Posted on 02/07/2018 6:26:29 AM PST by Kaslin
Ross Ulbricht was a quiet nerd -- an Eagle Scout who never cursed.
Then he became a libertarian, and he decided, "I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion."
By coercion, Ulbricht meant force.
He viewed laws against drugs as coercion -- government force that stops people from living the way they want.
So he created a website called Silk Road. Silk Road let people buy and sell contraband -- mostly drugs -- using bitcoin. The site became successful quickly. It soon carried a billion dollars in transactions.
Because Silk Road didn't use dollars, it was also private, said Ulbricht. "The State is unable to get its thieving murderous mitts on it."
But he was wrong. Ulbricht slipped up, using his real name in an internet forum, and the FBI found him and jailed him.
A jury, looking at his former website, convicted him of things like "conspiracy to traffic narcotics." He was clearly guilty of that.
But then Judge Katherine Forrest said that because "Silk Road was a black market of unprecedented scope" she would sentence Ulbricht to "double life plus 40 years, without parole."
That's a longer sentence than many murderers get.
My former Fox colleague Bill O'Reilly applauded it.
"We all agree here," he told his TV panel. "Life in prison without parole! Any other wiseguys want to do it, that's what you are gonna get." CARTOONS | Glenn McCoy View Cartoon
Give me a break. Locking some people up forever will not stop sales of drugs.
Americans should have learned that from our last attempt -- Prohibition.
Making popular things illegal rarely diminishes their use. People still buy the banned items, but now they buy them from criminals. Violence increases. Sellers, instead of resolving disputes in courts, settle them with violence.
The illegal activity doesn't go away. It just becomes more dangerous.
What we saw during alcohol prohibition, we now see in the drug market.
What did government accomplish by closing Silk Road? Nothing lasting. Other illegal sites opened. Today, they offer more contraband than Silk Road ever did. Silk Road had 12,000 listings. Now several sites carry more than 100,000 listings.
"So I guess they weren't scared by Ross's life sentence, as the judge said," says his mother, sarcastically.
But law enforcement still brags about brief successes. "The dark net is not a place to hide!" crowed Attorney General Jeff Sessions after one bust. "We will use every tool we have to stop criminals from exploiting vulnerable people."
"Our critics will say we shutter one site, another site emerges, and they may be right," says Andrew McCabe, who recently stepped down as Deputy Director of the FBI. "But that is the nature of criminal work. It never goes away."
Never. Ever.
But the criminality would go away if we just legalized drugs. Today, there are no shootouts over alcohol sales.
But what about sketchier products -- like hackers selling people's credit card information?
"Silk Road had some rules at least, like nothing that harmed or defrauded," says Ulbricht's mother. "No child pornography was allowed."
Also, the drugs were high quality. The FBI made more than 100 purchases from Silk Road and concluded that the drugs had "high purity levels."
Still, I find it hard to sympathize with Ulbricht because police now also have charged him with hiring a hit man to kill someone.
Ross's mom believes that threat was faked, possibly by law enforcement agents themselves.
No one was actually killed, and the government didn't charge Ulbricht with murder-for-hire in the trial that jailed him for life.
A typical sentence for murder-for-hire when no murder occurs is about 10 years. But Ulbricht got much more than that. Was the sentence for damage Ulbricht allegedly did, or because the State resents its inability to control this sort of online trade?
"He was a libertarian," says his mother. "Believed in free markets and volunteerism. He's not a dangerous person."
No American is safer because Ross Ulbricht is in jail for life. He is just one more casualty of our futile war against drugs.
Ross also tried to arrange to have one of his employees murdered and also 5 other people murdered using the drug dealers on his site.
A&E channel just had a two hour special on Silk Road this past Monday night - very interesting
I watched that also. Was very interesting.
John Stossel in this article is trying to make him out to be some sort of revolutionary hero
Glad to hear Sessions has been doing something. Maybe if we tell him Strzok and Page were also smoking pot?
Must have bought his mother a big house and new car and other riches...
Wondering, since we do not have TV, if he attended a Christian church regularly?
If you willingly do the crime be prepared to do the time.
I guess he should be happy he wasn’t a Persian doing his business in Iran, he would be headless by now.
Or what if he was in South America, let’s say Mexico. His body could have been seen one morning hanging from an overpass. While one of the Drug Cartel Kings would be running his so-called online Libertarian business.
You sleep with dogs you get flees, and dogs with flees can bite.
i watched that A & E special also.. he got caught by an IRS agent
I missed it. I wonder how much of it was true and how much was spin and distortion aimed at shaping our opinions.
*Joins in FR chorus denouncing this free market capitalist rascal!!!*
Seemed legit - it was a documentary, mostly the IRS agent and the FBI guys that busted Ross and the people that worked for Ross - also had a lot of stuff straight from him.
Qualifies him to run for PRESIDENT as a DEMOCRAT.
Thank you. I was looking for a way to same exactly that. Good job.
We may not be able to eliminate drug addiction and trafficking through keeping mind altering drugs illegal, but we can certainly increase these problems many fold by making them legal.
Difference is he got caught
Shaun Bridges was as a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service for approximately six years, operating out of the Baltimore Field Office. Between 2012 and 2014, he was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road, a covert online marketplace for illicit goods, including drugs. In 2015 and 2017, Bridges was convicted of corruption related to his government work, and is now serving a prison sentence.———— https://sharylattkisson.com/2020/01/former-govt-agent-admits-illegally-spying-on-sharyl-attkisson/
41 posted on 1/9/2020, 11:30:51 PM by Fedora
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.