On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it was moving to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. Though the rumors had been swirling for months that this might happen, I was still somehow shocked to see them actually do it. I mean, it’s not like they already have their hands full with controversial COVID-19 vaccines or anything, right?

My instant reactions brought two well-known memes to mind.

First, this rather ancient one:

(In my defense, it really was the stupidest fucking thing I’d read all day. Maybe all year. We truly are in the dumbest timeline.)

The other meme I thought of was from the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:

Here we go again, indeed.

This move is profoundly imbecilic on so many levels that I honestly feel kind of bad even writing about it. It’s like beating up Peter Dinklage. Or drag racing a short bus. There’s really no sport in it. It’s low-hanging fruit. Or in this case maybe it’s… low-hanging mint?

As a libertarian (though not a “real” one), I am against the banning of almost everything. In my perfect world, you’d be able to buy black tar heroin from a vending machine and then go get a drive-thru abortion. (Watch out for those cloth seats!) So going after cigarettes seems rather pointless; flavored cigarettes, doubly so.

The FDA’s logic, if I understand it, is that menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars target children and black folks. (Think about casually lumping those two together for a moment and you realize how condescending these people are.) There is some truth to both of those things, however poorly the bedside manner is of those making the argument.

Black folks, for whatever reason, do smoke menthols far more often than other ethnic groups. Who knows why. Who cares?

Menthols are also a “gateway” cigarette for younger folks. How do I know? I smoked cigarettes for many years, and I started on menthols. I remember specifically being told that you wanted to try those first because they were a little easier on beginners.

You can accept these two things as fact and still not give a shit. Which is where I come down (obviously.) Whether these cigarettes are favored by black people or youngsters (or young black people), banning them is horrendously misguided. The FDA is basically saying: “Don’t you silly Blacks know what’s good for you?” Which brings to mind the old Ronald Reagan quote: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

Everyone knows that cigarettes are bad for you. There is really no argument there. I have lost a family member to lung cancer that was almost certainly related to smoking and it’s no joke. But whether your bad habit kills you in forty seconds or forty years, it’s really not my concern either way. Unless we have national health care and I’m being forced via taxation to pay for your bad decisions. (Which is actually a better argument against national health care than against your bad decisions.)

But despite crazy rumors floating around for years that menthols were worse for you because they were filled with fiberglass or some such shit, or that they were intentionally made that way to kill off minorities, no one has ever actually proven that they are any more dangerous than regular cigarettes. And the FDA really isn’t even trying to argue that. So this isn’t about health per se. If that was the case, the FDA would ban all cigarettes and cigars. (Which I would also be against.) It’s more of a nanny state thing. You are being penalized not for wanting an inherently dangerous product; you are being penalized for wanting that inherently dangerous product to taste better. Or, at least taste better to you. This somehow becomes a social justice issue or an attack on a protected class. The logic escapes me.

The whole thing is also rather awkward because, in a post-George Floyd world where white folks are finally realizing that police have in fact been screwing black people over for decades, this gives police another tool to screw over those very same people. We even have a fairly recent example of a black man being killed by police over cigarettes in the Eric Garner case. (It would be ironic, in retrospect, if they were menthols.)

Oh, sure, the administration says they’re only going to target manufacturers and not consumers. How’d that work out in the drug war? Or Prohibition? I think you know.

A black (no pun intended) market will almost certainly develop overnight. First, people will start to hoard the current stocks of Newports, Kools, Salems, and so forth. After those are gone, people will start making their own menthol cigarettes. Stores will sell these menthol additives with a wink and a nod, kind of like how head shops have been selling bongs for years but labeling them as “exotic tobacco pipes.”

When a commodity is driven underground, prices skyrocket and quality suffers. Who benefits from that? Not your average law abiding citizen, that’s for sure.

Also, think about how this is also taking place against the backdrop of more and more states legalizing recreational marijuana. Or, as I call it, “the only good reason to set foot in Illinois anymore.” The juxtaposition is stunning. The optics are shit. Why would any level of government care what you were smoking in the first place, much less legalize one thing while criminalizing another? If you’d have told me twenty years ago that pot would be legal but menthol cigarettes would be banned, and that Democrats would be the ones pushing the menthol ban, I’d have asked you what you were smoking. (Spoiler alert: probably pot.) Have we surrendered in the “War on Drugs” only to start a new “War on Mint?”

(As a side note, I don’t think marijuana legalization has really been driven by any real thirst for freedom, or a recognition that people should be able to do what they want. It’s mostly because people just like marijuana. The thought process starts and stops there. Those same people often don’t think twice about banning other things because they happen not to like those other things.)

Why are we banning menthol cigarettes while you can walk into any liquor store and buy twenty different flavored vodkas? (Thanks, Burnett’s.) Or fifteen different kinds of Bud Light Lime-A-Ritas? (Whose motto should be: “It’ll take some hair off your chest.”) Or thirty kinds of crappy favored seltzers? Aren’t wine coolers still a thing? Isn’t Boone’s Farm still acting as a gateway booze for young tipplers? Speaking of flavors, you can drive across the bridge here over to Illinois and buy many different flavors of cannabis gummies. (At least, that’s what I’ve been told.)

Are we also going to ban flavored beers? Or malt liquors and fortified wines because they’re allegedly too strong, while also being popular in low income areas? Surely, no one would be silly enough (or perhaps racist enough) to try something so absurd, right? Think again. Meanwhile, Whitey McWhiteperson or Cracky McCrackerson is still free to buy his Busch Light and Marlboro Reds pretty much anywhere.

Instead of meekly going along with a menthol cigarette ban, will the tobacco companies fight? Or at least try and pull off a second “Tobacco Settlement”, in which they basically pay a bribe to the FDA (or the various states) in exchange for being left mostly alone? That worked well enough in 1998. Sure, it resulted in the absurdity of tobacco companies paying to advertise against themselves, and the settlement costs were passed along to smokers in the form of steep price increases, but Big Tobacco greased the palms that it had to grease.

I quit smoking twenty-one years ago. Not out of any serious concern for my health; one look at my monthly expenditures at Liquor Warehouse would attest to that. It was because smokes were just getting too damned expensive and I didn’t want to pay for them anymore. But when I did smoke, I was a brand-hopping tobacco whore. I tried about everything. I tried Salems, Kools, Newports, Marlboro menthols, and even weird stuff like Bel Air and Alpine back in the day.

I don’t often crave cigarettes anymore, but on the rare occasion that I do, it’s usually a full-strength Salem I’m jonesing for. Those suckers packed so much menthol punch that it was like French kissing a little jar of Vicks VapoRub.

I’m tempted to start smoking again, and specifically to start smoking menthols, just to stick it to Uncle Sam. I want to fire up a Salem, take a big gnarly drag of that minty goodness, and extend a middle finger in the general direction of the District of Columbia.

The Libertarian Republic’s fearless leader once famously said:

Would a world where gay black married couples are free to protect their menthol cigarettes with fully automatic machine guns also be too much to ask?

TLR image composite source: LibertyLover2 Instagram

The post They Can Pry Your Menthols From Your Cold, Dead Hands appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

As I posted on Facebook on April 23 a few years back:

Happy St. George’s Day! How best to celebrate England’s national day? Have some tea and crumpets? Sip a gin and tonic in the afternoon? Skip a trip to the dentist? Colonize some far away land and introduce them to western civilization whether they want it or not? Simply go to work and have a productive day because those bloody bills aren’t going to pay themselves, you know?

(It’s not as simple as St. Patrick’s Day, which apparently just involves wearing green and getting snockered.)

The United States makes a huge fuss over St. Patrick’s Day while practically ignoring St. George’s Day. That’s super weird to me, because we owe much more to the English than we do to the Irish. Our legal system is based on English common law. Many of our cultural and musical traditions come from jolly old England. We have fought side by side with our English friends in several conflicts, leading to the coining of the term “The Special Relationship.” And obviously, we speak their language. (Though obviously not as well as they do. Everything sounds better in an English accent.)

If demographics are destiny, one would tend to think that the future looks very Chinese. Or maybe Hispanic. Neither of those things are necessarily bad; the worst thing about a Chinese future would no doubt be their awful system of government.

I hope that English manages to survive and even thrive in the future. While it’s a notoriously difficult language to learn and our spellings and pronunciations are all over the place, one can’t argue with the profound effect the language and the culture have had on the world.

Things haven’t exactly been copacetic in the mother country. The trauma of Brexit was largely driven by England while being staunchly opposed in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The U.K. leaving the European Union sparked some serious talk about the U.K. itself disintegrating.

If England were to turn its back on Europe, and even on some parts of its own island, where would they turn?

Why not us? Why not just put the band back together? As long America’s in charge. (Which, population-wise, we would be.)

The Anglosphere, loosely defined at the English speaking world, totals 6% of the world’s population and 17% of the world’s land. The “core” Anglosphere would be heavily dominated by the United States (328.2 million people), followed by the United Kingdom (67.8 million), Canada (38 million), Australia (25.7 million), and New Zealand (5.1 million.)

But wait, there’s more! A broader definition of the Anglosphere that brings in all the world’s English speakers would be considerably larger. The big prize here would be India and its 1.2 billion souls. Which could, technically, put them in charge of the Anglosphere. (And it has been my experience that many Indians are far more English in their mannerisms and habits than Americans are.)

But you would also bring in some other good-sized countries like Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and even Israel. (Pakistan might be a stretch given that what happened with Osama bin Laden a decade ago, but if we can still be in NATO with Turkey at this point, anything is possible.) An extended Anglosphere would more than blunt the possible impact of Scotland going its own way, or Northern Ireland reuniting with the rest of Ireland. Though of course they would both be welcome to stay.

There already exists an organization of English-speaking countries: The Commonwealth of Nations. It’s largely a collection of former British colonies, most of which recognize the British monarch as their titular head of state. Conspicuously absent from the Commonwealth are Ireland and the United States. The Irish have their reasons, as do we. But you don’t even have to recognize the queen as your head of state to be in this group anymore; they’ve accepted republics since 1949 (though somewhat grudgingly.)

Why not take that concept and make a big free trade zone and military alliance? Think “Commonwealth Plus.” We’re already in bed militarily and intelligence-wise with the big players anyway through the Five Eyes and the UKUSA Agreement. I know libertarians are inherently hostile to foreign entanglements, but China doesn’t share these high minded ideals. Such an arrangement may be inevitable.

The bad:

Well, that whole monarchy business. Most Americans, despite our weird fascination with the House of Windsor, are never going to bend the knee. Even symbolically. But as noted above, republics aren’t out of the question in the Commonwealth.

Then there’s that whole weird thing about the U.K. having an official state religion. Again, that’s easy enough to deal with, as it’s not really a requirement.

Americans are never likely to become fond of cricket or hot tea.

The English may never completely go along with extensive dental work.

It also seems quite unlikely that our Commonwealth brethren will ever catch on with American gun culture, which is shame, because they’re totally missing out. That shit is fun.

And some parts of the extended Anglosphere, as noted before, may want to go their own way. Thinking maybe of Quebec or Puerto Rico here.

The good:

As mentioned, the largely shared language, legal system, and parts of the culture.

Plus let’s be honest: if there was an Anglosphere Parliament including the U.S., India, Pakistan, Israel, the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Prime Minister’s Questions would be absolutely fucking lit. It would be must see TV. (Or “must see telly,” if you’re already getting all English just by reading this.)

Plus, the English could certainly teach us a thing or two about proper soccer hooliganism.

Last but not least, the flag. While everyone agrees that the Stars and Stripes is a fine looking flag, the Union Jack is absolute fire. (Even if you had to take out the Irish part.) The Grand Union Flag could be a compromise, bringing with it the best of both worlds.

Now, you might argue: “This whole Anglosphere idea is an ugly vestige of colonialism at best, and kind of racist at worst!”

The colonialism thing certainly has an ugly side. But have you ever noticed that most former British colonies maintain good ties with the mother country? (Even if, like us, it took them a while to come around?) Some former possessions of The Crown are still a little sore over the whole thing, sure, but by and large they came out better for it.

The idea that this concept could be racist is poppycock, balderdash, and rubbish. “English”, as a language and culture, goes far beyond actual Anglo-Saxons. The Commonwealth Plus, as proposed, would be in fact be the most diverse nation on the planet. From the Maori of New Zealand to the Blacks of the former British Caribbean to the Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis of the former British Raj, it would be hella diverse. Just all speaking the same language.

The best:

Even an ascendant China might want to think twice before messing with such a rowdy bunch.

The post I Cheer, You Cheer, We All Cheer for the Anglosphere appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Obama Derangement Syndrome was also real, and it had a distinct racial tint to it. It was kind of hard to miss, what with all the birther/secret Mooslem conspiracy crap flying around. Nobody would try and pull that shit with a hypothetical President McCain or a President Romney. A lot of folks on the right weren’t so mad at Obama’s policies as much as they couldn’t believe a black guy was running circles around them. I know this because as a native of outstate Missouri (not the most tolerant place in the world,) I heard racial slurs tossed around when referring to our 44th president several times in casual conversation. Obama broke the brains of many rural Americans.

Trump Derangement Syndrome was also real, and I may have even had a little touch of it myself. But unlike the other two, I think quite a bit of “TDS” was justified.

I don’t think there will be a Biden Derangement Syndrome. The only derangement of note would maybe be his own. Plus, he’s just not worthy of getting all that worked up over. He is largely seen as a genial (if befuddled) placeholder president serving as a transition between the constant outrage of the Trump years and…whatever comes next. Could be President Harris. Could be something else. No one knows. Think of Biden as a bandage; but even a bandage can do damage if poorly applied.

I do think that another phenomenon is taking place, though—call it Biden Regret Syndrome.

To that end, I wrote in a prior piece:

“I’ll risk taking a few licks on policy in exchange for knowing our president isn’t a total piece of shit and a garbage-tier human being.”

Well, we have a president who isn’t a total piece of shit and a garbage-tier human being. Congratulations. But now the hard part—the licks on policy. They’re coming.

The most obvious problem with the new administration is the absolute balls-to-the-wall spending frenzy. As Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) noted on April 5:

Granted, a lot of this started during the last administration and was fueled by the COVID-related economic meltdown. But jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick, the spending has really hit the fan now. President Biden doubled down on the “stimulus” beeswax.

But wait, there’s more!

An ongoing joke in never Trump circles was that every week was “infrastructure week.” But now, we’re going to get a real infrastructure bill, and we’re going to get it good and hard. Cost estimates on this latest round of profligate spending may run up to two trillion dollars. That’s trillion with a “t.”

And just like the stimulus bills got hung up on what was really stimulus versus what was just part of the omnibus, the infrastructure thing is going to get bollixed up by arguments over what the word “infrastructure” means.

To most folks, the word conjures up images of roads, bridges, waterways, railroads, utilities, and such.

At the end of the day, “infrastructure” will end up meaning whatever progressives want it to mean. Everything they like will be infrastructure and everything they dislike will be racist, bigoted, homophobic, misogynistic, and so forth. You know the drill.

Meanwhile, as any decent economist could have predicted, when trillions of dollars are printed and dumped into the economy, inflation is on the rise. CNN acted completely surprised at this turn of events, leading to this delicious headline:

You don’t say? Meanwhile, the U.S. government is doing an Urkel, asking coyly: “Did I do that?” Why, yes. Yes, you did. We aren’t at Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe levels of inflation yet, but maybe you can see it from here. I’ve been meaning to paint the inside of our house; maybe we’ll just paper everything over with greenbacks instead.

Speaking of spending— the only Biden cabinet-level nominee who has been shot down so far was Neera Tanden. That’s doubly ironic, because never before has the Office of Management and Budget been more useless. I mean, we don’t really do budgets anymore. Budgeting requires saying “yes” to some things and “no” to others. “No” isn’t in the current budgeting vocabulary.

As Coolio might say if he was a policy wonk:

Been spendin’ most their lives
livin’ in the Keynesian’s paradise

At the same time, interest rates remain at rock bottom for as far as the eyes can see, rewarding spending and punishing savings. This is contributing greatly to the current housing bubble. I have a money market account that is paying, I shit you not, .03%. That’s .0003. We’re this close to having negative interest rates.

At least the Biden administration isn’t talking about using executive orders to roll back gun rights. Oh wait, yes it is. The usual boogie men are targeted: red flag laws, ghost guns, and…stabilizing braces? The president also nominated a gun control advocate to head every libertarian’s favorite convenience store, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. I’m sure that’ll go over well.

There is even talk of reforming, or getting rid of, Senate filibusters. I have mixed feelings on that. Filibusters have been abused by both major parties for the last twenty years with no end in sight.

Last but not least (for now) is the specter of “court packing.” In the run up to the November elections, Democrats, enraged by Trump’s nomination and confirmation of three Supreme Court justices during his term, floated the idea of expanding the number of justices on the court. Then-candidate Biden was a little wishy washy when pressed on the issue before finally coming down against it (kind of) in October.

(Many people don’t know that, like the filibuster, the size of the Supreme Court is not mentioned in the Constitution. The filibuster is a special Senate rule, while the size of the court is set by statute.)

Lo and behold, on April 9, the Oval Office announced the formation of the ominous sounding “Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.” One of the agenda items, not surprisingly, is “the membership and size of the Court.” Whatever do you think their findings will be? The suspense is killing me.

The whole idea is B-A-N-A-N-A-S for several reasons:

• Even FDR couldn’t successfully pull off packing the Supreme Court.
• No state has a Supreme Court of its own with more than nine members. So any argument that U.S. Supreme Court is overworked is probably bupkus.
• Most importantly, even if they could add (say) four liberal justices to the court, that would only be good for a generation. At some point those “extra” justices have to retire or croak like all the rest, and who knows who’ll be in office to appoint their replacements. So this would be a whole lot of trouble for what amounts to a fairly short term gain.

Luckily the idea of packing the court appears to be dead on arrival. That’s coming from no less an authority than Speaker Pelosi.

Will that hold in the future, however? Would Speaker Ocasio-Cortez, for example, have such qualms? Right now the “grown ups” are allegedly in charge, but only barely.

What we need more than anything right now is a strong opposition party. We certainly do not have that in today’s GOP. Not only are they more focused on posturing and riling up their base than governing, they don’t have the numbers to stop much of anything right now.

Divided government was a distinct possibility right up until the GOP blew both of the U.S. Senate elections in Georgia. The Lincoln Project, a controversial never-Trumper group, had some entertainment value right up to the point where Trump actually lost. I figured with him gone, they’d do a “mission accomplished” and ride off into the sunset. But no, they had to go after Georgia Sens. Loeffler and Perdue too, thus helping to hand the Senate to the Dems by the thinnest of margins. Thanks for nothing, Lincoln Project!

Trump-hating libertarians (both small and big “L”) will have to ride out the Biden presidency as best we can, hoping that whatever damage he does is less than Trump would have done. Only time will tell.

Image: TLR composite, Gage Skidmore (Biden)

The post TDS May Be in Remission, but Brace for “Biden Regret Syndrome” appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Plenty of conservatives talk about reducing the size of government; very few actually do it. The genius of Rep. Fitzwater’s plan is that it reduces the size of the state government in about the most literal way possible. That should send a thrill up the leg of all serious haters of our state overlords.

His plan would reduce the size of the Missouri House of Representatives from a bloaty 163 members to a more svelte 136. The Missouri Senate, currently at thirty-four members, would apparently remain the same.

But I say— Why stop there? Why not reduce the size of the Missouri House to a nice round number, like… zero?

Fitzwater’s logic is sound, even if he doesn’t go far enough for my tastes. Missouri’s upper and lower houses total 197 combined members, which is the seventh largest number of legislators of any state. Meanwhile, we are only eighteenth in population among the various states. We are apparently somewhat overrepresented, and this presents an opportunity to trim some fat.

It could be worse. New Hampshire has a whopping 424 souls in their state house. Apparently, serving in their House of Representatives is akin to being an alderman or city councilman in other parts of America. When you move to the Granite State, maybe a seat in the legislature is part of the welcome package.

All but one state has two legislative chambers, usually a lower (House of Representatives) and an upper (Senate), which mirrors our federal makeup.

But why? Are two chambers really necessary at the state level?

The federal government can easily justify having two chambers because they are populated differently and serve different functions. The U.S. House of Representatives is (allegedly) the “people’s house” and is apportioned by population. The U.S. Senate is based on a completely different setup, giving each state two senators regardless of population. (Those seats used to be elected by the various state houses, until the abomination that is the 17th Amendment.) This makes the Senate remarkably un-democratic, but it was one of the only ways to get the smaller states to sign on with the Constitution. Plus, democracy is a bit overrated anyway.

Also, the two federal chambers have distinctly different duties and powers. So while both chambers stink on ice most days, they can ultimately justify their separate existences.

Similarly, the Parliament of the United Kingdom has two houses and can (kind of) justify it. The lower house, the House of Commons, holds most the power and is elected according to population. The upper house, the House of Lords, is populated according to heredity (ugh), appointment, or because you hold some other special function in the government. So while most red-blooded Americans find the concept of royalty and nobility to be total asinine bullshit, the Brits can at least explain the existence of both houses while keeping a straight face (or a stiff upper lip, if you prefer).

The existence of two chambers on the state level might make sense if the upper chamber had a different method of selecting their members than the lower chamber. Say, for example, that each county got to elect or appoint one state senator regardless of that county’s population.

Which is exactly what some states used to do with their upper houses. I even proposed such a thing for our State Senate in my quixotic run for a seat in that august institution in 2004. (To be fair, my campaign was light on policy and heavy on comic relief. It was largely fueled by my distaste for the GOP candidate, a former college classmate who I never entirely cottoned to. Compared to the current state GOP, however, he looks positively ravishing in retrospect.)

What I didn’t know at the time was that states couldn’t do that anymore, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decision. Both houses of every state legislature must be apportioned by population. Which essentially makes one house or the other completely redundant.

So why stop at reducing the number of seats? Why not get rid of one house altogether?

Our friends in Nebraska figured this out even well before Reynolds v. Sims. They are the sole state that only has one legislative chamber, which they refer to as (perhaps not creatively) as “the Unicameral.” The lower house was abolished and only the state senate remained. Members are also technically non-partisan, though their political affiliations are generally public knowledge.

(Of course, I can never talk about Nebraska without giving a shout out to Libertarian Party member and former state senator Laura Ebke!)

If nothing else, you save some money. Granted, it’s not like the legislators are really making big coin, as both Missouri state reps and Missouri state senators only pull in $35,915.00 per year. (Most of them have other jobs, unless they’re a Joe Biden type who has almost never held a private sector job.) That’s not a huge amount of money, but it is if you look at it as part-time work and then multiply by 163. That’s 5.85 million simoleons, Holmes. Plus benefits and such.

Any astute businessman realizes redundancies when he or she sees them. The first thing most businesses do after a merger or acquisition is to identify redundancies and eliminate them. Why not in the General Assembly itself?

To be fair, there are some arguments in favor of having two houses, even if both are elected according to population:

• The lower house (like the U.S. House) is likely to be perceived as being more accessible to the people.
• Having two houses makes it, at least theoretically, harder to pass legislation. Especially if the chambers are controlled by different parties. However, as blue states get bluer and red states get redder, that phenomenon has become rare. Currently, only two state legislatures are split between one Democratic controlled chamber and one Republican controlled chamber. (Other factors besides party affiliation could conceivably cause friction between an upper and lower house even if they are controlled by the same party, but such things are likely speed bumps more than anything else.)
• Reducing the number of legislators, or eliminating one house altogether, does not really diminish the power of the state. It simply reduces the number of people who hold that power. Which is wonderful if you’re one of those people. Maybe not so good for the rest of us.

Still, I would like to see all fifty states and the various territories switch to a unicameral legislature. Just on principle. But as a compromise, perhaps make it one somewhat larger house, maybe eliminating their state senates instead of their lower chambers. Call it a “reverse Nebraska” (which sounds oddly dirty for some reason).

If Rep. Fitzwater wants to make a really big splash, why not go for that? Eliminate a chamber, toss out some legislators, and let God sort it out. If it’s their only job, tough. Let them try to live off stimulus payments and “enhanced” unemployment benefits like so many of their constituents.

That sends a thrill up my leg, indeed. But I’m kinky when it comes to such erotic topics as throwing the elected bums out.

The post The Best Small Government Position is the Reverse Nebraska appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Just when you thought the whole coronavirus thing was almost in the rearview mirror, this week everyone’s gone absolutely berserk over the prospect of “vaccine passports.” The concept: you carry some sort of proof of immunity to COVID-19, and in exchange you can be admitted to certain places or events.

The idea had been smoldering for a while. It has recently exploded in earnest, due at least in small part to certain parties throwing gasoline on that fire.

For example, the Libertarian Party of Kentucky tweeted (perhaps unwisely):

“Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?”

Ah, that good ol’ Libertarian Party bedside manner.

There are a couple things wrong with that tweet. For one thing, they botched the analogy. The un-vaccinated population would be the allegedly oppressed in their scenario, not the vaccinated. Most importantly, by referencing Nazis and/or the Holocaust, the LPKY invoked Godwin’s Law and thus invalidated any point they were ham-handedly trying to make.

The reaction was, as you might expect, mixed. No less than bong whisperer Seth Rogen (who has probably never set foot in Kentucky) chimed in. This led to the kind of wholesome, civilized debate Twitter is famously known for. Just kidding, it was a melee.

Never one to shy away from a good shitshow, renowned intellectual luminary Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA), with her usual aplomb, opined that vaccine passports would be “Biden’s mark of the beast.”  Please just kill me now.

I am on the record in a prior piece as being generally okay, in principle, with the idea of a vaccine passport. As long as it is private businesses or citizens asking for it. After all, a property owner has an almost absolute right to determine who comes and goes on their property. Right?

The idea is fraught with problems, however. The whole argument of what persons or businesses can do versus what government can do is one that sometimes trips up libertarians. While it sounds great in theory to say that persons and businesses can do what they want with their property, it is naive to think that government plays no role.

Many times when a business makes these decisions, they are doing so with the imprimatur of government authorities. And if the government isn’t playing a role, their insurance company probably holds significant sway in the matter. The hodgepodge of business requirements (or lack thereof) for face coverings is a decent example of this.

Perhaps a more vexing question, at least from a technical perspective: who’s going to issue these alleged passports? Not the federal government, at least according to some sources. (And even if they try, it’s probably a non-starter.) Will all 50 states (plus D.C.. Puerto Rico, etc.) issue their own separate documents? How about all 3,006 counties in the U.S.? Why not all 14,945 incorporated cities? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

As also noted in a prior piece, our federal system is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to dealing with stuff like this. Instead of one response to a national crisis, we have scores of wildly differing responses. And perhaps also scores of wildly different vaccine passports. Plus, consider that by the time any of this stuff gets going, the pandemic may be over with anyway.

Are our vaccination cards supposed to also be the passports? Or the primary documentation for obtaining one? Because if so, those cards are ridiculously easy to fabricate, forge, or alter. You might as well use them to wipe your arse in the next toilet paper shortage.

It’s super cute that Staples, Office Depot, and so forth are offering to laminate your vaccine cards for free, but lamination does not make something official. I could laminate my Certificate of Ordination from the Church of the Latter-Day Dude, but that doesn’t make me qualified to serve as Pope.

Their offer of free lamination, however, is convenient for forgers: they can get the card stock, the ink, and the lamination all at one place!

Seriously, if those cards are the cornerstone of all this passport business, then much of this is just for show. One big virtue signal.

What if your immunity comes not from a vaccine, but from having had the virus and then recovering naturally? Will you have to cough up (pun intended) medical records showing that you tested positive at some time in the past? What if you know you had it, but you were never officially tested or treated? Will you have to show proof of a positive antibody test?

Who is going to pay for all this shit?

Are there HIPAA concerns with being compelled to prove to a third party that you’ve had a disease or the vaccine for same?

From a property/casualty insurance perspective, I’m not entirely sure why an insurer would really care what their insureds do vis-à-vis masks or vaccine passports. Everyone’s scared of being sued if someone catches COVID on their property. But outside of severely confined environments like nursing homes and prisons, it is devilishly hard to prove when and where somewhere got infected. So from a tort perspective, I’d like a defendant’s chances in a civil suit on such matters, even with the lower burden of proof. A lot of restrictions businesses are imposing upon themselves arise from an abundance (perhaps overabundance) of caution.

“Why would businesses willfully turn away paying customers?” you might ask. Actually, they do it all the time. People aren’t the only entities that engage in virtue signaling. Businesses do it too, even if it hurts their bottom lines.

For example, many businesses were absolutely delighted to turn away paying black customers in the Jim Crow days. (Think of that as a form of vice signaling.) The whole gist of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and specifically its focus on “public accommodations” (whether one agrees with that or not) was to remedy that situation. Some folks just don’t want to “bake the cake” on religious grounds. Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling guns because, I don’t know, ‘reasons’. Twitter famously banned its highest profile user a few months ago, no doubt decreasing their page views. I could go on.

So yes, some businesses may require vaccine passports just to make their local or state governments happy, to placate their insurance companies, or to virtue signal. After all, we’re all in this together, right? At least that’s what every goddamned television commercial has been telling us for the last year, anyway.

I fear that most of the acceptance of vaccine passports on a person-to-person basis will be virtue signaling as well. The pro-passport people will want to show everyone how they’re being good citizens. (Think Ralph Wiggum saying “I’m helping!”) The anti-passport people will want to show that they’re not “sheeple” and they’re not “scared” while they are out there sucking on doorknobs, having infection parties, or whatever else they do to flex their muscles.

Make no mistake, however: there is some malevolence on both sides.

Some pro-vaccine/passport people will want passports in part so they can punish the anti-vax nutters. How dare they not play along! We’ll show them! It puts the vaccine in its skin or else it gets the hose again!

The malevolence from the anti-vaccine/passport folks is a little harder to sort out. It’s kind of all over the place:

• The virus is a hoax
• The virus is real, but is mostly harmless or being overblown
• ThE vaCciNEs areN’T fDa aPPROveD
• Bill Gates is allegedly trying to microchip them for some reason
• Fear of getting autism (or some shit); like that’s something people just “get”
• They are a person who, for some reason, think it’s totally fine to be in large or closely confined crowds during a pandemic while having little or no protection. Because sports, concerts, or airline flights are more important than their health, or the health of those around them. Weird flex, but okay.
• Fuck the government/fuck big business/or just a general “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” attitude*
• They fear their personal medical information is going to be misused or abused, or the passport will be used for other nefarious purposes (such as a social credit system)*

*an argument with which I have some sympathy

I’m tempted to do a Mercutio and just exclaim: “A plague o’ both your houses!”

The problem is that it’s a real plague and both houses probably will get it. How much more posturing goes on between here and the bitter end is anyone’s guess.

The post Vaccine Passports: The Most Virtuous of All Virtue Signals appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

My brother was a bit of a jock, playing several sports, but especially excelling at wrestling. (Real wrestling, not that rasslin’ business you see on the television.) My sister was involved in cheerleading, which is at least kind of a sport. Depending on who you ask.

In any event, I was constantly jealous of them both. They were pretty and popular; I was nerdy and a bit standoff-ish. (Surprise, I know!)

My mother supported her kids’ sporting efforts. My father was more of a skeptic who thought that sports were useless. Torn between those two worlds and not blessed with much athletic talent to begin with, I generally participated in sporting activities against my will. My youthful sports adventures were mostly limited to two years of “minor league” (coach pitch) baseball and various gym class indignities.

I allegedly hit one home run in two years of organized baseball; my recollection of it was more like a single with three subsequent errors. (They didn’t really give out errors at that level.) Compounding the problem was that I was taught to bat right-handed even though I threw left-handed, and no one picked up on this obvious discrepancy.

After my parents’ divorce as an early teen, I grew more interested in sports, especially baseball. I even started crushing it in wiffleball and softball after someone thought to turn me around to bat left-handed. But I was too far behind to really catch up with my peers who had been playing baseball full-time for their entire lives.

So I overcompensated by watching buttloads of sports on television. The 1985 World Series was the first one I really paid attention to. I was thirteen. I have never fully recovered from the infamous bad call at first base in Game Six and the subsequent John Tudor/Joaquin Andujar/Whitey Herzog collective meltdown in Game Seven.

The football team of my youth was the St. Louis Cardinals. The football Cardinals. Also known as The Deadbirds. The Big Pink. Or, perhaps most colorfully, The Retardinals. I fondly recall Stump Mitchell, Roy Green, J.T. Smith, Jay Novacek, and Vai Sikahema prowling the rock hard turf of Busch Stadium II while Neil Lomax ducked and covered. Those teams were just good enough to be competitive while also being bad enough to break your heart. Then of course, they broke everyone’s hearts one final time by splitting town due to complaints about a twenty-one year old stadium. (Take notes on that stadium thing; you’ll be seeing it again in a few paragraphs.)

I didn’t pay much attention to hockey. It was an afterthought. I was well into middle age before I truly appreciated hockey and understood such things as the offside rule or a good penalty kill. Oh by the way, LGB!

Naturally on this side of Missouri, the biggest sports thing has always been the St. Louis Cardinals, perennial contenders. Everybody loves a winner. I rooted for them when I became interested in sports, but soon found them rather boring. Not because those teams were boring per se, because they definitely were not. Whiteyball, focused on speed, defense, and pitching, was the antithesis of boring. What bored me was that everyone around me was cheering for them, and that just didn’t work for me. I discovered that I liked to be different and I liked to root for underdogs.

So I instead adopted the Chicago White Sox as my main team for a number of years. The logic: Chicago wasn’t that far away, the team kind of sucked, the American League was weird and different, and the Sox needed fans since they were constantly overshadowed by the crosstown Cubs. (Plus, the mid-80’s White Sox had the absolute coolest uniforms. By 80’s standards, anyway.)

I kept rooting for the football Cardinals for a number of years even after they stopped sucking in St. Louis and started sucking instead in Phoenix. Like the White Sox, I felt sorry for them. Plus at that time in my life I was fascinated by Arizona and thought at some point I’d follow them out there. When the Rams moved to St. Louis in 1995, I switched my allegiance to them. In a cruel twist of fate, they would also split town years later due to (alleged) complaints about a twenty-one year old stadium. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t really about the stadium.)

In between, I also learned to appreciate college basketball, college football, college baseball (the local teams anyway), and just about every sport besides maybe soccer and golf. And I’m even willing to give soccer a try once the new MLS team starts playing in St. Louis.

Yet, a large part of me remains skeptical about sports and their place in American life. We don’t just enjoy sports; we are obsessed with them. Pro sports bring in at least 100 billion dollars each year; college sports also bring in a big haul, though their profit/loss figures are murkier.

But it’s not just the money. It’s the prestige. Athletes, even mediocre ones, are placed on a pedestal in America. Go to any high school or college campus and you will find that the top of the social food chain is occupied by the jocks. Newspapers devote far more column inches covering high school and college sports than they do covering high school and college academics. Eat dinner at any red-blooded American family table and the conversation will be about the sporting exploits of the various kids. (Ask me how I know.)

It’s entirely possible to play sports at a high school, go to college for four years and play sports, then come back to your high school and coach there until the day you die. Some folks never spend more than four years of their lives outside of the high school they attended, and it’s just weird.

Also, there’s a better than average chance that the person teaching your children about history and government was actually hired mostly for his or her coaching ability. There’s an old joke that used to go around in my circles (that maybe I should’ve paid more attention to:)

Q: What is the most common first name of people who teach Social Studies?

A: Coach!

In the argument of college sports versus pro sports, they are both corrupt in their own way.

Pro sports, by definition, are mercenary. Players play for the highest bidders, and owners play in the cities that will make them the most profit or give them more money for a stadium. In fact, the public funding of stadiums is the biggest beef against professional sports.

College sports are considered more “pure.” After all, those teams can’t move. They’re stuck in whatever podunk town their college is in ad infinitum. Their players aren’t paid. Technically.

But are they really pure? The players are often “students” at the college in much the same sense that the Holy Roman Empire was “Holy,” “Roman,” and an “Empire.”

It’s an open secret that many big time athletes don’t go to class, or they receive significant assistance or leniency when they do. And though they’re not (usually) paid in the traditional (or legal) sense, many are on scholarship for their athletic abilities. “Athletic scholarship” is a contradiction in terms and always has been. We’ve simply stopped seeing the irony in it. Because, you know, go team.

Even if you disregard the free college degree, which is certainly worth something, there are many other examples of star college players receiving all kinds of other benefits. (Not even counting the groupies.) My own alma mater, while I was in school there, had a basketball player who allegedly couldn’t speak a lick of English, but got by because his brother was a famous NBA player. Bonus: our guy wasn’t even a good player.

There is some talk of actually paying college athletes above the table. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Then there’s this whole thing where college basketball or football coaches are the highest paid public employees in forty fucking states.

What I do know is that other countries are absolutely eating our lunch when it comes to education. China, for example, doesn’t much care about basketball, football, baseball, or hockey, but their kids can sure enough get a good education. In the economic war, the ability to throw a touchdown pass may not hold a candle to the ability to code. And while our big studly athletes may make for excellent foot soldiers in a shooting war, future wars are likely to be fought largely in the air and online as opposed to on the ground.

In any case, our obsession with sports is entertaining in the short run but potentially devastating in the long run. I’m not straight up saying that our focus on sports is the only reason our academics suck, because after all, it’s not a zero sum game. But there seems to be a definite relationship between those two things. It’s a cultural thing. Our priorities as a people are whacked.

Where, then, is the ideal place for sports in our future?

Pro sports would remain more or less the same, but without the ridiculous public money that goes into funding many of their palaces.

Ideally, every high school and college team would be a club team. Athletes would be real students who receive no benefit for playing, and their teams would raise their own operational funds. It would be generally recognized that sports are a distant second place priority to academics.

Render unto Education the things that are Education’s, and unto Sports the things that are Sports’.

So in other words: fat chance.

The post America’s Sports Obsession: Losing the Long Game appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

“Open” Congressional and U.S. Senate seats are rare, as re-election rates are somewhere north of 90%. So when an odd opening does occur for these more or less lifetime positions, a mad scramble ensues. One might even compare it to chumming the water. (We’re gonna need a bigger ballot.) Or, an orgy.

About twelve days ago, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri set off just such an orgiastic frenzy when he announced that he would not run again in 2022. Speculation immediately began as to who might replace him. Wikipedia already has a nice little page dedicated to the race, chronicling who’s in and who’s out.

As Missouri is now a fairly solid red state, most of the chatter is on the Republican side. Everyone expects a knock down, drag out primary fight. I will break down the contenders and throw a little shade while I’m at it.

GOP Maybe In:

Eric Greitens

The most interesting (and most aggravating) name in the mix. The Icarus of Show Me State politics, his rise and fall are well known tales. I’ve never been a fan.

(Did you know that he was a Navy SEAL? It’s kind of hard to miss, since he brings it up all the time.)

He is an obviously intelligent guy, but his naked ambition was always unnerving, and his 2016 gubernatorial campaign pandered to morons. That campaign was intensely shallow, complete with the infamous “I’m shooting up a field for no reason” ad that fouled our airwaves. The entire campaign was basically “I’m America’s Number One Navy SEAL® and I’m a conservative outsider, so vote for me or I’ll kick your ass!” Light on issues, heavy on machismo.

Missouri voters ate it up. In the primary, he beat three Republicans with impressive resumes (Lt. Governor Peter Kinder, former Missouri House Speaker Catherine Hanaway, and businessman John Brunner.) In the general, he took down the mostly harmless Robert Redford lookalike, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster.

Ego thus satisfied (for the moment), he swaggered into the governor’s mansion and almost immediately began burning bridges and stepping on his own d*ck.

About that: first came the allegation that he had taken an illicit photograph of his bound paramour without her consent. Among other things. Then came the charge that he had misused a donor list related to one of his charities. In one of the most “I wish both sides could lose” battles ever, he mixed it up with St. Louis circuit attorney Kim Gardner. Things didn’t really go well for Gardner either. (In a perfect world, those two would be stranded on a desert island together. They really deserve each other.)

Ultimately, he resigned while maintaining his innocence and claiming victimhood status. His wife, clearly the real intellectual in the family, split and ended up leaving Missouri altogether.

Listen to this phone call between then-candidate Greitens and primary rival John Brunner and tell me that this person belongs in any position of authority. Check out this glory hound rappeling from the rafters of an arena during a rodeo. (Gotta give him credit for knowing his target audience. When it comes to bread and circuses, he definitely had the circuses part down pat.)

Even the Navy didn’t seem to know what to do with him when he wanted to come back. But come back he did, with an assist from Vice President Pence.

Even before Blunt announced his upcoming retirement, Greitens had launched a bit of a political comeback tour at Blunt’s expense. Just weeks before Blunt dropped his official bombshell, Greitens was attacking him for being—get this—insufficiently pro-Trump. That’s right, Sen. Blunt, who had voted to acquit the Ol’ Trumpler in both of his impeachment trials and carried a lifetime 85.58% rating from the American Conservative Union in 2019, somehow didn’t kiss enough orange ass to satisfy The Elvis of Navy SEALs©.

The dangers of a Greitens senatorial run are best summed up here. While I do think that “Mr. Greitens Goes to Washington” would have a certain amount of entertainment value, I don’t think it’s worth the risk. If he got into this much trouble in Missouri, what sort of shenanigans might he fall into in D.C.?

Greitens delenda est.

Lt. Governor Mike Kehoe

Who is this guy? Nobody knows, which as lieutenant governor, is totally the point.

Remember the Great Missouri Statewide Office Shuffle of 2018? Greitens resigns as Governor. Parson becomes Governor. Parson appoints State Sen. Kehoe as Lieutenant Governor. Smarmy ladder-climbing Josh Hawley leaves the Attorney General’s office to become U.S. Senator. Parson appoints then-Treasurer Eric Schmitt to be Attorney General, and then appoints State Rep. Scott Fitzpatrick as Treasurer. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Auditor Nicole Galloway don’t go anywhere and just watch in bewilderment.

Did anyone (besides Parson, obviously) benefit from all that more than Kehoe? Yet I could run into him around town and have no idea who he is.

Attorney General Eric Schmitt

This gentleman probably has the most solid resume of all the statewide office holders. If Greitens doesn’t get in the race and Schmitt does, I imagine he’ll be the favorite.

Rep. Ann Wagner

Her last two elections have been closer than they probably needed to be, but don’t count out her blond ambition. She has a lot of friends in high places.

Rep. Jason Smith

This is my Congressman and I honestly don’t know how. With his dead fish personality, persistent flop sweat, low energy demeanor, and a voice that sounds weirdly similar to Hermey’s from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, he seems like an unlikely hero for outstate Missouri. He’s tried to butch things up in recent years with flannel shirts, blue jeans, and even a beard, but it just doesn’t feel right. Throw in his connections to disgraced former Congressman Aaron Schock and a lot of things just don’t add up. Yet, here he is.

But underestimate Congressman Hermey at your own peril. In the most amazing feat of combat since The Bride fought her way out of The House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill, lowly (at the time) State Representative Smith fought off an impressive squad of challengers to win this seat in 2013. Thanks to Rep. Jo Ann Emerson’s mid-term “retirement” to take a cushy corporate job right after she was re-elected, the seat was thrown open. In a situation kind of similar to today’s Senate race, nearly every prominent Republican from the Eighth District turned out for the seat.

The nomination was to be decided by the Eighth District Republican Committee, which was tantamount to election since the district is so red. Smith held enough sway on this committee to beat one sitting statewide officeholder (Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder), two former statewide officeholders (former state treasurers Wendell Bailey and Sarah Steelman), several other sitting or former state representatives and state senators, and some other random folks just for good measure. As Darth Vader would say: “Impressive. Most impressive.”

While I sometimes wonder who will finally come forward with some juicy kompromat on Smith someday, it seems possible that he held some juicy kompromat on a lot of other people eight years ago.

If this U.S. Senate race came down to Greitens vs. Smith on the GOP side, it’s not hard to imagine Greitens giving the testosterone-deficient Smith a wedgie on the debate stage. Greitens will probably challenge him to a posedown and then steal his lunch money just for good measure. Smith’s only hope might be to counter with a slap fight.

Seriously though… as weird as this dude is, he has some political chops. Anything could happen.

Still— I would pay real money to hear Rep. Smith say “Well, sir, some day, I’d like to be a…a dentist!” just once.

John Brunner

There’s a lot to like about Brunner; he’s probably the closest thing to a libertarian you’ll find in this piece. Alas, I fear that Missouri may be suffering from Brunner Fatigue, as he spent quite a bit of money in the 2012 U.S. Senate race and the 2016 Missouri governor’s race and didn’t get out of the primaries in either.

GOP Definitely Out:

Ashcroft the Lesser

A darned shame, actually, and I say that as someone who ran against him in 2016. He’s kind of boring, but he’s an adult and stays out of trouble. You’ll never have to worry about him defrauding a charity or tying up his hairdresser. He doesn’t have his dad’s fire and brimstone tendencies, but that’s maybe not a bad thing.

Peter Kinder

It seems Cape Girardeau’s favorite son (since his friend Rush Limbaugh died, anyway), former state senator, and former three term (!) Lieutenant Governor is too sane to run for statewide office again in post-Trump Missouri. That’s too bad, because like Ashcroft the Lesser, he’s a level-headed, deliberate adult.

Similar to Smith, there was a lot of chatter about Peter over the years, as tends to happen when a man reaches a certain age and is still a bachelor. The worst thing that ever came out, however, was that he was apparently a strip club aficionado back in the nineties.

Well, that just makes me like him more. It’s kind of amazing, in retrospect, that I never ran into him over there.

Governor Mike Parson

It should really be no surprise that our current governor has no interest in running for the U.S. Senate in 2022. He barely seemed to have any interest in running for governor in 2020, and won anyway.

I don’t say that as an insult, either. It’s refreshing to have an officeholder who really doesn’t seem to want to be there. Good for him. And us.

GOP Wild Cards:

Whatever happened to Catherine Hanaway? Blunt the Lesser? (Remember when he was governor? Most folks don’t either.) Former Senator Jim Talent?

You know what, never mind Talent. He somehow lost statewide races to both “One Term Bob” Holden and Claire McCaskill.

Dems Maybe In:

Auditor Nicole Galloway

As Missouri’s only remaining statewide Democratic officeholder, she’s automatically in the conversation. However, similar to Brunner Fatigue, Missourians may be tired of her. She just got shellacked in the most recent governor’s race against a guy who again didn’t really seem to want to be there. How she would fare against a more aggressive Republican opponent is highly questionable.

Lucas Kunce

I’m not gonna try to bullshit my way through this one. I don’t know much about him.

Scott Sifton

I don’t know much about this cat either.

Dems Definitely Out:

Claire McCaskill

Our former U.S. Senator, formerly blessed with electoral luck in weak electoral foes Jim Talent and Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin, wants no part of Missouri politics anymore. And who could blame her?

Jason Kander

Our former Secretary of State’s claim to fame is narrowly losing to Roy Blunt in the 2016 U.S. Senate election. He joined a weird pantheon of Democrats who were worshiped for losing races in red states. Think Wendy Davis,  Stacey Abrams, Jon Ossoff (2017 House race, anyway), Alison Lundergan Grimes, Amy McGrath, and whoever else runs against Mitch McConnell in 2026, 2032, 2038, 2044, 2050, and 2056.

Dem Wild Cards:

Why not dig up a centrist, popular Democrat with a history of winning statewide elections? Like Jay Nixon? (After all, Jay ran for the U.S. Senate twice before in 1988 and 1998. Don’t tell me he doesn’t still think about it.)

What are Chris Koster and his magnificent head of hair up to these days?

Is it too soon to make a “Why not run Mel Carnahan again” joke? I mean, that whole thing did work twenty-one years ago.

Libertarian Party maybe in, definitely out, and wild cards

The LP situation is still developing.

Constitution Party maybe in, definitely out, and wild cards

Are these folks still around? Isn’t the GOP largely paleoconservative these days anyway? What’s the point?

Green Party maybe in, definitely out, and wild cards

Even more developing. As they recently lost their Missouri ballot access, it’s gonna be a tough row to hoe regardless.

Bottom line:

The race will be the Republicans’ to lose. I see some danger if they nominate Greitens and he self-destructs (as he is wont to do), or if he doesn’t self-destruct but the Democrats counter with an old hand like Nixon or Koster. Literally any other Republican should have smooth sailing.

I think I’ve firmly established myself in the “anybody but Greitens” camp. Thirty years of him in the upper chamber could be more than my heart could bear. Or, my liver.

The post Missouri U.S. Senate Race 2022: An early look appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Ranking the Constitutional Amendments – Part I

This week, we finish up with the rest of the “meh” and have our grand finale: the worst amendments.

The “meh” (continued)

27th Amendment: Delays laws affecting Congressional salary from taking effect until after the next election of representatives

This well-meaning amendment was actually one of the first 12 ever proposed, along the same time as the Bill of Rights and the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (see more below.) It took a staggering 203 years to ratify this bad boy.

The idea is that Congress can’t give itself a pay raise. At least not right away. I think it’s mostly window dressing. 96% of incumbent Congresscritters were re-elected in the last cycle. So it’s no big sweat to wait until the next term to collect the pay increase you just voted for; I mean, you’re definitely going to be there. Unless maybe you die. (We should be so lucky.)

23rd Amendment: Grants the District of Columbia electors in the Electoral College

This was also well-meaning, but it dodged the whole D.C. statehood question. Not to mention it gave the Democrats a very easy three electoral votes each cycle. The highest a Republican presidential candidate has ever polled in D.C. was Nixon in 1972…with a paltry 21.56%. (An election in which he won forty-nine states.)

If we’re going to go this route, I’d rather just see D.C. merged back into Maryland. Statehood seems like a bit of a stretch, and there are Constitutional questions about that anyway.

3rd Amendment: Restricts the quartering of soldiers in private homes

This particular amendment is clearly a very specific reaction to British acts during the Revolutionary War and hasn’t seen much action since. It did briefly get some attention during last summer’s unrest in the capital city, which seems like a million years ago, now.

11th Amendment: Makes states immune from suits from out-of-state citizens and foreigners not living within the state borders; lays the foundation for state sovereign immunity

This amendment is a bit esoteric and somewhat hard to understand. Even though I will confess to not completely grasping the concept, I will say that I am in favor of states getting their asses sued off pretty much all the time. So I guess I’m against it in principle.

The worst (cover your ears, darlin‘):

17th Amendment: Establishes the direct election of United States senators by popular vote

It should surprise no one that the three worst amendments were all ratified during the “progressive” era. This stinker took the election of U.S. Senators away from the various state legislatures and turned it over to the infinite wisdom of the great unwashed masses.

The beauty of having state legislatures elect U.S. Senators was that it guaranteed the senators would have a particular interest in the rights of the various state houses that had sent them there. By switching to direct election, the U.S. Senate simply becomes another popularity contest, or another step in the ladder to higher office. Basically, the Senate now is just the House of Representatives-Plus—minus that whole pesky popular apportionment thing.

If election to the U.S. Senate by the state house was good enough for my distant cousin Justin, it should be good enough for everyone.

18th Amendment: Prohibited the manufacturing or sale of alcohol within the United States

Prohibition went over so badly that the mere mention of the word conjures up images of crime, violence, gangsters, and poisonings.

I’ll never understand how this amendment ever got ratified in the first place. Even states with economies heavily dependent on alcohol production (Missouri, California, and Wisconsin) ratified this turd, thus cutting their own economic throats. Only two states out of the 48 at the time refused to go along.

Another thing that blows my mind: at the time, it was considered a “progressive” amendment. Yet, it was also popular with conservative religious elements (except perhaps Catholics, for obvious reasons). Anytime the far left and the far right enthusiastically agree on something, you better run for the hills.

The best thing I can say about this abomination is that at least the proponents went the constitutional route as opposed to trying to push it through by statute. But you can have 46 states agree on something and still be wrong.

We learned our lesson and repealed this very bad amendment 14 years later.

Did we really learn our lesson, though? All sorts of other fun victimless things remain illegal, and we are still paying the price in terms of crime and dangerous black market products.

16th Amendment: Permits Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the various states or basing it on the United States Census

Congratulations, you have now reached the absolute bottom of the barrel. The federal income tax.

After ratification of this unholy terror, the first income tax imposed was aimed at high income earners and topped out at seven percent. Only three percent of Americans even paid the tax at the time. Isn’t that quaint?

Slippery slopes are a real thing, however. The harmless little income tax decided that it was hungry, and quickly grew and demanded more and more to eat, topping out at an astonishing 91% top tax rate towards the tail end of World War II. Fast forward to today and it’s been moderated somewhat, with a top tax rate of 37%. Which is still 37% too high.

Also during the war, income tax withholding was introduced, so the average Joe doesn’t even realize how much money is being stolen from him.

Again, I am astonished that this amendment was even ratified in the first place. Only six states of the 48 at the time declined to go along. God bless Connecticut, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

At least nobody’s making noise about a wealth tax. Well shit, never mind.

Bonus: other amendments I’d like to see

Congressional term limits

The average Congressman serves for nine years and the average Senator for eleven. (Honestly, both of those numbers sound rather low to me.) Our Founding Fathers didn’t likely intend to make Congressional service a lifetime position. We can fix that.

Many states have adopted term limits for state offices; if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander.

Federal balanced budget

Many states also operate under balanced budget amendments. Uncle Sam famously does not. We can fix that, too. Keynesian heads would explode, but that’s not really a bad thing.

Federal line item veto

This idea, along with the two immediately listed above, was popular in the early and mid-1990s when Newt Gingrich and his Republican “revolution” swept into Congress. None of them got anywhere, but all of them would be steps in the right direction toward a more responsible government.

Congressional Apportionment Amendment

People sometimes think that the amendments included in the Bill of Rights are numbered by their perceived importance. Sorry kids, not true. This was the original First Amendment, aimed at setting the size of the House of Representatives at one representative for every fifty thousand citizens. (For comparison, currently every Congressman represents about 720,000 people.)

Under this amendment, we would have a truly enormous House of Representatives, about six thousand Congressmen in total. Cape Girardeau County would basically have its own Congressman (and then some), which is pretty cool. Or pretty scary, if you know Cape County.

Six thousand sounds rather unwieldy and conjures up images of the Galactic Senate in the Star Wars prequels. (That’s a whole lot of Jar Jars.) However, when you consider that the average NBA arena capacity is just shy of 19,000, it’s completely doable. It’s about three times the size of the world’s current largest legislature, but if any country could justify it, it would be ours.

On the other hand, gerrymandering of current Congressional districts and the proliferation of “safe seats” has led to a number of members who are very extreme in their views. Imagine how extreme they could get if their districts were even smaller, safer, and even more gerrymandered.

Repeal (or at least limit) the federal income tax

“But where would the government get the money to fund their programs?” I don’t give a shit. Hold a bake sale. A national sales tax, maybe. Just slay the beast and we’ll figure the rest out later.

“No direct payments”

This one’s a bit out there, but I would like to see a ban on the government directly writing checks to individual persons. For anything. Ever.

Such a far-fetched amendment would leave open some public services that are truly public: parks, roads, etc. And you could even still sneak in universal health care under this kind of arrangement, if the services were being provided by public clinics and no money was changing hands between the government and the beneficiary.

Think about it.

No laws against “victimless crimes“

Think: anti-Prohibition. Legalize every activity that doesn’t hurt others or involves only consenting adults. Most libertarians would be totally on board with this one.

Equal Rights Amendment

I’d like to revive this and pass it just to watch liberals squirm. Almost fifty years ago, the progressive position was that equal rights “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Now there’s considerable debate whether sex or gender is even a real thing.

Awkward.

Replace the Constitution with The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition

I think a lot of ancaps and Trekkies (and ancap Trekkies) could really get behind this idea.

If I was promoted to God Emperor of North America tomorrow, I might be tempted to simply scrap the Constitution altogether and return to the Articles of Confederation, plus the amendments listed as “the best” earlier in this piece (if they fit within the framework of the Articles, anyway.)

“But God Emperor Christopher, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm! That government is too weak to actually get anything done!”

That’s the plan, baby.

The post Ranking the Constitutional Amendments – Part 2 appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

When you first learned about the U.S. Constitution in school back in the day, you didn’t know it at the time, but you were also getting your very first lesson in contract law.

It is, after all, a contract. And a remarkably efficient one at that, weighing in at a very modest four pages. (Consider that the main body of the Missouri state constitution runs a mind-numbing 167 pages.)

The U.S. Constitution is a contract between the people and the government that spells out exactly what the federal government can and cannot do. However, its original form was a bit light on the “cannot” part for many Anti-Federalists, so the Bill of Rights was added to hobble the new government somewhat. A restrictor plate, if you will.

It occurred to me that perhaps it would be fun to rank the various Constitutional amendments.

After all, do I like to make lists?

1. Yes.
2. Most certainly.
3. You bet your sweet ass.

As I have problems with brevity, we’re going to have to do this in two parts. This week is part one.

The Best:

1st Amendment:  Protects freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and the right to petition the government.

The first amendment is not only first in numerical order, but it is first in our hearts. The Bill of Rights starts off with a bang, declaring that we can say what we want, write what we want, worship what we want, gather when we want, and read the government the Riot Act pretty much any time we want. Hell yeah, brother.

10th Amendment: States that the federal government possesses only those powers delegated, or enumerated, to it through the Constitution

This very simple amendment is also very powerful. I mean, it would be, if anyone actually paid attention to it anymore.

Folks who are in the insurance industry should be familiar with named perils and open perils; this concept is similar. The federal government is supposed to have “named” powers, which are significantly more restricted than “open” powers (with various exclusions.) Everything else goes to the people or the states.

On that topic…

9th Amendment: States that rights not enumerated in the Constitution are retained by the people

This is an example of “open” powers, which are much more expansive, at least in theory. And these go to the people. Together, Amendments 9 and 10 (in a perfect world) forge a strong set of handcuffs for our federal government.

2nd Amendment: Protects the right to keep and bear arms

This is the favorite amendment of many libertarian types and right wing ammosexuals. Leftists like to try and poke holes in this one with the words “well regulated” and “militia”, while conveniently ignoring that whole “shall not be infringed” thing.

The saying goes— this one particular right helps to guarantee all others.

13th Amendment: Abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime

As chattel slavery is just about the most un-libertarian thing imaginable, this maybe should be number one on the list. It’s not, however, because it really only applied to the Southern states. The Yanks had freed their slaves peacefully decades before, or never allowed the practice in the first place. Had this amendment ended slavery in the entire country, it would be number one with a bullet.

The exception for criminal punishment is also troublesome in its own way.

Also, this amendment should effectively outlaw conscription, right? Isn’t the draft another kind of involuntary servitude? Yeah, no.

4th Amendment: Prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets out requirements for search warrants based on probable cause

Come back with a warrant indeed! This is the foundation for our “right to privacy”, such as it is, along with fringe elements of the 1st, 5th, 9th, and 14th Amendments.

5th Amendment: Sets out rules for indictment by grand jury and eminent domain, protects the right to due process, and prohibits self-incrimination and double jeopardy

Even more restrictions for the government. This country is lit.

6th Amendment: Protects the right to a speedy public trial by jury, to notification of criminal accusations, to confront the accuser, to obtain witnesses and to retain counsel

Yet another speed bump for our government. The wonders never cease.

8th Amendment: Prohibits excessive fines and excessive bail, as well as cruel and unusual punishment

Amendments 4-6 and 8 are so aggressively anti-government that you might start to think the Founding Fathers felt sorry for criminals or something. Well, given that most of the Founding Fathers were considered traitors by the British…I guess they kind of did.

(Most of this stuff is old hat for the Western world in 2021, but a lot of it was absolutely radical for the entire world in 1789.)

15th Amendment: Prohibits the denial of the right to vote based on race, color or previous condition of servitude

One of several other amendments adopted after the Civil War. Freedom is great, but with voting rights, it’s even better.

19th Amendment: Prohibits the denial of the right to vote based on sex

Despite some folks who might argue (hopefully tongue in cheek) otherwise, voting rights should apply to every adult of sound mind. Even people with vaginas!

21st Amendment:  Repeals the 18th Amendment and makes it a federal offense to transport or import intoxicating liquors into U.S. states and territories where such is prohibited by law

In other words: repealing Prohibition. As a person who has been known to have a drink now and then (mostly now), I have a certain fondness for the only amendment that specifically repeals another amendment. Just so happens it repealed a really shitty amendment, so the 21st deserves some love.

14th Amendment: Defines citizenship, contains the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause, and deals with post–Civil War issues

It’s kind of hard to believe that equal protection wasn’t in the Constitution until after the Civil War, but it’s true. Meant to shore up civil rights for freed slaves, it also had some nice bonuses for everyone else.

22nd Amendment: Limits the number of times a person can be elected President.

Screw you, FDR!

24th Amendment: Prohibits the revocation of voting rights due to the non-payment of a poll tax or any other tax

You know what’s also hard to believe? That of all the civil rights stuff that was passed in the 1960’s, only one thing required a constitutional amendment. And it’s this one.

25th Amendment: Addresses succession to the presidency and establishes procedures both for filling a vacancy in the office of the vice president and responding to presidential disabilities

Presidential succession wasn’t such a big deal until the Cold War, when it became possible for the entire government to be wiped out in one fell swoop. (Hence the “designated survivor” rule.) Ensuring that someone always had a finger on the nuclear button, and that this person was also sane, became a rather big deal.

This was also meant, in part, to address things like the Weekend at Bernie’s style end of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency.

26th Amendment: Prohibits the denial of the right of US citizens eighteen years of age or older to vote on account of age

One of the only good things to come out of our adventures in southeast Asia. Trivia point: this only applied to federal offices, so for a while some states had to offer different ballots to people depending on their age. All states eventually lowered the voting ages for state offices to jive with the new federal rule.

Now if we could only lower the drinking and smoking ages…

The “meh:”

7th: Amendment: Provides for the right to a jury trial in civil lawsuits

This is one of only two amendments from the Bill of Rights that’s a bit of a dud. Juries in criminal matters were already covered in the Sixth Amendment. Civil trials aren’t as sexy. Having seen several civil trials up close and personal, I can tell you that a jury isn’t always a good thing. I’d rather have a bench trial with a good fair judge every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

12th Amendment: Revises presidential election procedures by having the president and vice president elected together as opposed to the vice president being the runner up in the presidential election

This was written in reaction to the clusterfuck that was the election of 1800, in which Aaron Burr almost accidentally won the presidency when he was only (technically) running for Vice President. This established a separate vote for president and vice-president, and did away with the idea of the second place presidential vote winner serving as vice president.

I actually rather like the idea of the second place winner being vice president. So I would rather just see one vote for president and no votes for vice president, with the runner up hanging out at the Naval Observatory and hoping their bitter rival dies. This would have given us such delicious executive dynamic duos as Trump-Clinton, Bush-Gore, Adams-Jackson, Lincoln-Breckenridge, Hayes-Tilden, and so forth.

Who says America can’t do palace intrigue?

20th Amendment: Changes the dates on which the terms of the President and Vice President, and of members of Congress, begin and end, to January 20 and January 3 respectively. States that if the President-elect dies before taking office, the Vice President–elect is to be inaugurated as President.

This was enacted in 1933 in order to cut down on the “lame duck” period between presidential administrations. Thanks to advances in travel, you didn’t need four frickin’ months to get your shit together. (Although four months might’ve been handy in the whole Bush v. Gore thing.) Trump’s lame duck period was wild enough; imagine another month plus of it. Nah.

Tune in next week for the rest of the “meh” amendments, and the grand finale: the worst amendments.

The post Ranking the Constitutional Amendments – Part I appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

-Toby Flenderson, “The Office”

I’ve never much cared for native St. Louisan T.S. Eliot.

Come to think of it, I’ve never cared much for any modernist poets or modern “artists.” The only class I ever dropped in college was an elective art course. I had trouble believing that many of the things we were looking at were actually considered to be art.

One day I asked the professor, “Based on what you’re showing us, couldn’t someone could just randomly smear feces on a wall and call it ‘art?'” She responded, matter-of-factly, that one such artist did exactly that with poo. And it was delightful. The very next day I paid a visit to the registrar’s office and got the hell out of that class.

I tend to believe:

• If a poem or piece of art is something I could do, then it’s probably not poetry or art.
• If something is confusing,  vague, super dense, impenetrable, or open to way too many interpretations, maybe it’s not deep at all. Maybe it’s just gibberish. Maybe you’re just on better drugs than I am, so it makes sense to you, but not to me. Maybe, just maybe, the “artist” is simply pulling everyone’s leg.

But back to Eliot, who smeared verbal manure on written pages and called it poetry: I’m hardly the first person to feel this way about him. No less than H.P. Lovecraft did a far more masterful hit job on Eliot than I ever could. When Eliot abandoned America to live in the United Kingdom in 1914, I’m sure most Yanks were overjoyed to be rid of him and his pretentious twattery.

Most of all, I must vigorously dispute Mr. Eliot’s contention from The Waste Land that “April is the cruellest month.” It absolutely is not. Not even close. April can be a volatile month weather-wise, but it’s a total cakewalk compared to some other months. And if you live in the northern hemisphere, as our least favorite bloviating poet did for his entire sorry life, you’d know that in fact February is the suckiest month. And it’s not even close.

First and foremost is the weather. February weather sucks and sucks hard. The days are slowly getting longer, but they’re crappy days, so who cares? Ice and snow predominate through much of the United States. It’s cold, it’s dark, and it makes you yearn for the sweet release of death. This year, even Texas got in on the February winter misery, with disastrous consequences.

The nastiest blizzard to ever hit southeast Missouri struck in 1979. Care to guess when? To no one’s surprise, it was in February. February 26 to be exact. In an area where people go berserk over two inches of snow, we got two feet of thundersnow. I was not quite seven years old at the time, but I remember it fairly well. My dad dug a path out to the cars in the driveway and the walls of snow on each side of the path were taller than me. The roof of my school’s gymnasium collapsed, ruining the hardwood floor. The replacement floor was some sort of hellish blue rubber substance that ruined the knees of an entire generation of kids. Our cafeteria was also damaged and we had to brown bag it for a few weeks.

February has the shittiest sports scene. Football is over and baseball hasn’t quite yet begun. The NBA and NHL are still in their regular seasons. Same for college basketball, which is meaningless for the most part anyway up until March Madness. Which, as the name implies, occurs in March. Definitely not February. The month is a gaping maw of sports nothingness.

The February holidays are also garbage. Nobody cares about Presidents Day. Most presidents are (or were) douchenozzles.

Valentine’s Day is a minefield for all men (taken or single) and a depressing day for singles of any gender (real or perceived.) Back in high school, one of our clubs held a fundraiser every Valentine’s Day where you could send candy canes to your romantic interests. They would be delivered in class in the middle of the afternoon for maximum embarrassment. My incoming candy cane haul was usually close to non-existent, and I’m still angry about it. Plus I once went something like eleven straight fucking years without a Valentine’s date. While I saved a lot of money, it made me loath February even more.

Ash Wednesday usually occurs in February, and few holidays are as depressing as that one. Nothing says buzzkill more than fasting and putting a funky mark on your forehead. Then repeating the fasting thing every Friday for forty days. No thanks. (If you haven’t figured it out by now, moderation really isn’t my thing.) But at least Lent isn’t Ramadan (also known as “Lent on Steroids”), which can also start in February. Ugh.

If you are in school, February offers no relief. It’s the dead ass middle of the school year. Spring break isn’t until March, because nothing good is allowed in February.

Come to think of it, nothing begins in February but misery. Nothing ends in February, either. Except maybe your hopes and dreams.

February should be renamed “The Taint.” For example, this is Saturday, The Taint 27th. Or Saturday, the 27th of The Taint if you want to sound sophisticated. To our Canadian and European friends, it’s 27 The Taint 2021.

Since I’m doing butt jokes, it’s appropriate that February is the second month of the year, because it’s really a number two kind of month. If you know what I’m saying.

Politically speaking it’s also a crap month. At least once every eight years you’re guaranteed to have a new president bragging about the stuff he/she is doing in their first hundred days. Since Congress has no gonads and everything’s done by executive order, what fun is that anymore? Maybe once every four years you get a juicy Cabinet confirmation battle. But still… yawn.

One of the only good things about February is that it’s the shortest month. But every four years you get an extra day in February just to rub your nose in it. Why couldn’t we have June 31st or October 32nd instead? (I’m on the record of being a big fan of October, after all.) Leap Years, as currently designed, are designed for extra (cruel and unusual) punishment.

I will give a shout out to Fat Tuesday and Mardi Gras, which most often (but not always) fall in February.  And in fairness, February of 2020 was good because it was the last “normal” month before the COVID-19 pandemic wrecked hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of social calendars. In the rear view mirror, February 2020 looks frickin’ amazing. But in true February style, we didn’t know it at the time, so it just felt miserable. As per usual.

I often like to make outlandish statements of things I would do if I were God Emperor. I would definitely outlaw Mondays and Februarys, and double outlaw Mondays during February. The only problem with this, of course, is that people would just complain about Tuesdays and March (or Tuesdays during March.) Human beings love to complain and kvetch. Some of us more than others.

The best thing about this February? It’s almost over.

The post T.S. Eliot is Wrong. February is the Cruelest Month appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.