Rugby Star on Why He's Fighting Anti-Gay Bigotry and Bullying

The High Cost of Government-Mandated Discrimination: DOMA and the Regulatory State

Conservatives frequently talk about the cost of regulations. For instance, Freedomworks, a well-known conservative organization, published a piece called The Hidden Cost of Regulation. It said: “Complying with regulations is not cheap,” noting that regulations aren’t paid for by just corporations, but by “the entire economy.” It notes that consumers pay higher prices as well, due to these regulations, and that they “act as a drag on economic growth.”

Allow me to add two other points Freedomworks did not mention, but which I believe they would agree with. 1) Motives of the regulators do not change costs imposed by the regulations. That is, costs are not lower if the motives of regulators are good. 2) Costs are not changed if regulations are imposed by one political party rather than the other. In other words, the cost of Republican-imposed regulations would be just the same if Democrats had been the guilty party.

With this in mind, let us turn to a set of regulations Republicans put into place, with the claimed motive of “protecting the family:” The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Why Does Los Angeles County Hate the Poor?

A short drive from the offices of the Moorfield Storey Institute is the region of California known as the Antelope Valley. When we go to Los Angeles we drive through the area. It is one of the least densely populated areas of the greater LA region, with around 5,000 people spread out over 442 square miles. About a third of the residents are black or Latino. The population is older than average, less educated than average, and less wealthy.

Many of these people live miles from their nearest neighbors. Like us, these are people who enjoy life in the high desert. But the Los Angeles Country is doing its best to drive these people off their land and make their lives miserable. The county insists it has nothing to do with confiscating property later for a boondoggle of a transportation project that is being planned.

These are people who live in isolated happiness. They are not problems to anyone. But government is sending armed "Nuisance Abatement Teams" to order people off their land and ordering them to destroy their homes. The government says they can own the land, just not live on it. (That would certainly lower the value when they pay for property stolen through eminent domain later on.) The county makes repeated demands on people to "fix" their property with expensive changes that most simply can't afford.

Now, let us assume the worst, and let us assume that these people have substandard homes that need repairs. If they don't have the fucking money, they don't have the fucking money! But the politicians, like Mike Antonovich, are used to spending other people's money and simply can't relate to what they are doing to poor people. Forcing these people off their land will ONLY make their lives worse, not better. If these people could better their lives by moving they are likely to have done so already. They aren't out to hurt themselves. They are out trying to make the most with what they have. And unrealistic demands by uncaring politicians and armed bureaucrats will NOT improve their lives. It is government run amok. I should note that the politician behind these attacks on property rights are "small government" Republicans.

The Stonewall Uprising

PBS has an excellent documentary on the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. What is often forgotten is that millions of gay people were regularly and horribly oppressed by the state. So-called sodomy laws were selectively enforced against blacks and gay people according to the biases of the police. What happened in 1969 was the police once agains raided a gay bar and started hassling, harassing and attacking patrons. This time patrons fought back, which had never happened before. As the police gathered outside to counterattack they found themselves surrounded by hundreds of other angry people who were also tired of how the State treated the LGBT community.

That night changed modern society because the patrons were joined by hundreds of others, then thousands. The gay liberation movement that was born grew to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions. While a gay rights movement later formed, the early gay liberation movement was essentially a libertarian uprising against big government. It was a defense of the individual against the state. Like abolitionism, and the civil rights movement, what started that night pushed forward the cause of liberty and all libertarians ought to applaud it. The following video is about 90 minutes.

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