Civil forfeiture without a conviction banned in CT

Connecticut Banned Civil Forfeiture Without A Criminal Conviction - Nick Sibilla, Institute for Justice - Forbes:

July 11, 2017 - "Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy signed HB 7146 on Monday, which curbs the state’s civil forfeiture laws. Not only did the bill earn endorsements from the Yankee Institute for the Public Policy and the state chapter of the ACLU, HB 7146 even passed both the House and the Senate without a single no vote.

"Under the new law, in order to permanently confiscate property with civil forfeiture, the property must be first seized in connection to either a lawful arrest or a lawful search that results in an arrest. If prosecutors do not secure a guilty verdict, a plea bargain or a dismissal from finishing a pretrial diversion program, the government must return the property to its rightful owner.... Connecticut now becomes the 14th state to require a criminal conviction for most or all forfeiture cases.

“'Civil forfeiture is one of the most serious assaults on Americans’ private property rights,' Institute for Justice Senior Legislative Counsel Lee McGrath said. 'The bill is a solid first step to ensure that innocent people do not lose their property to this use of 17th Century admiralty law applied to the 21st Century war on drugs'....

"According to data obtained by the Institute for Justice and the Reason Foundation, police and prosecutors generated more than $17.8 million in forfeiture revenue from 2009 to 2016. Nearly two-thirds of those proceeds came from civil forfeiture cases, where the owner did not have to be convicted....

"Although civil forfeiture is often defended as a way to stop large-scale drug cartels and criminal enterprises, in Connecticut, half of all civil forfeitures were under $570 in 2016. These small amounts suggest that many victims don’t have the means to fight back against a seizure in court. The state’s conviction requirement should protect many innocent Connecticutians."

Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2017/07/11/connecticut-just-banned-civil-forfeiture-without-a-criminal-conviction/#16bafd6452e7
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Guatemala's free-market university

The Bond villain libertarians of Guatemala - Don Hannan, Washington Examiner:

December 19, 2016 - "Hidden away in Guatemala, surrounded by tall jungle trees, ... Francisco Marroquin University has been turning out free-marketeers for 45 years....

"The buildings are named after F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian School economists. There is a Plaza Adam Smith... One of the buildings is adorned with a massive sculpture of Atlas holding the world aloft — a homage to that vinegary anti-collectivist Ayn Rand. She would have approved of the way that lecturers must bid for teaching aids according to an internal market, with prices rising at popular times.

"Francisco Marroquin — named after the first Bishop of Guatemala, who translated several of the indigenous languages — is one of the best universities in Latin America. Its fees are at the upper end of the range, and it sets stiff entrance criteria, including a required fluency in English. All its undergraduates, whether they are studying law, medicine or architecture, are given a basic grounding in the principles of personal liberty and limited government....

"What makes Francisco Marroquin unusual is not that it seeks to inculcate values. Rather, it's that those values are not the leftist ones prevalent in almost every other institution of higher education. Instead of promoting anti-racism as the supreme political value, Francisco Marroquin promotes freedom. Safe spaces, micro-aggressions and trigger warnings have no place in these handsome buildings. Students are constantly exhorted to think for themselves....

"The free-market liberalism taught here has a samizdat feel. Most undergraduates are as opposed to the big-government paternalism that passes for conservatism in Latin America as they are to the Left.

"Which is why the best hope for the region lies in these young people. With the partial exceptions of Chile and Colombia, open markets have never really been tried in Latin America.... Latin America's underlying problem remains unaddressed.

"Governments are simultaneously too large and too small. Too large in the sense that they aim to control industries, dictate wages, set prices. Too small in the sense that they fail to operate impartial legal systems through which private citizens can claim redress....

"Just as the London School of Economics educated a generation of post-colonial leaders in Asia and Africa, with dire consequences, so there is now a crying need in Latin America for leaders who understand the difference between being pro-business and being pro-market. Every alternative has failed."

Read more: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-bond-villain-libertarians-of-guatemala/article/2609902
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Governments waging unwinnable war on darknet

The AlphaBay Shutdown Will Be as Futile as the Drug War Itself - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world - Nils Biedermann:

July 27, 2017 - "Recently, two major darknet markets, AlphaBay and Hansa Market, were seized by the FBI, DEA, EUROPOL and European Union member states. AlphaBay was the largest darknet market totaling about 40,000 vendors and 200,000 customers. For comparison, AlphaBay was about ten times bigger than Silk Road, another darknet market seized in 2013.

"Shortly after his arrest, AlphaBay founder Alexandre Cazes killed himself ... while [in] custody.

"On these websites, consumers are able to purchase drugs, weapons or counterfeit products of all kinds ... around 250,000 drug and chemical listings were online by the time of the shutdown (compared to about 100,000 for everything else). A conservative estimate of the total transactions since its creation in 2014 is one billion USD....

"These darknet markets work very much like any ... legal regular online market giving you the freedom to choose from a variety of products. They have a feedback system where a customer can voice his opinion about the drug as well. Vendors try to avoid bad reviews in fear of losing their good reputation, just as Yelp operates for 'above board' businesses....

"While there are a lot of similarities between darknet markets and street markets, there are huge differences as well. Darknet markets do not involve physical contact, confrontation or violence.... While the proliferation of Darknet Markets is unlikely to have an impact on systemic drug crime, the security for the consumer while buying the drug is significantly increased. The direct public feedback system ... rewards vendors and ensures the quality of the drugs. Drugs with high purity and without added substances allow consumers to properly dose the drug, reduce side effects through unwanted substances and therefore enhance security.

"History tells us that simply taking down these sites will not work.... The takedown of AlphaBay will by no means stop internet drug trafficking. It will give room to a lot of smaller sites to appear. The encryption is going to get stronger and better.... The only thing this operation has achieved is a momentary stop....

"In our efforts to reduce the drug supply we have wasted huge amounts of money, disregarded human rights, supported authoritarian structures and promoted violence and corruption. It is time to stop."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/the-alphabay-shutdown-will-be-as-futile-as-the-drug-war-itself/?utm_medium=push&utm_source=push_notification
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57% think legalizing cannabis will benefit society

Make America Great Again by Legalizing Weed, Majority of Voters Say - Janice Williams, Newsweek: 

August 3, 2017 - "U.S. voters have an idea of what might actually improve society and make America great again: legalizing weed.

"A Harvard-Harris Poll survey released Monday found a majority of voters — some 57 percent — thought making marijuana legal across all 50 states would make society better, and 69 percent of people said they wouldn’t be bothered by pot being legal in their state....

"Only 37 percent of Americans said cannabis should be legalized only for medical purposes, while 49 percent of voters said marijuana should be legal for both medical and recreational use. Meanwhile, only 14 percent of voters said marijuana should be completely illegal....

"'Voters point to drugs as the major source of crime and support tough sentences for drug dealers but view marijuana in a wholly different light,' Harvard-Harris Poll co-director Mark Penn said in a statement. 'Most think legalization of marijuana would probably be helpful in reducing crime, and almost half support legalization.'

"Even if marijuana is illegal, 72 percent said people caught possessing small amounts of pot shouldn’t be prosecuted or face jail time because of it....

"The Harvard-Harris Poll survey was conducted between July 19 and 24 and involved 2,051 registered voters."

Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/marijuana-legalization-laws-states-voters-645976
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How Nancy MacLean misrepresented David Boaz

Another Misleading Quotation in Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in Chains" | Cato @ Liberty - David Boaz:

July 5, 2017 - "Everybody’s finding errors in Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s 'work of speculative historical fiction' on Nobel laureate James Buchanan and the libertarian movement, Democracy in Chains. I’d feel left out if I weren’t misquoted, so I’m relieved to find my name on page 211. Here’s what MacLean says about me and some of my purported allies:

"If you tell a great lie and repeat it often enough, people will eventually believe it," Joseph Gobbels, a particularly ruthless, yet shrewd, propagandist, is said to have remarked. Today the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them. Attend a Tea Party gathering, and you will hear endless cries about the "moocher class." Read the output of the libertarian writers subsidized by wealthy donors and you will encounter endless variations. David Boaz of the Cato Institute, to choose just one, speaks of the "parasite economy" that divides us into "the predators and the prey"....

Is there any evidence to suggest that close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich through the tax system? That they contribute nothing, while using government to gang up on a defenseless minority that somehow, all on its own, generates wealth? ...

"Now: Did I actually say that the poor and working class are 'intent on exploiting the rich'? Or 'that they contribute nothing'? Well, here’s what I wrote on pp. 252-53 of The Libertarian Mind, which is the source MacLean footnotes:

Economists call this process rent-seeking, or transfer-seeking. It’s another illustration of Oppenheimer’s distinction between the economic and the political means. Some individuals and businesses produce wealth. They grow food or build things people want to buy or perform useful services. Others find it easier to go to Washington, a state capital, or a city hall and get a subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors. That’s the political means to wealth, and, sadly, it’s been growing faster than the economic means.

Of course, in the modern world of trillion-dollar governments handing out favors like Santa Claus, it becomes harder to distinguish between the producers and the transfer-seekers, the predators and the prey. The state tries to confuse us, like the three-card monte dealer, by taking our money as quietly as possible and then handing some of it back to us with great ceremony. We all end up railing against taxes but then demanding our Medicare, our subsidized mass transit, our farm programs, our free national parks, and on and on and on. Frederic Bastiat explained it in the nineteenth century: “The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” In the aggregate, we all lose, but it’s hard to know who is a net loser and who is a net winner in the immediate circumstance....

"I also wrote on page 253 about the 'parasite economy,' in which

every group in society comes up with a way for the government to help it or penalize its competitors: businesses seek tariffs, unions call for minimum-wage laws (which make high-priced skilled workers more economical than cheaper, low-skilled workers), postal workers get Congress to outlaw private competition, businesses seek subtle twists in regulations that hurt their competitors more than themselves.

"Let’s be clear: when public choice economists and I talk about 'rent seeking' and 'concentrated benefits,' and we point to 'subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors,' we’re not trying to protect the rich. We’re talking about ways that businesses, unions, and other organized interest groups seek to use government to gain advantages that they couldn’t gain in the marketplace. And when we suggest limiting the power of government to hand out such favors, we are arguing in the interests of workers and consumers.

"I do not believe that MacLean’s two very short quotations from The Libertarian Mind and the paragraphs in which she situates them fairly depict my argument in the book. One might even say that she reversed the meaning of 'the predators and the prey.' Unfortunately, selective quotation and misrepresentation seem to be MacLean’s M.O., as Steve Horwitz, Phil Magness, Russ Roberts, David Henderson, David Bernstein, Bernstein again, Nick Gillespie, Michael Munger, and others have pointed out."

Read more: https://www.cato.org/blog/another-misleading-quotation-nancy-macleans-democracy-chains
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Libertarian-bashing historian Nancy MacLean accused of "getting nearly everything wrong"

To Duke Historian Nancy MacLean, Advocating Free Markets Is Something 'The World Has Never Seen Anything Like...Before' - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Brian Doherty:

August 2, 2017 - "Duke University historian Nancy MacLean recently issued Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, an alas quite hot book that purports to expose the dark secrets of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan and the 'radical right'/libertarian movement he's allegedly the brains behind.

"MacLean has been convincingly accused by many who understand his work and the libertarian movement with both less built-in hostility and more actual knowledge than she has (including me here at Reason) of getting nearly everything wrong, from fact to interpretation. She recently took to the Chronicle of Higher Education to allegedly reply to her critics.

"A quick wrap up of many specific problems found in her book by her critics — by no means all — that MacLean ignores even while allegedly "respond[ing] to her critics," and which the editors at the Chronicle let her ignore:

• Her claim of meaningful similarity between John Calhoun's constitutional vision and that of Buchanan and his public choice school cannot be reasonably maintained.
• Her assertion that the modern public choice/libertarian constitutionalist vision has nothing to do with James Madison is not true.
• Buchanan did not, contra MacLean, believe that all taxation above voluntary giving is theft akin to a mugger in the park.
• She attributed to Buchanan the belief that those receiving government aid "are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to… animals who are dependent" though he used that phrase to describe the attitude that was the opposite of his.
• Her attribution of Buchanan's use of the Hobbesian term "Leviathan" to (racist, uncoincidentally for her rhetorical smear purposes) Southern Agrarian poet Donald Davidson rather than, well, Hobbes, falls apart with study of when and how Buchanan began using the term in his work.
•  She regularly cites libertarian thinkers as saying nasty things implying a contempt for the poor or for democracy that are not supported by the full context of the quotes; victims of her malicious misinterpretation including David Boaz and Tyler Cowen....

"MacLean speaks to none of the above specific critiques of her book in the Chronicle, merely generically complaining about being attacked and insisting that people who critique her work clearly hadn't read or understood it ...  she reached instead for sympathy by complaining these specific critiques on her methods and understanding as a historian made her 'feel vulnerable and exposed' and interpreting an intellectual metaphor for a physical threat...

"She certainly does not address a core problem with her book I detailed in my review: the 'historical fact' upon which her entire thesis depends, her book's distinguishing selling point, which she claims to have uniquely discovered through diligent archival work, that James Buchanan was the secret influence behind the political funding machine of Charles Koch and that that machine is deliberately and conspiratorially disguising its libertarian goals, is completely invented. She creates an illusion of proof by citing documents that do not support the thesis in any way, shape, or form."

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2017/08/02/to-duke-historian-nancy-maclean-advocati
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Sen. Jeff Flake's Conscience of a Conservative

Jeff Flake's Conscience Is Good for Libertarians — and the Country - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Nick Gillespie:

August 1, 2017 - "'We've been compromised...by forces...of populism and protectionism, isolationism, xenophobia,' says Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, about his own Republican Party.

"In a new book that borrows a title from Barry Goldwater, an NPR interview, and a no-holds-barred column in Politico, Flake is making the case that the GOP and President Trump are dishonest and disinterested in limiting the size, scope, and spending of government.

"He has impeccable credentials as a libertarian-leaning politician who once ran the free-market Goldwater Institute in Phoenix. Flake is a dedicated free-trader and defender of immigration.... Since arriving in Congress in 2001, he has passionately attacked the Cuba embargo as misguided, immoral, and ineffective: 'We preach the gospel of contact and commerce and trade and travel, yet with Cuba we turn around and say, "No, it's not going to work there." It just seemed to be a glaring inconsistency in our foreign policy.' An 'unapologetic member of the Gang of Eight' that sound comprehensive immigration reform, he is one of the few remaining Republicans in high office to champion higher levels of legal immigration both as a humanitarian gesture and as a practical boon to the country....

"He says that conservatives need 'to be honest with people' about the causes of economic dislocation. While Donald Trump and his fellow populists wail about Mexico and China, Flake stays grounded in reality. 'We manufacture twice as much as we did in the 1980s with one-third fewer workers and those productivity gains will continue. Globalization has happened and the question is: Do we harness it for our benefit or are we left behind by it?'

"In his Politico piece, Flake ranges close to calling for Trump's impeachment, or at least official censure, writing that 'unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility'.... No wonder there have been whispers about Trump working to primary Flake, who is up for re-election in 2018.

"You might not agree with Jeff Flake on everything, but it's good to see a principled free-market, open-borders Republican going public with his discontent, especially because he's got a strong record of calling out massive expansions of the government going back to his first days in Congress. We need more people like him in Washington, not just the handful we already know (Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Justin Amash, Thomas Massie...)."

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2017/08/01/jeff-flakes-conscience-is-good-for-liber
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