Free by Right

That sentence—that single, devastating sentence “It’s not as if people have a right to fly!”—should have been the last call I needed, because it starkly illuminates the root problem with our Republic:  Us.

We, the citizens, are the problem.

The fact that most Americans who bother to vote, consider it tolerable to cast their votes for people like Clinton and Trump instead of using their fundamental civil power for good, is the problem.

The fact me and almost everybody I know found it inconceivable that Trump could possibly win a free election in an educated democracy right up until the night of the election, is the problem.

The fact we tolerate our governments controlling and intervening and managing every aspect of our lives, liberties, and homes, from cradle to grave, is the problem.

The fact an American citizen could imagine that freedom of travel is not a basic human right, is their fault and the fault of everyone who doesn’t challenge their ignorance.

We are the ones to blame for the fact that we can stand up at ceremonies and sporting events, pledge allegiance to the flag, and then sing that our country is the “land of the free” without a shred of irony.

The fact that every one of us, from the President to school children, accepts lives regulated and regimented by our government and its enforcement agents as normal, and assumes that it is governments, not citizens, which enjoy and indeed create entitlements, is our own moral fault, to the extent we do it.

I’m a libertarian, not an anarchist.  I know government is a necessary evil.  I know one of the evils of government, even a democratic, constitutional republic, is that it needs enforcers.  (This article focuses only on domestic enforcement by the government against its own citizens.)  On the rare occasions when I interact with enforcers socially or professionally, I like to, and try to, give each enforcer the initial presumption that she or he is a good person who performs her or his job responsibly, just as I would do with anyone else.  And I find that many of them justify that presumption.  I know that in my state and my country, good peace officers are saving lives, protecting property, helping the helpless, and making a positive difference in the community.  I know statistically police deter crime; and although they are complex events, I have no doubt that the sudden absence of effective law enforcement in brownouts, riots, and similar civil disturbances contributes to their high crime rates.

But the existence of good deeds and intentions can never justify government as an institution or the use of force against citizens.  Nor are they evidence that any social system—let alone any government—is operating effectively, or even at any minimal level of acceptability.  More importantly:  If freedom, free will, individual choice, and indeed, individuals themselves matter, no government can ever be justified in the aggregate, statistically or otherwise.  Each and every person’s subjective and objective experiences must matter if each individual matters, independent of what happens to anybody or everybody else.

My own relationship to the governments around me is defined by their impact on my life.  How else should I view a government, than by the face it shows me?  How else should I rate a government, than by how it treats me and those I love?  Practically speaking, how else can I view it, other than from where I stand?  I am entitled, and indeed obliged, to consider whether my government is acting right towards me and mine.  If a government is not improving our lives, our liberty, and our property, why should I validate or accept it, regardless of the experiences of others?

(first posted on Medium 24 December 2016)

The third call came in 2009 when I was forced to deal with my local government to an extent I had not anticipated ever being forced to deal with it.  I started trying to build a small house with my own money, on my own property, for my own personal use.  The City of Dallas charged me thousands of dollars for permits and inspections, made me wait for months, required me to surrender 7% of the land, subjected me to contradictory and changing requirements, and micro-managed every aspect of the design and construction.  Although was trying to build my own home, on my own land, they required me to make and do what they wanted with it by threatening to deny me the use of it if I didn’t comply through the so-called “Certificate of Occupancy” requirement.  They told me what part of the property I could use, what construction materials I could use, where I could put plug sockets, how many sinks I had to have, what kind of insulation I could use, what color the roof had to be, how much water pressure I could have in my shower, how many gallons my toilet could flush, and how wide the stairs had to be.  They forced me to hire an architect to approve the plans made by a licensed civil engineer.  The platting office told me I didn’t need a plat; but then building was delayed when another employee of the platting office decided we had to get a plat.  One office told me the neighborhood wasn’t zoned for residences (even though it was filled with residences) and rejected the construction proposal the first time it was submitted.  (The tax office still lists it as a commercial property.)   Construction had to be paused for weeks at a time because the city didn’t have enough inspectors to complete mandatory incremental inspections.  The electrical inspector made me drill a drain pipe through the front wall of the house and add a sink—after the plumbing inspector had already signed off on, and I had installed, another sink.  We had to wait for a sprinkler inspection so long, the regulations changed in the interim and when the sprinkler inspector (who turned out to be the plumbing inspector because the city fired all the sprinkler inspectors without changing the sprinkler ordinance), he forced us to redo everything in accordance with the new regulation (even though he admitted everything had been done in compliance with the regulations in effect six weeks earlier, when the sprinkler was finished).  We built the sewer drain to the street as ordered by the water department.  Then the water department told us to tear that one up and instead dig the sewer to a 100-year-old clay sewer pipe in the rear alley because the street department wouldn’t tear up the street to allow them to hook up the sewer.  After the new, second sewer to the back was finished and connected, the street department tore up the street in front of the house and told me they’d need the water department to confirm the sewer had been hooked up before they could repave it.  Although it’s the only building on the street in a high-crime neighborhood (this wasn’t some mansion out in the suburbs), the fences had to be set 18 inches back from the property line to put barbed wire on top—even though most of the neighborhood fences have barbed wire at the top, and they’re all set on the property line.  Adding insult to injury, the city never bothered to pave the alley, but I was required to build a curb ramp at my expense on the very land the city stole from me, to connect the gravel driveway the city required me to build on my own property to… a bunch of grass and shrubs where the alley was supposed to be.  Weeks turned to months, the cost of construction multiplied, and the end result was a monument to regulation that didn’t feel like it was authentically mine.

At the same time, my son started attending a public high school in Dallas.  In the name of security, emergency exits were chained shut; everyone had to enter the school through a metal detector; bags and backpacks were searched; DISD police with dogs roamed the halls; and high school children were required to get permission to use the bathroom and carry a signed hall pass with them at all times. When I asked the other students who’d grown up in the Dallas school system what they and their parents thought about the searches and metal detectors and armed police with dogs, they all said they were glad because it made them feel safe and seemed confused at my implication there was something wrong with a school like this.

My son attended the Talented and Gifted magnet school, consistently one of the top-rated public schools in the United States.  The Dallas magnet schools survive on the grit, dedication, and determination of their underpaid, abused teachers; whose every creative talent and instinct is fought every step of the way by the zombie school administration.  Every month of my son’s freshman year we had to go to the Board of Trustees meeting to fight for the survival of Dallas’s—and one of America’s—finest schools.  The school board claimed they wanted to throttle back funding to the magnet schools because they enjoyed an advantaged status with a higher teacher-to-student ratio than the other Dallas schools.  But as we demonstrated, they had baked the numbers by not including coaches or coaching staff as faculty members.  While the P.T.A. at my son’s top-performing magnet school had to have fund-raising drives to buy toilet paper, paper towels, and soap for the bathrooms; and pencils, notebooks, and art supplies for the classrooms, kids at the regular high schools had shiny new band equipment, football jerseys, and large coaching staffs to sustain the district’s “Friday Night Lights” culture.

The magnet schools survived my son’s freshman year by a narrow vote of the trustees.  One of the trustees voting against the magnet schools had difficulty forming complete sentences and misused words because she didn’t know what they meant.  Another trustee voted against the magnets after his troubled, underperforming child couldn’t transfer into them.

Around 2010 I arrived at a TSA checkpoint and overheard the woman before me laughing with one of the TSA guards that they didn’t know why so many people complained about TSA harassment.  “After all,” she laughed, “It’s not as if people have a right to fly!”

I foolishly stated the obvious.  “Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right.  It’s what separates citizens from serfs.”  Before I could elaborate further, I was pulled out of line and hustled off for “special screening.”  When one of the TSA agents asked me what I did for a living, I told him I was an attorney.  Another agent, standing nearby, burst out “He lawyered up!”  as if I’d been caught with explosive sneakers, and the whole hive buzzed around excitedly for several minutes.  Doubtless, like me and everybody in line, they were wondering if I would make my flight or be dragged off to a windowless room for a pointless cavity search.

(first posted on Medium 29 November 2016)

America’s 2016 Presidential election is only three days away and early voting has already closed in Texas.  But in my Dallas neighborhood the only political sign for blocks in any direction is the one in my front yard.  You’d think Gary Johnson was unopposed, when he’s only polling 6%.

He’s not my ideal candidate, but he seems to be a respectful, honest, reasonable person—which is more than I can say for Trump or Clinton.  The deafening silence from my neighbors’ yards confirms my neighbors agree, these are two of the most dislikable and repugnant candidates nominated by either party in decades, whose supporters embrace them with the enthusiasm of a patient accepting chemotherapy.

The fact one of them will be elected is a punch in the gut—and another call to action, one I must not ignore or minimize as I have the many calls before.  There are many reasons for my inaction.  I have a life, and it is a busy one, with many obligations pulling me in different directions.  And to be fair, I take action as a citizen from time to time.

But still, I am ashamed it has taken me so long to commit to this.

I was raised Republican, and I voted for every Republican Presidential candidate through George W. Bush in 2000, when I still believed our Republic was strong and our country lived up to its self-image.  I admit, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, Rodney King, O.J., and more than anything the staggering violence and corruption of the misnamed “war on drugs” weighed increasingly on me over the course of the 1990s, heavily informed by my time as a student, and then a teacher, of economic history and theory.  Partly it was growing up and learning to recognize, and then believe, my own conscience; partly it was the world not working the way I thought it ought, that caused me to question much of what I had always believed about my country.  To be sure, in his first few months in office, “W” worked hard to alienate me by disregarding his commitments to small government and individual choice.  But I still recognized an incremental, continuous path of personal development.

The first call was the federal government’s wholesale sacrifice of every libertarian value in the wake of the 9-11 tragedy.  It knocked my worldview off its axis; and I knew my perspective had been fundamentally changed.  I was stunned when the so-called “P.A.T.R.I.O.T.” act passed.  I remember President Bush vowing, and Congress enthusiastically applauding, that we could not let the terrorists win by forsaking our democratic principles.  Right before they shrugged off everything I thought we all believed in, so casually, and summoned a regime I could hardly recognize as American:  Deprivation of counsel.  Monitoring communications.  Secret tribunals.  Secret detentions.  Even secret police.  I don’t think the government ever actually told us they were going to start torturing people—but in retrospect, how naïve was it not to realize that torture—and that other hallmark of police states, spying and informing—was an inevitable consequence of secret, extrajudicial action?

The second call came in 2008 when I made my first trip to the People’s Republic of China.  I felt some trepidation beforehand about voluntarily entering a country that had—and still has—the most prolific mass murderer in history on every unit of its currency.  And I recalled that when I traveled to Mexico in 1973, the sight of policemen with assault rifles and attack dogs had chilled me.  I remembered when I entered the Soviet Union in 1983, the hand of the state was so heavy it seemed to squeeze the very air from my lungs, and I found myself moving furtively in my own hotel room.  But when I entered the PRC in 2008…  I didn’t feel anything.  And then I understood the terrible truth:  I didn’t notice any difference, because It felt pretty much like America.  By then, I took it for granted that in my country:

• The government listened to phone calls and tracked Internet usage.
• “Code enforcement officers” cruse neighborhoods writing tickets, putting up signs, and interfering with property owners’ enjoyment of their land.
• The state and federal government exhort the citizens to obey and inform on lighted traffic signs, fliers, and so-called “public service” messages.
• People could be disappeared from American streets into black sites without any government accountability.
• The Supreme Court said it was okay for police to trespass on a private yard, climb up on a private fence, and peer through cracks in blinds to see what people are doing in their own homes.
• Helicopters fly overhead, and unmarked cars drive the streets, using infrared and other penetrating sensors to monitor us in our beds, backyards, and basements.
• There are so many laws on the books micro-managing our lives that police can intimidate almost anyone at any time; and many police consider it normal and appropriate to use these laws to scare people into informing.
• The state fingerprints and investigates citizens before they’re allowed to work, in many professions or at all, and even before they may drive.
• Citizens may be stopped and asked for papers without individual justification at random roadblocks and before entering many public places.
• Thousands of Americans are strip-searched and cavity-searched before trial, even when arrested on thin or minor charges.
• Militarized police units routinely break into American homes without knocking or warning, even homes with young children present, and at all hours.
• American police kill citizens at rates hundreds of times higher than those of other developed democracies like the United Kingdom.
• America locks up more of its own citizens than any country on Earth except Iran, North Korea, and… you guessed it… the People’s Republic of China.

(first posted on Medium 6 November 2016)