Topic: Arrested for feeding homeless people - page 3. (Read 8330 times)

I cannot believe an state has a law that forbid a person to help others. 

Cops are the topic I see on every other thread in this section. I think that says something itself.

The only question here is, cops do their job, so what is wrong with what they did? I can't believe law is overtaking people's common sense nowadays/

You keep repeating the lie about him being detained for "feeding homeless people."

But repeating that lie will not make it any more true than repeating "Hands up - don't shoot" will persuade a grand jury.

The man was detained for disobeying food safety regulations.

He could have fed the homeless in compliance with those regulations and not been detained.

But that fact is inconvenient to your sophomoric Marxist fuck-the-police free-shit-for-everybody narrative, so you carefully ignore it.   

IKR?  Why can't this guy feed the homeless like everyone else, in compliance with local food safety regulations?

How massive his sense of entitlement must be to impose this shit on a public park.

He should use his own backyard, or better yet a church/soup kitchen/food bank/shelter, instead of forcing others to subsidize his altruism.

The most shocking thing of all is how many people idiots believe that since his heart is in the right place, he can do no wrong and any restrictions on time/place/manner are an outrage.   

At one point in time I would have found this type of behavior surprising, however the more and more we see of this coming out of the United States, the more I am thinking that we're approaching the end of the US as a superpower. How can a nation that is one of the richest in the world yet have so many homeless people, and then criminalize feeding them is shocking.

i cant believe this shit acually happens!! this is so wrong in every way

Maybe it was a simple misunderstanding.  I saw # of regulations as your addition not mine.
"That government is best which governs least" is from Henry David Thoreau.
It advocates for the smallest government practical.
It doesn't really equate to the quantity of regulations.  It is also scope.  Small government.

A "least" government can be considered as most local to the issue governed.  The absolute most direct would be self government.

Whether your view of a curfew being valid or necessary, is somewhat less material than whether it is enforced (or even enforceable).
Whether a right is inalienable has a lot to do with what is doing the alienation.

We likely agree on general principles anyhow.

The only reason I remarked on the number of regulations was because you brought it up. I was, in effect, using your own example without subscribing to the belief myself. It's a snappy maxim, for sure, but number of regulations is somewhat immaterial to me. Rather, the quality of the regulations is my concern. More freedom and fewer regulations can be correlated, but are not necessarily the same. (As a rather silly example, a law that it is illegal to kill someone with a firearm and a separate law that is illegal to kill someone with a vehicle does not make us less free. While it would be easier to have one law that simply makes killing illegal, having a higher number of regulations that effect the same result would not make us less free, which is why the quality of the regulations matter more than the quantity. I'm concerned with laws that limit freedom.)

As for the examples of curfews, I don't consider familial restrictions by a parent-child relationship a valid analogy, and I view all three curfews imposed by the different levels of government as invalid and unnecessary. The base issue with curfews is the same as with any other issue: does freedom of association give you the right to use force to curtail the freedom of other people? My answer to that is no; that your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property justly derived remain inalienable by all others. Inalienability doesn't end at majority vote. That's what makes it inalienable.

It would be that simple if people like you didn't make it complicated for people.

This is good, you made it a good part of the way.  My statement was not enough to take it further so here's a sign post for the next step:
Which is the better governance, is there a difference, and why?
1) The father that requires his child to be home by midnight on weekends.
2) A similar city curfew.
3) A national curfew.
4) A global curfew.

All laws must require enforcement in order to be law. Enforceability is primarily a matter of geography, and of what authority holds the uncontested right of force within that geography.
So please consider whether the calculus of "# of regulations" is therefore an insufficient gauge for measuring government freedom restrictions, and consider also the number of square meters/kilometers those regulations cover in their scope.

Oh, if only the world were as simple as your mind.

But it isn't.

"Freedom" requires freedom of association.  Which entails like-minded individuals forming communities which reflect their values.

When you grow up, you will understand that only a tiny minority of humanity wishes to live under minarchist local conditions.

The vast majority want food safety regulations enforced at the (non-federal) local level.

Liberty does not obligate others to subsidize an individual's act of altruism.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

Now go put on your trenchcoat and go wave your black flag around at the mall.  I hear Hot Topic is having a sale on piercings!   

I don't see why this requires such extensive discourse.

It's his liberty to feed the homeless in a public place. Period.

No ifs, buts, or permits. Freedom means freedom

I'm not saying it's ultimately not a distinction worth making, I'm just saying that when your freedom is being infringed, it matters less who is doing it than the fact that it is happening. I guess I'm taking issue with the reasoning that because a local government is restricting my freedom, I should be more OK with it than if it was the federal government. That doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. I accept the idea that states should be allowed to set their own laws. That doesn't make states restricting my freedom more palatable.

Under the maxim you quoted, every regulation would make the government less good, so it would stand to reason that the best governments allow the most freedom through the least number of regulations. So when a regulation is passed about who you can give sandwiches to, it stands to reason that it's a pretty unnecessary restriction of freedom. (At least judged solely by this maxim. I would tend to agree, just for different reasons.)

It is a pretty important distinction.  You might consider rethinking your approach.  Government is a social cost, anything that needs governing costs therefore...
Start with the maxim: "That governs best which governs least"

And you get this corollary:
The smallest unit of government that can effectively manage something is the proper level of government to do so.

In most cases this would be individuals governing themselves, above that would be a head of household.

In this case of the sandwich gifting, it is a city, which is a pretty big government.  Some cities also care how sweet your drinks are.

When you get all the way up to a Nation State, there shouldn't be all that much left for them to do...  but democracy changes that over time.
In most jurisdictions, we've even gone so far as to put them in charge some of the most intensely personal of decisions, of when people die, through progressively intrusive legislation over generations.

(Does that mean Florida?)

In response to this here, and also what you just wrote in the other topic about this same subject:


My question then is are you OK with limitations on individual freedom as long as they don't come from the federal level? I suppose I'm trying to find the line between where my absolute right to not be restricted in my actions meets your right to freedom of association, and by extension to use force to restrict actions of mine you don't like.

I personally don't put much emphasis on the distinction between use of force by the feds vs. use of force by the states or local governments. It seems to me either we are free or we are not. The manner by which we are not free (feds vs. local authority) is not very critical.

It's a difficult question because the answer varies depending on local conditions.

The federal authority must be strictly libertarian (IE minimally statist).

The 50 States and their constituent regions/counties/municipalities/school districts/homeowner associations are laboratories of democracy which experiment with the trade offs between security and liberty to find the optimum balance and compete in the marketplace of jurisdictions to acquire citizens to pay taxes and consume their services.

I choose to live in a place where economic freedom is relatively low but personal freedom is relatively high.  It's not a perfect fit, but the weather is really nice!   

I'm interested to know where you draw the line between people having rights and people having the authority to make laws that affect other people's rights.

Yep.

But help me with this disambiguating this one:  FSA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSA

This is all wrong.  there is no "tragedy of the commons", there is "tragedy of private property".  It was only when the government put hunting regulations on the Rocky Mountain elk that applied to public and private land did the populations rebound!  If people would be allowed to do on private property whatever they want would the Rocky Mountain elk go extinct.

Social Security can never go bankrupt.  As there will always be money coming in from the workers.