The Tortoise

"We all remember the story of the tortoise and the hare. Ron Paul, steady, hardworking, consistent, and principled, keeps going...Ahead of us is one of the great men of American history, speaking truth to power. We can be slackers, or we can try to emulate greatness. For any real American, there is only one choice: the Revolution."

-- Lew Rockwell

Mark Steyn on the HRCs

In Macleans magazine, Mark Steyn has this column, in which he summarizes some of the most egregious facts about Canada's HRC system. Here are a few excerpts covering things I'm pretty sure I haven't mentioned before, but that make me just as angry as all the other stuff I have talked about.

These commissions were supposedly intended to investigate discrimination in housing and the like, but then came the very poorly drafted Section XIII, which makes it a crime to communicate anything electronically "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."

As Steyn points out, Canadian courts have tended to interpret "likely" in Section XIII of the Canadian Human Rights Act very broadly. HRCs have ruled that everything from comments on an Internet message board, to a letter-to-the-editor, to telephone recordings can qualify as hate speech under this law.

You might wonder: how in the world does a law like Section XIII get on the books? How in a civilized country does it stay on the books, and not get struck down for being unconstitutional? The answer lies in the Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the first section of which says:

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

In Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor (1990), Canada's Supreme Court decided that, while Section XIII does limit freedom of expression, that limitation is justified according to Section 1. The case involved an anti-semitic telephone message service; one could call a certain number and hear a recording of racist filth. Why one would wish to do this, I have no idea, and apparently, neither did the Court. It ruled against Taylor and shut the service down.

In the Keegstra case (also 1990), the constitutionality of a criminal prohibition on hate speech (Section 319 of the criminal code) was directly challenged. Again, the Supreme Court upheld the law in question on Section 1 grounds. Unlike Section XIII, violating Section 319 can result in real jail time (two years, as I recall) instead of civil penalties. At the same time, the court system and not the HRCs enforces 319, which means that those who violate Section 319 can expect at least a modicum of due process.

Sorry for the extended legal discussion. But for those who uphold free speech, while both Section XIII and Section 319 are problematic, Section 1 of the Charter is the real source of difficulty, since it provides legal justification for both.

Steyn doesn't directly confront the problem with Section 1, although I can guess how he feels about it (what's the point of having a constitution if in its first lines it says the government can ignore the document if it feels like it?) Instead, Steyn attacks the way Canada's human rights commissions have enforced Section XIII:

Who has availed themselves of the "human rights" protected by Section XIII? In its entire history, over half of all cases have been brought by a sole "complainant," one Richard Warman. Indeed, Mr. Warman has been a plaintiff on every single Section XIII case before the federal "human rights" star chamber since 2002 — and he's won every one.

And guess what Richard Warman used to do for a living: he was an investigator -- an inquisitor -- for the federal HRC.

This fact probably needs no further elucidation. But think about it: as far as laws go, Section XIII is inherently vague. How it gets defined at any time will have a lot to do with how it's being used, or how the appropriate people and institutions are trying to use it. The HRCs used to investigate discrimination in housing and employment. Now its "investigators" go around hunting for hatred on the Internet (sometimes producing it themselves.)

Obviously, it's in his interest (and the HRCs' interest, more broadly) for Section XIII to have the broadest definition possible. On one end, the HRC's investigators manufacture hatred by trolling the Internet. On the other, they broaden the definition of Section XIII so that more and more expression now counts as hateful. In both cases, the HRC and its inquisitors benefit, and freedom is caught in the pincher.

Can anyone see a problem here? And not just a problem, but an inevitable one. If a non-Muslim can complain about anti-Muslim posts on Free Dominion, then a former HRC investigator, who knows the system better than anyone, can and will complain about anything and everything he can. The HRC mandate and its interpretation of Section XIII will expand.

And free speech -- ha, what's that, but a merely American idea -- will suffer, wither, and die. Meanwhile, idiot Canadians will accept the inevitable, not with regret, but with the self-satisfied grin my old professors had on their faces while they were congratulating themselves on not being Americans.

My Piece on Ezra Levant in the Toledo Blade

As promised, here is the link to my piece in the Toledo Blade. They titled it "Free Speech Is Not Merely an American Idea." Pretty good, no?

The HRC inquisitor who said "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value" is named Dean Steacy. When he's not dismissing basic human rights, Mr. Steacy can be found on Stormfront, one of the most popular "white nationalist" online communities.

Is Mr. Steacy a white nationalist himself -- a mole working to bring down all the good work of the HRC? No. Mr. Steacy is a high ranking inquisitor with the HRC, and trolling on white nationalist message boards is apparently part of his self-defined job description.

This admission came up in another HRC investigation, this one against a popular right-wing Canadian message board called "Free Dominion" (think Free Republic, but Canadian.) Free Dominion got in trouble because of some hateful, anti-Islamic comments a few users had posted. A woman complained (not a Muslim, as I recall) and Dean Steacy jumped into action.

For your viewing pleasure, I reproduce the part of the legal document containing Mr. Steacy's interesting answers to a number of questions Free Dominion's lawyer asked.

So Jadewarr is Dean Steacy in disguise, logging on to Stormfront to chase down insolent hate mongers. To say that "Jadewarr is not a person" is disingenuous at best. It would be like me saying "'Fusionist Libertarian' is not a person. It's just an account I use while blogging."

Mr. Steacy's attempt to catch hate mongers in their acts of hate mongering reminds me of the way the police pretend to be 13 year old girls in order to catch pedophiles. The only different is that the police are looking for people who hurt children; Dean Steacy is looking for people who say and think naughty things.

Sure, we can talk about police entrapment and the like. But at least the police are subject to the kind of legal scrutiny able to reveal whether or not entrapment has actually taken place. That's all part of due process. The police are obliged to follow it, but is one of the HRCs top inquisitors?

Well, take a look at this next snippet and decide for yourself.


You can practically hear Mr. Steacy's exasperated sigh: "I told you, I'm the investigator! That means I get to decide how to investigate!"

The only question I have is whether Mr. Steacy birthed Jadewarr on his home computer, and if he was mostly unclothed at the time. Did this method of "investigation" receive any scrutiny at all, from anyone? Are there rules or at least guidelines for pursuing suspected hate mongers across cyberspace, or does he just make those up as he goes along? He is the investigator, after all. Better not try to tell him how he should investigate.

I get the feeling Dean Steacy thinks suppressing hate speech is a Very Important Job. Too important for something like Due Process to get in the way. The legal nebula the Canadian HRCs occupy makes it easy for their inquisitors to lose sight of important legal principles, and, in any event, few Canadians are really interested in holding them to those principles in the first place.

Better to just go along, and let people like Dean Steacy pursue the nasty hate mongers than to mildly protest and end up looking like one of the hate mongers yourself. Perhaps someday Canadians will change and become more willing to stand up for their rights -- become more like Americans, I mean.

Yeah, I know: that's never going to happen. Time to get back to work, but I sure hope Jadewarr doesn't read this blog post.

Via Mark Steyn. Steyn was the source of yet another human rights complaint (three, actually) in Canada after an excerpt from his book was published in a national news magazine. I haven't posted on the case yet, but it's just as significant as Ezra Levant's.

The Rockwell-Rothbard Race War

Via the East Coast Libertarian, as well as my friend Peter Jaworski, comes this Reason piece, a compilation and analysis of the mounting evidence that Lew Rockwell was Ron Paul's racist ghostwriter, written by Julian Sanchez.

Check it out. Like ECL, I await the spittle-laced rants from Rockwell and his cabal against Tom Palmer and just about anyone else who bucks the party line.

For me, here are the two, semi-new points from Sanchez's article:

• Even if Ron Paul knew absolutely nothing about the racist filth being put out in his name, its publication still made him a lot of money. That's another strike against Dr. Paul.
• Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard are/were assholes.
  

Ok, so that last one isn't even a semi-new point. But the Reason article further illustrates the extent of Rockwell's (and Rothbard's) depravity. Here's what I'm talking about:

During the period when the most incendiary [newsletter] items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters

With regard to Rothbard's contribution to this nasty "strategy" Timothy Wirkman Virkkala writes:

I knew what Rockwell and Rothbard believed regarding strategy. They believed in hate. Rothbard famously believed that you had to stir up hate against the state. He came to believe that you should stir up hatred against the underclass. That’s how you had to appeal to the middle-class Christians would turn on the old conservatism.

Now, look, contrary to the implication of Lew Rockwell's recent droppings musings, I don't love the state. Before I'd finished my internship at Citizens Against Government Waste this summer, I'd already decided on my life's goal -- the one thing that would make my life complete and give me the greatest satisfaction.

That goal is to put a politician in prison. Or maybe a bunch of them. Democrat, Republican, it doesn't really matter. That's how much I hold the state in contempt (I wouldn't say I hate it: how can you hate something so incompetent, so blithely unself-conscious about its own failings? Wouldn't that be like hating the dog for leaving Lew Rockwell turds on your carpet?)

So I don't like the state. But I'm also not an idiot (or evil.) That's why I would never think stirring up racial animosity is the right way to go about reducing the power of the government.

Think about it: if the white middle-class thinks the black lower-class is a bunch of animals ready to riot unless/until they get get their welfare checks (as one of Ron's newsletters opined), they're not going to say, "Oh yeah, better cut off the checks, then." No. They're going to say, "Damn it, we need to hire some more police officers!" Because if you're the kind of racist moron who thinks black people are aggressive and criminal by nature -- and, worse, lots and lots of them live and work all around you -- then you're going to want the state to protect you from them. And that means you're going to be willing to give the state more power.

Why this escaped Rothbard and Rockwell, I have no idea. Not to Godwin twice in as many days, but didn't these buffoons remember how Hitler used popular antisemitism as an excuse to grab more power? Libertarianism requires that we be able to trust each other.

As everyone knows, or should know, trust is a crucial component of the market's efficiency. The more you and I can trust each other, the less we have to rely on expensive enforcement mechanisms that diminish the overall benefit of the trades we make with one another. If I didn't trust most people to be reasonable and honest with me, most of the time, I would simply not be a libertarian. I can't afford to install a ten foot high wall around my apartment, complete with machine-guns, out of fear that the black folk are going to carry off my girlfriend and my computer.

Besides, my landlord would frown on the machine-guns. In any event, if I didn't have trust and faith in the typical person, I sure would want more of those big guns in the hands of the police, and boy, wouldn't that increase taxes. Maybe I'd want cameras installed on every corner. Hell, maybe I'd just empower the state (but just for a while, naturally) to finally, uh, deal with all those scary and swarthy people smart guys like Lew Rockwell always tell me to fear.

But I'm not an asshole. Or evil. Or an idiot. Which one of these is Lew Rockwell?

Incidentally, I've never cared for Murray Rothbard's libertarianism, which basically elevates a controversial (and inherently vague) moral principle to the status of a physical law. Instead, I've drawn inspiration from the contractarian libertarianism of my old mentor Jan Narveson.

Yes, it has problems, but Narveson's theory is focused like a laser on the importance of trust in every day life. This is a theme libertarians should return to again and again: who do you trust, really? Your neighbor or the government? But, unless you live in Beverly Hills, it's a lot harder to trust your neighbors when you're convinced that a good number of them are violent animals ready to riot when the welfare check is late in coming.

Lew Rockwell Enlightens Us About Libertarians...

Hidden in this post by Rockwell on his blog is this pithy revelation about all non-Paul-supporting libertarians, in a post entitled "The Liberal-Neocon-Cosmotarian Problem With Ron Paul":

The anti-Paulians love the state, especially the warfare state. They want perpetual war in the Middle East, and the approbation of the regime. Thus their hate of Ron Paul. Of course the hatred of these types is another medal on Ron Paul's chest.

And, yes, this is in a post where Rockwell favorably refers to Dennis Perrin's HuffPo piece "The Liberal's Ron Paul Problem."

But Rockwell explicitly extends Perrin's "diagnosis" to cover not just liberals, but "neocons and self-described cosmopolitan libertarians." Then he turns around and broadens the next to seemingly include anyone who is against Ron Paul.

So if you don't support Ron Paul, you love the state? If you oppose Ron Paul, that means you want to kill everyone in the Middle East? That's the argument now?

Hm. He might have a point. It's a well known fact that Hitler didn't support Ron Paul and he wanted to kill LOTS of people!

A Note on Libertarianism, Federalism, and the Constitution

This is just to reiterate a message I've kept up constantly in this blog.

The 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads as follows:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

When you read this well known passage, think of the following term in conjunction with it: "police power." According to Wikipedia, police power is the power of the state to regulate power, especially for reasons of morality and public welfare. From a libertarian perspective, the state's police power should be a necessary evil at best.

The 10th Amendment implies, first, that the federal government does not have any kind of general police power. The only powers it has are those specific ones enumerated in the rest of the Constitution.

But notice, the Amendment does not say the states have unlimited police power, either. Certainly, that possibility is compatible with the 10th Amendment, but not as strongly as some seem to think. After all, the Amendment says the powers are reserved to the states or to the people.

So state legislatures have broader powers to regulate life than the federal government, but not unlimited power. Some powers are reserved to the people. "The people" can't reasonably be read as simply a reference to a democratic majority, either. After all, the Amendment already refers to "the majority" in each state. Who else do the powers reserved "to the states" belong to, but to the democratic legislatures in each of those states?

Unless the 10th Amendment is stupidly redundant, states do not have unlimited police power. But where is the line drawn? Just what does the federal Constitution have to say about what states do to their citizens? This question and others like it show how weak and incomplete a strictly originalist interpretation of the Constitution really is.

According to the Supreme Court (in Lawrence v. Texas), Democratic majorities do not have the power to impose a single moral vision on all of the citizens of a given state. Thus, one of the main justifications for the use of a state's police power is removed. The state's dominion to regulate the lives of its citizens is diminished.

State... power... diminished. Power left to... individuals. Sounds pretty good and libertarian, right?

In the end, the question of how much police power should the states have? has an easy answer for libertarians. The right answer always is: as little as possible. Individuals should have power, not the states or the federal government.

I don't mind saying that my interpretation of the Constitution is driven at least in part by the value I place on individual liberty. At the same time, Randy Barnett argues that my interpretation, or something like it, can be well supported by a more originalist reading of the document. And I also agree with Justice Kennedy's eloquent opinion in Lawrence:

Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

Kennedy's opinion echoes Ronald Dworkin's distinction between semantic-originalism and expectation-originalism: the Framers were not always aware of the implications of the principles they placed in the Constitution. They expected them to have certain implications (the death penalty is not cruel or unusual), but we may discover additional or even contrary implications (the death penalty is in fact cruel and unusual.)

The meaning of the word "cruel" need not change from one generation to the next. What may change is the discovery (based, for example, on advancements in psychology and other sciences, as well as advances in moral philosophy) that a practice that was formerly accepted actually fits within the category of the cruel.

How does this fit in with the Constitutional limits of state police power? It means that a justification for a use of police power thought to be sufficient may in fact turn out to be inadequate to justify limiting individual liberty to the extent that use requires. It means that one can be a Constitutionalist while simultaneously holding that the Constitution itself imposes drastic limits on the use of state police power.

It means one can be a libertarian and love the Constitution at the same time.

But this is not the Ron Paul approach to the Constitution. Ron Paul's approach reserves to each state an almost unlimited police power -- power to prohibit gay sex, abortion, and birth control; to bring the Ten Commandments into court rooms; to mandate segregation in buses and schools.

This is not, and never has been, a libertarian agenda. This is tyranny, but on a small scale. On a scale some Ron Paul supporters are comfortable with, living blue state lives, far away from the places in which state legislatures would use their expanded police power most effectively, if and when Ron Paul gave them the green light to do so.

That is why I have never supported Ron Paul, whether he is a racist or not. I have deeper, moral objections to his agenda. If that means his libertarian posse will put me on their hit list along with Tom Palmer and David Boaz, so be it.

I will still be right and they will still be wrong.

The Mental Gymnastics of Some Ron Paul Supporters

Click here to see how some Ron Paul supporters are reacting to the racist newsletter fiasco. As the blog suggests, it's a good example of how the human mind adapts to believing in lies.

However, I don't think Ron Paul supporters have a monopoly on this kind of self-deception. Fans of just about any political candidate -- or any other celebrity, for that matter -- will scamper through mental hoops in order to maintain purity in their beliefs.

What's ironic is that Ron Paul supporters tend to believe they are so very different from the supporters of Obama, Hillary, or Huckabee. More intelligent. More patriotic. Better at interpreting the Constitution.

In fact, they're pretty much this woman I once overheard talking about how much she just loved Michael Jackson. And she just couldn't believe the lies circling about him: that he was a pedophile; that he'd paid off children and their families; that his personal life was deeply, deeply bizarre.

It didn't matter to this woman. She wouldn't even entertain the possibility. Why not? Well, she really loved his music, and how could a man who made such beautiful music possibly be a pedophile?

But it happens. Humans are corrupt. Moreover, the greatest demonstration of the corruption is the extent to which they're willing to deny it.