He writes, “the implied cost-benefit analysis is a sham. Defenders tout IP’s hypothesized benefits while presuming the costs are virtually zero. Ignored are the costs in innovation never ventured for fear of legal reprisal, in resources consumed during litigation, in talent diverted to protecting IP rather than producing useful goods, and so on.”

Rather, innovation in a free market is dependent on the ability – within reason – to imitate competitors because innovation usually occurs in small steps. Richman puts it beautifully, “copying combined with product differentiation equals rising living standards.” The alternative is artificial scarcity induced by a government-enforced monopoly, which leads to higher prices and less innovation.

In today’s dynamic market with falling production costs and increased fear of competition, a firm depends more and more on its intellectual property rights. Enter patent trolling, copyright litigation used as a scare tactic against file sharers, and new legislative attempts to protect IP holders.

On a very related note, anyone who uses Wikipedia, Google or hundreds of other sites are finding their pages darkened today in a blackout protest against pending copyright legislation in both houses of Congress. SOPA and PIPA haven’t been brought up for a floor vote yet, but net activists are making their concerns known, as is the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm, which promises to list the vote on congressmen’s legislative scorecards. Support for the bills comes largely from the music industry, Hollywood and the Chamber of Commerce.

The last phrase may be basic for understanding the report. The groups that prepared it favor using state power to monitor speech in both public and private educational facilities. Students and teachers are to be apprised of the government’s sexual harassment policy and the young should “be educated about what their rights are under Title IX (banning any form of gender discrimination), with special attention paid to encouraging girls to respond assertively to harassment because they are targeted more often than boys.” Moreover, an official for the National Association of Secondary School Principals indicates that bigotry has become dangerously hidden in recent years. Instead of “overt attempts” to make sexual advances, we now have “more use of sexual remarks to degrade or insult someone.”

There is nothing novel about these concerns. We have been living for decades with expanding government surveillance over our minds and emotions, a development that I describe in my books as “the triumph of the therapeutic state.” Sadly the outcry against this tyranny has been so underwhelming that I expect it to go on and on into the distant future. Universities and corporations are already being forced to monitor selectively insensitive speech (such as straights insulting gays but not the reverse), and about twenty years ago I began to notice that men hanging out in gyms were looking over their shoulders lest they be overheard engaging in “hurtful interactions.”  Should we therefore expect any limits to be placed on this meddling done in the name of making us more sensitive?

Note that I believe that instructors should reprimand students for grossly insulting their classmates. But it should not be the federal government’s business to control conversation among students; nor do I see any reason for bureaucrats at the state level to perform this task. Moreover, the AAUW report makes reference to “negative remarks” that students are supposed to be making against gays. This reference seems so loaded that one has to wonder whether the accusers are seeking to punish people for disagreeing with their socially leftist views. Are Christian students or teachers who openly disapprove of gay relations engaging in “negative remarks”? In Canada such accusations have led to criminal charges being brought against the “hate speaker” for being in violation of the federal human rights code.

It should also be clear that male adolescents behave differently from the female kinds (No, Virginia, gender identities are not entirely social constructs); and that flirting with and acting out before females is characteristic of males, and not only of the human ones. The feminists may try to change this by reducing us all to amoebas; but despite the recent successes of social engineering, embattled feminists may still have trouble totally eradicating male identity traits.

Lastly I would note that bringing suits against males for harassing speech often entails “hurtful interactions.” An offended female, even one who decides long after the hurtful stare or unwelcome remarks that she is offended, can bring charges against the offending male. All she needs are a willing attorney (who may take the case on contingency), the appropriate legal form, and a judge who will hear her case. The young lady can then inflict lots of damage, financial and otherwise, on the defendant. Suits of this kind may earn the attorney between one-third and one-half of the settlement, and there is no scarcity of judges who will listen to such cases. Even if the plaintiff loses, her legal costs will be slight. It is private institutions and hapless individuals who have to protect themselves against such procedures; and private schools may be what the AAUW has its sights on.

Presumably public schools already enjoy the special attention of state and federal bureaucracies and teachers’ unions; it is the private ones, and particularly religiously traditional ones, that are a tempting target for government-employed social manipulators. In such enclaves one can still encounter defenses of gender distinctions and critical remarks about the gay movement. Encouraging legal suits against such institutions, under Title Nine or whatever legal hook one finds for one’s grievance, may be exactly what feminist activists have in mind.

If you are unlucky enough to be the target of a criminal investigation — or perhaps just tied in someway to someone who is (a boyfriend? a family member?), the police think they can, without a warrant, affix a GPS monitor under the carriage of your car — anywhere you can’t see it — and follow you around for as long as they like. Apparently tired of wearing the shoe leather down through good old fashioned police work, police have been doing this for a while.

There have been conflicting rulings about whether tracking people with GPS without warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment right against unlawful search and seizure. One such complaint was brought to court by a drug dealer appealing his conviction which was based in part on the use of GPS tracking and led to a life sentence in prison. The DC Federal Court of Appeals was the first court to challenge the practice when it threw out Antoine Jones’ conviction in 2010, finding that the use of GPS to follow him 24-hours a day for a month violated his Constitutional rights. The Justice Department is appealing, and that is where the case stands now, in the High Court.

This is a big one. The next critical test of that ever-thinning line between what constitutes technological evolution and what is in fact, the irrevocable erosion of one’s personal freedoms as codified by the Constitution. How will the justices rule? If they side with the government, most of us know that the aforementioned slippery slope will have hit an ice patch toward an all-out surveillance state: just take a look at the UK. They had to start somewhere.

But not all justices appear inclined to take the ride. In what might be the most positive development for holding the line since arguments began, a number of them yesterday invoked the menacing spector of Big Brother. Yes, that one, from George Orwell’s 1984.

Big Brother Is Watching, from film version of Orwell's 1984

From Wired yesterday:

Justice Stephen Breyer told Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben that, “If you win this case, there is nothing to prevent the police or government from monitoring 24 hours a day every citizen of the United States.”

Breyer said that “sounds like 1984.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wondered aloud whether the government’s position was that it may secretly attach GPS devices to the cars of the nine members of the Supreme Court without a warrant.

“You think they are entitled to do that?” Roberts asked.

“The justices of the Supreme Court?” Dreeben replied.

“So your answer is, ‘yes,” you could tomorrow decide that you put a GPS device on every one of our cars, follow us for a month; no problem under the Constitution?” the chief justice continued.

“Well, equally, Mr. Chief Justice, if the FBI wanted to it could put its team of surveillance agents around the clock on any individual and follow that individual’s movements as they went around on the public streets …, Dreeben replied.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested the government’s position went too far, especially in the age of “smart phones” that contain GPS tracking devices.

“It would be OK to put a computer chip and put it on somebody’s overcoat?” she asked. Dreeben said Sotomayor was off base because her scenario would allow GPS monitoring inside a home. “That is off-limits,” he said.

However, “a car parked in the garage,” he added, “does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

But the justices seemed troubled on whether a warrant was always necessary, and whether they should take into account how long the monitoring continues. “Where do you draw the line?” Justice Samuel Alito asked.

Why go so far as ‘a chip?’ Why not suggest that our cellular phones would give police the same ability — to track us everywhere, even in our homes.

From Catherine Crump at the ACLU:

This kind of (GPS) tracking is extremely invasive, because if the government knows where you are, it knows who you are. As the Jones appellate court explained in its ruling that the government violated the Fourth Amendment, “A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

Cell phone tracking can reveal our private associations and relationships with one another. The government could make note of whenever people being tracked crossed path or spent time together, showing who our friends, associates and lovers are.

If you want to see where the slippery slope of warrantless GPS tracking goes, just check in with the Brits.

Britain’s largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area.

The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitan police from Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the Middle East among its customers. Strictly classified under government protocol as “Listed X”, it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person’s movements in real time.

The disclosure has caused concern among lawyers and privacy groups that large numbers of innocent people could be unwittingly implicated in covert intelligence gathering. The Met has refused to confirm whether the system is used in public order situations, such as during large protests or demonstrations.

There are plenty of privacy activists who would say London is already 1984, given that Big Brother is everywhere there, and in addition, “the eye” in the sky is now carried around in the form of ubiquitous  iPhones and Smart Phones in coats and hip pockets, the GPS and clever “apps” monitoring their every activity online, and off, and without the Constitutional bulwark we enjoy here. For now. We may be one ruling away from becoming what we fear the most. I’m glad that at least some of the justices seem to know it.

Now, several of the occupations, Oakland in particular, are fighting for their survival against police assaults. This video of the police raid on Occupy Oakland brings to mind the assaults of Hosni Mubarak’s thugs on the protesters in Tahrir Square this winter.

It gets worse. This video shows a police officer firing a flashbang grenade at a group of people attempting to help a young protester who had just been wounded by a tear gas canister.

At Occupy Nashville, the police even seem willing to arrest members of the media and charge them with resisting arrest for covering the story. Regardless of how you feel about the original message of Occupy Wall Street, this should be very alarming. These people are American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, and they shouldn’t be attacked like an invading army.

I recently reread “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” Hunter S. Thompson’s account of the controversy surrounding the killing of journalist Ruben Salazar by a L.A. sheriff’s deputy (using a tear gas cannon, incidentally) in 1970, and one line struck me as particularly appropriate today: “When the cops declare open season on journalists, when they feel free to declare any scene of ‘unlawful protest’ a free fire zone, that will be a very ugly day–and not just for journalists.”

Why the Occupiers started protesting is immaterial for the moment; that they have a right to protest is paramount. If we abandon that, we abandon everything that makes this country worth preserving.

I viscerally disliked nursing home deliveries, but upon entering, I was relieved to find that this home was far nicer than the others—it was clean and had individual apartments for each guest. I found the specified room and handed the bouquet to a pleasant elderly woman, who was overjoyed to receive it.

When I returned to the shop, my dad informed me that the nursing home had just called. Not only had I delivered the arrangement to the wrong room, I was at the wrong place altogether–the correct nursing home sat just down the road. I returned shamefaced and apologized profusely to both the woman and the staff (not to mention my parents) for the mix-up. I had screwed up, and it was only right that I take the blame.

Many police departments in this country do not seem to follow that standard of common decency, however. Take this case from Pontiac, South Carolina:

A Gibbs Road couple came home from work Thursday to find their home surrounded by Richland County sheriff’s deputies, their front door kicked in and their home ransacked.

Deputies were executing a search warrant at Wanda and Reginald Blanding’s home Thursday, after drug agents said a confidential informant “made a controlled purchase of crack cocaine from an unknown black male at the location,” according to the search warrant…

Reginald is the only black male that lives at the home. He says when he arrived after the raid, deputies never searched him for drugs and never asked to look through his two cell phones even though the search warrant states that’s one of the things deputies were after. …

The Blandings deny there ever was a drug buy at their home and think deputies got bad information from their informant.

Wanda says deputies emptied nearly every drawer in the home, searched through the attic and their daughter’s bedrooms.

“This is humiliation,” said Wanda. “I mean, come in, I can see the door, go through my room, clothes and everything all over the place. I mean, they went through every room in the house and just tore it up.”

Wanda and Reginald just want an apology and their door to be fixed. …

The sheriff’s office says an apology is just not happening, and they’ll continue investigating this case until they make an arrest.

If police had hit the right house, I’m inclined to think they would have turned up some evidence to support their claim. Nevertheless, in the face of complete absence of evidence, the police refuse to so much as apologize for ransacking this couple’s home. The police, like government as a whole, are fundamentally unaccountable to the public. They can coerce tax dollars from us, so it really doesn’t matter to them if they destroy our property, constitutional rights, or even our lives. Until government agencies face real consequences for this kind of sloppy work, you can expect it to continue. Just don’t expect them to lose a minute’s sleep over it.

Link via–who else?–Radley Balko.

More generally, Obama has repeatedly expressed the view that many people in federal prisons are serving unconscionably long sentences. Yet he has not used his unilateral, absolute, and constitutionally unambiguous clemency power to shorten a single sentence, even though he has not otherwise been reticent about pushing his executive authority to the limit (and beyond). Obama went almost two years, longer than every president except George Washington and George W. Bush, before approving any clemency petitions. So far all 17 of his clemency actions have been pardons for long-ago crimes, most which did not even result in prison sentences, as opposed to commutations, which authorize the early release of current prisoners. While seven of the pardons involved drug offenders, the most severe sentence among them was five years for conspiracy to import marijuana, which 63-year-old Randy Eugene Dyer of Burien, Washington, completed more than 30 years ago. As of mid-2011, Obama had received about 4,000 petitions for commutations,  in addition to 900 that were pending when he took office. He had not approved any.

This is not for lack of glaring injustices. Last year a federal prisoner named Hamedah Hasan, who is seeking clemency with help from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), wrote an open letter to Obama. “I am a mother and grandmother serving my 17th year of a 27-year federal prison sentence for a first time, nonviolent crack cocaine offense,” she said. “I never used or sold drugs, but I was convicted under conspiracy laws for participating in a drug organization by running errands and wiring money. Had I been convicted of a powder cocaine offense, I would be home with my three daughters and two grandchildren by now. I have had a lot of time to think about where I went wrong, and I genuinely take full responsibility for my actions. But I hope you will see that over 16 years in prison is enough time for me to pay my debt to society.”

Another crack offender, Kenneth Harvey, is serving a life sentence for possession of more than 50 grams with intent to deliver, a crime he committed in his early 20s. Although legally required to send Harvey away for life because of two prior drug convictions (neither of which resulted in prison time), the judge who sentenced him recommended that he be granted clemency after 15 years, and an appeals court agreed. Yet Harvey, now 45, has been in prison for more than two decades. Last year USA Today reported that his family “thought when Barack Obama got elected president, they’d have a shot.”

Clarence Aaron, arrested when he was a student at Southern University in Baton Rouge with no criminal record, is serving three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole for arranging a meeting between a childhood friend and a cocaine dealer. He has been behind bars since 1993. “There’s no reason he needs to serve more time,” says [President of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation] Eric Sterling. “The system is rife with these injustices. Obama’s record on clemency is shameful.”

Indeed. Obama’s unwillingness to use his clemency powers to correct these obvious injustices demonstrates a complete lack of moral authority. Defenders will argue that political reality forces him to keep these people in prison. Obama could grant these unfortunate souls mercy, the argument goes, but the Republicans would not show him any. Perhaps it would be his Willie Horton moment and turn him into a one-term president.

But so what? Is the goal of Obama’s presidency to make government more just or to wield political power for its own sake? These are the sort of horrific injustices that every decent man should shout from the rooftops until they are either rectified or his voice gives out, and if Obama cannot bring himself to break out the autopen and free these people, he reveals that he cares more about the political scoreboard than justice.

WILLIAMS: Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?

PERRY: No, sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which — when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United States, if that’s required.

But in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is, you will be executed.

Perry seems to believe that these due process protections exist for the sake of the guilty, not the innocent. He assumes away the very core of Williams’ question. The point is that we don’t know for certain that these people committed heinous crimes, and Perry has proved absolutely incurious about the possibility that Texas might have convicted innocent people. He actively fought an inquiry that could have revealed Cameron Todd Willingham, executed by the state of Texas in 2004, was in fact innocent, and he continues to block potentially exculpatory DNA testing in the case of death row inmate Hank Skinner.

Perry effectively assumes guilt in death penalty cases. He has to. If he allowed himself to believe that these people might be innocent, he would have to entertain the possibility that he is a murderer himself. So, yes, Rick Perry sleeps just fine at night–because he refuses to believe that he could be wrong.

So you’d think the guys at the ATF who ordered Fast and Furious would be finished, right? Their careers completely destroyed and possibly facing prison time?

Well, that might be the just thing, but government is usually the enemy of justice, not its champion. Here’s what really happened:

The ATF has promoted three key supervisors of a controversial sting operation that allowed firearms to be illegally trafficked across the U.S. border into Mexico.

All three have been heavily criticized for pushing the program forward even as it became apparent that it was out of control. At least 2,000 guns were lost and many turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and two at the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

The three supervisors have been given new management positions at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF’s deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency’s Phoenix office.

This illustrates one of the many reasons the government fails so consistently and so thoroughly. Everyone accepts a CYA mentality, whenever someone screws up royally, his superiors have to pretend that all the screw ups responsible are actually super competent and fete them with promotions and awards. Remember when President Bush honored George Tenet and Paul Bremer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom after Tenet told us the case for Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk” and Bremer horribly mismanaged the early days of Iraq’s occupation? That wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s a pervasive feature of government: pretend your mistakes are actually accomplishments. Even if no one believes you, you might be able to say it enough to convince yourself.

Story via Radley Balko.

Predictably, the Twittersphere and media comment pages have been groaning – often literally – with unsolicited socio-economic diagnoses and moral assessments. In the face of such mindless and nihilistic unrest, commentators and bloggers have been eager to tease out of the “meaning” of the recent violence.

Voices on the left have been quick to blame David Cameron’s Conservative-led government’s austerity program, which, against fierce resistance from public sector unions, has been trying to enact significant cuts in Britain’s public spending and eliminate the nation’s deficit. There riots are simply “what happens” when governments try to shave down the welfare state and cut back public sector jobs and youth services. Former mayor of London and veteran Labourite Ken Livingstone claimed that austerity measures had given rise to a “social division” driving the police into confrontation with impoverished communities. Labour MP Harriet Harman was more forthright on BBC’s Newsnight:

People are still very frightened and very worried about whether or not they are going to be able to carry on with their business […] there is a sense that young people feel they are not being listened to. That is not to justify violence. But when you’ve got the trebling of tuition fees, [the Conservative-led government] should think again about that. [...] when you’ve got jobs being cut and youth unemployment rising and they are shutting the job centre in Camberwell….

Consigning the violence to rage over reduced job opportunities and welfare doesn’t quite wash. A large number of the vandals and looters are teenagers on their school vacations (some more or less permanently), rather than desperate twenty- or thirty-somethings recently out of a job and with a family to support. A dearth of job opportunities for the working class youth is not a satisfying explanation: if Britain suffered a shortage of low-skilled jobs, the steady flow of Polish temporary immigrant workers to London would cease immediately. Furthermore, the objects of looting tended to be frivolous luxury consumer items – iPhones, high-tech trainers, jewelry – rather than “essentials” previously denied to them.

Neither can the riots be interpreted as a political gesture: unlike a serious protest, there were no demands articulated on signboards or in collective chants, and no discrimination in the targets of violence – unless you were to nebulously describe the various retail outlets as “the symbols of capitalist oppression,” as some have tried to do, as if stealing an iPhone were a victory in the class war. And as Toby Young wrote in the Daily Telegraph, the rioters hardly represented a beleaguered minority neglected by the state:

So far, those arrested and charged include an 11-year-old girl, a 31-year-old primary school teacher and the 19-year-old daughter of a company director who is currently at Exeter University. The participation of those from relatively affluent backgrounds, either in full-time education or full-time employment, makes a nonsense of the knee-jerk responses of Ken Livingstone and Harriet Harman, blaming cuts to the Education Maintenance Allowance, among other things.

A more plausible “root cause” is the parlous state of British inner-city state education, which has turned out a generation of unemployable youth, who are understandably angry at their dim prospects and their miserable state-provided living environments. This introduces a different, and altogether more damning, diagnosis: the failure of the policies of post-war social democratic orthodoxy, and the cumulative growth of the welfare state, to address the problems of urban poverty and the integration of marginalized classes into wider society – indeed, social democracy’s role in destroying the integrity of families, in discouraging bourgeois aspiration, and in uprooting traditional community values which historically served to harmonize and reconcile society to itself. Brendan O’Neill wrote possibly the final word on this “mob made by the welfare state” in Spiked Online:

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. [...] Nurtured in large part by the welfare state, financially, physically and educationally, socialised more by the agents of welfarism than by their own neighbours or community representatives, these youth have little moral or emotional attachment to the areas they grew up in. [...] We have a saying in Britain for people who undermine their own living quarters – we call it ‘shitting on your own doorstep’. And this rioting suggests that the welfare state has given rise to a generation perfectly happy to do that.

Anthony and I both wrote reviews of  Thaddeus Russell’s recent book, A Renegade History of the United States–mine for this very publication–and we spend the bulk of the podcast exploring some of our favorite parts of that extremely entertaining and informative work. We also talk about Anthony’s forthcoming book on habeas corpus, which Anthony argues is something of a double-edged sword. Although habeas corpus often protects individuals from unlawful detention by the state, Anthony describes how it has also been used by people in power to restrict freedom, such as when slaveholders used it to retrieve escaped slaves. The interview is a relatively brief 16 minutes, but I believe you will find each one highly informative.

This is downright Soviet. If people don’t have the right to record public meetings of government officials, we are in danger of losing one of the bedrocks of republican government, which isn’t terribly healthy as it is. Radley Balko, who knows a thing or two about recording public servants, wryly notes that the cab drivers, who are mostly immigrants “from east Africa and the Middle East,” are outraged and therefore “seem to have a far better grasp of free expression and the need for transparency in government than the federal and city employees working in America’s capital city.”

Government transparency is not a sufficient condition for a corruption-free government, but it’s sure as hell a necessary one. And although this may seem to be a minor incident, government at the federal level has grown dramatically more opaque with, for instance, an explosion in the number of classified documents after 9/11. President Obama pledged to reverse this trend, but that promise has not yielded impressive results. We should not be surprised when local bureaucracies follow the lead of their federal overlords and do everything within their power to shield themselves from public scrutiny.

The professor, John Banzhaf, claims that Catholic’s decision is in violation of a D.C. anti-discrimination law that prohibits discrimination based upon sex.

GW prof John Banzhaf argues that the plan to gender-segregate all of the school’s dorms constitutes illegal sex discrimination under the District of Columbia’s Human Rights Act.

Banzhaf has won more than 100 legal actions under the statute, he said in a statement, adding that the District’s anti-discrimination law “prohibits any discrimination based directly or indirectly upon sex unless it is strictly necessary for the entity to remain in business.”

And since for more than 25 years Catholic University has grown considerably without gender-segregated dorms, “it is very unlikely that this newly-unveiled plan would qualify” as a business necessity, Banzhaf added.

The good news is that people finally seem to be realizing that drug prohibition is no more workable than alcohol prohibition. At the beginning of the month, I discussed a new report calling for an end to the drug war that has continued to spur discussion, but it appears that the report’s luminary authors are far from alone in their assessment. Over at Hit and Run, Jacob Sullum has helpfully rounded up a wide selection of the commentary on this unhappy anniversary, and from Time to The Washington Post to The Chicago Tribune everyone seems to think that it might be time to start developing an exit strategy from this unwinnable quagmire. While visiting CBS’s News for a completely unrelated story, I stumbled upon this relatively critical piece on a policy that was unquestionable fifteen years ago.

And there’s good reason to think that this shift in opinion among pundits will (eventually) change policy. George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan reports here on research that supports the idea that “intellectuals change their minds first, and activists, the rank-and-file, and politicians gradually get into line.” That process appears to take a decade or so–or at least it did in the early to mid twentieth century–but still it offers hope that we can change tragically bad policies…even after forty years of senseless repetition.

U.S. Department of Education spokesman Justin Hamilton confirmed for News10 Wednesday morning federal agents with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), not local S.W.A.T., served the search warrant…

OIG is a semi-independent branch of the education department that executes warrants for criminal offenses such as student aid fraud, embezzlement of federal aid and bribery, according to Hamilton. The agency serves 30 to 35 search warrants a year…

[Stockton] Police officers did not participate in breaking Wright’s door, handcuffing him, or searching his home.

Seriously? The Department of Education has a police force? And it executes paramilitary raids? Words fail.

Update: A summer intern at the Department of Education emailed me to pass along this fact sheet about the Department’s Office of Inspector General and the raid in question. I doubt this is how this intern imagined his first few weeks on the job playing out.

The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson…

The 19-member commission includes Mexico’s former President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil’s ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, as well as the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and the current Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou.

The panel also features prominent Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU’s former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and George Schultz, a former US secretary of state.

It’s revealing that only one of the many political figures on the commission is currently in office. I think most high level politicians know the drug war is a failure. How could they not? However, they fear that voicing such a heresy will instantly brand them as “soft on crime” or “pro-drug” and potentially cost them their office. Better to wait until after retirement to speak the truth on such an emotional issue. It’s becoming more acceptable to question prohibitionist policies in Latin America, which has borne the worst of the fighting, but in the states, supporting the drug war is still the electorally safe route.

In The Republic, Plato famously advanced the idea of “the noble lie,” a myth that political leaders consciously propagate to keep social order. That’s a disturbing thought, but the noble lie seems to be mercifully rare. Unfortunately, the ignoble lie–a myth propagated by a politician for no greater good save his constant reelection–is common as the cold. Politicians’ ignoble lies are hardly limited to drug policy, of course. They employ it whenever the public would rather not hear the truth, so it surfaces frequently in conversations about health care and entitlements among other issues where unpleasant tradeoffs must be accepted.

But the idea of a drug free America is the king of ignoble lies. Every politician knows it’s a fantasy, but if one of them dares to even acknowledge this fact, his opposition will turn him into Tony Montana. This will not change until the public becomes willing to accept uncomfortable truths, or politicians are willing to accept the negative consequences of speaking them. I am not optimistic on either front.