Censorship

"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."

Sigmund Freud, 1933

Education

"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."

Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister (1804-1881):

Thoughts from Washington

"Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth."

George Washington

'I Am a Socialist' that is Lawrence O’Donnell

by Scott Lazarowitz



Lawrence O’Donnell MSNBC Commentator

 Recently, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell announced that he is a "socialist." O’Donnell referred to Milton Friedman’s quote, "We’re all Keynesians now," and President Richard Nixon’s quote, "I am now a Keynesian," in the context of Keynesian economics being very similar to socialism. O’Donnell went on to assert his pride in being a socialist, and even suggested that Glenn Beck, Rand Paul and others are also socialists in one form or another.

So here is an elaboration of someone, whoever that might be, explaining why he is a socialist:

"First and foremost, I am a socialist because I disagree with the Founding Fathers’ ideas on morality and the Rule of Law. It is important that we have a centralized government that redistributes all the wealth. The State needs to have the power to take some of the wealth away from those the State decides have too much of it. Obviously, no one has a ‘right’ to one’s own wealth or property. And I don’t believe that ‘all men are created equal’ because, if there is a law against theft, then obviously because we need to allow agents of the State to take wealth away, then therefore laws against ‘theft’ must exempt agents of the State. That means that some people should be above the law.


"And I am a socialist in medical care because I think that the centralized government should control everyone’s medical care – it’s as simple as that. It is important that government bureaucrats and their government doctors and medical services have a monopoly in the medical industry so they don’t have to deal with competitive interests, as opposed to a free market in medical care in which the consumers determine which doctors and medical plans would stay in business and which ones would fail. Some people assert that that gives ‘power to the people,’ but we socialists don’t want the people to have that kind of power – it takes control away from government bureaucrats and that’s why I don’t like that. It’s important that government officials control the ultimate decisions in what affects American medical patients (and because the Blue State grandmas are more likely to vote for the "good guys" than the Red State grandmas, if you know what I mean).

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men."

Samuel Adams

Airplane II Security Clip

The Pilgrims and Property Rights: How our ancestors got fat & happy

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"

Patrick Henry

The Original Radical

"Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the rights of others.--Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection.

From this short review it will be easy to distinguish between that class of natural rights which man retains after entering into society, and those which he throws into common stock as a member of society.

The natural rights which he retains, are all those in which the power to execute is as perfect in the individual as the right itself. Among this class, as is before mentioned, are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind; consequently, religion is one of those rights. The natural rights which are not retained, are all those in which, though the right is perfect in the individual, the power to execute them is defective. They answer not his purposes. A man by natural right has a right to judge in his own cause; and so far as the right of the mind is concerned, he never surrenders it; but what availeth it him to judge, if he has not power to redress it? He therefore deposits this right in the common stock of society, and takes the arm of society, of which he is a part, in preference and in addition to his own. Society grants him nothing. Every man is a proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right."


Thomas Paine

Will Republicans Get Serious on Spending?

Don't count on it.

by Steve Chapman

Barely a week has passed since the thumping Republican victory in congressional elections, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is enjoying the chance to reveal how the GOP will use its new power.


Speaking to a crowd at the annual convention of the Federalist Society, an influential organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers, McConnell is among friends. They are happy to hear him declare, "Americans want less government, less spending and less debt."

Then the senator tells them what his party is going to do to bring the runaway federal budget under control. "We will vote to freeze and cut discretionary spending," he vows.


What is important is not so much what is said but what is omitted. The four biggest items in the federal budget are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. And those programs escape any mention from McConnell.

They make up about 60 percent of the federal budget. Domestic discretionary outlays, by contrast, account for only about 16 percent. If Republicans focus entirely on those, they will be sending a clear and quite believable message: We're not serious. 

 Read the rest at Reason.com

Coming soon.....

Don't Touch My Junk

by Mike Calpino

Mike Calpino

 The controversy over new airport screening procedures has continued to grow. No doubt it will explode over the long holiday weekend, particularly is planned protests involve even a fraction of the flying public. The TSA and Homeland Security have dug in their heels and defended the new procedures as necessary to ensure our safety. If a majority of Americans begin to strenuously object or even refuse, there is the possibility of a real confrontation over these methods. Even more importantly, it is getting people to talk about government intrusion in a way they have not considered before. It is the various levels in which these procedures have struck a nerve that need to be explored.

At some airports, there are two choices given. There are the new electronic screening machines which display your naked body to some minimum wage security guard, some of whom have been getting pretty excited about their job. If you choose not to display yourself in ways only your spouse should be privy to, don’t want to be radiated in ways the government assures you are safe (we believe everything they say) or the TSA decides you need to be further investigated, then you will receive an "aggressive" patdown. This involves touching and squeezing in areas that, again, only our spouse should touch and squeeze. It is applied to the very young, the very old, the infirm, everyone.

So why does this bother us so much? After all, we don’t want another terrorist with a bomb in his shoe, underwear or anywhere else to get on an airplane, do we? Of course not. However, the way we are going about it is insulting on a variety of levels. On the surface, we know it is a waste of time and resources to treat four year olds, nuns and cancer survivors with prosthetic devices or urine bags as potential terrorists. Yet we have Janet Nepalitano refusing to answer the question as to whether or not they would use such techniques on a Muslim woman in a burka. That offends our basic sense of fairness. We also know that any terrorist who chose to do so could walk across our southern border. If we applied a fraction of the effort on our border we do in the airport, we would catch a lot more terrorists and criminals. So far the TSA has caught.....zero.

A new TSA PSA

Rand's Persecuted Minority

By Roger Donway

Atlas Shrugged is an extended cry against the oppression of creators, most particularly businessmen: the Atlases who bear this world on their shoulders. Uniquely, Rand’s work portrays the exploited entrepreneurs of the mixed economy as the true successors of Socrates, Galileo, and the countless other truth-seekers who, over the centuries, have been silenced, punished, crushed, and killed—not for their vices but for their virtues.

In the scene that gives the book its title, one of the novel’s greatest Atlases, the steelmaker Hank Rearden, is asked: “When you strain your energy to its utmost in order to produce the best, do you expect to be rewarded for it or punished?” The questioner’s point is that Rearden knows he should be rewarded for his productive efforts, yet he allows himself to be punished—and by helpless parasites at that. Why? Why not free himself of his tormentors? Why not shrug them off?

Rand’s novel, thirteen years in the writing, was finally published in October 1957, but she did not stop asking “Why?” Why were businessmen persecuted? Why did moralists not condemn the injustice? Why did businessmen themselves do nothing? Within a few years, she had taken to the college lecture circuit to denounce this continuing oppression, and her talk could not have been more provocatively titled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Businessmen.” Nor could it have been better timed. The Sixties were just beginning, and the students at elite Northeastern universities were preening themselves for their moral superiority, in part because they opposed Southern segregation and in part because they disparaged capitalists (like their fathers) as “hidden persuaders” and perpetrators of “planned obsolescence.” Into this environment came Ayn Rand, to declare that America’s truly oppressed minority comprised just those businessmen the students scorned.

Read the Rest

Toward a Conservative Foreign Policy of Non-Interventionism

Mark Grannis

During the presidency of George W. Bush, those of us who criticized U.S. foreign policy as overly hawkish tended to be considered “liberal,” a tendency neoconservatives had little reason to resist. I personally found this very frustrating, for reasons that probably mystify some readers. Does it really matter whether any given position is suitably “conservative”? It does to a conservative, because conservatives are supposed to obsess about continuity with the past. Conservatives are, by definition, strongly committed to the proposition that our received political traditions represent centuries of political wisdom which, at least in the ordinary case, should trump all but the most extraordinarily well-founded private judgments. This gives self-identified conservatives who part ways with their old cohort an unusually strong stake in substantiating the claim that “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.”


In my own family, the question has arisen from time to time whether my larger-than-life grandfather — a Taft man in the early 50s, a Goldwater delegate at the 1964 Republican Convention, and a committed Republican all his life — would have supported the Bush (43) foreign policy. My mom says yes, and I suppose I have to accept that strictly on her authority. My skepticism, however, has been renewed by a couple of recent issues of The American Conservative.

Read the Rest at Reasonable Minds

Banking

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."

Napoleon Bonaparte

Libertarians mourn death of David F. Nolan

WASHINGTON - David F. Nolan, one of the founders of the Libertarian Party (LP), died unexpectedly on November 21 in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 66.

Mr. Nolan was also a member of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC). He is survived by his wife Elizabeth.

Mr. Nolan founded the Libertarian Party with a group of colleagues in his home in Denver, Colorado on December 11, 1971.

Mark Hinkle, Chairman of the LP, said, "I am saddened by the news of David Nolan's death. He not only helped found the Libertarian Party, but remained active and helped to guide our party for the last forty years. We are now the third-largest political party in America, and one of the most persistent and successful third parties in American history, thanks in large part to David Nolan. We will feel this loss."

Mr. Nolan ran this year as a Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senator in Arizona, against incumbent John McCain. In 2006, Mr. Nolan ran for U.S. Representative in Arizona's 8th District, against incumbent Gabrielle Giffords.

Mr. Nolan was also well known for his invention of the "Nolan chart," a two-dimensional chart of political opinion that was designed to get past the more familiar but deficient liberal-conservative paradigm. Marshall Fritz, founder of the Advocates for Self-Government, refined the Nolan chart into the popular World's Smallest Political Quiz with its diamond-shaped chart.

The Advocates for Self-Government provides more information about David Nolan's contributions here:
Visit site.

Comments from friends and colleagues:

Sharon Harris, President of the Advocates for Self-Government: "I am so shocked and saddened by Dave's death -- what a loss for the cause of liberty!"

Wes Benedict, Executive Director of the LP: "While I've admired David Nolan for years, this year I finally had the pleasure of working directly with him. He was an enthusiastic and principled activist doing the hard work right alongside newer members."

Jack Dean, longtime friend and political associate: "David was the conscience of the Libertarian Party. He was always there to remind us what the party was about."

Mr. Nolan had submitted a resolution for consideration at the November 20-21 LNC meeting in New Orleans. Unaware of Mr. Nolan's death, the LNC adopted the resolution, which reads as follows:

"WHEREAS the Libertarian Party can grow only by attracting new members and supporters, and

"WHEREAS libertarianism is a unique political philosophy, distinct from both contemporary liberalism and contemporary conservatism, and

"WHEREAS we need the support of both former liberals and former conservatives who have come to realize that libertarianism and the Libertarian Party offer a better path to achieving a just, humane and prosperous society,

"The Libertarian National Committee hereby reaffirms that the Libertarian Party welcomes individuals from across the political spectrum who now accept the libertarian principles of self-ownership and non-aggression."

View a biographical article about Mr. Nolan here.
==========

Sincerely,

Wes Benedict
Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee

Libertarian Party founder, David Nolan dies

Former Mission Viejo resident David F. Nolan, who helped found the Libertarian Party in his Denver living room on Dec. 11, 1971, died Sunday, two days before his 67th birthday.

Nolan opposed government intrusion in daily life, and believed in personal freedom, according to an obituary in Sentinel of Tucson, where he lived most recently. He opposed the war in Iraq, called for an end to personal income taxes, and wanted to legalize drugs. He supported a guest-worker program over building a border wall, wanted to close the Federal Reserve System, and end the Patriot Act.

"He was sort of a guiding light," Fullerton's Jack Dean, past chairman of the California Libertarian Party, told the Arizona Daily Star. "He was kind of our conscience. Dave was a presence at every national convention; everyone respected him. He kept reminding everybody what the goal was.

"He was a low-key and extremely reasonable radical. "And he could make Libertarian positions sound reasonable and logical to anyone."

Nolan also developed the "Nolan Chart," which plots a participant's answers to a questionnaire on a political grid which an axis for social issues and one for fiscal issues, and shows the relationship between the political parties. The Libertarian Party is now the third largest political party in the country.
In 2002, while living in Mission Viejo, Nolan unsuccessfully ran for the House of Representatives against incumbent Christopher Cox, R-Newport Beach. He moved to Arizona in 2005.

In 2006, Nolan unsuccessfully ran against Gabrielle Giffords for a seat in Arizona's 8th Congressional District.

This year, he challenged John McCain for his Senate seat and racked up 63,000 votes – in a state with only 24,000 registered Libertarians, according to the Arizona Daily Star.

Nolan's cause of death was unclear late Sunday, and no information was immediately available on memorial services, according to the Arizona Daily Star.

He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth.

Posted on the Orange County Register

Barney Frank continuing his public service

Debt Delenda Est

By Bill Bonner

The subject is debt; it needs to go away.

Debt was the market’s bête noire, this week and last. In Europe, it snatched up the Irish and carried them off. Then it attacked the Portuguese. Everyone knew the periphery states were going broke. Their cost of borrowing soared. Then, when the search parties reached them, the Irish turned them away. Debt has it usefulness, the Irish figured. They held out until Wednesday, apparently negotiating terms of their own rescue.

In America, municipal debt collapsed by nearly 10% over the last two weeks. It became more and more obvious that state and local governments were headed for default too. California might get a bailout…but California, like Ireland, is a sovereign state. It could refuse. Borrowers worried that Californians and the Irish might prefer to default like honest incompetents rather than submit to the rescuers’ demands.

Debt is underrated. For one thing, it is more reliable than asset values. The crisis of ’07–’09 wiped out about a third of the world’s equity and property wealth. And it disappeared 7 million jobs in America alone. But debt survived intact. In terms of the cash flow needed to support it, debt actually grew larger.

Central planners can make a recession appear to go away. With enough hot money, they might warm up asset prices or soothe the swelling unemployment rate. But debt doesn’t cooperate. Neither monetary policy nor fiscal policy will make it go away. Debt demands honesty. The debtor has to fess up, admitting that he is a fool or a knave. Either he owns up to his mistake and defaults…or he cheats.

“With all due respect, US policy is clueless,” said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble. “It’s not that the Americans haven’t pumped enough liquidity into the market. Now to say let’s pump more into the market is not going to solve their problem.”

Read the rest at Lew Rockwell

What can Rand Paul do

The Tea Party libertarian will likely prove a more effective figurehead than senator.

For all the furor the Tea Party movement generated this year, when it came to the mightiest deliberative body in human history, the U.S. Senate, the Tea Party won only one real prize: Rand Paul's election as Kentucky’s junior senator. On the surface he's a Republican, but Paul frames himself as a representative of a supposedly trans-partisan Tea Party, burning with an urge to cut spending and curb debt that he admits his GOP comrades have not shown.

In terms of passing laws or shifting the Senate in his direction, Paul is not going to get much done by trying to operate as a one-man Tea Party in a minority party. Though he may become a filibuster machine, which given his outlier status means the Senate will have lots of cloture votes to shut him up. (He is not likely to succeed in using the filibuster to cap the debt limit and thereby destroy the entire world economy, as has been wildly speculated in some quarters.)

While those frightened by Paul see in him the power and will to wreck the planet, his fans are unduly thrilled just to hear a senator-elect talking about raising the retirement age and means testing for Social Security; cutting federal employment and pay; plotting a two-year path to a balanced budget; pushing term limits and a balanced budget constitutional amendment; insisting that bills should point to their constitutional justification and that senators should have read them before signing on; and even, to the surprise of some who found him avoiding his father’s non-interventionism on the campaign trail, talking up military cuts and questioning the value of our Afghanistan mission.

Read more at Reason

The Attack on Human Dignity

by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy




The human being is made in the image and likeness of God. He or she has the Spark of the Divine "within" him or her. He or she is the primal and primary Temple of God on earth. Each person therefore deserves from the other and gives to the other not just respect, but reverence. The destruction of a fellow human — whether it be in mind, soul, body or spirit — is therefore the desecration of the Great Temple on earth, the place in time and space where the Living God chose foremost to reside.

The sublimity, dignity and transcendental value of each human being make it a grave violation of the Presence of God and of God-given human dignity to treat a person as a thing, a widget in some one's grand illusion, a means to be used, manipulated, abused, lied to, and/or crushed to serve another's agenda. Violate is derived from the same Latin word as violence, violare. To violate a reality is to do violence to that reality. To violate a reality is to treat it in a way that is not in accordance with its nature, e.g., to treat a sentient human being as if he or she were a non-sentient rock violates the reality of the human being. To treat a human being who is the living Temple of God on earth and who is infinitely loved and valued by this same God, as a tool, as a thing, as a person of no real significance beyond my utilitarian need for him or her in some grandiose plan I have concocted, rather than with the reverence, love and value that he or she intrinsically and forever possesses, as a son or daughter of my God and his or her God, of my Father and his or her Father, of the One God, is to violate him or her, to do violence to them. And, a violation of a person's intrinsic, God bestowed human dignity and transcendent value is evil regardless of how normalized it has become, how culturally acceptable it has become, how "holy" it has become or how legal it has become.

Read the rest at Lew Rockwell

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us."

Benjamin Rush

WWJD

Going broke by fractions of a percent

Ben Bernanke should stop paying interest on reserves

By Tim Cavanaugh




Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s rollout of $600 billion in quantitative easing was a public relations disaster that deserves to be studied in college communications classes. And he could have avoided it by giving up a shiny monetary tool he got in 2008—one that may be at the root of the extended recession.

The Federal Reserve Bank’s shopping spree of distressed debt will, Bernanke claims, create 700,000 jobs over the next two years. But if one of its immediate goals was to inspire market confidence, Quantitative Easing II (QE2) could hardly have gone worse.

In the three months since Bernanke floated the idea of a second round of large-scale asset purchases, the U.S. dollar index has declined by about 5 percent. With household net worth at $54.6 trillion, according to the Fed’s most recent Flow of Funds data, this means about $2.73 trillion of domestic wealth may have vanished in three months.

While much of that fall took place during the period between Bernanke’s QE2 trial balloon in late August and the rollout of the actual program two weeks ago, events since QE2 actually hit the streets have not been encouraging. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble called the move “clueless,” and China’s Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. downgraded long-term U.S. debt. The Anglophone financial press tends to dismiss such criticisms as nationalist trash talk, but QE2 cast a glare over President Barack Obama’s Asia junket and made what would ordinarily be considered an average performance—the president failed to close a trade agreement with South Korea and came home with few solid results—into a demonstration of U.S. powerlessness.

Read more Reason

Zombie Keynesianism

by Michael S. Rozeff




The Keynesians are having a highly public quarrel on a deep and divisive issue – a fundamental issue. They are wrangling over exchange rates.

Obama and Bernanke and the U.S. Congress want the Chinese to raise the value of the Chinese currency. The Chinese don’t want to.

Both sides to this quarrel are Keynesians. Both states use the powers of the state to manage their economies through fiscal and monetary policies. This happens throughout most of the world.

Keynesianism has brought the world to grief. State-controlled economies fail, as in the Soviet Union and Red China before 1978. The higher the degree of state control, the higher the degree of failure. The U.S. is experiencing the results of state control now. Its central bank has controlled the nation’s money for years. The government has controlled the mortgage and housing markets for decades. Lately, it has run huge deficits in a futile attempt to end the recession created by its earlier mismanagement.

The Keynesian quarrels actually show that the Keynesians don’t know what they are talking about. Their politics and economics are both hopeless. Keynesianism is hopelessly flawed, wrong, inadequate, and unsuited to what is needed so that the planet’s people can progress. Freedom and free markets are the prescription. The Red Chinese seem somehow to have found this out while the so-called bastion of so-called free enterprise remains mired down in Keynesianism.

National Opt-Out Day

Travelling this Holiday Season?  Join the resistance on National Opt-Out Day.