Libertarian Quote of the Day

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

– Ayn Rand

MDLP Candidate Spotlight: Jusitn Kinsey

We are casting the spotlight on Justin Kinsey, the Maryland Libertarian Candidate for House of Delegates in District 5B.

Check out more about Justin on his website www.kinsey5b.com.

When Government Tramples The Rights of Property Owners....

A most unfortunate situation is arising in the City of Salisbury, our government - particularly the office of the Mayor - are instituting Nazi like tactics against law abiding, tax paying, responsible citizens.  During his campaign Mayor Ireton vowed to crack down on non-compliant Rentals, clean up our city, reduce crime, clean up our river (swimmable & fishable in 10 years), among other things, leading us all to Utopia.  So far he has not been very successful in his quest.  He is gaining success though, on shutting down converted rental units.

In a featured article in yesterday's Daily Times titled  "Salisbury rental war takes another casualty" Home Owner Karen Marshall has been ordered to evict a tenant that lives in a one bedroom apartment over her garage.  Ms. Marshall bought the property because she saw the apartment as a great way to help offset the cost of her mortgage.  Her tenant also has a great opportunity to save on an apartment in a very nice neighborhood.  Yet, in the great wisdom of those who make decisions and think they know what is best, they decide this horrible situation must end.  It is a danger to our city, the rental industry is destroying everything we hold dear ......... whatever.

We have debated about FBI crime statistics and the false impressions they can imply.  Every city in America has a crime problem.  Anyone who implies crime is not that bad is foolish.  Yet, what are people supposed to think when the very government that writes and enforces laws cannot get it's story straight and in the end makes a decision that detrimental to the rule of law?

I certainly understand that rental properties need to be in good, livable conditions.   Property owners should take the extra step of screening people who will be living in their rentals.  Property owners also reserve the right to include certain requirements and expectations in the contracts that they have tenants sign.  However, we must understand that People Commit Crimes, Not Houses.

The other dynamic that Salisbury has, is we are a University town.  70% of the living space in Salisbury is rental, however 50% of single family homes are primary residences.  Certainly we want as many people to own homes as possible, that is a good thing.  We also have to understand that not everybody is in the position to own a home for a variety of reasons. 

Many in the Camden neighborhood feel invaded by a growing University.  Salisbury University has acquired nearly all the homes directly around it.  Many homes have been converted into rentals to help sustain the needs of a growing Student Body and what comes with that.  People have made the decision to sell homes and move elsewhere or let go of homes they have inherited, or turned them into rentals themselves.  Times change, neighborhoods will change, even the very City we live in will look different in 20 years.  We have to understand that.

Many scenarios have led where we are now.  However, I do not believe a Government Entity has the right to tell you what you can do with or on your property, within limits of how it would affect another person's property.  What is Liberty and Freedom in this great country when a government over reaches and sticks it's nose where it does not belong.  This is also another situation where we have too many laws and too many people who think they know better.  I do believe we need rules and regulations but there comes a point when these laws over extend and destroy the very thing we all hold dear - liberty.

Muir Boda

Carry On

Does the Second Amendment apply outside the home?

Jacob Sullum | March 3, 2010

Yesterday the Supreme Court considered the question of whether the Second Amendment applies outside of jurisdictions controlled by the federal government. The Court will almost certainly say yes, and soon it may consider a question that should be equally easy to answer: whether the Second Amendment applies outside of the home.

In 2008, the first time the Supreme Court explicitly declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to “keep and bear arms,” it ruled that the District of Columbia’s handgun ban violated that right. Since the Chicago handgun ban at issue in the case the Court heard this week is virtually identical, it will be overturned if the Court concludes that the Second Amendment binds states and cities as well as the federal government. And since the Court has ruled that almost all of the other guarantees in the Bill of Rights apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment, it would be very strange if the fundamental right to armed self-defense did not make the cut.

Assuming the Court strikes down Chicago’s handgun ban, what other forms of gun control could be vulnerable? Since the Second Amendment protects the right to “bear” arms as well as the right to “keep” them, restrictions on carrying guns in public are a ripe target.

Forty-one states either do not require handgun carry permits or issue them to anyone who satisfies a few objective criteria, which generally include firearms training and lack of a criminal record. Seven states let local officials decide whether to issue permits, while Illinois, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C., do not allow even that option.

 READ MORE @ REASON

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.
© Copyright 2010 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

Obama, Congress Wink at Massive Surveillance Abuses

by Julian Sanchez 

This article appeared in the American Prospect on March 3, 2010. 

Here's how it was supposed to be. Under his administration, candidate Barack Obama explained in 2007, America would abandon the "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." There would be "no more National Security Letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime" because "that is not who we are, and it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists." Even after his disappointing vote for the execrable FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which expanded government surveillance power while retroactively immunizing telecoms for their role in George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping, civil libertarians held out hope that the erstwhile professor of constitutional law would begin to restore some of the checks on government surveillance power that had been demolished in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks.


The serial betrayal of that hope reached its culmination last week, when a Democratic-controlled Congress quietly voted to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act without implementing a single one of the additional safeguards that had been under consideration -- among them, more stringent limits on the national security letters (NSLs) Obama had once decried. Worse yet, the vote came on the heels of the revelation, in a blistering inspector general's report, that Obama's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) had issued a secret opinion, once again granting retroactive immunity for systematic lawbreaking -- and opening the door for the FBI to ignore even the current feeble limits on its power to vacuum up sensitive telecommunications records.
 
NSLs have been around for decades, but their scope was radically expanded by the Patriot Act and subsequent intelligence bills. They allow investigators to obtain a wide array of financial records and telecommunications transaction data without a court order -- revealing the phone numbers, e-mail accounts, and Web addresses with which their targets have been in contact.

READ MORE @ CATO

Greek Financial Troubles

Chip Bok | March 5, 2010

The Same Rotten Rx

by Michael D. Tanner 

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try, try again.

With Plans A, B and C having failed miserably, President Obama yesterday unveiled his latest "new and improved" version of health-care reform. He says that this incarnation "incorporates the best ideas from Democrats and Republicans — including some of the ideas that Republicans offered during the health-care summit." Unfortunately, its fundamental premise remains exactly the same — a government takeover of the health-care system.

Start with those "Republican ideas": Though mostly not bad, they're hardly game changing.

• Increase the financial incentives for states to experiment with malpractice reform by $50 million. Wow — a million dollars per state! That undoubtedly has the trial lawyers quaking in their boots.
• Undercover stings to help root out Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Fine — but when fighting fraud in government programs becomes a major concession, it shows just how out of touch Washington has become.
• Increase Medicare reimbursements. OK, higher spending for a program that's already going broke may well be a Republican idea, but it doesn't exactly make Obama's better.
• Allow health-savings accounts to be sold through the government-sponsored exchanges. This could be a positive step — but the details are key, and they remain to be seen.

HSAs have been proven to reduce the cost of health care and have added nearly 3 million people to the ranks of the insured since their inception. But they only really work in conjunction with high-deductible insurance — if your policy already pays for everything, there's not much point to saving for health expenses.
And every version of ObamaCare to date has restricted high-deductible insurance and/or mandated low-deductible policies. Unless the president is prepared to make major changes in those areas, the HSA concession is just bait-and-switch.

READ MORE @ CATO

Keep Your Laws Off My Body

John Stossel | March 4, 2010

The case for legalizing drugs, prostitution, organ sales, and other consensual acts.

"It's a free country."
That's a popular saying—and true in many ways. But for a free country, America does ban a lot of things that are perfectly peaceful and consensual. Why is that?

Here are some things you can't do in most states of the union: rent your body to someone for sex, sell your kidney, take recreational drugs. The list goes on. I'll discuss American prohibitions tonight at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again on Friday at 10) on my Fox Business program.

Here are some things you can't do in most states of the union: rent your body to someone for sex, sell your kidney, take recreational drugs. The list goes on. I'll discuss American prohibitions tonight at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again on Friday at 10) on my Fox Business program.


But is that true? Or is much of what you think you know ... wrong?
I believed the Drug Enforcement Administration's claim that drugs like crack and meth routinely addict people on first use.
But Jacob Sullum, who wrote Saying Yes, says, "If you look at the government's own data about patterns of drug use, it clearly is not true."

READ MORE REASON

Sunday Truth

"Virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed, not because they are the law, but because reasonable people would do that anyway. If you obey a law simply because it is the law, that's a pretty likely sign that it shouldn't be a law. "

– Unknown

Libertarian Quote of the Day

"Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it."

– Will Rogers

Libertarian Quote of the Day

"When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny."

– Thomas Paine

Libertarians On The Campaign Trail

The Libertarian Party's candidate for the 2nd Congressional District Lorenzo Gaztanaga will be speaking to the Baltimore area Campaign for Liberty group this Wednesday, March 3, at 7 p.m. The meeting will be at Hightopps Backstage Grille, 2306 York Road, Lutherville/Timonium.

Lorenzo's wife and the Maryland Libertarian Party's candidate for Governor will also be there handing out literature and doing a meet and greet.

Libertarian Quote of the Day

"The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others. "

– Robert Ringer

A Tale of Two Libertarianisms

The conflict between Murray Rothbard and F.A. Hayek highlights an enduring division in the libertarian world.

Brian Doherty from the March 2010 issue

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, by Murray Rothbard, edited by Roberta A. Modugno, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 168 pages, $14.

If Murray Rothbard—free-market economist, anarchist philosopher, American historian, and inveterate activist—had never lived, the modern libertarian movement would have nowhere near its current size and influence. He inspired and educated generations of influential intellectuals and activists, from Leonard Liggio to Roy Childs to Randy Barnett. He helped form and/or shape the mission of such institutions as the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, the Libertarian Party, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (and wrote a regular column for Reason for more than a decade). His initially unique combination of a Randian/Aristotelian natural rights ethic, Austrian economics, anarcho-capitalism, fervent opposition to war, and a populist distrust of “power elites” both public and private have injected modern libertarianism with a distinct flavor distinguishing it from other brands of pro-market thought. It was a differentiation intensified by Rothbard’s bombthrowing polemical style.

Put it this way: When the likes of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman died, the conservative flagship National Review could and did praise the Nobel Prize–winning economists unreservedly. But when Rothbard died in 1995, his old pal William Buckley pissed on his grave. Rothbard, Buckley wrote, spent his life “huffing and puffing in the little cloister whose walls he labored so strenuously to contract, leaving him, in the end, not as the father of a swelling movement…but with about as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco. Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.”
Things look a little different now when it comes to Rothbard’s influence, though it’s unlikely anyone at National Review will note it—except maybe in the context of yet another attack on Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). The rise of Paul and his young and enthusiastic fan base, which Buckley could not have foreseen, contradicts the contention that Rothbard’s divisive radical intransigence doomed him to irrelevance.
The Paul phenomena, the largest popular movement in the postwar period to be motivated by distinctly libertarian ideas about war, money, and the role of government, has been influenced far more heavily by Rothbard than by the beliefs or style of any other prominent libertarian intellectual. The Paul movement is the sort of mass anti-war, anti-state, anti-Fed agitation that Rothbard dreamed about his entire adult life.

  

CNN Poll: Majority says government a threat to citizens' rights

From CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser

Washington (CNN) – A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.
Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

Read More @ CNN

Obama's openness on health care reform

Henry Payne

Libertarian Quote of the Day

"Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion – the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals – the technique of the marketplace."

– Milton Friedman

4.5 SWAT Raids Per Day

Maryland's SWAT transparency bill produces its first disturbing results

Radley Balko | March 1, 2010

Cheye Calvo's July 2008 encounter with a Prince George's County, Maryland, SWAT team is now pretty well-known: After intercepting a package of marijuana at a delivery service warehouse, police completed the delivery, in disguise, to the address on the package. That address belonged to Calvo, who also happened to be the mayor of the small Prince George’s town of Berwyn Heights. When Calvo's mother-in-law brought the package in from the porch, the SWAT team pounced, forcing their way into Calvo's home. By the time the raid was over, Calvo and his mother-in-law had been handcuffed for hours, police realized they'd made a mistake, and Calvo's two black Labradors lay dead on the floor from gunshot wounds.

As a result of this colossal yet not-unprecedented screw-up, plus Calvo's notoriety and persistence, last year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.

Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George's County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state's SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that's just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.

But that’s unlikely to happen, at least in Prince George's County. To this day, Sheriff Michael Jackson insists his officers did nothing wrong in the Calvo raid—not the killing of the dogs, not neglecting to conduct any corroborating investigation to be sure they had the correct house, not failing to notify the Berwyn Heights police chief of the raid, not the repeated and documented instances of Jackson’s deputies playing fast and loose with the truth.

Read More Reason

Reason.tv: Nanny of the Month for February 2010! Here's to you, Kansas state rep. Robert Olson, for banning fake pot

Safe Toyotas, and Other Surprises

Driving is a hazardous activity, but that's rarely because of unsafe cars.

Steve Chapman | March 1, 2010

Last week, facing a congressional committee acutely dissatisfied with his company's safety record, the head of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, was asked what he would tell President Barack Obama if he had the chance. His surprising reply: "Toyota cars are safe."

It was surprising because more than 8 million Toyotas have been recalled for safety flaws that have caused dozens of deaths. It was even more surprising because he was right.

No one denies that these defects have caused some horrifying accidents that were preventable. Still, worrying that you are going to be killed while driving a Toyota that suddenly zooms out of control on the road is like worrying that you are going to die of a spider bite while climbing a ladder onto your roof. Though either is possible, the chief dangers are the ones you take for granted. Driving is a hazardous activity, but rarely because of unsafe cars.

During the last decade, the sudden acceleration of Toyota vehicles has been blamed for 34 fatalities. In that same period, more than 21,000 other people died in accidents while riding in Toyotas. Your own lapses, and those of other drivers, are far riskier than the flaws found in your automobile.

Chuck Hurley, CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, agrees on the pressing need for Toyota to repair its troubled cars. But he estimates that more than 80 percent of traffic deaths are the result of excessive speed, drunken driving, or unused seat belts. Last year alone, more than 11,000 Americans died in accidents involving drunk drivers. By contrast, only about 2 percent of wrecks stem from vehicle defects.

Yet Congress is not holding hearings to ask Toyoda why his company sells cars that can travel well above the speed limit, with engines that start even if the operator is too drunk to spell "key." It would rather worry about freakish risks inflicted on us than common ones within the control of individual motorists.

READ MORE REASON