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The Citizen or the Police
Or, Why I Am Not a Liberal.

...I am a “my sister” libertarian.

Nobody worth performing the Heimlich Maneuver on is going to tell the police they saw their sister smoking pot. Am I okay with my sister going to jail if she sells some pills or her favors? Do I think my sister or brother should be dragged into court if she drains her field or he hires too many people of the wrong color? No. So I have no business supporting a regime that subjects other people’s siblings to those things. Would I have to agree that if my sister drowned my niece, or my brother defrauded credit card companies or my mother burned down her building for the insurance, that they should be subject to arrest and imprisonment. Yes, I’m afraid. And a note to you smartypants readers: Not all of the examples in this item have been hypotheticals. So I really do mean it.

Which brings us back to guns - not the guns that citizens might or might not own, but the ones the State most definitely does. Behind every law is a weapon. That goes for all the nice regulatory laws too. Sure, it’s only “civil proceedings,” but try telling them to tie a tail and a string to their civil proceedings and run into a headwind and its the sherrifs and marshalls who come round to uphold “the majesty of the law.” Which ends up in the same place the criminal law does - jail or, if you take the armed fugitive route, death. “Contempt of Court” - dissing da judge - is the thing that judges will lock you up for indefinitely, and on their own say-so, and try checking and balancing that if you don’t like it. They don’t ask you to go politely, either. It’s sherrifs and marshalls time again. For the system to survive, resistance must prove futile. Even the most “innocuous” law has, potentially, the entire weight of the State and the State’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence behind it. I can bitch about the Ravens’ stadium deal, but watch what happens if I keep my share in protest and get stubborn....

...This is the core problem with contemporary liberalism: liberals can be very good at noting the dangers of police power (though they used, present company excepted, to be a lot better at it); but the liberal program of strengthening the regulatory state amounts to turning more and more of life into police business. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland, we have a County Executive, Doug Duncan, whose enthusiasm for undercover operations seems boundless. Teen smoking? Undercover operations to catch insufficiently zealous store owners. Minority Hiring? Undercover operations to “catch” local businesses not hiring…undercover officers. When there was a brouhaha recently about dog barking I fully expected Doug Duncan to dress cops up in cat suits and troll for trouble. Waco started as a tax case. Show me a law and I’ll show you a district attorney who wants to be governor.

“I never saw any of them again,” Philip Marlowe says at the end of The Long Goodbye. “Except the police. No way has yet been found to say goodbye to them.”

But ways must be found to say, “Some other time.” Because that’s my sister you’re talking about.