Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."

Patrick Henry

Groping for Answers

by Mike Calpino



Mike Calpino

 The news of the week are the new procedures implemented at airports around the country in the name of security. Once again we are closing the barn door after the horses are gone and refusing to consider the fact that it is a broken latch that keeps letting them out. First there was 9/11 so the list of prohibited objects in an airport grew immensely. Then there was the shoe bomber so we all have to take off our shoes. Then there was the underwear bomber so now we have to endure the hands of TSA employees in places only our wives or husbands should see. There have already been terrorists who placed explosives in various body cavities, and drug smugglers have been doing that for years. Are we going to have to endure full body cavity searches next?

Our security procedures are a strange mix of political correctness and a total disregard for our rights to be secure in our persons. Political correctness because we are afraid of offending the terrorists who want to kill us, the overwhelming majority of whom are young, middle eastern men from specific countries. They are not toddlers, senior citizens or nuns. Disregard for our rights because no one should be subject to such intimate and invasive procedures just because they want to travel. 99.99% of airline travellers are not terrorists and those 99.99% should not be treated as potential terrorists or criminals just because they want to fly to see grandma over the holidays. Certainly we have the choice as to whether or not we want to fly but it should be our free choice to enter into a private contract with an airline to provide us a service and the government should not require we check our rights or our dignity at the door when we enter into that contract.

Thoughts from Washington

"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness."

George Washington

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"There, I guess King George will be able to read that."

John Hancock remarking on his signature on the Declaration of Independence.

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."

Samuel Adams

Andy Harris and the sense of entitlement

Representative Elect Andy Harris had an embarrassing moment at Freshman orientation when, according to a Politico.com report which quoted and an unnamed staffer "He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care."

Harris, according to the unnamed staffer, asked if government healthcare could be purchased in the interim.

Now Harris portrayed himself as knowledgeable of Health Care during the campaign, would he not know he could continue COBRA coverage from his previous employer?

Bill Clinton's New Job

I saw this on Julie Brewington's site. Certainly we are all upset and concerned about the new body scanners and getting a pat down that goes above and beyond the call of duty. We have qualified individuals stepping up to help ensure the process goes smoothly.

A General's View on Banking

“I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for.One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.War for any other reason is simply a racket."

Quote by: Major General Smedley Darlington Butler(1881-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military man from the pre-World War II era.
Source: from a speech in 1933

Banking

"The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful
crime against civilization. Why? Because they "create" the money made out of
nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their "Federal Reserve Notes" and
stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc."

H.L. Birum, sr.

Barry Said it before Ron Paul

"Most Americans have no real understandingof the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside of the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States."


Quote by: Barry Goldwater(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)

Are You Ready for Hyperinfaltion?

by Mike Calpino

The day after the election the Federal Reserve announced it was going to engage in "Quantitative easing" to the tune of $600 billion dollars over the next eight months. Commodities have already reacted to this, with gold, oil and other raw materials rising rapidly. We are to expect inflation after supposedly going through an extended period without it. If we go though a time of even double digit inflation, we should consider ourselves very fortunate. If it were a different time in our history, perhaps that is what we could expect. We have, however, put ourselves into a very precarious position with our debt and liabilities. What I would like to give you is a short history lesson because nations have gone through this before and the causes are easy to determine.

Our more recent example is Chile which went through a hyperinflationary period in the early seventies. In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected. Allende was a hard core socialist and brought together other socialists, communists and hard leftists to begin implementing changes (transforming) Chile into a socialist workers paradise. Even though we have apparently rejected President Obama’s socialist/communist agenda, he and his leftist czars will still wield a lot of power and it is unlikely any of the damage he has done will be repealed.
Allende took the land from "the rich" and gave it to the workers. We have been redistributing wealth for years but President Obama and the Democrat congress doubled down on this, constantly demonizing the "rich". Allende nationalized companies and mines. While we certainly protest against the nationalization of the industries that have taken place, in America nationalization isn’t really necessary. Industries and companies can be controlled just as easily through regulation and tax policy, both of which are moving out of the hands of elected officials and into the bureaucracy, a bureaucracy controlled by the executive branch which is run by leftists, socialists and in some cases, admitted communists.

The beginning of the end.....

by Mike Calpino

Last week’s elections were historic, there is no question about that. Voters were fed up with our lurch into socialism and with the rise of the TEA party movement, questions of government spending, control and intrusion were finally being discussed openly and honestly. Many people became involved in politics for the first time, recognizing that politics affects everything in our daily lives and if we ever want to regain some control over our lives (i.e. our liberty) politics can no longer be ignored or left up to the "political class." All this represents a good trend.

TEA partiers and conservatives who pinned their hopes on Republicans are likely to be very disappointed, however. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the new TEA party/conservative Republicans represent a small minority of the total number of Republicans in office, at all levels of government. Because of this, it will be very difficult for them to resist the pressure the establishment has on "public servants". The "system" has been in place for a long time and the beneficiaries of that system are not about to let these upstarts disassemble it. Even if they have the character to resist the pressure to conform, the radical steps necessary to save us from catastrophe will never move beyond their sparse numbers and may be beyond the imaginations of most of them.

What am I talking about? Here are some necessary steps for starters. Ending the Federal Reserve and pegging the dollar to gold. Ending all entitlement programs, a particularly difficult pill to swallow for Republicans who have been demonized for phantom proposals to do so in the past. Remove all the tax and regulatory impediments to businesses so we can return manufacturing to the United States. Eliminate public sector unions and approximately eighty percent of government jobs. Bring the military home from the vast number of places it is around the world and slim it down to a size that will ensure a devastating defense, not a costly and ineffective offense, or even less unsuccessful nation building. Can you see even one of those things happening in the next two years, or even four years with a Republican president and congress? I certainly do not.

John Adams on Banking

"Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility,
prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will
do good."

John Adams

The Wisdom of Milton Friedman

"The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.''


Quote by: Milton Friedman(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"

If Leaders had the Stones of Jackson

"The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American peopleshould they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or theestablishment of another like it."


Quote by: Andrew Jackson(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: To Congress in 1836, Jackson closed the second Federal Bank (est. 1816) with these comments

The Wisdom of Maxwell Anderson

"When a government takes over a people’s economic life it becomesabsolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts,the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs."


Quote by: Maxwell Anderson(1888-1959)
Source: The Guaranteed Life

Interesting thought from Alan Greenspan

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protectsavings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabbysecret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spendingis simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in theway of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of propertyrights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding thestatists' antagonism toward the gold standard."


Quote by: Alan Greenspan(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: from page 101 of the book "Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal" by Ayn Rand with additional articles by Alan Greenspan - 1966

*********** Liberty Notes******
If Greenspan was channeling Ayn Rand and he espoused this thought process, why did he not act upon this as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He had years to fix it and did nothing.

Scary Quotes from the 9th Circuit

"... we conclude that the [Federal] Reserve Banks are not federal ... but
are independent privately owned and locally controlled corporations... without day to day direction from the federal government."

Quote by: 9th Circuit Court
Source: Lewis vs United States, June 24, 1982

If Leaders had the Stones of Jackson

"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."


Quote by: Andrew Jackson(1767-1845) 7th US
PresidentSource: In 1836, Jackson forced the closing of the Second Bank of the U.S. by revoking its charter

The Wisdom of Milton Friedman

"I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements."


Quote by: Milton Friedman(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: 'Capitalism and Freedom'