Spoiler: The show first introduces a couple with three children living in a dystopian future 200 years from now. There is a cutscene that shows the Earth from the moon (cf. Earthrise), but instead of a picture of the cerulean verdant world we live on now, we see a sandy desert wasteland from space (cf. Dune). Pollution, over-population, and habitat destruction—the liberal trifecta of red herrings that supposedly will lead to our doom (but a workable plot device)—have made the Earth almost uninhabitable. People generally have to wear breathing masks and society is governed by a security state.

It becomes apparent that having more than two children is illegal because of Malthusian policies put into place by the fascist government. Upon a warrantless search, the police discover the third child that the couple tries to hide. The father, fearing that she will be taken away from them, attacks the police. They subdue him, and the criminal enforcement system sends him to a long maximum security prison sentence. Apparently hitting a cop and having a third child are maximum offenses. It is poetically notable, also, that there is no depiction of a trial.

Fast forward some years, and his wife comes to visit him in prison. We learn that society has found a way to overcome the problems plaguing Earth, by sending pilgrims through a one-way time fracture 85 million years into Earth’s prehistoric past—a place of environmental perfection and hope (sunshine and breathable air). The wife is a well-educated well-trained highly sought doctor. She informs her husband that she has been recruited to this prehistoric colony, Terra Nova, and that their first two children are allowed to go but that she can’t take the third child, since that would be “rewarding illegal behavior.” Obviously her husband is prohibited from going. She has already, however, hatched a plan to abscond with her husband and smuggle their daughter so they can live in the past as a family. Through a bit of hidden planning and a small portable plasma cutter, the father/husband escapes, is almost outed near the time-portal to the past, and as his family is going through the portal, he makes a break for the time gate and throws himself through, ensuring his permanent freedom and his family’s reunification.

They have no way of returning to the dystopia they have always known. And the government has no way of retrieving “stowaways.” Certainly they will face new challenges adjusting to their environment, dinosaurs, life in a small colony that survives with advanced technology, and a new micro-culture. But, the day they arrive into this new world, the wife asks her husband whether they have “made the right decision?”

I was floored. She successfully reunited her family, ensured that the terrible government that was oppressing their ability to freely choose how to create their family (three children) could no longer oppress them, and rescued her husband from a maximum security prison and a lifelong status as a convicted felon for actions that should hardly be considered crimes. It is harder to know what the worst part of 22d century Earth was—the environmental decline or the totalitarian centrally planned security state (I mean, even the people allowed to go through the time fracture were chosen by the government, so it’s evident the government was in maximum control). The former doomed civilization. The latter made the last days of civilization unbearable.

Of course they made the right decision! Clearly this decision is the plot device underpinning the TV show, and the tension caused by the decision to travel in time from the future to the past, and further tensions that will arise over the course of their lives are what will make the story interesting or not. Thus, it is possible the writers were intentionally explaining the crux of the story. But still, doing so directly made the tension too obvious, taking way sophistication the show could have displayed. And, using the vapid question, “Did we make the right decision?” made the show almost incredible.

Truly, they are not quite free, because they arrived into a micro-culture that is run as a top-down command-central tribe, but at least they could leave the gates if they wanted to. They remain in Terra Nova voluntarily, because that society offers them better benefits than slumming it with the dinosaurs, but at least the choice is meaningful, precisely because they can walk outside the gates and never return if they decide that is a better choice. Meanwhile, the family gets to be together. The children grow up with a father. And they are free from the clutches of the security state of the year 2149.

The question, “Did we make the right decision?” may have been more meaningful after a host of episodes in which they suffer and repel constant attacks, deal with disease, plague, and misfortune (I haven’t watched beyond episode 2, so I do not yet know what befalls them). At least at that point, one could understand the question as much as one could identify with the murmuring of the Israelites to return to the Egypt they had known out of fear for the wilds of the desert. When you are beset by the vagaries and tragedies of the wilderness, the temptation to trade its liberty for security becomes a more palpable tension.

But to ask the question so soon after a heroic, exhilarating exodus was not just bad writing, it inexcusably glossed over how terrible the future civilization was. Maybe that’s because we’ve all gotten so used to an increasing number of controls that the show’s writers didn’t even think twice about the absurdity of the comparison.

Although the Wyoming Firearms Freedom Act conflicts with existing federal law, the Act is a constitutionally valid exercise of state power. The Act is a manifestation of the doctrines of interposition and nullification espoused by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in the early history of the United States. The Act is also a clear exercise of state sovereignty that comports with the historical development of the Tenth Amendment.

First Reason: Perversion of Incentive
Communism and socialism do not just hope for, but rely on the good of mankind in aggregate to work. In fact, apropos to a previous discussion, all political purveyors of socialism/communism are selling hope and the value received is far less than the value paid out by the buyer. Believing in the current goodness of mankind, or rather in the goodness of every individual such as to expect that he will act in the best interest of others is rank madness. Socialism wrecks the ability for people to appropriately measure value for themselves by robbing them of incentive. When the fruits of labor are taken from a person in order to redistribute them in aggregate to everyone else, including him, he resents the theft of his labor but also comes to reliance upon the redistribution.

Jamestown and Plymouth
In Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s book, How Capitalism Saved America, he recounts the story of two early colonies in America, Jamestown and Plymouth. In both, the settlers were required to function in socialism; private property was not allowed and the settlers were required to toil for the “common good.” Within six months of the founding of Jamestown,

all but 38 of the original 104 settlers were dead, most having succumbed to famine. Two years later, the Virginia Company sent 500 more ‘recruits’ to settle in Virginia and within six months, a staggering 440 more were dead by starvation and disease.

He also recounts an example: if 1 out of 20 people refuses to work but can take as needed from the “common wealth,” he will still be able to maintain 95% of his “income” on average while 19 out of 20 people do their jobs. Once too many people realize they can game the system and do less work for more food at the expense of their fellow man, the system fails, and starvation ensues.

Thankfully, in 1611, a governor traveled to America and realized that the incentive structure for the English colonists was the culprit for the previous death and failure. He instituted private property with a small tax on the fruits of their labors. The people could (only) realize the full fruits of their own labor, and the colony began to thrive, because everyone, self-servingly, worked as much as they needed and desired.

Nature’s stochasticity is a far more potent motivator than government’s contrivances.

Socialism cannot possibly work, because it is axiomatically flawed on the notions that people should be selfless and government is the correct actor to ensure selflessness. Thus, in order to effectuate the schemes of the noble cause of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” violent force is justified as a necessity to make men noble. This brings us to the second fatal flaw: socialism relies on force to make it work. By definition, because humans are amoral in aggregate, force is required to effectuate wealth transfer, because rational actors, on the whole, do not voluntarily give away money without value in return.

The Legal Tangent
In fact, our Anglo-Saxon legal system, particularly in the Law of Contracts, at a fundamental level (modulo all the reforms of the modern era), reflects an innate belief that individuals should receive value for value exchanged. The doctrine of consideration, quid pro quo, a bargained-for exchange of something received for something given, mandates that for a contract to be enforceable, it must have the element of consideration. Courts do not like to weigh the relative values of the “something given” for the “something received” because value is entirely relative to the circumstances of individuals in their own situations, and judges do not usually believe their purview is to monitor or value private contracts. An iPhone may be worth $600 to an early adopter, but only $300 to a later adopter or not worth any expense to someone who does not want one. If there is no consideration, the promise is often viewed as a gift, which is always legally revocable unless the promisee reasonably relied on the promise.

Inherent in the doctrine of consideration is that there must be an exchanged that was bargained for. Bargaining, as a legal term of art, does not mean wrangling, dickering or heavy negotiation is required. What it means is that there is an intention of both parties to exchange things of legal value to which both parties assent. By contrast, a contract forced upon one person by another, i.e., using duress, is voidable by the coerced party later.  Why? Because there was no bargaining. There was an exchange, and it might even be of relatively legal value, but the mere act of force makes the contract voidable by the party who was wronged by the lack of free will. It is not usually discussed in this manner, but duress is really the antithesis of consideration.

Second Reason: Socialism is Violence
Force, of course, is a form of duress, and though the United States now has a long history of employing force to get what it wants from its constituents and other peoples (starting, really, with Alexander Hamilton’s policies of excessive and overwhelming national power), the augmentation of the use of force to transfer wealth is still total anathema to our natural law notions in Anglo-Saxon society of what a fair and right contract is. We should all recognize that force to take wealth away from another person, while justified at a governmental level, is still theft on an individual level. So, while socialism might be noble in its thrust to ensure the welfare of other people, it is pragmatically reliant on the evil of violence to make it work.

Contrast the doctrine of consideration, required in Anglo-Saxon legal systems, with contract laws in civil countries, which do not necessarily recognize the need for consideration. It is not surprising, therefore, that in cultures without a long history honoring the notion of bargain to ensure the satisfaction of parties exchanging value, communism and socialism took root faster, even with our early forays into forced socialism. See Jamestown, supra. Because these political theories are fundamentally based on oppressive force–in contrast to force being used in the name of liberty here, even though liberty does not require it–the doctrine of consideration as an innate part of our culture has been a silent bulwark to such force. Unfortunately, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans seem to not be wide enough . . .

Ironically, the Jamestown/Plymouth colonies are poignant examples from our own history of why a modern socialist government relies on force to effect an economy. The perversion of incentives leading to low production are evident to even the most mindless pro-government drone, which is why modern governments employ force to ensure the “health” of the socialist state.

Of course, labor at gunpoint does not comprise a worthwhile society; it is a Prison.

Vitiating the Counterexample
Naive proponents of socialism correctly point out that the apostolic community of believers in Yeshua (“Jesus”) was the first successful manifestation of communism. I suppose the inherent argument is that if it was good enough for Jesus . . .

The surprisingly overlooked flaw in this counterexample is that the association of believers was entirely voluntary, because at no time did Yeshua command his followers to preach the good news to convert by force. I believe it is a hallmark of Good for people to voluntarily associate and combine their assets and incomes in a manner to synergetically benefit one another. But it is the voluntariness (the “cheerfulness” in scriptural semantics) that makes it noble and good, not the sharing by itself.

Let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not of grief [grudgingly] or of necessity [compulsion], for Elohim loves a joyous [cheerful] giver.

2d Corinthians 9:7 (The Scriptures, Inst. for Scripture Research 1998)

Third Reason: The Corollary of Correct Valuation
Correct valuation of labor in the form of goods and services can only be appropriately calculated by the parties to their own contract. This is definitely a corollary to the observation that incentives remain healthy when individuals have control over their own labor. Only you know what you really need. Only I know what I really need. If we are friends, we may be able to effectively negotiate on behalf of one another and trade for value in a way that satisfies the other person. Of course, we run the risk of not doing so. Why? It is as simple as the fact that we cannot read one another’s minds and perfectly understand one another’s goals.

Multiply that by the billions of transactions that occur daily. Is it even fathomable that a central planner (especially a bureaucratic committee prone to inaction and inefficiency, detached from the reality of life and the harshness of nature) can correctly value the effectuate transactions between hundreds of millions of people? No, such a proposition is patently absurd.

The market is not a controllable system: it is simply the sum-greater-that-its-parts of all value exchanges between the actors in a population. It is more organic than technical, and it is only predictable on an individual level where we can spend time imperfectly analyzing how actors might negotiate and trade value. If you know all about me, you, again, can probably predict how I would want to transact business and for how much money. Of course, that requires time, patience and astute observation to get it right.

Thought Experiment
Let’s assume a central planning committee has the resources to observe each person constantly and to get to a point where it can accurately predict the appropriate value exchange for each person. Let’s assume this observational analysis only takes one minute one time for each person in the country. Let’s also assume each person enters into five transactions daily. For 327,000,000 people, it would require 3,111 man-years to accomplish the analysis to ensure the central planner could have the information necessary to direct the economy. The assumptions for the experiment are prima facie conservative in favor of the theory socialism, of course, and the result is, nonetheless, literally incredible.

One alternative is that the central planning committee simply fails to do what it believes its job is. It is doomed to failure, because “getting it right,” i.e., ensuring maximum wealth in a centrally controlled manner for each person, is impossible. Because no one appropriately small subset of people can correctly evaluate economic incentives for hundreds of millions of people, the wealth transfer is guaranteed to be lopsided and ineffectual. The plight of the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban and several southeast Asian peoples from the twentieth century are evidence of this.

Conclusion
Socialism promotes misery, starvation, violence and murder. The worst that can be said for capitalism is that it allows for poverty due to nature and poverty due to laziness, both of which decrease over time in a free market. All examples of non-voluntary socialism in their stated quest to eliminate poverty only increase it.

The true alternative is that we can simply allow for each person to transact for himself freely. Liberty is the hallmark of a workable economic system. As flawed as capitalism is for relying on man’s self-centered nature, it is paradoxically this reason that makes capitalism pragmatically perfect.

Complete economic failure of a prison system for which humane treatment of prisoners is a requirement would probably entail starvation, suicides, rising death rates due to communicable disease contagion and riots. California’s system is exhibiting three of those characteristics now.

The situation is instructive on several levels.

The Irony

First, there is a lesson in irony here, because although the breaking of federal law implies incarceration in a federal prison, most state drug laws are modeled on federal drug law, i.e. everything comprising the failed, unnecessary and immoral War on Drugs. This is, of course, modulo the need for an expansive Commerce Clause which the federal government games on a weekly basis to interfere with and subsume what should be state matters. The irony appears where federal, not state judges, are telling California that its prison population is too large (dense?) for the care the state is able to financially provide its prisoners and where approximately two-thirds of them (as in all American jurisdictions) are incarcerated for drug crimes. Most of those crimes would not exist without the strongarm tactics of the federal government (by having made money-in-exchange-for-compliance-in-passing-law offers the states just could not refuse over the last decades), and therefore many of the prisoners would not be imprisoned, meaning the situation would not exist in the first place.

That is to say, the incarceration of those prisoners was unnecessary to begin with.

The more removed a government is from the local needs and desires of a people (the federal government being maximally removed from all local affairs with respect to state or municipal governments, save Washington, D.C.), the less necessary and more invasive those laws are, because they are applied broadly and with less consideration for the factual circumstances inherent in the lives of the populace in a smaller local body. They are also more expensive, because they require policing of a larger population with an exponentially greater number of interactions between people giving rise to situations exploited to foment and enforce law.

The Economics of the Imposition and Enforcement of Law

Secondly, and to that point, in a vast country such as ours where taxes are levied for many of us through our paychecks in a manner that keeps the magnitude of the money taken invisible, it is easy to forget that the legislation, enforcement and adjudication of those laws costs money. The amount currently required at the federal level for all activities (since the sum total of activities is equivalent to to the total of all legislation, enforcement and adjudication of law) far exceeds the annual budget.

Without respect to any specific law or set of laws, it should be obvious by inspection that the decrease of the number and complexity of the laws made, enforced and adjudicated would necessarily lead to a decrease in the amount of money required to do those actions.

The viability of imprisonment, as a function of enforcement and adjudication, thus, is dependent on the money that can be successfully levied for the construction and maintenance of prisons, the payment for guards and the costs associated with preserving the lives of the inmates. However, these costs are proportional to the number of inmates who the State incarcerates, which is a number itself proportional to the number of laws created, enforced and adjudicated.

The Penal System as a Leading Indicator of State Financial Illness

California is functionally bankrupt, and though there are many real life examples of how this is bearing out, the prisons are a model example. There are 157,000 inmates currently, which is twice the standardized capacity for the California Penal system, and federal judges are looking to reduce that number to approximately 100,000.

Why? Because the lack of funds to provide for “adequate” living space, food and other regulated necessities is causing an increase in death and illness. That is to say, the California Penal system is failing, because it is unaffordable.

It is unaffordable, because there are too many laws to be adequately funded by the citizens of California and because at least some of the laws exact a higher cost to the taxpayers than they provide in benefit.

Lest one argue that the tax system has not been made robust enough to support the administration of all laws in California, of which the Penal system is a leading indicator of health, California exacts high income taxes (7% or more), higher capital gains taxes (9.3%), relatively high property taxes (1%+) and a high sales tax (7.25%-8.75%) against its 33.8 million citizens. Never mind the taxes levied against corporations, vehicle licensing, etc. If extracting more taxes were an answer, California should be successful.

The reasonable conclusion is that too many laws can grow to be unaffordable. Not only does the imposition of more law in general reduce freedom directly, it also indirectly attenuates freedom by requiring the exaction of taxes (a limit on economic freedom) to pay for the enforcement of the laws.

California’s laws have become unaffordable and the State should cut out of its budget those which generate the smallest benefit for the cost (which is most of them).

The United States also falls into this category, because the inability to maintain a budget demonstrates that the number of laws currently enforced and adjudicated is too great for the population to affordably bear, the native immorality of most of them notwithstanding.

They are immoral, because they abrogate the freedoms of individuals to ingest and imbibe the things that they wish, as stupid or unwise as taking those drugs may be. The government overreaches when it legislates and enforces laws to prevent people from making poor choices that do physical harm to only themselves.

Further, because the government is the worst allocator of economic and moral resources, i.e the sum of the individuals comprising government are synergetically more wasteful and corrupt together than they are individually, its policies and enforcement are logarithmically more wrong the more people who are affected or “covered” by the laws in force. Moreover, the application of the laws are largely due to an incomplete understanding of the subject matter and are corrupted by lobbying.

As an example, caffeine, a legal and necessary drug for much of the population to function, would instantly kill a person if he were able to powderize and ingest the same quantity as some people do when they take cocaine. Yet, caffeine is invisibly and minimally indirectly regulated by the FDA whereas the DEA will use automatic weapons to secure a cache of cocaine.

Oxycontin, the drug mimicking the hormone that the hypothalmus orders to be released during orgasm, is a prescribed medication in hospitals, and is vastly more addictive than other drugs (as evidenced by society’s new discovery of oxycontin abuse) for obvious reasons. But marijuana, which patients have used to some benefit of relief, cannot even be legally prescribed according to federal law.

So what drives the illegality of certain drugs over others? Tradition, the inability of the federal system to admit wrong when it has quixotically pursued an unattainable goal, lobbying and fear.

I am not passing opinionated judgment on the morality of use of a particular drug at this time, but even if I did, it is far more immoral for the government to decide what is okay for you to ingest, precisely because the government is not able to effectively allocate resources or ensure a consistent morality to its own or your own actions. Your choice to use drugs, as improvident or banal as it may be, is for you to decide with respect to your wishes, predilections, your family’s desires and your relationship with the Almighty.

Drug laws are unnecessary, because though addiction to drugs does lead people to do drastic things to feed their addictions, criminal and tort law was as (in)sufficient beforehand without the specific drug laws to deter violent and immoral acts by drug addicts to gain what they perceive they need as it is currently.

Possession laws do not prevent drug users from committing violent crime. Criminal law and moral upbringing prevent drug users from committing violent crime. Possession laws simply give people disincentive to possess drugs. They are unnecessary, because criminal assault, battery, murder, and larceny laws (and their attendant attempt counterparts) suffice as do their analogous common law torts.

Meanwhile, drug laws are dangerous, because the artificial degradation of supply always ensures that both price and risk for obtaining the commodity increase. This occurs in what is commonly known as a black market. Black markets ensure violence, and other evil behavior between the parties in the market, precisely because of the risk of punishment by the so-called legitimate government who has the power to enforce its laws with a nearly limitless budget and powerlust. In order to avoid being caught and sentenced for a lengthy term for selling drugs, a dealer may kill an informant or a counterparty and risk a murder charge in the hopes that he will not get caught.

Take the black market away by not making drug use, sale or purchase illegal, and it will instantaneously remove the incentive for intra-black-market crime. The price of drugs will also drop precipitously, because supply and demand will not be artificially constrained, and the attendant ills caused by the interaction of addiction and artificially high prices will be greatly lessened. Who needs to rob someone else for a coke hit when coke is 1 cent per ounce?

Drug laws not just exacerbate but cause the ills caused by the risk inherent in a black market. They also are a but-for causation of the increase in violent tendencies of people who were otherwise peaceful but foolish when they are sent to prison and are forced to adapt to the facility’s Lord of the Flies culture of violence.