The Civilian Government Doesn't Owe Deference to Military Officers

The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) consists of 12 subindices, which are weighted according to their shares in total household expenditures. If, for example, food and non-alcoholic beverages (subindex 1) account for 15% of expenditures, they should also be given a weight of 15% in the overall index. In this way, each expenditure category would be given the importance it has for an average household. This is the claim of official statistics. But here, too, as so often, aspiration and reality diverge.

In Germany, the traditionally largest subindex covers housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels (subindex 4). It has always accounted for more than 21% of the overall index since the mid-1990s. Between 2020 and 2022, the weight had increased to slightly more than 25%. The official statistics thus assumed that German households spend on average around a quarter of their total expenditure on goods of this category. This is too little in the eyes of some critics. Many households spend significantly more on goods of this type. In larger urban areas, households often spend more than a third of their income on rent alone.

There has now been an unexpected change in 2023. The Federal Statistical Offices did not increase the weight of subindex 4, but lowered it from 25.2% in the previous year to 16.5%. No valid justification for this has yet been provided. On the website of the Federal Statistical Offices, there are only empty phrases: "The Corona pandemic, which has been prevalent since 2020, with its restrictions on public life and the resulting consequences, makes it necessary to change the usual procedure for updating the goods weights for the third year in a row as well." (translated with DeepL because AI is really good at translating bureaucratic talk.)

How could one even justify such an implausible adjustment? As a matter of fact, the adjustment means that from now on official statistics will assume that the average German household spends only 16.5% of its total expenditure on housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels. Whether this assumption is realistic is something everyone can consider for themselves.

What is clear is that the down-weighted subindex 4 has been showing above-average inflation rates for some time now. Between 1996 and 2022, it has risen by 84% overall, but the HICP as a whole has risen by only 59%. Only subindex 2 for alcoholic beverages, tobacco and narcotics has risen even more strongly during this period, by 115%.

During the inflationary phase of last year, prices in subindex 4 rose the most of all. The inflation rate here was 13.9%, more than 5 percentage points above the official average inflation. That the Federal Statistical Offices have now decided to lower the weight of this subindex has one practical effect: the officially measured inflation will be lower. But it measures past reality.

ABSTRACT: This article identifies the lack of policy analysis as a major research gap in pay equity policies. Applying a policy analytic approach, the article applies comparative empirical evidence to the tasks of problem structuring and policy prescription as well as to three different evaluation methods: effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and benefit-cost analysis. The results show that pay equity policies lack fundamental justification as public policies. Implications for research and policy revision follow.

Read the full article at the Journal of Libertarian Studies. 

Late last month, the administrators at a Colorado public school—with the grandiose name "the Vanguard School"—tried to force a 12-year-old boy named Jaiden to remove a Gadsden flag patch from his backpack. The Gadsden flag may be more familiar to readers as simply the rattlesnake flag with the words "don't tread on me" on it. People who are at all familiar with the American revolution know the flag is a revolutionary-era flag with a message designed to repudiate the imperial despotism imposed on the Americans by British elites. 

Teachers and administrators at the Vanguard School, however, were absolutely sure the flag has "origins with slavery, and the slave trade." Of course, this is exactly the kind of historical illiteracy and social-democratic revisionism we'd expect from public school teachers and administrators. "Teaching" at your average public school is mostly about running a taxpayer-funded propaganda mill and daycare center, and has little to do with the dissemination of any factual material. Thus, it is likely that the staff at this school saw on MSNBC once that the Gadsden flag is "racist" because some American conservatives wave it. The leap from this slur to the idea that the flag is a symbol of slavery is brief indeed. 

 This whole narrative is part of the story pushed by the "1619 Project" at the New York Times which would have us believe that the American Revolution itself was all about racism and slavery. Meanwhile, the real themes and facts of the revolution—secession, natural rights, radical liberalism, violent revolution, and extreme decentralization—have all been swept aside to serve Progressives' current ideological projects.  The regime's propagandists—which includes most public school employees—naturally seek to destroy and discredit all symbols of the American Revolution beyond bland slogans about "taxation without representation." This framing of the revolution makes it all very safe and does not encourage any opposition to the current regime. After all, we have "representation" now—the millionaire gerontocracy in Congress "represents" you, don't you know—so there's no reason to think revolution can be justified. If you don't like something, just vote harder. 

This sterile pro-status-quo interpretation of the revolution is exactly what we should expect to be taught in a government school because the correct interpretation is far too dangerous and inconvenient for the regime. 

The reality of the revolution, of course, is that a sizable portion of the population—from intellectual elites in cities to ordinary farmers in the countryside—grew tired of the British yoke. Animated by a radical ideology of natural rights—which we now call "classical" liberalism or libertarianism—Americans declared the established government illegitimate and seceded. It didn't have to be that way. At first the Americans had asked politely for more freedom. They even sent the Olive Branch Petition to the King. For their efforts, the Americans were declared "traitors"—that epithet so often used by despots and their useful idiots everywhere. 

When the British state eventually launched a war against the Americans to prevent their secession, the Americans were forced to take up arms and killed government soldiers and officials until they packed up and left the country. The revolutionaries only wanted peace and self-determination. The British refused to let them have it. The British got their response, and got it good and hard. 

It was all morally justified, of course: the secession, the rebellion, the disdain for the British idea of "law and order." Parliament and the Crown had attempted to destroy the Americans' human rights—the rights of life, liberty, and property as outlined by the libertarian Leveller revolutionaries in England a century earlier. As a result, the revolutionaries were entitled to protect their rights by using violence in self-defense. 

Naturally, today's elites ignore those parts of the American Revolution. It also now appears the Progressives have moved on to the next phase which is to discredit the revolution altogether. Thus, symbols of the revolution must be denounced as symbols of slavery, and all modern rebellion and secession declared to be "treason" or "sedition" or some other political "crime." It's okay to "rebel"—i.e., in the style of Antifa or Black Lives Matters—so long as the "solution" is always more state power. Real independence, secession, and rebellion are absolutely not allowed. The 1619 Project thus assures us the whole enterprise of the American Revolution was suspect. We're told those ill-mannered Americans should have listened to their betters in the imperial metropoles of Britain! 

For those who actually respect human rights, however, any attempt to craft or promote this Progressive anti-revolutionary narrative must be met with enthusiastic opposition. In the case of Jaiden at the Vanguard School, there is a happy ending. The teachers were humiliated and Jaiden's backpack remains bedecked with the Gadsden flag. It's a small victory, but a necessary one. For obvious reasons, the regime doesn't want Americans to think secession or revolution—as so well described by Thomas Jefferson—is ever an option. Ever since the counter-revolutionaries got their new centralist-nationalist constitution in 1787, the American regime has been about the maintenance and spread of federal power. The revolution, however, acts as a beacon in the opposite direction, and Rothbard has explained why: 

The Americans had always been intractable, rebellious, impatient of oppression, as witness the numerous rebellions of the late seventeenth century; they also had their own individualist and libertarian heritage, their Ann Hutchinsons and Rhode Island quasi anarchists, some directly linked with the left wing of the English Revolution. Now, strengthened and guided by the developed libertarian natural rights ideology of the eighteenth century, and reacting to aggrandizement of the British imperial state in the economic, constitutional, and religious spheres, the Americans, in escalated and radicalized confrontations with Great Britain, had made and won their Revolution. By doing so, this revolution, based on the growing libertarian idea pervading enlightened opinion in Europe, itself gave immeasurable impetus to the liberal revolutionary movement throughout the Old World, for here was a living example of a liberal revolution that had taken its daring chance, against all odds and against the mightiest state in the world, and had actually succeeded. Here, indeed, was a beacon light to all the oppressed peoples of the world!

A member of the Fort Lupton, Colorado Police Department was fired last month after she was found guilty of reckless endangerment and third-degree assault. Former Officer Jordan Steinke had arrested Yareni Rios-Gonzalez for suspected menacing and put her in the back of the patrol car of Platteville police officer Pablo Vasquez. Vasquez had parked his cruiser on railroad tracks. Moments later, the car was struck by a passing train with Rios-Gonzales inside. The victim—who has never been convicted of any crime related to the incident—and can thus be presumed innocent—suffered life-threatening injuries as a result. She barely survived. 

The incident helps to illustrate the risks faced by suspects in custody when at the mercy of indifferent, incompetent, or hostile law enforcement officers. 

The matter of police aggression toward persons already in handcuffs is also notable for being central to the George Floyd case. Floyd was subject to deadly force by police officers even though he was cuffed and posed little-to-no threat to the safety of officers or the public at large. 

Indeed, we can point to many, many cases across the country of police assaulting persons who were in handcuffs. In most of these cases, police convicted of offenses receive slaps on the wrist such as job loss or probation. When lawsuits are pursued against the police officers or their respective departments, it is the taxpayers who pay the bill.  Police attacks against handcuffed victims provide interesting case studies because they cannot be justified by the usual claims about the use of force by police. When law enforcement officers use violent tactics against others, it is often said this is justified because the officers were in danger of harm themselves, and thus acted in self-defense. These claims are often correct. In cases where suspects are already restrained, however, suspects do not pose a deadly threat to police and police assaults cannot be justified. 

Unfortunately, protections for police such as qualified immunity and pro-police bias in law courts often prevents victims from receiving sufficient restitution from their attackers.

Murray Rothbard noted that the deck is already stacked against those who are taken into custody by police, and a legal double standard clearly exists. Rothbard writes: 

The policeman who apprehends a criminal and arrests him, and the judicial and penal authorities who incarcerate him before trial and conviction—all should be subject to the universal law. In short, if they have committed an error and the defendant turns out to be innocent, then these authorities should be subjected to the same penalties as anyone else who kidnaps and incarcerates an innocent man.

In the Western world, the principal that government agents must be subject to the same law as everyone else is many centuries old. The reality faced by police, however, is something far different. Police can arrest, restrain, and imprison persons who have been convicted or no crime of offense. If police are wrong, and have imprisoned the wrong person, they rarely face any sanctions that an ordinary person would face for similar behavior. Rothbard goes on to note that in a truly just world, police 

must observe the critical libertarian rule that no physical force may be used against anyone who has not been convicted as a criminal— otherwise, the users of such force, whether police or courts, would be themselves liable to be convicted as aggressors if it turned out that the person they had used force against was innocent of crime.

Of course, many will argue that this simply isn't practical and some suspected violent criminals must be detained until their guilt can be ascertained. 

Even if we grant that claim for the sake of argument, we can see that depriving people of their freedom when they have yet to be convicted of anything is very serious business and offers many opportunities for abuse. Thus, one would think that taking non-convicts into custody—i.e., people still presumed innocent—requires the utmost care from police officers to preserve the health and safety of those who have been rendered unable to protect themselves or see to their own safety when in transit. Put another way, people in restraints have been deprived of exercising self-ownership and so it falls to the arresting officers to guarantee the suspects' safety. 

Moreover, even those people in custody who are later found guilty of some offense must not abused while in custody. Punishments are to be dispensed by the law courts, not by arresting officers. 

Unfortunately, many police officers don't see it that way. 

On the matter of George Floyd, for example, Floyd already had his hands cuffed behind his back when police officer Derek Chauvin saw fit to kneel on his neck for several minutes. Why did Chauvin decide to use deadly force on a man already in restraints? This question was posed during Chauvin's trial to Minneapolis homicide lieutenant Richard Zimmerman, who is Minneapolis's longest-serving sworn officer. Zimmerman testified that Chauvin's use of deadly force on Floyd was "totally unnecessary" and that the use of deadly force would only be justified if the officers felt their lives were threatened by Floyd. Zimmerman testified it's hard to see how Chauvin could possibly come to this conclusion since the threat level posed by handcuffed suspects is very low. (Police Sergeant David Pleoger also testified that Chauvin used unnecessary force and violated policy by pinning Floyd on the ground.)

Chauvin's defenders naturally attempted to come up with excuses for Chauvin's incompetence and aggression. Although it has never been established that Floyd actually used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, some claimed that Floyd was arrested while stealing and thus—for some unexplained reason—deserved to have a man kneel on his neck while handcuffed. Others noted Floyd may have been on drugs, as if this was in any way relevant to the question of whether or not a police officer ought to be able to attack a handcuffed suspect.

The truth is that Chauvin likely assaulted Floyd simply because Floyd was being uncooperative and Chauvin felt Floyd was wasting Chauvin's time. We see this often. Suspects in handcuffs—i.e., people who have been convicted of no crime—have often been the target of police abuse because police grow impatient. 

For example, police officers in Yuba City, California threw an elderly handcuffed man to the ground and paralyzed him because he wasn't complying fast enough to suit the short-fused police officers. In East Point, Georgia police shocked handcuffed Gregory Towns with a taser 14 times because he wasn't walking fast enough for police. In Clayton County, Georgia, a sheriff's deputy held a gun to a man's head while the man had his hands cuffed behind his back. The deputy wanted the man to comply with her orders more quickly. Officers in West Valley City, Utah shot and killed a man who was in handcuffs and detained inside a police station. Near Trinidad, Colorado, deputies barked conflicting orders at a handcuffed man who had parked in a place police didn't like. When the man couldn't figure out the deputies' incoherent demands, the police tased him in the face. Police in Castle Rock, Colorado allowed a police dog to attack a handcuffed man sitting on a curb. Police used a similar tactic in Alpharetta, Georgia. 

Sometimes police abuse handcuffed suspects to extract information. In Roswell, Georgia, police locked a handcuffed 13-year old boy in the back of a police cruiser with the windows down in sub-freezing temperatures. The child wouldn't answer questions, so a police sergeant concluded "he's not going to say anything if he's warm." Police decided to freeze the boy until he talked. 

These are all just cases that have been recently resolved, reported, or subject to legal proceedings. A longer timeline, of course, shows a long history of police abusing people in custody who are restrained and unarmed. These are also just the more egregious cases where police met with some level of legal accountability. Lesser cases often just bring acquittal or docked pay for abusive police. For example, when a Miami police officer kicked a handcuffed man in the head while he was lying on the pavement, the only punishment for the officer was a lost job. After an Atlanta police officer kicked a handcuffed woman in the head, he was fired but faced no legal consequences.  Moreover, because most states protect officers from any personal liability due to "qualified immunity" laws, most legal settlements are extracted not from individual officers or police pension funds—as should be the case—but from taxpayer funds. 

Yet, even when we recognize that policing can be a dangerous business and suspects are often unpredictable, how police treat people in custody is an indication of just how much police consider themselves to be above the law. It's one thing to react violently against armed and unrestrained suspects. That is often justified. It's something else entirely when police assault people who are on the ground with their hands cuffed behind their backs.  Or, as in the case of Rio-Gonzales, the police may take away a person's freedom, but can't be bothered to ensure that person is not parked in the path of an oncoming train. Police are very good at taking advantage of the extra power and privileges that come with a gun and a badge. But they are apparently much less concerned with the added responsibilities and obligations that come with taking people into custody. 

Rothbard was right that these abusers ought to be treated the same as any private citizen who attacks a person in handcuffs and is unable to defend himself. Police must be held personally liable for the harm they caused. Instead, under the status quo, these offending officers often enjoy free legal services from the police unions and can hide behind immunity laws. It's a two-tiered justice system, after all.