Democratizing Nookie & Buyer’s Remorse

The cover story of January’s issue Reason Magazine is Guilty Until Proven Innocent – How the government encourages kangaroo courts for sex crimes on campus is authored by Cathy Young.  The article explores the confused and conflicted sexual agendas that can get a guy expelled from college for a seemingly consensual roll in the hay.

Our governing authorities rightly look to protect women from sexual predators.  Conversely, the culture encourages sexual an attitude of sexual freedom.  Popular wisdom holds that the easy access to birth control and abortion liberates females to explore sexuality as partners with men.

Ms. Young’s article suggests that liberation has muddied the already murky waters of sexual relations; making it ever trickier to navigate the hazardous channels of love, sex and romance.

Let’s look back at how are arrived here and what roles state and culture played.

Beginning in the 19^th Century, Sigmund Freud taught that society’s ills are squarely rooted in the repressive Victorian sexual attitudes.  

That may be so said Margaret Sanger, but what about us women?  We can’t let loose without getting pregnant?  We need birth control if we are to have sexual equality and enjoy the therapeutic benefits of a fulfilling sex life.

Soon the churches fell in line.  At the 1930 Lambeth conference the Anglican Church became the first major confession to get on board with birth control and in front of the sexual revolution.  Come the Sixties and the Pill and the rest virginity was no longer an option.

Now all of this is fine with us libertarians so far.  We really don’t care who hooks up with whom so long as it is between consenting adults and they assume responsibility for any adverse outcomes.  Yet, once again democracy rears its ugly head.

Over two centuries ago in his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observed that there exist separate moral stands for the well-to-do versus the hoi polloi because, let’s face it, they could afford to be bad:

“In every civilized society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people; the latter is commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called the people of fashion.”

In the modern age, we workaday folks live vicariously through Hollywood celebrities, pop stars and jet setters who leap from bed to bed and from marriage to marriage because they can write big checks when the fit hits the Shan.

“How can this be fair?” cry the pleaders for the poor and oppressed? Why are the wealthy more entitled to a good time in the sack than us?  Isn’t that a basic right?  Margaret Sanger dragged class conflict into the already hazardous battle of the sexes, when she wrote about the “knowledge of birth control, so carefully guarded and so secretly practiced by the women of the wealthy class -- and so tenaciously withheld from the working women”.  A central argument in the pro-legal abortion position is that rich women can always “go away” to have their problem “taken care of” safely while the poor girls fall prey to back alley butchers.

In no time, sexual fulfillment became a right with birth control and abortion becoming entitlements.  With this, men and women arrived at equality in the bedroom, able to indulge risk-free pleasure that was often taxpayer subsidized.

We should now be a socialist dreamland of equality with men and women essentially neutered and turned into indiscriminant pleasure seeking bio-droids.  With the playing field leveled by legislation and litigation, it should be open season for guys and gals to find regret free trysts.

However, something has gone wrong.  Despite the best efforts of gender levelers there are still differences in how the sexes survey the sexual battlefield.  Vive la difference! 

Margaret Sanger herself saw this when she wrote, “There is no doubt that the natural aim of the sexual impulse is the sexual act, yet when the impulse is strongest and followed by the sexual act without love or any of the relative instincts which go to make up love, the relations are invariably followed by a feeling of disgust.” 

She concludes, “Respect for each other and for one's self is a primary essential to this intimate relation.”

What is happening and what is documented by Cathy Young’s Reason article, is that the breaking down of cultural and biological barriers to sexual gratification often results in impersonal hook-ups that engender that “feeling of disgust” and loss of self respect and resentment of the casual partner.  In other words, buyer’s remorse.

One is tempted to say caveat emptor, live and learn.  However the backlash now often carries considerable penalties for men who mistakenly believed that they equal participants in a mutually agreeable shag fest.

The lessons for libertarians here are that, yes, we endorse equality before the law and strong protections against sexual predators.  But let us also remember that the strength of a free society lies in diversity, including some hardwired differences between the sexes no matter how much we would like to deny them.

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

Crabby in Maryland

Politico reports that Democrats in Maryland are at odds with one another over the slip shod rollout of Obamacare in the state.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Doug Gansler wonders aloud why a state that has, in his estimation, “literally the smartest people in the country” is having such problems getting ACA enrollment right.

Here is what Gansler doesn’t get.  It doesn’t matter how many smart people there are in Maryland.  Any centrally market disruption is bound to fail.  No one can doubt that there were plenty of smart people in Soviet Union or in the entire Eastern Block, yet conditions were miserable, there was no prosperity.  

 However, just beyond the Wall, West Germany and Western Europe experience a spectacular post World War II recovery.

Ditto with the PRC.  Life there was fairly primitive, while free Hong Kong was setting the business world on fire.

Centrally planned systems are doomed to failure.  That’s because no individual or group of individuals can ever possess the knowledge that resides with thousands or millions of freely acting producers, consumers and middlemen.  F. A. Hayek demonstrates that order in a society emerges spontaneously from countless numbers of people making even more countless decisions based upon their estimate of what best suites their particular needs.  Those decisions that are successful get repeated and emulated while those that fail are discarded.   This how a healthy society evolves adapts and grows without guidance from some all powerful planner.   

The idea that one man or some central committee can know what is best for each every person in society is what Hayek calls the “conceit of knowledge” or The Fatal Conceit.

So, back to Obamacare and back to Maryland.  The Dems can argue all that they want who is to blame for the ACA’s flubbed execution and who is most competent to handle it.  It is a losing proposition from the get-go no matter who is in charge because it is impossible for a handful of politicians and technocrats to guess what is most right and satisfactory for each and every citizen.  The longer that is takes them to realize this, the crabbier everyone in Maryland will be.

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

Burgers and Bullets

News of fast food labor strikes continues pouring in.  Minimum wage workers are looking to increase their hourly wage to $15, which they contend to be a “just” living wage.   In my own Soprano State of New Jersey, the voters have recently approved a state constitutional amendment to increase the minimum wage by a buck and to mandate annual cost-of-living increases.

Please indulge me in a little thought exercise.

Let’s say that you go down to you local burger joint to ask for a job. The boss tells you that he can pay $7 but say that you want $15.  He says “too bad, take it or leave it”.  So you take it.   However you also take an additional $8 from the cash register for every hour that you worked in order to get up the $15 per hour that you feel you deserve.

Most people would call that stealing.  If most of your coworkers did it, the burger joint might soon be out of business and you would need to find a new gig.

Now let’s consider another scenario.  As before, you apply for the job, you ask for $15 and the boss offers $7.  This time you pull a gun on the boss and tell him that it will be $15.  End of discussion.  You also make sure that you bring your gun with you on payday to ensure that you are getting your $15 per hour.

If nothing else, this method is more honest and straightforward than stealing from the register.  At least the boss knows where his money is going.  Still, most people would still call it a crime.

Now let’s run through this one more time.

You and your fellow workers convince your elected representatives that you really deserve $15 an hour, not $7.  So then the State sends your boss a note informing him that he will be giving you a nice raise.  The letter also advises your boss that he must do so under the penalty of law.  “Penalty of law” is a polite way of saying that guys with guns will come by to ensure compliance “or else”.

Question: how is having the hired guns of government to extort an extra $8 per hour out of your boss any more moral or any less of a crime than doing it yourself?

I now turn the thought exercise over to you, the reader, to complete.

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

Papal Fallibility

As believing Catholic I accept my Church’s teaching as regards Papal infallibly.  Specifically, the Church hold that papal pronouncements are inerrant on matters of faith and doctrine if and only when he speaks ex cathedra – and this has happened only twice.  Since infallibility is limited to Church doctrine, the Pope is neither infallible nor or even within his competency when commenting on other topics.  To be sure Catholics do look to Rome for expertise on medical treatment, automotive maintenance, information architecture or much outside of the moral or spiritual realm.   

The Pontiff may be our spiritual leader par excellence but he is literally no rocket scientist, nor should we expect him to be.  After all, our first Pope, St. Peter, has humble fisherman from a backwater town.  Although Peter was tutored at Christ’s feet on matters of divine import, it is safe say that he knew little to nothing about the Egyptian mathematics, Greek astronomy or Roman engineering of his day.

All of this is preface my alarm and frustration when churchmen, and the Holy Father in particular, conflate moral teaching with wishful economic thinking.  Just the other day, Pope Francis decried “trickle-down” economics .  Sadly, the Pontiff adopted the rhetoric of Marxism of class warfare saying, “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.”  He ignored the facts of material progress asserting that “some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.”  Like many on the Left, he confuses income inequality with poverty by assuming the upper crust is taking a larger slice of a static sized pie.  And, one would expect, he roots his critique in Scripture.

While it is a morally compelling argument is factually and conceptually off base.  Thus the prescriptions that might flow from such ill-founded rage could be harmful and destructive rather than curative and productive.

The Biblical perspective is based should be understood in the context of the ancient world.  In that day the “rich” were primarily of aristocratic or warrior class.  These powerful elite employed the violence or the threat of violence to extract material comfort from the peasantry and the artisans, leaving little behind for those who produced the economic staples of life.  In his 1974 book, The Socialist Phenomenon, Soviet dissident, Igor Shafarevich, traces the evolution of a novel form of social structure in the ancient Near East, the state.   This new institution united “human masses on an unprecedented scale and the subjugation of these masses to the will of a central power. The "technology of power" and not the "technology of production" was the foundation upon which the new type of society was based. “

As we can see, the technologies of mass wealth creation had yet to be created.  However those select few who had mastered the techniques weapons production and deployment subjugated the defenseless many.  Thus we can see how in ancient times the “rich” truly were a class that unjustly extracted their riches from the subjugated masses.  Thus it is understandable how Jesus and biblical prophets inveighed against “the rich”, and their oppression of the “poor” of their day.

However an economic, scientific and social revolution began in the 17^th century that would ignite wealth creation and forever alter the concepts of rich and poor.   This century witnessed the advent of three earthshaking intellectual innovations in England.  These are classical liberalism, free market economics and Newtonian mechanics.

The liberalism of John Locke would follow the Christian notion of human equality before God and the law to its logical conclusion. According to Locke’s logic King and commoner, price and pauper stood as equals before the Lord and no man could rightly claim to be born with a right to power over others.  This philosophy would take root in American and come to full fruition in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents of the American experiment.

The economic insights of Adam Smith expose the mercantile economic fallacies of the day.  Mercantilism was the crony capitalism of its time whereby, governments intervened in commercial activity to outcomes to the benefit of a well connected few.    Smith demonstrated how free and unfettered markets deliver superior outcomes for all strata of society, enriching all, impoverishing none.

Finally the scientific insights of Sir Isaac Newton provided a technical foundation for Industrial Revolution.

The combination of new found personal liberty, free markets and fueled an unprecedented economic production. Nearly 90% all wealth creation that has occurred over the past two millennia has occurred over the past two hundred years as a result of capitalist revolution that was launched by the aforementioned English gentlemen.  The following illustrates the progression:

In the natural state, wealth, that collection of material goods that sustains life and makes it livable, does not exist.  In the natural state, human beings eke out a tenuous hunter-gatherer existence that is completely vulnerable to the vagaries of nature.  The natural state is a state of poverty.  To overcome poverty, wealth must be created, and more of it is being created and at a faster rate than ever.

The question that the Vicar of Rome might pose is whether this new found wealth is finding its way to the masses or is simply accumulating in the hands of select few? 

Certainly corporate titans, Wall Street tycoons, tech innovators, show biz magnates, and top tier entertainers and athletes are racking up outlandish fortunes.  That cannot be denied.  However it is also true that world poverty is falling at unprecedented rates.

According to a 2010 World Bank report, the number of people living in “extreme poverty” which is defined a $1.25 or less per day has fallen to 22% of the developing world’s population – or 1.29 billion people from 43% in 1990 and 52% in 1981. That’s decline of nearly 58% in less than 30 years.

Granted, $1.25 is not much but other indicators of life quality have improved,  According the organization, HumanProgress many major indicators of material improvement speak to improved living conditions throughout the world including increased life expectancy, decreased infant mortality and increases in things like paved roads and access to healthcare and communications technology.

This progress is attributable to the global spread of economic and political freedoms.  Even Bono has come to realize that only free enterprise capitalism will lift Africa out its economic woes.  And Sting is correct when he sings that “there is no political solution to our troubled evolution”.    That is because the political solution is the way of the state, the way of coercion and violence.

Murray Rothbard succinctly defines the State as “that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion."

As such, the State or State sponsored measure will never lift the human race out of misery because to alleviate poverty wealth must be created.  However, the State produces nothing.  It only steals and redistributes the hard earned fruits of others’ risk, investment and labor.

The German sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer, clearly enunciates how the working world earns its keep versus how the State supports itself.  In his book, The State” Oppenheimer observes:

“There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. . . . I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of need while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means“. . . . The State is an organization of the political means. No State, therefore, can come into being until the economic means has created a definite number of objects for the satisfaction of needs, which objects may be taken away or appropriated by warlike robbery.”

So when clerics such as the Pope decry capitalism and call for State intervention, they are calling for theft, for robbery, no matter how well intentioned they may be.   .   No society that is rooted in theft can prosper.

When they employ the language of class struggle, they are falling prey to utopian illusion of state socialism.  The world’s greatest socialist endeavors Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China and Cuba have killed, tortured and imprisoned millions while failing to improve the lot of the masses as capitalism clearly has done.

When the Pope speaks of a misplaced “trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power” he misses the mark entirely.  Over two centuries ago, Adam Smith taught us that it is not good intentions that advance civilization's  prosperity.  Prosperity, the wealth of nations, and of the world, advances because of the aggregate transactions of individuals, each acting in his or her enlightened self interest.

“It is not from the benevolence (kindness) of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”  “by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”  The unforeseen consequence of free and voluntary production and trade is the material advancement of the nation and the human community.

Yes, my Pope is infallible in the realm of spiritual doctrine.  The Church is dead on correct its defense of life and religious liberty.  The Pope is also correct in calling out us on rampant consumerism and reminding us of our obligation to ease the lot of the poor and suffering.  He is on solid ground when he calls on us to withhold judgment upon those whose lifestyles depart from Christian norms.  After all, judgment is the Lord’s alone.

However, Popes can err in the area of providential judgment.  St. Paul, himself, confronted the first Pope, Peter in Antioch.  Paul wrote in Galatians that “I opposed him to his face because he clearly was wrong” about his treatment of the Gentiles.  So too is our Pontiff dangerously mistaken when he adorns himself in the mantle Marxism in his quest to help the poor. 

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

EA Sports Obama Drone Strike 2013

Recently a wave of seemingly bad publicity for America’s drone war has spilled out into the media.  This includes a quote in the new book Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in which President Obama boasts to aids that he is “really good at killing people.”  In another story, it seems that the Pakistanis are miffed that the U.S. offing of Taliban bigwig, Hakimullah Mehsud has screwed up recent peace negotiations and made a hero out of  a thug who heretofore regarded as a bad guy.

However bad this may appear on the surface, one must view this apparently adverse publicity through the lens of the ‘70s recording impresario, Neil Bogart who famously observed that “Good press is good press.  Bad press is good press.  No press is bad press.”

In reality, this tide of ink is nothing more than part of elaborate and sophisticated PR campaign that will get people talking about drones in advance of this season’s hottest video game release:  EA sports Obama Drone Strike 2013.  The game is set for release on Black Friday, November 29 just in time for the Christmas season.

In this hyper-realistic role playing game you assume the duties of our Commander in Chief who is also the fist Nobel Peace Prize winner to occupy the White House.  While sitting in the seat of power you will:

·         Receive intelligence briefings and  pick among alternative targets – some real, some bogus

·         Order the strike

·         Remotely navigate the drone

·         Identify the target

·         Terminate with extreme prejudice

Scoring is as follows:

·         100 points for every confirmed “high profile” terrorist killed

·         One additional point for every confirmed low level operative that is confirmed dead

·         Five points are deducted for every collateral civilian that is terminated

·         Ten points are deducted for every child that you take out

Lesser point totals are earned or deducted for those who are merely maimed but not killed.

The scoring scale is roughly in keeping with the odds of successfully delivering a high profile prize and inflicting collateral damage.

Players who chose to play the interactive, multiplayer online version will compete to win the honor of conducting an actual drone strike alongside of the POTUS himself in the Oval Office.  The winner and our Nobel Laureate President will undertake the attack live on national TV during halftime of the 2014 Super Bowl on February 2. 

The halftime target will be selected the week prior during the Pro Bowl via a nationwide cell phone poll. The selection show will hosted by Ryan Seacrest, John Stewart, General Colin Powell and Paris Hilton.

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

Insuring Profits for Insurers

Since at least World War II, the health insurance industry has been the beneficiary of federal government support.  This handy PBS chart explains how “wage and price controls (were) placed on American employers. To compete for workers, companies begin to offer health benefits, giving rise to the employer-based system in place today.”

By making health insurance premiums tax deductable to employers but not to individuals, companies were incentivized to provide this perceived high-value benefit to workers that the employer was able to attain at a steep discount.  Thus the health insurance industry prospered as the federal tax code motivated more employers to offer this benefit in lieu of higher cash wages.

By taking individual consumers out of the insurance market and by states severely regulating entry into the health insurance industry, the state insurance markets turned into oligopolies, or cartels.  Employers and workers were offered an abbreviated assortment of suppliers, plans and prices. 

As with higher education, housing , mortgages, agriculture, defense contracting or any other industry that government begins to control, the prices for healthcare and health insurance escalated as competitive market forces were suppressed.

 Harry Browne, the former Libertarian presidential candidate observed that   "Government is good at only one thing. It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See if it weren't for the government, you couldn't walk.”’  And so it goes with healthcare.  Government launched an inflationary spiral that it blamed on free markets and then claimed that it had to fix with added laws and regulation.

Of course, free markets have never been allowed to work in the U.S. healthcare market for well over half a century.  Thus the Affordable Care Act became law to add layers of complexity to the mess that government had already created.

The crony capitalist friends of our elected representatives were licking their chops.  This new law would force millions to buy their products and force millions more to pay higher premiums.  Laggards who refused to participate would be punished just like draft dodgers and tax evaders. 

Forbes reports that big insurers were giddy over the prospect of windfall profits.   In a related article the same publication notes how the ACA enriches only the insurance companies and their shareholders. 

But wait!  The embarrassing malfunctioning of healthcare.gov has spurred lawmakers to call for a delay in the enrollment mandate. 

The insurance companies are crying “Foul!”  They are pleading before Congress that any delay may result in a shortfall of profits.

To paraphrase Allen Iverson, “We’re talkin’ about profits here”.  No going out of business.  Not shutting down.  “We’re talkin’ about profits”.  Windfall profits, that Wall Street has been promised.

If profits fall short, there is a way to address that.  Cut executive bonuses and perks.  Cut staff.  Reduce pay.  Take furloughs.

What Congress cannot allow happen is to allow the big insurers and their Wall Street backs to make their numbers on the backs of regular Americans who are struggling to enroll in a crappy, dysfunctional and overpriced health insurance sinkhole.

Call your representatives and make sure that they resist the onslaught of high pressure, big money lobbyists.  Call them today!

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

The Federal Services Disruption Rebate

As a young boy I delivered newspapers to the daily subscribers in my neighborhood.  I quickly learned that if I failed to deliver the paper on any given day, that my customers would deduct the day’s cost from their weekly remittance.

Likewise, Americans who subscribe to a TV delivery service, be it cable, satellite or FIOS understand that when their service is disrupted for any significant portion of time, that they deduct a pro-rated portion of the fee from their monthly bill to reflect the term of the outage.

So it is with our federal government.  They are nothing if not fair, understanding, forgiving and customer friendly.  Therefore, the government’s revenue collection arm, the Internal Revenue Service will soon be making available Form 666 – FU , the Federal Services Disruption Reimbursement Form.

Bloggers such as myself received an advance draft copy of this form in order to help publicize this tax saving opportunity to our readers.

Long story short – Uncle Sam wants to make good the loss of service that its valued customers (i.e. federal taxpayers) suffered during the recent 16 day government shutdown.

The math is simple and straight forward.  You just:

1.      Take your total 2013 tax liability as reported on your 1040 Form

2.      Divide the above by 365 to determine your daily liability

3.      Multiply Line 2 by .17 (or 17%) to reflect the portion of government services lost each day

4.      Multiply Line 3 by 16 to reflect the total days of the shutdown to determine the rebate that is due to you.

An example follows.  In this hypothetical case, Mr. Ira B Sheeple owed $10,000 in Federal Income Taxes.  That computes to $27 per day.  However, Mr. Sheeple was deprived of 17% of the daily federal services that he was accustomed to receiving – this comes to $4.66 per day.  He was deprived of said services for a total of 17 days, which means that he is eligible for a $74.52 rebate on his 2013 taxes.

There is one catch however; the IRS will not be mailing these forms out to all taxpayers.  To receive one you must call your local IRS office and request a copy Form 666 – FU.  If the IRS clerk with whom you  speak with feigns ignorance, I suggest that you call your elected federal representatives as well as the White House and insist on receiving a copy.  I further recommend that you send a copy the attached example to help expedite the process.

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon

Who You Gonna Call?

Trenton activist Daryl Brooks and
Glenn Beck

Are you aware that police forces are only a recent invention?  

Are you are also aware the SCOTUS has determined that your police force is under no obligation to protect you?

Both are true facts.  According to Wikipedia only Philadelphia had police force during the colonial era.  The Philadelphia officers were positioned in watch boxes stationed throughout the city.  In the 1800’s other Eastern cities began to follow suit – Richmond (1807), Boston (1838) and New York (1845).  Wikipedia points out that, “After the civil war, policing became more para-military in character, with the increased use of uniforms and military ranks. Before this, sheriff's offices had been non-uniformed organizations without a para-military hierarchy.”

Prior to that, laws were enforced by elected Sheriffs who called upon local militias when extra muscle was required.  Militias in the U.S. were generally understood to be voluntary organizations of local citizens who banded together for the common defense.  Militia’s were so vitally important that they were enshrined as an essential American institution in the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  In the West, local Sheriffs also deputized the armed local citizens as the need arose.

Like most other things, government overtook and professionalized law enforcement.  Has it made America any safer?  I think not and for the following reasons:

1.       The arming of professional police has coincided with vigorous government efforts to disarm its citizens.  The rationale being that an armed citizenry was no longer necessary as law enforcement professionals were sufficient to protect us.

2.       However, experience over time has shown that Americans often need protection from the police.  So numerous are the cases police brutality, corruption and rogue unconstitutional behavior that the “protected” often become the persecuted.

3.       The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that that local police are under no obligation to protect individuals.

4.       Even if the police were entirely virtuous and were constitutionally obliged to protect us, prevailing economic conditions are such that many cities can no longer afford effective police protection.  In Detroit, it now takes police over an hour to respond to a call.  In that time, an efficient criminal could rob, rape, murder and bury his victim before the cops arrived.  Where’s the protection?

So why am I picking on the cops?  I'm really not.

Earlier this week, the Trenton political gadfly, Daryl Brooks was attacked for no good reason by local hoods.  When I spoke with him on the morning afterward, Daryl mused about how likely these thugs would have been to tangle with him if they feared that he might be armed.

He’s right.  Every New Jerseyan, every American deserves to able to protect themselves.  It is a fundamental human right.

Sure there are plenty of brave, honest and dedicated men in blue who will do whatever it takes to protect and serve their communities.  But it is simply impossible for them to look after our personal well being.  They are not body guards.

It is time that New Jersey lawmakers reconcile themselves to the Founders’ wisdom that an armed citizenry is the best defense alien invaders, common criminals and the incursions of a repressive government.

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