Libertarians call for more finance industry freedom

WASHINGTON - Libertarian Party Executive Director Wes Benedict issued the following statement today, regarding the financial regulation legislation in Congress:

"The Libertarian Party opposes the legislation currently in Congress. Instead of removing harmful regulations that reduce competition, create winners and losers, and stifle the choices of consumers and financial firms, this legislation merely adds to that heap of regulations.

"It is remarkable that so many people have blamed the banking and financial company failures on the 'free market.' The American finance industry is probably the most regulated industry in human history. It doesn't remotely resemble a free market, and that's been true for many decades. It would be much more accurate to blame the failures on government interference.

"The 2008 TARP bailouts were strongly supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain both supported them--Senator McCain even 'suspended his campaign' to rush back to Washington and help push through the massive bailouts. On the other hand, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr firmly opposed those bailouts, and the Libertarian Party has continued to express our opposition since then.

"We're seeing the typical cycle of government regulation:

1. Add more regulations.
2. Watch the new regulations create new problems.
3. Blame the free market.
4. Go to step 1.

"The 2008 TARP bailouts were rationalized with the 'too big to fail' phantom -- the notion that if a big company goes bankrupt, then all financial activity will cease, and the world will basically end. It was one more example of government creating a 'fear of catastrophe' to get people to knuckle under to big government payouts.

"Another major problem with protective government regulation is that it gives consumers the false impression that 'everything's OK, the government will make sure you can't be hurt.' That causes consumers to stop doing their homework, and stop keeping an eye on the businesses they depend on. Then, when the government regulators fail in their job (as the SEC has repeatedly, for example), consumers get hurt much worse than they would if they had never been told the government was taking care of them.

"The problem isn't too little regulation, but too much. Banks, insurance companies, and other financial companies must be allowed to operate freely in a free market, and they must be allowed to fail. No other system will work. Heaping more regulations on top of the already enormous financial regulation pile will only lead to new problems."

Mark A. Calabria of the Cato Institute, writing in the New York Post, commented, "Far from protecting the little guy and sticking it to the fat cats, this bill keeps good, old-fashioned political patronage alive and well."

The Libertarian Party's Platform states: "We favor free-market banking, with unrestricted competition among banks and depository institutions of all types."

For more information, or to arrange an interview, call LP Executive Director Wes Benedict at 202-333-0008 ext. 222.

The LP is America's third-largest political party, founded in 1971. The Libertarian Party stands for free markets and civil liberties. You can find more information on the Libertarian Party at our website.


-- Post From My iPad

Two Weeks With the iPad....

Two weeks with the iPad and I must say it has surpassed my own expectations. As with any new technology product, I was a little skeptical if it would actually work consistently and if I would experience a bunch of crashes. I have been surprised because I have not experienced any major issues, or really any issues at all.

The iPad is the missing link between the iPhone/PDA category and the laptop category. Now I will not give up my iPhone for anything and I used the Palm Treo for years, yet the size of the iPad allows for efficiency when work with spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. The iWorks suite is much more efficient and simpler to use that Microsoft Office.

Here is list of items that make the iPad:
1. Battery Life. Apple's battery technology is light years ahead of anybody else.
2. Speed. A clean operating system with an impressive processor minimizes, or eliminates lag time. Web surfing is much faster than my laptop or desktop.
3. Touch, Touch, Touch. Eliminating the cumbersome use of the mouse and keyboard increase efficiency. Save clicks and moving the mouse around. It is complete freedom!
4. Free Apps! Anything free is great but when they are great quality and provide valuable use, well you can only recommend them.
5. Screenshots. Being able to press the home button and the sleep button to create a snapshot of the screen is very nice. One action and it save it on your photos. Great for training or sharing information.
6. The iWorks Suite - Numbers, Pages, and Keynote. Three great programs before they created the iPad versions. This is what sold me on the iPad.
7. The VGA connector. I purchased a VGA Connector which gives the ability to hook your iPad up to a monitor or projector.
8. Compatible cables. The same cable that connects your iPod and iPhone connects to your iPad. However, the iPad require a 10W power adapter. As with all Apple power adapters, they are rated 110-240V.
9. The iBooks App. Great selection of books and more added weekly. The App reads well in the dark.
10. The Calendar. I never could quite find a Calendar for the iPhone that I liked. However, the one with iPad is exactly what I have been looking for since switching to the iPhone.

There are few items I would like to see aded to the iPad. Such as the ability to copy and paste text from websites, a USB Cable that can connect to a flash drive, better integration between apps and their ability to access files on the iPad.

Overall for me the iPad gets 9.8 stars out of 10. It simply does everything I need it to do and it has replaced my laptop.

Muir Boda

-- Post From My iPad

GOA's Pratt to Speak at Mid-Shore Tea Party

Gun Owners of America E-Mail Alert
8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151
Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408
http://www.gunowners.org

Tuesday, April 13, 2010


GOA Executive Director Larry Pratt will be a featured speaker at the Mid-Shore Tea Party on Saturday, April 17. The event kicks off at 10:00 and will wrap up at noon.

The venue will be the Talbot County side of the Coptank River Fishing Piers. This is located adjacent to MD Route 50 near Cambridge.

In addition to the speakers, there will be a flag ceremony, patriotic music and "Tossing of the Crates."

For more information, go to http://marylandtaxdayteaparty.com. You can e-mail midshoreteaparty@gmail.com or call 410.858.3687 or 410.476.3207.


-- Post From My iPad

Location:Larry Pratt to Speak at Mid Shore Tea Party in Cambridge

The Free Market and Technology Innovation

Yesterday I received the new iPad from Apple. It is a truly impressive piece of technology. It is entirely a product of the free market. Apple's achievement of developing the iPad is a testament to the company's ingenuity and creativity.

I am not suggesting everyone go out and buy one, I am saying as Americans we should be proud of a company such as Apple. We should celebrate the achievements of the free market.

We should continually fight for less regulation on businesses so that they can continue to develop and create new technologies. We should continue to fight for lower taxes on businesses so they can create more jobs. We should keep on fighting for lower taxes on our citizens to keep these businesses viable.

So I salute those businesses that continue to bring us new technologies despite having to jump through all the hoops our government makes them jump through.

Muir Boda



-- Post From My iPad

Today Counts: Census Encourages Participation With Fanfare

Below is the article that appeared in the Daily Times and Circulated by Capital News Service to other local newspaper and online news services in Maryland.


Posted on March 31, 2010
By DIANA NGUYEN


WASHINGTON (March 31, 2010) -- National Census Day is Thursday -- the federal government's reminder to get those census forms in post haste and save money.

To promote the day and its message, the U.S Census Bureau and its community partners will sponsor a slew of events across the nation to "empower communities" and remind residents that $400 billion in federal assistance is at stake.

"This is the push," said Census Bureau spokeswoman Sylvia Ballinger. "We use this day to rally people, encourage and remind them to fill out the 2010 census form" so that someone won't have to show up and knock on their doors after May 1. 


Those census takers will cost a pretty penny.

To send back a completed form takes 10 minutes and costs a mere 42 cents. But it costs taxpayers $25 per person to send a census taker door-to-door to collect the same information, according to the Census Bureau.

Every 1 percentage point increase in mail-back rates saves taxpayers $85 million in follow-up costs.

To follow up on those who fail to respond costs an estimated $2.74 billion, which is the largest portion of the projected $14.7 billion needed to operate the 2010 census.

To keep follow-up costs down and spread census awareness to "Hard to Count" areas, the Census Bureau spent $62.7 million on television, $18.1 million on radio, and $21.1 million on print ads.

But critics say census publicity is unnecessary.

"The census happens every 10 years," said Muir Boda, communications director of the Libertarian Party of Maryland. "It's another extreme waste of taxpayer money to promote something we know is already going to happen."

Although Maryland continues to surpass the national participation rate, about half the state still needs to answer the 10-question survey as of Wednesday.

Census Bureau and Maryland officials expect a wave of forms to return after April 1 because there is usually an uptick from residents waiting until Census Day to send back their forms, said Jane Traynham, manager of the Maryland State Data Center. 


Traynham predicted there will be a big effort from the counties to encourage communities with low response rates after the first week of April.

That's because the count counts: A community's population count will determine the area's legislative and congressional representation and serves as a major factor in the allocation of federal funds to jurisdictions.

Census numbers are also used in other ways.

For example, the Census Bureau produces about 100 surveys a year based on census data; companies use housing and income figures to locate ideal consumers; and non-profit organizations look at the data to determine important statistics in their communities when applying for grants.

While census takers battle low response rates in rural and urban communities, they will also have to deal with suspicious residents who consider census questions intrusive and unconstitutional.

"They are asking questions that are private. And oftentimes (the government) uses the information for purposes that it's not intended for," Boda said. "Race and ethnicity are irrelevant and information the government doesn't need."

The only necessary question, Boda said, is the one that pertains to how many people are living in the household.

The Census Bureau said it plans to follow up several times if questions are left unanswered or an occupied household fails to respond. It's important that every person living in your household is counted as of April 1, said Ballinger. "It's not too late."

Capital News Service contributed to this report.

Executive Board Member Interviewed About the Census

I received a phone call from a reporter at Capitol News Service.  It got picked up by the Daily Times in Salisbury.  Check it out and share it.

How to Oppose ObamaCare

What critics of the president's health care plan can learn from Gandhi's methods of nonviolent resistance

Shikha Dalmia | March 26, 2010

President Barack Obama came into office promising hope and change. But he might get more change than he hoped for. By foisting ObamaCare on a deeply unwilling country he might have set the stage for the largest civil disobedience movement since the civil rights era, which, if it plays its cards right, could undo his legislation and his legacy.

President Obama is betting that come November the bruising, year-long battle that he has just dragged the country through will be a distant memory. But that profoundly underestimates the dismay of a large segment of the public that sees what he signed Tuesday as a fraudulent piece of legislation based on fraudulent thinking backed by fraudulent facts enacted through a fraudulent process. (Yes, Americans do care about "process," Mr. President. It's another name for representative government.)

President Obama tried for a year to convince the country that the cure for rising health care costs and the swelling ranks of the uninsured was a de facto government takeover of the health care system—only to be rebuffed in poll after poll. And if there was any doubt as to where the public stood, it was put to rest by Republican Scott Brown's stunning December victory in Massachusetts, the land of Big Government.

But instead of backing down President Obama went for broke using tactics more reprehensible than the "business as usual politics" that he had pledged to change when he came to office.

First, there were the budgetary magic tricks that he and his Congressional enablers got the highly respected Congressional Budget Office to perform. The last CBO assessment—that pushed the bill through—showed that the Obama plan would reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over 10 years. The reality, once all the double counting and fantasy savings are eliminated, is that it will add $562 billion.

But the CBO is not the only entity whose honor Democrats have violated—perhaps beyond repair. Federal taxpayers will also get royally screwed when they have to pay for all the sweetheart deals that Obama's Cogressional minions cut behind closed doors and whose true scope will only become apparent in the coming months. (Bart Stupak is rumored to have gotten $700,000 for airport repairs as his sell-out price.)

Worst of all were the shameless parliamentary tactics that Democrats deployed. The Founders deliberately constructed many roadblocks for new laws to prevent elected officials from straying too far from the will of the people. But Democrats could care less about parliamentary niceties.

They are poised to use the so-called nuclear option or "reconciliation" to square the House and the Senate bills. This option will allow the Senate to circumvent the normal committee process to make fixes to the House bill through a simple majority without risking a filibuster. But reconciliation is meant exclusively for budgetary matters—not ramrodding sweeping social legislation on a party-line vote. This is why the Senate parliamentarian—a completely nonpartisan figure—has to approve its use for every fix. But Democrats are poised to have Vice President Joe Biden overrule him should he dare to stand in their way. In short, instead of bending the cost curve, President Obama is bending the rules of accountable government.

READ MORE REASON

The Entitlement Rip-Off

How unfunded liabilities drain the treasury

John Stossel | March 25, 2010

Bernie Madoff took money from people who thought he'd invested it, gave some to others who thought it was a partial return on their earlier investments, and kept much for himself. That's called a Ponzi scheme, and his $50 billion fraud was called the biggest ever. But it wasn't the biggest. Social Security and Medicare are much bigger ones.

These are trillion-dollar scams. Medicare has a $36 trillion unfunded liability. Social Security's is $8 trillion. There's no money to keep those promises.

But Congress isn't investigating this scam. Congress runs it. That FICA money you thought government had saved for your retirement is gone. There's nothing left but IOUs backed by nothing. Your money was spent not only on current retirees but on wars, welfare, corporate bailouts, earmarks, and all the other stuff Congress wants. For years, this was possible because the FICA tax brought in surpluses that allowed government to pay retirees more than they contributed and still help buy those other things.

Those days are gone. The huge group of baby boomers has started to retire, and that means trouble. In 2008, for the first time, Medicare paid out more than it took in.

So instead of filling the government's coffers and hiding the real size of the budget deficit, the entitlement programs have now begun to drain the treasury. Part of the "problem" is that we live longer. When Social Security started, most people didn't live to 65. Now we average 78.

READ MORE REASON

Obamacare's First Patient

Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey

Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey is an original Reason.tv documentary series airing the week of March 15-19, 2010.
Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey is an original Reason.tv documentary series airing the week of March 15-19, 2010.

Healthcare Reform Passes

by Ron Paul

Following months of heated public debate and aggressive closed-door negotiations, Congress finally cast a historic vote on healthcare late Sunday evening. It was truly a sad weekend on the House floor as we witnessed further dismantling of the Constitution, disregard of the will of the people, explosive expansion of the reach of government, unprecedented corporate favoritism, and the impending end of quality healthcare as we know it.


Those in favor of this bill touted their good intentions of ensuring quality healthcare for all Americans, as if those of us against the bill are against good medical care. They cite fanciful statistics of deficit reduction, while simultaneously planning to expand the already struggling medical welfare programs we currently have.


They somehow think that healthcare in this country will be improved by swelling our welfare rolls and cutting reimbursement payments to doctors who are already losing money. It is estimated that thousands of doctors will be economically forced out of the profession should this government fuzzy math actually try to become healthcare reality. No one has thought to ask what good mandatory health insurance will be if people can’t find a doctor.


Legislative hopes and dreams don’t always stand up well against economic realities.


Frustratingly, this legislation does not deal at all with the real reasons access to healthcare is a struggle for so many – the astronomical costs. If tort reform was seriously discussed, if the massive regulatory burden on healthcare was reduced and reformed, if the free market was allowed to function and apply downward pressure on healthcare costs as it does with everything else, perhaps people wouldn’t be so beholden to insurance companies in the first place.


If costs were lowered, more people could simply pay for what they need out of pocket, as they were able to do before government got so involved. Instead, in the name of going after greedy insurance companies, the federal government is going to make people even more beholden to them by mandating that everyone buy their product!


Hefty fines are due from anyone found to have committed the heinous crime of not being a customer of a health insurance company. We will need to hire some 16,500 new IRS agents to police compliance with all these new mandates and administer various fines. So in government terms, this is also a jobs bill. Never mind that this program is also likely to cost the private sector some 5 million jobs.


Of course, the most troubling aspect of this bill is that it is so blatantly unconstitutional and contrary to the ideals of liberty. Nowhere in the constitution is there anything approaching authority for the Federal government to do any of this.


The founders would have been horrified at the idea of government forcing citizens to become consumers of a particular product from certain government approved companies. 38 states are said to already be preparing legal and constitutional challenges to this legislation, and if the courts stand by their oaths, they will win. Protecting the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, should be the court’s responsibility.


Citizens have a responsibility over their own life, but they also have the liberty to choose how they will live and protect their lives. Healthcare choices are a part of liberty, another part that is being stripped away. Government interference in healthcare has already infringed on choices available to people, but rather than getting out of the way, it is entrenching itself, and its corporatist cronies, even more deeply.

www.lewrockwell.com

Reason.tv: Why is the "Live Free or Die" state banning fish pedicures?

Another Senseless Drug War Death

Stunning developments in the 2009 police shooting of Georgia pastor Jonathan Ayers

Radley Balko | March 23, 2010

The Jonathan Ayers story was already outrageous enough. Last September, Ayers, a 28-year-old Baptist pastor from Lavonia, Georgia, was gunned down by a North Georgia narcotics task force in the parking lot of a gas station. Ayers had not been a suspect in any drug investigation. And even today, police acknowledge he was not using or trafficking in illicit drugs. Instead, Ayers had either been ministering to or having an affair with (depending on whom you believe) Johanna Kayla Jones Barrett, the actual target of the investigation.

Ayers is yet more collateral damage in the boundlessly tragic and wasteful drug war, as are his widowed wife Abigail and the child she was carrying at the time of his death. But that's really only the beginning of this mess. In a lawsuit filed last week, Abigail Ayers makes some astonishing new allegations about the competence of the police officers who killed her husband, the supervisors who hired them, and the law enforcement agencies and the grand jury that investigated Ayers' death. Most damning: The police officer who killed Ayers wasn't even authorized to be carrying a gun or a badge.

Hours before Ayers was killed, police say Johanna Barrett sold undercover officer Chance Oxner $50 worth of crack cocaine. According to an interview Barrett gave to the North Georgian newspaper shortly after Ayers' death, the pastor had seen her walking near a gas station on her way back to an extended-stay motel where she was living with her boyfriend. Ayers, who had known Barrett for a number of years, offered her a ride back to the motel and gave her the money in his pocket, $23, to help pay her rent.

The police were trailing Barrett at the time. But instead of apprehending her at the motel, they instead followed Ayers, the stranger they'd just seen give her a ride and hand her some cash.

Ayers then pulled into a nearby gas station to withdraw money from an ATM. Shortly after he got back into his car, a black Escalade tore into the parking lot. Three officers, all undercover, got out of the vehicle and pointed their guns at Ayers. The pastor, understandably, attempted to escape. As he pulled out of the station, Ayers grazed Officer Oxner with his car. Officer Billy Shane Harrison then opened fire, shooting Ayers in the stomach. (You can watch surveillance video of the altercationhere.) Ayers continued to drive, fleeing the parking lot for about a thousand yards before eventually crashing his car. He died at the hospital.

Ayers’ last words to his family and medical staff were that he thought he was being robbed. The police found no illicit drugs in his car, and there was no trace of any illegal substance in his body.

If the story ended there, it would merely be enough to boil your blood. These officers jumped from an SUV waving their guns commando-style over a possible $50 drug transaction. Worse, the man they pounced upon wasn't the target of their investigation.

The police claimed they announced themselves, but it isn't difficult to see how Ayers—or anyone else—might have been confused in the commotion. It was a hot, late summer Georgia afternoon. Ayers likely had his windows up and his air conditioning on. The officers were undercover, dressed in shabby clothes and ski-mask caps. The badges they had hanging from their necks, seen in this photo, were far from conspicuous.

Let’s say that you (which would include 99 percent of the people reading this) aren't a drug dealer, or a mobster, or some other sort of career criminal. You've just returned to your car after getting cash from an ATM. An unmarked Escalade pulls up and three men jump out in masks and guns. Confusion and self-preservation is not only understandable, it ought to be predictable, even expected.

This would have been a grossly disproportionate way for these cops to have approached Barrett, their arctual suspect, much less a guy they sought to question only about the 10 minutes he'd just spent in the car with her.

The Stephens County, Georgia Sheriff's Department initially said Ayers was a drug suspect, but later had to retract. In her September interview with the North Georgian, Barrett told the paper that Ayers had been trying to help kick her drug habit, but later, while facing charges related to both the Ayers case and another incident, she told investigators that Ayers had in previous years paid her for sex. This testimony persuaded the grand jury not to indict the officers who killed Ayers. The pastor may have fled the police, the grand jury concluded, because he feared his reputation would be ruined if his relationship with Barrett were exposed.

District Attorney Brian Rickman praised the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for going to "very extraordinary lengths" to insure the investigation into the shooting was fair. But Abigail Ayers' civil suit (PDF) calls that assessment into question. The complaint alleges that Officer Harrison, the cop who shot Ayers, wasn't even authorized to arrest him. On the day Ayers was killed, Harrison had yet to take a series of firearms training classes required for his certification as a police officer. More astonishing, Harrison apparently had no training at all in the use of lethal force.

These allegations have since been confirmed by local TV station WSBTV and, after the fact, by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Despite the fact that Harrison had killed a man suspected of no crime months earlier without having undergone lethal-force training and certification, the officer was still carrying his badge and gun up until the time of the WSBTV report. Once the publicity hit, Harrison was suspended. Abigail Ayers' civil suit also alleges prior disciplinary problems with both officers Oxner and Harrison, including alleged drug use.

The wasteful use of public resources to pursue a petty drug offender and the aggressive and short-sighted apprehension of Jonathan Ayers that led to his death are bad enough. That a police officer untrained in the use of lethal force and unqualified to be holding a badge and gun was put on a narcotics task force, and then placed in a position where he was able to shoot and kill a non-suspect is worse. But the kicker has to be that the subsequent police-led investigations of this high-profile casefailed to turn up such a critical piece of information. It ought to cast more doubt on the already dubious notion that police shootings should only be investigated by other police officers.

At the heart of this outrage, though, once again, is our increasingly demented, hysterical, all-too-literal drug war. Until we're ready to dispense with the notion that gun-toting cops in ski masks going commando at a public gas station is an appropriate response to an alleged $50 drug transaction, we're going to see a lot more Jonathan Ayerses.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

The Biggest Obstacle to the Liberty Movement is .....

.... the Republican Party.  It is the continuos promises that the Republican Party makes, such as Limited Government, Lower Taxes, Fiscal Responsibility, Family Values, Privacy, Focusing on Our Hemisphere, Property Rights, etc., etc., etc.

Yet, when the Republican Party actually gained control of both the Presidency and both houses of Congress, their actions were completely opposite of their platform and avowed principles.

Here is there list accomplishments:

• The Largest Expansion of Government Power since, well, Richard Nixon
• Passage of the Patriot Act
• Historic Increases in Deficit Spending
• 2 Invasions and Occupation Sovereign Nations
• Failure to Pass Their Family Values through Legislation
• Subsidized Tax Refunds to People Who Do Not Pay Taxes
• Failure to Make Tax Cuts Permanent

The Republican Party is poised to present itself as the only alternative to Barack Obama and a Democratic Party that is bent on turning America into a socialistic, government depending nation.  The problem with this thought process is the fact is the Republican Party runs a government just as bad if not worse than the Democrats.  The traditional Tax and Spend policy of the Democratic Party is just as bad the Republican's traditional of Deficit Spending policy.

Many voters are just as dissatisfied with the Republicans as they are the Democrats.  A bad taste from the Bush years seems to linger and not go away as Obama, Pelosi, and their goons run roughshod on America.  Let's hope that voters do not develop another case of amnesia.

Muir Boda

Is Health-Care Reform Constitutional?

by Randy Barnett

This article appeared in the Washington Post on March 21, 2010.

ith the House set to vote on health-care legislation, the congressional debate on the issue seems to be nearing its conclusion. But if the bill does become law, the battle over federal control of health care will inevitably shift to the courts. Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, has said he will file a legal challenge to the bill, arguing in a column this month that reform legislation "violate[s] the plain text of both the Ninth and Tenth Amendments." On Friday, South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster and Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced that they will file a federal lawsuit if health-care reform legislation passes.

Will these cases get anywhere? Here is a guide to the possible legal challenges to a comprehensive health-care bill.

The individual mandate.


Can Congress really require that every person purchase health insurance from a private company or face a penalty? The answer lies in the commerce clause of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power "to regulate commerce . . . among the several states." Historically, insurance contracts were not considered commerce, which referred to trade and carriage of merchandise. That's why insurance has traditionally been regulated by states. But the Supreme Court has long allowed Congress to regulate and prohibit all sorts of "economic" activities that are not, strictly speaking, commerce. The key is that those activities substantially affect interstate commerce, and that's how the court would probably view the regulation of health insurance.

But the individual mandate extends the commerce clause's power beyond economic activity, to economic inactivity. That is unprecedented. While Congress has used its taxing power to fund Social Security and Medicare, never before has it used its commerce power to mandate that an individual person engage in an economic transaction with a private company. Regulating the auto industry or paying "cash for clunkers" is one thing; making everyone buy a Chevy is quite another. Even during World War II, the federal government did not mandate that individual citizens purchase war bonds.

If you choose to drive a car, then maybe you can be made to buy insurance against the possibility of inflicting harm on others. But making you buy insurance merely because you are alive is a claim of power from which many Americans instinctively shrink. Senate Republicans made this objection, and it was defeated on a party-line vote, but it will return.

READ MORE @ CATO

The Lunatic Left Is Getting Desperate

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo


The Huffington Post recently (March 18) sunk to a new low by publishing an attack on“Ron Paul and the Tea Parties: States’ Rights and the 17th Amendment” by one Leonard Zeskind, a “former” Stalinist rabble-rouser. According to Laird Wilcox, author of The Watchdogs, a book about contemporary political movements, Zeskind began his communistic career of agitprop in the ’70s as a “front man” for the “Sojourner Truth Organization” whose stated objective was “to motivate the working classes to make a revolution.” The Organization quoted its role model, Josef Stalin, who insisted on the need for “iron discipline” in agitating for a communist revolution in America.


According to Wilcox, Zeskind has written favorably about “the value of a grass roots school of communism” that would teach people how to “destroy the marketplace.” He wrote this in a journal called “Urgent Tasks,” a phrase popularized by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Kansas City City Magazine once called Zeskind “elusive, paranoid, near hysterical.” His forte, according to the Wilcox Collection, appears to be “ritual defamation” of his perceived political opponents, i.e., “to call people names in the hope of defaming, discrediting, stigmatizing or neutralizing them.”


An example of the Zeskind/Huffington “ritual defamation” strategy is his statements in The Huffington Post that: 1) Someone writing for an obscure publication called “The American Free Press” noted recently that “the Tea Parties were actually born during the presidential campaign of Rep. Ron Paul of Texas”; 2) Several decades ago, someone who wrote in “The American Free Press” was revealed to be a Holocaust Denier; 3) Therefore, the Tea Parties (and Ron Paul’s supporters) must be hotbeds of Holocaust Denial.


Zeskind works himself into a hysterical frenzy over the fact that the “Tea Party Movement” has been talking about repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, which he says would be the equivalent of denying women the right to vote, or abolishing the constitutional principle of equal justice under the law. I’m not making this up. He really is that hysterical. And he calls Ron Paul an “extremist”! Apparently, Ariana Huffington believes Zeskind is a qualified expert on constitutionalism.


Why are the Huffingtonians upset about mere talk of repealing the Seventeenth Amendment? Because the Amendment, which mandated the popular election of U.S. Senators (as opposed to the original system of appointment by state legislators) allows a small cabal of wealthy and influential people to dominate governmental decision-making. Getting elected to the U.S. Senate requires the raising of millions of dollars for television advertising and other elements of modern campaigning, so that senators have long been in the pockets of their major donors from all over the country, and the world, as opposed to the folks back home. Zeskind says this system is “democratic,” but in reality it is the opposite. Reverting back to the original system that was created by the founders would allow the “riff-raff” known as the citizens of the sovereign states to exert more influence over their own government. Historically, this system was an important brake on the growth of the central government. This is why the Lunatic Left is increasingly hysterical over the talk about repealing the Seventeenth Amendment as well as nullification, and especially secession.


The Rationale for State Legislators To Appoint U.S. Senators


Professor Ralph Rossum of Claremont McKenna College explains the rationale for the original system of appointing U.S. Senators in his book, Federalism, the Supreme Court, and the Seventeenth Amendment. The founding fathers intended that state legislatures would appoint senators and then instruct them on how to vote in Congress. This was to safeguard against the corruption of senators by special interests. “The ability of state legislatures to instruct senators was mentioned frequently during the Constitutional Convention and the state ratifying conventions and was always assumed to exist,” writes Rossum.


At the New York ratifying convention John Jay, co-author of The Federalist Papers, said “The Senate is to be composed of men appointed by the state legislatures…. I presume they will also instruct them, that there will be a constant correspondence between the senators and the state executives.” At the Massachusetts ratifying convention Fisher Ames referred to U.S. senators as “ambassadors of the states.” James Madison wrote in Federalist #45 that because of this system the U.S. Senate “would be disinclined to invade the rights of the individual States, or the prerogatives of their governments.” This was an important element of the whole system of states’ rights or federalism that was created by the founders (not by John C. Calhoun, as Zeskind and myriad neocons falsely claim). As Madison wrote in Federalist #62, the system gave “to state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government as must secure the authority of the former.” It helped establish the fact that the citizens of the states were sovereign and the masters, not the servants, of their own government.


The legislative appointment of U.S. senators was responsible for the most famous declarations of the states’ rights philosophy of the founders, the nullification philosophy as expressed in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves of 1798, authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison respectively (not by Calhoun, as Zeskind and others falsely claim). These Resolves were used as part of the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures’ instructions to their senators to vote to repeal the odious Sedition Act, which effectively prohibited free political speech. The origins of nullification do not lie in attempts to protect slavery or Jim Crow laws, as Zeskind once again falsely claims. Jim Crow laws existed throughout the Northern states for many decades before they were imposed on the South by the Republican Party’s military occupation authorities during Reconstruction.


John Quincy Adams resigned from the Senate in 1809 because he disagreed with the Massachusetts state legislature’s instructions to him to oppose President James Madison’s trade embargo. Senator David Stone of North Carolina resigned in 1814 after his state legislature disapproved of his collaboration with the New England Federalists on several legislative issues. Senator Peleg Sprague of Maine resigned in 1835 after opposing his state legislatures’instructions to oppose the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States. When the U.S. Senate censured President Andrew Jackson for having vetoed the rechartering of the Bank, seven U.S. Senators resigned rather than carry out their state legislatures’ instructions to vote to have Jackson’s censure expunged. One of them was Senator John Tyler of Virginia, who would become President of the United States in 1841.


In other words, the original system of state legislative appointment of U.S. Senators did exactly what it was designed to do: limit the tyrannical proclivities of the central government. As Professor Todd Zywicki of George Mason University Law School has written, “the Senate played an active role in preserving the sovereignty and independent sphere of action of state governments” in the pre-Seventeenth Amendment era prior to 1913. “Rather than delegating lawmaking authority to Washington, state legislators insisted on keeping authority close to home…. As a result, the long-term size of the federal government remained fairly stable and relatively small during the pre-Seventeenth-Amendment era”(emphasis added). (See Todd J. Zywicki, “Beyond the Shell and Husk of History: The History of the Seventeenth Amendment and its Implications for Current Reform Proposals,” Cleveland State Law Review, vol. 45, 1997).


You know the Lunatic Left is whistling past the graveyard when they resort to the “might-makes-right” argument against nullification and repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment. Echoing the views expressed by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia several weeks ago, Zeskind concludes his paranoid tirade by saying that the “vision of state sovereignty and secession were settled by the Civil War….” But nothing is ever “settled” permanently in politics, no matter how many citizens the U.S. government might murder (some 350,000 in the case of the “Civil War”) in order to prove itself “right.”

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln;Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book isHamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.

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