"If This Be Lying to the Government, Make the Most of It!"

The email systems and the Web have been all aflutter this week with various faux humorous speculation about Martha Stewart's fate at the hands of the criminal so-called justice system.  That pains me, she's one of my genuine heroes.  She is an individual who harmed no one, aggressed upon no one, and built a successful, beneficent, and wealthy life in wholly voluntary relationships with others.

What part of that series qualifies her for hard time?!

A politically astute and sensitive analysis comes from former LP presidential candidate Harry Browne, who suggests we have entered a phase of nonobjective law in which you are guilty of a felony by virtue of disobeying a regulatory statute erected by bureaucratic whim.  Taking its cue from the drug laws, the state has simply created another class of victimless felony laws, with ludicrously severe penalties, in the SEC.

And Martha, like the poor guy doing time for smoking a joint, has been mugged by them.

http://www.harrybrowne.org/articles/MarthaStewart2.htm

As long as we're talking about the Libertarian Party, please read the Libertarian Party platform—especially in this context of nonobjective regulatory (i.e. unjustifiable) law.  It is a masterpiece of political theory, and grows in intellectual stature year by year as we watch the tendrils of the statist kudzu vine choke out the light and air of our lovely forest.

http://www.lp.org/issues/platform/platform_all.html#righprop

Why bring up political theory in the context of Martha's mugging?

A friend of mine is okay with the verdict because the " 'the law' says do x and Martha did not do x, so don't do the crime if you can't do the time." If we lived in a world where context for behavior is meaningless, he's right.  But to ignore legal context—let's take an extreme case to make the point—would make it acceptable for a Nazi to exterminate a Jew if that's what the ink stated on the camp commandant's official orders.

Theory and context matter.

If the concrete law under which a person is prosecuted is itself a crime as demonstrated by reference to a more universal law—for instance drug laws, arguably (to my mind, certainly), violate the "disestablishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment—then the concrete law is actually against The Law.  This is what they mean when they say this is a government of laws, not of men.

Regarding securities regulation, the US Constitution grants no authority.

The commerce-authority clause in the Constitution, "Congress shall have the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes," was surely a minimalist plank intended to keep the states from erecting trade barriers.  Having no expressed authority to regulate securities trade, the federal government by the Tenth Amendment has no authority to regulate securities trade.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

Therefore, as American citizens and by virtue of our ability to read, we hereby decree the SEC is an illegitimate exercise of government power!  Any legislated statute to be enforced by the SEC or any rule the SEC conjures up through its own bureaucracy has no Constitutional authority.  Which is to say, again, no authority.

As the Harry Browne column shows, the particular "crimes" Martha is accused of are arbitrary, silly, and maliciously overpunitive: conspiracy and making false statements to government investigators.

Ironically, the idea of lying to government officials about a felony crime for which one is being investigated—aside from making fraudulent claims of value to the government—was rendered ubiquitous during the reign of the Clinton administration's justice department.  It extended the rule to virtually every government agency (18 USC Sec. 1001 (1993)).

Making two crimes out of one contradicts American legal precedent, which assumes a felony defendant will likely not tell the truth anyway.  Why burden the bloated injustice system with needless clutter?  Why, indeed.  In Martha's case, the government did not believe her stated reasons for selling ImClone.  The government convinced the jury she had different reasons from what she told the government, i.e. she "lied."  Baloney stuff!

http://www.rense.com/general50/where.htm

In no way is Martha's purported dissembling a crime: a) it's none of the state's business and b) she has the absolute right to give any reason she wishes for making a sale of securities.  On a broader plane of moral argument, consider the following article about the morality of lying to the government.

http://www.libertysoft.com/liberty/features/71kopel.html

This piece is interesting for also bringing up the right of jury nullification, which is also pertinent in the case of Martha's legal mugging.  We as citizen jurors, contrary to the stern invocations of autocratic judges and prosecutors, have the right to decide fact and law.  If a juror feels for any reason the law under which a defendant is being prosecuted is unjust, he/she may vote to acquit.  That was the whole idea of juries in the Constitution, a last stand against tyrannical government.

http://fija.org/

The laws under which Martha was harassed before a criminal court are police-state crimes.  By convicting her of these "crimes' the jury groveled obediently to the judge and to the prosecutors, and released the beastly tyrant to throttle her life and to take a very large step toward knocking down your door and hauling you away.

It baffles me how my buddies succumb to the state's pandering to class envy.  In their resentment of the individual who achieves wealth and happiness through productive effort, they accept and even revel in that person's downfall, thus giving the goons in suits the patina of popular appeal.  What my buddies forget is for every successful person the state deprives of freedom, hundreds of ordinary schmucks like themselves are going to take it in the neck, worse.

Do you think the beast is going to be satiated by devouring a few famous people?

Not by a long shot, buster.

So Martha lied to the government.  Shocking!

A final thought:

Has anyone considered that lying to the government is like cheating the Mafia?  After all, what is the government's main business but lying, stealing, and killing.  Which brings to mind an old libertarian bumper sticker, "Don't steal, it's illegal to compete with the government."

The older I get, the more exposed I've been to this incessant pontificating of the political class--to its draping in sacred cloth the true-criminal institutions that they inhabit and with which they bind us.  They treat government, especially our own government (now fully unfettered by the Constitution), as some deity worthy of universal reverence.  More like the Wizard of Oz, to be sure… only with very bad manners. 

And I've had my share of run-ins with various official poobahs of the government.  Some would call me a bonafide enemy of the descending veil.  So now that Martha's probably heading upstate to break rocks in creative patterns, yours truly is sure to appear on one of the next few lists of undesirables the federales and/or local officialdom will want to "hold for questioning."

I only ask one favor of the politicians, judges, prosecutors, and cops who with all due process lay the chains upon me: please spare me your dismal sanctimony!