How To Have Your Personhood Removed By The Police -- Even Though You're No Danger To The Rest Of Us
Jeffrey Tucker has a compelling long read at Liberty.me about his capture, handcuffing, and jailing -- how he was caged like an animal over a bit of government paperwork from (as an officer contended) the wrong government department:

There's a new traffic law in most states called the "move over" rule. When the police are stopped on the right hand side of the road, you are to move over to the left lane. This makes the police feel safer. For my part, I had never heard of this law or never had it really tested in my driving behavior. The police had set up a trap, stopping there on the side just to test compliance. I moved over a bit but not enough.

The lights flashed behind me, and I pulled over. I gave the officer my license. Another police car arrived. He returned and told me to step out of the car, and asked me why my license was suspended. I was shocked. Then I remembered I was one day late in paying a parking ticket. The lady at the counter told me there might be an issue with my license, so she gave me an official paper labelled "Official Notice of Reinstatement of Driver's License," and put the official seal on it.

Remembering this, I told the police that they could find this document in my car. They looked because at this point I was not allowed to move. They brought the paper back and stared at it. One policeman said it was clearly legitimate. The other said, no this was issued by the municipal court, not the Department of Motor Vehicles, so he couldn't accept it. I protested but he had made his decision.

He stared at me and said: put your hands behind your back. I was cuffed and led to the car. I protested that my computer, my phone, all my stuff was in the car. None of this mattered. They searched my car for drugs, guns, liquor, or whatever. They found an unlabelled bottle of pills (a blood thinner) and interrogated me about it, strongly implying that having an unmarked bottle of pills is illegal (is it? I don't know).

One policeman seemed to take a slight liking to me at some point, so he let me keep the pills. Then he said he would do me a favor. He undid the cuffs -- they were very tight and hurting my wrists -- and put my hands in front, re-cuffed me, and loosened them. This did make a huge difference.

My car would be towed to a wrecker lot, he explained. If I get out on bail, I could pay to get it back. Would the lot still be open by then? I asked. The policeman had no answer, no concern. And this is generally what you come to realize. Once arrested, you are a captured animal. Nothing else matters. You are no longer a consumer, a citizen, a person with a job, a normal human being. You are now just fodder, a thing they can use as they see fit.

The notion that you have any rights at all once you are arrested is a joke. What happens to you is entirely the decision of your captors.

They searched him thoroughly. He wondered why.

They want to find any excuse, any small reason to intensifying charges, spread more misery and wreckage. One of the guards seemed less excited than the others, and I asked him how he can stand to watch this kind of thing happen all day, every day. He told me that you just get used to it.

How did we get here?

Generally, the right says the problem is the left, and the left says it is the right. And the masses of people follow these claims and push their agendas, which are always about building the law code, higher, thicker, tougher, more and more horrible.

And yet, every law ends in the right of a tiny elite to capture you, pillage you, and, ultimately, kill you. Every addition to the law code intensifies the violence.

After I was freed -- but of course not really freed -- and reclaimed my car, I ended up at McDonalds, where I was greeted like a visiting dignitary, even though they knew not my name and had never seen me before. I was immediately offered free fries and drink and invited to order the hamburger of my dreams.

There it was in living color, the astonishing contrast between the jail and the fast food restaurant. The former is a hell, created by law. The latter, a product of the emergent social order and civilized by exchange and commerce, is the closest thing to heaven that this world offers.

Laws are dangerous. They can be used to turn each of us into criminals even though we aren't dangerous to anyone.

Don't be smug about how innocent you are. Again, you can be thrown into a cage (and possibly be murdered by some actual criminal) because the lady who stamped your "reinstatement of license" form was from the wrong government department.

Oh, and you're probably guilty of at least three felonies as you move throughout your day, dropping the kids off at school, going to work, and picking up your dry cleaning.

We've really gone off the rails in this country -- a country started on the premise of civil liberties, yet now denies them left and right.