Will Grigg's Liberty Minutes
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Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

March 9, 2010

The parents of Rachael Greer and Mason Jammer would be thoroughly justified in exploring the possibility of home-schooling their young children.

Both Rachael, a seventh grade student from Kentuckiana, Indiana, and Mason, a kindergartner from Ionia, Michigan, were suspended for entirely inocuous behavior considered impermissible under so-called “zero tolerance” policies.

During gym class, Rachael was handed a prescription drug pill by another student. She promptly handed it back, saying “I don’t want it.” Yet school administrators, displaying the kind of blinkered legalism that might have struck the Pharisees as exessive, insisted that merely by touching a pill she didn’t ask for and promptly disposed of, Rachael was guilty of illicit “drug possession.”

Mason’s grave offense was to curl a hand into what was described as the “shape of a gun” and point it at another student. He was playful, not violent. Yet Mason was slapped with a disciplinary suspension.

“Zero tolerance” has nothing to do with fighting drug abuse and violence. It’s intended to cultivate collectivist conformity in children.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

March 8, 2010

Despite the fact that 22-year old Kane Gorny was a cancer patient at one of England’s finest hospitals, a neglectful nursing staff left the young man dangerously dehydrated.

At one point, when Kane became frantic for a drink, the nurses shook off their indifference long enough to call a security guard to restrain him. Kane finally called the police; when they arrived, the nursing staff insisted that he was all right and sent the police away.

It wasn’t until a day later that Kane received a drink from his anxious mother. He died just hours later after his mother had been ushered away. The government-run hospital did provide trauma counseling – to the nursing staff responsible for the young man’s death, that is, not his bereaved mother.

According to one authoritative estimate, hundreds of British patients die from malnutrition and dehydration in hospitals each year. This is something to remember as Congress contemplates further government control over our own health care system.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

March 5, 2010

There are some who, despite ubiquitous and ever-accumulating evidence, dispute the proposition that government is an elaborate criminal racket. A measure before the Washington State legislature might serve as the tipping point for at least some statist holdouts.

Washington House Bill 2565, which purports to be an anti-drunk driving statute, would permit police to seize and hold any automobile on the mere suspicion that its operator is driving under the influence of an intoxicant.

The measure specifies that any police officer “may take custody of a vehicle, at his or her discretion,” and that the confiscated vehicle is subject to a mandatory twelve-hour impoundment.
Whether or not charges are actually filed, owners will have to pay steep impound and towing fees. This is summary punishment without due process.

Not surprisingly, the measure is eagerly supported by the Towing and Recovery Association of Washington, which stands to profit handsomely from it.

How can this honestly be described as anything other than an officially sanctioned car theft ring?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

March 4, 2010

Whatever else can be said about Officer Adil Polanco of the New York Police Department, his disclosure of arbitrary arrest quotas makes him an authentic hero.

Officer Polanco told WABC News that he and other officers in the NYPD’s 41st Precinct are under severe pressure to make needless arrests and issue unnecessary summonses.

“Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them,” Polanco explains.

In a recording obtained by WABC, a supervising officer describes the quotas to his subordinates and tells them that “until you decide to quit this job and go to work at a Pizza Hut, this is what you’re going to be doing till then. Do you understand?”

One case described in the report involves two young men needlessly arrested and held in jail overnight before being released without charges – simply to meet a quota.

NYPD officials describe this kind of thing as police being “productive.” The word “predatory” makes a better fit.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

March 3, 2010

Elizabeth Cheney is the daughter of the former Vice President and a former Bush administration official herself. Bill Kristol is publisher of the Weekly Standard magazine. Cheney and Kristol have launched a pressure group called “Keeping America Safe,” the purpose of which is to promote the use of torture as an interrogation tactic, defend those who institutionalized the practice, and defame those who oppose it.

A recent ad run by that group describes a group of Justice Department attorneys as the “Al Qaeda 7” because they acted as defense counsel for people detained at Guantanamo. The implication here is that anyone who defends an accused terrorist must himself be considered one, rather than an attorney carrying out a vital constitutional function.

Those who defended Gitmo detainees include many decorated military attorneys who swore an oath to defend the Constitution and pursue justice. Presumably they, too, would be considered al-Qaeda sympathizers by Cheney, Kristol, and their ilk.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

March 2, 2010

In his book Lost Rights, James Bovard observes that in the old Soviet Union, the operative principle of the law was that whatever was not explicitly permitted by the government was forbidden.

Police in Twin Falls, Idaho recently acted on this same principle when they raided a nursing home to break up a long-running poker game.

For at least five years, about twenty residents of the Twin Falls Senior Center had run a poker game with a $20 buy-in, with the pot split evenly among the top chip holders. Obviously, all of the participants were consenting adults, and there is no record of gunfights or other violence erupting over a disputed hand.

Yet some sanctimonious scold, inspired by a Soviet-style vision of civic rectitude, anonymously reported the game to the police. The department defended the raid by claiming that “nothing in Idaho law permits gambling at any age.”

This will surprise people who routinely cough up money to participate in the government-sanctioned gambling called the Idaho State Lottery.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

March 1, 2010

An entrepreneur wanting to make business for himself offers a new product or service, or improves an existing one. This benefits both the businessman and his customers.

A bureaucrat wanting to make business for himself devises some way to intrude on the property rights of others. This enhances the job security of a handful of tax-fattened parasites while producing no public benefit.

One splendid illustration is offered by the seizure of 30 toy machine guns by the officially sanctioned criminal syndicate calld the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (or ATF).

According to ATF functionary Kelvin Crenshaw, the shipment of Airsoft BB guns from Taiwan was seized because they could be “retrofitted” into machine guns. Oregon business owner Brad Martin, who paid for the merchandise stolen by the ATF, points out that this is a mechanical impossibility. Yet the ATF is determined to destroy the entire shipment.

It’s long past time the ATF was put out of business – permanently.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 26, 2010

According to a study published by the Pew Center, state governments are $1 trillion short of the funds necessary to cover benefits promised to their employees.

In some cities, such as Tracey, California, municipal governments are preparing to impose special surcharges and fees for emergency services that are already funded by taxation. These new fees are supposedly necessary to cover a $9 million budget shortfall – the exact amount, as it happens, that is spent each year in Tracey on employee pensions.

In Albany, New York, the police officers union is demanding raises even if that means hiking taxes in the teeth of a depression. Chris Mesley, the chief thug in charge of that union, bluntly declares: “If I’m the bad guy to the average citizen … and their taxes have to go up to cover my raise, I’m very sorry about that, but I have to look out for myself and my membership.”

Such open, predatory contempt for the public suggests that revolution is not only likely, but imminent.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 25, 2010

Joseph Stack’s murder-suicide attack on an IRS office building in Austin, Texas was an act of irrational criminal violence. A lawsuit filed against Stack’s family by the widow of his victim, IRS employee Vernon Hunter, make result in lethal collateral damage to individual rights.

Before his attack on the IRS office, Stack had become sufficiently threatening to his wife Sheryl that she and the couple’s daughter fled their home and spent the night in a motel. Valerie Hunter has sued Mrs. Stack, claiming that she had a duty to “avoid foreseeable risk of injury to others,” including Hunter’s late husband, Vernon.

It isn’t clear how Mrs. Stack could have carried out that supposed duty unless she was either clairvoyant or a co-conspirator – and there is no evidence that she was either. The legal principle advanced in the lawsuit would require that family members contact the authorities when relatives give voice to anti-government opinions – a genuinely totalitarian assumption.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

February 24, 2010

Much like serfs who were permitted to live on land owned by a feudal lord who could evict them at his pleasure, residents of the western United States can be dispossessed at the arbitrary whim of a distant ruler.

Most western land is controlled by the federal government, which has no constitutional warrant to own or control any property beyond the minimal amount necessary to carry out its limited legitimate functions.

In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton signed an order seizing more than 1.7 million acres of land to create the Grand Staircase-Escalate National Monument . In doing so Clinton locked up huge supplies of clean-burning coal as well as vast reserves of other valuable resources. That whimsical decree inflicted immense economic harm on southern Utah.

A leaked Interior Department document lists 14 sites in 9 states as possible targets for similar seizures, which can occur by the stroke of the presidential pen. Such dispossession by decree is a hallmark of feudalism, not freedom.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.