Relative to prosecution for victimless crimes.

February 9^th, 2012

Written testimony of:

Bill McGonigle

251 Croydon Turnpike
Plainfield

603.448.1668

bill@mcgonigle.us

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the Committee:

I’m Bill McGonigle of Plainfield, and I am here today to testify in favor of HB1531.

I’m sure you’ll hear many important points today – about how Government is instituted to protect us from each other, that Just Government arises from the concent of the governed, and how the natural right of defense enables a Just Government to provide for the mutual defense. Our Constitution has specific requirements for just incarceration, namely to reform.

These are all good points, and true, however, I wish to add a slightly different perspective, from perhaps a more pragmatic angle. I will focus on that point and try to be brief.

I would like to bring to the Committee’s attention the incarceration rate in New Hampshire and illustrate how it compares to some other States and Countries around the world.

According to the standard measure, New Hampshire imprisons 220 individuals per 100,000 residents. That number in isolation has little meaning.

For comparison, Massachusetts has an incarceration rate of 218 per 100,000 – pretty similar. Yet, who would suggest that the level of crime is Massachusetts is similar to that in New Hampshire?

Further down the list we’ll find Minnesota at 179 and Maine at 151, but not before we pass the narco states of Mexico and Columbia, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey. To be fair, in Saudi Arabia, one might think the execution rates might keep the incarceration rate down, but Turkey hasn’t executed anybody since 1984.

Next we find Australia at 133, then Canada at 117, but not before passing the repressive regime of China at 122. France at 109 marks half the incarceration rate of New Hampshire. At this point we should stop to ask if New Hampshire is a place with twice the criminal activity of France. Below the half-way point we find Italy, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and Norway, then Finland below the 1/3 mark. All of these countries have abolished capital punishment.

So, what’s going on here? To be sure, New Hampshire isn’t the worst offender among the United States, and the US rate at the Federal level is much worse. But there’s clearly a problem here – New Hampshiremen aren’t somehow more evil than their European counterparts, and these European States aren’t suffering from rampant crime waves that we’re somehow avoiding with our overflowing prisons (as an aide: this is something to consider in light of County-level controversies about having to build new, larger prisons).

But perhaps incarceration rates correlate with reduced crime, so the State has a vested interest in such high levels? Again, this can be shown to be untrue by way of comparison. For example, when comparing crime rates between New Hampshire and Switzerland, major crime indicators are very close in scale (I have a data table in my written testimony with some figures for comparison). The similarity of the crime numbers between New Hampshire and Switzerland is likely more illustrative of a universal aspect of human nature than an effect of particular legal systems.

Because other Western countries prosecute victimless crimes less, they don’t have staggeringly different crime levels than New Hampshire, and the magnitude of the incarceration rate is shown here to not significantly reduce crime, we must consider the effectiveness of our incarceration rates, and the prosecution of, and imprisonment for, victimless crimes.

Now, it’s possible that the Legislature could spend the next twenty years going through the State’s Statutes with a fine-toothed comb to find all of the offending Statutes, and that’s probably a good idea anyway. Whether that kind of long-term project can actually be accomplished in a political environment where control of the Legislature tends to flip every four years and the parties tend to abandon the projects of the other guys – I’d like to think it could happen but I’m not really sure.

But in the meantime, this Legislature has the responsibility to ensure than injustice is not being brought upon the People of New Hampshire. With our existing Statutes, over that same 20-year period it’s very likely that the State will imprison hundreds if not thousands of individuals for committing so-called ‘crimes’ that have no victim, and it won’t reduce crime rates or protect other people. HB 1531 offers a way out of this bind by allowing defendants to offer, as a defense, that the alleged crime had no victim.

Besides saving the taxpayers a tremendous amount of money by not prosecuting and incarcerating all these individuals unnecessarily, it would start us down the path of bringing New Hampshire in line with more appropriate crime-control measures, as established empirically by the example of the entirety of the rest of the Western World.

HB1531 doesn’t instantly solve all of our problems – and I like to think it would be a stop-gap measure until our Statutes can be straightened out – but it does give the People of New Hampshire a realistic chance at a fair shake at Justice in our State, and as I hope I’ve shown here today, it does so without the risk of increased levels of crime.

Thank you for your time, and I’d be happy to answer any questions the Committee might have.

Incarceration Rates (per 100,000)

Crime Rates (per 100,000)

Sources:

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

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nhcrime.htm

http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/fr/index/themen/19/03/02/key/02/straftaten_im_einzelnen.html

A fair question to ask, though, is how much racist content was there in these newsletters?  It’s often said that “surely he must’ve read his own newsletters.”  Reporter Ben Swann at WXIX has compiled the data and concluded that racist content appeared in nine newsletters over a twenty year period.  Here’s what it looks  like visually:

So, how do Ron Paul’s claims hold up?  Do his claims that articles were often written by freelance writers seem reasonable?  How about his claims that he sometimes was too busy to read the newsletters while running his medical practice?  Could he have read most of his newsletters but still missed these?

Method:

First, make a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough.  Use your favorite.  Here’s the one I used (oz are by weight):

Cream in mixer for two minutes:

2 sticks butter, softened

8 oz brown sugar

2 oz white sugar

Add:

2 eggs

1½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Separately, mix:

12oz all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

and slowly add to wet mixture.  Incorporate:

8 oz chocolate chips (dark belgian chocolate chips are good)

OK, then, spray a bowl with cooking spray and set outside to cool:

If you don’t have a snowy woodpile, a refrigerator or freezer would suffice.

Next, spread out 18 Double-stuff Oreos on an insulated jelly roll pan, and set on top of the woodstove:

The temperature here was 113° F:

If you don’t have a woodstove, a warming oven, or a second oven about 120° F would do.  The idea is to make the cookies warm enough that they’re not cooling the cookie from the inside while they’re baking, but if this goes on too long or too hot, there will be a gooey cookie mess.  Once the top cookie rotates freely, it’s warm enough.  This took about 15 minutes.

Pre-heat the oven to 325° F (but see discussion of temperatures below).

Spray some cupcake tins with cooking spray:

Set out a rolling mat, or flour a counter with the chilled dough (use more flour than shown in this picture):

and flour the dough as you roll it out (this is sticky dough):

The final thickness of the dough will be determined by the thickness of the chocolate chips:

What you’re going for is about 1/4″ thick:

Now, take a biscuit cutter and cut the dough into as many disks as will fit:

Gently remove the excess and lift the disks into the cupcake tin:

Now, place an Oreo in each tin.  Try to center them as well as possible:

And then add a disk to the top of each one:

It’s not necessary to seal the top to the bottom, but I did push the edges down a bit, to make a bit of a dough dome.

These are set for the oven.  Place on the middle rack and bake for 17 minutes.  I’ve verified that my (gas) oven’s thermostat is property calibrated, but many recipes assume an oven that runs too hot, so if your oven runs hot, reduce the cooking time.  Here’s what they look like when they’re done:

Set them outside on the woodpile to cool for 10 minutes (photo is of second batch):

While the first batch is baking, roll out the rest of the dough:

and when you’re down to the last of the dough, it helps to just mark the dough before cutting, so you can count out an even number of tops and bottoms:

In the end, I had 36 rounds, for 18 tops and 18 bottoms.

Now, then, bring the cooled cookies inside and gently run a butter knife around the edge to make sure they don’t stick.  Transfer to a cooling rack to finish cooling through to room temperature (as if you’re not going to eat one hot…):

I made these as a gift, so I arranged them on a plate:

Now then, about temperature.  Here are two cookies, the left is baked at 350° F and the right is baked at 325° F:

At 350, the cookie does not rise as high and is more cooked through.  At 325, you get a higher rise, and a more gooey chocolate chip batter.  I find the 325 cookies to be the most popular, but it’s a matter of personal taste.  At 350, bake for 14 minutes instead of 17.

Here are some inside shots, again 350 on the left, and 325 on the right:

Enjoy!  A full glass of milk is required per cookie.  I guess that’s not really a surprise, since these are really four cookies in one.  Best to have these only once a year!

Here’s a chart showing the polling results over time of the NH 2012 Republican primary candidates.  Automatic data smoothing is turned on to make the trends visible.

Observations:

• Romney’s support has been very consistent over time, in the 35-40% band
• Romney, Gingrich, and Paul appear to be the long-haul competitors
• Ron Paul and Romney have the most consistent support – with the notable difference that Paul’s support continues to increase over time, while Romney’s now appears to be wavering.  Also, over the time scale here Romney’s support has shown quite a bit of oscillation while Paul’s mainly trends upwards.
• Gingrich’s uptick in recent weeks appears to mirror Romney’s losses.  Is this a defection among Romney supporters to the Gingrich camp?
• The media-darling poll bumps are quite apparent for Bachman, Perry, and Cain.  The length of a media-darling poll bump appears to be in Gingrich’s favor – unless he tanks it spectacularly in the next month (his opponents are already working his personal history hard).
• The big questions are: will Romney continue to trend downward, will Gingrich’s bump fade before the primary, and if both are true, how high do Paul’s numbers reach, come January 10th?

I think to support this you have to assume that a private worker has a right to a job at a private employer under the employee’s terms and that the State has to step in to enforce that. The State is acting like a violent union here.

I wish the legislation had been written to actually prevent unions from being able to demand donations of its members to political action committees against their interests, but as it’s written, it looks like an anti-liberty bill to me.  In essence, it’s the State interfering in the right of private contract, for what it thinks are sound social-engineering reasons.

People I respect tell me, “yeah, but it’s the best way to achieve the greater good.”  This violates my “the means are everything,” guiding principle.  Try harder next time.

The Union Leader reports that it would cost $43 billion and take 40 years to bury power lines in New Hampshire. This number doesn’t pass the smell test. The Gross State Product of New Hampshire was $60 billion in 2010, so the cost estimate is 2/3 of the GSP.

Let’s assume each ratepayer (home, business) paid for his own underground service to the next ratepayer (so, you pay for the line from your house to your next door neighbor’s). This would mean the cost-shared amount would be equivalent to 2/3 of the median household income to install a buried line from your house to your neighbor’s house (ignoring the higher incomes of businesses for the sake of easy math, so an overestimate of actual costs) . The 2009 household median income in NH was $61,000 which would put the cost of that cable pull at about $40,000. No way that’s a real number unless somebody’s uncle is getting very rich on the deal. In this kind of massive volume, this should be more like a $4000 project for an average home. Even that seems high – we could install a generator at every home in New Hampshire for that kind of money.

Of course there are corner cases – houses a miles from the road, and long stretches of house-less road, but there are also homes right next to each other in the cities, trailer parks, and dense developments (some of which already have the lines underground) for balance. But even if we ‘only’ had every residential area with buried utilities, that would be a heck of an improvement.

Especially because I’m ignoring all business income here, on an order-of-magnitude scale, $43 billion looks very wrong. If we were to assume a $4000 cost and spread it over 40 years, that could be a rate increase of around $8/mo to get the lines underground. That doesn’t seem so bad, especially since it would restore some of the charm to our idyllic New England towns that has been lost with the tapestry of wires overhead.

I’m assuming the cost of maintenance of the underground facility is no worse than the cost of trimming 2000 miles of trees, buying telephone poles, and repairing fallen wires in storms.  I think this is a reasonable to generous assumption.

As always, correct my math if I’ve erred.

Ron Paul’s plan is the only one that actually keeps Social Security afloat without borrowing more (unpayable debt) money from China – surely that has merit?  It’s the only one economists will actually score as being workable.  Others may have catchy names, but call this one the $999,999,999,999 plan if that matters more than fixing the problem.

Listening carefully, he said eliminating departments (bureaucratic organizations) doesn’t entail eliminating all of the programs within each department – some of the programs would be moved to other departments.  Nobody expects Yellowstone will be abandoned, but Ron Paul’s plan does reduce the cost of administering Yellowstone (by eliminating administrative redundancies).

Ron Paul is calling for a 10% reduction in the Federal workforce, and a return to Clinton-era spending levels – a time when the economy was in arguably better shape.  Real non-government unemployment is in the 19% range (or more for minority demographics) and the Federal government isn’t even being asked to match that level.  The key to understanding this plan is that the money used to pay those workers is drained off the productive members of society.  Government is by definition merely administrative, not productive – returning that trillion dollars per year to our economy’s productive members (and associated deficit reductions) will provide it with a jolt it desperately needs.  Getting everybody back to work is the most important goal, and those dollars in production will have a multiplicative effect (the economic ratios are documented on the US House’s website).

Pretending that we can continue all of the existing programs and spending without accumulating debt on an ever-increasing spiral isn’t a useful exercise.  Ron Paul’s plan is the only one that takes a mature, sober approach to the problem.  Given his 30 years of experience in government fiscal policy, it should hardly be surprising that he’s the right man to get this job done.  Does that mean there are some tough choices that have to be made?  Absolutely.  But there are no easy answers.  The time for fiscal games is over, and we’re all in this together.

Bill McGonigle, Plainfield
Co-Chair, Ron Paul 2012, Sullivan County

Why didn’t AGW start in the 1830′s? Because there wasn’t enough CO2 to cause warming until later, when the temperature records started to increase significantly.

How much CO2 emission is required to start the climate warming? “I dunno, let’s look at the charts.”

What do the models tell us? “That this much CO2 will cause AGW.” How were those models developed? “Based on the charts.”

See? It’s honest-to-goodness begging the question. Maybe AGW happens to be correct despite the sloppy method. One side says, “we’re all gonna burn in ‘Hell on Earth’ if we’re right.” The other side says, “I’m not spending $300T on that bet.”

As an attempt to isolate the variables people look to other planets. They see warming there. That’s a reasonable indication that there’s a common cause, though no proof that AGW isn’t happening too.

In the end it’s a business decision, but one that affects everybody, one way or the other. We can’t predict the future with confidence, but we can control our behavior in the present. Making moral decisions now is the best we can do.