43. A Chesapeake, Virginia man is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of a police officer, after his home was raided on a tip that he was growing a large amount of marijuana.  Ryan Frederick claims to have fired in self-defense, not knowing the intruder was a cop.  And while police found only a small amount of marijuana (enough to charge Frederick with misdemeanor possession), they did find a number of young Japanese maples, whose leaves look similar to those of cannabis plants.  Sound familiar?

44. Aurora, Colorado police are enforcing the state “puffer” law, which makes it illegal to leave a running car unattended.  (Courtesy of Severin at LP Colorado Blog.)

45. It’s so stupid, it’s funny: the RIAA now wants each song on a compilation CD to be counted as a separate copyright violation if the CD is copied, which could result in a $1.5 million fine for a ten-song album.  The fact that copyright holders become more desperate each year to protect their business model is proof the model doesn’t just need reform, it’s broken beyond repair.

46. Congress approves a two-week extension to the Protect America Act to allow time for further debate, mainly on whether to grant immunity to telecom providers who assisted the NSA in illegal wiretap activities.  Jacob Sullum has more here.  David Friedman on the accountability of leaders.  The Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon proceeds to lose his freaking mind.

47. When you can’t find terrorists to fight, just create new ones.

48. A police officer in Hamilton City, Calif. tases a bicyclist who tried to run from a stop for a lighting equipment infraction.

49. First it’s Ice Breakers; next thing you know kids will mistake crystal meth for Pop Rocks.  Shame on Hershey for caving into the cops on this one.

50. Beware of unmarked police cars attempting to stop you on deserted rural roads–they could be a criminal impersonator.  Or maybe some other type of criminal.

51. A Boston lawyer faces criminal charges for using his mobile phone to record police making a drug-related arrest.

52. Whatever is not mandatory is forbidden, but you still have to pay taxes on it: New York Governor Eliot Spitzer seeks a tax on illegal drugs, which 29 other states have already adopted.

53. Police in Lewsville, Texas arrested a middle-school student last October and charged  him with delinquency for sniffing a teacher’s hand sanitizer.  County prosecutors have since dropped the charges, although the teen had to serve an in-school suspension.

54. “The war on drugs in Clayton County, as in most jurisdictions, I liken it to the Vietnam War. Hit and miss, there is no clear win–we don’t know if we’re gaining ground or not. What we want to do is we want to change our strategy. We want to make this more like a Normandy invasion.”

55. New York City police seek a law requiring anyone wishing to use an air-quality monitor or other equipment to detect biological, chemical and radiological weapons to get a permit from them first.  More here from Radley Balko.

56. Why Internet porn is such a good deal: the FCC proposes that ABC pay a $1.43 million indecency fine for showing some ass during an episode of NYPD Blue in 2003.

57. “Papers, please” for real: starting today, anyone wishing to enter the U. S. will be required to show proof of citizenship.  Russ Nelson has more.

58. The U. S. Patent and Trademark Office issues a patent on a “mobile entertainment and communication device”–a smartphone, in other words–and the patent holder promptly sues every mobile phone manufacturer on the planet.

Going forward, I shall refer to the day on which I prepare my family’s tax return, which this year falls on January 30, as Fuck Milton Friedman Day.

Friedman, for all of his great contributions to economic theory and advocacy of the free market, was also instrumental in developing the Federal government’s most efficient means of confiscating the income of Americans with a minimum of protest: the withholding tax.  Prior to the 1940s, citizens paid taxes in a lump sum every March.  The 1913 tax act, which was adopted following the ratification of the 16th Amendment, originally called for withholding as well, but taxpayers expressed great displeasure at money being taken out of their pay envelopes before they even received them.  The withholding provision was struck a few years later.

The problem with annual lump-sum payments is that it proved very difficult for the IRS to ensure it received all of the revenue that citizens were obligated to pay.  Furthermore, it hampered the government’s ability to fund operations throughout the year.  Imagine getting just one paycheck every year, covering your entire annual salary.  You would likely budget your money very carefully to ensure it covered your expenses throughout the year.  On the other hand, it would also give you the opportunity to invest some of that money so it could earn interest until you needed it to pay later expenses. In retrospect, that’s probably not a bad way for government to operate as well.

The Feds seemed to realize this, so to raise revenue during the year it sold “tax anticipation notes” to taxpayers to generate interest to help pay their tax bill the following year.  This allowed taxpayers to meet their tax liability using less money than if they paid out-of-pocket when the bill came due.

With the country’s entrance into World War II, the government was faced with skyrocketing expenditures.  Congress adjusted the tax rates from a heavily progressive system that mostly impacted the rich into more moderate brackets that imposed obligations on nearly everyone.  Within three years following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the number of tax returns received by the IRS increased more than four-fold.  Had the lump-sum payments continued, the entire system would have collapsed under the effort of ensuring tax obligations were met with every return.  Withholding taxes at the source—by conscripting employers to serve as the government’s revenue agents—was the most effective method to protect the government’s revenue stream.  In 1942, Friedman, then working in the Treasury Department, devised a new withholding plan.  But the challenge of selling it to a public which had roundly rejected the previous scheme remained.

And like any good bureaucrats and politicians, they used the time-honored trick of snake-oil salesmen everywhere: they lied about it.

The key strategies used to obtain support for income tax withholding in 1943 all entailed political transaction-cost augmentation. Government officials artfully employed national defense language, tax-cost information, and promises of “tax forgiveness” to engineer support for a withholding system at root designed to enhance and protect government revenue for all times to come. The above-noted conflict between the government’s actual objectives and its publicly promoted objectives formed only one part of a systematic pattern of transaction-cost manipulation . . .

Treasury officials repeatedly testified to Congress that such withholding of income taxes–current collection at the source–represented “no additional tax.” On dozens of occasions, Treasury official Randolph Paul and other government spokesmen testified:

This collection at the source mechanism is nothing but a mechanism for collection. It is not an additional tax. … It merely speeds up the collection (U.S. House Hearings 1942, vol. 1: 100).

It should be kept in mind that collection at the source does not in itself increase or decrease the tax liability of the taxpayer (U.S. House Hearings 1943: 11).

Given the expert witnesses’ knowledge of present value, statements so seriously misleading to Congress and the public could not have been inadvertent.

Because it replaced interest-bearing notes with a pay-as-you-go system, the withholding tax did represent an additional tax on the public, by taking money before it even reached taxpayers’ pockets to be used by the government.  Only when taxpayers filed their returns could they determine if they paid too little (and thus would have to send even more money to the IRS) or too much (and thus receive a refund, although the Treasury did initially suggest that interest be paid on any money returned).  And with future dollars worth less than the present value of the money taken by the government, taxpayers would lose even more each year.

The Treasury Department acknowledged all this in hearings before Congress, yet insisted that withholding would not only impose no additional tax burden, but was merely a convenience for patriotic Americans to meet their obligations and support the war effort.  And these same obfuscations were parroted by members of Congress during floor debates.  Oppose such a sensible scheme, and you allow the Huns and Japs to win.

Sixty-five years later the government still gets its loot via the withholding tax, and despite many proposals to eliminate or at least greatly simplify the process, it remains the single greatest enabler of an ever-expanding state.  As Murray Rothbard wrote about Friedman in 1971:

Only the Friedmanite withholding tax has permitted the government to use every employer as an unpaid tax collector, extracting the tax quietly and silently from each paycheck. In many ways, we have Milton Friedman to thank for the present monster Leviathan State in America.

Friedman did later express his regrets at helping bring about the withholding tax, as evidenced in this interview with reason‘s Brian Doherty in 1995:

It was a very interesting and very challenging intellectual task. I played a significant role, no question about it, in introducing withholding. I think it’s a great mistake for peacetime, but in 1941-43, all of us were concentrating on the war.

I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn’t found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now.

Yeah, me too.  And while I stand to repatriate a significant chunk of my income from the Leviathan State this year, when I click the File button in TurboTax I’ll remember to honor the man who made it necessary in the first place: fuck you, Milton Friedman.

31. Minnesota-born Thomas Warziniack is detained for weeks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement because they mistakenly believe he’s an illegal Russian immigrant. I know, I know, mistakes are made, all in the name of national security.

32. An air traveler passes through security at Reagan National Airport with a loaded gun, goes back to report it, and now faces criminal charges.

33. Friday is Robert Burns Night, but Scottish-Americans will have to celebrate the poet’s birthday without the traditional haggis: the U. S. government has banned imports of the dish since the outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain.

34. An “aggressive young” Nebraska sheriff’s deputy seizes $69,000 during a traffic stop in which the driver wasn’t even ticketed. Money quote (from Kimball County Sheriff Tim Hanson): “The big thing is he grabbed 69 (thousand dollars) and took it away from them [the suspected drug dealers]. That’s going right straight to the heart of the matter.”

35. The judge in the Jose Padilla terrorism trial “questioned the range and impact of the conspiracy, saying that there was no evidence linking the men to specific acts of terrorism anywhere or that their actions had resulted in death or injury to anyone.” She then sentenced Padilla to 17 years in prison.

36. The Federal Election Commission rules that a free-speech advocacy group must register as a “political committee” and thus be subject to Federal campaign regulations, restricting the amount of individual donations it can accept. More here.

37. An Ohio woman is freed from prison after serving 16 months of a 10-year prison sentence for a drug crime she didn’t commit. Her conviction was based on fraudulent testimony from a DEA informant and a rogue agent–who put 15 other people in prison as a result of the same investigation.

38. To better serve its 3,300 citizens, the town of Verona, Mississippi will get its own SWAT team.

39. The MPAA is pushing Congress to link Federal college funding to adopting stricter anti-piracy measures on college campus networks.

40. Police in Alaska arrest a 13-year-old girl for sexual assault after two boys accused her of touching them “over their clothing”, although they are tight-lipped over where the boys were touched.

41. The ACLU are representing a New Mexico man in a lawsuit against county law enforcement for seizing his state-licensed medical marijuana plants and equipment. His pot was turned over to the DEA, although he has not been charged with a Federal crime.

42. Awww, poor babies: some former DEA agents are suing NBC Universal, owners of the studio that produced American Gangsters, for defamation, saying the movie “has ruined and impugned the reputations of these honest and courageous public servants in the eyes of millions of people”. You mean the millions who haven’t yet been put in prison on trumped-up drug charges?

16. People on the street are slapped with emergency jury-duty summonses in Greeley, Colo. after less than 40 of 200 people summoned by mail show up at court.  People who refused to comply would have faced contempt of court citations.

17. State troopers in Minnesota permanently subdue a man using non-lethal Taser.  Another Taser death in Florida.

18. Miami Beach bans outdoor food displays, long used by restaurant owners to lure tourists inside, in an effort to “clean up” the city’s image.

19. Police in Daytona Beach are looking for a man who is “clean-cut, employed and involved in a relationship, possibly even married,” in connection with a string of serial killings.  Police Chief Mike Chitwood “asked women involved with someone with qualities likened to the serial killer to contact the police immediately.”  I suppose these kind of guys really stand out in Daytona Beach, huh?!

20. A judge in North Dakota rules that DNS zone transfers are illegal under the state’s computer crime statute.  A zone transfer is merely a request to a DNS server to provide any public information it has on a given Internet domain.

21. Canada’s “Prince of Pot”, Marc Emery, cops a plea on U. S. charges of money laundering and selling marijuana seeds and will serve five years in prison . . . but avoids extradition to the U. S., where he could have faced 20 years or more.

22. In our Laws that Don’t Actually Exist But They’re Too Amusing Not To Mention segment, a Virginia lawmaker has introduced a bill to ban “truck nuts”—the plastic scrotums hanging from the trailer hitch of Bubba’s toy (usually with a bumper sticker that reads “MY OTHER TOYS ARE YER MOM’S TITS”).  This is courtesy of the same state legislature that tried to ban saggy pants in 2005—an effort now being made by other states and municipalities around the country.

23. Another vicious dog terminated by cop.

24. Among the new traffic laws taking effect in California this year is a prohibition on smoking in cars with kids as passengers.

25. San Mateo, Calif. police take down poker game in private home.  More here.

26. IP madness: Ford now claims ownership of any pictures of their cars—even the ones taken by owners.

27. Chicago cop to black resident: “Do you have any niggers in the building?”

28. Texas school threatens student with not graduating unless he cuts his hair.

29. Illinois man freed after spending more than 20 years in prison for a double-murder he didn’t commit.

30. Arizona’s Maricopa County has paid over $30 million on liability claims against Sheriff Joe Arpaio dating back to 1993, due to lawsuits over jail conditions.  That doesn’t count the $11 million taxpayers pony up just for the insurance policy covering the “toughest sheriff in America”.  Hey, they must think they’re getting a good deal, as they keep re-electing the bastard.

6. Texas expands its forced blood-draw program, where motorists accused of driving under the influence can be compelled to give blood samples, with police officers using force if necessary.

7. Just to show that it isn’t just individual civil liberties which are threatened: the California Supreme Court has ruled that private shopping malls must allow demonstrators on their property, even if it means promoting boycotts of the mall’s tenants.

8. An off-duty firefighter is busted by the cops for indecent exposure after a woman sunbathing topless in a city park asks to see his penis. See, exposing your breasts is legal, but bringing out Mr. Winky is a no-no.

9. You can no longer pack spare lithium batteries in your checked airline luggage, the TSA has ruled.

10. In this week’s Most Unenforceable Law segment, New Jersey has banned sex offenders from using the Internet.

11. Arizona enacts a “death penalty” for businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

12. Texas now allows cops to write tickets for misdemeanor pot possession, but few counties are taking advantage of the law, even when their jails are overcrowded—the very problem the law is intended to address.

13. A law in Washington state which allows prosecutors to charge people with murder if they supply drugs to an overdose victim may actually be causing more deaths . . . because people are afraid to call 911 when a friend ODs.

14. Illinois climbs aboard the smoking-ban bandwagon.

15. Collateral damage in the heroic war on drugs: a SWAT team in Lima, Ohio, shoots and kills a woman and injures her one-year-old child after storming the house to arrest her suspected drug-dealer boyfriend. Lima, it’s worth noting, is also the site of this outrageous asset forfeiture case (item # 4).

5. So if you don’t want your kid to go to the hospital after taking a spill, and you’re one of those weird “constitutionalist” cranks, expect the SWAT team to bust down your door, throw you and your wife to the floor, and take your kid at gunpoint to the hospital.

I’m not kidding.

Authorities said they had reason to believe Shiflett mistreated his 11-year-old son, Jon, by failing to provide him proper medical care for a head injury. But Shiflett says his privacy and his rights were invaded, and that he has the right and the skill to treat his son himself. Shiflett, 62, said he served as a medic in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. . . .

Speaking about the incident from his home in the Apple Tree Park on Monday, Shiflett was very upset. Perhaps most offensive, Shiflett said, was that law enforcement didn’t announce there was a warrant before breaking into his home south of New Castle.

“I would have let them in,” he said. “It was traumatic to my children, and it’s unnecessary.”

His spouse, Tina, and his six of 10 kids who are still at home were shocked at the manner of entry. Tina said law enforcement, wearing masks, broke down their door with a battering ram and pointed guns in her children’s faces.

“They didn’t need to bash into my home and slam my kids to the floor,” Tina said, adding later, “I think they get a kick out of this.”

Yes, they do get a kick out of this, the sick bastards. Cops act as little more than thugs with badges, working for the stolen loot of the criminal state. These are the people who “serve and protect” you.

And the sheriff’s rationale for sending a SWAT team on what amounts to a welfare check?

The sheriff said . . . the father was a “self-proclaimed constitutionalist” and had made threats and “comments” over the years.

However, the sheriff declined to provide a single instance of the father’s illegal behavior. “I can’t tell you specifically,” he said.

So you can now expect the cops to treat you differently based on your political views, especially if they’re considered radical or “dangerous”.

Oh, and the guy’s son? He’s fine; the doctor told him to take Tylenol and apply ice to the bruises.

1. Slogan of the newest graduating class of the Idaho Police Officer Standards and Training Academy: “Don’t suffer from PTSD, go out and cause it.”  Well, at least they’re honest about it now.

2. You know the TSA is doing its job, not because it’s finding bombs sneaked into luggage, but because it’s taking a lot of your shit:

“Even without clear evidence of the accuracy of testing, the Transportation Security Administration defended its measures by reporting that more than 13 million prohibited items were intercepted in one year,” the researchers added. “Most of these illegal items were lighters.”

3. Your right to self-defense ends where keeping contraband in your home begins.

4. But that’s not even the worst that could happen:

Two robbers who broke into Luther Ricks Sr.’s house this summer may have not gotten his life savings he had in a safe, but after the FBI confiscated it he may not get it back.

Ricks has tried to get an attorney to fight for the $402,767 but he has no money. Lima Police Department officers originally took the money from his house but the FBI stepped in and took it from the Police Department. Ricks has not been charged with a crime and was cleared in a fatal shooting of one of the robbers but still the FBI has refused to return the money, he said. . . .

Police originally took the money after finding marijuana inside Ricks’ home, which Ricks said he had to help manage pain.

Ricks wasn’t even charged with pot possession.  Just finding the stuff is enough for asset forfeiture laws to kick in.  No trial, no due process—the government will take your property and then make you prove it’s yours and that you earned it honestly.

This is our country now, bleeding to death by a thousand cuts.