"No, you can't talk on the phone! Do you want the guy next to you to hear your entire conversation? That's why you should only text in the bathroom. Just be sure you don't hit the wrong button and end up putting a photo of your junk on Twitter. Trust me, you don't want those followers."
"If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. "
CNN reports today that not only will Republicans not attempt to block the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, but top Senate Republicans even went to far as to praise her record -- one of opposition to individual, property and gun rights -- as "mainstream."
"To be honest with you, your record as a judge has not been radical by any means...You have, as a judge, been generally in the mainstream," said Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions. Sessions also ruled out any attempt to filibuster the confirmation.
Libertarians disagree with Sessions' characterization of Sotomayor's record as "mainstream." Citing Sotomayor's consistent ruling in opposition to gun rights, individual ownership of private property and color-blind hiring policies, America's third largest party continues to urge senators to vote against her confirmation and will hold accountable at the ballot box senators who vote to confirm.
"While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny."
Rev. Nicholas Collin, Fayetteville Gazette (N.C.), October 12, 1789
"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. "
"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet."
"The lieutenant's test that I took was without a doubt a job-related exam that was based on skills, knowledge and abilities needed to ensure public and the firefighters' safety. We all had an equal opportunity to succeed as individuals, and we were all provided a road map to prepare for the exam. Achievement is neither limited nor determined by one's race but by one's skills, dedication, commitment and character. Ours is not a job that can be handed out without regard to merit and qualifications."
"When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans. "
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. "
"What, sir, is the use of militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. . . Whenever Government means to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise a standing army upon its ruins."
"Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth."
With unemployment rapidly approaching 10 percent, one would think it would be a priority for Congress to make it easier for businesses to hire workers. But the health-care bill unveiled by House Democrats on Tuesday goes in exactly the opposite direction, actually making it more expensive to hire workers.
The bill would require all but the very smallest businesses to provide health insurance to their workers. Employers would have to pay 72.5 percent of the premium for individual coverage and 65 percent for family coverage. Those businesses that don't comply would be assessed a penalty or tax equal to 8 percent of their payroll.
Such a mandate is simply a disguised tax on employment. And while it might be politically appealing to claim that business will bear the new tax burden, nearly all economists see it quite differently.
Business owners care about the total cost of hiring a worker, not how that cost is apportioned between wages, taxes, health insurance or retirement benefits (or for that matter, a free parking space). Mandating insurance or assessing a new tax penalty simply increases the cost of hiring that worker.
Employers will therefore seek ways to offset the added cost by raising prices (the most unlikely solution in a competitive market), lowering wages, reducing future wage increases, reducing other benefits (such as pensions), cutting back on hiring, laying off current workers, shifting workers from full-time to part-time or outsourcing.
Most economists believe that the largest portion of those offset costs would come in the form of job loss, since workers are likely to resist wage reductions. READ THE REST
O'Malley, meanwhile, said he was doing his best to preserve the state's top priorities in health, education and public safety. But as the recession continues to drag down state revenues, the governor conceded there wasn't much that could escape review. Read More
To boost the economy out of the recession, President Obama has chosen to spend an additional $100 billion on public schooling over the next two years. His education secretary, Arne Duncan, is touring the nation to promote this education "stimulus."
However well-intentioned, their effort isn't just futile; it's also counterproductive.
Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death. The U.S. spends 2.3 times as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted dollars as it spent in 1970, but the return on this ballooning investment has been less than nothing.
Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for nearly 40 years, according to a recent study by the Education Department, while the graduation rate fell over the same period, according to a report by James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist.
If the efficiency of U.S. public schooling had merely remained at its 1970 level, the country would enjoy the equivalent of an annual $300 billion tax cut.
The productivity collapse in education is more than staggering; it's unparalleled. Can you name any other service or product that has gotten worse and less affordable over the past two generations? The reason you can't is that no other field is organized as a state-run monopoly. READ THE REST
Congressman Bob Barr, the 2008 Libertarian presidential nominee, writes in his Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog today that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's views on the Second Amendment are "superficial and disappointing." The Libertarian Party agrees and reiterates its opposition to her nomination.
Click here to read Barr's entry. He writes, in part:
...Sotomayor’s views of the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms is similarly superficial and disappointing. When pressed by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah on this issue, Sotomayor once again, and repeatedly, assured us she would “bring an open mind.” Frankly, I’m ready for a Supreme Court justice that has the judicial backbone to say they actually believe in, understand, and will actually defend – through judicial decisions – those fundamental rights guaranteed us in the Bill of Rights. I’m tired of nominees saying in effect that they will “keep an open mind” on whether we even have such fundamental rights as are specified in the Bill of Rights.
The furthest Sotomayor would go on the Second Amendment question (and Hatch did press her pretty hard, but then, true to form, backed away) was to say that if the Court ever did decide in its wisdom to incorporate the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms as against state government infringement, then perhaps she might recognize it as a fundamental right! Such reasoning turns the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that our fundamental “privileges or immunities” will be protected against infringement by the states, on its head.
With confirmation questioning like this, is it any wonder our fundamental rights – which are supposed to be guaranteed by the very Constitution judges such as Sotomayor take an oath to protect and defend — are being dramatically reduced by both the Senate and the federal judges its members confirm?
Crime and Public Safety
"I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card. "
“Is there a constitutional right to self-defense?” Sotomayor asked when questioned by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) whether or not the Constitution guaranteed him the right of self-defense. “ I can’t think of one. I could be wrong.”
“Whether you agree with her position or not, Judge Sotomayor has had no problem stating that things not directly found in the Constitution are ‘settled law.’ That’s why it’s troubling that when confronted with a constitutionally-enshrined principle she disagrees with, the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of one’s rights, things are suddenly muddled and up for debate,” said Donny Ferguson, Libertarian National Committee Communications Director.
“The Libertarian Party is the only party that never compromises in its defense of our Second Amendment-guaranteed rights. That’s why we have opposed Judge Sotomayor’s nomination from the moment we reviewed her troubling anti-gun record. Judge Sotomayor’s answers Wednesday further show she believes the law should flow from her own personal biases and not the literal wording of the Constitution,” said Ferguson.
Judge Sotomayor is the latest in a long line of hardline anti-gun activists nominated by President Obama to government positions where they would have the power to infringe on gun rights. Libertarians also opposed the nominations of anti-gun Attorney General Eric Holder and anti-gun State Department legal adviser Harold Koh.
“The Libertarian Party will hold accountable at the ballot box any senator who votes to confirm Judge Sotomayor. America’s nearly 90 million gun owners come from all walks of life and political beliefs – and they decide their vote on this issue. Libertarians look forward to speaking with them about the LP’s fundamental belief in gun rights, and their senator’s voting record on it,” said Ferguson.
For more information on this issue, or to arrange an interview with the Libertarian Party, please call Director of Communications Donny Ferguson at 703-200-3669 or 202-333-0008, x. 225, or email Donny.Ferguson@lp.org.
The Libertarian Party is America's third-largest political party, founded in 1971 as an alternative to the two main political parties. You can find more information on the Libertarian Party by visiting http://www.LP.org. The Libertarian Party proudly stands for smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom.
It's not easy for a judge to undermine property rights further than the Supreme Court did in 2005 in Kelo v. City of New London, Conn. But Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who is scheduled to begin Senate cofirmation hearings today on her nomination to the high court, succeeded. In the 2006 case of Didden v. Village of Port Chester she signed on to perhaps the worst federal court property rights decision in recent memory.
In Kelo the court held that the government can condemn a person's property and transfer it to someone else in order to promote economic development. In Didden, Judge Sotomayor's federal appellate-court panel went further, upholding the government's condemnation of property after the owners refused to pay extortion money to a politically influential private developer.
In 1999 the village of Port Chester, N.Y., established a "redevelopment area," giving designated developer Gregg Wasser a virtual blank check to condemn property within the area. When local property owners Bart Didden and Dominick Bologna sought a permit to build a CVS pharmacy in the area, Wasser demanded that they pay him $800,000 or give him a 50 percent partnership interest in the store, threatening to have their land condemned if they said no. They refused, and a day later the village condemned their property. READ THE REST
"A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property – an unpaid tax bill. "
"I am unable to accept the idea that I should be an obedient subject of a gang of corrupt, unprincipled thugs who pontificate about freedom while enslaving the population. "
Open and Responsible Government
From across the political and ideological spectrum, there is now almost universal acknowledgement that the American social welfare system has been a failure.
Since the start of the "war on poverty" in 1965, the United States has spent more than $5 trillion trying to ease the plight of the poor. What we have received for this massive investment is -- primarily -- more poverty.
Our welfare system is unfair to everyone: to taxpayers who must pick up the bill for failed programs; to society, whose mediating institutions of community, church and family are increasingly pushed aside; and most of all to the poor themselves, who are trapped in a system that destroys opportunity for themselves and hope for their children.
The Libertarian Party believes it is time for a new approach to fighting poverty. It is a program based on opportunity, work, and individual responsibility.
None of the proposals currently being advanced by either conservatives or liberals is likely to fix the fundamental problems with our welfare system. Current proposals for welfare reform, including block grants, job training, and "workfare" represent mere tinkering with a failed system.
It is time to recognize that welfare cannot be reformed: it should be ended.
We should eliminate the entire social welfare system. This includes eliminating AFDC, food stamps, subsidized housing, and all the rest. Individuals who are unable to fully support themselves and their families through the job market must, once again, learn to rely on supportive family, church, community, or private charity to bridge the gap.
If the federal government's attempt at charity has been a dismal failure, private efforts have been much more successful. America is the most generous nation on earth. We already contribute more than $125 billion annually to charity. However, as we phase out inefficient government welfare, private charities must be able to step up and fill the void.
To help facilitate this transfer of responsibility from government welfare to private charity, the federal government should offer a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for contributions to private charities that provide social-welfare services. That is to say, if an individual gives a dollar to charity, he should be able to reduce his tax liability by a dollar.
Almost everyone agrees that a job is better than any welfare program. Yet for years this country has pursued tax and regulatory policies that seem perversely designed to discourage economic growth and reduce entrepreneurial opportunities. Someone starting a business today needs a battery of lawyers just to comply with the myriad of government regulations from a virtual alphabet soup of government agencies: OSHA, EPA, FTC, CPSC, etc. Zoning and occupational licensing laws are particularly damaging to the type of small businesses that may help people work their way out of poverty.
In addition, government regulations such as minimum wage laws and mandated benefits drive up the cost of employing additional workers. We call for the repeal of government regulations and taxes that are steadily cutting the bottom rungs off the economic ladder.
There can be no serious attempt to solve the problem of poverty in America without addressing our failed government-run school system. Nearly forty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, America's schools are becoming increasingly segregated, not on the basis of race, but on income. Wealthy and middle class parents are able to send their children to private schools, or at least move to a district with better public schools. Poor families are trapped -- forced to send their children to a public school system that fails to educate.
It is time to break up the public education monopoly and give all parents the right to decide what school their children will attend. It is essential to restore choice and the discipline of the marketplace to education. Only a free market in education will provide the improvement in education necessary to enable millions of Americans to escape poverty.
We should not pretend that reforming our welfare system will be easy or painless. In particular it will be difficult for those people who currently use welfare the way it was intended -- as a temporary support mechanism during hard times. However, these people remain on welfare for short periods of time. A compassionate society will find other ways to help people who need temporary assistance. But our current government-run welfare system is costly to taxpayers and cruel to the children born into a cycle of welfare dependency and hopelessness.
The Libertarian Party offers a positive alternative to the failed welfare state. We offer a vision of a society based on work, individual responsibility, and private charity. It is a society based on opportunity and genuine compassion It is a society built on liberty.
by Alan Reynolds
Robert Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell, has long argued that affluent Americans spend too much on conspicuous consumption, which he relabels "positional" goods. His favorite examples include big houses, expensive watches, barbecue grills, and wine. If Smith has more positional goods than Jones, then Jones is said to suffer "relative deprivation" because "what we feel we need depends on what others have." Poverty is relative too. A small house seemed "terrific," he explains, "when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal."
An affluent professor and consultant with a five-bedroom house and a taste for BMWs, Frank nevertheless boasts that he never spends much on wine and that he decided to eschew a costly Viking grill in favor of a cheap Weber.
How he spends his own money is his business. Unfortunately, Frank views everyone else's money as collective property: "Do we want to spend our money on better teachers, better roads, and enhanced national security? Or do we want to spend it on more expensive watches, more elaborate gas grills, and bigger mansions?" Everyone else's money becomes "our money."
"Everyone assumes America must play the leading role in crafting some settlement or compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington explicitly warned against involving ourselves in foreign conflicts. "
"Both major parties are currently controlled by leaders who work for ever-expanding government programs with massive federal spending and continued meddling in the affairs of countries around the world, whatever rhetoric they may employ to the contrary."
We defend the right of individuals to form corporations, cooperatives and other types of companies based on voluntary association. We seek to divest government of all functions that can be provided by non-governmental organizations or private individuals. We oppose government subsidies to business, labor, or any other special interest. Industries should be governed by free markets.
"People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us. "
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
"Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.""
"The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. It doesn't guarantee our rights to charity. "
"Today we live in a legal world in which many progressives and conservatives share the legal realists' preoccupation with results."
If you suspect this week's Senate confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor will be, like Seinfeld, a show about nothing, you are probably right. To understand why, we need to revisit an era that remade how lawyers and the public think about law, and especially the Constitution.
In the 1930s, academics developed a philosophy they called "legal realism" to undercut judicial resistance to "progressive" statutes such as laws restricting the hours a baker or a woman could work. Legal realism elevated just results over the rule of law. It saw analysis of "the law" as an after-the-fact rationalization that allowed reactionary judges to conceal their empathy for the oppressed. Because legal realists believed judges inevitably made law when they ruled, they thought judges should decide cases with progressive ends in mind.
At the same time, and somewhat inconsistently, realist progressives also condemned judges who declared progressive federal and state laws to be unconstitutional as judicial activists who were thwarting the will of the people. Never mind that the Supreme Court was only tepidly enforcing the original meaning of the Constitution and was upholding the vast majority of enlightened regulations. Any interference of the will of the people was deemed to be undemocratic.
Today we live in a legal world in which many progressives and conservatives share the legal realists' preoccupation with results. So justices must be chosen who will reach the politically correct results or opposed because they will reach the wrong results. Judicial confirmation hearings are thereby turned into a game of gotcha, with questioners trying to trip up the other side's nominees, and nominees quite properly refusing to reveal the only thing their inquisitors truly care about: how they would rule in particular cases that are likely to come before the Court. READ MORE
by Randy Barnett
Randy E. Barnett teaches at Georgetown Law and is the author of Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2005).
Added to cato.org on July 13, 2009
This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on July 13, 2009.
"Calls Grow to Increase Stimulus Spending," says a recent front-page Wall Street Journal headline. Author Deborah Solomon claims, "Some economists are pressuring the White House to enact a second round of stimulus spending." The article mentions only two economists, however, one of whom heads "a left-leaning Washington think tank" (the Economic Policy Institute) that always tries to pressure the government to spend more. The other, a former Bush official, dreams of "something that is relatively fast and thoughtful" like "personal tax cuts." But asking Congress to do something fast and thoughtful is like asking fish to fly.
Ironically, another headline in the same paper on the same day said, "Spending Spooks India's Sensex." The article read: "Indian stocks fell 5.8% Monday amid concern the proposed government budget will add to the country's fiscal deficit."
Investors understand that increased government spending diverts valuable resources away from the private sector and ends up imposing even more demoralizing taxes on labor and capital. READ MORE
by Alan Reynolds
Alan Reynolds is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and the author of Income and Wealth (Greenwood Press, 2006).
Added to cato.org on July 10, 2009
This article appeared in Forbes on July 10, 2009.
A company called Smartronix will get $18,000,000 to redesign Recovery.gov, the federal Web site intended to track where federal Recovery Act spending goes.
The government purchased technology for a similar site (with a somewhat smaller scope), USASpending.gov, from the non-profit group OMB Watch for only $600,000. A private company already provides information on Recovery Act spending to the public for free.
I wrote here enthusiastically about the plans of the Sunlight Foundation to go after this contract, saying “[T]he contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risks of awarding the contract based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism. Transparency in all things.”
Sunlight did not ultimately bid. Instead, it took some lessons about the government contracting business. The transparency I wrote about materialized, though, and we can take a lesson, too: The federal government will pay $18,000,000 for one freaking Web site.
by David Rittgers
Added to cato.org on July 10, 2009
This article appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on July 10, 2009
Congress seems intent on passing new hate-crime legislation. It may sound like a surefire way to tamp down on hate crime, but it won't work.
The law would expand federal jurisdiction from crimes motivated by the victim's race, color, religion, or national origin to include the victim's gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. It also disconnects the prosecution from traditional civil rights statutes such that whole categories of intrastate crimes successfully prosecuted by state courts would become the business of the federal government.
There are two problems with the proposed law. First, crimes motivated by racial animus, misogyny, or homophobia are already recognized as atrocities and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. No new law is needed. Second, making the ideology of the perpetrator a centerpiece of the trial doesn't deter like-minded extremists; it encourages them.
We don't have to look far through today's headlines to see that the current system works. Those who commit crimes of violence motivated by extremist ideology are consistently locked up by a rule of law that criminalizes their actions, not their ideas.
Scott Roeder is accused of shooting abortion doctor George Tiller to death; he is sitting in jail awaiting prosecution. The same goes for Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who shot up an Army recruiting station in Arkansas and killed Pvt. William Long. As soon as Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn is out of the hospital, he can join them. READ THE REST
"Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon."
"He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them."
"Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty. "
“National honor is the national property of the highest value”
"The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom"."
"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased. "
I used to love Franken on Saturday Night Live. Although his Stuart Smally character got old very quickly, he did a wonderful Paul Tsongas impression. I’d link to an example on YouTube, but NBC takes its intellectual property very seriously and therefore hundreds of the most humorous bits ever to air on late night television have been tragically withheld from us.
I enjoyed his 2003 book Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Well, I enjoyed the first half, much of which was a trenchant critique of modern, Fox-style conservatism. Some of the worst distortions of the Bush-era right were properly put in their place. The second half was just left-liberal boilerplate.
But this is what has always stuck in my mind about Franken’s book. It includes an illustrated chapter called “Operation Chickenhawk: Episode One” in which he characterizes many modern war advocates as hypocrites for their effortless success in dodging “service” in Vietnam. The chapter discusses such prominent hawks as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Bennett. But one big problem with this humorous chapter is it includes Pat Buchanan, who, although we might all agree holds many bad positions, including on the Cold War, did not support the Iraq War. But do you know who did? Al Franken. READ MORE
"Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. "
