Our friends on the left, by contrast, have the opposite perspective. They believe in so-called “positive liberty,” which means an entitlement to various handouts.
And they don’t care that those goodies can only be financed by using government coercion (via taxes, regulations, mandates, etc).
But today’s column is not going to involve a serious discussion of rights. Instead, I want to add to my satirical series on “great moments in human rights.”
The latest example comes from Spain, where you have the right to declare a different gender to get more benefits from the government.
Spain’s Left-wing government introduced a self-ID law in 2022 that made it simple to transition formally, while at the same time boosting benefits for women in the military and security forces. Since the change was introduced, 41 men have become women in the Spanish territory of Ceuta in North Africa. Only four of that number have changed their names. …Roberto Perdigones, an army corporal who registered as female in the last year, now earns more money and lives in superior accommodation. “On the outside I feel like a heterosexual man, but on the inside I am a lesbian…” “For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 per cent more salary for being a mother,” he said. …Under Spain’s transgender law, anyone can switch the gender entered on their ID card and passport by formally requesting the change, without any additional requirements… Sources told El Español that officers in the Civil Guard, the National Police and the Local Police in Ceuta were also changing their sexes for benefits.
Like any good libertarian, I support the right of adults to change their names, to dress how they want, and/or to surgically alter their genitalia.
Making any of those choices simply to get more goodies from the government, however, seems a bit strange.
But, as I’ve written before, incentives matter. For better or worse.
P.S. Here are some other bizarre moments in human rights.
But there’s another reason to be concerned about redistribution. I worry that it erodes societal capital (i.e., the traits such as work ethic, self reliance, etc, that are associated with successful societies).
What happens, for instance, when politicians convince people that have a “human right” to other people’s money?
It would be very difficult to be optimistic about a society where most people have that mindset.
This is why I’m very pessimistic that there will ever be a meaningful economic rebound in nations such as Greece and Argentina.
Simply stated, too many people thing they have a right to government-provided goodies. Which means, of course, that they think they have the right to live off the labor of others.
Let’s look at an example.
Remy Tumin reports in the New York Times that Scottish politicians have decided that there is a human right to tampons and sanitary pads.
Period products are now free to anyone in Scotland who needs them, nearly two years after the country’s Parliament approved a landmark piece of legislation. The initiative makes Scotland the first country in the world to provide free sanitary products, part of a global effort to end “period poverty”… The 2020 legislation in Scotland came on the heels of an earlier law that provided free access to tampons and sanitary pads in schools, colleges, universities and other public buildings. …People can find the nearest location with free period products through a mobile app… Seventeen states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws that require free access to period products for students.
As an economist, I’m irked that the story keeps referring to “free.”
Period products will still have a cost. All that’s happening is that taxpayers are paying instead of users.
But the most depressing part of the story is that this idea seems quite popular. So what comes next? Well, food is even more important to human existence, so why not make food “free” as well?
I wrote two days ago about a jury correctly voting to acquit a Swiss banker who was being prosecuted (and persecuted) by the government. The jury presumably recognized that it’s not the responsibility of foreign national living in outside the U.S. to enforce our bad tax law.
Instead, I was motivated by the principle that borders should limit the power and reach of government. And this principle is a two-way street. I also don’t want foreign governments to have carte blanche to impose their laws inside the United States.
I’m impressed that ordinary jurors apparently understood that principle better than policy makers in Washington.
But that’s not the only evidence for the wisdom of jurors.
A jury delivered an extraordinary blow to the government in a long-running battle over the use of public lands when it acquitted all seven defendants involved in the armed occupation of a national wildlife refuge in rural southeastern Oregon. …The Portland jury acquitted Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy and five others of conspiring to impede federal workers from their jobs at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, 300 miles southeast of Portland. …Even attorneys for the defendants were surprised by the acquittals. …Federal prosecutors took two weeks to present their case, finishing with a display of more than 30 guns seized after the standoff.
But that was just the start because another trial was scheduled for Nevada.
U.S. District Judge Anna Brown said she could not release Bundy because he still faces charges in Nevada stemming from an armed standoff at his father Cliven Bundy’s ranch two years ago. …Daniel Hill, attorney for Ammon Bundy in the Nevada case, said he believed the acquittal in Oregon bodes well for his client and the other defendants facing felony weapon, conspiracy and other charges.
And what happened at that second trial?
Hold off on that question for a moment, bucause some of Bundy’s allies were given their day in court. The Las Vegas Sunreported on another outbreak of jury nullification.
A federal jury in Las Vegas refused Tuesday to convict four defendants who were retried on accusations that they threatened and assaulted federal agents by wielding assault weapons in a 2014 confrontation to stop a cattle roundup near the Nevada ranch of states’ rights figure Cliven Bundy. In a stunning setback to federal prosecutors planning to try the Bundy family patriarch and two adult sons later this year, the jury acquitted Ricky Lovelien and Steven Stewart of all 10 charges, and delivered not-guilty findings on most charges against Scott Drexler and Eric Parker. …”Random people off the streets, these jurors, they told the government again that we’re not going to put up with tyranny,” said a John Lamb, a Montana resident who attended almost all the five weeks of trial, which began with jury selection July 10. …The current jury deliberated four full days after more than 20 days of testimony.
So how did the government respond?
The second Bundy trial won’t even take place. As David French explained in a column for National Review, an Obama appointee threw out the case, thus saving a jury from another chance for nullification.
…a federal judge, Obama appointee Gloria Navarro, dismissed the federal government’s criminal case against Bundy and two of his sons on the basis that the government was guilty of “flagrant misconduct” in the trial. Its conduct was so “outrageous” that “no lesser remedy” than dismissal with prejudice “is sufficient.”
And why did the Judge make that decision?
In this case, evidence shows that a federal agency motivated by ego, anger, and prejudice launched the most militaristic and aggressive campaign possible against a rancher whom federal officials had deemed to be likely peaceful. There is evidence they abused that rancher’s son, ringed his property with snipers, and intended to “kick [him] in the mouth and take his cattle.” Then, when it came time to prosecute that same rancher, they withheld the truth and portrayed his accurate claims about federal misconduct as criminal deceptions designed to inflame public outrage. …The judge, however, understood her legal obligations. Who is the greater threat to public peace and the rule of law? A rancher and his sons angry that the government is destroying his livelihood in part through political favoritism and vindictiveness? Or a government that acts as if might makes right, abuses its citizens, and uses maximum force when far less intrusion and risk would accomplish its lawful purposes? Bundy’s case teaches a number of valuable lessons. We cannot presume the government’s virtue. Sometimes even wild tales are true. And every American — from the angriest antifa activist to the leader of “Y’all Qaeda” — is entitled to the full protection of the United States Constitution.
Jim Bovard, in a column for USA Today, opines on the broader implications.
…federal judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial in the case against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and others after prosecutors were caught withholding massive amounts of evidence undermining federal charges. This is the latest in a long series of federal law enforcement debacles that have spurred vast distrust of Washington. …The Bundys have long claimed the feds were on a vendetta against them, and 3,300 pages of documents the Justice Department wrongfully concealed from their lawyers provides smoking guns that buttress their case. …In the Bundy case, Judge Navarro slammed the FBI for withholding key evidence. …Until the feds cease wrongfully abusing their targets, there will be no rebound in trust in Washington. If the Trump administration cannot rein in renegade federal prosecutors, the president should cease-and-desist any and all claptrap about “draining the swamp.”
In other words, so long as there are some bad apples in the world of law enforcement (and, more broadly, in positions of power in government), jury nullification is a bulwark against abuse by the state.
Incidentally, I’m not implying Bundy and his pals are heroes. Yes, they’ve been mistreated, but they also seem to think they have a right to treat government land as their land. Which is why I think the real solution is privatization of the excessive government holdings of land.
Let’s now zoom out and look at three good pieces about jury nullification in Reason, starting with a column by J.D. Tuccille.
…jury nullification—acquittals of defendants who jurors believe did violate the law but don’t deserve punishment, either because of specifics of the case or because jurors oppose the law in question—isn’t always obvious. …But, as with much of what jurors do, nullification is important and potentially powerful. …Given the fury that judges and other officials display toward independent jurors, including occasional contempt of court and jury tampering charges, …Jurors who go about their business without revealing their motivations are immune to punishment, so keeping your mouth shut is just smart, even if it leaves the rest of us in the dark.
He provides an example of a jury slapping down an absurd prosecution.
…it’s more common to see cases like the rapid acquittal of an Ohio machinist who was arrested for making what Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agents claimed were firearms noise suppressors (so-called “silencers”) without a license. …He claimed his products were actually unregulated muzzle brakes and that the government’s “expert” had no idea what he was talking about. Whether the jury believed the machinist, or whether they thought it was ridiculous to threaten a man with producing items that can easily be made on a home workbench and that lawmakers at the state and federal level are considering deregulating, is something we’ll probably never know. …Either way, they likely concluded that they were carrying out their responsibility to do justice and protect defendants from government overreach. Because, ultimately, jury nullification is just an extension of the jury’s role as a check on the state—whether prosecutors are applying law badly, or just applying bad law.
It’s not surprising to learn that the government does not like jury nullification.
But what is shocking is that the state is willing to imprison people for exercising their rights to free speech by informing potential jurors about nullification.
…a Michigan judge sentenced a local activist to eight weekends in jail, plus $545 in fines, 120 hours of community service, and six months of probation, for passing out jury nullification pamphlets in front of the Mecosta County courthouse. Keith Wood, a former pastor and father of eight, was arrested in November 2015 and convicted last month of jury tampering, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. …Wood’s lawyer, David Kallman, who plans to appeal the conviction, argued that distributing the pamphlets, which contained general information about jurors’ rights, was protected by the First Amendment. He emphasized that Wood never discussed Yoder’s case with passers-by at the courthouse. …After Wood’s arrest, Mecosta County Prosecutor Brian Thiede said the FIJA pamphlet is dangerous because “we would have a lawless nation if people were to vote their conscience.”
The last sentence is the key. Notwithstanding the fevered statement of Mr. Thiede, we would not have a “lawless nation.” Jurors have no problem convicting those who assault, harm, kill, steal, and rape.
Nullification is a check on bad laws and/or bad actions by government. And that’s a good thing.
Let’s close with another piece by Tuccille, which has two very encouraging examples. We’ll start in Texas.
…El Paso, Texas, Police Chief Greg Allen turned out to be a surprise defender of bypassing the usual criminal justice rigmarole of booking, mug shots, and jails. While careful to emphasize that he’s no fan of drug legalization, Allen says it’s a waste of his officers’ time to put hours into an “an arrest that has no end result of a conviction because of jury nullification.” This is only the latest evidence that rebellious jurors are putting limits on how badly government officials can treat the rest of us. …”Jury nullification, though still rare, appears to be on the rise in drug cases that reach the trial stage,” wrote Rice University’s Prof. William Martin… But jurors are…doing just that often enough that the El Paso Police Chief sees no point to making arrests that have “no end result of a conviction because of jury nullification.”
And finish with Georgia.
In Laurens County, Antonio Willis faced up to five years in prison for selling the equivalent of a few joints to an undercover cop. The cop, “who switched into an exaggerated Hispanic accent straight out of Cheech and Chong when dealing with suspects,” according to Bill Torpy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, kept pestering Willis for drugs while promising to hook the unemployed man up with a construction job. …the jury acquitted after just 18 minutes of deliberations. “A jury in Middle Georgia returned a Not Guilty verdict in a marijuana sale case despite the evidence,” retired sheriff’s deputy Tom McCain, now executive director of Peachtree NORML, approvingly commented after the trial. “The verdict can be nothing other than Jury Nullification.”
The moral of the story is not that jury nullification is a great thing. It’s only a second-best solution to the real problem of bad laws (exacerbated occasionally by bad prosecutors or bad cops).
But so long as bad laws (or incomprehensible laws) exist and government officials sometimes act dishonorably, we should support juries being the last line of defense for persecuted citizens. Remember, a tough-on-crime policy is only good if laws are just.
I haven’t written in any detail about “jury nullification” since late 2010 and it’s time to rectify that sin of omission.
Nullification occurs when a jury votes not guilty because a law is either unjust or wrongly applied, not because a defendant is actually innocent. And I know that’s what I would do if I was on a jury and the government was persecuting someone for engaging is self-defense or getting nabbed by a revenue camera.
The bottom line is that Walter Williams is right when he says that it is immoral to obey bad laws.
Let’s review some expert opinions.
Writing on the editorial page of the New York Times, a former prosecutor urges jury nullification.
Earlier this year, prosecutors charged Julian P. Heicklen, a retired chemistry professor, with jury tampering because he stood outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan providing information about jury nullification to passers-by. …The prosecutors who charged Mr. Heicklen said that “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.” The prosecutors in this case are wrong. The First Amendment exists to protect speech like this — honest information that the government prefers citizens not know. …Jury nullification is not new; its proponents have included John Hancock and John Adams. The doctrine is premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished. As Adams put it, it is each juror’s “duty” to vote based on his or her “own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.” …Nullification has been credited with helping to end alcohol prohibition and laws that criminalized gay sex. Last year, Montana prosecutors were forced to offer a defendant in a marijuana case a favorable plea bargain after so many potential jurors said they would nullify that the judge didn’t think he could find enough jurors to hear the case.
A column in the Washington Post by Professor Glenn Reynolds at the University of Tennessee argues that juries have an obligation to rein in bad prosecutors.
Despite the evidence, those responsible for convicting you may choose to let you go, if they think that sending you to jail would result in an injustice. That can happen through what’s called “prosecutorial discretion,” where a prosecutor decides not to bring or pursue charges against you because doing so would be unfair, even though the evidence is strong. Or it can happen through “jury nullification,” where a jury thinks that the evidence supports conviction but then decides to issue a “not guilty” verdict because it feels that a conviction would be unjust. …Prosecutorial discretion is regularly applied and generally regarded as a standard part of criminal justice. …So-called jury nullification, on the other hand, gets far less respect. Though it is clearly within the power of juries to refuse to convict whenever they choose, judges and prosecutors tend to view this practice with hostility. …there has been a massive shift of power toward prosecutors, the result of politics, over-criminalization, institutional leverage and judges’ failure to provide supervision. It’s time to redress the balance.
By the way, Glenn has proposed ways (see postscript of this column) of addressing this imbalance, which is tied to over-criminalization.
And here’s another column in the Washington Postarguing in favor of jury empowerment.
As I tried cases, I gained enormous respect for the seriousness with which jurors approached their work. …These jurors had no problem convicting anyone of a violent offense, if the government proved its case. For drug crimes, however, it was a different story. …they frequently voted “not guilty” in nonviolent drug cases, no matter how compelling the evidence. …When I started teaching law, I published an article in the Yale Law Journal situating these D.C. jurors in a long line of jurors…who refused to convict American patriots of sedition against the British crown; jurors who acquitted people guilty of violating the Fugitive Slave Act; and jurors who would not punish gay people for “sodomy” for having consensual sex.
Amen. Juries should pursue justice, not act as rubber stamps when prosecutors act as cogs for an unjust regime.
Now let’s look at a real-world example, as reported by the New York Times.
As much as chocolate and watches, Switzerland is known for bank secrecy. …it also made Swiss banks targets for an assault by the United States government… Bank Frey was among the very few to defy the legal onslaught. And Mr. Buck…was the bank’s public face, responsible for landing and then managing American accounts. That put Mr. Buck in the government’s cross hairs. In 2013, a federal grand jury indicted him for conspiring to help Americans avoid taxes. …But things didn’t go as prosecutors had planned… The crux of the defense was that the responsibility to pay taxes and declare income did not rest with Mr. Buck. It was his clients who had decided not to pay taxes. He was under no obligation to tattle… Prosecutors branded him as a crucial cog in an international tax-evasion scheme. …Then it was Mr. Agnifilo’s turn. …“Stefan Buck has nothing whatsoever, nothing whatsoever, to do with the choice that an American taxpayer makes” to not declare offshore assets. …The jury deliberated for a little more than a day. …the verdict: not guilty.
The story doesn’t mention jury nullification, but I’m assuming – from a technical legal perspective – the prosecutors had an open-and-shut case against Mr. Buck. After all, he did “conspire” to help Americans protect their income from the IRS.
But the jury decided that conviction would be absurd because a Swiss person on Swiss soil has no obligation to help enforce bad U.S. tax policy. So they voted not guilty because that was the only moral choice.
And the good news is that this is becoming a pattern.
In October 2014, one of UBS’s top executives, Raoul Weil, went on trial in Florida. Federal prosecutors accused him of helping clients hide billions. Mr. Weil’s lawyers argued he had no knowledge of or responsibility for what had happened. The jury deliberated for barely an hour before acquitting him. The same week, a Los Angeles jury acquitted an Israeli banker who faced similar accusations. The Americans’ pursuit of foreign bankers no longer looked invincible.
The even-better news is that these nullification decisions by juries may now lead to some “prosecutorial discretion.”
The Justice Department had now lost the three cases it had tried against foreign bankers who helped Americans avoid taxes. Dozens more cases are pending. Those who represent accused Swiss bankers say they expect Mr. Buck’s verdict to embolden defendants and to cause prosecutors to think twice before bringing new charges.
In other words, the bad law will still exist but hopefully will have little or no impact because prosecutors are less likely to file charges and juries won’t convict when they do.
That’s a victory for liberty, though it surely would be best – as we discussed just a few days ago – if politicians repealed the bad laws that make unjust prosecutions possible.
P.P.S. In my younger days, I assumed that cops and prosecutors were the good guys, helping to maintain an orderly society. I still think that most of them want to do what’s right, but I also now realize that our Founding Fathers were very wise to include strong protections for defendants in our Constitution. Simply stated, some cops and some prosecutors are bad and those bad apples are why I favor strengthening the Fourth Amendment and have become more skeptical of the death penalty.
P.P.P.S. Even if you’re a law-abiding person, you should support civil liberties.
I wrote last year about the moral vacuum that exists in Europe because gun control laws in nations like France make it very difficult for Jews to protect themselves from barbaric attacks.
Politicians in Denmark don’t seem to understand this principle. Or maybe the do understand the principle, but they are so morally bankrupt that don’t care. Not only do they have gun control, they even have laws against pepper spray. And they are so fanatical in their desire to turn people into sheep that the government apparently will prosecute a girl who used pepper spray to save herself from rape.
Here are some excerpts from a report in the U.K.-based Daily Mail.
A Danish teenager who was sexually assaulted near amigrant asylum centrehas been told she will be prosecuted after using pepper spray to fend off her attacker. …she managed to prevent the man from attacking her further by spraying the substance at him. …However, as it is illegal to use pepper spray, the teenage girl is set to face charges.
So the only practical effect of gun control (or bans on pepper spray) is to make life easier for the scum of society.
And the real insult to injury is that a teenage girl who should be hailed as a hero now faces the threat of punishment. Just like the unfortunate British woman who was persecuted for using a knife to deter some thugs.
Italian hospitality for the visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has stretched to covering up nude statues. Italy also chose not to serve wine at official meals
Pathetic. Particularly since the Italians bent over backwards for a truly heinous regime.
Kudos to President Hollande in France, by contrast. The Daily Mailnotes that he held firm.
A lunch between the French and Iranian presidents in Paris was scrapped today because France refused to remove wine from the menu.
By the way, there clearly is a role for common courtesy and diplomatic protocol. It obviously would be gratuitously rude for a nation to serve pork at a dinner for officials from Israel or any Muslim nation, just as it would inappropriate and insensitive to serve beef for an event for officials from India.
Moreover, officials from one nation should not make over-the-top demands when visiting other countries. Just as it would be wrong for French officials to demand wine at state dinners in Iran, it’s also wrong for Iranian officials to demand the absence of wine at meals in France. After all, it’s not as if they would be expected to partake.
In the grand scheme of things, though, the kerfuffle about wine and statues doesn’t matter compared to the potentially life-and-death issue of whether Europeans should be allowed to defend themselves.
That’s why Europe isn’t merely in trouble because of fiscal bankruptcy, but also because of moral bankruptcy.
P.S. While having the ability to protect your life or to guard against rape isn’t a human right in most European nations, take a look at some of the things that are “rights.”
So I gave a pessimistic answer. But I should have thought beyond economic policy because there is a bit of potential good news from Brazil. Timereports that citizens may soon get the right to keep and bear arms.
Congressmen in Brazil, one of the most violent countries in the world, are proposing to dramatically loosen restrictions on personal gun ownership, bringing the country much closer to the American right to bear arms. The politicians say the measures are necessary to allow embattled citizens the right to defend themselves from criminals armed with illegal weapons. …The draft law…introduces a right for citizens to own firearms for self-defense or the protection of property.
Not surprisingly, the statists think people should have to rely on government.
…opponents say the move will only increase the country’s toll of nearly 60,000 murders in 2014. …“Without doubt we will see an increase in the murder rate,” says Ivan Marques, executive director of the Sou de Paz institute, which campaigns for disarmament. …Marques said Brazil should not try to emulate the United States. “Our constitution emphasizes collective security not individual security,” he added. …José Mariano Beltrame, the state security secretary in Rio de Janeiro… “We need to disarm the bandits not arm the people,” he says in an emailed statement.
But the reality is that the government is incapable of protecting people. The bad guys can get guns (as we’ve repeatedly seen in Europe). Prohibition simply means the good guys are disarmed.
“…the state has failed to resolve this problem,” the law’s author Laudivio Carvalho of the powerful Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, says in a telephone interview. “The population needs the right to defend themselves, their family and their property as they are the ones being attacked. Ninety percent of assaults are being carried out with illegal weapons.”
So let’s keep our fingers crossed that human rights will be expanded in Latin America.
And since we’re on the topic of gun control, here are some clever posters.
This second one reminds me of my IQ test for criminals and leftists.
P.S. You can see some amusing pro-Second Amendment posters here, here, here, here, and here. And some amusing images of t-shirts and bumper stickers on gun controlhere, here, andhere.
Just like I have a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame and a Moocher Hall of Fame to draw attention to spectacular cases of overpaid sloth and entitled dependency, I may have to set up something similar to commemorate bizarre examples of government-manufactured human rights.
Our newest example comes from Canada, where a so-called “human rights adjudicator” has decided that drunks are entitled to “accommodations” for their “special needs.”
A health-care aide’s alcohol addiction qualifies as a disability, and her employer was wrong to fire her… Linda Horrocks is entitled to be reinstated, get three years back pay and an additional $10,000 for injury to her dignity, independent adjudicator Sherri Walsh said ina report released Tuesday. “The issue for determination in this matter is…whether (the employer) made reasonable efforts to accommodate the complainant as soon as it was aware that she had a disability and special needs associated with that disability,” Walsh wrote. …Walsh ruled that alcohol addiction amounts to a disability under the human rights code.
Wow, so guess we have the answer to the question of how “human rights” are protected in Canada.
Sounds like a great deal…so long as one is willing to ignore the right of business owners and shareholders to choose their employees.
Though we shouldn’t laugh too much at the Canadians. After all, the EEOC in the United States made a similar decision restricting the right of a trucking company to weed out a drunk driver.
In other words, the natural tendency of most politicians and bureaucrats is to make odd choices.
If you want to read more “great moments in human rights,” here’s an ever-growing list.
Academics in both America and Europe, as well as a committee from the Council of Europe, claim there isa right to other people’s money.
I’ve written extensively about gun control, but mostly because of practical and moral objections to the notion that government should have the power to disarm law-abiding people.
But I hadn’t realized that some of the earliest gun control initiatives were designed to oppress blacks.
As Dave Kopel explains in Reason, the white power structure in many post-Civil War states was very anxious to disarm former slaves.
After the Civil War, the defeated Southern states aimed to preserve slavery in fact if not in law. The states enacted Black Codes which barred the black freedmen from exercising basic civil rights, including the right to bear arms. Mississippi’s provision was typical: No freedman “shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition.” …The Klansmen, unlike the freedmen, had horses, and thus the tactical advantages of mobility. In a few months, the Klan triumph was complete. One freedman recalled that the night riders, after reasserting white control, “took the weapons from might near all the colored people in the neighborhood.” …Sometimes militias consisting of freedmen or Unionists were able to resist the Klan or other white forces. In places like the South Carolina back-country, where the blacks were a numerical majority, the black militias kept white terrorists at bay for long periods. …In areas where the black militias lost and the Klan or other white groups took control, “almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless,” wrote Albion Tourgeé in his 1880 book The Invisible Empire. …As Jim Crow intensified, other Southern states enacted gun registration and handgun permit laws. Registration came to Mississippi (1906), Georgia (1913), and North Carolina (1917). Handgun permits were passed in North Carolina (1917), Missouri (1919), and Arkansas (1923). As one Florida judge explained, the licensing laws were “passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers… [and] never intended to be applied to the white population.”
With this historical knowledge, this poster now makes a lot of sense.
It quotes the infamous Dred Scott decision, which also was predicated on the state-sanctioned oppression of African-Americans.
While I wasn’t aware of the racist history of gun control, I did have some familiarity with the fact that totalitarian governments traditionally have wanted to disarm citizens.
I don’t think advocates of gun control in the United States are racists or fascists. I assume that 99 percent of them are guilty instead of being naive.
P.S. Switching to a different topic, a French economist (no, that’s not a contradiction in terms) was awarded the Nobel Prize about a week ago.
He’s apparently considered to be on the left of the philosophical spectrum, yet it’s worthwhile that even he thinks there’s too much statism in his home nation.
Hours after he won the economicsNobel Prize, Tirolesaid he felt “sad” theFrench economywas experiencingdifficultiesdespite having “a lot of assets”. “We haven’t succeeded in France to undertake the labour market reforms that are similar to those in Germany, Scandinavia and so on,” he said in telephone interview from the French city of Toulouse, where he teaches. Franceis plagued by record unemployment and Tirole described the French job market as “catastrophic” earlier on Monday, arguing that the excessive protection for employees had frozen the country’s job market. “We haven’t succeeded also in downsizing the state, which is an issue because we have a social model that I approve of – I’m very much in favour of this social model – but it won’t be sustainable if the state is too big,” he added. Tirole remarked that northern European countries, as well as Canada and Australia, had proven you could keep a welfare social model with smaller government. In contrast, he said France’s “big state” threatened its social policies because there will not be “enough money to pay for it in the long run”.
He’s exactly right. I’m a libertarian, so I don’t want the government involved in areas such as housing, healthcare and income redistribution.
But even if you favor larger government, there’s a giant difference between having the public sector consume 57 percent of economic output (as in France) or a more reasonable amount, such as what’s found in Canada or Australia (as Professor Tirole mentioned).
By the way, I made the same point as Tirole when I spoke last year in Paris. I asked my audience whether they thought they got better and/or more services than the citizens of Switzerland, where the burden of government spending is far less onerous.
And sometimes I’ll even have a story that combines dumb regulation and boondoggle spending. For instance, you won’t believe the government’s inane approach to different-sized condoms.
I also have a satirical series about “great moments in human rights” and it’s time to augment that collection.
Europe’s political elite may decide that being overweight is a protected disability.
The EU’s top court is considering a test case which could oblige employers to treat obesity as a disability. Denmark has asked the European Court of Justice to rule on the case of a male childminder who says he was sacked for being too fat. …The court’s final ruling will be binding across the EU. It is seen as especially significant because of rising obesity levels in Europe and elsewhere, including the US. …Audrey Williams, an employment discrimination expert at Eversheds law firm, said the judges would have to decide “whether obesity itself should trigger preferential rights…”. If the judges decide it is a disability then employers could face new obligations, she told the BBC. Employers might in future have a duty to create reserved car parking spaces for obese staff, or adjust the office furniture for them, she said.
Yes, you read correctly.
If the European Court of Justice rules the wrong way, you can eat all you want, knowing that you’re part of a protected class and that your employer has to incur all sorts of costs for your benefit.
Now it’s time for a bit of libertarian dogma. I think people have the right to over-eat, and I don’t think the government should be trying to impose lifestyle choices, either through coercion or by tilting our behavior with penalties or subsidies.
But I also think we should bear the costs (or reap the benefits) of our behavioral choices. In other words, we don’t have – 0r shouldn’t have – the right to compel others to like us, to hire us, to promote us, or to incur costs on our behalf.
Simply stated, a free society should have free association.
If you want to read more “great moments in human rights,” here’s an ever-growing list.
Academics in both America and Europe, as well as a committee from the Council of Europe, claim there is a right to other people’s money.
The federal government has now decided that taxpayers should be liable for the cost of sex-change surgeries.
Here are some excerpts from a story last month in The Hill.
Medicare beneficiaries who are transgender may now receive coverage for sex reassignment surgeries, a federal health board ruled Friday. The decision lifts a decades-old ban on coverage for sex-change operations with Medicare and hands a major victory to transgender rights advocates who argued the rule was discriminatory.
I suppose you could categorize this story as an example of wasteful spending, but I doubt there are that many people over age 65 who will be signing up for this surgery. So while Medicare is bankrupt, this change presumably doesn’t ever merit a fiscal asterisk.
And I suppose you could use this story to make a point about why, in a sensible health care system, voluntary medical procedures should be paid directly by the consumer rather than via insurance (though if private insurance companies want to offer that coverage, it’s not my business to object).
In my opinion, though, this story belongs in the “human rights” category because the policy apparently was made on that basis.
Now, time again for some libertarian commentary.
As far as I’m concerned, people should have the right to choose this type of surgery. Indeed, I personally know a great economist who has undergone this procedure.
All I’m saying is that other people shouldn’t be coerced to pay for it.
Which also describes my views on aspirin purchases, dermatologist appointments, and other health costs as well.
See, isn’t it great to be a libertarian! You don’t coerce other people and they don’t coerce you. Instead, you have a peaceful society based on voluntary cooperation and exchange.
Senator Rand Paul is being criticized and condemned by the Washington establishment.
That’s almost certainly a sign that he’s doing the right thing. And given the recent events in Russia and Ukraine, we should say he’s doing a great thing.
This is because Senator Paul is waging a lonely battle to stop the unthinking and risky move to a world where governments – including corrupt and evil regimes – collect and share our private financial information.
I’ve written about this topic many times and warned about the risks of letting unsavory governments have access to personal information, but the Obama Administration – with the support of some Republicans who think government power is more important than individual rights – is actively pushing this agenda.
The White House has even endorsed the idea of the United States being part of a so-called Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, even though that would require the sharing of large amounts of personal financial data with thuggish and corrupt regimes such as Argentina, Azerbaijan, China, Greece, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, and Saudi Arabia!
I’m sure Vladimir Putin very much appreciates this insider access so he can monitor dissidents and track political opponents. His government even signed onto a recent G-20 Communique that endorsed automatic information-sharing.
Heck, there’s even a Russian heading up the Financial Action Task Force, which is endlessly pushing to give governments untrammeled access to private information. FATF even wants banks and other financial institutions to spy on customers, regardless of whether there’s the slightest evidence of any wrongdoing.
The general mindset in Washington is that we should all bury our heads in the sand and blithely allow this massive accumulation of power and information by governments. After all, Putin and other thugs would never abuse this system, right?
Senator Paul battles the statists
Fortunately, at least one lawmaker is trying to throw sand in the gears. Like Horatius at the bridge, who single-handedly thwarted an invasion of Rome in 509 BC, Senator Paul is objecting to this massive invasion of privacy.
He has this old-fashioned appreciation for the Constitution and doesn’t think government should have carte blanche to access private financial data. He even – gasp! – thinks that government power should be restrained by the 4th Amendment and that there should be due process legal protections for individuals.
No wonder the DC establishment doesn’t like him.
One example of this phenomenon is that Senator Paul has placed a “hold” on some tax treaties. Here are some excerpts from a recent article in Politico.
Paul for years has single-handedly blocked an obscure U.S.-Swiss tax treaty that lawmakers, prosecutors, diplomats and banks say makes the difference between U.S. law enforcement rooting out the names of a few hundred fat-cat tax evaders — and many thousands more. …International tax experts for years have seethed over Paul’s block on the Swiss and several other tax treaties. These sorts of mundane tax protocols used to get approved by unanimous consent without anyone batting an eyelash — until Paul came to town.
These pacts are “mundane” to officials who think there shouldn’t be any restrictions on the power of governments.
Fortunately, Senator Paul has a different perspective.
Kentucky’s tea party darling says the treaty infringes on privacy rights. …Paul, a libertarian Republican widely believed to be eyeing a 2016 presidential run, says his hold stems from concerns about Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable search and seizure.” “These are people that are alleged, not convicted of doing anything wrong,” Paul said a few weeks ago. “I don’t think you should have everybody’s information from their bank. There should be some process: accusations and proof that you’ve committed a crime.”
The article also notes that Senator Paul is one of the few lawmakers to fight back against the egregious FATCA legislation.
Paul’s protest is also linked to his abhorrence of the soon-to-take-effect Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which will force foreign banks to disclose U.S. account information to the IRS, and domestic banks to reciprocate to other nations’ revenue departments. …the senator has legislation to repeal FATCA and hesitates to support a treaty that enables a law he views as U.S. government overreach.
I don’t know how long Senator Paul can withstand the pressure in his lonely fight for individual rights, but I’m glad he’s waging the battle.
Even the Swiss government and Swiss banks have thrown in the towel, having decided that they have no choice but to weaken their nation’s human rights laws on financial privacy because of threats of financial protectionism by the United States.
So let’s give three cheers to our modern-day Horatius, a very rare elected official who is doing the right thing for the right reason.
For more information on the importance of financial privacy, here’s my video on the moral case for tax havens.
Now, via Cafe Hayek, I have a great cartoon showing the fancy equation that left-wing economists use when they tell us that the economy will grow faster if there’s a bigger burden of government spending.
Now you can see how the Congressional Budget Office puts together its silly estimates.
The next step is to find the secret equation that CBO uses when it publishes nonsensical analysis implying that growth is maximized when tax rates are 100 percent.
But to be fair, the politicians who pay their salaries want them to justify bigger government, so should we expect anything else?
One of the many differences between advocates of freedom and supporters of statism is how they view “rights.”
Libertarians, along with many conservatives, believe in the right to be left alone and to not be molested by government. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as “negative liberty,” which is just another way of saying “the absence of coercive constraint on the individual.”
Statists, by contrast, believe in “positive liberty.” This means that you have a “right” to things that the government will give you (as explained here by America’s second-worst President). Which means, of course, that the government has an obligation to take things from somebody else. How else, after all, will the government satisfy your supposed right to a job, education, healthcare, housing, etc.
Sometimes, the statists become very creative in their definition of rights.
You may laugh at these examples, particularly the ones that focus on seemingly trivial issues.
But don’t laugh too hard, because our friends on the left are busy with very grandiose plans for more “positive liberty.”
The EU Observer reports on efforts in Europe to create expanded rights to other people’s money.
Austerity programmes agreed with the troika of international lenders (the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) are in breach of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, according to a German legal expert. …under the EU charter of fundamental rights, a legal text which became binding for member states in 2009, several austerity measures enshrined in the MoUs can be fought in courts. …His study highlights that the MoUs “have seriously limited the autonomy of employers and trade unions to negotiate wages.” …Education and health care reforms prescribed in the memorandums are also questionable because they are focusing too much on cutting budgets, he said. …He noted that the concept of “financial stability” was put above all other considerations. “But financial stability cannot be achieved without social stability,” he said.
But it’s not just one oddball academic making these claims.
…the Council of Europe’s social rights committee noted that public policies since 2009 have been unable to stem a generalised increase in poverty on the continent. The committee identified some 180 violations of European Social Charter provisions on access to health and social protection across 38 European countries. In the bailed-out countries, the committee found several breaches – particularly in terms of wages and social benefits. Ireland was found in breach of the social charter for not ensuring the minimum levels of sickness, unemployment, survivor’s, employment injury and invalidity benefits. Greece and Cyprus have “inadequate” minimum unemployment, sickness, maternity and old age benefits, as well as a restrictive social security system. Spain also pays too little to workers on sick leave.
This crazy thinking also exists in the United States. A former Carter Administration official, now a law professor at Georgetown, has written that countries with good policy must change their systems in order to enable more tax revenue in nations with bad policy.
Do states like Switzerland, which provide a tax haven for wealthy citizens of developing countries, violate internationally recognized human rights? …bank secrecy has a significant human rights impact if governments of developing countries are deprived of resources needed to meet basic economic rights guaranteed by the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. …The Covenant explicitly recognizes individual rights to adequate food, clothing, and housing (Article 11); health care, clean water, and sanitation (Article 12); and education (Article 13). The Covenant also imposes obligations on member states to implement these rights.
And the right to redistribution isn’t just part of the U.N. mission.
There’s also a European set of Maastricht Principles which supposedly obligates nations to help each expand the burden of government.
Articles 19 and 20 of The Maastricht Principles call on states to “refrain from conduct which nullifies or impairs the enjoyment and exercise of economic . . . rights of persons outside their territories . . . or which impairs the ability of another State to comply with that State’s . . . obligations as regards economic rights.” …recognizing the fact that secrecy for offshore accounts makes it difficult for developing countries to implement Covenant obligations. It therefore seems indisputable that offshore accounts impede the fulfillment of internationally recognized human rights.
You may be thinking that all this sounds crazy. And you’re right.
You may be thinking that it’s absurd to trample national sovereignty in pursuit of bad policy. And you’re right.
And you may be thinking this is a complete bastardization of what America’s Founding Fathers had in mind. And you’re right.
But you probably don’t understand that this already is happening. The IRS’s awful FATCA legislation, for instance, is basically designed for exactly the purpose of coercing other nations into enforcing bad American tax policy.
Even more worrisome is the OECD’s Orwellian Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, which is best viewed as a poisonous acorn that will grow into a deadly World Tax Organization oak tree.
P.S. And the Obama Administration already is pushing policies to satisfy the OECD’s statist regime. The IRS recently pushed through a regulation that says American banks have to put foreign tax law above U.S. tax law.
I semi-confessed that I may have set off fireworks in a stairwell at my high school.
And I’ve already confessed my role in an “attack” on a float during a homecoming parade.
So I may as well admit that I got in trouble during college for having a pet snake in my dorm room.
Given that last bullet point, you would think I would sympathize with people who want to bring pets to school.
And I do, but I don’t sympathize with the notion that the federal government should compel colleges to allow pets – even if they’re for “emotional support.”
College freshman suffering from separation anxiety, take heart: The federal government says universities have an obligation to admit “emotional support” animals into school housing. …emotional support animals (dogs, mostly) provide therapy through companionship and affection.
The pinheads at the Department of Housing and Urban Development say this is required by the Fair Housing Act.
Housing providers must offer people with disabilities a “reasonable accommodation” for emotional support animals under both the Fair Housing Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1974, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a notice to its regional offices late last month. …The April 25 notice was sent about a week after a federal judge ruled that student housing is covered by the Fair Housing Act, in a lawsuit filed by HUD against the University of Nebraska, on behalf of a student there.
Meet Fido, your new dorm neighbor
Best of all, you can bring any animal you want so long as it doesn’t have a track record of bad conduct.
Housing providers can’t exclude animals based on breed, size or weight. They can, however, refuse an animal that poses a direct threat to the health and safety of others or would wreck havoc on the property, but such refusals must be based on “objective evidence about the specific animal’s actual conduct – not on mere speculation or fear,” the notice says.
So that doberman pinscher is innocent until proven guilty!
Another great development in “human rights” around the world. Indeed, it belongs with these momentous breakthroughs.
In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat.
Now, in honor of Sandra Fluke, the United Nations has decided that contraception is a human right. Not just a human right, a universal human right. The New York Times reports on this big news.
The United Nations says access to contraception is a universal human right that could dramatically improve the lives of women and children in poor countries.
So what’s the big deal? Surely people should have the right to buy a condom.
Paid for with your tax dollars?
Yes, but we’re talking about the United Nations, so you won’t be surprised to learn that there shouldn’t be any “financial barriers” to birth control, which means people have the right to have other people pay for their fun and games.
It effectively declares that legal, cultural and financial barriers to accessing contraception and other family planning measures are an infringement of women’s rights. …The global body also says increasing funding for family planning by a further $4.1 billion could save $11.3 billion annually in health bills for mothers and newborns in poor countries.
Well, Sandra Fluke surely will be happy about this news. Even though national governments safely can ignore U.N. pronouncements, this is yet another sign of a growing dependency mindset.
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.
Centuries from now, I’m sure historians won’t bother teaching about the Magna Carta, the Constitution, the end of slavery, or the collapse of communism.
Instead, people who want to know about human rights will learn about these great European developments.
In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat.
Now the Italians have taken the next step with a crucial legal decision that will enshrine an important basic freedom. What are we talking about, the right to free speech, the free exercise of religion, or the right to emigrate?
Italy’s highest court has ruled that telling a man he has “no balls” as an insult is a crime punishable with a fine because it hurts male pride… The case was brought to the supreme court by a lawyer named only as Vittorio against his cousin Alberto, a justice of the peace, for the phrase uttered during a heated courtroom exchange in the southern Italian city of Potenza. “Apart from the vulgarity of the term used, the expression definitely also has an injurious quality,” the male judge, Maurizio Fumo, said in his ruling yesterday as quoted by Italian news agency ANSA. …Vittorio’s lawyer had argued that the expression implied that his client was “worth less than other men because he did not have the attributes.” A judge will now rule on the fine that Alberto should pay to Vittorio. The ruling, which comes after years of legal dispute, did not specify whether any insults against women should now also be considered crimes.
I wonder, based on the story, whether the court ruled against Alberto because of what he said, or because Vittorio actually is lacking certain…well, as the article says…”attributes.”
In any event, I suppose we should close with a more serious point. A big problem in Europe is that politicians and courts keep creating “rights” that require the erosion of other people’s liberties.
These so-called positive rights can only be fulfilled by taking away the freedom of other people. Not that the United States is immune to such nonsense. Here’s a horrifying video showing President Franklin Roosevelt discussing various “rights” to jobs, housing, healthcare, and education.
The Obama Administration is in a bit of hot water because it wants to coerce just about everyone – including a lot of religious institutions – to provide health insurance policies that cover the cost of birth control and certain abortion-inducing drugs.
The White House already has tried to defuse the controversy by shifting the coverage mandate from insurance buyers to the insurance companies, but everyone with an IQ above room temperature realizes that is a meaningless cosmetic change.
Regardless of how one feels about abortion or birth control (or even how one feels about religion), this is a bad policy. Decisions about what sort of insurance to provide shouldn’t be the result of a one-size-fits-all government mandate.
John Cochrane, an economist at the University of Chicago (and an Adjunct Scholar at Cato!) addresses the economic issues in a Wall Street Journal column. Here are some key passages.
Insurance is supposed to mean a contract, by which a company pays for large, unanticipated expenses in return for a premium: expenses like your house burning down, your car getting stolen or a big medical bill. Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses. There are good reasons that your car insurance company doesn’t add $100 per year to your premium and then cover oil changes, and that your health insurance doesn’t charge $50 more per year and cover toothpaste. You’d have to fill out mountains of paperwork, the oil-change and toothpaste markets would become much less competitive, and you’d end up spending more. …Doubling the number of wellness visits and free pills sounds great, but who’s going to pay for it? There is a liberal dream that by mandating coverage the government can make something free. Sorry. Every increase in coverage means an increase in premiums. If your employer is paying for your health insurance, he could be paying you more in salary instead.
He also delves into the moral issues and explains that the only solution is to get the government out of health care.
Our nation is divided on social issues. The natural compromise is simple: Birth control, abortion and other contentious practices are permitted. But those who object don’t have to pay for them. The federal takeover of medicine prevents us from reaching these natural compromises and needlessly divides our society. The critics fell for a trap. By focusing on an exemption for church-related institutions, critics effectively admit that it is right for the rest of us to be subjected to this sort of mandate. They accept the horribly misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and they resign themselves to chipping away at its edges. No, we should throw it out, and fix the terrible distortions in the health-insurance and health-care markets. Sure, churches should be exempt. We should all be exempt.
Maybe I’m being naively dogmatic, but I refuse to patronize a company that uses a mass murdering communist and racist like Che Guevera as a marketing ploy.
It’s not like I would ever spend a lot of money for a car anyhow, but even if somebody deposits $10 million in my bank account, you can rest assured that I won’t be cruising around town in the MB Guevera C230, the MB Hitler E350, or the MB Mao GL450.
There’s something about Che Guevara that convinces older European men that they will become cooler through association with his “brand.” We saw that again yesterday when Mercedes-Benz Chairman Dieter Zetsche launched a new car under a banner picture of Guevara. …Che Guevara, not to put too fine a point on it, was a psychopath whose sadistic lust for blood was not easily quenched. He killed for pleasure. He had, moreover, little time for youthful rebellion and none at all for individualism. Lastly, Che Guevara was a racist who specifically held blacks in contempt. I think about this often when I see deluded young African-Americans wearing a t-shirt with his likeness. But a German born a handful of years after 1945 really ought to have known better. Much has been written about how Guevara executed men and boys in prison in the early revolutionary years in Cuba, disposing of such bourgeois niceties as trials. …Speaking of blacks he said: “The ***** is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.” Yes, quite a model that Che Guevara. You’d buy a car from him, wouldn’t you? What will Mercedes-Benz come up with next? The Baader-Mienhof super coupe?
Almost exactly one year ago, the Baltimore Symphony used the Hammer and Sickle emblem of the Soviet Union to promote an event. That was disgusting, but at least the event involved the work of a Soviet-era composer.
Mercedes-Benz, by contrast, is using the image Che Guevera because the amoral executives of the company think this will help sell cars to an amoral public.
Please don’t buy anything from a company with that cavalier attitude about human decency.
Earlier this year, President Obama’s IRS proposed a regulation that would force banks in America to report any interest they pay to accounts owned by non-resident aliens (that’s the technical term for foreigners who don’t live in the U.S.).
What made this regulation so bizarre, however, is that Congress specifically has exempted these account from taxation for the rather obvious reason that they want to attract this mobile capital to the American economy. Indeed, Congress repeatedly has ratified this policy ever since it was first implemented 90 years ago.
So why, you may be asking, would the IRS propose such a regulation? After all, why impose a regulatory burden on a weakened banking sector when it has nothing to do with enforcing American tax law?
The answer, if you can believe it, is that they want American banks to help enforce foreign tax law. And the bureaucrats at the IRS want to impose this burden even though the regulation is completely contrary to existing U.S. law.
Not surprisingly, this rogue behavior by the IRS already has generated considerable opposition. Senator Rubio has been a leader on the issue, being the first to condemn the proposed regulation.
And now we have two more important voices against the IRS’s rogue regulation.
The Chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee in charge of the IRS, Congressman Charles Boustany of Louisiana, just sent a very critical letter to Treasury Secretary Geithner, and these are some of his chief concerns.
If the regulation were to take effect, it would not only run counter to the will of the Congress, but would potentially drive foreign investments out of our economy, hurting individuals and small businesses by reducing access to capital. I write to request that IRS suspend the proposed regulation. …As the Internal Revenue Code imposes no taxation or reporting requirements on this deposit interest, the proposed regulation serves no compelling tax collection purpose. Instead, it is my understanding that the IRS seeks this new authority to help foreign governments collect their own taxes abroad. …It is disappointing to see the IRS once again try to impose unnecessary regulations and costs on U.S. banks. To attract investment of foreign dollars into the U.S. economy, the Internal Revenue Code generally exempts these deposits from taxation and reporting requirements. These foreign investments in turn help to finance a variety of products essential to economic growth, such as small business loans and home mortgages. Imposing reporting requirements on these deposits through regulatory fiat threatens to drive significant investments out of our economy by undermining the rules Congress has set in place specifically to attract it, and at exactly the time when our economy can least afford it.
And now the business community has become involved. Here’s some of what the Chamber of Commerce recently said, and you can click this PDF file (USCC S1506) to read the entire letter.
Given the fragile state of America’s economic recovery, it is disturbing to see actions by the Treasury that could jeopardize deposits at U.S. banks and credit unions held by nonresident aliens. These deposits, which are not subject to U.S. taxes, are at risk of being abruptly withdrawn and future deposits deterred, which could lead to a reallocation of deposits out of the U.S. banking system and, thus, reduce lending to businesses. Furthermore, complying with the proposed regulation places additional reporting requirements and expenses upon financial firms. Without any real benefit stemming from the collection of this information, imposition of this reporting requirement seems to be a solution in search of a problem.
This may seem like an arcane issue and international tax matters often are not terribly exciting, but a couple of minutes of watching this video will make you realize there are some very important principles at stake.
Only the IRS could manage to combine bad tax policy, bad regulatory policy, bad human rights policy, and bad sovereignty policy into one regulation.
The bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the horrible crime of standing in the public lobby of a hotel and giving advice to low-tax jurisdictions.
But if that makes it seem as if the battle is full of drama and (exaggerated) glory, that would be a gross exaggeration. More than 99 percent of my time on this issue is consumed by the difficult task of trying to convince policy makers that tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy should be celebrated rather than persecuted.
Sort of like convincing thieves that it’s a good idea for houses to have alarm systems.
And it means I’m also condemned to the never-ending chore of debunking left-wing attacks on tax havens. The big-government crowd viscerally despises these jurisdictions because tax competition threatens the ability of politicians to engage in class warfare/redistribution policies.
To determine whether tax havens are immoral, let’s peruse Mr. Vallely’s column. It begins with an attack on Ugland House in the Cayman Islands.
There is a building in the Cayman Islands that is home to 12,000 corporations. It must be a very big building. Or a very big tax scam.
If lying is immoral, this is a quick black mark on Mr. Vallely rather than tax havens. I’ve already explained, in a post eviscerating an empty-suit Senator from North Dakota, that a company’s home is merely the place where it is chartered for legal purposes. A firm’s legal domicile has nothing to do with where it does business or where it is headquartered.
In other words, there is nothing nefarious about Ugland House, just as there is nothing wrong with the small building in Delaware that is home to more than 200,000 companies. Obama, by the way, demagogued about Ugland House during the 2008 campaign.
Now that we’ve established that the author is a careless and know-nothing hack, let’s see what else he has to say.
Are there any legitimate reasons why anyone would want to have a secret bank account – and pay a premium to maintain their anonymity – or move their money to one of the pink dots on the map which are the final remnants of the British empire: the Caymans, Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands?
o Persecuted ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and the Philippines?
o Political dissidents in places such as Russia and Venezuela?
o Entrepreneurs in thug regimes such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe?
o Families threatened by kidnapping failed states such as Mexico?
o Homosexuals in murderous regimes such as Iran?
As this video explains, there are billions of people around the world that are subject to state-sanctioned (or at least state-permitted) religious, ethnic, racial, political, sexual, and economic persecution. These people are especially likely to be targeted if they have any money, so the ability to invest their assets offshore and keep that information hidden from venal governments can, in some cases, be a life-or-death matter.
And let’s not forget the residents of failed states, where crime, expropriation, kidnapping, corruption, extortion, and economic mismanagement are ubiquitous. These people also need havens where they can safely and confidentially invest their money.
The author of the column is probably oblivious to these practical, real-world concerns. Instead, he is content with sweeping proclamations.
The moral case against is clear enough. Tax havens epitomise unfairness, cheating and injustice. .
But if he is against unfairness, cheating, and injustice, why does he want to empower the institution – government – that is the source of oppression in the world?
To be fair, our left-wing friend does attempt to address the other side of the argument.
Apologists insist that tax havens protect individual liberty. They promote the accumulation of capital, fair competition between nations and better tax law elsewhere in the world. They also foster economic growth. …Yet even if all that were true – and it is not – does it outweigh the ethical harm they do? The numbered bank accounts of tax havens are notoriously sanctuaries for the spoils of theft, fraud, bribery, terrorism, drug-dealing, illegal betting, money-laundering and plunder by Arab despots such as Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali, all of whom had Swiss accounts frozen.
But he can’t resist trying to discredit the economic argument by resorting to more demagoguery, asserting that tax havens are shadowy regimes. Not surprisingly, he offers no supporting data. Moreover, you won’t be surprised to learn that the real-world evidence directly contradicts what he wrote. The most comprehensive analysis of dirty money finds 28 problem jurisdictions, and only one could be considered a tax haven.
Last but not least, the author addresses the issue that really motivates the left – the potential loss of access to other people’s money, funds that they want the government to confiscate and redistribute.
Christian Aid reckons that tax dodging costs developing countries at least $160bn a year – far more than they receive in aid. The US research centre Integrity estimated that more than $1.2trn drained out of poor countries illicitly in 2008 alone. …Some say an attack on tax havens is an attack on wealth creation. It is no such thing. It is a demand for the good functioning of capitalism, balancing the demands of efficiency and of justice, and placing a value on social harmony.
There are several problems with this passage, including the (perhaps deliberate) mixing of tax evasion and tax avoidance. But the key point is that the burden of government spending in most nations is now at record levels, undermining prosperity and reducing growth. Why should add more fuel to the fire by giving politicians even more money to waste?
Let’s now shift from the inaccurate ramblings of a left-winger to some real-world evidence. The Wall Street Journal has an article on the Canton of Zug, Switzerland’s tax haven within a tax haven. This hopefully won’t surprise anyone, but low-tax policies have been very beneficial for Zug.
Developed nations from Japan to America are desperate for growth, but this tiny lake-filled Swiss canton is wrestling with a different problem: too much of it. Zug’s history of rock-bottom tax rates, for individuals and corporations alike, has brought it an A-list of multinational businesses. Luxury shops abound, government coffers are flush, and there are so many jobs that employers sometimes have a hard time finding people to fill them. …If Switzerland is the world’s most famous tax haven, Zug amounts to a haven within a haven.
Here’s some of the evidence of how better fiscal policy promotes prosperity. This is economic data, to be sure, but isn’t the choice between growth and stagnation also a moral issue?
Zug long was a poor farming region, but in 1947 its leaders began to trim tax rates in an effort to attract companies and the well-heeled. In Switzerland, two-thirds of total taxes, including individual and corporate income taxes, are levied by the cantons, not the central government. The cantons also wield other powers that enable them compete for business, such as the authority to make residency and building permits easy to get. …businesses moved in, many establishing regional headquarters. Over the past decade, the number of companies with operations of some sort in the canton jumped to 30,000 from 19,000. The number of jobs in Zug rose 20% in six years, driven by the economic boom and foreign companies’ efforts to minimize their taxes. At a time when the unemployment rate in the European Union (to which Switzerland doesn’t belong) is 9.4%, Zug’s is 1.9%.
It turns out that Zug is growing so fast that lawmakers actually want to discourage more investment. What a nice problem to have.
Describing Zug’s development as “astonishing,” Matthias Michel, the head of the canton government, said, “We are too small for the success we have had.” …Zug has largely stopped trying to lure more multinationals, according to Mr. Michel.
…the Swiss are mostly holding fast to their fiscal beliefs. Last November, in a national referendum, they overwhelmingly rejected a proposal that would have established a minimum 22% tax rate on incomes over 250,000 francs, or about $315,000.
This global tax cartel will be akin to an OPEC for politicians, and the impact on taxpayers will be quite similar to the impact of the real OPEC on motorists.
If that’s a moral outcome, then I want to be a hedonist.
To conclude, here are two other videos on tax havens. This one looks at the economic issues.
And here’s a video debunking some of the usual attacks on low-tax jurisdictions.
After World War II, some Germans tried to defend venal behavior by claiming that they were “just following orders” from their government.
Governments in America have never done anything nearly as awful as the Nazis, but there certainly are some very unpleasant blemishes in our past – and some very bad laws today.
This raises an interesting moral quandary. To what extent are we – as moral individuals – obliged to obey (or help enforce) bad law?
Decent people should not obey immoral laws. What’s moral and immoral can be a contentious issue, but there are some broad guides for deciding what laws and government actions are immoral. Lysander S. Spooner, one of America’s great 19th-century thinkers, said no person or group of people can “authorize government to destroy or take away from men their natural rights; for natural rights are inalienable, and can no more be surrendered to government — which is but an association of individuals — than to a single individual.” French economist/philosopher Frederic Bastiat (1801-50) gave a test for immoral government acts: “See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.” He added in his book “The Law,” “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”
I don’t pretend to know where to draw the line, but, as suggested by my posts about jury nullification, I fully subscribe to the libertarian principle that “not everything that’s illegal is immoral, and not everything that’s immoral should be illegal.”
So if you’re dodging taxes, cutting hair without a license, or smoking pot, the government better not put me on a jury if you get arrested. An if you have an expired registration sticker on your car, an unregistered gun, or a stockpile of normal light bulbs you plan on selling after the ban takes effect, you can safely confide in me.
I’m getting sick of the debt downgrade issue, so let’s shift to another topic.
The title to this post may seem like a joke, but Europe’s bizarre courts have decided to trample the property rights of landlords by ruling that tenants have a “right” to satellite TV and therefore cannot be barred from installing dishes.
It is regarded as a luxury that allows people to watch top sport and blockbuster movies from the comfort of their armchairs. But owning a satellite dish is actually a human right, according to unelected European judges. In an extraordinary ruling, lawmakers in Strasbourg have warned that banning dishes on listed buildings, social housing and even private homes could breach the right to freedom of expression… The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Britain’s discrimination watchdog, has now published new guidance warning that landlords could be at risk of being sued if they try to stop their tenants putting up a satellite dish.
To be fair, other government entities can be equally stupid when it comes to fabricating human rights. The Finish government, for instance, decided that there’s now a human right to broadband access.
I wonder if the politicians and judges might rethink some of these decisions if people decided that they had a “human right” to rob the homes of the political elite?
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and other Senate Republicans on Tuesday introduced a bill aimed at blocking pending regulations that would require banks to report to the Internal Revenue Service all interest deposits paid to nonresident aliens (NRA). Rubio, along with Texas GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, introduced S. 1506 because they believe the pending regulations have the potential to drive billions of dollars of deposits away from U.S. banks. A summary of the bill provided by Rubio’s office argues that this could leave U.S. banks undercapitalized and less able to lend in the U.S. “Simply put, this rule will cause billions of dollars in important NRA deposits to be withdrawn from American banks and invested in countries with less onerous reporting requirements,” the lawmakers state in the bill summary. “A capital flight of any magnitude will hurt the lending capacity of community banks and damage local and state economies — not to mention endanger those who invest in U.S. banks due to corruption, inflation, and violence in their home countries, particularly in nations like Mexico and Venezuela.” The summary also notes that Congress has explicitly exempted NRA deposits from taxation… Rubio’s bill is a companion bill to H.R. 2568, which was introduced by Reps. Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Francisco Canseco (R-Texas), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), Ruben Hinojosa (D-Texas) and Gregory Meeks (D-NY).
I’m often amazed at how the political class concocts new rights that can only be fulfilled by trampling on genuine freedoms.
In a previous post, I mocked Finland for deciding that broadband access was a human right (which presumably means Finns were being oppressed before Al Gore invented the Internet).
Another post sarcastically noted that European courts decided that free soccer broadcasts were a fundamental right (meaning Europeans were being oppressed before TV was invented).
But these two posts might lead people to think that only Europeans are stupid enough to create non-existent rights. Rest assured, this is not the case. Politicians from all part of the world are perfectly capable of making decisions that are economically foolish and morally depraved.
Consider President Evo Morales of Bolivia. His government decided to grant amnesty to people who purchased stolen cars. You may think I’m exaggerating, but here’s an excerpt from a news service report.
According to Bolivian Customs in the first ten days of the amnesty, effective until next July first, a total of 70.248 “chuto” cars (as illegal vehicles are called in Bolivia) have been presented for legalization to which another 6.000, with the wrong paperwork, must be added. …President Morales justified the legalization of contraband cars arguing that the ‘chutos’ are purchased by “poor people” who want “to improve their status” and prefer them because they are ‘cheaper’. “We all have a right to have a car” said President Morales.
In a just society, of course, there is no such thing as a “right” that can only be provided by stealing another person’s property. And that’s true even when the government is the middleman in the transaction.
The IRS issued this proposal, even though Congress repeatedly has voted not to tax this income because of an understandable desire to attract job-creating capital to the U.S. economy. In other words, the IRS is acting like a rogue bureaucracy, seeking to overturn laws enacted through the democratic process.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The IRS’s interest-reporting regulation also threatens the stability of the American banking system, makes America less attractive for foreign investors, and weakens the human rights of people who live under corrupt and tyrannical governments.
This Center for Freedom and Prosperity video outlines five specific reason why the IRS regulation is bad news and should be withdrawn.
I’m not sure what upsets me most. As a believer in honest and lawful government, it is outrageous that the IRS is abusing the regulatory process to pursue an ideological agenda that is contrary to 90 years of congressional law. But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of policy from the IRS with Obama in the White House. After all, this Administration already is using the EPA in a dubious scheme to impose costly global warming rules even though Congress decided not to approve Obama’s misguided legislation.
As an economist, however, I worry about the impact on the U.S. banking sector and the risks for the overall economy. Foreigners invest lots of money in the American economy, more than $10 trillion according to Commerce Department data. This money boosts our financial markets and creates untold numbers of jobs. We don’t know how much of the capital will leave if the regulation is implemented, but even the loss of a couple of hundred billion dollars would be bad news considering the weak recovery and shaky financial sector.
In pushing this regulation, the IRS even disregarded rule-making procedures adopted during the Clinton Administration. But all this is explained in the video, so let’s close this post with a link to a somewhat naughty – but very appropriate – joke about the IRS.
I’m not a big fan of the Internal Revenue Service, but I try not to demonize the bureaucrats because politicians actually deserve most of the blame for America’s complex, unfair, and corrupt tax system. The IRS generally is in the unenviable position of simply trying to enforce very bad laws.
But sometimes the IRS runs amok and the agency deserves to be held in contempt by the American people
Let’s look at a grotesque example of IRS misbehavior. It deals with a seemingly arcane issue, but it has big implications for the US economy, the rule of law, and human rights.
On January 7, the tax-collection bureaucracy proposed a regulation that, if implemented, would force American financial institutions to put foreign tax law above US tax law. Banks would be required to report to the IRS any interest they pay to foreigners, but not so the US government can collect tax, but in order to let foreign governments tax this US-source income.
This isn’t the first time the IRS has tried to pull this stunt. At the very end of the Clinton years, the agency proposed a rule to do the same thing. But the bureaucrats were thwarted because of overwhelming opposition from Capitol Hill, the financial services industry, and public policy experts. There was near-unanimous agreement that it would be crazy to drive job-creating capital out of the US economy and there was also near-unanimous agreement that the IRS had no authority to impose a regulation that was completely inconsistent with the laws enacted by Congress.
But like a zombie, this IRS regulation has risen from the grave.
I’m not sure what is most upsetting about this proposed rule, but there are five serious flaws in the IRS’s back-door scheme to turn American banks into deputy tax collectors for foreign governments.
1. The IRS is flouting the law, using regulatory dictates to overturn laws enacted through the democratic process.
Yet rogue IRS bureaucrats want to impose a regulation to overturn the outcome of the democratic process. Heck, if they really think they have that sort of power, why don’t they do us a favor and unilaterally junk the entire internal revenue code and give us a flat tax?
Issued by the Clinton Administration, this executive order requires that regulations be accompanied by “An assessment of the potential costs and benefits of the regulatory action” for any regulation that will, “Have an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more or adversely affect in a material way the economy, a sector of the economy, productivity, competition, jobs, the environment, public health or safety, or State, local, or tribal governments or communities.”
Yet the IRS blithely asserts that this interest-reporting proposal is “not a significant regulatory action.” Amazing, we have trillions of dollars of foreign capital invested in our economy, perhaps $1 trillion of which is deposited in banks, and we know some of which definitely will be withdrawn if this regulation is implemented, but the bureaucrats unilaterally decided the regulation doesn’t require a cost-benefit analysis.
We don’t know how much money will leave America if this regulation is implemented, but there are many financial centers – such as London, Hong Kong, Cayman, Singapore, Tokyo, Zurch, Luxembourg, Bermuda, and Panama – that would gladly welcome the additional investment if the IRS makes the American financial services sector less attractive.
4. The IRS is destabilizing America’s already shaky financial system.
Five years ago, when the banking industry was strong, the IRS regulation would have been bad news. Now, with many banks still weakened by the financial crisis, the regulation could be a death knell. Not only would it drive capital to banks in other nations, it also would impose a heavy regulatory burden.
How bad would it be? Commenting on an earlier version of the regulation, which only would have applied to deposits from 15 countries, the Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation warned that, “[a] shift of even a modest portion of these [nonresident alien] funds out of the U.S. banking system would certainly be termed a significant economic impact.” He also noted that potentially $1 trillion of deposits might be involved. And a study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University estimated that $87 billion would leave the American economy. And remember, that estimate was based on a regulation that would have applied to just 15 nations, not the entire world.
So what happens if more banks fail? I guess the bureaucrats at the IRS would probably just shrug their shoulders and suggest another bailout.
5. The IRS is endangering the lives of foreigners who deposit funds in America because of persecution, discrimination, abuse, crime, and instability in their home countries.
If you’re from Mexico you don’t want to put money in local banks or declare it to the tax authorities. Corruption is rampant and that information might be sold to criminal gangs who then kidnap one of your children. If you’re from Venezuela, you have the same desire to have your money in the United States, but perhaps you’re more worried about persecution or expropriation by a brutal dictatorship.
Let’s wrap this up. Under current law, America is a safe haven for international investors. This is good news for foreigners, and good news for the American economy. That’s why it is so outrageous that the IRS, unilaterally and without legal justification, is trying to reverse 90 years of law for no other reason than to help foreign governments.
By the way, you can add your two cents by clicking on this link which will take you to the public comment page for this regulation. Don’t be bashful.
One last point. The Obama Administration says this regulation is part of a global effort to improve tax compliance. But unless Congress changes the law, the IRS is not responsible for helping foreign tax collectors squeeze more money out foreign taxpayers. Moreover, the White House has been grossly misleading about U.S. compliance issues (as this video illustrates), so their assertions lack credibility.
A writer for the Atlantic (or perhaps an editor in charge of headlines) is so clueless about world affairs that he lists America as one of the world’s most-authoritarian nations. As someone who is constantly criticizing government, I certainly have no objection to strong rhetoric when describing the misguided policies of the federal government. But I also like to put everything in context and recognize that the United States is still one of the best places for people who value freedom. That may be damning with faint praise, but relative rankings matter. And so when someone at the Atlantic asserts that we are more authoritarian than Libya, Russia, Venezuela, and Cambodia, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The fundamental problem with the article is that it uses some maps put together by Esquire that simply show nations that impose the death penalty and nations that allows gays to serve in the military. It is quite reasonable to argue that the United States has the wrong approach on those issues. To argue that the American position on those two issues someone makes us worse than 178 other countries is borderline nuts. The Atlantic writer basically acknowledges that point in the article, which brings us back to who was in charge of the headline?
Forget the Magna Carta and the Constitution. Finland is now on the cutting edge of protecting, promoting, and guaranteeing fundamental rights. As the BBC story excerpted below reports, Finland has announced that broadband access is now a legal right! Yes, you’re reading it here first. But not just the right to broadband. Apparently one megabit per second is a human right today and 100 megabits per second is a human right by 2015. I gather this is the Finnish version of a “living, breathing” right. My only question, though, is whether older Finns can sue the government for failing to provide this right back in the awful, deprived days before Al Gore invented the Internet?
From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection. Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015. In the UK the government has promised a minimum connection of at least 2Mbps to all homes by 2012 but has stopped short of enshrining this as a right in law. The Finnish deal means that from 1 July all telecommunications companies will be obliged to provide all residents with broadband lines that can run at a minimum 1Mbps speed.
Jeff Jacoby righteously – and rightfully – condemns the moral perversion that allows people to overlook the barbaric cruelty and oppression of communism.
If Jose Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Leading publishers would never have brought out his books, his works would not have been translated into more than 20 languages, and the head of Portugal’s government would never have said on his death — as Prime Minister José Sócrates did say last week — that he was “one of our great cultural figures and his disappearance has left our culture poorer.” But Saramago wasn’t a Nazi, he was a communist. And not just a nominal communist, as his obituaries pointed out, but an “unabashed” (Washington Post), “unflinching’’ (AP), “unfaltering’’ (New York Times) true believer. A member since 1969 of Portugal’s hardline Communist Party, Saramago called himself a “hormonal communist’’ who in all the years since had “found nothing better.” …the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, only a moral cripple could be a committed Nazi. By the same token, there are no good and decent communists — not after the Gulag Archipelago and the Cambodian killing fields and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.’’ Not after the testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and Dith Pran. In the decades since 1917, communism has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other cause in human history. Communist regimes on four continents sent an estimated 100 million men, women, and children to their deaths — not out of misplaced zeal in pursuit of a fundamentally beautiful theory, but out of utopian fanaticism and an unquenchable lust for power. Mass murder and terror have always been intrinsic to communism. “Many archives and witnesses prove conclusively,’’ wrote Stéphane Courtois in his introduction to “The Black Book of Communism,’’ a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, “that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of modern communism.’’ The uniqueness of the Holocaust notwithstanding, the savageries of communism and of Nazism are morally interchangeable — except that the former began much earlier than the latter, lasted much longer, and shed far more blood.
I’m on my may to El Salvador to give a speech about the principles of good fiscal policy and I stopped off in Panama for a luncheon speech sponsored by the Fundacion Libertad about the dangers of excessive government spending. I have two observations based on my day of discussions.
First, Panama has a very large banking sector, in part because it is a tax haven and in part because it is a “dollarized” economy. But Panama, like Canada, did not have any sectoral problems during the financial crisis. Why? Because unlike the United States, there are no policies to subsidize housing. There is no Fannie Mae, no Freddie Mac, and no Community Reinvestment Act. So even though there has been a housing boom in Panama City that has since cooled off, this did not lead to significant problems since banks had no government-created incentive to make zero-downpayment loans or offer loans to people with inadequate income and assets.
Second, Panama is a safe haven for oppressed people in Latin America. Many people from unstable regimes such as Venezuela have fled to Panama – or at least moved their money to Panama – to protect their families. Other people from places such as Ecuador and Argentina have moved their money to Panama to guard against expropriation and theft by corrupt governments. And others from nations like Mexico have placed their money in Panama because of rampant crime and kidnapping in their home nations – often triggered when corrupt bureaucrats in national tax offices sell information to criminal gangs. Putting money in Panama minimizes these terrible risks because so-called tax havens have strong human rights policies that protect financial privacy. But for many Latin Americans, the goal is not to protect against punitive taxation, but rather to guard against thuggish and incompetent governments. These are some of the issues highlighted in this video about “The Moral Case for Tax Havens.”
For taxpayers from North America and Western Europe, tax havens are an important safety valve to guard against bloated and wasteful government. For taxpayers in most other parts of the world, though, tax havens can mean the difference between life and death. So every time you hear greedy politicians like Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy attack tax havens, remember that they are willing to put people’s lives at risk to promote their big government agenda.
There’s a principled Fourth Amendment argument against anti-money laundering laws. In this video, however, I mostly focus on the cost-benefit issue, explaining that the fight against crime will be more effective if law enforcement is not forced to look for a needle in a haystack.
…Roberto Perdigones, an army corporal who registered as female in the last year, now earns more money and lives in superior accommodation. “On the outside I feel like a heterosexual man, but on the inside I am a lesbian…” “For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 per cent more salary for being a mother,” he said. …Under Spain’s transgender law, anyone can switch the gender entered on their ID card and passport by formally requesting the change, without any additional requirements… Sources told El Español that officers in the Civil Guard, the National Police and the Local Police in Ceuta were also changing their sexes for benefits.
guides for deciding what laws and government actions are immoral. Lysander S. Spooner, one of America’s great 19th-century thinkers, said no person or group of people can “authorize government to destroy or take away from men their natural rights; for natural rights are inalienable, and can no more be surrendered to government — which is but an association of individuals — than to a single individual.” French economist/philosopher Frederic Bastiat (1801-50) gave a test for immoral government acts: “See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.” He added in his book “The Law,” “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”
International Liberty 
