Eric Garner – praag.org

Garner: Innocent actor in Sovereign’s snuff film

Despite its elegant simplicity, the libertarian law is difficult to grasp. This I realized pursuant to the publication of “Eric Garner: 100% innocent under libertarian law.” Some of the smartest, polymathic readers a writer could hope for were easily bullied into believing that by failing, first, to submit to the Sovereign and question him later, Eric Garner had undermined some sacred social compact.

A small-time peddler is killed-by-cop for selling single smokes on a New York street corner. Yet so befuddled were readers over the application of libertarian natural law to the Garner case, that they insisted against all evidence that Garner’s was an understandable death by “civil disobedience.”

“I certainly would applaud those who resist truly immoral laws (like ordering someone to commit torture),” equivocated one writer, “but I am leery to suggest massive civil disobedience of petty regulations which may, in fact, just give rise to more oppressive government to ‘restore law and order.’”

Yes, the poor sod who dared to purchase and dispose of a couple of loose smokes had committed “massive civil disobedience.” Fearing the Sovereign’s vengeance, some of his fellow citizens felt obliged to calibrate just how daringly Garner should have deviated. Did he raise his voice excessively? Did he wave his arms too energetically? All utilitarian, not principled, considerations.

Other readers beat on breast. Hopelessly “torn” were they between my verdict – Garner was an innocent actor in the Sovereign’s snuff film – and the proposition that Garner had an obligation to prostate himself before the law to his overlord’s exacting specifications. By failing to do so, Garner had somehow invited his fate.

“Torn” is a word that better comports with images of Gloria Swanson or Marlene Dietrich mid-swoon. What in bloody blue blazes is there to be “torn” over? The right of a man to stand on the curb with a few “loosies” in-hand, and stay alive?

In claiming that Garner was innocent in natural law, I was – or so I was informed – guilty of implying that he had no moral obligation to obey state-enacted positive law. Woe is me – and woe betides that rascal who counseled that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Here’s the rub about the rudiments of libertarian law. While we all have ideas about what is moral and what’s immoral, libertarianism doesn’t! It has nothing whatsoever to say about morality per se. When libertarians say this or the other is wrong in libertarian law, they mean the following and the following only:

Unprovoked, A initiated aggression against B or his “legitimately owned” property. That’s it!

Libertarianism is thus concerned with the ethics of the use of force. This and this alone is the ambit of libertarian law.

The foundation of libertarianism is the non-aggression axiom. “The non-aggression axiom is the lynchpin of the philosophy of libertarianism,” explains Walter Block:

It states, simply, that it shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another. That is, in the free society, one has the right to manufacture, buy or sell any good or service at any mutually agreeable terms. Thus, there would be no victimless crime prohibitions, price controls, government regulation of the economy, etc.

The concept was unremarkable among 19th century classical liberals, who were Russell Kirk conservatives by any other name. Nowhere was the self-evident nature of natural law more evident than in the matter of Eric Garner. According to a “nationwide USA Today/Pew Research Center poll,” “Americans by nearly 3-1″ agree the police officer was responsible for the death of Eric Garner.

What is immoral is not necessary illegal and vice versa. It is, arguably, immoral to legislate preferences in employment for certain employees, based on the concentration of melanin in their skin. Yet racial set-asides are perfectly legal in some precincts around the country. Conversely, it is utterly moral to sell an item that belongs to you, as Garner did. However, it was illegal for Garner to sell said items, even though he was in his moral right to trade.

Naturally, there are very many difficult moral issues over which natural-rights libertarians – as opposed to Benthamite, utilitarian libertarians – will argue. Abortion, for example.

Based on the non-aggression law, some libertarians hold that abortion is legal in libertarian law, because a woman owns herself and may evict anything from her body. To punish her for exercising dominion over her own body, they claim, would be wrong – even if we think abortion immoral. Other natural-rights libertarians disagree with this position. They say that abortion is aggression against a living, non-aggressive, sentient being.

The debate is mired in morality. But it always returns to what should be legal or illegal in a truly free society: Based on the non-aggression law, should we or should we not proceed with force – for that is what law is – against a woman for what she does to her body.

Law is force. Every time our overlords in D.C. legislate (unconstitutionally, for the most), they grant their gendarmes permission to aggress against an innocent citizen who’s been criminalized. Every new law and regulation licenses law enforcement to initiate mostly unjust, unprovoked force against an innocent, sovereign individual and/or his lawful property – an individual who has done harm to nobody.

Competition in a free society is not aggression. “Eric Garner was not violating anyone’s rights or harming anyone by standing on a street corner and peddling his wares.” The shopkeeper who sicced the cops on Garner had the right to pursue profits. He has no right to the profits he had before the competition arrived on the scene. Not in a free market.

Ultimately, libertarianism’s elegant minimalism as to what is lawful and what’s unlawful comports with the American idea of individual sovereignty, subject to limited, legitimate authority.

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G4S guards accused of migrant’s death found innocent

Three security guards from the controversial security firm G4S have been cleared of manslaughter, despite accusations they killed a 46-year-old man by forcibly restraining him on a charter airline flight.

Jimnmy Mubenga, from Angola, died on the 12 October 2010 after being restrained by guards at Heathrow Airport while on a British Airways flight. He was due to be deported to Angola from the UK.

The guards, Terrence Hughes, 53, Colin Kaler, 52, and Stuart Tribelnig, 39, were accused of killing Mubenga by forcibly pushing his head down and restricting his breathing.

The court heard fellow passengers said Mubenga told the guards he couldn’t breathe. Mubenga was already handcuffed and held down with a seatbelt during the restraining.

In a statement issued on the guards behalf, Alex Preston from Olliers Solicitors said: “Terrence Hughes, Colin Kaler and Stuart Tribelnig are delighted to have been found not guilty so quickly. They bitterly regret the death of Mr Mubenga but have always said they were trying to do a very difficult job in difficult circumstances to the best of their ability.”

“They are grateful to the judge and jury for the care they have taken resolving these sad events,” the statement added.

The hearing comes weeks after the death of Eric Garner in New York, an African-American who also suffocated despite telling police that he couldn’t breathe whilst being restrained.

Mubenga came to the UK with his wife Adrienne Makenda Kambana in 1996, but faced extradition after being involved in a violent nightclub brawl in 2006.

Mubenga’s lawyer, Mark Dennis QC, also told the court he was co-operative before boarding the extradition flight, but became upset after he spoke on the phone in the plane’s toilet cubicle.

“Each officer would have known from their training and from common sense that keeping someone in such a position was likely to cause a person harm yet they did so over a prolonged period and did so ignoring shouts from Mr Mubenga that he was in trouble,” Dennis said.

“‘I can’t breathe’ shouts were heard by many a passenger seated further away.”

Following the court hearing, a number of human rights organizations expressed their disappointment, including Amnesty International UK, who said the outcome ignored the ‘multiple failings’ that led to Mubenga’s death.

The Migrants Rights Network also said the outcome would not provide comfort to immigrants facing deportation from the UK.

“Once again a migrant has lost their life in detention, and once again no one will ultimately be held to account,” said MRN’s action director Jerome Phelps.

“There needs to be a fundamental review of the detention and deportation system, to ensure that the UK does not needlessly jeopardize the lives of people who have come here in search of a better future.”

Eric Garner: 100% innocent under libertarian law

Eric Garner was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him. It can be argued, if anything, that Garner was being entrepreneurial. He had been trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s “slave patrol” and “Comrade” Andrew Cuomo’s “Cigarette Strike Force,” in the words of liberty’s Don Quixote, William Norman Grigg.

Had Garner’s naturally licit trade not been criminalized by today’s Tammany Hall, he’d be alive today.

“Garner,” wrote Grigg, “had suffered years of pointless and unnecessary harassment by the costumed predators employed by the New York Police Department,” when he declared, minutes before he was killed: “Every time you see me, you want to mess with me! I’m tired of it! It stops today!”

Grigg noted: “Eric Garner’s exasperated proclamation ‘It stops today!’ is cognate with ‘Don’t tread on me.’”

The killing of Eric Garner was caught on camera and uploaded to YouTube. A grand jury, however, failed to see what was as plain as day to everyone else as well as to the city medical examiner. An autopsy revealed that the Garner death was a homicide, brought on, July 17, by “compression of the neck and chest, along with Garner’s positioning on the ground while being restrained by police.”

The footage also shows that the cops who jumped Eric Garner with such enthusiasm were oblivious to his repeated pleas for air. Neither was an attempt at resuscitation commenced once they realized Garner was unresponsive. Instead, the cops panicked, barking orders at observes to disperse.

Garner’s manner of death conjures the manner in which Carol Anne Gotbaum met her untimely demise, in 2008. Gotbaum, a petite, 45-year-old slip of a woman – she weighed 105 pounds – was likely asphyxiated in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport by some corpulent cops. She had become distraught – not dangerous – after she was detained at the airport and not permitted to proceed to her destination. Unhinged, Gotbaum took off down the concourse hollering. She was quickly scrummed by meaty policemen, tackled to the ground, a colossal knee jabbed into her skinny spine. Gotbaum was then thrown in a holding cell, where she was shackled and chained to a bench. Minutes later Gotbaum was dead.

Her bruised body was autopsied. As inevitably as water spiraling down a plughole, the police were exonerated. Famous forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden said: “… the most likely cause of death has to do with asphyxia and could be a result of too much pressure on her chest when they were putting on the handcuffs and the shackles.”

Carol Anne Gotbaum was white. Cops are equal-opportunity offenders. Factoring into account the disproportionate representation of blacks among the population of law-breakers, cops aggress against whites and blacks more or less equally. (Except that whites don’t riot and loot.)

Not to be conflated are the cases of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, of Ferguson fame. While the evidence of police wrongdoing in Garner’s death is incontrovertible, the reverse is true in Brown versus Officer Darren Wilson.

As the evidence shows, Michael Brown initiated aggression. He had aggressed against the store keeper and the policeman, who protected himself from this rushing mountain of flesh. In libertarian law, the individual may defends himself against initiated aggression. He may not initiate aggression against a non-aggressor.

Eric Garner, on the other hand, had aggressed against nobody. Whereas Brown was stealing cigarillos; Garner was selling his own cigarettes. The “law” he violated was one that violated Garner’s individual, natural right to dispose of his own property – “loosies” – at will.

In libertarian law, Garner is thus 100 percent innocent, for the good libertarian abides by the axiom of non-aggression. When enforcers of the shakedown syndicate came around to bust him, Garner raised his voice, gestured and turned to walk away from his harassers. He did not aggress against or hurt any of the goons.

To plagiarize myself in “Tasers ‘R’ Us,” “Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician [or policeman] unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, even killed.”

Again: Garner had obeyed the libertarian, natural law absolutely. He was trading peacefully. In the same spirit, he turned to walk away from a confrontation. Befitting this pacific pattern, Garner had broken up a street fight prior to his murder.

The government has a monopoly over making and enforcing law – it decides what is legal and what isn’t. Thus it behooves thinking people to question the monopolist and his laws. After all, cautioned the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, “What is legally just, may not be what is naturally just.” “Statutory man-made law” is not necessarily just law.

Unlike the positive law, which is state-created; natural law in not enacted. Rather, it is a higher law – a system of ethics – knowable through reason, revelation and experience. “By natural law,” propounded McClellan in “Liberty, Order, And Justice,” “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”

Eric Garner was on “public” property. Had he been trespassing on private property, the proprietor would have been in his right to remove him. However, Garner was not violating anyone’s rights or harming anyone by standing on a street corner and peddling his wares – that is unless the malevolent competition that sicced the cops on him has a property right in their prior profits. They don’t.

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