COUNTY SOVEREIGNTY No. 3
1996 May 1
Frank Forman, editor


Contents:
1. Free Ted Kaczynski!!
2. Information on the Fully Informed Jury Association
3. Resolved: The Federal Government Should *Not*
Play an Active Role in Redistributing Wealth and
Income

FREE TED KACZYNSKI!!
by Frank Forman

We should always expect the unexpected; it's
just that we don't know *which* unexpected to
expect. Who foretold the Internet, or the
destruction of our inner cities fifty years ago,
in 1946? Here's some possibilities, not
predictions though, that could have huge
consequences:

1. Cybercash. If it is possible to move money
around without the tax man finding out about it,
there will be a dramatic devolution of
government back to the county level. Land, at
least, cannot be hidden.

2. Plagues. Something far worse than AIDS could
break out. There are books about this, though no
one is so foolish to give any dates.

3. Soma. This was the pill in Aldous Huxley's
_Brave New World_ that kept the proles content.
An updated version of the bread and circuses of
ancient Rome. A higher tech version would be
direct stimulation of the pleasure centers of
the brain. Stimulation of the pleasure center
can be already done on rats, who will keep on
pressing a level to choose pleasure over food
until they die. But humans have many pleasure
centers, and they seem to be hard to tap. We'd
certainly hear about it if it were possible.

4. A jobless world. The first three could happen
within a few years, but a jobless world will be
a gradual process. Kurt Vonnegut foresaw such a
world in his first novel, _Player Piano_ (1952),
where all but an elite that tended the machines
were without work and less useless lives. Bread
is very cheap, thanks to high-tech agriculture
and teevee is even cheaper, but something closer
to soma had better come along, or the workless
may revolt.

5. Nuclear proliferation. The free market price
of an H-bomb is only a million dollars or so.
This would decentralize not only governments but
geographic congregations of wealth. Cities above
the ransom size would go, and so would large
manufacturing plants. Cities are being replaced
with telecommuting, and even the big automobile
plants in Detroit are shrinking. (Does anyone
know what the largest single plant in this
country is?)

6. Telecommuting. See No. 5. Lots of people are
predicting this.

7. Chemical and biological warfare. Less
containable than nuclear proliferation.

7 1/2. Space for more speculation on major
unexpecteds.

8. Jury nullification. The subject of the
current essay. Suppose the evidence pointing to
Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber turns out to be
as good as many people already think it is but
that *one* juror thinks, as I do, that the
Unabomber violated no *proper* Federal law and
held out against conviction. There would be
another trial, no doubt, and yet another.
Eventually the Feds would give up.

Recall that it was very difficult to get
convictions against Prohibition, because juries
would nullify. And when Reconstructionist
governments refused to put blacks on trial for
crimes and lynch mobs (a/k/a vigilante
committees) took the law into their own hands
out of sheer frustration^, juries refused to
convict the lynchers.
  ^[According to Bruce Benson, _The Enterprise
of Law_, the committees were made up of solid
citizens who made every effort to ascertain
guilt and did not go after the innocent. These
committees disbanded after the government went
back to doing its proper job.]

If the idea of jury nullification of improper
laws spreads, 8 1/3 percent of the population,
or one in twelve could effectively repeal
improper laws and rapid decentralization would
occur. Of course, the Feds could respond by
abolishing trial by jury or by changing the law
so that juries could have fewer twelve members
or so that less than unanimous verdicts would
result in convictions. Or trial by jury could be
suspended due to an "emergency." Governments
like to stay in power, but politicians also want
to get elected. There may be a race between the
Feds cracking down and the spread of the
nullification meme through the Internet and
other increasingly cheap channels of
communication.

Now I proposed in earlier essays in _County
Sovereignty_ a 5/6th supra-majority rule for
Federal legislation, and a corresponding 2/3rds
rule for the states, while retaining a simple
50% majority rule for the counties. This is my
proposed scheme for county sovereignty, which
also limits the ability to tax to the counties,
though the counties could send money to the
states and the states to the country as a whole.
Jury nullification, by one out of twelve,
effectively implements an 11/12ths supra-
majority rule, though not in formal referenda of
the citizens, as suggested by one correspondent
(whose name has departed from my files and for
which I apologize). So the 11/12ths rule may
come suddenly, and not just at the Federal
level, and work its effects unpredictably. As I
say, we must expect the unexpected.

So what happens to Dr. Ted, if the evidence
against him is substantial to convince all
twelve members of a jury beyond a reasonable
doubt that he committed murder? He is now being
held on a *Federal* explosive crime, which ought
not to be a Federal crime and he is suspected of
a *Federal* crime of murder. I say murder should
be a *county* crime and am not sure keeping
explosive should be even a county crime, though
that's up to each county. What should happen is
that the sheriff (or sheriffs) of whatever
county (or counties) thinks Ted committed a
murder should apply to that county's state
governor to ask the governor of Montana to ask
the sheriff of Lewis and Clark County to hand
Ted over to the governor of Montana, thence to
be extradited to another state and to be tried
in the county court in that other state. So the
chain would go from county to state to state to
county. The sheriff of Lewis and Clark County
and the governor of Montana may refuse
extradition. (Already governors can so refuse,
under our Constitution of 1787.)

But Ted should be released for any supposed
Federal crimes, as the Constitution gives no
authority to make them such.


INFORMATION ON THE FULLY INFORMED JURY ASSOCIATION

"The FIJA began in 1989 in the state of Montana,
where Larry Dodge, a longtime libertarian activist,
decided to amend state constitutions to require
judges to inform jurors of their right to judge
what was to be enforced in the courts as "Law." 
This concept, commonly referred to in the legal
community as "Jury Nullification," is a solidly-
based cornerstone of law upon which the principles
of both Republicanism and Democracy merged in the
vast majority of the founding Constitutions of
the several states, and the United States....

"This right is very ancient in the English-
American tradition, going back at least to the
Magna Carta of 1215 at Runnymede, agreed to by a
tyrant, King John, under threat of death, from a
popularly based uprising of noblemen...."

--from the welcoming document that goes to all
new subscribers to the FIJA e-mail list.

To subscribe, send mail to 
with the message "Subscribe fija ".
Read it for a while before you post, following
directions. Post only on topic!

You can join the FIJA, like I have done, by sending $25 to

FIJA
1937 Highway 271
Helmville, MT 59843-0059.

Members get a subscription to the extensive
quarterly newsletter "FIJActivist."


RESOLVED: THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
SHOULD *NOT* PLAY AN ACTIVE ROLE IN
REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH AND INCOME

by Frank Forman
forman@netcom.com
1996 April 21
submitted to National Debate


Should the Federal government play an active role in
redistributing wealth and income? In fact, the federal
government does very little else, not from the rich to the
poor to any great extent, but rather from the unorganized
to those whose merit consists of an ability to get
organized. The prime recipients of Federal largesse are
the elderly. The elderly are the richest age group in this
country, principally because their mortgages are usually
paid off, but they are also now the generation that is the
most likely to vote. This so-called "G.I. generation"
cohort has always been the most politically active age
group, and the budget will get balanced when they
eventually die off, and not before. Social Security and
Medicare are the big budget busters, but no politician can
tackle the Greedy Geezers and stand a prayer of getting
elected.

Now *direct* transfer payments to individuals do not
make up the entire Federal budget, but most of the other
items in it are really *indirect* transfer payments.
"Defense" contractors, for example, do very well by the
Federal government, even though our country was last
invaded in 1812 and faces no immanent threat and not
even a remote threat of invasion. If we were really
worried about the Russians invading, we would give them
large hunks of Federal land so that Russian business
interests would be harmed by any disruption of business
brought about by invasion. Except for "defense"
contractors, capitalists do not like war.

Add all the direct transfers to indirect transfers and I
doubt that fifteen percent remains for genuine public
goods that benefit the people as a whole. By counting
such items as the National Institutes of Health, the Bureau
of the Census, and the National Center for Education
Statistics,^ I have estimated that no more than two percent
of Federal spending goes for scientific research and data
gathering. Add in whatever you like, such as highways^^
(which benefit nearly everyone) and National Parks
(which benefit a broad cross-section) and it will be hard to
come up with as much as fifteen percent. But let's call it
fifteen percent anyhow.
  ^[I took what I found and doubled it, just to avoid
underestimating the total. A good deal of this may be as
useless as most of our "defense" budget, so please forgive
me if I have overestimated the total.]
  ^^[I am not endorsing the idea that the Federal
government *should* be spending money on highways,
that this is the most efficient way of doing financing them,
but the benefits are real and tangible, even if they should
be reduced by the extent of their inefficiency.]

So it seems that eighty-five percent of the Federal budget
goes to reward groups for getting organized. But this is
something of an overestimate, for there is a certain
amount of redistribution in the sense that most of us think
of redistribution, namely from the rich to the poor, or
rather from the better-off to the less well-off. How much
does this sort of *downward vertical* redistribution
amount to, as opposed to *upward vertical* redistribution
("welfare for the well-to-do") and *horizontal*
redistribution (like transfers from the taxpayers as a whole
to "defense" contractors)?

An estimate comes from Gordon Tullock, an economist at
the University of Arizona and one of the Founding
Fathers of the Public Choice school of economics, who
has come up with what has come to be called the "Tullock
Five Percent Rule," namely that men are naturally
charitable and will give up five percent of their income to
help the poor. Tullock finds that this percentage is
remarkably constant: in the 1850s and 1860s the poor did
just as well, in terms of the wages of the average worker,
as they do today. What has changed is that charity then
was mostly private and what was not private was handled
by local governments. There is no actual basis for the
feeling among liberals that devolution of Federal functions
to the states, local governments, or private citizens would
result in a "race to the bottom." Transfers to the poor
have grown only to the extent that governments are more
in the business of transfers of all sorts, and no more.

  Biologists, until very recently, taught that genuine
charity is impossible in animals, that supposed instances
of altruism are merely devices to perpetuate one's genes
in one's relatives ("kin altruism") or agreements to
"scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" ("reciprocal
altruism"). This would imply that genuine altruism is
confined to humans, who supposedly can transcend
nature. But recent observations of lions helping each other
out call this into question.^ I can't tell whether the
Tullock Five Percent Rule (as opposed to one percent or
fifteen percent) holds for lions as well as for people, but it
now stands to reason that the "natural sympathies" David
Hume held to be the basis for ethics has biological roots at
least as far as social mammals. Biologists are going to
have to retool their thinking about animals, and we are
going to have to retool our thinking about ourselves. This
is very good news, for we now have a great deal of new
thinking to do.
  ^[See "Cowardly Lions Confound Cooperation Theory,"
_Science_, 1995 September 1.]

Now not all Federal transfers are direct cash payments, as
I have said. But the indirect transfers are very inefficient
and result in net waste. It costs $100,000 in higher
automobile prices for every job that is saved by imposing
"voluntary" import quotas on Japanese cars. This is
wealth lost for good, for Americans are making cars
inefficiently, whereas the Japanese would make them
efficiently. "Defense" contracting is an even more blatant
waste: the contractors do get money, but instead of
producing something useful, their energies are devoted to
producing something useless. It would be far cheaper to
just write Treasury checks to those getting indirect
transfers.

The Tullock Five Percent Rule means that it does not
matter to the poor whether charity is provided by the
Federal government, by state or local governments, or by
private institutions. They will still get five percent. But it
does matter in other ways. Private charities could
distinguish between the deserving poor and the
undeserving poor,^ between those whose morals and work
habits would not be corrupted by receiving charity and
those whose morals and habits would. As one goes up the
chain of governments, rules come to dominate personal
knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place
by the charity worker. This is so because rules come to
dominate in large bureaucracies. (No one has ever found a
way around this.) And those among the poor, such as the
homeless, who do not fit the rules, fall between the
cracks. The homeless were taken care of better during the
1850s and 1860s than they are today, but the welfare
bums are better off.
  ^[Some liberals have internalized the norm of making
transfers so thoroughly that they are instantly horrified by
any such distinction.]

In summary, the deserving poor are worse off (as always
in terms of their income as a percentage of the average
worker) than they were 100 or 150 years ago, and all the
poor--indeed, everybody--is worse off because of all the
waste that indirect transfers cause. So, the poor get the
same sized slice of a smaller pie and the deserving poor
get a smaller slice.

I am not going to give any natural rights or libertarian
arguments against government charity. Other contributors
to this Forum can make them as eloquently as I. Just to
invoke libertarian principles against (vertical downward)
redistribution begs the whole question that the Forum is
intended to address in the first place. Besides, whole-hog
libertarian principles may well conflict with our animal
nature, as the evidence of lion cooperation may indicate.
But this means that the professed altruism of those who do
think the Federal government should play an ever more
active role in income redistribution are invoking a
morality just as spurious. There are *limits* to how far
such redistribution should go, but although Gordon
Tullock has been pestering liberals for decades now to
specify what a *just* distribution of income would look
like, he has found only one specification and that one
highly arbitrary.^ And never does any liberal call for
confiscating ninety percent of the incomes of Americans
so that Indians could have twenty percent of our standard
of living.
  ^[Lester Thurow "feels that the highest income an
American should receive is not more than five times as
much as that of the lowest income American" (Gordon
Tullock, _Economics of Income Redistribution_ (The
Hague: Kluwer-Nijhoff Publishing, 1983, p. 195). One
wonders whether, even then, Thurow would clamor for
still more redistribution. The present author has a large
file of clippings called "MORE!", whose message consists
essentially of wanting more.]

What to do? What to do? The underlying problem is not
what the Federal government does or does not do with
regards to *vertical downward* income redistribution, for
the poor are going to get their five percent in any case.
Devolution would target that five percent better to the
deserving poor and the disincentive effects of poverty
programs would decline. All this is true, but what enables
these badly designed poverty programs in the first place is
the same thing that allows for such massive redistribution
to groups whose merit consists solely of the ability to get
organized, namely the ease with which such legislation
can be passed. It is made easy by the New Deal revolution
which unchained Congress from being restricted to doing
the eighteen things specified in Article II, Section 8 of the
Constitution, to the situation today where there are at
most eighteen things Congress may *not* do, such as
conferring titles of nobility. Excess legislation has also
been made possible by the technological revolution in
communications, whereby it is far easier for groups to get
organized to pressure the government than it was in 1787.
Even back then, a simple 50% majority rule was
hampered by requiring majorities in two houses of
Congress formed on quite different principles
(considerably relaxed by the Seventeenth Amendment in
1913 for the direct election of senators), plus the signature
of the president. Because of another revolution in
communications (esp. the Internet), a reaction to excessive
government at the Federal level to confine it to its original
powers is well underway. To this I would add a
requirement for a five/sixths supra-majority of both
houses of Congress (plus a two-thirds supra-majority at
the state level, but still a simple 50% majority at the
county level). Markets, we now know much better than
we did in 1787, coordinate human action, and with the
information revolution proceeding apace, they coordinate
better than ever before. There is very little the Federal
government does that is genuinely useful that would not
be apparent to five/sixths of our Congressmen, even to the
ones we have in that august body today.

[Three other matters, not easily fit in above, and not
enough space to deal with now: 
1. There is not nearly as much inequality as imagined. We
all *start* at an effective income level undreamed of in
the past. Consider that the average American would turn
down $10,000 to give up teevee for a month. (Let this
idea sink in.)
2. It's the position in the race that matters, not the actual
amount of inequality anyhow. *Social mobility* is more
important, and the best way to promote this is to get rid of
regulations that make small businesses hard to start.
Public spending on education works to promote social
mobility only in theory.
3. There is no need to redistribute from rich *state* to
poor *state* on top of redistributing from rich *person* to
poor *person* by way of block grants. All this does is
promote geographic immobility by reducing incentives to
move. Governors love these block grants, since it means
their states don't have to pay, but this is an illusion.]

CONCLUSION

Let's get the Federal government out of redistribution
from rich to poor,  then, but as a part of a general reform
of getting it out of the business of redistributing generally.