That’s Our Conservertarian!

Many people have already said it, but this really is a remarkable piece of work. I’m reminded of nothing so much as Jim Henley‘s description of Eugene Volokh: “I’ve always considered his specialty to be showy moral handwringing on the way to siding with Power anyway. The further you get from standard Republican issues like guns and university speech codes, the more likely he is to arrive, with exquisite regret, at the conclusion that the State, particularly when helmed by George W. Bush, must have its way.” Even leading aside the fact that Althouse’s blind faith in the policeman’s account was unjustified, she is arguing that it’s desirable for the police, without even announcing their policy in advance, to have the power to execute people for utterly ordinary behavior. (If running in the subway with a bulky jacket is “suicide by cop,” I should have been shot dozens of times.) Her argument that the ability of the police to keep citizens cowering and conformist is a good thing is chilling–a world of Helaine Olens with guns. And–this is a nice conservertarian touch–she seems not to have considered the possibility that poor people riding public transit many not be able to afford an expensive new Thinsulite ski jacket every time the police decide that wearing a heavier one might be a capital crime.

Mithras also notes Althouse’s diversionary whining about how anybody who questions her authoritarian police policies must be doing so out of some sort of deep-seated hostility to the police. This is something I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot more of over the next year. To be clear, I believe that nobody should have the power to engage in pre-emptive executions based on behavior that in the winter thousands of people a week are “guilty” of. It’s not that policeman are worse than any other group of people; it’s that unconstrained power is inevitably abused, and awful mistakes will be made even by people acting in good faith. The heinous act in the London Underground was the inevitable result of an extremely bad policy; it has nothing to do with policemen being inherently bad people.

Of course, you would think that an alleged libertarian would among the first to understand this. But this is the defining characteristic of the fake libertarian of the Reynolds/Althouse variety; when it comes to the war on terra, any skepticism toward, or desire for constraints on, state power vanishes. Given that under their rubric every public space is a battlefield, this is a frightening prospect indeed.