I’ve been railing against the War on Drugs for a long time and against the seizure laws used in said war. I really don’t know that I can say anything else.

Read the story of Charles L. Clark and tell me that you support the War on Drugs. I dare you.

He may or may not be guilty of anything. He had a lot of cash he claims he had saved up. They stopped him because his luggage “smelled of marijuana”. When they found a pile of cash in his luggage, $11,000, they took it. They charged him with resisting arrest when he tried to stop the officers from taking his money although those charges were dropped. They couldn’t charge him with anything else because he had committed no other crime.

They suspected that because he had a one-way ticket and cash that he had earned it selling drugs. They had no proof of such and so they took his money. Now he has to sue the government to get it back. They stole it from him legally.

Meanwhile thirteen different law enforcement agencies have asked for their share of the $11,000.

If you don’t think something is wrong with this then I suggest that you cannot believe in the ideals upon which the United States of America was founded. You cannot believe in freedom.

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Ideology
Current Release: The Black Sphere
Next Release: The Girl in Glass I: Apparition – Release date: late August 2015

There’s a lot of debate in the last few weeks about flags. The flag of the United States and the second flag of the Confederacy.

In many southern states the Stainless Banner is still used in many public places and by private citizens. It is strongly associated with a history of slavery. It’s very creation is steeped in the idea that the white race is superior to the black race. Many people see it thusly. Others see it merely as a symbol of southern pride and do not think of it racially.

In most of the United States people consider the Stars and Stripes a symbol of national pride. Others see it as representative of atrocities that this nation has inflicted upon others and of general tyranny.

What I find most interesting about the debate is the complete lack of consistency on both sides of the argument.

Both groups seem to think that the government should not be able to ban its chosen flag while absolutely thinking the government should be able to protect the same flag.

As I Libertarian I think the both sides are incorrect. The government has absolutely no say in how any person treats a flag. If a person wants to hang it from their porch in pride the government should in no way prevent them from doing so. If a person wants to burn it on their porch then the government should in no way prevent them from doing so.

When the government makes a law telling citizens of this country how they are allowed to display or destroy their flags I will stand up and decry it. I will shout from the tallest tree that this law is wrong.

If a business, a governor, or a private citizens chooses to display a flag of their own accord, that’s their legally protected decision. If they choose to destroy it in any manner, that’s up to them.

If the governor of Alabama wants the Stainless Banner removed from the statehouse, then so be it. But if the federal government orders it so removed, that’s a problem.

If someone burns their flag in a public display of dissatisfaction with the government of the United States and gets arrested, that’s a problem.

We cannot simply support a law when it works to our benefit. We must support the law even when it works against us. Then we are consistent. Otherwise we don’t really support the law at all. If we don’t support the law then how can we expect anyone else to do so?

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Ideology
Current Release: The Black Sphere
Next Release: The Girl in Glass I: Apparition

There is not a group of nine people that I respect more in this world than the Supreme Court Justices. I certainly do not agree with all their decisions. That being said, I find them to be intelligent and interesting. Their ability to work with one another even when they disagree vehemently is a model that I only dream Congress members might emulate.

They appear to largely and genuinely like one another. This attitude seems to have been fostered largely by former Chief Justice Rehnquist and continued on under Chief Justice Roberts. I read Supreme Court opinions on cases I find interesting and their humor and passion always shines through. Some Justices write in a more legalese fashion that my non-legally trained mind finds difficult to follow but I try my best.

Justice David Souter is a personal hero and I loved reading the clean and dispassionate logic of his thought processes which appear in what we call opinions. It was like reading a great philosopher.

Justice Elana Kagan just wrote the opinion on a copyright case involving Marvel Comics and a fellow who invented a web-shooting device. The company began marketing a similar tool and agreed to pay him a great deal of money and a percentage of sales. They agreed to payment in perpetuity but only later came across a ruling that limited payment to twenty years. They tried to enforce this limit while the inventor, predictably, wanted to continue with the original agreement.

Kagan wrote the majority opinion joined by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. Justices Alito filed a dissenting opinion, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas joined.

As Chief Justice; Roberts gets to decide who writes the opinion, and knowing Justice Kagan was a comic book fan, kindly allowed her the opportunity. This is a classic example of the congeniality of the court.

In any case, Justice Kagan got to slip several Spider-Man references into the opinion including the classic with great power comes great responsibility line that is the center of Peter Parker’s philosophy.

This story makes me happy. Good for Chief Justice Roberts. Good for Justice Kagan for grabbing the opportunity with both hands.

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Ideology
Current Release: The Black Sphere
Next Release: The Girl in Glass I: Apparition

The case of baby Bou-Bou has been settled. Freedom loses.

I wrote about this situation back in December of 2014 but I’ll recap quickly in case you don’t want to read it again.

A man, his wife, and children moved in with relatives because of financial difficulties. The relatives had an estranged son who hadn’t been seen in months. An informant told police the son was selling drugs. The police learned the address of the family. A judge wrote a “no-knock” warrant (kick in the door without warning). The police made no determination that children were in the house and the supposed criminal hadn’t lived there in months. During the raid a flash-bang grenade was thrown into the baby’s crib. The resulting medical bills were in excess of one million dollars. The family sued.

A summary of the defense was written by a fellow named William Griggs and sums it up pretty well.

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.

Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.

In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.

The case was settled for less than the medical bills and split between all family members. No officers, judges, or anyone else was charged with a crime. The settlement money is paid directly from tax-payer revenue. So, taxpayers of Georgia, you are party to this disgusting travesty.

The War on Drugs is, at this point, nothing more than a series of vile schemes to enrich judges, lawyers, law-enforcement officers, private prisons, and a host of others at the expense of our freedom. Let’s end it.

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Ideology
Current Release: The Black Sphere
Next Release: The Girl in Glass I: Apparition

There’s an interesting case that was just resolved in France where a bartender was sentenced to a suspended sentence and ordered not to work in a bar for a year after serving a patron fifty-six shots of alcohol in a single sitting.

In the United States it’s largely illegal to serve habitual drunks or clearly intoxicated people so this could well have happened in the United States as well. I wanted to examine the law and the ruling from a Libertarian perspective. It’s clear that Renaud Prudhomme willingly and eagerly consumed the alcohol. He was trying to break a record for the most shots of liquor taken in a single sitting, the previous record being displayed in the bar. That seems to have been the crux of the legal case against Gilles Crepin who was the bartender on duty and who posted the record on a notice board.

I think it’s pretty clear that by posting the record Crepin and the establishment were encouraging patrons to try and break the record. It’s also fairly obvious to me that anyone who drinks fifty-six shots of alcohol in a sitting is putting their life at risk. Still, should it be illegal for bars to encourage drinking to excess? Should it be illegal for a restaurant to offer all you can eat buffets? That is also clearly unhealthy. Should it be illegal for governments to sell lottery tickets, which largely serve as a tax on the people who can least afford it? These are interesting questions in my opinion.

I do think there is legitimacy to the idea that a business should endeavor to make their environment safe for patrons. We have guard rails on overlooks to prevent people from falling and nets at baseball stadiums to prevent foul balls from harming spectators but this is somewhat different than rules about protecting people from themselves. If someone wants to drink themselves to death or at least into a dangerous state is it the job of the bartender to prevent it?

I absolutely don’t think bars should be posting information about the record number of drinks taken in a sitting but I’m equally convinced it shouldn’t be illegal. Any establishment that does so is encouraging people to drink too much and this leads to drunken behavior. I’m not a fan of being around people vomiting, stumbling around, erratically driving their vehicles, and all the other attendant problems with too much alcohol. If a bar proved to be full of people like that I’d stop going.

It’s my opinion that in the end we must allow people to make their mistakes in life. When we try to make the world a better place with such laws it inevitable makes the situation worse and the establishments in question find a way to defeat the rules.

There is no doubt that humans are often weak of will in many ways and that they can be taken advantage of by unscrupulous people. But, as long as the person so manipulated was not a victim of fraud and simply chose, of their own free will, to behave in a self-destructive fashion, so be it.

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Ideology
Current Release: The Black Sphere
Next Release: The Girl in Glass I: Apparition