Posted on 07/31/2009 7:16:39 AM PDT by marktwain
Federal law now criminalizes activities that the average person would never dream would land him in prison.
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Every year, thousands of upstanding, responsible Americans run afoul of some incomprehensible federal law or regulation and end up serving time in federal prison. What is especially disturbing is that it could happen to anyone at all -- and it has. We should applaud Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), then, for holding a bipartisan hearing today to examine how federal law can make a criminal out of anyone, for even the most mundane conduct.
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This is an inevitable result of the fact that the criminal law is no longer restricted to punishing inherently wrongful conduct -- such as murder, rape, robbery, and the like. Moreover, under these new laws, the government can often secure a conviction without having to prove that the person accused even intended to commit a bad act, historically a protection against wrongful conviction.
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So many thousands of criminal offenses are now in federal law that a prominent federal appeals court judge titled his recent essay on this overcriminalization problem, "You're (Probably) a Federal Criminal." Consider small-time inventor and entrepreneur Krister Evertson,
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Krister never had so much as a traffic ticket before he was run off the road near his mother's home in Wasilla, Alaska, by SWAT-armored federal agents in large black SUVs training automatic weapons on him. Evertson, who had been working on clean-energy fuel cells since he was in high school, had no idea what he'd done wrong. It turned out that when he legally sold some sodium (part of his fuel-cell materials) to raise cash, he forgot to put a federally mandated safety sticker on the UPS package he sent to the lawful purchaser.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. -Ayn Rand
Actually they did but since Federal Judges routinely lie to Jurors they probably had no idea that they could nullify this stupid law by refusing to convict.
L
The “abandonment” charge looks like something that ought to have been overturned on appeal — a matter of a bad application of law by the trial judge — but a peon like Evertson doesn’t have the money for federal appeals.
~ Tacitus
Indeed. An NFA violation (mere paperwork) is taken more seriously.
See post #4.
declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. -Ayn Rand
This is the Holy Grail of our rulers. They require absolute authority over every aspect of our lives. We are, in every respect, slaves to our government.
And for anyone wanting to look ahead enough to see if there is a problem with something beyond working a wage job, there aren’t any easily accessible encyclopedias. The result, of course, is to favor huge enterprises that have the lawyers who know the rules inside and out.
Later.
They almost had me there. Quick, somebody make sure they're not fishing for ideas!
But the safety at any cost crowd told me if I’m not doing anything wrong, then I have nothing to worry about.
Most laws are available online free at gov’t websites.
Making them accessible, however, does not make them comprehensible. For years I spent considerable spare time studying just sections 265 & 400 of NY Penal Code - and that was mind-bending.
And to think our masters want to pass a 1000+ page “health care” bill that even they haven’t read...
It is time for sunset provisions on ALL laws. My thinking is that they should automatically expire after 10 year, unless re-approved. This would also help to keep legislators busy and prevent them from cooking up new asinine laws because they have too much time on their hands.
Yeah... We're in deep doo-doo.
I would be willing to guess that nearly all of us are violating some arcane law or regulation on a daily basis. The IRS makes the Gestapo look like the Salvation Army.
It does not sound so bad -— unless you have actually seen and observed sodium...really dangerous stuff!
I'm certain he packaged it carefully (wrapped in wax or some other coating and in an unbreakable container).
Sodium is a metal, and an element. It reacts with oxygen and ‘air.’
It is a soft metal which can be very shiny if it did not oxidize immediately upon contact with ‘air.’
A pea sized amount of sodium dropped into a glass of water will cause it to react violently bubbling and releasing a gas which will ignite almost immediately on the top of the water. A larger chunk of sodium in this situation would create an explosion.
Pretty nasty stuff!
Of course, when combined with the poison iodine it becomes quite tasty and a necessary component of life - sodium iodine, or table salt!
That would be Sodium Chloride, not Iodide.
???
Did you not forget a small matter of Chlorine? NaCl is salt, Iodine has been added for human health concerns; goiters (a visible, noncancerous enlargement of the thyroid gland) owing to iodine deficiency.
Sodium is highly reactive stuff. Pour a few drops of water on a little piece of sodium and it will burst into flames !
Iodized salt is not Sodium Iodide, it’s Sodium Chloride with a tiny bit of Iodine (Iodide) added.
Add a bit of the poison chlorine, too.
Thanks!
Have a great weekend!
What I find interesting is that many of these revolve around the areas that the 'left' have claimed as their own; environment, hate crime, sexuality and gun control. Amazing how we have to keep proving our rights while they keep imposing their executive and judicial fiat. A frequent and dismaying trend is an overly broad law drawn up by the legislature that is then interpreted into regulations that have the force of law. The larger the bill, the more places to hide 'Easter Eggs' and 'Grenades'; how many pages is HR3200 / health bill going to be when it gets to the floor?
As another poster has cited, written law is frequently [usually?] so convoluted as to require expertise beyond common man to understand, yet we operate on the precept that 'Ignorance is no excuse'! I begin to feel that we need a panel of 'common people' drawn from a random, non-lawyer ranks that can send back any legislation to be re-written for clarity. I know, no chance in hades!
At some point the impenetrability question may gain traction under “due process of law.” Shoot, the Supremes use that for almost every other “fairness” issue. Hey, Sotomayer may be useful for something!
And many of those laws are just bizzare. Didja know that in NY a rifle is not a firearm?
And ain't nobody REALLY stepping up to the plate to take her back. "Tea Parties" don't count for anything -- nobody cares.
I think we need to revive the doctrine of jury nullification, and require judges to tell the jury, and hang judges that don’t inform the jury, and for that matter, hang the prosecutor tooo, he forgot to remind the judge.
Er, I think you mean sodium chloride?
NaI is useful, but I wouldn't want to eat it.
Gohmert has been a good person to-date. I would be surprised if it was anything but a sincere effort to solve a real problem.
You're (Probably) a Federal Criminal
Some animals are more equal than others
See #25.
Have a great day!
We should applaud Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), then, for holding a bipartisan hearing today to examine how federal law can make a criminal out of anyone, for even the most mundane conduct... Consider small-time inventor and entrepreneur Krister Evertson... run off the road near his mother's home in Wasilla, Alaska, by SWAT-armored federal agents in large black SUVs training automatic weapons on him. Evertson, who had been working on clean-energy fuel cells since he was in high school, had no idea what he'd done wrong. It turned out that when he legally sold some sodium (part of his fuel-cell materials) to raise cash, he forgot to put a federally mandated safety sticker on the UPS package he sent to the lawful purchaser.
shall not be infringed really depends on the meaning of is...
... prolly just a typo...but since intent need not be established, off to the cattle car...
>>>The other hardened criminal whose story members of Congress will hear today is retiree George Norris. A longtime resident of Spring, Texas, Norris made the mistake of not knowing and keeping track of all of the details of federal and international law on endangered species — mostly paperwork requirements — before he decided to turn his orchid hobby into a small business. What was Norris’s goal? To earn a little investment income while his wife neared retirement.
The Lacey Act is an example of the dangerous overbreadth of federal criminal law. Incredibly, Congress has made it a federal crime to violate any fish or wildlife law or regulation of any nation on earth.<<<
My goal following my own retirement was to grow heirloom variety vegetables and flowers for seed and sell that seed to various distributors, literally for a little “seed” money during my older years.
These paragraphs floored me. It appears to me that I could go to prison for growing the wrong flower protected by some law in some other country.
Ayn Rand was right in “Atlas Shrugged” when one of her characters states the idea of all those laws and regulations was to make everyone a criminal, and therefore under the control of the state. Yikes.
What really torques me is all the freaking non-elected regulatory agencies who spend billions of taxpayer dollars thinking up and enforcing — with guns, prisons, fines, etc — little rules about everything.
Like the EPA for instance. It has destroyed more jobs and more access to America’s energy than any foreign enemy could.
I keep seeing pictures of these two bozos. What exactly did they do besides stand around trying to look important? Did they actually or actually attempt to prevent anyone from voting?
"You can't keep it," sez they. "Migratory Bird act. Illegal to possess unless you have a federal license."
"OK," sez I, "Could I bring it up to you and get it stuffed and donate it to a school or museum or something?"
"Nope. It's illegal to transport. And they can't display it unless they have the right papers."
"OK," sez I, "So I can't have it and I can't get rid of it. What do I do with it?"
Riffling of papers in the background. "Well, yes, technically you can't possess it and you can't transport it to give to somebody else. You're already illegal. Just bury it and nobody will give you a problem. Unless they find out."
What a waste. Yes, to some policy wonk moron in DC it seemed like a good idea. He or she didn't have to live with the consequences.
Thing is, and the reason for the Rand quotations above, nobody is going to send a SWAT team after me for a stray eagle feather or something like that. But if they want to send it after me for another reason - political dissent? - that's a perfect justification. Don't think that can't happen here. Every time you hear some police administrator crow that a new law is "a tool to use in the War on Whatever," that's precisely what he has in mind. No-knock raids? Asset forfeiture? All "tools to use" despite the fact that they are clearly and specifically unconstitutional, so specifically that Supreme Court decisions allowing them are this generation's Dred Scott.
The difficulty with activist judges on the Supreme Court - and Sotomayor is certainly one of those - is that once the Constitution becomes merely an impediment, a thing to be bent around desirable social policy, then we have no Constitution and hence no guard against arbitrary government. Some of that is built into the system, but when we have contradictions such as the ones presented above it is well outside the bounds of reason and well into the territory of pure coercion. The only people who find that attractive are those who prefer coercion over their fellow citizens to persuasion and compromise. Remember who they are.
To be truly free, you will be an Outlaw.
I don’t mean criminal — although you are probably that, also. I mean a person who thinks “outside the law.” When you are an Outlaw, your body (just like everybody else’s) may be subject to the dictates of bureaucrats, armed enforcers and various elected fixers, controllers, connivers, pork-barrellers, socializers, corporatizers, fear-mongers, cigar-sexers, bribe-takers, old-boy-networkers and global influence peddlers.
But when you are an Outlaw, your heart and mind (unlike most everybody else’s) are your own.
What exactly does that mean, though, in this over-lawed, over-ruled, over-executive-ordered world?
Let’s go back for a moment to the statement that you’re already a criminal. I’ve said it before and it always offends somebody: “YOU may be a criminal, Wolfe. But I’M a law-abiding citizen. Don’t paint me with your black brush.”
Well, sorry. You may not already be an Outlaw. But definitely you are already a criminal. You can’t help but be.
In The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton write:
“The U.S. Code, which contains all federal statutes, occupies 56,009 single-spaced pages. Its 47 volumes take up nine feet of shelf space. An annotated version, which attempts to bring order out of chaos, is three feet long and has 230 hardcover volumes and 36 paperback supplements. Administrative lawmaking under statutes fill up the 207-volume Code of Federal Regulations, which spans 21 feet of shelf space and contains more than 134,488 pages of regulatory law. … Federal law is further augmented by more than 2,756 volumes of judicial precedent, taking up 160 yards of law library shelving.”
And you’re certain you’re not breaking one of those laws?
During the Clinton years alone, as James Bovard noted in Feeling Your Pain, “Federal agencies issued more than 25,000 new regulations—criminalizing everything from reliable toilets to snuff advertisements on race cars.” And Bovard wrote that before Clinton’s final year in office, when the federal government issued more than 100,000 pages of new regulations.
That’s just federal. Let’s not even mention the states.
Still think you’re not a criminal?
Really. So you’ve never: “forgotten” to report a little extra income on your 1040, built an addition on your house without a permit, driven without a seatbelt (the Supreme Court says cops can throw you in jail for that), given a glass of dinner wine to your 17-year-old, smoked a joint, disconnected a pollution control device on your car, cut a friend’s hair without a license, installed an “outlaw” toilet, carried a pocket knife with a blade longer-than-legal (bet you don’t even know what length is legal, do you?), been in a room where friends were talking about doing something illegal (conspiracy!), put a dollar in a football pool, patronized a prostitute, taken a tax deduction you really weren’t “entitled” to, lied to a bureaucrat, “willfully” failed to file, built a pipe-bomb just to watch it go boom, carried money with traces of cocaine on it (like some 82 percent of the paper money in circulation today), put prescription medicine into one of those little daily dispenser containers, given one of your own prescription pills to a sick friend (search Title 21 of the U.S. Code and just see if you can figure out exactly what you can and can’t do with that itty-bitty bottle of Zoloft or Prozac you depend on to help you survive this modern madness), owned chemicals that might be used in bomb making (like the bleach and ammonia bottles under your kitchen sink), transposed the digits of your Social Security Number on a government form, or driven in a car with someone who might have been transporting contraband. Ever?
Remember, these days you can be convicted of “conspiracy” for crimes you don’t even know about, or for buying legal items that might be used for illegal causes. Some acquaintance gets in trouble and needs to snitch on a friend to get his own sentence reduced — and you’re toast.
You can even be convicted of violating laws that don’t exist — as plenty of “tax criminals” have been. Ask the IRS for copies of the laws you’re allegedly breaking and they’ll respond with legalistic gobbledegook. I have a friend who once testified as an expert witness in a tax case. Her expertise? Grammar. On the stand, she diagrammed a mega-monster sentence from the tax code and proved the alleged regulation couldn’t be obeyed — because it literally had no meaning in the English language. Still, people get arrested for disobeying it.
Those are just a few of the ways individuals can get in trouble. Heaven forbid you should own a business and try to get through the day without committing a crime. For example, while Your Father in Washington still permits you, you lucky little person, to disconnect the crazy-making doodad that goes bingidy-bing-bing when you leave your car keys in the ignition and open the door, it’s a federal crime for your car dealer to disconnect it at your request. Like, whose car do they think it is, anyway? Well, actually, it’s not a federal crime to disconnect only the part that goes bingidy-bing-bing when you open the door and leave your key in the ignition, but it is a federal crime to disconnect the part that goes bingidy-bing-bing when you unhook your seatbelt and leave your key in the ignition, which is all part of the same system but a different set of wires from the other one. (Are you following this? There won’t be a test, but there could be a hefty fine later.) Oh yeah, by the way, before you unhook the thing yourself, you’d better check your state law. You wouldn’t want the state-o-crats’ SWAT team swooping down on you when you’re armed only with a pair of wirecutters.
Bottom line. You are no longer a law-abiding citizen. There are too many laws to abide. And it doesn’t matter whether they call ‘em laws, rules, regulations, or something else altogether. You break them every day.
With laws like these, who even wants to be a law-abiding citizen? When you put yourself at the service of rules and diktats of this nature, you put your life in thrall to the kind of people who make them. Even if you’re a member of the infamous Snopes clan, you’re bound to be better at figuring out how to live your own life than people who sit around all day cooking up stuff like this and figuring out how severely to punish you if you don’t obey.
In the science fiction novel Pallas, one of L. Neil Smith’s characters says, “People—pardon me, journalists and politicians—have often accused me of believing that I’m above the law. And yet, who isn’t? … The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable criminals, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I’m above the law. And so are you.”
Amen, bruthah Neil.
So why not enjoy being above the law? Why not embrace it? Why not do it with panache? Flair? Savoir faire? Pride and shining resolution? Why not, in short, free your Inner Outlaw?
For this is what divides the Outlaw—D.B. Cooper, Bonnie and Clyde, Robin Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro—from the mere criminal—the creep who steals your CD player or the furniture out of the White House. Or the person who breaks the same old everyday laws you do, but breaks them in a sniveling, sneaking, guilt-ridden way, rather than with a jaunty shrug.
Attitude. Attitude. Attitude.
Don’t let me give you the wrong idea. You don’t have to start holding up IRS offices and distributing the proceeds to starving taxpayers to be an Outlaw. Whatever crimes you’re already committing will do. The essence of free Outlawry is the way you live in the face of growing tyranny—the Outlaw way you think. Even when it’s the government that’s committing the real crimes, being an Outlaw comes in handy.
Some examples:
The Outlaw doesn’t always emerge victorious from encounters with authority. Bonnie, Clyde, and John Dillinger ended up with their bullet-riddled bodies on public display, after all. You really might end up with your face in the gravel and your nether portions in a world of hurt if the nice officer is having a Justin Volpe moment and thinks you’re Abner Louima. Refuse to allow a random search of your vehicle, for instance and, as Boston T. Party describes in You and the Police, a drug dog and handler may be brought to the scene. The handler strokes a baggie of marijuana in his pocket then touches the trunk of your car. The dog goes wild and voila!—instant “probable cause.” (Or the dog simply sniffs you, and the almost inevitable traces of cocaine on your federal reserve notes lead to a shake-down and the forfeiture of all the cash you’re carrying.)
Government ruthlessness is a giant purple rhinoceros standing in the path between you and the free enjoyment of Outlawry. It’s a rabid rhino. With a cyanide-tipped horn. It’s rutting season and it thinks you’re competition. It’s got a thorn in its little hoofie. In general, it’s having a really, really, really bad day.
Yes, resistance to arbitrary power is dangerous. Let’s nobody kid herself about that. But resistance is not futile.
In most cases, being an Outlaw doesn’t mean attracting attention to yourself. It simply means living, as much as possible, as you wish. More important, it means having the mindset needed to live that way in a world of adversity. More often than confronting, it means ignoring or evading insane and excessive rules. When confrontation is necessary, it means having the knowledge, preparation, and—once again—attitude to help you get through the situation without either passively submitting or going unproductively postal.
In practice, that means something different for every Outlaw. But in every case, it means you have an attitude of self ownership (or, if you prefer, of belonging to God), not being the natural subject, and easy target, of any bureaucrat or badge-bearer who wishes to push you around.
It means recognizing the pathetic state of law and justice around you, and recognizing its dangers—but resolving to live your life more like a free American than a Stalinist peasant, regardless. It means living by your own highest moral and ethical choices, rather than trying to tippy-toe around every persnicketing regulation in every obscure book in every cubbyhole governmental office.
It means remembering that this is still our America. Not theirs.
It means remembering that you are still a human being with potential beyond anything those who want to put us all into tight little categories and boxes—and prison cells!—could ever conceive.
It means knowing every day that, despite the chains and travails of too much government, and their very real threats to your security, your heart and mind remain free.
It means you belong to yourself. That you think for yourself. That you have higher values than any do-gooder, lobbyist, congressthing, corrupt cop, or midnight raider will ever give you credit for.
But that’s okay. Because it’s not their approval you’re looking for. Freedom is what you’re looking for. And you’re only going to find that by being determined to live it.
Gandhi said it: “We must be the change we wish to see.”
Amen to you, too, bruthah Mohandas, fellow Outlaw.
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