Small Business Ownership

Larry said that there is a systemic lack of ownership that’s noticeable in lower-income, Black and Brown communities and among immigrants. Business-minded people come to the United States with a high level of enthusiasm, and visions of a better life than the one they left. People everywhere imagine owning their homes and starting businesses. Yet, our system of governance puts major obstacles in the way of their success.

Here in New York, they are faced with a wall of regulations and occupational licenses for everything you can imagine, from braiding hair at a whopping $20,000 required spend on education and other prerequisites, to its crackdown on unlicensed dog-walkers. Seriously?

How is a person expected to respond to such entrepreneurial spirit-killing over-regulation? Unsurprisingly, Larry says that with limited choices, these impoverished people begin looking at high-risk activities and crime. Those people who turn to crime will prey on their neighbors, where these crimes often go unreported, particularly in immigrant communities where undocumented people fear deportation, or where previously incarcerated individuals don’t want to increase their own risk of recidivism. According to Larry, this endless cycle continues, increasing incentives for human trafficking, the illegal drug trade, protection rackets, and sweatshops.

Larry believes that one approach to reducing poverty in these communities is by creating incentives for business ownership. For example, licensing requirements can be replaced with non-compulsory credentials. A hair-braider can just braid hair if they want to, without a license, or they may take the courses necessary to qualify for credentials in which some people may find value. This is especially true for low-risk jobs that do not involve dangerous activities. In this regard, a hair braider or dog-walker may get to work right away to earn an honest living, and they may also choose to get credentialed after they have the necessary funds in hand. As a result, consumers have more choices and can make rational decisions. They may choose the lower-priced, non-credentialed dog-walker, or they may choose to pay more to the dog walker who took a 12-hour class on animal care.

Home Ownership, and Poverty

According to Larry, wealthy, and often middle-class people are able to give their children an edge with the savings they accumulate through homeownership, but impoverished people have no corresponding equity. This leaves their children in a cycle of dependence and poverty, where money spent is money lost, as is the case with rent,  and a community that encourages the use of government programs that are funded by taxpayers.

Larry wants to see these communities thrive. People from every background are eager for homeownership, business ownership, and self-ownership. Yet because of barriers to ownership, people stay on welfare and stay poor.

Larry believes that public housing should have a path to ownership, too. Renting housing to low-income families is a bandaid, even when rental costs are low. Instead, Larry believes that we should give people the chance to purchase their public housing units. Instead of throwing away money on rent every month, people can invest in their property. In addition, when people own their property, they take better care of it. This is a win for society, and for the new homeowner. London already has a similar model for homeownership, where low-income families can have shared ownership in property, without investing the full market rate.

Fixing Families and Prison Reform

Larry Sharpe applies this concept to the idea of taking ownership of your life. This is most apparent in Brown and Black populations, where men are incarcerated at a considerably high rate. These people–predominantly men get convicted for nonviolent crimes like drug-related offenses, resulting in fatherless homes. The other people in these populations who actually have productive lives are incentivized to work for the government, where their lives aren’t self-owned, either.

Larry believes that we can do a lot of good by eliminating the fear among potential employers when it comes to hiring less-skilled, minority, and immigrant employees. Presently, employers may be targeted by the government if they fail at complying with any number of regulations, and so they hire the “safer” employees.

Want to know more? Watch the video, below:

The post How to Decrease Poverty in America appeared first on Larry Sharpe, Libertarian.

NY SAFE Act, Drug Laws: Stop punishing people for pretend “crimes.” Pardon those already in jail.

by Dan Smith

It used to be common sense that you needed a victim in order for a crime to have been committed. No one would argue that if you steal, commit fraud or physically hurt someone—i.e., there’s a victim, a crime had been committed. And in that case, the law needed to step in to protect the victim and punish the perpetrator.

In almost all other cases, where there is no victim, no one would think law enforcement had a role. Culturally, we may frown upon some behaviors, but we didn’t expect anyone to be prosecuted when consenting adults hurt no one else other than possibly themselves.

But today you can be jailed or fined for any number of infractions. If you hurt no one, but put the wrong substance in your body, if you have the wrong piece of equipment in your home, if you sell a prohibited item to a willing buyer without a state license, you may face fines or even jail time.

On the more ridiculous side, cities and towns across the nation have been shutting down children’s lemonade stands. It’s gotten so bad that Country Time Lemonade has offered to pay for fines and fees of children who commit the heinous act of selling the cool beverage on a hot day.

Turning our attention elsewhere, some people think we need laws which prohibit behaviors which in some rare cases lead to someone getting hurt. Prohibitions of all sorts suffer from this failure of logic. Just because someone commits an actual act of violence with a certain type of weapon or dies after ingesting a drug, that doesn’t mean that the millions of others who own that same weapon or drug are guilty of a crime. That’s fear-based ‘guilty until proven innocent’ backward logic. This is where our nanny government has gone too far in trying to run our lives.

We’re Adults, leave us alone!

This same logic applies to things like prostitution. We can think it unseemly and even immoral for someone to trade sex for money, but why should consenting adults be punished for such behaviors? Some say prostitution should be illegal because of the violence prostitutes face. But, in fact, making prostitution illegal creates the violence, as it does under other prohibitions—because the violence is the only method to resolve disputes and because johns know sex workers are not willing to go to police. Studies of legal prostitution back this assertion—the lack of prohibition erases almost all the violence. Attacking it from another angle, a New York Times opinion piece claims that prostitution is not a victimless crime because the prostitute has no choice—that it’s often human trafficking. But that’s then not consensual. The New York Times conflates prostitution with the real crime of slavery, and their misdirection destroys their argument. Safe, legal prostitution in places like Nevada refute this claim, as well.

The growth in prosecution of victimless crimes has also somehow made it proper for your property to be guilty, even if you’ve committed no crime. Your money or assets can be taken from you under what is known as civil asset forfeiture. Under the false guise of reducing narcotics sales, police can show up and take and keep your money, car or home and never charge you with a crime. Police are no more than thieves in such instances. And there’s nothing you can do—you’re presumed to be in the wrong while the state is given all the power and presumed to be in the right. And it’s a direct consequence of our victimless crime regime under which we live.

Some people claim that laws against drug use helps protect people from substance abuse. That fails on almost every front. Substance abuse has not gone away because laws—it’s gotten worse. Places like Portugal show drug abuse declines when you legalize. And, like prostitution, violence actually increases when you prohibit drugs—whether it be alcohol Prohibition of the 1920’s or today’s War on Drugs. The only explanation for why our backwards victimless crimes laws persist is the sad realization that the War on Drugs makes drug warriors wealthy. It’s just another form of cronyism and it needs to stop.

Victimless crime mentality undermines the legitimacy of our proper laws and those tasked with enforcing them. It leads to police brutality in situations like the famous case of Eric Garner who was choked to death by police for the “crime” of selling untaxed cigarettes because of New York’s nation’s highest cigarette taxes which causes most cigarettes to be smuggled into the state.

Beyond wasting police time and resources, we are wasting lives and taxpayer dollars.  300,000 Americans are sitting in prisons for non-violent drug offenses. With incarceration costs of $9.3 billion per year and lost income taxes of $3.1 billion which prisoner would otherwise be earning, America loses $12.4 billion per year even before we count the wages lost to the economy. [H/T: Libertarian-In-Chief, @ToddHagopian for the stats]

Recently President Donald Trump has started pardoning non-violent felons. He pardoned non-violent drug “criminal” Alice Marie Johnson, for whom celebrity Kim Kardashian had requested be pardoned. Trump says he’s looking to set more such victimless criminals free. Whether or not you like Donald Trump, this is a good thing.

Perhaps he got this great idea from Larry Sharpe, who weeks ago made it a campaign promise to pardon those convicted of non-violent “crimes” when he becomes governor of New York. To start, Sharpe plans to pardon those who are convicted of non-violent violations of the NY SAFE Act. The NY SAFE Act makes it a “crime” to own certain pieces of equipment New York deems to be an “assault weapon”. The Act makes certain types of pistols “assault weapons”, while others are not.  Certain features, like detachable magazines, pistol grips and folding stocks somehow turn a weapon into an “assault weapon,” while other features do not. Prison sentences for owning such pieces of equipment are draconian, to say the least.

It’s all very confusing. But your confusion could earn you serious jail time for doing nothing more than owning an innocuous piece of equipment which is legal in almost the entire rest of the country. It’s completely ridiculous, which is why Sharpe wants to bring some common sense back to New York.

And that’s what we need, across the board: common sense, and justice. If there’s no victim, there almost certainly is no crime.

Let common sense justice be served.

The post Victimless Crimes in New York appeared first on Larry Sharpe, Libertarian.

The purpose of prison is not to teach lessons, and it rarely corrects bad behavior—it simply punishes lawbreakers. We need to start thinking of our justice system as just that: a system of justice, not punishment, in which prisons, police, and the laws themselves are used to pursue actual justice.

Legal Reform

According to the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, they are responsible for the confinement and habitation of 53,000 people in custody and 36,000 on parole. Nationally, there are over 2.2 million people incarcerated in both jails and prisons. Are there really that many criminals in New York and across the country? Or are people being confined for committing nonviolent crimes or unknowingly violating statutes? We can easily reduce the prison population by creating fewer criminals in the first place: by repealing bloated legislation and decriminalizing nonviolent and victimless offenses.

Many “crimes” should not be considered as such. The Libertarian Party supports the idea that only the use of force and fraud should be criminal. One way to reform what characterizes a criminal is mens rea reform. Mens rea is the idea that criminal intent occurred at the time of the wrongdoing. Currently, the extent of evidence that needs to be proven to show criminal intent varies.

The Mens Rea Reform Act of 2017 (which is supported by the Federal Defenders of New York) was introduced in early October by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) to raise the requirements for prosecutors to prove criminal intent for a conviction of federal crimes. Often, the justice system operates on the principle that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking a law; this makes no sense given the sheer number of laws on the books, and, according  to the CATO Institute, this definition of “criminal” should be rejected. This would be a great first step to decreasing the number of incarcerated individuals.

Prison Reform

Another element of the criminal justice system in need of reform is the prison system. National jail populations are rising, including in New York. In New York state, 70% of county jail inmates have not even been convicted yet. There are too many people who are not a threat to public safety in cages because they cannot afford a cash bail. Biased risk assessments are keeping people in jail unnecessarily. And if someone is unable to afford bail, it affects their ability to maintain employment during their jail stay. When their trial ends, they have no job to go back to. This hurts the most disadvantaged people in society.

Although there are no private prisons in New York state, private prisons in the rest of the nation are currently paid per inmate, which creates an incentive for prisons to put more people behind bars, whether they deserve to be there or not. Instead, prisons should only get paid when they house dangerous criminals and when non-violent prisoners are rehabilitated, released, and rejoin society (similar to recruiting companies, as Larry Sharpe states). This is not currently happening, as recidivism rates are extremely high.

New York City claims to want to help inmates rehabilitate back into society. For example, there has been a proposal for NYC Artist Residencies. The money would be used to help rehabilitate and resocialize prisoners through art. It sounds nice, but it is difficult to see how it would help. Art is a wonderful healing tool, but it’s not a practical way to get criminals the real help they need. That money could be put toward education to help them get back into the lawful workforce.

Right now, prisons around the country are profiting from the suffering of many citizens, especially those who struggle with substance abuse and addiction. True rehabilitation of these inmates would entail treating drug problems as medical issues, not crimes. The War on Drugs does nothing to help addiction or abuse. Alcohol prohibition did not work; Marijuana prohibition does not work. Prohibition does not curb sales or use of any drug. Not only does this war kill and jail too many good people, it is a waste of time and money for police officers to enforce. If prisons start educating inmates and treating addiction as a health issue, we would start to see recidivism rates decrease.

Police Reform

Law enforcement reform is also needed. As the martial arm of the criminal justice system, this is a crucial aspect of promoting justice over punishment. Body cameras make transparency possible (but we do need to be careful about how we use technology so as to not infringe on privacy rights). Police need to be held accountable for errors in judgement, including the use of violent force against the accused. Many issues must be resolved at the federal level, but as a state, New York can effect meaningful change for the training and accountability of our police force, ensuring that justice is served in police-civilian interactions. For example, civil asset forfeiture laws can be changed at the state level.

Civil asset forfeiture is a process in which law enforcement seizes money or property from an accused person before he or she is convicted of a crime. This is a very controversial process, as most state laws on asset forfeiture encourage law enforcement officers to profit from the property taken. We expect our law enforcement to remain neutral entities in the judicial process, but reports of widespread corruption show that this is not the reality.

For example, the NYPD claims they have not backed up data detailing $68 million in forfeited assets, and have therefore been unable to give property back to those they have taken it from.  Not only that, but the “NYPD is supposed to return property seized during an arrest once a criminal case ends, so long as the person has a signed release from prosecutors. But public defenders say these requests are often ignored without consequence.” In this case, the law itself is at odds with justice. Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft, and reform is needed. The process of recouping property needs to be much easier—or, better yet, law enforcement should stop taking property from the accused before conviction.

Another major problem specifically in New York with the criminal justice system is perjuring police officers. Cops are lying under oath to justify unnecessary arrests made to meet quotas. First, there should not be quotas set for arrests, as this only incentivizes police officers to make petty arrests that can ruin lives. Second, we need to trust officers to be honest about important cases, and cops lying about petty crimes undermines our entire judicial process. Quotas and petty-offense policing open the door to harassment and civil rights violations, which works against the goal of justice. And there is already evidence that reform of this nature works. When NYPD did a slowdown in petty law enforcement as a form of protest, major crime complaints were down. By simply reducing the aggressive policing of minor statutes, the number of serious crimes in the community fell.

We must get back to the idea of criminal justice, not criminal punishment. We need to rethink the definition of crime and how prisons and police precincts make a profit. Take a look at what Larry Sharpe has to say about criminal justice reform on his issues page: https://backup1.larrysharpe.com/issues.

The post Restoring Justice to the Criminal Justice System appeared first on Larry Sharpe, Libertarian.