Tag: lp

  • No on AB 63 – An Authoritarian State Bill to Re-criminalize People for Loitering

    No on AB 63 – An Authoritarian State Bill to Re-criminalize People for Loitering

    There’s an authoritarian move afoot to re-criminalize “loitering with intent to commit prostitution”, by reimposing Section 653.22 of the California penal code, which was eliminated several years ago in decriminalization legislation sponsored by state senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and signed by governor Gavin Newsom.

    Now another Democrat, Michelle Rodriguez (D-Ontario), has put forward Assembly Bill 63 in an attempt to recriminalize this vague “offense” (how police officers are supposed to read the minds of persons on the street to determine what their “intent” is, has never been truly explained).

    Laws against loitering (like laws against nudity) are arguably among the most absurd, senseless, and offensive laws on the books, because they subject people to arrest, criminal records, and possible incarceration and prosecution for literally doing nothing.
    Sex work rights advocates posted this 20 minute video clip of the State Assembly Public Safety Committee’s hearing on AB 63 today. It’s worth watching, not only to hear what the proponents and opponents of this particular authoritarian bill are saying, but as a glimpse into how the legislative process in Sacramento typically works:
    Each side has a parade of people present to testify, many of them employees of government agencies, most probably there on the taxpayers’ dime. Even many of those not directly employed by government, work for non-profits that are probably receiving taxpayer funding, and again are likely being paid to be there.
    This is not to denigrate the staffers at Public Defenders offices, representatives of the ACLU, workers with sex work rights non-profits, and others who took the time to show up and speak against AB 63. We should appreciate them being there and speaking out against the expansion of government at the expense of civil liberties – if they are being paid in part with your stolen money, such harm reduction efforts are certainly among the least objectionable uses of taxpayer funds.
    Nevertheless, it is telling and notable that of the dozens who testified today, not one appeared to be simply a member of the general public, unconnected to any organization with an institutional interest in the matter. This is sadly typical, and a recurring feature of Big Government statism – few ordinary people have the time, resources, etc., to follow and weigh in on all the endless crap being generated in the governmental chambers of Sacramento, Washington, or even locally here in San Francisco.
    All the more reason why it does help to speak out as an ordinary person against bad bills like AB 63. Fewer people do so in a state of ~39 million residents than you might think. This bill was not passed out of the Public Safety Committee, but is on a 2-year track and will be taken up by the committee again, probably later this year following a committee hearing in Assemblymember Rodriguez’s district.
    Here are the email addresses of some of the staffers for members of the committee. I encourage you to take a minute to write to them (probably most effective to copy and past what you write into a separate email for each recipient, and not list your location unless you happen to live in their district), and let them know you oppose people being criminalized for doing nothing, and OPPOSE AB 63:
    Chair Asm. Nick Schultz
    Asm. Mark Gonzalez
    Asm. Matt Haney*
    Asm. John Harabedian
    Asm. Stephanie Nguyen
    Asm. Dr. LaShae Sharp-Collins
    *Represents District 17, encompassing eastern San Francisco (see https://a17.asmdc.org/district-map)
    If you want some talking points for your letter, or just dare to see a bit of how the sausage gets made, here again is the link to the short video clip from today’s hearing:
    If a phone call is more your style than a written letter, you can call and leave a message for members of the Public Safety Committee urging a NO vote on AB 63 by calling (916) 319-3744.
    Or if you want to go the extra mile for liberty, you can find the contact information (phone and email addresses) for all members of the State Assembly, and look up your representative, here – https://www.assembly.ca.gov/assemblymembers.
    Hopefully this anti-libertarian garbage will die in committee, but in case it doesn’t, and just to communicate how the public feels about their resources being wasted on this kind of nonsense fueling mass incarceration and the destruction of civil liberties, it doesn’t hurt to let “your” representative know how you feel about AB 63 even if they aren’t on the committee themselves.
    Love & Liberty,
    ((( starchild )))
    Chair, Libertarian Party of San Francisco
    (415) 573-7997
  • Sympathy for the Sausage Makers

    Sympathy for the Sausage Makers

          Politicians and bureaucrats certainly give people plenty of good reasons to hate them, but from time to time you have to sympathize with them, because in their power-addiction, serving as cogs in the leviathan they have created, they victimize themselves too.

          Just because they are oppressing us from the top of the pyramid doesn’t mean that most of the individuals running government necessarily have a good quality of life. I don’t think most people would actually enjoy doing their jobs. They may have power, but the daily grind of exercising it, cranking out the sausage on a day-to-day basis, can’t be very enjoyable for most of them. They’re like junkies who keep chasing after that power fix even though it’s destroying their lives.

          What do senior government officials really spend their time doing, to earn all the taxpayer money they suck up? Many of them spend significant amounts of time writing, reading, interpreting, and/or overseeing compliance with material that’s written like this:

    ———————————————————————————————————————

    SEC. 13. Section 17070.57 is added to the Education Code, to read:

    17070.57. (a) A school district submitting an application for an apportionment shall include all of the following as part of the school district’s application package:

    (1) A school facilities master plan adopted pursuant to Section 17070.54.

    (2) A certification by the governing board of the school district acknowledging the applicable school facilities program grant agreement and the school facilities program’s associated audit requirements.

    (3) Any information and forms required by the board and department required pursuant to law.

    (4) Written approval from the State Department of Education that the site selection, and the building plans and specifications, comply with the standards adopted by the State Department of Education pursuant to subdivisions (b) and (c), respectively, of Section 17251.

    (5) Plan approval of the project by the Department of General Services pursuant to the Field Act, as defined in Section 17281.

    (6) A certification by the governing board of the school district indicating that upon receiving an apportionment, the school district will have entered into construction contracts within 90 days for at least 50 percent of the work included in the scope of the application.

    (7) For modernization projects, a certification that the school district complied with the requirements of Section 116277 of the Health and Safety Code.

    (8) The applicable grant agreement associated with the school district’s applicable project.

    (b) Subject to the availability of funds, the board shall disburse apportionment funds to an eligible school district only upon a certification by the school district that the required matching funds from local sources have been expended by the district for the project, or have been deposited in the county fund, or will be expended by the district by the time the project is completed.

    (c) As a condition of participating in the school facilities program, a school district shall certify that it has submitted a five-year school facilities master plan pursuant to Section 17070.54 and that the school facilities master plan is consistent with the goals, actions, and services identified in the school district’s applicable fiscal year’s local control and accountability plan for the first state priority, as described in paragraph (1) of subdivision (d) of Section 52060, as it relates to school facilities. In developing its required school facilities master plan, a school district shall review any data that is publicly reported for the school accountability report card related to the safety, cleanliness, and adequacy of school facilities pursuant to paragraph (8) of subdivision (b) of Section 33126.

    (d) (1) New construction and modernization applications submitted before August 30, 2019, shall be processed in accordance with this chapter, as it read on August 30, 2019.

    (2) New construction and modernization applications submitted before August 30, 2019, that are withdrawn and subsequently resubmitted by a school district shall be processed in accordance with this chapter, as it read on August 30, 2019.

    SEC. 14. Section 17070.59 is added to the Education Code, to read:

    17070.59. For purposes of determining the points used to compute the adjustments applied pursuant to Sections 17072.30 and 17074.16, the department shall compute the sum of the following point computations applicable to each school district:

    (a) For each school district, the department shall divide the district’s gross bonding capacity by the district’s total enrollment, as determined for purposes of this chapter.

    (1) A school district determined to have a gross bonding capacity per enrollment of between zero dollars ($0) to nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars ($9,999), inclusive, shall receive four points.

    (2) A school district determined to have a gross bonding capacity per enrollment of between ten thousand dollars ($10,000) to nineteen thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars ($19,999), inclusive, shall receive three points.

    (3) A school district determined to have a gross bonding capacity per enrollment of between twenty thousand dollars ($20,000) to fifty-four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars ($54,999), inclusive, shall receive two points.

    (4) A school district determined to have a gross bonding capacity per enrollment of more than fifty-five thousand dollars ($55,000) shall receive one point.

    (b) For each school district, the department shall identify each district’s unduplicated pupil percentage as determined for purposes of the local control funding formula pursuant to Section 42238.02.

    (1) A school district determined to have an unduplicated pupil percentage of between 75 percent and 100 percent shall receive eight points.

    (2) A school district determined to have an unduplicated pupil percentage of between 50 percent and 74.99 percent shall receive six points.

    (3) A school district determined to have an unduplicated pupil percentage of between 25 percent and 49.99 percent shall receive four points.

    (4) A school district determined to have an unduplicated pupil percentage that is less than 24.99 percent shall receive two points.

    (c) A school district that has a pupil enrollment of 200 pupils or fewer shall receive one point.

    (d) The department shall draft regulations for consideration by the board to further clarify the requirements of this section.

    ———————————————————————————————————————

          If you take a few minutes to try to read and understand the material above, and then consider the fact that there’s much more where that came from which you may need to read for context (see http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB48 to get started), and that even the material there comprises just one single document out of an endless web of government documents that relate to each other in various ways, you may be moved to feel some pity for your oppressors. (At least until you recall the inflated paychecks, generous benefits, and pensions they give themselves at your expense!)

          Except in regimes where tyrants simply do as they please regardless of what’s written in the law, the actual functioning of government on a large scale is always entwined in a morass of this kind of legalese. Humorist P.J. O’Rourke called the notion that the senior bureaucrats who live and breathe this stuff are lazy a “delusion”, noting that wasting as much money as government does requires “enormous effort and elaborate planning”. And as novelist Mary McCarthy said, reminding us that it really isn’t funny but destroys peoples’ lives, “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”

          If you think you can tell me, in a few readily understandable sentences and without resorting to reading someone else’s analysis, what effect adding the above regulations to state law will have in the real world, please do so. I’d honestly like to know. After all, I’m a voter.      

          Which leads me to sort of the kicker of this essay: Those running government expect you to understand it. I mean, that’s the basic premise of putting a piece of legislation before the voters, isn’t it? A belief that voters are competent to understand the proposal and make an educated decision on it.

          Do you feel competent to make a decision based on your understanding of what real-world effect the regulations copied above would have if enacted? Because this material was taken from Assembly Bill 48, a piece of legislation that put a $15 billion bond measure on California voters’ ballots this year. If you vote for that bond measure, designated as Proposition 13 on the March 3, 2020 ballot, all 55 pages or so of it will become the law of the land in California.

          Mind you, you won’t see the whole thing on the ballot, only one part out of 56. But if voters approve that part, guess what? The other 55 sections that weren’t in the ballot will also take effect! Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the legislation, and you’ll see, “Sections 1 to 56, inclusive, of this act shall take effect upon the adoption by the voters of the Public Preschool, K–12, and College Health and Safety Bond Act of 2020, as set forth in Section 54 of this act.”

          So it you might vote for something with a title like that, and believe in being a responsible voter who makes educated decisions on ballot measures based on understanding what a measure you’re voting on actually does before you support it – you’ve got a few weeks as of this publishing to bone up on the document.

          And again, if you think you do understand this legislation, and can explain in plain English exactly what it will do in the real world, please do share! I’m serious – send me an email with your response, putting “I Can Explain What AB 48 Does” in the subject line. If I were designing a video game here, accomplishing this task might earn you your Master Bureaucrat credentials. Sadly I don’t have any of those to give out, but I can tell you the real world relevance: $15 billion of Californians’ money is at stake.

          Even if you believe “your” state senators and assembly members who voted to put it on the ballot are smart, honorable people in whom you have full confidence, are you sure they read and understood the legislation before voting on it? To ask that question is to answer it – they vote on hundreds of bills a session and spend most of their time fundraising. It’s on you! Before you go along with letting government relieve you and your fellow residents of that kind of cash without their individual consent, shouldn’t you or someone you trust have first read the plan and understood it well enough to be able to explain what any of the language in it means if asked?

          But if you don’t feel like doing all that work for no actual compensation (unlike the well-paid politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers who generate this stuff) – and what sane person would? – there is a libertarian shortcut: Vote No.

          Even if they’ve given it a really appealing title, like “The Public Preschool, K–12, and College Health and Safety Bond Act of 2020.” Even if you see a lot of slick fliers and TV ads telling you the great things it’s going to do. Just Vote No.

          Don’t feel bad for rejecting the legislation without understanding it. If you can’t understand something, chances are there’s a lot of unsavory stuff hidden in those bits of legal sausage. Supporting a piece of legislation is saying you want it to be The Law™, which means that someone could be prosecuted for not obeying it – they could have their money taken or be put in jail or worse. Voting to potentially inflict that kind of harm on people without even understanding what you’re voting on is immoral.

          And if studying a proposed law sufficiently to understand it would take an unreasonable amount of your time, you have no actual moral or civic responsibility to do so before rejecting it. The people who wrote it, or had it written, or voted on it, have no legitimate basis on which to expect you to understand it, and the reality is they don’t expect you to. Odds are most of them don’t really understand it either.

          It’s not really written in English after all, but in another language whose meanings can be quite difficult to comprehend. Some call this language legalese or bureaucratese, but there is another more revealing term for the particular dialect found in lengthy pieces of legislation like this, and that term is bullshit.

          Really grokking* this last point is something a number of Libertarians have achieved. It may lead to some deep epiphanies, among them:

    • Maybe you aren’t meant to understand it; maybe that’s the point – “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,” as the coffee mug saying goes

    • Master Bureaucrat credentials are kind of like Master Huckster credentials, they just involve specializing in and mastering different types of bullshit

    • Hang on, why did I think employing large numbers of people at great public expense to immerse themselves in creating and processing bullshit was a good idea?

    • Government is a scary bunch of bullshit, I should become an anarchist

          Anyway, thank you for reading this considerably shorter and more reader-friendly column. Besides giving you a small head start on next year’s ballot questions, if it has in any slight way enhanced your insight into understanding government, then it has served its purpose. 

          And if you know of any high school or college teachers who might be interested in having someone come in and give their class(es) a “real world” talk on civics and American government based on this essay, please write and put us in touch with them!

                                                                 *          *          *

    *Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein invented the verb “grok” to describe understanding something deeply and holistically.

     

  • Selective Anger At “Freeloaders”

    Selective Anger At “Freeloaders”

        In my dialogues with defenders of statism, online and off, I routinely encounter people – usually though not always on the political right – who express feelings of anger, disgust, contempt, etc., toward those whom they characterize with terms like “lazy”, “bums”, “freeloaders”, “parasites”, “anti-social”, “welfare queens”, “druggies”, “illegals”, “junkies”, “leeches”, “the homeless”, “non-productive members of society”, etc. Most of the criticisms seem to boil down to resentment that the people who are the objects of their ire are in some way being assisted or provided for by government at the expense of others.

        Are such feelings a step on the path toward libertarian enlightenment, or just narrow-minded self-justification? I’d like to think the former, and in some cases that may be the case, but I often have my doubts. Because from where I sit as a long-time observer of San Francisco politics and local political attitudes, the sad truth is that not just the folks who are often criticized in such terms, but the vast majority of the local population, appear, both from their voting habits and from their own comments, to want to be taken care of by the nanny-state in one way or another.

        It is bitterly ironic, and hypocritical as hell, for anyone who wants government to provide them with “free” elementary schools, “free” libraries, “free” fire protection services, a “free” regulatory bureaucracy of immense scale and complexity that intrudes into everything from air travel to household pets, “free” enforcement of border controls and persecution of people who reside in or attempt to enter the U.S. without government permission, a “free” military whose budget is inching toward $1 trillion with hundreds of bases in other countries, “free” enforcement against people lying on sidewalks or sleeping in tents in the commons, etc., to look down their noses at somebody who wants “free” food stamps, “free” SSI, or “free” housing vouchers as being necessarily a much worse leech or parasite than themselves or their friends.

        Let’s be crystal clear about this:  ALL of these things and more are forms of nanny-state welfare designed to take money stolen from taxpayers to fund services desired by particular constituencies, which members of those constituencies are unwilling to pay for themselves, whether or not the “free” service in question is called “welfare” or not.

        For anyone tempted to feel disgusted, contemptuous, or resentful toward those whom you characterize as wanting to be taken care of by the “nanny-state”, please examine what “free” things you yourself want government to provide at the expense of others. Those who want more welfare than you do when it comes to food stamps or SSI or housing vouchers may in many cases want LESS welfare than you do when it comes to the military-industrial complex, or border controls, or home loans, or government education, etc., and may even want less welfare and a less controlling, less authoritarian government overall!

        Before we judge anyone else too harshly, here’s an illuminating pair of questions for each of us to ask ourselves:

    1) How much theft, and how much coercion, would be required for government to do the things that I want it to do?
    2) How can I reduce the amounts of theft and coercion that I am effectively demanding?