – requires students to “discuss whether it is good to pay the tax we do, considering the benefits we receive. If it is good, then why do people try not to pay?” It continues: “Show class the remaining factfile slides on tax evasion. What do students think of those who refuse to pay tax…? “Can they think of any example they may have heard of in their local area?” …The modules were criticised by thinktank Civitas. David Green, its director, said: “This sounds a bit too ‘Big Brotherish’. People ‘in their local area’ are most likely to be parents or close relatives. Turning children into state spies is un-British.”

The government denies that it collects and uses the information as part of its tax enforcement activities.

An HMRC spokesman said…”We certainly don’t use this to collect information on tax evaders from children. These materials are solely designed to help children to learn about how tax works in Britain.”

I’m willing to assume that the government is being honest about its actions today, but that doesn’t mean the statists won’t decide to expand the system in the future. After all, that is the history of government.

But even in the unlikely event that the tax police never utilize the system to encourage snitching, it is still disgusting and reprehensible that the government is brainwashing children into being compliant serfs.

P.S. The statists in the U.K. say money is needed to fund important social services, but these examples (here and here) show that dysfunctional and destructive impact of the welfare system, and this post (as well as all the examples linked at the end of the post) show that the government-run healthcare system leaves a lot to be desired.

P.P.S. But the U.K. government needs more money. After all, how else can it have taxpayer-financed sex trips to Amsterdam?

P.P.P.S. Thuggish and Orwellian tax enforcement also exists in the United States. You won’t be surprised to learn that Chicago encourages snitches by paying bounties. Yup, the murder capital of the world can’t keep its people safe, but it has resources to implement Soviet-style revenue tactics (and don’t forget the city is against free speech as well).

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Chik-fil-A, Gay Marriage, and the Role of Government

Since I’ve already written that polygamy – regardless of how weird it is – is not something that demands government intervention, you won’t be surprised that I also think that gay marriage is a non-issue.

I don’t care if two guys want to get together. I don’t care if some religion (or some other group) wants to sanction their union, and I don’t care if they want to call it marriage, or make up some new word.

But I also don’t care if some churches don’t want to sanction same-sex unions. And I don’t care if some religious people don’t want to give approval to such relationships.

The good thing about freedom is that there is room for diversity. We all don’t have to be the same and think the same.

Unless, of course, government is involved. Then private differences become policy disputes.

This is why I urged non-intervention in this CNN discussion about whether local governments should discriminate against a restaurant chain merely because the top executive has religious beliefs that irk some politicians.

Some of these local politicians are nothing but Chavez-style  thugs, willing to use government coercion for arbitrary and capricious reasons. I hope my disdain was apparent in the interview.

P.S. Just to show I’m consistent, here’s my post urging that Bush’s pro-marriage program be defunded.

P.P.S. And for those who appreciate humor, there are good gay marriage one-liners among the rest of the jokes you can peruse here, here, and here.

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North Carolina’s Attempted Censorship Shows How State Governments also Are a Threat to Liberty

I spend much of my time focusing on the dangers of a bloated federal government. And if you’ve ever paid attention to the name of this blog, you know I have a special interest in monitoring the ill-advised actions of foreign governments.

But that doesn’t mean I have a Pollyanna view about state governments or local governments. Malfeasance, waste, abuse, fraud, and corruption exist at all levels of government and should be condemned at all levels of government.

And few governments are more deserving of our contempt at this moment in time than the state of North Carolina.

You’ll understand when you watch this video.

The folks at the Institute for Justice do a remarkable job, as you already know if you’ve seen these videos about their fights against the IRS, their battles in defense of property rights, and their campaign against abusive asset forfeiture policies.

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Forcing Taxpayers to Pay for Government Propaganda

It’s not easy being a libertarian, especially if your job is to convince the looters and moochers in Washington that they should stop pilfering. The Cato Institute is a great place to work, to be sure, but my job is akin to standing outside an all-you-can-eat buffet and trying to convince the bloated patrons to munch on celery stalks instead of going in for a 3-hour binge.

To add insult to injury, almost all of my personal interactions with government are unpleasant.

• Governments pull me over and give me tickets for trying to efficiently drive from one location to another.
• Governments coerce me into filling out complicated tax forms in order to give politicians money that will be wasted on vote-buying scams.
• Governments make flying a miserable and time-consuming experience.
• Government officials from Amtrak treat people like pests and criminals rather than valued customers.

But even during my off hours, the annoying presence of government seems to follow me around. Driving back and forth to softball games this past weekend, I was irked that the radio was filled with vapid taxpayer-financed ads from fatherhood.gov and letsmove.gov.

The government apparently has so much money to burn that these empty bits of proselytizing were on conservative talk radio programs!

Now we have a new outrage to add to the list. President Obama is using $20 million of our money so a firm of PR hacks can promote Obamacare.

The Health and Human Services Department has signed a $20 million contract with a public-relations firm to highlight part of the Affordable Care Act. The new, multimedia ad campaign is designed to educate the public about how to stay healthy and prevent illnesses, an HHS official said. …The PR firm Porter Novelli won the…$20 million contract… Porter Novelli did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If this sounds familiar, it may be because the thugs at the IRS recently decided to squander $15 million on a contract to show the tax agency’s warm and fuzzy side. Interestingly, the same Porter Novelli firm got that contract, so they must specialize in sucking on the public teat. What a bunch of reprehensible leeches.

I’m sure there are many other examples of taxpayer-funded propaganda, though the only other two episodes that I recall writing about were the Census Bureau’s grotesque $2.5 million ad during the Super Bowl and dishonest television ads by Government Motors.

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Thieving and Reprehensible Government

I hope you’re a libertarian already. But if you’re not, I hope you’ll be one after you finish reading this post.

And if you’re not a libertarian after reading this post, I suggest you emigrate to Zimbabwe, or some other place where government has unchecked and arbitrary power to steal. You’ll feel right at home.

This post is about the disgusting practice of “asset forfeiture,” which is basically a scheme that allows government to steal people’s property and money.

I’ve already posted a great video from the Institute for Justice about this topic, and I also suggest you read this horror story and this nauseating episode to see how asset forfeiture works in the real world.

Now let’s look at two new examples of theft by government.

Let’s start with some excerpts from a George Will column.

Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: “What country are we in?” He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language. This town’s police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law — which is less permissive than federal law — to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million. The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime.

Is Will’s language over the top? Hardly, as you can see from this excerpt. The government is trying to steal the hotel because a tiny percentage of guests engaged in victimless crimes.

Since 1994, about 30 motel customers have been arrested on drug-dealing charges. Even if those police figures are accurate — the police have a substantial monetary incentive to exaggerate — these 30 episodes involved less than 5/100ths of 1 percent of the 125,000 rooms Caswell has rented over those more than 6,700 days. Yet this is the government’s excuse for impoverishing the Caswells by seizing this property, which is their only significant source of income and all of their retirement security. The government says the rooms were used to “facilitate” a crime. It does not say the Caswells knew or even that they were supposed to know what was going on in all their rooms all the time. Civil forfeiture law treats citizens worse than criminals, requiring them to prove their innocence — to prove they did everything possible to prevent those rare crimes from occurring in a few of those rooms. What counts as possible remains vague.

Amazing. You’re guilty until you prove yourself innocent, even though you’ve done nothing wrong.

The government officials should be the ones arrested and thrown in jail.

Now let’s look at a Huff Post column by Radley Balko.

When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail. She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer’s wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer’s bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. “The police specifically told us to bring cash,” Greer says. “Not a cashier’s check or a credit card. They said cash.” So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she’d be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son. Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers’ cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills — and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

You probably can figure out the rest of the story. Radley’s column has a lot of additional details, but here are a couple of passages to whet your appetite.

The Greers had been subjected to civil asset forfeiture, a policy that lets police confiscate money and property even if they can only loosely connect them to drug activity. The cash, or revenue from the property seized, often goes back to the coffers of the police department that confiscated it. It’s a policy critics say is often abused, but experts told The HuffPost that the way the law is applied to bail money in Brown County is exceptionally unfair. It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family’s money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. “The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money,” Williams says. “Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money.” …Civil asset forfeiture is based on the premise that a piece of property — a car, a pile of cash, a house — can be guilty of a crime. Laws vary from state to state, but generally, law enforcement officials can seize property if they can show any connection between the property and illegal activity. It is then up to the owner of the property to prove in court that he owns it or earned it legitimately. It doesn’t require a property owner to actually be convicted of a crime. In fact, most people who lose property to civil asset forfeiture are never charged.

It’s probably worth noting that this is another example of government stealing when the underlying offense was a victimless crime. I reckon this must be a turbo-charged version of Mitchell’s Law.

P.S. Just in case you’re pro-Drug War, here are some examples of government thuggery that don’t involve persecution of victimless crimes. This post shows how the IRS can run amok, engaging in brutal persecution. And here’s a story of the government targeting a low-level person for inexplicable reasons.

Both these stories should turn you into a raving libertarian. In which case, welcome to the club!

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New IRS Regulation Shows the “Willful Negligence” of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner

I’ve been fighting for more than 10 years to stop an IRS regulation that would force American banks to put foreign tax law above US tax law.

Sadly, I recently lost that battle when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner finalized the third version of the regulation (it was first proposed by Clinton, and then a second version was put forth by the Bush White House).

In previous posts, I explained why this regulation represents bad tax policy and undermines the rule of law. I also have explained that it will hurt the American economy and why it endangers the human rights of people living under tyrannical and thuggish regimes.

But such concerns don’t matter to the tax cheat who is serving as the Treasury Secretary.

Richard Rahn is not happy about this outcome, either, and here is some of what he wrote in the Washington Times.

Over the past several years, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner was warned by many private economists and members of Congress of the adverse consequences of a proposed rule that would force U.S. banks to be uncompensated tax collectors for foreign governments. On April 17, Mr. Geithner issued the rule anyway. …To put it simply, the Obama Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are forcing U.S. banks to report to foreign governments that often are corrupt or worse on lawful deposits their citizens hold in U.S. banks, thus putting those citizens’ lives at risk. As the former governor of Oklahoma and now president of the American Bankers Association, Frank Keating, wrote: “While the IRS minimizes potential security issues, nonresident aliens are unlikely to feel reassured by promises that their information won’t fall into the wrong hands. These pledges could be met with apprehension when countries with questionable human rights records remain on the recipient list. This rule gives nonresident aliens every incentive to pick up and move their deposits elsewhere.” …Looking at the actions and words of Mr. Geithner, you can conclude that he is consciously trying to destroy the U.S. economy, he lacks a sufficient number of brain cells and nerve connections for the job, or his ego and desire to pander to his boss and well-known economic illiterates has caused him to be willfully negligent over and over again. The latter is probably closest to the truth.

What makes this new regulation so disturbing is that it is a gross abuse of the regulatory process. For more than 90 years, Congress has maintained a policy of seeking to attract capital to the American financial system. Lawmakers repeatedly have looked at this issue of “nonresident alien” deposits, and they always have decided that America should be a safe haven for foreigners who want a good place to deposit money.

Yet the IRS, which is supposed to issue regulations that enforce existing law, proposed a regulation that overturns the law. And Geithner approved it. No vote from Congress. No legislation from the White House. No need to bother with the rule of law or democracy (and people wonder why there is rhetoric about a gangster government!).

I cover some of the key points in this video about the proposal.

You may be wondering why the Obama Administration is in favor of such a bad idea. Well, there’s no great mystery. Politicians get very upset if people have the freedom to shift economic activity to jurisdictions with better tax law. This process, known as tax competition, creates pressure for better tax policy.

Statists from all around the world have united in a campaign to undermine tax competition and expand the power of governments to impose bad tax policy. Obama and his team are simply doing their part to advance this dystopic vision.

The implementation of this IRS regulation means we’ve suffered an unfortunate defeat in this battle. So if we care about promoting good policy and restraining the greed of the political class, we need to redouble our efforts.

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When Hugo Chavez Battles Supply and Demand Curves, Guess What Happens?

Haiti may be the poorest nation in the Americas. Cuba may have the dictator with the longest lifespan. But Venezuela arguably has the worst government.

Not the clownish dictator, Hugo Chavez, is trying to repeal the laws of economics. How’s that working out for him?

Well, here’s some of what the New York Times wrote.

By 6:30 a.m., a full hour and a half before the store would open, about two dozen people were already in line. They waited patiently, not for the latest iPhone, but for something far more basic: groceries. …Venezuela is one of the world’s top oil producers at a time of soaring energy prices, yet shortages of staples like milk, meat and toilet paper are a chronic part of life here, often turning grocery shopping into a hit or miss proposition. Some residents arrange their calendars around the once-a-week deliveries made to government-subsidized stores like this one, lining up before dawn to buy a single frozen chicken before the stock runs out. Or a couple of bags of flour. Or a bottle of cooking oil. The shortages affect both the poor and the well-off, in surprising ways. A supermarket in the upscale La Castellana neighborhood recently had plenty of chicken and cheese — even quail eggs — but not a single roll of toilet paper. Only a few bags of coffee remained on a bottom shelf. Asked where a shopper could get milk on a day when that, too, was out of stock, a manager said with sarcasm, “At Chávez’s house.” At the heart of the debate is President Hugo Chávez’s socialist-inspired government, which imposes strict price controls that are intended to make a range of foods and other goods more affordable for the poor. They are often the very products that are the hardest to find. …many economists call it a classic case of a government causing a problem rather than solving it. Prices are set so low, they say, that companies and producers cannot make a profit. So farmers grow less food, manufacturers cut back production and retailers stock less inventory. Moreover, some of the shortages are in industries, like dairy and coffee, where the government has seized private companies and is now running them, saying it is in the national interest.

Here’s a chart that I’ve used before, using international data to compare living standards in Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile since 1980. One nation (take a wild guess) has tried statism, one nation has tried a mix of statism and capitalism, and the other has tried capitalism.

And just in case you need one more reason to despise Chavez’s despotic government, the regime is copying Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other murderous tyrants in imposing gun control.

(h/t: Greg Mankiw)

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A Victory over the Ideological and Tyrannical Thugs at the EPA

In some recent polling data, most Americans expressed a negative view of the federal government, with many of them in another poll saying it poses an “immediate threat to citizens.”

That probably sounds extreme to some people, but this story about IRS abuse should be enough to convince any normal person the the federal government is despicable.

For another example, let’s look at a case involving the thugs at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This Reason TV video provides the background.

This is a horrifying video to watch. Anybody with a shred of decency should be outraged.

Fortunately, all nine Supreme Court Justices sided with the property owners. I don’t know if they were outraged, but they made the right legal decision. The Wall Street Journal opined about the outcome.

These are hard times for economic liberty, but the Supreme Court on Wednesday offered a modest reason to hope. In a 9-0 ruling, they concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency can’t terrorize Americans via regulation without allowing them a day in court. …The case landed at the High Court after the Sacketts tried to appeal the wetlands designation. But the EPA refused to grant a review or lookback hearing, because an appeals process isn’t explicitly required by the Clean Water Act. Only after the EPA moved to enforce the compliance order would the Sacketts get their day in court. The EPA almost never needs to enforce, however, because disobeying a compliance order—even one that is later overturned—is legal proof in its mind of “willfulness” or a tacit admission of guilt. The only way to defend yourself is to break the law and therefore invite even higher penalties. The Sacketts claimed this Star Chamber violates their due process rights. …Congress ought to amend the Clean Water Act to make the law’s jurisdiction clearer. Meantime, the ordeal of the Sacketts shows once again how this agency with a $10 billion budget and 17,000 agents has become a regulatory tyranny for millions of law-abiding Americans.

Sadly, the decision still leaves the EPA thugs with too much power for discretionary abuse, as Brian Garst notes.

We’ve still got a long way to go to restore basic property rights in this country, and the Sackett’s still have to fight the EPA on the merits of the case as they seek to disprove the claim that their own property is a “wetland,” much less a “navigable water” of which the Act supposedly deals, despite having no water. But at least now they have their Constitutional due process rights recognized, so that they may challenge EPA’s jack-booted thugs in court without first having to rack up millions in fines waiting for EPA to allow them to do so.

But let’s enjoy at least a partial victory. I’m smiling today at the thought of unhappy bureaucrats at the EPA.

Last but not least, I want to acknowledge that government thuggery is not limited to the federal government in Washington.

• If you have a soul, you will be outraged by this example of a local government abusing poor people.
• If you have decency, you will be disgusted by this example of a state government persecuting someone who didn’t commit a crime.
• If you believe in basic rights, you will be horrified by this example of a foreign government seeking to outlaw political dissent and free speech.

Gee, do you detect a pattern?

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Three Cheers for this Lawsuit against the Thugs at the IRS

Early in 2010, I wrote about a reprehensible IRS plan to create a cartel in the tax preparation industry, which would screw small firms and entrepreneurs to help line the pockets of big companies such as H&R Block.

And, earlier this year, I specifically criticized the IRS Commissioner for moving ahead with this scheme, which I also suspect is motivated by a desire on the part of the IRS to have a group of captive tax preparers who will be timid about protecting the interests of taxpayers.

With thuggish moves like that, no wonder the IRS wants to flush $15 million of our tax dollars down the toilet in a futile effort to improve its public image.

But there is some good news. The Institute for Justice has filed suit against the IRS for its disgusting behavior. This video explains.

One point from the video that should be emphasized is that the IRS is taking this step without any congressional authorization or instruction. But if you read this link about an IRS regulation that would force American banks to put foreign law above US law, you’ll know that the tax agency is capable of rogue behavior.

By the way, the Institute for Justice is a great organization that effectively fights for individual rights. Check out this IJ video on asset forfeiture laws (which basically enable stealing by the government).

And since we’re on the topic of theft by government, this IJ video on property rights, eminent domain, and the Kelo decision also is very much worth watching.

P.S. I’m not interested in protecting the interests of the tax preparation industry. Indeed, I want a simple and fair flat tax, which would decimate all tax preparation firms. But I don’t want the thugs at the IRS to decide which firms are allowed to operate.

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Another Brutal Dictator Chooses Gun Control

If you click here, you’ll see the best poster ever produced on gun control. It shows the various tyrants that have disarmed citizens as part of their oppressive rule.

But it’s missing one face, Hugo Chavez, the hopefully-soon-to-die dictator of Venezuela.

Here’s the key part of an excellent column for Business Insider.

In recent remarks to the Latin American Herald Tribune, Venezuelan Interior and Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami announced that the government will begin suspending firearm importation, effective this month. Furthermore, local gunsmiths will no longer be able to market or sell firearms and ammunition. According to El Aissami, “As of March, every last gun shop remaining in Venezuela – and there are less than 80 – should be closed. That is to say, in Venezuela, the perverse chapter of the commercialization of firearms and munitions is over.”

If you support the 2nd Amendment, you’ll enjoy these gun control posters (here,here, here, here, and here). And here are some amusing images of t-shirts and bumper stickers on gun control (here, here, and here). In addition, I’ve posted three different videos on gun control (here, here, and here). And here’s my interview on NRA-TV. Last but not least, you’ll like this powerpoint presentation on Firearms and the Second Amendment.

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