David McElroy

Cleaning out the notebook….

In the last couple of days, it’s become widely know among certain libertarians and anarchists that someone they knew and trusted in Philadelphia was arrested for drug sales and coerced to become a government informant. A lot of people are very angry with her for betraying them in order to cut a better deal for herself. I’m surprised that anybody is surprised.

If you’re curious about the situation, you can read more here, but I’m not really interested in getting into the details and the blame. The bottom line is that police arrested a young woman and then released her after they blackmailed her into worked for them. (Oh, wait. It’s not supposed to be blackmail when the state does it, I guess.) She was set loose to inform on her friends about their drug purchases and to set up people selling drugs.

When police had enough evidence, they arrested a bunch of people and they eventually found out that the friend they had trusted was the one who set them up. They’re angry and hurt. She’s trying to justify what she did.

All I can say is that when someone holds a gun — metaphorical or otherwise — to your head, you’re probably going to do what the people with the gun ask you to do. This woman betrayed her friends to save her own skin, but I have trouble getting too upset about it and I certainly can’t act surprised about it. That’s what almost everyone does in the same situation. It’s easy from the safety of our homes to pontificate, but it’s a very different thing when you’re sitting in a jail cell facing the prospects of losing everything. Self-interest almost always kicks in. Right or not, that’s just reality.

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When Vice President Joe Biden said earlier this week that he’s in favor of gay marriage, it made headlines. The subject polarizes two groups of people, each certain that their position is morally correct. But what if the question is irrelevant?

Marriage has been a religious institution for a very long time, at least in countries with Christian roots. Centuries ago, churches held records and married people. Eventually, as societies became more secular, governments took over that role — keeping records and granting licenses.

Why exactly does government need to be involved? Why shouldn’t a marriage be whatever people decide for it to be? Two people can enter into any other partnership in life for their own reasons and with people of their own choice. Why does marriage need a legal status? Why shouldn’t it simply be a private thing?

For people who want it to be a religious institution, it can be between them and their church. For those who want it to be something else, they can make it what they want it to be.

Conservatives and churches who are fighting to defeat gay marriage are looking at this all wrong. If you demand that government define marriage in a certain way, you are agreeing that the government has the legitimate right to define marriage. Churches who take this approach are ceding authority to the state. Governments don’t decide who can be baptized or take communion. Churches decide that for themselves. Why should the state decide who can marry?

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Nobody is entirely sure what a socialist is anymore. Some people are convinced that Barack Obama is a socialist. Two years ago, Newsweek argued that both sides of the mainstream are basically big-government socialists now. And now we have a new French president from the Socialist party. So what do real socialists want?

It turns out that real socialists want pretty much the same thing as Obama and the Democrats do — more government spending, higher taxes on “the rich” and an end to planned budget cuts. Newly elected French President François Hollande says he will end “austerity” in the country, which basically means he’s going to take as much money as he can from productive people and spend like there’s no tomorrow.

Government spending in European countries has been so bad that the idea of reducing spending to at least start trimming deficits is called austerity. Just as is the case here, the people who want the spending to continue say that “the rich” have the responsibility to pay more — because people who are now being supported by government would have to support themselves otherwise.

The standard rhetoric in this country is to claim that those who want to balance the budget want to “balance the budget on the backs of the poor,” but the idea is the same. The idea is that those who are already being supported by productive people deserve to continue to get that support — and it’s “greedy” for “the rich” not to want to work hard and have their money confiscated to be given to other people.

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