Tag: law

Mailvox: defenses of dishonesty

RobertT writes:

So anyone who has ever worked for wages at an hourly wage is inherently
dishonest? That makes sense. How else do people get paid, except for
their time? That concept is as old as time itself. Service businesses
aren’t selling a product, they’re selling their time. And they generally
get a contract before doing anything just to make sure there are no
misunderstandings. This is how I work and my clients worship the ground I
walk on.  I don’t think much of attorneys either as a group, but maybe this is a little bit over the top.

No, there is nothing inherently dishonest about working for wages at an hourly wage.  But there is a fundamental distinction between ““billable hours” and fees charged “based on the time they’ve supposedly put in rather than concrete results” and working for hourly wages.  The distinction is based on the difference between wages, which are paid by an employer who has the power to provide oversight and manage performance, and fees, which are paid by a client who is completely at the mercy of the fee-charger.

Fees of this sort are deceptive because they are based on a fundamental falsehood, which is the labor theory of value.  They are primarily the result of government intervention in the economy, which creates artificial shortages that permit the government-protected fee charger to force the client to purchase the fee charger’s time rather than the service he actually wishes to charge.

Fee chargers often resort to a deceptive defense, by claiming that they must charge for their time because they don’t know exactly how long it will take to provide the service.  This defense is belied by the fact that products and services in markets permitted to be competitive are delivered despite the fact that their time-cost is unknown.  For example, when I sign a book contract, I don’t know how long it will take to write the book anymore than a lawyer knows how long it will take to resolve a legal case.  I therefore assume part of the risk; the longer I take to write the book, the more my compensation per hour will be reduced.

The fee charger, on the other hand, not only structures the arrangement so that his client assumes all of the risk, but also leaves the client at his mercy because the only hard limits on his time cost are his conscience and the client’s solvency.  Even if the fee charger has a conscience and bills the service in the actual amount of time required to perform it, this doesn’t change the fact that the nature of the structure is intrinsically corrupt.

Logos doesn’t even attempt a defense, but tends to concur:

I’m a lawyer, and I admit that I hate just about every lawyer I’ve come
into contact with. I’m still naive enough to try to make good arguments
and win cases, but lawyers I work with abhor the possibility of closing
a matter early or letting me get credit for winning it (I even have to
fight to sign my name on my own work product, which is damn good). It
makes me sad because we are supposed to be in a noble profession that
fights for the rule of law against all who would threaten it, especially
government.

I actually have an amount of sympathy for those lawyers who entered the profession without understanding its corrupt and corrupting nature.  Neither pre-law nor law school really explicate the truth for them, but rather give it to them in small doses so that only the most perceptive law student could put into any kind of coherent perspective.  One of my best friends is a lawyer, he was fired from his first law firm due to his unwillingness to bill nonexistent hours, and he is generally a man of good conscience.  But even he sees the problematic aspects of the system.  Those individuals of good will who chose to become a lawyer may well be bothered by the genuine hatred and disdain which so many people feel for them, but then, no doubt there are nice, good, honest bankers too.  So long as he is an officer of the court, a lawyer is a sworn agent of the legal system and cannot credibly disassociate himself from it.

And finally, robwbright attempts to get lawyerly, which is always unwise when dealing with a superintelligence armed with facts and logic, at least outside the courtroom.

Now, Vox said something I find a bit ironic.  “if one doesn’t know
the difference between written law and case law, and understand how the
latter trumps the former, it’s not even possible to have an informed
opinion on the issue.”

Vox, if you’re going to rant about
something, at least get the terminology right, or YOU risk appearing as
if it’s not even possible for you to have an informed opinion about it.

By
“written law”, I assume you mean statutory law. However, that’s not a
normal/common way to say/describe it, because case law is also most
certainly written. Perhaps I misunderstand your meaning of “written
law”, but that’s not my fault, as your term “written law” is not
precise. Common law might be referred to as “unwritten law”, but that’s
not case law, either.

And no, case law most certainly does NOT
trump statutory law in any court in which I have practiced (2 states, 7
counties, District Court of Appeals, State Supreme Court, Federal
District Court and Court of Appeals).

Given that robwbright quite clearly understood the precise distinction I was making between the two distinct types of law, a distinction that the average layman does not even know exists, this is nothing more than a shallow attempt at rhetorically undermining my point while appealing to his own authority.  I used the term “written law” because I am not addressing an audience of lawyers here, and there is absolutely no need to resort to legal jargon in order to make clear the difference between the statutory laws that are written and passed by the elected legislatures, (which is what most people understand the law to be), and the non-laws that are the set of existing rulings which made new interpretations of law and can be cited as precedent, and which the lawyers in the system agree to mutually pretend are “case laws” possessed of a standing intrinsically superior to the legislative laws.

The fact that robwbright’s objection is a trivial and deceptive one can be shown by the U.S. legal jargon “black letter law”, which means “well-established case law”.  After all, statutory law is printed in black letters too… so how can anyone possibly know what “black letter law” is?  It could be statutory law, it could be case law, it could be regulatory law, right?  If we are to accept his lawyerly logic, we must assume that any judge or lawyer who uses the term “black letter law” risks appearing as if it’s not even possible for them to have an informed opinion about it.  I trust this demonstrates how feigning ignorance and confusion is a counterproductive means of attempting to rhetorically undermine an opponent, particularly when one is attempting to establish oneself as a trustworthy authority.  Henceforth, I will use the terms “legislative law” for “written law” or “statutory law”, and “interpretive rulings” for “case law”, in the interest of precision and clarity.

He then appeals to the authority of his own experience in claiming that interpretive rulings do not trump legislative law in any court in which he has practiced.  However, I have personally witnessed interpretive rulings repeatedly trump legislative law in several Minnesota and Federal District Courts, and there are no shortage of similar examples I could cite.  But since I cannot expect to win competing appeals to personal experience with a lawyer on this subject, I will have to do better than that.  Which, as it happens, is simple enough, based on logic and legal history.

Being a lawyer, robwbright must know that interpretive rulings always trump legislative law at the court’s discretion, otherwise it would not be possible for “the set of existing rulings which made new interpretations of law and, therefore, can be cited as precedent” to be so often used by the Supreme Court and other courts for the purpose of overturning legislative laws.  If we are to accept his reasoning, it is impossible for a legislative ban on abortion to be overturned… except by a subsequent action on the part of the relevant legislature.

Hence the lawyer hate

Susan Walsh asked me about why I despise lawyers:

Care to explain? I actually know a ton of married couples where both are lawyers, the dynamic is positive, the kids are high achieving, everyone seems to have good values. Lawyers marry and have families, and most of them do corporate law. Why the hate?

Lawyers are among the most useless, parasitical, and unethical scum on the planet.  They are a shameless guild in the medieval sense that uses the government to erect artificial barriers to competition, they are fundamentally and intrinsically dishonest about what they do and for whom they work.  Talk to a lawyer sometime about what “the law” truly is… and if you can catch one being honest for a change, he’ll tell you “whatever a judge declares it to be”.

Nota bene: if one doesn’t know the difference between written law and case law, and understand how the latter trumps the former, it’s not even possible to have an informed opinion on the issue.

No one who works in an industry based on “billable hours” and charges
fees based on the time they’ve supposedly put in rather than concrete
results delivered can claim to be even remotely honest. One thing I’ve
noticed in my dealings with lawyers in five countries is that if you
make the mistake of trying to hire a reputable, top-notch lawyer to
actually do something, the first thing he usually tries to do is hire another lawyer to do the actual work for him.

Now, the domesticated form of lawyer, the in-house counsel, can be all
right, mostly because they can’t pull all the usual stunts since
they’re on salary… even though they try to hire outside counsel every
time they’re not kept on a tight leash.

Finally, lawyers are the larval form of politicians.

Gay marriage eliminates motherhood

Time exposes yet another lie from the pro-homogamy crowd:

France is set to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.  The move, which has outraged Catholics, means only the word “parents”
would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and
same-sex couples. The draft law states that “marriage is a union of two people, of
different or the same gender”. It says all references to “mothers and fathers” in the civil code –
which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply “parents”. 

The homogamy advocates often like to ask how government-approved “gay marriage” could possibly affect normal heterosexual marriages.  Here is the answer: by eliminating both maternal and paternal status in law.  Nor is France the only place this legal assault on the traditional concepts of motherhood and fatherhood are taking place; the California Senate has sent up a trial balloon in its bill 777 which appears to be an attempt to remove the traditional concepts from the state educational system.

The interesting thing will be how this end to the legal statuses of “mother” and “father” will affect divorce law.  After all, it won’t be possible to assume that child custody will be given to the mother, once that position is legally abolished.  One wonders if the pro-homogamy members of the more progressive sex will rethink their support for the fake institution if they realize it may eventually result in their losing a substantial portion of their family court advantage.

Never count on a court

They always find a way to do what the politicians want them to do. Their job isn’t oversight, as it is commonly thought, but finding ways to publicly rationalize the obviously ridiculous:

Germany’s top court on Wednesday rejected calls to block ratification of the European Stability Mechanism, triggering a modest sigh of relief from financial markets and clearing the way for implementation of an important tool in Europe’s effort to contain its three-year-old debt crisis.

In a decision read from the bench of the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, the red-robed judges rejected six requests for an injunction to prevent Germany’s president from signing the treaty establishing the 500 billion euro ($643.7 billion) permanent rescue fund.
Reuters Judges at Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe.

The decision eliminates the threat that Germany, the euro zone’s largest economy and paymaster, would be blocked from participating, which would have effectively scuppered the fund and potentially set off a financial panic.

What the courts do, both in Europe and the USA, is to come up with language to circumvent the clear language of black letter law. Consider the following text:

a) Article 136 (3) TFEU does not change the orientation of the monetary union, nor does it remove the prohibition contained in Article 125 TFEU of assuming the liabilities of other Member States; it merely contains a clarification. The measures of stability support of the Member States are not measures of monetary policy for which, under Article 3 (1) point (c) TFEU, the European Union would be competent. The granting of financial assistance is a measure of economic policy, for which the Member States are competent.

In other words, the prohibited action is legal, not because the prohibition has been removed by court fiat, but because the prohibited action is supposed to not be the action everyone knows it to be. In this case, mere assistance is being granted, which is legal, instead of liability being assumed. Of course, the assistance being granted is the effective assumption of the liability.

This is why Tocqueville was correct to point out that it was America’s populace, and not her laws, that made America great. But America’s populace has changed dramatically, and that is why, as Tocqueville correctly predicted is no longer great.

Obama’s murderous legacy

Even black left-liberals are troubled by what they realize is likely the chief legacy of Barack Obama’s term of misrule:

Let us grant that the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki, said to be the mastermind behind the foiled underwear bomb plot, should not much trouble us. But surely the killing of his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and the secrecy around both acts, should.

I like to think that the junior Awlaki’s (reportedly accidental) death weighs heavy on the president’s conscience. In fact that weight does nothing to change the net result — from this point forward the presidency means the right to unilaterally declare American citizens to be American enemies, and then kill them.

It seems America’s liberals and conservatives – both of whom are largely misnamed – share a common inability to grasp the obvious consequences of the actions of the politicians they support. Ta-Nehesi Coates is a rare exception to this, as he clearly sees how the precedent set by the Obama administration can easily be used against them.

The “creeper” debacle was usefully informative in this regard. John Scalzi and his fans illustrated they simply could not recognize that the ability to socially ostracize a “creep” necessarily entails the ability to ostracize any other behavior-based group, and in most cases, any identity-based group as well. In precisely the same manner, most Democrats and many Republicans presently fail to grasp that the ability to legally assassinate a Muslim who is an American citizen on the sole basis of being a President-declared enemy necessarily entails the ability to legally assassinate any American citizen, for any reason, without oversight.

No doubt everyone will belatedly begin to realize this should a future president begin exercising his power to legally assassinate SWPLs. Or church-goers. Or Jews.

This isn’t a Democrat-Republican issue, it is a totalitarian-libertarian one. Coates is astute enough to understand that even if Obama is extremely unlikely to decide to assassinate him, he might not be so fortunate with the next president. Or the one after that. The murderous precedent has been set, and it is the imperial power of the presidency to unilaterally declare death sentences that will be the chief legacy of Barack Obama.

The state of the kleptocracy

Barry Ritholtz provides a useful summary of the crimes committed by the financial sector, complete with links and sources:

Laundering money for drug cartels. See this, this, this and this (indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis)

Laundering money for terrorists

Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments.

Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide.

Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts

Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them.

If it is not eminently clear that there is no rule of law whatsoever in the USA, this should suffice to prove it. It should come as no surprise that financial crime and corruption are on the upswing, as it has become increasingly obvious, even to those who don’t pay any attention to the financial sector, that the entire system is a criminal enterprise run by short-sighted financial gangsters. However, since they’re fast running out of other people’s cows to milk, as exhibited by the fact that less than one-third of the people who owe $1 trillion in school loans are repaying anything, the whole structure appears to be rapidly approaching collapse.

Some say it will end in fire (inflation), others in ice (deflation). But either way, it will end.

In the meantime, be sure to start a corporation and hire yourself before committing any crimes. Then fire yourself, and tell the police that you are no longer with the company when they come to investigate. They will then turn the matter over to the appropriate regulatory agency, which will fine the corporation about five percent of the profit you made from your illegal acts. This is what passes for criminal justice in America circa 2012.

WND column

Conservatives and Forced Consumption

It is said that hope springs eternal in the human breast. This is certainly true when it comes to Republicans, as no sooner had Chief Justice Roberts exploded all of the expectations that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would be overturned due to the mandate that requires Americans to make certain purchases or face a financial penalty than various Republican commentators were attempting to manufacture a silver lining from the unadulterated equine ejectus of Roberts’ opinion.

Supreme Court stimulus

Or how Judge Roberts fixed the housing market. I think one of the more interesting aspects of the surprise decision by the Supreme Court to declare forced consumption constitutional by virtue of the federal taxing power is its potential use as a device for economic intervention. Since savings is the bane of the neo-Keynesians, the newfound ability of the federal government to dictate consumption means that there need never again be a savings glut, a demand gap, or what Paul Krugman decries as insufficient inflation.

For example, since there is presently insufficient demand in the housing market, the Congress can address this by simply passing a law requiring everyone with an annual income of more than $75,000 who does not presently have a mortgage to purchase a house with a price of at least $250,000 or face paying a tax of $15,000. Because the annual cost of the mortgage payments would only come to around $11,500 at current low interest rates, most people would choose to purchase a house rather than pay the tax, especially since there would be an implied “Roberts Put” providing a reasonable expectation of decent profits on the forced investment. Such a law would be perfectly constitutional, as per the court’s recent decision, and it would have an undeniably inflationary effect on home prices, bank assets, and national wealth while reducing those pernicious savings rates and ending debt-deflation in the household sector.

Surely permanent economic prosperity is nigh!

Supreme Court: Obamacare is constitutional

This is the first Scotusblog take: “So the mandate is constitutional. Chief Justice Roberts joins the left of the Court…. The bottom line: the entire ACA is upheld, with the exception that the federal government’s power to terminate states’ Medicaid funds is narrowly read.”

People are still reading the opinion, but it would appear that the Court did its usual trick of admitting that the law is unconstitutional on its face, but finding a way of allowing it to come into force anyhow. And the support of the Bush-appointed Roberts for Obamacare demonstrates the complete absurdity of appealing to the Supreme Court to justify voting for Republican presidents. After nearly 40 years of this, you’d think Charlie Brown would realize that Lucy is never going to hold the football no matter what she says.

UPDATE: Bingo. “The Court holds that the mandate violates the Commerce Clause, but that doesn’t matter b/c there are five votes for the mandate to be constitutional under the taxing power.”

UPDATE 2: In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding…. to answer a common question, the whole ACA is constitutional, so the provision requiring insurers to cover young adults until they are 26 survives as well.

MMR caused this case of autism

Ever notice that science fetishists love to point to the courts when it suits them, then quickly reverse course and point out that that the law isn’t science when it doesn’t?

At nine months old, Valentino Bocca was as bright as a button. In a favourite family photo, taken by his father, the baby boy wriggles in his mother’s arms and laughs for the camera. His parents look at the precious picture often these days. It is a reminder of their only son before they took him on a sunny morning to the local public health clinic for a routine childhood vaccination.

Valentino was never the same child after the jab in his arm. He developed autism and, in a landmark judgment, a judge has ruled that his devastating disability was provoked by the inoculation against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).
The case of Valentino Bocca age nine from Rimini Italy has reignited the debate over a possible link between the MMR and autism after a judge ruled his disability was provoked by the jab.

The judgment in a provincial Italian court challenges the settled view of the majority of the medical profession — and could have profound implications in Britain and across the world. Valentino’s parents, Antonella, 44, and Maurizio, 43, have been awarded £140,000, to be paid by Italy’s Ministry of Health and they plan a civil action against the Italian government that may get them £800,000 more…. The judge’s view has since been endorsed by Italy’s High Court of Law (the equivalent of our Supreme Court) which ruled that the Italian government must pay compensation to children damaged by any jabs given under the Ministry of Health auspices — even if they are not compulsory ones.

The problem faced by the pro-vaccine camp is twofold. First, what passes for the science on this issue is dreadful and really should not be described as science. The same scientific community that didn’t hesitate to give syphilis to black men and performed experiments on Jewish concentration camp internees is suddenly claiming that it would be terribly unethical to allow children to remain unvaccinated or even push back the vaccine schedule a few months in order to gather meaningful scientific evidence on the safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule. Statistical surveys of populations are not proper science, and furthermore, have absolutely nothing to do with whether one individual will be negatively affected by a vaccine or not.

The constant bleating that “no scientific evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism” has been found is so irrelevant and misleading as to be dishonest. I doubt there is any scientific evidence between a punch in the nose and death either, but there is no question that people have been killed by a single punch before because people have seen it happen. For some reason, the process of simple observation that everyone believes is perfectly reliable when one person punches another in the face suddenly becomes not only unreliable, but downright anti-scientific when one person injects various foreign substances into a child. I have personally witnessed an infant scream and immediately collapse into unconsciousness when given a shot, and I absolutely defy any moronic scientist to claim it was not the result of the vaccine being administered. Fortunately, there were no ill effects apparent after the infant regained consciousness, but after witnessing that, I would no sooner permit any child of mine to be vaccinated at such a young age than I would permit someone to hit me in the head with a hammer… no matter how many statistical surveys are presented by scientists claiming that there is no scientific evidence showing any link between being hit in the head with a hammer and autism.

Second, the legal standard is “beyond a reasonable degree of doubt”. And it is well beyond a reasonable degree of doubt that certain vaccines have caused autism in some children. Very few vaccine skeptics are saying that no children can be vaccinated against anything or that all vaccines are intrinsically evil – although the whole fetal tissue thing on which some vaccines are based is, quite clearly, evil on its face – but most parents are not complete idiots incapable of recognizing when their normal child suddenly loses speech and motor abilities that it previously possessed, or linking it to probable causes. In fact, the awareness that vaccines are, beyond any reasonable degree of doubt, responsible for autism and other damage is precisely why Congress passed a law removing vaccine makers and administrators from legal liability.

It is far beyond the current state of biological science to claim one particular administration of a vaccine did not cause one specific case of autism and any honest scientist would admit it. Can you imagine if other culpable parties began to try defending themselves using the “no scientific link” defense? Science simply doesn’t work that way, especially “science” that is nothing more than statistical analysis, and those who attempt to appeal to science in such fashion are guilty of dishonesty, empty propaganda, and the abuse of science.

Anyhow, this is a welcome outcome and I hope that the threat of being financially ruined by their victims will force Big Pharma to spend more effort in improving the safety of their products than in lobbying the various governments to mandate more vaccines and providing them with additional protection from liability. Science is not the law, nor should it ever be confused for it. We don’t need scientists to determine if a specific vaccine has harmed a specific individual any more than we need them to determine if a specific individual has robbed a specific bank, in fact, scientists should not be involved in the legal discussion at all given their shoddy faux-science and oft-demonstrated biases on the matter.