Okay, this is now my favourite Coke ad ever:
Tag Archives | No Borders
The Time I Commented On the Time He Committed … Oh, Just Go Read It
I left a comment on James Leroy Wilson’s “The Time I Committed Election Fraud.”
Jim Crow Returns to Alabama, Part 2
For a giggle, check out this critique (CHT Brandon) of my recent immigration post, by a “John J. Ray, M.A., Ph.D.” (Yes, he’s one of those.) The best bit is when the guy infers my deranged mental state from my picture. Yes, this picture. René Allendy, move over!
Jim Crow Returns to Alabama
This past Thursday the Alabama legislature put on their white hoods and enacted the harshest anti-immigrant regime in the country, one even more tyrannical than Arizona’s ethnic-cleansing laws.
As in Arizona, the new edict “allows police to arrest anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant if the person is stopped for some other reason”; but it also “requir[es] schools to find out if students are in the country lawfully,” “requires all businesses to check the legal status of workers using a federal system called E-Verify,” “makes it a crime for landlords to knowingly rent to an illegal immigrant,” and in a flourish of pure petty malice, “mak[es] it a crime to knowingly give an illegal immigrant a ride.”
The old Jim Crow laws enforced discrimination based on the colour of a person’s skin; the new Jim Crow laws enforce discrimination on the basis of a person’s birth on the wrong side of an imaginary line. Though of course racist motivations are not exactly absent.
To make sure that racism and misogyny continue to march hand in hand, the legislature also passed an abortion ban on the same day. Well heck, if the state can treat immigrants as second-class persons, why can’t it do the same to women, and force them to use their bodies as incubators for unwanted fetuses?
If only we could get some Republicans in power! They’re for smaller government, you know.
Imagine No Taxation
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News:
To the Editor:
Charlotte Ward asks us to imagine a world without taxes. (“Don’t like taxes? Imagine a world without these services,” Tuesday.)
Okay, let’s try. What would it be like?
True, the government wouldn’t be able to provide its services any more. But it also would no longer be able to forbid competitors from offering such services non-coercively. With formerly governmental services no longer insulated from market competition, their quality would rise and their prices would fall.
Government would also no longer be able to rig markets in favor of the corporate elite and against the poor and middle class. Most governmental redistribution is from the less to the more affluent, not vice versa. Getting rid of taxation and the plutocratic policies it supports would eliminate the chief cause of poverty.
Gone too would be the ability to enforce laws against “lodge practice” – laws that deprive the poor of low-cost health care in order to enrich the medical establishment. That one change would do far more for health care than either the liberals’ state-run solution or the conservatives’ corporate-run system.
Oppressive policies like harassing immigrants [deleted by the newspaper: and downloaders] and pot smokers, or bombing Pakistani children, would be unsustainable in a freed market. And police brutality would be a lot harder to maintain if security services were competitive.
Liberals claim to be advocates for the disadvantaged, but all too often support regulations that entrench established interests and make it impossible for the poor to compete.
Conservatives claim to oppose big government, but in practice support corporate welfare, anti-union laws, intrusions into personal liberties, a bloated military-industrial complex, and grants of monopoly privilege and cronyism cloaked in the language of “deregulation” and “privatization.”
And taxation makes all this possible.
To learn more, check out the websites of the Center for a Stateless Society and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left.
Roderick T. Long
Defending Canadian Censorship
Some of you will be interested in my exchange (as berserkrl) with atheron and ginge_muppet in the comments section of this story.