Freespace

Firefighters have relatively safe jobs

Steven Greenhut has the story.

Anne & Pete Sibley play Monticello

C and I went up to Sebastopol this past weekend to see Red Molly, one of my favorite music groups. They were great; their closing number, Oklahoma Hills, was particularly nice, as were the new songs from Molly Venter's forthcoming album. Opening for them that night were Anne & Pete Sibley, who also joined them on a number of songs. Here on their blog, the Sibleys have a short video of their spontaneous effort at harmony in Monticello's dome room, with the Honey Dewdrops. Pretty nice results, I'd say.

Amusing presidential trivia bit

Pres. Obama will be the only president other than FDR to be sworn in four times. He was sworn in twice because of the mistake last time around, and because Inauguration Day falls on a Sunday this year, he'll be sworn in on Sunday and then again at the ceremony Monday.

Talking property rights, Progressivism, and guns with A&G

The podcast recording of my appearance with Armstrong & Getty this morning is now available online.

Update: Here is the cat in question:

More privacy? Or less precision?

When it comes to surveillance and the right not to be searched, remember that precision and accuracy are a good thing for the innocent. If you’re going to have to be searched in the first place, then you should want as precise and targeted a search as possible in order to eliminate false positives and false negatives. Less accurate search technologies or processes open the door to more mistakes in the search, more human errors in interpreting results, and more possibilities for corruption. That’s why I think that, on balance, accurate search technology is better for our privacy rights than a hand pat-down search by some TSA flunky. I don’t like either one, of course—but if it has to be a person touching me or a computer picture, I’d prefer the latter. Computer images still have to be interpreted, so there’s still plenty of room for improvement, but they’re more objective than someone just acting on a hunch.

That’s why I’m not sure this story about the TSA eliminating the “naked scanner” technology is a good thing. Note that the news report says “Right now the TSA uses two types of scanners. One makes a generic image showing where agents should look for an object on the traveler’s body. Those scanners are staying.” A “generic image” that agents interpret to decide where to “look” is more likely to produce false positives, whether innocently or not—and thus more likely to be a greater burden on our rights than a more precise system.

Talking Koontz with Armstrong & Getty

I'll be in the studio with Armstrong & Getty on Friday at 8 to discuss PLF's case, Koontz v. St. Johns' Water Management District. You can learn more about the case here.

(Radio show appearences are always subject to last minute changes.)

Speaking in D.C. February 7

I'll be speaking at the Cato Institute forum on "Ongoing Challenges to Obamacare" on February 7, at 4 pm eastern. You can watch live online. More information here. I'll be joined on the panel by Christina Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute (and my wife), and Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute. We'll all talk about the Obamacare cases we're continuing to litigate.

The relationship between guns and freedom

Via The Skeptical Libertarian, I discovered this post from Prof. David Friedman on the relationship of guns and freedom, which echoed some thoughts I’d been having recently. In recent arguments about gun restrictions, the point’s been frequently made that guns help the populace to fend off tyranny. And although to some extent I agree with that, I’m not so sure that the relationship is causal so much as correlational. It’s not exactly that we should be free to own guns because we can then protect ourselves from a tyrant—it’s that a populace dependent upon the state to provide the kinds of protection that require firearms is thereby rendered less responsible and less self-sustaining. Imagine the Environmentalist Utopia in which we’re forced to turn in our cars and to rely on public transportation. Among the many other consequences of such a policy, the populace would be rendered more dependent upon—and hence less skeptical toward—the government. (And think of all the places we wouldn’t go or think of going.) Or consider a society in which people gave up their right to read, in exchange for the government providing them with reading services. Obviously the government’s temptation to abuse this power would be great—which is what most people have been focusing on in the gun argument—but the consequences for the people would be deleterious, too. It would reduce individual initiative and self-responsibility. And think of all the things we wouldn’t read, or think of reading.

A government that is not willing to allow its people the firearms necessary to defend themselves also must regard them as so irresponsible and childish that the rest of their lives must also be guided by a coddling, dehumanizing big brother attitude. In short, a society in which people are forced to rely on the police and the state’s army to protect themselves is one that lacks independence and gumption, and in which those who are responsible and self-directed are forced to give up their capacity for individual initiative in order that the irresponsible and incapable minority not commit wrongs or accidents.

Of course, a people who are responsible, and are seen as responsible, are both more likely to possess firearms for self-defense and to resent government intrusion into their private lives. In that sense, I think gun ownership and liberty have a more correlational than causal connection.

PLF in the Supreme Court, again

My friend and colleague Paul Beard is arguing Koontz v. St. John's Water Mgt Dist. before the Supreme Court this morning. You can follow the action on PLF's blog or on Twitter.

Anachronistic English in Lincoln

An amusing article about the problems with the dialogue in Lincoln. I noticed some of these when I saw it, particularly the name Kevin, but I was also impressed that the writers evidently tried to use enough of the genuine language of the time to elevate the realism a bit. Of course, when you read as much eighteenth and nineteenth century American political writing as I do, you start to recognize certain patterns and locutions. It's amusing to me when people fall for fake founding father quotations that are obviously anachronistic, like the one where George Washington supposedly said that "property rights" are as essential as other kinds of rights. Washington certainly believed this in substance, but it would be a rare find, indeed, if you could point to a founding father using the phrase "property rights," or using the modern second person form of rhetorical address.