UNR Students for Liberty » Law

A Policeman’s Duty

Barry Belmont — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:27:42 +0000

“It is a policeman’s duty to protect men from criminals—criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not the protection, but the plunder of property—then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.”

–Ayn Rand

We even made a video emphasizing the point:

Leaders with ‘Biblical Worldviews’

Barry Belmont — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:49:18 +0000

Former Governor-turned-political-commentator Mike Huckabee is a man of whom I am not a fan. And it is not just him personally, but everyone he represents: the new conservative Christian Right. The kind of people who want to see In God We Trust on every public building. The kind of people who want to have the ten commandments in every courthouse. The kind of people who want to teach intelligent design in public schools. These people are wrong and wrong in a very significant way.

But I bring Mike Huckabee up because in a recent interview he said that he would “love the world to be lead by people [politicians] who have a biblical worldview.” Now given many of the fundamental tenets lurking away in the Bible, that’s just an extraordinarily outlandish statement in and of itself. Square that with the fact that this nation (and many like it) strive for religious toleration and you can see that Huckabee’s craving for a pseudo-theocracy is rather disturbing.

Anyway, I did some digging and it turns out that in this country you actually cannot hold office in many states if you do not believe in God. That’s right a country whose Constitution says “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” has at least seven — that’s right, count ‘em, seven — states within it who expressly do not allow atheists/agnostics/nones to hold public office. They are as follows.

Maryland’s Declaration of Rights

Article 37 – “That no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God.”

Mississippi’s State Constitution

Article 14, Section 265 – “No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state.”

North Carolina’s State Constitution

Article 6, Section 8 – “Disqualifications of office. The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.”

South Carolina’s State Constitution

Article 6, Section 2 – “No person who denies the existence of the Supreme Being shall hold any office under this Constitution.”

Tennessee’s State Constitution

Article 9, Section 2 – “No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.“

Texas’s State Constitution

Article 1, Section 4 – “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.”

And to top it all off, in Mike Huckabee’s home state of Arkansas:

“No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.”

The only thing preventing Huckabee’s ~~Sharia~~…~~Theocratic~~…~~Christian~~…Biblical law from being fully implemented is the apparent reluctance to enforce the laws already on the books. These are terrible laws and if implemented would make for terrible politicians. To prevent someone from holding a job based on religious beliefs is just as bad as not allowing Democrats or Republicans or libertarians from attaining public office. It punishes and excludes people on what is essentially a ‘thought crime’.

No harm comes to A if B does not believe in a god. There is only the mutual harm of not mutually benefitting from one another’s interactions. A and B can both bring much to the political table, they just have to check their religious inclinations at the door.

How Copyright Laws, a Judge, and a Bad Decision Have Crippled the World

Barry Belmont — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:58:18 +0000

Today, Judge Denny Chin ruled against Google‘s plans to make available some 12 million books in a digital library that could be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. “While the digitisation of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” Chin wrote in his decision, Google “simply go[es] too far, [...] giv[ing] Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission.”

More depressing, however, was the fact that the judge rejected the agreement Google reached with the plaintiffs allowing them to continue the digitization and redistribution of books in exchange for an cool $125 million annually. Sounds like a fair deal. But the judge said ‘No’ citing that the ownership (copyrights) of many of the works scanned by Google could not be established.

If you didn’t catch that, I’m going to repeat it, because it is that awful: Since no one is sure who owns the copyright of a particular piece of work, no one is allowed to touch it. What!? Why? That’s like saying you can’t pick up a penny (or a dollar bill) from the street because you can’t properly trace its origins. That. does. not. make. any. sense.

And the judge was able to make this decision so easily because it is not he that will ultimately bear this cost. It’s the hundreds of millions of people who will lack access to tens of millions of books and the vast catalog of information associated with it. This judge’s decision doesn’t just minutely hurt every single human being, it damages the human condition.

What reason could their possibly be to prevent the access to free and open exchange of information? Is the world not better with the internet, with Wikipedia, with knowledge? Cloistering information such that it is not allowed into the hands of others has never been the path of progress and this will be no exception.

It is better to light the world one booklight at a time than to see it cast in darkness as the next chapter of humanity is written.

SFL VS ASUN – Smoke-a-thon – Round 2

John Russell — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:22:28 +0000

UNR SFL tries once again to host a fundraiser for the American Lung Association but gets denied because tobacco is immoral (but, you know, getting $3200 worth of catering right before this request is totally legit).

A Bicycle Tax?

Barry Belmont — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:54:02 +0000

I know most of us libertarians aren’t much for riding bicycles (I’m looking at you John in your giant ManTruck), but as always, that ambivalence is trumped by a distinct loathing for unnecessary taxes. Introducing, The Bicycle Tax.

An Assemblyperson in New Jersey by the name of Cleopatra Tucker (D-Essex) introduced legislation a little over a week ago proposing that each and every bicycle (in the entire state!) would be required (by force of law) to pay $10 a year to register their bicycle with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

And if that wasn’t enough, every bicycle would be required to have a license plate hanging off the back end with the failure to do so being a $100 fine for each offense.

Facepalming enough yet? Well don’t worry, it seems that everyone in New Jersey was and Tucker has withdrawn her bill as a result.

The reason I brought this up was the coup de grace: In a statement she made after the fact, the Assemblyperson made the clearest expression of every lawmakers blindness. She said, “My intention was never to impose a burden or additional costs.”

There it is, all pink and naked, the Law of Unintended Consequences. No matter what you do as a rule maker, your rules will necessarily have unintended consequences — they will benefit those undeserving and punish those who have done no visible wrong (like a child riding a bike down the block).

Unintended consequences will always happen so long as rules can be enforced through force. Introducing, Government.

Wouldn’t it be absurd?

Barry Belmont — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:34:52 +0000

…to say that because the treatment of women (and their right to wear pants) within a society is wholly determined by the subjectivity of the members of that society that we can’t say there is anything wrong with this?

Clearly we can say this is wrong. Lock, stock, and barrel. It’s time to stop pretending like objective moral, ethical, and philosophical truths don’t exist.

–

In fact, I would love to hear how anyone favoring subjectivity in such fields would justify this video. Beating a woman for wearing trousers = Good? Let’s see your proof.

Drug Legalization: Case Study

Keegan Idler — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:55:33 +0000

There is a lot of argument on the necessity of the drug war. The benefits would be revenue gained from taxation, less drug dealers and less drug war associated crime, less money spent on fighting the drug war (police, jails, customs, etc.), easier access to treatment, and of course freedom.

The harmful effects are less clear… will people use more drugs? Will this lead to higher violent drug user crime? Will children have more or less access to drugs?

Well, Portugal legalized all illegal drugs, and so provides a fantastic case study of the issue. In short, the answer is that legalization is better in every possible way (that I can think of at least).

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html?ref=nf

Proposition 8 Struck Down

Barry Belmont — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:38:02 +0000

Take that bigots of the world.

And that people-who-think-you-can-vote-away-other-people’s-rights.

Go get those criminals…oh wait…that’s if I saw them two days ago…

Silly me, I thought rights (you know, like the basic fundamental cogs that turn with every action such as voluntary interaction) were now and forever…

Why Don’t the Rich Kill?

Barry Belmont — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 03:06:16 +0000

By this I mean the down and dirty version, namely, why is there currently a distinct correlation between income level and and homicide?

My originally, off-the-top-of-my-head answer was that there were simply less rich people than there the-not-so-rich and hence of course we would tend to see more of the not-so-rich getting themselves into homicidal messes than the rich themselves. But a quick glance at any criminological history textbook will show that this wasn’t the case even as recently as a hundred years ago.

Not content to let this question go, I did a little research and found an article (those with University access can read it in full) that gives a fairly reasonable answer the question with some solid evidence behind it. Much to my surprise it has relevance beyond just intellectual curiosity:

The criminological literature consistently reports a negative relationship between social status and interpersonal homicide. Regardless of the setting studied, homicide tends, with just a few exceptions, to be concentrated among low-status groups, such as the poor, the unemployed, the young, and cultural minorities. Yet robust as it is, this relationship is confined to modern societies. In the premodern era, homicide was found at all levels of the social hierarchy, including its higher echelons.

What explains these facts? Why is homicide largely confined to low status people today but was not in the societies studied by anthropologists and historians? Why has elite homicide declined? The answer developed here builds on a theory advanced by Donald Black (1983), which argues that violent conflict is a function of the unavailability of law. In modern societies, low social status and law are antagonistic, and the result is that legal means of resolving conflict are effectively unavailable to those at the bottom of the social pyramid. In earlier societies, law tended to be unavailable to everybody, irrespective of their social standing.

When Governments Fail: The Right to Die

Barry Belmont — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:22:24 +0000

A French high court has just decided that a 52 year-old disfigured woman (seen at right) who has suffered unimaginable physical and psychological pain due to a rare disease is not allowed to have her qualified (and willing) doctor administer a lethal dose of drugs to end her suffering and kill her. Law should exist only insofar as it seeks to limit human suffering — all laws, after all, should be negative laws (do not kill, do not steal) — and yet this is not what laws seek to do under governments. Laws under governments are almost worse than arbitrary as are too often left in the hands of those who would rather play semantic games than use those codifications to the reasonable purpose of reducing human suffering. Hence, under “law”, this lady must continue to suffer.

Chantal Sebire (the woman) has said she won’t appeal the courts decision but she intends to find life-terminating drugs through other means. “I now know how to get my hands on what I need, and if I don’t get it in France, I will get it elsewhere,” she said.

Can anyone really believe in the benevolence of the State anymore? I’m sorry Ms. Sebire has suffered and I can only hope through her own efforts and those around her willing to help, she will end it once and for all.