But, fortunately, groups like the Institute for Justice, Mercatus Center and Reason are fighting back – for all of us. They are fighting by filing lawsuits that would require the government to hold hearings promptly to address and decide about people’s seized assets, educating the media and citizenry about the importance of free minds and free markets, and bringing political pressure to cut back numbers of intrusive laws and executive over-reachings. So we can also stand up for Liberty by supporting these and other similar organizations. For further information, please visit www.IJ.org, www.mercatus.org or www.reason.com .
Judge Jim Gray (Ret.)
2012 Libertarian candidate for Vice President,
along with Governor Gary Johnson as the candidate for President
**Here’s another of the daily posts from the gasoline station in Gauteng, South Africa: “Don’t do something permanently stupid because you’re temporarily upset.”
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Only supervised activities for our children; safely drive them to school; don’t let them go out on Halloween by themselves, etc., etc. As aptly stated in the December 2017 edition of Reason Magazine, “Play is training for adulthood.” And today not only aren’t our children playing much on their own, they’re not doing much of anything on their own. But only when children fall down and skin their knees in some “resilience moments” without parental guidance will they learn from their mistakes. And this is virtually the only way that they can effectively grow into adulthood.
Recently some militants set off a bomb in a crowded mosque in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt during 
Hi everyone!
Many years ago when I was a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles I found myself waiting at a red light while walking over to the Federal Building Cafeteria for lunch when a judge widely known for his harsh sentencing came up beside me. When I greeted him and asked how his day was going, he surprised me by saying “Jim, Mondays are always hard because they are sentencing days.” Without pausing at all to reflect on who I was or who he was, I responded “In many ways, Your Honor, when it stops being hard you will be in the wrong job.” What followed thereafter was an awkward silence.
During the past year my wife and I have devoted more special time in the evenings to sitting on our front porch, sometimes with a Manhattan or wine, sometimes not, but always with our dog. What have we found? Lots of things and all of them good. Neighbors walk by and we chat, joke and laugh with them. We notice things that had escaped us before because we were too busy: a hummingbird (we call him “Dart”) that always rests on the same twig; and not only sunsets and moon risings, but also the sense of the breeze and the seasons – and we also utilize the casual opportunity to explore each other.
It is truly a rare occurrence for anyone in either the legislative or executive branches of government not to have favorite constituents to whom they give public money and other favors. For example, the City of Anaheim gives great tax advantages to Disneyland, Governor Brown and officials from many other states and cities are offering hundreds of millions of dollars in public incentives to Amazon, and most liberal governments ensure lots of extra tax money goes to public and private union workers. And that is not to mention the numerous “humanitarian” and “environmental” laws that directly feather the nests of some plaintiffs’ attorneys. In other words, we need to elect Libertarians, because all of this Crony Capitalism is totally against their philosophy!
As you may have heard, recently the long-time sports television broadcaster Al Michaels said while doing the play by play in the third quarter of a football game between the New York Giants and Denver Broncos that the Giants were coming off a worse week than Harvey Weinstein, which was an obvious reference to the disgraced movie mogul. But the response on social media was so immediate and harsh that Michaels was forced to apologize by the fourth quarter. Of course, everyone certainly agrees that a comparison between the allegations against Weinstein, which are serious, and a football game is quite different. And, of course, there are some things that can never be funny, like death camps, slavery or the recent Las Vegas massacre. But come on, we simply must not as a country lose our sense of humor. All of this sensitivity is simply driving us further apart from each other, and most often unnecessarily so. Furthermore, all psychiatrists will tell us that it is mentally helpful for human beings to laugh at themselves, and that must be true for countries as well.
How many of these sick people who wantonly and arbitrarily kill crowds of people with bombs, guns or their cars are acting as copycats of prior similarly demented acts by other people? Of course, we may never know. But every time these demented folks have killed people in places like Aurora, San Bernardino, Charlottesville and Las Vegas the media have prominently published their names and even their pictures. Don’t you think that this has an effect? The media can call them losers, shooters, terrorists or the social dropouts that they are, and even publish information about them such as their backgrounds and affiliations. But don’t EVER publish their names or pictures! Don’t glamorize them so that later copycats can have their turn having fame as well!
Should we regulate and control gambling, or should we continue with most of it being illegal? Today the federal Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act prohibits any states – except Nevada – from regulating or controlling gambling. Maybe the federal law was passed with good intentions, because the government was logically concerned by the prospect of athletic competitors being bribed to “throw” their matches. But the law of unintended consequences once again prevails because not only has this law ushered in an enormous Black Market, it actually has made it more difficult to detect and prosecute corruption. How so? Because illegal betting makes it much more difficult to detect betting patterns, which increases the ability to fix athletic contests. And now eSports gambling is upon us, where people bet on online video game competitions, and already one player has been found to have made large amounts of money by betting against himself and then throwing his match. As of now it is estimated that this business garners about $700 million in profits, which is predicted to explode to $1.5 billion by 2020. The facts are that people have always gambled – always have and always will! So the only practical question is: shall gambling be controlled under the law, or by people outside of the law?
Recently, I received the following information from a recipient of these weekly 2 Paragraphs. She had, in turn, received the information from 
As I said in the first sentence of the introduction of my book on judging*, “the best decision I ever made in my life was choosing my parents.” And, of course, I have been the beneficiary of that so-called choice ever since. Obviously, I could have been born to a single mother with AIDS in Nigeria. But I believe that my good fortune has given me the moral obligation to help those people who did not “choose” quite so well. So all of this gets me around to one of my favorite reminders, which is “Who says life is fair?” My children were raised on that saying (just ask them!). Socrates was forced to drink hemlock. Tchaikovsky was forced to commit suicide when it was discovered publicly that he was gay. Many more innocent men, women and children are also randomly killed and otherwise harmed by terrorists, hurricanes, earthquakes or diseases. Sometimes a baseball player hits a sharp line drive that is caught for an out, and other times he duffs one that falls for a double. No, life simply is not always fair.
The whole issue of the minimum wage brings in a conundrum: we see people working for wages that would not provide enough revenue to pay for an apartment, and think it wrong. But we also see that the more laws we pass to rectify that situation, the deeper the problems become. So what’s to be done? The answer is to listen to Dr. Milton Friedman, who said that we should judge programs by their results instead of their intentions. In that regard, the fact is that when the government mandates that workers’ wages be increased, it obviously makes that labor more expensive. And the result of that is for many employers to lay off some employees and replace them by automation (think self check-out machines at stores like Home Depot and self-ordering kiosks at fast food stores like McDonald’s). For example, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that nationally increasing the minimum wages even to the level of $10.10 per hour would cause 500,000 workers to lose their jobs. And for the employees that remain, employers will also try to reduce their number of hours of work – particularly for overtime. As a result, minimum wage laws actually result in victories for robots and defeats for most employees. (Sorry, the callous fact is that in today’s world some workers are simply not worth $10.10 per hour.) And these are only just some of the problems that result. Thus, almost literally, the only good thing that results from minimum wage laws is that legislators get to feel better about themselves.
Regretfully, but not surprisingly, most people are outcome-oriented in both their thinking and their voting. This means that, regardless of the process used, if they like the outcome on an issue they are for it, and if they don’t like it they are against it. An important and timely example of that is the present controversy about the issue of the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” or DACA. Virtually everyone agrees that these “Dreamers,” who were brought into this country illegally by their parents before they turned 16 years of age, are blameless, and that it would in so many ways be an unfair tragedy to deport them. Accordingly, upon balance, the outcome that almost everyone favors is to work out a situation in which those who have been studying and working hard, and have stayed on the right side of the law, can remain in this country, and often even have a pathway to citizenship.
The logical extreme has happened in New York City! According to an August 19, 2017 article on the front page of the New York Times, teachers who either had disciplinary problems or bad teaching records or who worked in schools that had either been closed or were experiencing a decline in enrollment were paid $150 million in salary last year alone – not to teach! That constituted a full 822 teachers, more than 200 of whom had been receiving those payments for at least five years! At an average salary of $94,000 per year! They could have been re-engaged as teachers, but their performance was so poor that none of the school principals wanted them. So, since the teacher’s unions were so strong that they couldn’t be fired, they were being paid their full salaries mostly not to teach.
The truth is the truth, regardless of when it is spoken. And who better to speak about timeless racial truths than Frederick Douglass? A former slave and premier abolitionist writer, Douglass spoke and wrote often and forcefully that “It has long been the desire of our enemies to deepen and widen the line of separation between the white and colored people of this country.” In literal effect, the only minority that counted for Douglass was the “Minority of One,” which was the individual. And with what we have seen in the last few months and years in our country, we truly need to keep his teachings fresh in our minds because so many people from so many different standpoints are trying to separate us.
Last week we talked about how Government is Money. In other words, people in government have their own biases and, often, personal desires for power and influence. So Liberty —in this context defined as instituting a system for private individuals to have incentives to prosper by producing (legal) goods and services that other people will desire and purchase – will almost always triumph over government bureaucracy, controls and regulations. And that is what has happened over the past few years with the survival of bees.
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