No, a myriad of new silk roads will not rise up to replace the old one

The State’s war on Dark Net marketplaces will result in previously trusted marketplaces being replaced by riskier and less trustworthy ones. Honest people operating on a reasonable risk/reward calculation will increasingly abstain from using them. The likely consequence is that the confidence level of DarkNet c-to-b transactions will begin to resemble that of traditional c-to-b transactions, with the additional negative repercussions of being more riskier to the buyer than the traditional c-to-b model.

By now, I’m sure anyone reading this post is aware of the sentence handed down to Ross Ulbricht(aka,”Dread Pirate Roberts”). The purpose of this post is not to extend a commentary on the barbaric character of the sentence.¹ That will be for another time. Instead, I want to counter the conventional postscript that concludes virtually every postmortem of the drug war.

“Just another example of an irrational,failed drug war. Take one down, fifteen will rise up to take its place…”

Nope. Not the case. Particularly, in this instance.

First, we should accurately report the full sentence Ulbricht received. It was life imprisonment and a 185 million dollar fine. The State rolled up money laundering charges in the conviction, in no small part because the United States government now “recognizes” bitcoin as a legitimate medium of exchange.²The financial penalty of bitcoin money laundering appears to be the total transactional value that can be pieced together through a forensic analysis of the public blockchain.

Secondly, public court documents and testimony regarding the fed purchases of product from the original silk road marketplace indicate an abnormal level of reliability in a c-to-b(consumer to business, or, if you prefer, user to dealer) drug transaction. Documents indicate you had about a 95% level of confidence that you were actually getting what you thought you were buying. Trust me, that level of confidence is not the norm in traditional c-to-b drug transactions. That’s the real story. The “reduction in violence” argument is not. Frankly, if you made the argument, it is a good indication that your only knowledge of the drug trade comes from watching tv/movies and reading state media sources.

Unfortunately, the effect of barbaric sentencing and draconian money laundering penalties will serve to introduce quite a bit of fraud into Dark Net drug marketplaces. Yes, knock one down, and perhaps fifteen will rise up to take its place. But the level of confidence of a c-to-b transaction confidence will begin to approach the traditional level and indeed may even fall below what you can expect on “the street.” In addition, the confidence level of “dealing with a narc,” on either side of the ledger(consumer or supplier), begins to exceed what you can expect “on the street.” So while there will be replacements, they won’t be exactly the same version as the previous ones.

Frankly, anyone who engages in a repeated pattern of buying or selling on Dark Net sites can only expect to be busted. You may as well just send out an email to the pigs for all intent and purposes. This is opposed to the traditional model where only the dealer following a repeated pattern faces a probable certainty of being prosecuted.

Bitcoin has its uses, but in terms of buying contraband, you are better off sticking to the old-fashioned human p2p network of your reasonably trusted inner/outer circle.

Unfortunately, that conclusion doesn’t exactly make for a “failed war on drugs,” now does it?

¹ I’ve read many characterizations that described it as “tragic.” Its not tragic. Its barbaric.

² Another demonstration why the dipshit “libertarians” at George Mason University campaigning for a “bitcoin regulatory regime” are mortal enemies of libertarianism. The argument that a “regulatory regime” carves out a “legitimate space” in a space that would otherwise be treated wholly as “criminal” actually introduces a far more punitive criminal sanction regime.”Legitimacy” allows the feds to wield the weapon of “money laundering.” And the blockchain is not anonymous. It is only pseudo-anonymous. The crime of operating a website can now carry the financial penalty of any applicable transactional value of the duly recorded transactions in the public blockchain.

The Madisonian Trifecta

Michael Hayden claims the enterprise of US Government surveillance has attained the status of the Madisonian Trifecta. Hmmm, sounds like a bad Robert Ludlum novel, or perhaps it’s just another name for The Firm.

Political Science III

This cybersecurity bill effectively applies the drug war model to computer security.

Of course, as predicted.

In the 90s, I thought the internet presaged an era of unprecedented human liberty. Now I know better…

Political Science

Political science is not moralizing. It is not liturgical recitation from sunday school scripture. Nor is it mere statistical interpolation of voting patterns to predict elections. Predicting elections may be a type of science but there may be a more fundamental science to be had if the outcome repeatedly proves irrelevant to the policies enacted or enforced.

Political science, like all sciences, applies a specific methodology(the scientific method) to explain and predict rational patterns within a specific domain of study. In this case, the specific domain of study is the organization and exercise of political power. There may be some that try to divine a type of justice that animates such an organization of power, but such musings preponderate on the side of prescription(“the ought”) and not description(“the is”). Hence, they are the stuff of political church, not science.

In a previous post,The FBI pwns you, I gave an assessment of an observed phenomenon of state security organs defeating network layer obfuscation. The official explanation claimed only innocuous investigative exploitation of “criminal stupidity.” I, however, offered a competing explanation: the FBI was resorting to application layer exploits to thwart network(IP layer) anonymity. I then advanced a prediction: the FBI and other organs of state security are seeking to bundle application layer exploits under an extended legalized wiretapping regime.

Recently, from Boing Boing FBI secretly seeking legal power to hack any computer, anywhere:

But under the proposed amendment, a judge can issue a warrant that would allow the FBI to hack into any computer, no matter where it is located. The change is designed specifically to help federal investigators carry out surveillance on computers that have been “anonymized” – that is, their location has been hidden using tools such as Tor.

The amendment inserts a clause that would allow a judge to issue warrants to gain “remote access” to computers “located within or outside that district” (emphasis added) in cases in which the “district where the media or information is located has been concealed through technological means”. The expanded powers to stray across district boundaries would apply to any criminal investigation, not just to terrorist cases as at present.

Were the amendment to be granted by the regulatory committee, the FBI would have the green light to unleash its capabilities – known as “network investigative techniques” – on computers across America and beyond. The techniques involve clandestinely installing malicious software, or malware, onto a computer that in turn allows federal agents effectively to control the machine, downloading all its digital contents, switching its camera or microphone on or off, and even taking over other computers in its network

Note, I also offered a corollary to the prediction: the extended wiretapping regime would effectively allow unfalsifiable data laundering from the NSA’s three-hop graphical dragnet. If the “wiretap” failed, the likes of the FBI could make a request up the “corporate intelligence ladder” to the NSA for the mother of all wiretaps: the 3-hop graphical dragnet. The information gleaned from that data could be “reversed-engineered” to fall within the “legal wiretap.” Once the network devices are seized, it is trivial to ex post facto plant a “vulnerability profile” that would “launder” the evidence collection. From a forensics standpoint, it would be difficult to falsify such after-the-fact subterfuge. The only circumvention of this totalitarian “law enforcement technique” would be to have redundant snapshots of the devices in question outside the jurisdiction of any one intervening authority. If the FBI could seize the device but couldn’t get all the redundant snapshots, then a comparative forensic analysis could take place that would expose the subterfuge.

Now, in these two little posts of mine we have seen an actual example of political science. An observed phenomenon: an explanation of the phenomenon, a prediction, a confirmation of the prediction, a prediction corollary that demonstrates the importance of jurisdictional differentiation to stymie the totalitarian pattern of exercised political power.

Of course, for my statement to be a scientific statement, the statement itself has to be subject to falsification. But who is going to falsify it? The political scientists? Let me know when you actually find one…¹

¹ Death of the Liberal Paradigm

FBI Resolves Question of Totalitarian State

No one is beyond the reach of the FBI. We will find you.

FBI statement on the arrest of radical libertarian, Dread Pirate Roberts

Periodically, the question of the US as a totalitarian police state is taken up by respectable company that unfailingly use the open consideration of the question itself as immediate evidence to the contrary. Indeed, those who may argue the point are often dismissed as undesirable rift-raft endangering libertarian respectability among the people who count.

But I think the FBI perhaps has finally put this debate to rest. They obviously view themselves as having totalitarian power and authority to the point of openly bragging about it. Given the current context of NSA revelations, this type of braggadocio illustrates a state apparatus quite comfortable with a perceived reality that either no one cares or there is not a god damned thing they can do about it if they do.

So, as they say, straight from the horses mouth.

Next question…

The State is its Own Agency

That the NSA has now commenced with overt pressure campaigns to countermand any legislative effort to curtail its vast surveillance enterprise cements an obvious liberal dilemma regarding the agency of the State. Make no mistake, totalitarian spying exemplifies an agency whose ends are in competition with the ends of its own citizens. This is a fatal violation of the liberal paradigm out in the open, staring you right in the face.

The germane question which moves to the fore of consideration hence pertains to the extent of government surveillance. Is it indeed totalitarian? If we were to constrain the scope of consideration strictly to the NSA itself, then the answer would probably be no. It’s modus operandi does not follow the traditional taxonomy of the textbook totalitarian spymaster. However, thanks to the documentation leaked by Edward Snowden, what we have now is confirmation of the cypherpunk dystopian model, which in a real sense, is much worse, for it portends a sustainable template of planetary social control. The NSA in and of itself is one thing. However, in the larger context of its coerced “strategic partnerships” with the top US internet & software companies–as means to facilitate/execute the data collection requirements–what we end up with is quite another: the equivalent of a libcap library on every one of your network devices persistently cataloging your “matrix” in the well-connected social graph, built and maintained under the “legal auspices” of a three-hop dragnet.

In light of the Snowden revelations, the NSA has embarked on the aforementioned pressure and information campaign to countermand the PR damage. Just yesterday, the NSA released two documents that purport to dispel the notion of it being an agency of totalitarian collection. Having just read them , I can say that the 1.6% statistic of “touched traffic” and 0.025% statistic of “reviewed traffic”, on a daily basis, are highly misleading. The first hoodwink is to point out that out of the exabyte daily traffic volume, roughly 60%-70% is ip video traffic¹, which shrinks our “basketball court” down to the size of a racquetball court. The second hoodwink is to infer the sampling follows a pattern of independent random trials–in the classic stats model, proving or disproving a hypothesis drawn from such a random sample–instead of what it actually is: the accumulation of a graph-based document store enabling a traversable, retrospective query system. The whole thing is just plain subterfuge.

By now, it should be apparent that I consider the cypherpunks to be the most relevant social scientists of our day. In no small part because they are at the forefront of the battle-lines of 21st century political economy. Assange, for one, has been singularly confirmed on a number of points. In particular, the US reaction of “Insider Threat” has to count as spectacular confirmation of his thesis of “conspiracy and networks.” The kernel of differentiated political and economic jurisdiction that always lurked beneath the rationale of wikileaks now seems obvious in light of what is required for secure and autonomous cloud computing platforms going forward². Assange’s contention that legal and regulatory entities were engaging in data-laundering–that is, ex post manufacturing legal reconstructions of “evidence” gathered from the NSA dragnet spying enterprise–has since been confirmed by Reuters with respect to two agencies: the DEA and the IRS.

In contrast, the “liberal” political and academic establishment are dinosaurs. No better example of this than this piece at “Bleeding Heart Libertarians,” The United States is not a Police State. The entire piece is a confirmation of my (quite prescient, as it turns out) old post, Free Market Fairness: A bridge to nowhere. Fernando Teson’s entire argument boils down to the position that truth should never stand in the way of mainstream recognition. Of course, as I pointed out in that earlier post, the “respectable libertarian formulation,” in the form of the chicago school, had held sway for thirty years in the domain of finance and “regulatory reform” leading to nothing but banking oligarchy and a permanent severance of political freedom from capitalism. As I pointed out at the end, all it would take would be a minority dissident faction to blow that entire thesis to smithereens and force the “bleeding hearts” to side with what everyone and their brother–outside of polite academic company–knew to be tyranny and oppression. I’m not surprised “Edward Snowden” doesn’t appear in any post on that site, outside one inclusion in an obscure link.

Frankly, the boogeyman of North Korea is tiresome as the singleton measuring stick of totalitarianism. For starters, the inquisitive person might ask just how long North Korea would last if not for China and the US directly and indirectly propping it up(which should trigger a deeper discussion of the taxonomy to begin with when considering States that prop up even worse monsters). However, the better question might be why the persistent singleton casting of 21st century totalitarianism in the mold of mid-20th century soviet model when that model–in terms of having any sphere of international influence–died out two decades ago?

In the recent book, “Cypherpunks: Freedom & The Future Of The Internet,” Andy Muller-Maguhn specifically outlines the stated intent of our 21st century spooks: the use of secrecy as a means to gain control of social processes. This presents a countervailing agency problem more along the lines of a “squishy totalitarianism,” but this is more than sufficient to eviscerate the liberal paradigm. In fact, it acquires a particular sinister aura because it appears quite apparent that most are quite comfortable persisting the liberal mythology within its confines. The industries of “social justice” and “the invisible hand of market social coordination” will continue to spit out oblivious drivel because after all, they are “industries.”

As I have noted on previous occasions, the planned order or surveillance introduces a potentially glaring incentive-incompatibility agency problem into market exchange. One that makes mincemeat of any position that uses the existence of markets as an immediate counterfactual to any claim of systems of social control. If we cast “spontaneous order” as a type of “social graph” and then analytically run it against the “planned order of surveillance” that exists to anatomize it, we obtain a “second-order dynamic” between the social graph and its surveillance that illuminates the distinction between laissez-faire and capitalism in a far greater clarity than the dinosaur methods of 20th century classical liberalism still mired in the roots of the socialist calculation debates.

Frankly, to avoid serious methodological error, one should start from the assumption of “the State as its own Agency.” Everything else flows from there…

¹ As I pointed out in this old post, Technology is not Freedom, ip video has its own extensive surveillance regime.

² Ideological preferences aside, the cloud, in any rent-seeking context, is where the internet goes because it is simply a much more efficient computing platform.

Is the DOJ Essentially Now a Data Laundering Operation?

In a recent interview with Democracy Now, Julian Assange(starting at around the 29:00 mark) made a particularly salient observation regarding the current DOJ surveillance ignominy involving the AP and Fox News: the NSA already had the data. The DOJ “investigation” was not an investigation per se, but rather a “data laundering operation” to “cleanse” the data for possible legal use in court proceedings. Assange prefaced his remarks with “do not be deceived,” and I would spot a high probability that he is correct in this instance with the only qualification being that he will be absolutely right within the very near future.

Interestingly, Assange proceeded to spell out the political economy of data analytics, detailing how the NSA is involved in a massive graphical analysis of node connections(nodes would be you and me) to map out the “social network”(the links or edges that connect all of us). Of course, this very thing was the basis of my earlier critique of his “Call to Cryptographic Arms,” noting that encryption can’t reliably shield the connectedness of your own little(or perhaps not so little) matrix in the well-connected graph¹.

In any event, Assange labeled the NSA the “dirty team” and the DOJ the “clean team.” In the totalitarian surveillance world of the well-connected graph, this shifts the DOJ’s role to be that of the State’s data launderer. In the 21st century political economy, the so-called liberal “rule of law” rests on the foundation of a data laundering operation.

Two words: The Firm. And the lines are further blurred between the Ministry of Truth and The Department of Justice.

¹ Benjamin Tucker is noted for his four monopolies. The 21st century political economy will introduce a fifth one: data analytics. And this will be the mother of all monopolies. Tucker’s observation regarding money–a free market in banking is one of humanity’s greatest civilizers while a monopoly in the same is one of its greatest enslavers–can be multiplied by orders of magnitude both ways in regards to data analytics.

The Social Justice of a Police State

Fareed Zakaria recently published a piece, Incarceration Nation, that points out there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America – more than 6 million – than were in the Soviet Gulag Archipelago at its height. The imprisonment rate in the US is approaching 1 per 100 which is generally an order of magnitude greater than the other western-styled democracies around the globe. Zakaria notes that this gap between the US and the rest of the world is relatively recent phenomenon. Thirty years ago, at the start of the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” the US incarceration rate, though at the outer bounds, was nonetheless in line with other civilized democracies. Since then, however, the US incarceration rate has more than quintupled.

I mention the Zakaria article because it offers a relevant contextual backdrop to this recent Cato Unbound essay, A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarianism, by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi. Both of these authors are academics involved in the so-called “Bleeding Heart Libertarian Project” to marry distributive justice to libertarian political theory. The preferrred distributive justice paradigm is the Rawlsian one. The intent of their essay is to demonstrate the compatiblity of this paradigm with a historical weaving of the (classical) liberal tradition. The corollary is that libertarianism, as typically defined, is a departure from this tradition. It is proposed then that a sympathetic adaptation of Rawls will right the course of a proper libertarian political theory.

Frankly, I would not dispute the primary thrust of the essay: that a “non-bleeding heart libertarianism” is a departure from liberalism. I would qualify this agreement by noting that a “non-bleeding heart libertarianism” is not a modern development. Historically, libertarianism is rooted in a rejection of any normative social contract rationale for obedience to the State. Of course, we are talking about a different history than the highly selective one outlined by Zwolinski and Tomasi. However, it is not my intention to adjudicate libertarian history in this post. I’ve previously given my account of this history here and here. Instead, I will only point out there is a reason why libertarianism departs from liberalism: namely, because liberalism inherently violates its own constraints regarding the artificiality of the State and politics. By artificiality, we mean the State is not supposed to become the source of government. At the very least, the State should avoid the evolutionary equilibrium of becoming the total source of government(i.e., a Police State). However, Zwolinski and Tomasi’s essay demonstrates how easily distributive justice can legitimize a police state and provides yet another example of bleeding hearts not exactly bleeding for everyone.

The Zwolinski and Tomasi essay begins with an erroneous, straw-man premise:

To the extent that respect for property leaves some individuals poor and destitute, individuals might be called by a sense of charity and beneficence to respond. But the moral justification of free market institutions is logically independent from any claims about the effects of those institutions on the material holdings of the poor.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Zwolinski and Tomasi mischaracterize the libertarian principle. Enforceable moral claims of any property rights regime are not independent of the material holdings of agents. Indeed, the libertarian principle is actually a moral constraint against property rights regimes. If agents are worse off under the regime than they would be without the regime, then there is no moral obligation to obey the regime. This moral constraint illuminates an essential distinction between libertarians and progressives. Libertarians are not intererested in distributive justice correcting unjust regimes. The correction is the abolition of these regimes. I would argue the classical libertarian position–if we were to,say, follow Bastiat–is that any property rights regime that requires distributive justice to retain legitimacy is probably corrupt. Following Bastiat, we would identify distributive justice as a form of bribery against defection. I would add that these bribes are much more directed at the “middle class” than the so-called poor. Thus, we can expect the so-called “social safety net” to largely consist of an array of middle-class subsidies and not a device or thing designed to minimize a worst-case condition.

Zwolinski and Tomasi identify Rawlsian justice as the “gold standard” of contemporary social justice. But as I havepreviously discussed, Rawls later modified his methodological approach to defend his principles of justice. David Friedman, in his critique of Zwolinksi and Tomasi provides a clue to the problem with Rawls’ original approach. Writes Friedman:

And one implication of that version, taken as literally as I have been taking the natural rights alternative, is that it is better to have a world where everyone is at a utility level of a hundred than a world with one person at ninety-nine and everyone else at a thousand. I have never yet been able to figure out why anyone takes either the derivation or the conclusion seriously.

The answer to Friedman’s criticism is that Rawls’ formulation was actually challenged. In particular, John Harsanyi’s “originalist position” maximized aggregate utility(straight utilitarian). Indeed, Harsanyi’s version exposed the problem with the “Veil of Ignorance” as a normative construct: it lacked a plausible risk aversion model. Rawls’ “Maxmin” version is equivalent to infinite risk aversion. Harsanyi’s “max utilitarian” is equivalent to zero risk aversion. Neither infinite nor zero risk aversion is plausible. The VOI instrument has to establish the appropriate level of risk aversion in the original position that falls somewhere between zero and infinity. Obviously, then, the VOI does not yield unique solutions and thus loses its normative power.

Friedman’s primary criticism of Zwolinski and Tomasi is that the Rawlsian conception doesn’t actually link to the historical utilitarian foundations of “classical liberalism.” But John Harsanyi’s formulation directly casts the Originalist Position in such utilitarian terms. And it is this utilitarian casting which more or less demonstrated that the normative foundation of Rawls’ theory was built over a house of cards.

Rawl’s modified approach to his theory of justice was developed in his later book, “Political Liberalism.” Political Liberalism more or less concedes the lack of a rational foundation for a unanimity regarding hypothetical justice principles. Political liberalism is an explicit shift from the rational to the “reasonable,” a shift from justice as “moral” to justice as “political.” It is here that Rawls lays out the ideas of the “overlapping consensus” and “Public Reason.” The government stays neutral between competing moral foundations. Justice is a “political product” defined by the overlapping consensus of moral dialogue. Reasonable discussion is supposed to validate Rawls’ principles of justice. In practice, however, it merely roots justice in the cultural war. So, the gold standard of contemporary social justice turns out to be the overlapping consensus between Rush Limbaugh and Daily Kos. This, of course, is a farce. But it only points out the inherent flaw of “Public Reason.” Public Reason has nothing to with liberal justice; instead it is entirely rooted in a communitarian war over “recognition.”

The Zwolinski/Tomasi essay makes it clear that “recognition” plays an important in who “qualifies” for justice. They propose a rather high barrier of entry to qualify for being “poor.” Evidently, “Poor” excludes the social rift-raft and the unemployed. To be properly poor means to be employed. But this is a silly and obviously artificial exclusionary construction. An obvious solution to maximize the condition of our properly defined “poor” would be to simply to maximize the barrier of entry to qualify to work. A “social justice claim” reduces to a protectionist claim, which is often the case. This type of protectionism becomes particularly insidious when you consider that who is legally “recognized” to work in a National Security State becomes a matter of public debate of an overlapping consensus between Rush Limbaugh and Daily Kos. This is hardly justice; rather, it’s a moral perversion.

In the past I have discussed the concept of the “Pink Police State.” The Pink Police State, like all police states, delineates a clear demarcation of privilege between the professional classes and those who are shit out of luck in terms of inclusion in the club. In other words, it is “the illegals,” the scapegoats, and the “unrecognized” who take the full brunt of a police state. It breeds a permanent underclass. The Pink Police State, however, is a type of classification that likely portends a flourishing recognition of a “libertarian” professional class. This professional class will spare no opportunity to equate unprecedented recognition with an unprecedented condition of human liberty. And the primary aim of this community will be recognition, not justice(or reform). In this vein, the Bleeding Heart Libertarian Project simply appears to be an exercise in professional recognition. It is difficult to take seriously claims of distributive justice in a police state, particularly if the “bleeding heart” concern for the poor excludes the very victims of this police state. But this is exactly how a professional class can babble about social justice in an underlying context marked by an unprecedented political economy of a prison industrial complex.

The West is accustomed to regarding “Police States” as restricted to non-democratic states, but “voting” has nothing to do with its definition. The definition is as follows: (1) undue restrictions on the freedom of mobility, the freedom of transactions, the freedom to work (2) perverse rates of domestic incarceration (3) system-wide domestic surveillance organs engaged in domestic spying in all aspects of the social, economic and political life of its citizens. The makeup of these organs will usually entail some degree of a secret police and an unaccountable intelligence complex (4) the militarization of the borders (5) an arbitrary distinction between law and the exercise of power by the executive agency (6) a militarization or para-militarization of “law enforcement” (7) a social context where the government actively propagandizes a permanent enemy, a permanent threat, a permanent war (8) a social context that glorifies the organs of authority, “the men and women in uniform.”

The United States is a Police State. And the Pink Police State that will be its social justice…

“The Penalty of Treason is Death”

So proclaimed supposed left-winger Bill Maher to the applause of his supposed left-wing audience Friday night. The question: a brief consideration of Ron Paul’s critique of Obama’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Seth MacFarlane commented that while he trusted Obama with this power, he would be troubled with the exercise of such power by someone like Michelle Bachmann. Salman Rushdie, apparently unbothered by any consideration of irony regarding unilateral issuance of death edicts, informed us that those who commit treason forfeit any claim to rights, a comment which prompted Maher’s succinct editorial conclusion: “…And the Penalty of Treason is Death.”

That was the cue for the audience applause, but it also served as a reminder that what supposedly passes for “liberal” is usually anything but. The liberal would have corrected Rushdie that US presidential edict is not sufficient to establish the crime of treason. It has to be substantiated in open court. And the liberal would have reminded Bill Maher that death is not the only the punishment prescribed by congress for this crime. The penalty for those convicted is either death or imprisonment not less than five years. However, the liberal would also be quick to remind both Rushdie and Maher that “treason” hitherto has been a very rare charge/prosecution in American history, with conviction even rarer still, and execution yet even rarer. Indeed, there have been as many pardons¹ of “treason” convictions as executions.

Convicted and Executed:
WWII:
Herbert Hans Haupt: German-born naturalized U.S. citizen, convicted of treason in 1942.

Civil War:
(i)Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt, conviction by military tribunal concerning the Lincoln Assassination
(ii) William Bruce Mumford: convicted of treason and executed for tearing down a United States flag

John Brown Slave Revolt(technically, tried by the commonwealth of Virginia and not the Feds):
(i) John Brown
(ii) Aaron Dwight Stevens

Those pardoned of the crime of Treason
WWII:
(i) Tokyo Rose, pardoned by Gerald Ford
(ii) Tomoya Kawakita, deported by JFK in lieu of execution

Civil War:
(i) Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other leading confederates given amnesty from indictment or trial of Treason by Andrew Johnson

Dorr Rebellion:
Governor Thomas Dorr, guilty treason verdict in 1844 anulled in 1854

Whiskey Rebellion:
Philip Vigol and John Mitchell pardoned by George Washington

The liberal, then, rather than clapping to Maher’s assertion, dampens the Obama celebration with the point of objection: “Actually Bill, up to now in American History, the penalty of Treason, as a convicted crime, has just as likely resulted in a pardon than execution. This is what is supposed to separate us from the barbarians, such as Iran, right Salman?”

Then the liberal, amidst the onset of partisan booing, proceeds to set the actual historical and legal meaning straight: this power the US Executive claims actually has nothing to with usurping the constitutional parameters of treason. It goes way beyond that. It’s claim of extrajudicial power to murder overturns the entire liberal legal tradition. We’ve returned to the original historical meaning of “outlaw,” which denoted someone declared outside the sphere of legal protection. Any person saddled with this designation was fair game, meaning anyone was “legally” sanctioned to do anything they wanted to against that person, including murder.

The liberal legal tradition ultimately derives from the principle of the Great Writ, habeas corpus, which subjugates any “legal sanctioned” punishment to due process. This simply means that the State, the King, or the Authority cannot sanction any punishment against the accused as “legal” without “due process,” that is, without some mechanism in place for the accused to challenge the accusation. Habeas corpus puts an end to the historical meaning of outlaw because the State does not have the legitimate power to legally define someone as “fair game.”

The liberal will then point out the final egregious error of the partisan Obamatard defenders, such as Mother Jones. If you are liberal, it is far better to deal with a Bush/Cheney regime that operates under a unitary executive principle that any action by the President is legal by virtue of the office itself than with an Obama regime that legitimizes it under the “rule of law.”

Let me spell out the problem for liberalism: The “rule of law” under the “liberal State” has now re-legitimized the old historical legal concept of the “outlaw,” a legal concept, specifically, it’s abolition, that more or defines the raison d’etre of the liberal State itself.

Mother Jones attempt to legitimize Obama under the “rule of law” only reminds us of the validity of the libertarian critique. The “rule of law” phrase itself means shit; the historical definition of “outlaw” was enforced by two thousand years of interpretation regarding the “rule of law.”

Eventually, the honest liberal comes to understand that “eternal vigilance” largely means nullifying the “rule of law.” “Outlaw,” however, cannot be nullified in the court. The American revolutionaries, under charge of “outlaws,” didn’t nullify it in King George’s court of law. They nullified it on the battlefield.

Here’s the current reality. The people of the world, under the rule of “American Exceptionalism,” now largely despise their governments. Thus, there shouldn’t be any surprise that the US wields the greatest unaccountable secret intelligence/military complex in the history of the world. And it shouldn’t be any surprise that American law now has resurrected the historical legal sanction of “outlaw.”

In the end, we should understand what is meant by American Exceptionalism: the liberal legitimization of “outlaw.”

¹ The term Pardon here, for brevity, has a more expansive meaning than it’s actual technical meaning. In this context, it refers to pardon, deportation, amnesty, or anullment.

Our New Net Zero Immigration Nirvana

Two years ago at Freedom Democrats, I posted an article on Libertarianisim and Immigration that sort of languished at the time. A year later, my republishing of the article managed to achieve some degree of notoriety with Less Antman’s endorsement.

The argument made in that essay was simple. Freedom of movement, freedom of contract are essential to any libertarian social theory and any (i) welfare argument (ii) cultural argument (iii) property rights regime argument against these essential liberties would result in:

(i) a dreadful social welfare
(ii) a dreadful culture
(iii) a dreadful property-rights regime

And I named “names” regarding the origins of these “libertarian arguments” against these liberties. And I concluded that these arguments were nothing but a welfare costly form of collectivism.

Now, two years later, we have an “empirical moment.” As the NY Times reports, we now are experiencing net zero immigration flows.

Douglas S. Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton, an extensive, long-term survey in Mexican emigration hubs, said his research showed that interest in heading to the United States for the first time had fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s. “No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” Mr. Massey said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”

The decline in illegal immigration, from a country responsible for roughly 6 of every 10 illegal immigrants in the United States, is stark. The Mexican census recently discovered four million more people in Mexico than had been projected, which officials attributed to a sharp decline in emigration.

What are the reasons for this sharp decline in immigration? According to the NY Times:

(i) Economic, demographic and social changes in Mexico
(ii) a piss-poor performing, Papers-Please US Political Economy

What our current conditions in this net zero immigration environment?

(i) Budget Deficits at a minimum as a result of net-zero influx of unskilled immigrants no longer burgeoning the welfare rolls and sucking up public monies?
Nope. Budget Deficits are at an all-time high, indicating that perhaps Public Debt has little do to do with labor migration

(ii) Unemployment at record lows, real wages at record highs, particularly at the low-skilled end, as a result of net-zero influx of unskilled immigrants no longer competing in the labor market
Nope. Unemployment at record-highs, real-wages, stagnant.

(iii) Access to Medical care up, cost of services down as a result of net-zero influx of unskilled immigrants no longer inflating demand for services?
Nope. Medical inflation still at roughly double digits. Medical tourism abroad still on the rise.

In short, there’s no empirical argument that our net zero immigration environment has improved social welfare. Indeed, this net zero immigration environment has coincided with a rather dramatic worsening of overall welfare.

The obvious question then is why is this outcome something that is desirable to enforce and with the current condition already being net zero immigration, why is this enforcement effort being dramatically ratcheted up with Real ID and E-Verify systems consolidated under the auspices of DHS?

For libertarians it’s a question with an obvious answer. There is no welfare argument against freedom of movement, freedom of contract. If you want to experience a true welfare State, defining a “welfare State” to be a “mechanism of redistribution,” then no better way than totalitarian control of the freedom of movement and the freedom of contract. And this totalitarian control is a Papers-Please Political Economy.

The loss of economic welfare from the Papers-Please Political Economy is the obvious rejoinder to Milton Friedman’s “welfare argument.”

Hoppe’s “invited-contractual property rights” schema, as an absolutist dogma, results in a Papers-Please Political Economy. It’s only “enforceable” indirectly, via a totalitarian control over a general freedom of contract. It’s an utter violation of the libertarian principle and the Lockean proviso.

And the likes of Hoppe have to explain the social and demographic changes in Mexico while coming to grips with the fact that it is the conservative, evangelical Christian culture that is pushing/enacting things like E-Verify.

Finally, Rothbard. Rothbard, in his later years, would oppose immigration on the grounds that it would serve partisan political ends. And it is true that the likes of the Political left largely support immigration on the grounds/perception that it would reinforce a demographic trend that would lead to political domination. I would dispute that Prima facie assumption on the grounds that no one wants to migrate to a political economy that serves corrupt political ends. I used to argue this point frequently at Freedom Democrats, against both progressive assumptions and those underlying Arnold Kling’s “One Party State.” On this matter, the current condition speaks for itself.