Good Enough for Government Work

Updated below:

Members of the news media — at least in the Kansas City area — are expressing shock at some of the revelations coming from the kidnapping case in Cleveland. According to some of the stories, police failed to follow-up on reports that women were seen tied up and nude in the Castro home, that a little girl could often be seen peering from an attic window, and at least once women were heard yelling for help.

The police were called to investigate the cries for help, but left after no one answered the door.

There has also been criticism of the 9-11 dispatcher who took the call from one of the victims. He seemed uninterested in helping the victim, and attempted to end the call less than a minute into the conversation.

Why is this a surprise, though? The police officers and dispatchers are government employees; their employer runs a monopoly and isn’t threatened by competition, so the incentive for these agencies to provide excellent service is virtually nonexistent.

Update:

Another case that highlights this problem is unfolding near Kansas City. From The Kansas City Star:

When Kortni McGill went to check on her friend Andrew Sout (sic) at his farm just outside Ottawa, Kan., on Sunday, Stout was nowhere to be seen.

[...]

But McGill spotted a clean pair of baby socks folded up in the driveway near a set of footprints in the mud. She also smelled a terrible odor coming from the house, near her friend’s bedroom, and the garage.

So McGill called Franklin County deputies, who looked in the garage and house.

The “smell of death poured out of the house,” McGill said. “It reeked.”

Yet deputies concluded the stench was from trash and “living dirty,” McGill said. They didn’t seem to be interested in the socks or footprints, either, McGill said.

But McGill couldn’t let it go. She and two friends returned to the farm in the 3100 block of Georgia Road on Monday. They inspected the garage and found a decomposing woman’s body under a blue tarp with a drum set and other items piled on top of her.

How did the sheriff respond to questions of why his deputies failed to act?

“’I don’t want to Monday morning quarterback at this time,’ he said. ‘So after this is all said and done, we’ll review everything that happened in this case.’”

Stay Away from the DoD

Here’s yet more evidence (as if we needed any more) that Christians ought to avoid the military, and churches should stop promoting military service. The Pentagon has announced they may consider courts martial for soldiers who proselytize while in uniform. Instead, as I advocate here, Christians who feel called to minister to soldiers should do so without joining the ranks.

Buying and Selling Children with Tax Dollars

Two judges from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania will soon be convicted of selling children into slavery. Sort of. It’s a little more complicated, but that’s the essence of the case.

According to The Inquistr, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan plead guilty to “[sentencing] children to juvenile detention because they were paid off to do it by the PA Childcare and a sister company, Western PA Childcare corporation that ran the private facilities.”

These two nominally private corporations are said to have paid more than two and a half million dollars to the two judges, in exchange for sending juveniles to their facilities.

Why?

Because the state of Pennsylvania was paying the prisons for every inmate they housed, thus offering an incentive to attract inmates.

The article above, written by H. Scott English, suggests that the problem is a privatized prison system. This is hardly the case.

The government paid the prison, which in turn set aside some of the funds to be used as seed money to pay the judges for the children. So by way of the prison, the government paid agents of the government to imprison kids who were at worst, guilty of misdemeanor offenses.

It wasn’t private companies that wrote the laws or established a legal system whereby minors could be locked in cages for misdemeanors. While there is no data presented on which supposed crimes these children were convicted of, it is entirely reasonable that a good number were for victimless crimes, i.e., vices.

There’s really no reason such a thing couldn’t happen in a system that was ran entirely by the State, either. The fact that a private entity, operating under the direction and the funding of the state government, was implicated misses the bigger point. It’s the legal system as a whole that needs to be rethought, not merely changing the corporate structure of the prisons.

‘So Enamored of Equality’

“…they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”

This was Alexis de Tocqueville’s impression of Americans when he visited in the nineteenth century. Not much has changed, as the “Market Place Fairness Act” makes it way through congress.

No doubt, brick-and-mortar businesses can’t wait for something like this, which will surely deter Internet commerce by imposing new taxes on online retailers. That one group is bilked by the state, so the only way to ensure fairness is to expropriate from another group, turns fairness on its head.

No business should be forced to collect taxes for the state, it’s a horribly regressive form of taxation in the first place, Second, it means the business necessarily becomes an agent of the government, an altogether perverse situation.

This twisted idea that the government is doing this in order to achieve fairness — and not put its hands on billions of dollars in tax receipts — seems quite transparent. But maybe I’m just too cynical.

‘But Who Would Ignore the Terrorists?’

Despite having gathered information related to the 9/11 attacks prior to September 11, 2001, certain agencies failed to share this intelligence within the national security complex. The result? Some three thousand people died and hundreds of millions of dollars in private property was destroyed.

In order to rectify this glaring deficiency — one that would no doubt have bankrupted a private security agency — the federal government vastly expanded its role in national security.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act were quickly established. Aggressive wars were undertook, in which millions of innocent people were killed and displaced abroad, while government power domestically expanded greatly. The TSA was established to nationalize airport security, and its role continues to expand.

In other words, a vast expansion of military, security, and law enforcement powers was allowed to take place. Everything was supposed to be fine, or so we were told. And then this.