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Utah’s Porn Resolution is an Obscenity

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Pornographic film set, December 2007. Pictured...
Pornographic film set, December 2007. Pictured are Mikey Butders, Cali Chase, and a photographer simply identified as Nicole.The photograph was taken by Larry Knowles for an article for The Naughty American website called “One Fine Day on a Porn Set” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On April 19, Utah governor Gary Herbert signed a resolution passed and forwarded to him by both houses of the state’s legislature: “[T]he Legislature of the state of Utah, the Governor concurring therein, recognizes that pornography is a public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms; and recognizes the need for education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level in order to address the pornography epidemic that is harming the citizens of Utah and the nation.”

For the moment, the resolution has no real legal effect. It’s just a statement of sentiment and resolve to eventually do … well, something. Par for the course in political demagoguery, in other words. It is nonetheless, to use a word that appears down in the resolution’s detailed list of complaints, “toxic” in two ways.

The first is obvious: We have a First Amendment for a reason, and claims that it only extends to whatever speech and press politicians don’t think they can make hay by attacking this week don’t stand up to scrutiny.

I don’t have to like porn (I’m not going to try to convince you I’ve never looked at it). You don’t have to like porn (maybe you do, maybe you don’t). Governor Herbert and the Utah legislature don’t have to like porn (yes, I do wonder). If you don’t like it, don’t view it. Unless the participants in it are children or adults acting under compulsion, whether or not anyone else views it is None. Of. Your. Business.

Secondly, resolutions of this kind further degrade and politicize the terms “public health” and “epidemic.” At one time, those terms were arguably useful. They referred to legitimate epidemiology, i.e. the spread of pathogens (the prime example being the tale of John Snow tracing a cholera epidemic to a particular well and ending it by removing the pump handle).

Volitional human behavior — such as having sex in front of a camera or watching people have sex on camera — isn’t a pathogen per se, any more than “gun violence” — another “public health” hobgoblin raised by demagogues for political purposes — is.

And as has historically been the case with “gun violence” per the Centers for Disease Control et. al, Herbert and company fudge the evidence to reach the results they want regardless of the facts. As the Free Speech Coalition notes, “access to adult entertainment correlates pretty clearly historically and geographically with declines in sex crime.” Which may explain why rape reports declined by 14% between 2005 and 2014 in Utah, the state with America’s highest porn consumption rate.

Perhaps Herbert and his pals should work on ending the remaining 86% of rapes instead of on obscene grandstanding.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“The Price We Pay for a Civilized Society,” 2016 Edition

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English: Many dollar banknotes.
Hundred dollar banknotes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Tax Day,” the deadline for filing individual federal income tax returns, falls on April 18 this year. Usually it’s April 15, but a federal holiday, Emancipation Day, bought you the weekend if you’re running late. I feel your pain. Sackcloth and ashes! Wailing and gnashing of teeth!

In addition to the annoyance of filling out a bunch of paperwork and maybe even sending a check to Uncle Sam if he didn’t take as much as he wanted out of your paychecks over the course of 2015, you’re in for the usual series of lectures about how this business or that billionaire didn’t pay “their fair share.” Case in point: Javier E. David’s April 16 column for CNBC, “Corporate tax dodging costing US billions in annual income.”

Let’s try an experiment.  I have a dollar in my pocket. OK, I’m taking it out. Now, instead of giving it to you, I’m putting it back in my pocket. Did my actions “cost” you a dollar? No, they didn’t. That dollar was never yours to begin with.

Similarly, when David complains that “Apple, General Electric, Microsoft and Google engage in tax havens that costs [sic] the US $111 billion annually,” he’s getting it backward. That money belongs to Apple, General Electric, Microsoft and Google, not to “the US” (by which David means “the US government”). Wanting it and not getting it is not a “cost.”

Ditto the 1040 you’ve probably filed or are about to file. In most cases, every dime involved is money you earned that the government previously embezzled from your paycheck, or demands that you cough up now (I say “most cases” because some lower income filers end up getting back, through “refundable credits,” money than they paid in).

So here comes the libertarian line that induces tantrums and seizures in lovers of big government:

Taxation is not, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, “the price we pay for a civilized society.” Taxation is theft, pure and simple. It’s no different in principle than any other embezzlement scheme or protection racket.

If there’s a difference at all, it’s a difference of manners. Muggers and extortionists are morally superior to government in that at least they don’t pretend they’re doing this stuff to you for your own good.

Next time a politician regales you with tales of all the great things he intends to spend billions on, remember who he’s getting that money from, and how.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Election 2016: The Perils of Political Welfare

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Libertarians have traditionally opposed calls for “public financing” of elections, as well as the current system under which candidates can receive “matching funds” from the Federal Election Commission. In 1996, Libertarian Party nominee-apparent Harry Browne mused about applying for such funding, refusing to commit one way or another until, at the party’s national convention, someone in the crowd screamed “SAY IT! SAY IT!” at him and he begrudgingly announced he wouldn’t seek a government welfare check. And that was the end of that … for the next 16 years, anyway

When former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson dropped out of the 2012 Republican nomination contest and sought the Libertarian nomination instead, some party activists were concerned about his campaign debt (as of April 2012) of about $150,000. No problem, said Johnson. He’d qualify for matching funds and pay off that debt.

Qualify he did, receiving more than $600,000 in political welfare. But it turned out his actual debt had been six times as much as originally reported — more than a million dollars — and his campaign committee ended the general election campaign more than $1.5 million in debt.

In 2016, Johnson is back for a second run on the Libertarian ticket and is thus far the closest thing to a media darling the party has ever enjoyed.

But the $1.5 million debt remains unpaid. And on April 5, the Federal Election Commission notified Johnson and his campaign that it wants a good chunk of that 2012 welfare check back. It deems more than $330,000 in “matching funds” to have been improperly spent. The campaign has 30 days to cough up.

What was shaping up as a banner year for a credible third party presidential campaign seems to be going south for Gary Johnson — and for the Libertarian Party, if it nominates him next month at its national convention in Orlando.

Fortunately, the party has other options. Among others, software tycoon John McAfee, libertarian talk radio host Darryl W. Perry, and former Fox producer Austin Petersen have offered themselves up as presidential prospects.

As a long-time partisan Libertarian, I’d hate to see my party set itself up to come in a distant fourth place this November, behind likely Green Party nominee Jill Stein. That’s already a distinct possibility given the likelihood that Bernie Sanders’s supporters will desert a Hillary Clinton Democratic campaign for Stein. It will get a lot more likely if the Libertarian Party nominates a political welfare queen who can’t balance his campaign’s checkbook.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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