One thing I never understand about libertarians is how they focus on how, say, environmental regulations enslave us all! and don't seem to give a shit about real-life, obvious infringements of freedom. Is it because they only care when it affects corporations? Or maybe they only care when it affects white people, unlike this story about reporting while black:
“What’s The New York Times doing down here?” asked an incredulous black man. He and about a dozen other men were standing in front of a clapboard house in Salisbury[, North Carolina]. I observed several drug sales there within minutes of arriving.
“Man, you a cop,” said another. “Hey, this guy’s a cop!”
“You’ve got me wrong,” I said trying to sound casual as the men looked at me warily. I started to pull my press identification out of my wallet. “I’m a reporter. I’m just trying to talk to you about your neighborhood.”
In the distance I heard neighborhood lookouts calling: “Five-O! Five-O!” — a universal code in American ghettos for the approaching police. I thought they were talking about me, but thought again as three police cars skidded to a stop in front of us.
A tall white police officer got out of his car and ordered me toward him. Two other police officers, a white woman and a black man, stood outside of their cars nearby. I complied. Without so much as a question, the officer shoved my face down on the sheet metal and cuffed me so tightly that my fingertips tingled.
“They’re on too tight!” I protested.
“They’re not meant for comfort,” he replied.
...
After a quick check for outstanding warrants, the handcuffs were unlocked and my wallet returned without apology or explanation beyond their implication that my approaching young black men on a public sidewalk was somehow flouting the law.
“This is a dangerous area,” the officer told me. “You can’t just stand out here. We have ordinances.”
“This is America,” I said angrily, in that moment supremely unconcerned about whether this was standard police procedure or a useful law enforcement tool or whatever anybody else wanted to call it. “I have a right to talk to anyone I like, wherever I like.”
The female officer trumped my naïve soliloquy, though: “Sir, this is the South. We have different laws down here.”
Then we get the comedy:
I tried to appeal to the African-American officer out of some sense of solidarity.
“This is bad area,” he told me. “We have to protect ourselves out here.”
As the police drove away, I turned again to my would-be interview subjects. Surely now they believed I was a reporter.
I found their skepticism had only deepened.
“Man, you know what would have happened to one of us if we talked to them that way?” said one disbelieving man as he walked away from me and my blank notebook. “We’d be in jail right now.”
Another one of the features of libertarian ideology that I find ridiculous is the idea that local government is necessarily more freedom-loving than state government, and state government better than the federal government. When in fact it's the state and local governments that are usually the most freedom-depriving, captured by faction and not subject to scrutiny by anything like a functioning press. Until some reporter from a powerful institution like the NYTimes decides to show up, and then it's an issue for 5 minutes, maybe 6. Without that amplification, no one ever even hears about it.
(Via P6.)
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