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What does he know?
Rarely does a person so well understand his topic and make that knowledge easy to grasp. Scott might just know everything there is to know about everybody involved. Sounds amazing, and it is, but you think the amazing it can’t be. It is be.
Scott has written a deeply researched book about just how badly this whole affair has gone and been and sheds a very needed light on parts of the government action we would prefer to think doesn’t happen.
Scott was recently on the Dave Smith podcast and explained further just how we have been misinformed.
Scott’s writing is an easy read, which is good, for he makes a chaotic topic easy to understand. With that understanding comes a rage at how such horrors were conceived, started and allowed to continue. It’s almost as if the government has a mind of its own, that it does not listen to the people. As Mark Twain might say, but I repeat myself.
Fools Errand takes you down a rabbit hole from which there is no escape. It’s kinda like the photos of the ugly dogs: you can’t un-see those and you can’t un-know what you learn from Scott’s book.
It’s not what you think
Despite the page count, the text is about half that.
Why?
Foot notes. No kidding. Hundreds of foot notes supporting every point.
Fools Errand does such a good job at expressing the idiocy of the brass who chose war, who chose killing Americans and Afghanis and anyone else who gets in the way, who chose fighting battles that are not ours to fight.
Not one thing in Afghanistan was our concern. But, Americans went and killed and died for no good reason.
Fools Errand exposes the foolishness that is Army Brass but also the foolishness of thinking violence grows peace.
In addition to writing the book, Scott appears on the Tom Woods show here, and here, here, and here. Scott talks quickly so you’ll have to keep distractions at bay.
What’s old and what’s new?
Scott does have a previous book available, Lords of Secrecy, and is working on another.
It is an irony when we praise the power of the state for something good. For example, when they give back to the people the rights they had in the first place to grow a garden on their property.Florida’s legislature has told cities that they must respect the right of the people to grow their own food. Let’s home that WI judge doesn’t move south and decide they don’t have the right to eat the food they grow! You can read about him and the other thuggery from the state at my post about food rights.This article from Reason.com is the source of the legislature’s decision, and I think it is the right one.h/t Reason.com
A court says a city can squash your property rights because it thinks vegetables are ugly.
Late last month, I had the opportunity to discuss my recent book, Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable, before a Seattle-based group of family and consumer scientists, many of them retired. During my talk, I focused in part on a series of city ordinances around the country that ban people from gardening in their own front yards. As almost always happens, these particular laws, among the countless dozens I discuss in the book, raised the most ire among the audience:
“Why would any city do this? How can a city do this? I hope these people are fighting back!”
One of the most egregious examples I highlighted comes from an ongoing case in Miami Shores, Fla. There, Hermine Ricketts and her husband, Laurence Carroll, had kept a nicely manicured vegetable garden in their front yard for nearly two decades. Then, in 2013, Miami Shores adopted an ordinance that banned vegetable gardens, and vowed to fine violators each day they failed to comply with the law.
The couple sued, arguing, as a local CBS affiliate put it, “that the ordinance ran afoul of the Florida Constitution, including that it violated their privacy rights and their right to acquire, possess and protect property.”
Last year, a Florida state court upheld the vegetable-garden ban, on grounds that aesthetic reasons—the city thinks vegetables are ugly—are sufficient justification for a city to ban vegetable gardens.
Last week—a few days after my Seattle talk—a state appeals court ruled in the matter. The court’s words are, at first, buoying. The decision begins with an non-exhaustive list of all the things Miami Shores residents may have in their front yards: “garden gnomes, pink flamingos and trolls…. boats and jet skis…. whatever trees, flowers, shrubs, grasses, fruits and berries they desire.”
Everything save for vegetables.
Surely, thinks the reader, such a ban cannot stand. Tragically, after the appeals court’s ruling, it did just that.
“Though [the plaintiffs’] claims seem compelling, the trial court’s well-reasoned, ten-page final order rejecting the appellants’ claims correctly acknowledged the difficult procedural posture confronting the appellants and dutifully applied controlling precedent,” the appeals court held.
I will concede that the trial court’s order is, in fact, 10 pages in length. Well reasoned? The order simply recommends that the proper remedy for Ricketts and Carroll—or anyone else whose right to plant a garden and feed themselves and their family has been trampled on—is to vote for better elected officials in their cities and towns. (It’s worth noting that judges in Florida are also elected by voters.)
This is the judicial equivalent of the shruggie: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s also a typical, if particularly repugnant, example of the trifling level of scrutiny—known as “rational basis review“—that’s commonly applied by our courts.
“In Miami Shores, it is perfectly fine to grow fruit, build a pool, or park a boat in your front yard,” says Ari Bargil, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which represents Ricketts and Carroll, in an email to me in the wake of the court’s ruling. “But this decision holds that it[‘s] perfectly rational for a City to prohibit vegetable gardens, while permitting virtually everything else.”
Why ever would Miami Shores adopt such a draconian and unconstitutional measure? What rational basis might city lawmakers have had? These are great questions. Meh.
“City commissioners’ motives in adopting ordinances are not subject to judicial scrutiny,” the appeals court explains, citing Florida precedent. The particular Miami Shores garden ban is part of the city’s zoning laws, an area in which courts often provide cities with almost boundless and arbitrary discretion.
“Prohibitions on gardens such as those in… Miami Shores… arise largely out of zoning regulations,” I write in Biting the Hands that Feed Us. “Zoning, supporters contend, is intended to prevent conflicts and nuisances from arising. There’s probably some truth to that argument. But sometimes, as in the case of the prohibitions on edible gardens detailed in this chapter, zoning itself becomes the nuisance and the source of conflict.”
The problem of gardens and property rights snuffed out by draconian zoning rules is national in scope. In my book, I discuss many other examples of local gardening bans, several of which I first wrote about in a 2012 column, including ones in Oklahoma, Florida, Massachusetts, and Michigan (and have also written about since).
Thankfully, people are fighting back. For that approach to succeed, though, courts have to do their jobs.
“The Florida Constitution protects individuals from wholly arbitrary restrictions on their right to use their property,” IJ’s Bargil says.
I’m both optimistic and hopeful that Florida’s highest court will see that truth and side with Ricketts and Carroll.
But wait! There’s more…
Listen to my podcast with Michael Boldin of the 1oth Amendment Center talk with me about food sovereignty and José Niño talk about the war on meat and meat eaters.
