The violent death of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia set off the Arab Spring. Could the killing of Eric Garner lead to a springtime of police reform – and regulatory reform -- in the United States?

Bouazizi was a street vendor, selling fruits and vegetables from a cart. He aspired to buy a pickup truck to expand his business. But, as property rights reformer Hernando de Soto wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "to get a loan to buy the truck, he needed collateral — and since the assets he held weren't legally recorded or had murky titles, he didn't qualify."

Meanwhile, de Soto notes, "government inspectors made Bouazizi's life miserable, shaking him down for bribes when he couldn't produce licenses that were (by design) virtually unobtainable. He tired of the abuse. The day he killed himself, inspectors had come to seize his merchandise and his electronic scale for weighing goods. A tussle began. One municipal inspector, a woman, slapped Bouazizi across the face. That humiliation, along with the confiscation of just $225 worth of his wares, is said to have led the young man to take his own life."

Bouazizi was a poor man trying to engage in commerce to make a better life. His brother Salem told de Soto the meaning of Bouazizi's death: "He believed the poor had the right to buy and sell."

It was a story that resonated across the Arab world – a government that stifled freedom and enterprise, unaccountable bureaucracy, arbitrary enforcement, official contempt for citizens, a man who just couldn't take it any more.

Eric Garner's story is surprisingly similar. He had been arrested more than 30 times, for such crimes as marijuana possession and driving without a license, and most often for selling untaxed cigarettes on the street.

Why sell untaxed cigarettes? Because New York has the country's highest cigarette taxes, $4.35 a pack for New York State and another $1.50 for the city. A pack of cigarettes can cost $14 in New York City, two and a half times as much as in Virginia. So a lively black market has sprung up. Buy cigarettes at retail in Virginia or North Carolina, sell them at a big markup in New York, and you can still undercut the price of legal, taxed cigarettes.

Patrick Fleenor reported in a 2003 study for the Cato Institute that New York's cigarette taxes had created a thriving black market, with rising levels of street crime, turf wars and increasing organized crime. He found that from 1990 to 2002, as the city and state repeatedly raised taxes, New York's sales of taxed cigarettes relative to the national average plummeted. But reported smoking rates fell only slightly, in line with national trends. Obviously a lot of New York smokers were getting their fix from the black market.

A 2013 study by the Mackinac Center found, not surprisingly, that New York had the highest rate of cigarette smuggling, totaling 61% of the state's cigarette sales.

Eric Garner was a small part of that black market. He sold individual cigarettes – "loosies" – on the street to people without much money. It's easier for police to apprehend street sellers than interstate organized crime. Thus his long record of arrests. And the more laws we pass, the more chances there are for people to run afoul of the police. Especially when we outlaw peaceful activities, such as smoking marijuana, selling untaxed cigarettes or feeding the homeless.

Eric Garner's last words could have been said by Mohamed Bouazizi. We've all heard that his very last words were "I can't breathe," which he told the police eight times. But before his encounter with the police reached that final, fatal point, cellphones captured his frustration:

"Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I'm tired of it. It stops today. … Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me (garbled) Selling cigarettes. I'm minding my business, officer, I'm minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone."

Mohamed Bouazizi's death after he was disrespected and impeded by government officials set off a wave of protests, first in his native Tunisia, then across the Arab world. Governments toppled, Time magazine proclaimed "The Protester" the Person of the Year for 2011, and people talked hopefully of an Arab Spring. Reform has been more successful in Tunisia than anywhere else.

Eric Garner's death has also set off protests, not just in New York but in Boston, Chicago, Washington, and other places. Many protesters held signs reading "I can't breathe" and "This stops now." They should add "I'm minding my business. Just leave me alone."

Let's hope this coming spring brings a wave of police reform in the United States, and also a reconsideration of the high taxes, prohibitions, and nanny-state regulations that are making so many Americans technically criminals and exacerbating police-citizen tensions.

Originally posted by drjarhead:
I agree these things need to change.

But what are these people going to do when the changes are in place?

Go apply for a job at Walmart?

Illegal enterprises are easier money with higher risk.

Just putting it out there. I'm all for bringing govt down to the bare essentials and putting 90% of govt employees in unemployment lines. About time they got a taste how the other half lives anyhow.

Somehow, I don't see them working at Walmart either. The cigarette traffickers have more qualifications than they do.

Both groups could fight for pieces of a shrinking pie that is criminal enterprise. lol

Expanding the rights of self-defense in the wake of such things seems a winner to me as well. Country needs an enema.

"Careening Toward A New & Different Kind Of Civil War"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/08/2014


Submitted by James H Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The Beauty Shop had barely stopped smoldering in Ferguson, Missouri, when the Eric Garner grand jury decision came down on Staten Island — no probable cause to indict one particular cop for something — manslaughter? — in his choke-hold take-down of the 300-pound cigarette-seller. For my money, they should have indicted the whole gang of cops who were there that day, including the black female NYPD sergeant on the scene ostensibly “supervising” the action, at least for something like negligent homicide, since the infamous video shows them acting cruelly, stupidly, and indifferently as the poor guy just lay dying on the sidewalk.

Worse, the decision only muddied the public’s view of several events in recent years involving black people, police, and standards of behavior so that now a general opinion prevails that all black people are always treated badly for no reason. That was the same week, by the way, that a white Bosnian immigrant named Zemir Begic was bludgeoned to death by three black teenagers wielding hammers who were out beating on stopped cars on a St Louis street — a crime that was barely covered in the news media, and went unprotested outside the immigrant neighborhood where it occurred. It’s hard to blame the public for being confused about what may or may not be happening across the nation, but history will surely judge this as a tragic time for America.

If we can’t or won’t unpack the separate issues in these matters, the country is going to get into a lot more trouble. One issue is whether police forces in the USA are becoming goon squads. The decision by the federal government to offload tactical military equipment, including armored war wagons, on police departments far and wide was disgracefully stupid since it only gives the impression, when hauled out, that the police are at war with the citizenry. There ought to be public discussion of just flat-out taking all that stuff away from them.

Non-black America is constantly being importuned to “talk honestly” about race and then punished when they actually do. I’ll venture here to summarize what I think has actually happened, and I’m sure a lot of people won’t like it, including plenty of white people. I take a historical view. It is at least an interesting coincidence that the climax of the civil rights campaign produced a black separatist movement that has endured for half a century. It emerged at exactly the moment that the two signal civil rights acts passed congress in 1964-65 (the public accommodations act and the voting rights act).

I think the reason for the sudden rise of black separatism was anxiety among black Americans about the prospect of being formally invited to participate in what was then American common culture. By the late 1960s even colleges were chartering new, separate student unions (at the demand of black students). The sad irony of this has been lost to history. But in effect, by that time a large segment of the black population had opted out either actively or mentally from trying to join the then-dominant culture. The gulf between the two cultures has only grown wider since then, egged on by a foolish white-sponsored “diversity” campaign which had imposed the ridiculous idea that a common culture in one nation is unnecessary.

The result is a permanently oppositional black culture with an elaborate ideology of endless grievance and a guilt-tripped white political culture held hostage by it and pandering endlessly to it — and sandwiched in between those two dispositions is a whole lot of really bad behavior. The least you can say about the four incidents involving Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice is that they involved some degree of ambiguity about what was actually going on, and in probably all those cases, at least, death was not caused by sheer malice. The same is not true about the case of Zemir Begic, or of the many people victimized during last year’s “knockout” game fad, or indeed the astounding number of people being gunned down regularly on the streets of Chicago.

I don’t think we’re capable of making these distinctions anymore, and surely not of doing anything constructive about them. Instead, we just appear to be careening toward a new and different kind of civil war.

Originally posted by Imagrunt:

Quote

Originally posted by drjarhead:
[b] I agree these things need to change.

But what are these people going to do when the changes are in place?

Go apply for a job at Walmart?

Illegal enterprises are easier money with higher risk.

Just putting it out there. I'm all for bringing govt down to the bare essentials and putting 90% of govt employees in unemployment lines. About time they got a taste how the other half lives anyhow.

Somehow, I don't see them working at Walmart either. The cigarette traffickers have more qualifications than they do.

Both groups could fight for pieces of a shrinking pie that is criminal enterprise. lol

Expanding the rights of self-defense in the wake of such things seems a winner to me as well. Country needs an enema.

If only everyone knew how accurate is THIS post!

These enterprise are only "illegal" because swarms of officers have been sent forth to eat out our substance.

This is ALL about revenue generation for .gov [/b]