Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → despotism → declining liberty, drug war, mass imprisonment

The United States has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country on Earth.

I understand that this is a data point and not a conclusion in and of itself, but whatever heuristic you use to determine how “free” a country is — the percentage of citizens behind bars has got to be a big factor.

It would be one thing if all of those people were put away because they were violating someone else’s freedom, but an awful percentage of them are doing time for vice crimes — behavioral deviance — heresy, in short: nothing more than violating a bunch of politicians’ idea of what a person ought to be doing with his or her short span of days.

Any definition of political freedom has to start with the freedom to do something different, or unpopular, or disapproved.

Of course, your freedom isn’t just reduced when the government throws you in its dungeon. Just knowing that it has the will and ability to do so can shackle you. When Saddam Hussein opened his prisons in a general amnesty he may have freed the prisoners but a nation of people who knew they could be rounded up and tortured for stepping out of line probably felt no more free than before.

All governments love to prohibit and imprison. The government of the United States, more than that of any other country on earth, backs its imprisoning impulses with resources and will.

If, as in the United States, every part of your life has its corresponding shadow in the library of laws and regulations, it’s only sensible to assume that any deviation from the norm is probably illegal as well as heretical. And if, as in the United States, the government has not only the inclination to blanket the country with prohibitions but the riches and power to actually enforce this — you’d better stay close to the center of the herd.

And even if straightforward torture is relatively rare in U.S. prisons (which I think is more of an open question than we’d like to admit), I think it’s worth a pause to consider how a country that really valued freedom might weigh the punishment of imprisonment relative to thumbscrews and the rack.

I’m freshly back from beautiful Antigua Guatemala. My español is much improved, thank you, and I had more than my fill of vibrant forest and colonial ruins.

Understandably, not everyone in Guatemala is a big fan of the U.S., though this American at least felt like the red carpet was rolled out. Guatemala’s big brother to the north has a sorry history of intervening to prevent democracy from interfering with U.S. business interests.

The influence of the United States can still be felt there, not least in the political process. The high courts in Guatemala have recently done an end-run around their constitution and their quasi-democratic institutions to help grease the wheels of the presidential candidate from the party most identified with the military and secret police (which also packed the court with party loyalists). It reminded me of home.

State-sanctioned pro-ruling-party rioters closed the Guatemala City airport once or twice during my visit, but, thankfully, not when I was coming or going. The U.S. Customs Service and La Migra gave me unprecedentedly speedy and courteous service (which, these days, I should probably be ashamed of).

It occurred to me during my travel that if you want to see America’s future, you don’t need to imagine Orwell’s boot-stomping-on-a-human-face metaphor — you just have to visit an airport. The omnipresent surveillance, the variety of pass-cards and restricted areas, the overpriced bad food, the kindergarten safety-scissorsizing of anything that might savagely clip a pilot’s toenails, the constant repetition of recorded voices over loudspeakers, the superstitious courtesy to security guards who can ruin your day on a whim — these are all features that are coming to a shopping mall near you, then to your school or business park, then to your downtown or your gated community.

But anyway, me and my libertarian hysteria are back home and although the rest of looks very busy, I hope to be updating this site more frequently.

“Under the abominable Patriot Act, Franz Kafka’s The Trial is coming true in America, in comic and tragic versions, just under the mass media radar, just off the front page. Wounded, we’re fast becoming the Saddam Husseins, the Robert Mugabes we pretend to deplore. The Department of Justice reported 1,182 arrests under the Patriot Act; from those prisoners, its inspector general received 1,072 accusations that FBI agents and other department employees had violated their civil liberties, and in many cases physically abused them. That’s not a left-wing rumor. That’s a gulag, a secret police state that’s encroaching, case by case, on the smug affluent America where most of us live.”

―from Counter Intelligence by Hal Crowther Durham Independent

’s the day of the recall election in California (I mention this for the benefit of future blogeologists; the rest of you may have already heard the news). What does this have to do with tax resistance? Precious little, but I’ll rant on anyway.

Over the last few days our answering machine has been host to frantic recordings featuring the voices of Bill Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and Martin Sheen urging a “no” vote on the recall. I have to admit that I don’t understand an electorate that’s on the one hand supposed to applaud a Congress and President who pass a toothless “Do Not Call” list, but on the other hand is supposed to react favorably to multiple answering-machine spams.

Meanwhile, my email inbox is full of debate one way or the other — including some debate I don’t usually see around election time: about whether or not voting is worth the time, or indeed whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

It looks like Davis is finished. Good riddance. He’s one of the most venal and unprincipled politicians on the stage. What I’m most pissed off at him for isn’t the budget or the power outages or even the car tax, but the fact that he enthusiastically helped preside over the great imprisoning in California which led California to have “the highest rate of drug offender incarcerations in the nation — 134 per 100,000.” In there were more people in prison in California serving sentences solely for drug possession than the total California prison population in .

Was Davis a hard-nosed drug warrior that he came into office unwilling to stop this disaster? I doubt it. I think his motivations for supporting this policy were much the same as his motivations for most everything else he did. In this case, massive donations from California’s prison guards’ union probably were the deciding factor. If the pot smokers had a union that could cough up more money, Davis would probably have worked for decriminalization, at a snail’s pace, squeezing donations from all sides and trying to put off anything decisive until the well had run dry.

The Democrats should be ashamed of the time and effort they wasted trying to bail out this sinking ship (and at the depths they sunk to in order to try to torpedo the recall).

Myself, I voted for the recall. Best vote I ever cast. If I can, I’ll vote for another recall next month, and then another the month after that. With recall elections, the more the merrier. I say we keep recalling until we run out of governors, and then recall the last one twice just to be sure.

Of course people have pointed out to me that a vote for the recall is a vote for The Governator. I’m less worried by that than they are. Bush has taught me not to underestimate a buffoon, but still, The Governator would have to work awfully hard in the time between his inauguration and the next recall battle in order to do as much rotten stuff as Davis would do if he got the green light to carry out his term.

I’ve said that the Democrats should be ashamed for backing their dead horse. Now it’s the Republicans turn.

You know how the government’s Knowledge Gathering Bureau is trying to pull all of the world’s databases, public and private, into one giant überdatabase — in order to protect our children from evil madmen who hate freedom?

That way they can use computers to pull together all sorts of information about all of us — each bit possibly innocent in and of itself, but in the aggregate perhaps fitting the profile of a terrorist. Like this family — whose high electricity use and habit of waiting until the last minute to put the garbage out on the curb marked them as likely marijuana farmers.

They weren’t. And they’re a little upset at the police raid. “I understand they feel something isn’t appropriate here,” said Carlsbad Police Lieutenant Bill Rowland, “but it is very much consistent with how search warrants are prepared.”

The Smoking Gun has the complete affidavit for search warrant that the judge approved.

In the future, the police won’t have to rely on such vague data points as electricity use and trash collection patterns — they’ll have your TiVo viewing patterns and Safeway Club Card receipts to help them figure out just what sort of terrorist you might be in danger of becoming.

And the IRS is enthusiastic about these new advances in information technology. They’re eager to share their data with other law enforcement agencies — and they want fresh sets of data for their automated investigations too:

“It’s the new trend. It’s where everybody is headed,” said Verenda Smith, government affairs associate at the Federation of Tax Administrators, which represents state tax agencies. “The greatest value of these systems is in finding patterns that the human eye isn’t that good at seeing.”

In Massachusetts, for example, the state tax agency can scan a U.S. Customs and Border Protection database of people who paid duties on big-ticket items entering the country — so anyone who fails to pay the state the required 5 percent “use tax” gets flagged.

The state has also tried comparing motor vehicle registration data with tax returns, looking for people who might be driving Rolls Royces or Jaguars but declaring only a small income, Revenue Commissioner Alan LeBovidge said…

The new tools have reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in increased tax collections, officials say. But the government’s growing sophistication at collecting and scrutinizing data about taxpayers is sounding alarms among privacy advocates.

The Federation of Tax Administrators doesn’t keep a definitive list of states using the technology, but Massachusetts, Texas, California, Washington, Virginia, Iowa and Florida are known to be leaders in the trend, which began in . The IRS is also using the techniques.…

The tax agencies’ “data warehouses” can stockpile data from state and federal agencies and, in some cases, private sources. And they are using new tools to analyze the data, including “data-mining” software that can scrutinize mountains of information to find patterns or establish relationships.…

LeBovidge now unabashedly dreams of a day when people won’t even have to fill out their income tax forms: The government will have so much information about people’s finances that it can simply fill out tax forms and mail them to taxpayers to be endorsed.

California has taken a step in that direction, mailing 23,000 pre-filled-out forms to taxpayers who have simpler types of returns, a small fraction of the state’s 15 million business and private returns, said Denise Azimi, spokeswoman for the California Franchise Tax Board,

She said an upgrade to California’s “non-filer” system that began in offered the state an increased data warehousing and analysis capability. The system brings together multiple databases, including records from the IRS, state agencies, banks and brokerage houses to try to identify tax cheats.

So where are all those lawyers finding their Geneva Convention loophole? Apparently it’s in Article 5 of Convention IV:

Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.

Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.

In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.

This section seems mostly designed to prevent captured members of an ongoing resistance from using their rights under the Geneva Conventions to continue to coordinate with and share intelligence with their comrades. If you read it generously, though, it’s carte blanche. If you can say with a straight face that it would be “prejudicial to the security” not to torture your “individual protected person… definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State” then, voila! — you’re free to haul out the thumbscrews. Just be sure to treat them “with humanity” (and we all know what humanity is like).

What a nice little loophole. It’s hard to imagine anyone you couldn’t throw to the wolves with this little clause if you just interpreted it this way. After all, you wouldn’t want to torture them in the first place if you didn’t suspect them of activities hostile to the security of your State.

Can you imagine the glee of the lawyers who found this? “Hey! It says here we have to treat our prisoners well unless we suspect them of being hostile to us!” There’s a place on our Supreme Court for brilliant legal minds like that. Because that’s what the Geneva Conventions are all about — protection for those prisoners of war you don’t suspect of being on the other team.

Wouldn’t it be awful if the Dubya Squad had the same sort of contempt for the laws that protect American citizens too?

If you’re keeping track: “A record 6.9 million adults were incarcerated or on probation or parole [in the United States] , nearly 131,000 more than in , according to a Justice Department study. Put another way, about 3.2 percent of the adult U.S. population, or 1 in 32 adults, were incarcerated or on probation or parole at .” ―Associated Press

…we can foresee a time when, in a Europe of concentration camps, the only people at liberty will be prison guards who will then have to lock up one another. When only one remains, he will be called the “supreme guard,” and that will be the ideal society in which problems of opposition, the headache of all governments, will be settled once and for all.

Of course, this is but a prophecy and, although governments and police forces throughout the world are striving, with great good will, to achieve such a happy situation, we have not yet gone that far. Among us, for instance, in Western Europe, freedom is officially approved. But such freedom makes me think of the poor female cousin in certain middle-class families. She has become a widow; she has lost her natural protector. So she has been taken in, given a room on the top floor, and is welcome in the kitchen. She is occasionally paraded publicly on Sunday, to prove that one is virtuous and not a dirty dog. But for everything else, and especially on state occasions, she is requested to keep her mouth shut. And even if some policeman idly takes liberties with her in dark corners, one doesn’t make a fuss about it, for she has seen such things before, especially with the master of the house, and, after all, it’s not worth getting in bad with the legal authorities.

In the East, it must be admitted, they are more forthright. They have settled the business of the female cousin once and for all by locking her up in a closet with two solid bolts on the door. It seems that she will be taken out fifty years from now, more or less, when the ideal society is definitively established. Then there will be celebrations in her honor. But, in my opinion, she may then be somewhat moth-eaten, and I am very much afraid that it may be impossible to make use of her.

When we stop to think that these two conceptions of freedom, the one in the closet and the other in the kitchen, have decided to force themselves on each other and are obliged in all that hullabaloo to reduce still further the female cousin’s activity, it will be readily seen that our history is rather one of slavery than of freedom and that the world we live in is the one… which leaps out at us from the newspaper every morning to make of our days and our weeks a single day of revolt and disgust.

The simplest, and hence most tempting, thing is to blame governments or some obscure powers for such naughty behavior. Besides, it is indeed true that they are guilty and that their guilt is so solidly established that we have lost sight of its beginnings. But they are not the only ones responsible. After all, if freedom had always had to rely on governments to encourage her growth, she would probably be still in her infancy or else definitively buried with the inscription “another angel in heaven.” The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, so far as I know, with assuring the triumph of freedom and justice. Police states have never been suspected of opening schools of law in the cellars where they interrogate their subjects. So, when they oppress and exploit, they are merely doing their job, and whoever blindly entrusts them with the care of freedom has no right to be surprised when she is immediately dishonored. If freedom is humiliated or in chains today, it is not because her enemies had recourse to treachery. It is simply because she has lost her natural protector. Yes, freedom is widowed, but it must be added because it is true: she is widowed of all of us.…

How then can this infernal circle be broken? Obviously, it can be done only by reviving at once, in ourselves and in others, the value of freedom — and by never again agreeing to its being sacrificed, even temporarily, or separated from our demand for justice. The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom. In particular, the few democratic liberties we still enjoy are not unimportant illusions that we can allow to be taken from us without a protest. They represent exactly what remains to us of the great revolutionary conquests of the last two centuries. Hence they are not, as so many clever demagogues tell us, the negation of true freedom. There is no ideal freedom that will someday be given us all at once, as a pension comes at the end of one’s life. There are liberties to be won painfully, one by one, and those we still have are stages — most certainly inadequate, but stages nevertheless — on the way to total liberation. If we agree to suppress them, we do not progress nonetheless. On the contrary, we retreat, we go backward, and someday we shall have to retrace our steps along that road, but that new effort will once more be made in the sweat and blood of men.

―Albert Camus,

Today’s collection of links:

Jonathan Magbie photographed while meeting President Ronald Reagan in 1982

Jonathan Magbie meeting President Reagan in during the proclamation of National Respiratory Therapy Week

  • “Our prison system is both a devastating moral blight on our society and an overwhelming economic burden on our tax dollars, taking away much needed resources from schools, health care and affordable housing. The prison system is corrupting our society and making us more threatened, rather than protecting us as its proponents claim. It is a system built on fear, racism, and the exploitation of poverty. Our current prison system has no place in a society that aspires to liberty, justice, and equality for all.” So says Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility, which is asking professionals to pledge “to not participate in the design, construction, or renovation of prisons.”

Remember this story the next time someone from the Department of Homeland Security gets up and screams “Anthrax! 9/11! Dirty Bombs! We need more money!” — 

“It’s all very surreal, quite honestly,” [Stephanie] Cox said . “I thought it was a prank when I first heard. I couldn’t understand why Homeland Security would be investigating a tiny toy store in St. Helens.”

The call came in . A man identifying himself as a federal Homeland Security agent said he needed to talk to Cox at her store.

Cox asked what it was all about.

“He said he was not at liberty to discuss that,” she said.…

“I was shaking in my shoes,” said Cox, who has owned Pufferbelly Toys for more than four years. “My first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim, in my opinion. If I’m closed even for a day that would cause undue stress.”

The next day, two men arrived at the store and showed Cox their badges. The lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube. She said yes. The Magic Cube, he said, was an illegal copy of the Rubik’s Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.…

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that the Homeland Security agents had it wrong. The Rubik’s Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on rival toy’s trademark.…

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency’s intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

Kice also said Homeland Security officials routinely investigate such complaints and follow up if they determine they are valid.

“One of the things that our agency’s responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation’s financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications,” she said.

In the past on The Picket Line, I’ve discussed Thomas Jefferson’s strange legacy. Among the strange interactions between Jefferson and slavery is this one: Jefferson only became president because the U.S. Constitution considered a slave to be the equivalent of three-fifths of a person for the purposes of counting population and allocating electors to states.

I was reminded of this when I read the New York Times opinion piece Why Some Politicians Need Their Prisons to Stay Full.

Felons are barred from voting in 48 of 50 states — including New York. Yet in New York, as in the rest of the country, disenfranchised prisoners are included in the population counts that become the basis for drawing legislative districts.

An eye-opening analysis by Prison Policy Initiative’s Peter Wagner found seven upstate New York Senate districts that meet minimal population requirements only because prison inmates are included in the count. New York is not alone. The group’s researchers have found 21 counties nationally where at least 21 percent of the “residents” were inmates.

The New York Republican Party uses its majority in the State Senate to maintain political power through fat years and lean. The Senate Republicans, in turn, rely on their large upstate delegation to keep that majority. Whether those legislators have consciously made the connection or not, it’s hard to escape the fact that bulging prisons are good for their districts. The advantages extend beyond jobs and political gerrymandering. By counting unemployed inmates as residents, the prison counties lower their per capita incomes — and increase the portion they get of federal funds for the poor. This results in a transfer of federal cash from places that can’t afford to lose it to places that don’t deserve it.

More of what your tax dollars pay for:

The population of the nation’s prisons and jails has grown by about 900 inmates each week , according to figures released Sunday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. By the system held 2.1 million people, or one in every 138 U.S. residents.

The Christian Science Monitor puts some statistics behind the suspicion that in the United States the police have mostly given up on fighting real crimes and have become big vice squads:

Federal statistics reveal that the nation’s “clearance rate” — the percentage of cases for which police arrest or identify a suspect — has fallen dramatically. And this shift is fraught with implications.

The arrest clearance rate for reported homicides recently dropped to about 60 percent compared with about 90 percent 50 years ago. This means that a murderer today has about a 40 percent chance of avoiding arrest compared with less than 10 percent in . The record for other FBI Index Crimes is even more dismal: The clearance rates have sunk to 42 percent for forcible rape, 26 percent for robbery, and 13 percent for burglary and motor vehicle theft, all way down from earlier eras.

It’s not that America’s cops haven’t been making arrests — in fact, their total annual arrests jumped from 3.3 million in the nation in to 14 million in , a staggering number that helps to explain why the United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world.

So, if reported crime has been going down and arrests have gone up, what accounts for the plummeting arrest clearance rates for murder, robbery, rape, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft?

Part of the answer must involve drug law enforcement — victimless offenses that aren’t reported to the police or included as FBI Index Crimes. Instead of arresting suspects for burglaries and other serious reported crimes, cops today spend much of their energy going after illegal drugs. Their arrest rate for drug possession (especially marijuana) has shot up more than 500 times from what it was in .

Polls show those who live in “high crime” neighborhoods are generally the most dissatisfied with the police. Maybe this is because they have reported to the police that they have been victimized by robbery and other serious crimes, then witnessed that the police are not arresting anyone for it but are instead aggressively waging a “war on drugs” in the community.

They used to say that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. What happens when the conservative gets mugged and reports it to a yawning cop who can’t be bothered?

I’m guessing there’s some sort of bureaucratic pathology at work here. Police departments get financially rewarded both for shifting their resources to making cheap-and-easy marijuana arrests (“look at how many arrests we’re making nowadays — we need more money!”) and for failing to make arrests in more difficult non-vice crimes (“look at how many horrible crimes are going unsolved — we need more money!”) and those rewards translate into more personnel, promotions, and institutional power for the vice-squads.

But, of course, we’re part of this bureaucratic pathology, as taxpayers and citizens who don’t demand anything better: Police continue to enjoy popularity, especially in those areas where they are least rude and recklessly dangerous which, no coincidence, are also home to the most politically powerful segments of society. Americans love uniforms and authority figures and violence; cops & prison guards have the trifecta and so they’re able to successfully evade the criticisms that are commonly directed at other bloated, inept, inefficient, self-serving bureaucracies full of government-employees who are made nearly unaccountable by politically-powerful unions.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Marlene at Pick My Brain reviews “Death & Taxes,” the new war tax resistance video from NWTRCC: “I listened intently to the 28 voices who spoke with clarity and passion about their call to action and I was definitely inspired to do something, even a token action to resist using my taxes to fund war and militaristic action. … I heartily recommend using this 30 minute DVD in small groups, Sunday School classes, peace and justice retreats, etc. It is fast paced, very positive and upbeat with lively music.”
  • RantWoman, at RantWoman and the Religious Society of Friends, reflects on the neglected tradition of Quaker war tax resistance and what it might take to revitalize it in modern Meetings.
  • South Carolina is requiring all organizations that “directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing, or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina, or any political division thereof,” to register their activities with the South Carolina Secretary of State and pay a five-dollar filing fee. A member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left decided to register: “When belligerence and inhumanity prevail, the peaceful and the humane must find honor in being categorized as the enemies of the prevailing order. Please keep me updated as to the status of our registration. I look forward to hearing back from you as to our official recognition as enemies of your state and its government. … PS. I am told that there is a processing fee in the amount of $5.00 for the registration of a subversive organization. Our organization is in fact so dastardly that we have refused to remit the fee.”
  • Paying taxes is not a civic virtue, according to a Google Translation of an op-ed by Thomas Schmid in a recent issue of Welt Online, which namechecks Thoreau on the way to criticizing governments who rely on data stolen from banks in tax havens to crack down on tax evaders.
  • Wendy McElroy has an interesting note about the philosopher William Wollaston who investigated the sensible idea that our actions are a more reliable indicator of our beliefs than are our utterances.
  • “Where are 1% of American adults?” asks Shakesville. In prison, is the answer. Along with some other revolting statistics about America’s lockdown culture that you’ve probably heard before was this interesting claim: “It is illegal to bring into the United States any goods produced by forced labor or by prisoners, yet American prisoners make 100% of the military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, ID tags as well some other items used by the US military. Although a prisoner is not technically forced to work, solitary confinement is the punishment for refusal. They also make 93% of domestically produced paints, 36% of home appliances and 21% of office furniture.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • A few people at least are beginning to look the sacred cow of the U.S. military budget in the mouth:
  • There’s a good interview with nonviolent resistance scholar Gene Sharp in Reason.
  • Drug warriors publish reports touting their successes that have all of the charm and veracity of Mao-era reports on the latest record-breaking grain harvests. We’re driving cocaine production down, say one set of reports. We’re seizing more cocaine than ever, say another. A group of skeptical reporters in Italy took a look at the numbers and realized that this year, the trend lines crossed, and the drug warriors expect to be so successful that they’ll seize fully 103% of the cocaine produced worldwide this year.
  • Remember when the divided Congress was teasing us with the possibility of a “government shutdown?” Heh. We should be so lucky. Thomas Knapp of the Center for a Stateless Society gives us the low-down on Government Shutdown Theater. Excerpts:

    When the organs of of American government come to loggerheads on the federal budget, a temporary shutdown of “non-essential services” ensues until one side caves.

    Oh, no, Br’er Bear! Please don’t throw me in the briar patch! Unfortunately, the compromises usually come fairly quickly. Government shutdowns generally go a few days. The record is three weeks. We’ve seen 15 of these shutdowns since the Carter administration, which should tell us something about how non-traumatic they really are.

    So what, pray tell, is the distinction between “essential” and “non-essential?” Here’s an easy way to tell: If the shutdown of a service irritates and inconveniences ordinary people, but doesn’t really reduce the power of politicians, that service is “non-essential.” If shutting down a service would actually reduce government’s control over your life, it’s “essential.”

    [For example] During a shutdown you can’t get a passport from the government. Your ability to travel is “non-essential.” If you show up at the border, though, there will still be a customs official waiting there, demanding to see said passport. The government’s ability to control your travel is “essential.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there: