Patriot Act Up for Renewal - Time to do Away With It

From the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and other civil liberties to Jim Crow laws to Wilsonian prosecutions of antiwar citizens during World War I, our federal and state governments have a long, if less than honorable history of infringing  (when not  riding roughshod over) the rights of Americans. Usually this occurs in a time of some panic or crisis (real or perceived), and it almost always turns out to be excessive, fading away quickly as cooler emotions prevail.  (Some cases, like the Jim Crow laws, take decades to overcome.)

Our current version is the Patriot Act, which was excessive from the start in its allowance for government agencies to override the rights and of citizens in the name of protecting them from foreign terrorists.  (Of course, we can’t be trusted to carry weapons to defend OURSELVES from such terrorists in the rare cases where we might encounter them but we must trust government agents to go through our personal information and communications (including financial), and even physically search us and our belongings to keep us safe as citizens.)  To me this is to devalue the nature of citizenship.

I ‘m told that the Patriot Act comes up for renewal and/or extension over Memorial Day.  I can hardly imagine a more appropriate holiday for doing away with this un-American act as a step toward returning us to the freedom, independence, and self-reliance that have defined us as Americans since the country’s founding.

Sincerely,

Dr. Richard J. Davis

(Dr. Davis was the Maryland Libertarian Party's

Why Be Libertarian?

by Murray N. Rothbard

This essay is chapter 15 of the book Egalitarianism As a Revolt Against Nature.

Why be libertarian, anyway? By this we mean, what's the point of the whole thing? Why engage in a deep and lifelong commitment to the principle and the goal of individual liberty? For such a commitment, in our largely unfree world, means inevitably a radical disagreement with, and alienation from, the status quo, an alienation which equally inevitably imposes many sacrifices in money and prestige. When life is short and the moment of victory far in the future, why go through all this?

Incredibly, we have found among the increasing number of libertarians in this country many people who come to a libertarian commitment from one or another extremely narrow and personal point of view. Many are irresistibly attracted to liberty as an intellectual system or as an aesthetic goal, but liberty remains for them a purely intellectual parlor game, totally divorced from what they consider the "real" activities of their daily lives. Others are motivated to remain libertarians solely from their anticipation of their own personal financial profit. Realizing that a free market would provide far greater opportunities for able, independent men to reap entrepreneurial profits, they become and remain libertarians solely to find larger opportunities for business profit. While it is true that opportunities for profit will be far greater and more widespread in a free market and a free society, placing one's primary emphasis on this motivation for being a libertarian can only be considered grotesque. For in the often tortuous, difficult and grueling path that must be trod before liberty can be achieved, the libertarian's opportunities for personal profit will far more often be negative than abundant.

The consequence of the narrow and myopic vision of both the gamester and the would-be profit maker is that neither group has the slightest interest in the work of building a libertarian movement. And yet it is only through building such a movement that liberty may ultimately be achieved. Ideas, and especially radical ideas, do not advance in the world in and by themselves, as it were in a vacuum; they can only be advanced by people and, therefore, the development and advancement of such people – and therefore of a "movement" – becomes a prime task for the libertarian who is really serious about advancing his goals.

Turning from these men of narrow vision, we must also see that utilitarianism – the common ground of free-market economists – is unsatisfactory for developing a flourishing libertarian movement. While it is true and valuable to know that a free market would bring far greater abundance and a healthier economy to everyone, rich and poor alike, a critical problem is whether this knowledge is enough to bring many people to a lifelong dedication to liberty.

The Google Pharm Case

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.



The American pharmaceutical system is a highly controlled apparatus for restricting access to much-needed drugs and violating the rights of those who want to purchase them. This has long been true.

Lew Rockwell

Vast amounts of drugs that people should be permitted to purchase of their own free will are withheld from the market (of course, many others are outlawed). Instead, people who know what they need are forced first to fork over their money to a physician – who then gets overpaid by insurance – then part of the buck is passed to the over-trained checkout clerks at the pharmacy. We are all treated like babies in order to sustain and fund an industry filled with bamboozlers in white coats.


The Internet in its early days (perhaps 1998 to 2008) represented a wonderful alternative to this apparatus. Suppliers all over the world popped up to give us what we wanted, bypassing the whole cage of government regulations and private monopolists who rule them like prison wardens. You know what you need, so just click and buy it!


So the pharmaceutical industry solicited the help of government. Together, they worked to crack down on "counterfeit" medicines – meaning the real thing that bypasses patent restrictions and supplier monopolies. In their view, people must not be allowed to get prescription medications without doctor approval – else an entire fake industry could collapse. So they bandied together and instituted a medieval guild system for the digital age.


Over the years, Google has accepted some advertising from some of these so-called rogue elements. In a free market, they would be perfectly legitimate advertisers. Google makes no guarantee of the exact nature of the goods and services of all those who choose to advertise on its network. It has some degree of interest in quality control, of course, but if the customers are buying and happy, what could be the problem?



Well, the medical cartel, of course, and it asked for the Justice Department to intervene. As for this writing, Google is assuming that it is going to be in hot water very soon. Its recent report to stockholders says that it has put half a billion dollars in escrow to deal with the Justice Department investigation. The presumption here is that Google is going to be held liable for permitting ads to run from market-based drug sellers.

Equality

A society that puts equality … ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. 

 Milton Friedman