Monday, March 7, 2011

Fwd: We Owe You A Receipt



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: We Owe You A Receipt
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 10:13:25 -0500
From: Scott Brown <info@scottbrown.com>
To: rhomp2002@earthlink.net


I believe you need a receipt for your tax dollars.
 
Taxpayers are entitled to see exactly where their money is being spent and how much Uncle Sam borrows each year.



Under this legislation that I have filed this week, every taxpayer who files an income tax return would receive an itemized receipt – similar to a grocery store receipt – from the IRS that lists where their payroll and income taxes are spent. The receipt would include key categories such as the interest on the national debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national defense, education, veterans’ benefits, environmental protection, foreign aid – and, last but not least, Congress.

Taxpayers also would be directed to a website where they could get more detailed information on programs not included on the one-page receipt. Additionally, the receipt would provide taxpayers with the amount of debt per American – which currently is more than $45,000 - and how much new borrowing we put on the national credit card in the past year.

During this tough economy, American taxpayers deserve to know exactly how the government is spending their hard-earned dollars. That kind of transparency is the first step towards addressing our exploding debt and deficits.

What do you think?
 
 
Your Senator,
 

 
 
 
Paid for by the Scott Brown for U.S. Senate Committee Inc
www.brownforussenate.com


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George Will’s Republican candidates for President in 2012

George Will's Republican candidates for President in 2012
Posted by Walter Block on March 7, 2011 12:10 PM

George Will, in his article today, "The GOP's weirdness faction" ( http://herald-zeitung.com/opinion/columns/article_96a4a97e-46b5-11e0-b0db-001cc4c002e0.html ) states as follows: "Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Rupublican presidents on the horizon -- Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty."  This, after bashing Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich as potential candidates. Notice any missing name from this list? I'll give you a hint. His initials are R.P., he is a congressman from Texas, and the father of a newly elected senator from Kentucky, also with the same initials, R.P. If you haven't guessed yet, you probably had a public school education. Go to the back of the class!

xxx

The GOP's weirdness faction
Posted: Sunday, March 6, 2011 12:00 am
By George Will georgewill@washpost.com

If pessimism is not creeping on little cat's feet into Republicans' thinking about their 2012 presidential prospects, that is another reason for pessimism. This is because it indicates they do not understand that sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party.

The most recent vibrator is Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who won the 2008 Republican caucuses in Iowa and reached that year's national convention with more delegates than Mitt Romney, and might run again. Huckabee, now a Fox News host, was asked by Steve Malzberg, a talk radio host, this:

"Don't you think it's fair also to ask (Barack Obama) ... how come we don't have a health record, we don't have a college record, we don't have a birth cer - why, Mr. Obama, did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate. It's one thing to say, I've - you've seen it, goodbye. But why go to court and send lawyers to defend against having to show it? Don't you think we deserve to know more about this man?"

Huckabee should have replied, "I've seen paranoia, goodbye." Instead, he said:

"I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya. ... "

Huckabee thereupon careened off into the (he thinks) related subject of Obama having sent back to the British Embassy in Washington a bust of Winston Churchill that Obama's predecessor had displayed in the Oval Office: " ... a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists."

The architects and administrators of the British Empire were imperialists? Perish the thought. A contemporary of William Jennings Bryan once said of the three-time Democratic presidential nominee, "One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact." But an absence of facts means there is no argument.

A spokesman for Huckabee dutifully lied, saying his employer "simply misspoke": "The governor meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia." Obama did not really grow up there - he spent just five of his first 18 years there and the other 13 years in Hawaii. But obviously Huckabee, with his dilation on the Mau Maus, was deliberately referring to Kenya. Unless Huckabee thinks the Mau Maus were Indonesians, which he might count as another "one thing that I do know."

Republicans should understand that when self-described conservatives such as Malzberg voice question-rants like the one above, and Republicans do not recoil from them, the conservative party is indirectly injured. As it is directly when Newt Gingrich, who seems to be theatrically tiptoeing toward a presidential candidacy, speculates about Obama having a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" mentality.

A magazine article containing what Gingrich calls a "stunning insight" is "the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama." Gingrich begins with a faux question: "What if he is so outside our comprehension" he can be understood "only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior?" Then Gingrich says this is not just a question, it is "the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."

To the notion that Obama has a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview, the sensible response is: If only. Obama's natural habitat is as American as the nearest faculty club; he is a distillation of America's academic mentality; he is as American as the other professor-president, Woodrow Wilson. A question for former history professor Gingrich: Why implicate Kenya?

Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon - Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah Gov. and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.


George Will is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group.

Read more: http://www.sgvtribune.com/opinions/ci_17546892#ixzz1FwGl2mMH

How the Constitution Enabled Socialism and Fascism in America

How the Constitution Enabled Socialism and Fascism in America
http://www.strike-the-root.com/how-constitution-enabled-socialism-and-fascism-in-america


"Even though Barack Obama is still president, the conservatives are already suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome, as they constantly label Obama a 'socialist,' just as the left continue to label George W. Bush a 'fascist.' This is strange, given that Bush is also a socialist and Obama is also a fascist. Go figure. But the more I have thought about these issues, the more I have realized there is not much difference between socialism and fascism. And with essentially total government control over every aspect of our daily lives, while America is presumably a 'capitalist' society, it is really more communist than capitalist."



"How is legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."
- Frederic Bastiat 


Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft

In Montana, an Economic Boon Faces Repeal Effort

In Montana, an Economic Boon Faces Repeal Effort
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/us/06marijuana.html?_r=1&hp


"In the Legislature, a resurgent Republican majority elected last fall is leading a drive to repeal the six-year-old voter-approved statute permitting the use of marijuana for medical purposes, which opponents argue is promoting recreational use and crime."




"Attempting to debate with a person who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to the dead." 
- Thomas Paine
 
Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft

Re: No one has the right to bargain with thieves for a bigger share of the loot.


The State is a gang of thieves writ large. -- Murray Rothbard


At 12:02 PM 3/7/2011, you wrote:
"What we need in this country is the remote, stealthy, post-natal abortion of all criminals in government."
- Richard Miller
 
On 03/07/2011 08:53 AM, Travis wrote:
Congress is a 535 thief food fight.

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Bruce Majors <majors.bruce@gmail.com > wrote:
No one has the right to bargain with thieves for a bigger share of the loot.

Re: No one has the right to bargain with thieves for a bigger share of the loot.

"What we need in this country is the remote, stealthy, post-natal abortion of all criminals in government."
- Richard Miller
 
On 03/07/2011 08:53 AM, Travis wrote:
Congress is a 535 thief food fight.

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Bruce Majors <majors.bruce@gmail.com> wrote:
No one has the right to bargain with thieves for a bigger share of the loot.



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The Most Surprising News of the 21st Century


The Most Surprising News of the 21st Century
Posted by Thomas Woods on March 7, 2011 10:45 AM

The Heritage Foundation is opposed to state nullification. The peons have evidently latched onto an idea that has not been approved for them in advance by either National Review or the New Republic, so it is time for a ritual scolding.  Why, didn't you know, citizen, that if you think a federal law is unconstitutional we can change that law?  Happens all the time!  All. The. Time.  And we have courts, too, which have done a splendid job restraining the institution that employs them.  What kind of crank could be unsatisfied with this?

Since I'm getting things together for the first lecture in my online U.S. history course for the Mises Academy tonight, I don't have time for the usual point-by-point reply.  But I don't need one.  I see almost nothing here that isn't already addressed in my standard reply to objections.

A few highlights, though:

– "President Andrew Jackson (himself a strong advocate of 'states' rights') settled the matter." Actually, Secretary of State Edward Livingston wrote Jackson's Nullification Proclamation, a thoroughly confused document that was systematically dismantled by Littleton Waller Tazewell.

– "There is no state nullification clause [in the Constitution]."  This, too, is answered in my reply to objections.  Very quickly: In the same way that the state ratification conventions (which is where we are to look for the Constitution's interpretation) were told that what later became the 10th Amendment was already implicit in the document as written, the Richmond Ratifying Convention of 1788 said the same for nullification.  Beyond that, there's the simple logic of the matter: the peoples of the states are the sovereigns; they in turn apportion powers among the states and the federal government, while of course retaining their sovereignty (no government is sovereign in the American understanding); therefore, the very logic of the system demands that in the last resort the architects of the system must retain (as an expression of the sovereignty they never parted with) the power of final judgment regarding whether their own creation possesses a particular power.

– Madison, in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, was referring merely to "state actions meant to arouse public opposition, challenge federal actions and ultimately change the objectionable action."  Uh-huh.  That's what the Madison of 1830 would have us believe.  I address this on pp. 288-290 of Nullification.  Madison biographer Kevin Gutzman (see James Madison and the Making of America, St. Martin's, forthcoming 2012) dismantled this toothless interpretation of Madison's Virginia Resolutions in "A Troublesome Legacy: James Madison and 'The Principles of '98,'" Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 569-89.  Judge Abel Upshur likewise made quick work of this view in An Exposition of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, excerpted in my book.  (One quick point: if we're really expected to believe Madison went to the trouble of drafting formal resolutions affirming a principle absolutely no one denied ­ "the states may issue formal protests" ­ why was the response from some of the northern states so negative?  Obviously they took him to mean what everyone at the time took him to mean.)

– "Jefferson did use the term 'nullification' in his draft of the Kentucky Resolution, but he makes it clear he is speaking in terms of an assertion of a natural right to revolution–admittedly and of necessity outside the constitutional structure." Pure Straussianism, this.  Jefferson's draft uses the phrase "natural right," so we're to believe he is asserting merely an airy-fairy position that has no constitutional grounding but lies "of necessity outside the constitutional structure."  If that were true, I'd say so what ­ since when is the Constitution an idol?  But it isn't.  The grounds on which Jefferson asserts this "natural right' of nullification are established firmly in history, where we discover that the peoples of the states delegated a few powers to a federal government, while necessarily retaining their sovereign powers intact.  If that is the case, then it necessarily follows that they would possess a right of nullification.  The alleged "natural right" is merely the logical consequence of the meaning of sovereignty.

In short: quit being so uppity, stick to the most laughably failed strategies in the history of mankind, and have confidence that the strategies officially approved for you by the establishment will surely bear fruit.

There was a white guy from Milwaukee




There was a white guy from Milwaukee(enter any city you like actually)
that checked african american on an
application for a restaraunt chain.
When he went in for the interview,
they accused him of filing a false
application. He said, "I was born
in Kenya, and I am now a US citizen."
He had them by the gonads!



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Obama Undermines Freedom of the World Wide Web

No gov't should have any control over any part of the wed.  No taxes on it either.







Obama to the Internet: No ICANN

White House undermines freedom of the World Wide Web

The Washington Times

7:36 p.m., Friday, March 4, 2011

President Barack Obama takes part in an Internet town hall meeting, Thursday, March 26, 2009, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

reedom of information and communication on the Internet is playing a key role in supporting pro-democracy demonstrators in the Middle East and developing norms for civil society elsewhere around the world. But just when freedom is beginning to flicker, the Obama administration is seeking to give authoritarian regimes more power to impose censorship on the Web.

The issue has been swirling around a small nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN was established in 1998 under an agreement with the Commerce Department to move domain-name system management from the government to the private sector. At the time, fewer than 150 million people were using the Internet. Now there are around 2 billion users in every corner of the world. For some oppressed people, the Internet has brought unimagined opportunities for freedom of thought and expression. And as the influence of the Internet has grown, ICANN has come under increasing scrutiny for foreign governments seeking more control over the system.

Proposals for international governance of the Internet have been particularly popular with authoritarian regimes and countries - particularly in the Middle East - where freedom is not a core value. The Bush administration time and again rebuffed these power-sharing proposals. However, the Obama administration, consistent with its view that the United States has too much influence in the world, has sought to give foreign countries their say.

In October 2009, the Obama administration concluded an agreement with ICANN that increased international input on Internet governance. ICANN now has a foreign advisory board representing 100 countries, and the Obama administration is pushing for them to have veto power over the introduction of new top-level domains to which they may object. "If foreign governments do not trust the Internet governance systems," Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Lawrence Strickling explains, "they will threaten to balkanize the Domain Name System, which will jeopardize the worldwide reach of the Internet." The notion at work here is that if the regimes that censor, bully and block the Internet simply have a place at the table, they will be more likely to behave.

O Force propaganda aside, the central issue is not trust but control. Giving more power to leading Internet censors like China, Iran or Saudi Arabia won't build confidence, it will simply allow these countries to be more creative in finding ways to shut down dissent and control information at much higher levels. The Obama administration's internationalist approach to Internet governance is a direct expression of the president's general belief that the United States is too large, too powerful and has too much influence on world affairs - but moves toward internationalizing Internet governance will introduce countless new problems for free communication, commerce and cybersecurity.

Kowtowing to countries that see freedom as a threat and cyberspace as a battlespace will only further erode America's global position. Maybe that is the White House objective.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC

 


 


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Re: No one has the right to bargain with thieves for a bigger share of the loot.

Congress is a 535 thief food fight.

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Bruce Majors <majors.bruce@gmail.com> wrote:
No one has the right to bargain with thieves for a bigger share of the loot.



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Government, Poverty and Self-Reliance: Wisdom From 19th Century Presidents


Government, Poverty and Self-Reliance: Wisdom From 19th Century Presidents
By Lawrence W. Reed | April 8, 2005

This essay is an edited version of a speech originally given by Lawrence W. Reed, president emeritus of the Mackinac Center, at the inaugural conference of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in April 2005.

Foreword
The paper by Larry Reed reprinted here was originally commissioned for the inaugural conference of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in April 2005. The conference was titled "The Road From Poverty to Freedom: A Look Backward and Forward at the War on Poverty," and it was natural to include Larry, a 1975 graduate of the college who majored in economics and studied under the renowned Austrian economist Hans Sennholz.

We are grateful for the guidance Larry gave us as we developed the poverty conference, but we are also grateful for this paper, which had a significant impact on our students. One student said, "Reed's paper was excellent, giving tremendous insight into a correct view of government aid according to respected men of history." Another commented, "Reed's piece provided a historical comparison I had never seen made before." In addition to being published as the document you are holding, this valuable paper is a permanent contribution to the collection of distinguished resources that we will use to teach students and interested readers about poverty.

Following the conference, we asked Larry to become a charter member of our new advisory board. We are thankful that he accepted another assignment from his alma mater. We are thankful, too, for the significant impact on the cause of liberty that he and the Mackinac Center have had in Michigan and around the world.

­ Lee S. Wishing
Grove City, Penn.


"A Subtle Destroyer"
I can hardly give a speech about presidents without citing a witty remark from an old friend of mine from Tennessee, humorist Tom Anderson. He once said, back in the 1970s, "Franklin Roosevelt proved a man could be president a lifetime; Harry Truman proved any man could be president; Dwight Eisenhower proved we really didn't need one; and every president since proved that it was dangerous to have one." Funny, but there's a kernel of truth there!

Here's a quotation from an American president. Who do you think it was?

"The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America."

Those were not the words of a 19th century president. They came from the lips of our 32nd chief executive, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his State of the Union Address on Jan. 4, 1935. A moment later, he declared, "The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief."

We all know that it didn't. Indeed, 30 years later Lyndon Johnson would take "this business of relief" to new and expensive heights in an official "War on Poverty." Another 30 years and more than $5 trillion in federal welfare later, a Democratic president in 1996 would sign a bill into law that ended the federal entitlement to welfare. As Ronald Reagan, a far wiser man, observed long before it dawned on Bill Clinton, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won."

What Reagan instinctively knew, Bill Clinton finally admitted and FDR preached but didn't practice was that government poverty programs are themselves poverty-stricken. We have paid an awful price in lives and treasure to learn some things that the vast majority of Americans of the 19th century ­ and the chief executives they elected ­ could have plainly told us: Government welfare or "relief" programs encouraged idleness, broke up families, produced intergenerational dependency and hopelessness, cost taxpayers a fortune and yielded harmful cultural pathologies that may take generations to cure.

The failure of the dole was so complete that one journalist a decade ago posed a question to which just about everybody knows the answer and the lesson it implies. "Ask yourself," wrote John Fund of The Wall Street Journal, "If you had a financial windfall and wanted to help the poor, would you even think about giving time or a check to the government?"

The pre-eminent beneficiaries of the whole 20th century experiment in federal poverty-fighting were not those whom the programs ostensibly were intended to help. Rather, those beneficiaries were primarily two other groups:
  1. Politicians who got elected and re-elected as champions of the needy and downtrodden. Some were sincere and well-meaning. Others were cynical, ill-informed, short-sighted and opportunistic. All were deluded into traveling paths down which not a single administration of the 19th century ever ventured ­ the use of the public treasury for widespread handouts to the needy.
  2. The problem was neatly summarized once again by Tom Anderson, whose vignette on recent presidents I cited earlier. Anderson said the "welfare state" got its name because, "The politicians get well, while everybody else pays the fare."
  3. The bureaucracy ­ the armies of professional poverty fighters whose jobs and empires always seemed secure regardless of the actual effects of the programs they administered. Economist Walter Williams put it well when he described this as "feeding the sparrows through the horses." Williams also famously observed, "A lot of people went to Washington (D.C.) to do good, and apparently have done very well."

Liberty: The Real War on Poverty
An unabashed, unrepentant welfare statist would probably survey the men who held the highest office in the land during the 19th century and dismiss them as heartless, uncaring and hopelessly medieval. Even during the severe depressions of the 1830s and the 1890s, Presidents Martin Van Buren and Grover Cleveland never proposed that Washington, D.C., extend its reach to the relief of private distress broadly speaking, and they opposed even the smallest suggestions of that kind.

Welfare statists make a crucial error, however, when they imply that it was left to presidents of a more enlightened 20th century to finally care enough to help the poor. The fact is, our leaders in the 1800s did mount a war on poverty ­ the most comprehensive and effective ever mounted by any central government in world history. It just didn't have a gimmicky name like "Great Society," nor did it have a public relations office and elitist poverty conferences at expensive seaside resorts. If you could have pressed them then for a name for it, most if not all of those early chief executives might well have said their anti-poverty program was, in a word, liberty. This word meant things like self-reliance, hard work, entrepreneurship, the institutions of civil society, a strong and free economy, and government confined to its constitutional role as protector of liberty by keeping the peace.

In hindsight, it's a little amazing that the last great president of the 19th century, Grover Cleveland, was just about as faithful to that legacy of liberty as the first great one of that century, Thomas Jefferson. When Cleveland left office in March 1897, the federal government was still many years away from any sort of national program for public payments to the indigent.

To be sure, the Washington, D.C., establishment was bigger than Jefferson had left it in many other respects ­ alarmingly so, in most cases. But it was not yet even remotely a welfare state. Regardless of political party, the presidents of that period did not read into the Constitution any of the modern-day welfare-state assumptions. They understood these essential verities: Government has nothing to give anybody except what it first takes from somebody, and a government big enough to give the people everything they want is big enough to take away everything they've got. These chief executives had other things going for them, too ­ notably, a humbling faith in Divine Providence, and a healthy confidence in what a free and compassionate people could do without federal help.

And what a poverty program liberty proved to be! In spite of a horrendous civil war, half a dozen economic downturns and wave after wave of impoverished immigrants, America progressed from near-universal poverty at the start of the century to within reach of the world's highest per-capita income at the end of the century. The poverty that remained stood out like the proverbial sore thumb because it was now the exception, no longer the rule. In the absence of stultifying government welfare programs, our free and self-reliant citizenry spawned so many private, distress-relieving initiatives that American generosity became one of the marvels of the world. This essentially spontaneous, non-centrally-planned "war on poverty" stands in stark contrast to Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" because it actually worked.

My assistant in preparing this paper, a Grove City College senior named Christopher Haberman, expressed in an e-mail to me a little frustration at what he was not finding as he researched the papers of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He wrote: "I was disappointed to find that there were not many direct references to poverty. It seems that (they) were more concerned with Barbary pirates. They had no concept of (direct) government aid to the impoverished."

Haberman was right. Consider Jefferson -- the author of the Declaration of Independence, America's third president, and someone who exerted enormous intellectual influence during this country's formative years. His were the first two presidential terms of America's first full century as a nation. His election in 1800 marked a turning point from 12 years of Federalist Party rule and set the tone for decades to follow. In his first Inaugural Address in 1801, Jefferson gave us a splendid summation of what government should do. It did not describe welfare programs, but rather, "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."

A similar view was held by James Madison, a key figure in the construction of the Constitution, a prime defender of it in "The Federalist Papers" and our fourth president. Madison vetoed bills for so-called "internal improvements," such as roads, at federal expense, so it would have been inconceivable to Madison that it was constitutional to use the power of government to take from some people and give to others because the others were poor and needed it. While there might be a reasonable, even constitutional, case for certain federal road-building projects for national defense purposes (or at least the benefit of everyone), for Madison and Jefferson there was no constitutional case to be made for assistance to individuals in poverty.

In a speech in the U.S. House of Representatives years before he became president, Madison declared: "The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."


Honoring the Rules
Why didn't Jefferson, Madison and other American presidents of the 19th century simply stretch the Constitution until it included poverty assistance to individuals? Why does it seem to have hardly ever occurred to them? Many factors and reasons explain this, but this one was paramount: Such power was not to be found in the rule book.

Let me elaborate. Imagine playing a game ­ baseball, gin rummy, Monopoly or whatever ­ in which there is only one rule: anything goes.

What kind of a game would this be? Chaotic, frustrating, unpredictable, impossible. Eventually, the whole thing would degenerate into a free-for-all. And while simple games would be intolerable if played this way, the consequences for the many deadly serious things humans engage in ­ from driving on the highways to waging war ­ would be almost too frightful to imagine.

The most profound political and philosophical trend of our time is a serious erosion of any consensus about what government is supposed to do and what it is not supposed to do. But this was not so in Jefferson and Madison's day. The "instruction books" at that time were America's founding documents, namely the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. In the spirit of those great works, most Americans shared a common view of "the sum of good government" ­ the protection of life and property.

Today, far too many people think that government exists to do anything for anybody at any time they ask for it, from children's day care to handouts for artists. Texas congressman Ron Paul is noted for blowing the whistle whenever a bill is proposed that violates the spirit or the letter of the Constitution, but quite often he does so all by himself. How are his appeals received by the great majority of other members of Congress? "Like water off a duck's back," he once told me.

I once gave a series of lectures to high school seniors, and I asked the students what they thought the responsibilities of government were. I heard "provide jobs" or "take care of the poor" far more often than I heard anything like "safeguard our freedoms." (In fact, I think the only time I heard the latter was when I said it myself.)

A while back, an organization called the Communitarian Network made news when it called for the federal government to make organ donations mandatory, so that each citizen's body after death could be "harvested" for the benefit of sick people. Like ending poverty, helping sick people is a good cause, but is it really a duty of government to take your kidneys?

You can imagine how Jefferson and Madison might have answered such a question. In their day, Americans appreciated the concept of individual rights and entertained very little of this nonsense. But there is no consensus today even on what a right is, let alone which ones free citizens have.

Years ago when the Reagan administration proposed abolishing subsidies to Amtrak, the nationalized passenger rail service, I was struck by a dissenter who phrased her objection on national television this way: "I don't know how those people in Washington expect us to get around out here. We have a right to this service."

Once when Congress voted to stop funding the printing of Playboy magazine in Braille, the American Council of the Blind filed suit in federal court, charging that the congressional action constituted censorship and denial of a basic right.

The lofty notion that individuals possess certain rights ­ definable, inalienable and sacred ­ has been cheapened beyond anything our Founders and early presidents would recognize. When those gifted thinkers asserted rights to "freedom of speech," "freedom of the press" or "freedom of assembly," they did not mean to say that one has a right to be given a microphone, a printing press, a lecture hall or a Playboy magazine at someone else's expense.

Indeed, their concept of rights did not require the initiation of force against others, or the elevation of any "want" to a lawful lien on the life or property of any other citizen. Each individual was deemed a unique and sovereign being, who required only that other citizens deal with him honestly and voluntarily or not at all. It was this notion of rights that became an important theme of America's founding documents and early presidencies. It is the only notion of rights that does not produce an unruly mob in which each person has his hands in someone else's pocket.

This wisdom prompted early Americans to add a Bill of Rights to a Constitution that already contained a separation of government powers, checks and balances, and numerous "thou-shalt-nots" directed at government itself. They knew -- unlike tens of millions of Americans today -- that a government that lacks narrow rules and strict boundaries, that robs Peter to pay Paul, that confuses rights with wants, will yield financial ruin at best and political tyranny at worst.

Jefferson, Madison and almost all of the succeeding 20 presidents of the 19th century were constrained by this view of the federal government, and most of them were happy to comply with it. When doing so, they were faithful to their charge. They were true poverty fighters, because they knew that if liberty were not preserved, poverty would be the least of our troubles. They had read the rule book, and they knew the importance of following the rules.


"Plain and Simple Duties"
Andrew Jackson, whose tenure stretched from 1829 to 1837, was our seventh president and an exceedingly popular one. He, too, reminded Congress frequently in Jeffersonian terms what the federal role was. In his fourth annual message on Dec. 4, 1832, he wrote:

"Limited to a general superintending power to maintain peace at home and abroad, and to prescribe laws on a few subjects of general interest not calculated to restrict human liberty, but to enforce human rights, this government will find its strength and its glory in the faithful discharge of these plain and simple duties."

In his second Inaugural Address three months later, Jackson again underscored the federal government's limited mission. He said:

"(I)t will be my aim to inculcate by my official acts the necessity of exercising by the General Government those powers only that are clearly delegated; to encourage simplicity and economy in the expenditures of the Government; to raise no more money from the people than may be requisite for these objects, and in a manner that will best promote the interests of all classes of the community and of all portions of the Union."

As if to head off any misunderstandings about the role of the federal government, Jackson went on to say, "To suppose that because our Government has been instituted for the benefit of the people it must therefore have the power to do what ever may seem to conduce to the public good is an error into which even honest minds are too apt to fall."

Compared to giants like Jefferson, Madison and Jackson, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire is often thought of as a mere cipher. But he was another in a long string of 19th century American presidents who had their heads on straight when it came to the matter of federal poverty assistance. Among his nine vetoes was one in 1854 that nixed a bill to help the mentally ill. Here's what Pierce said:

"It can not be questioned that if Congress has power to make provision for the indigent insane ... it has the same power to provide for the indigent who are not insane, and thus to transfer to the Federal Government the charge of all the poor in all the States. It has the same power to provide hospitals and other local establishments for the care and cure of every species of human infirmity, and thus to assume all that duty of either public philanthropy, or public necessity to the dependent, the orphan, the sick, or the needy which is now discharged by the States themselves or by corporate institutions or private endowments existing under the legislation of the States. The whole field of public beneficence is thrown open to the care and culture of the Federal Government. ... If Congress may and ought to provide for any one of these objects, it may and ought to provide for them all."

It is a testament to the lack of federal welfare-style programs during more than 60 years under our first 13 presidents that Pierce, our 14th, termed as "novel" the very idea of "providing for the care and support of all those among the people of the United States who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy."

Meanwhile, the poor of virtually every other nation on the planet were poor because of what governments were doing to them, often in the name of doing something for them: taxing and regulating them into penury; seizing their property and businesses; persecuting them for their faith; torturing and killing them because they held views different from those in power; and squandering their resources on official luxury, mindless warfare and wasteful boondoggles. America was about government not doing such things to people ­ and that one fact was, all by itself, a powerfully effective anti-poverty program.


"The Art of Associating Together"
Americans of all colors pulled themselves out of poverty in the 19th century by creating wealth through invention and enterprise. As they did so, they generously gave much of their income ­ along with their time and personal attention ­ to the aid of their neighbors and communities. When the French social commentator Alexis de Tocqueville visited a young, bustling America during the Jackson administration in the 1830s, he cited the vibrancy of this "civil society" as one of our greatest assets.

De Tocqueville was amazed that Americans were constantly forming "associations" to advance the arts, build libraries and hospitals, and meet social needs of every kind. If something good needed to be done, it didn't occur to Andrew Jackson or his fellow citizens to expect politicians and bureaucrats, who were distant in both space and spirit, to do it for them. "Among the laws that rule human societies," wrote de Tocqueville in "Democracy in America," "there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve. ..."

Indeed, this "art of associating together" in the 19th century produced the most remarkable flowering of private charitable assistance ever seen. This era saw the founding of many of America's most notable, lasting private associations ­ from the Salvation Army to the Red Cross.

For many reasons, such groups are far more effective in solving social problems ­ poverty, homelessness and illiteracy, for instance ­ than are government programs. They are more likely to get to the root of problems that stem from spiritual, attitudinal and behavioral deficiencies. They are also more inclined to demand accountability, which means they won't simply cut a check every two weeks without expecting the recipient to do something in return and change destructive patterns of behavior. Ultimately, private associations also tend to promote self-reliance, instead of dependency.

And if these groups don't produce results, they usually wither; the parishioners or others who voluntarily support them will put their money elsewhere. In contrast, when a government program fails to perform, its lobbyists make a case for more funding. Worse, they usually get it.

From start to finish, what private charities do represents a manifestation of free will. No one is compelled to provide assistance.No one is coerced to pay for it. No one is required to accept it. All parties come together of their own volition.

And therein lies the magic of it all! The link between the giver, the provider and the receiver is strong precisely because each knows he can walk away from it at the slightest hint of insincerity, broken promises or poor performance. Because each party gives his own time or resources voluntarily, he tends to focus on the mission and doesn't get bogged down in secondary agendas, like filling out the proper paperwork or currying favor with those in power.

Management expert Peter Drucker summed it up well when he said that private charities, both faith-based and secular, "spend far less for results than governments spend for failure."

Men and women of faith -- whether Christian, Jewish, Moslem or something else -- should be the first to argue that God doesn't need federal funds to do His work. When they get involved in charitable work, it's usually with the knowledge that a change of heart will often do more to conquer poverty than a welfare check. They focus on changing hearts, one heart at a time.?

That's the way most Americans thought and behaved in the 19th century. They would have thought it a cop-out of the first order to pass these responsibilities on to politicians. Instead, Americans became the most generous people on earth. Christians specifically viewed personal, charitable involvement as "servanthood" commanded of them by Christ.


"No More Were Needed"
Consider a story that I first learned from the eminent Hillsdale College historian Burton Folsom, a good friend of mine.

In 1881, a raging fire swept through the state of Michigan's "Thumb" area, killing nearly 200 people and destroying more than 1 million acres of timberland. "The flames ran faster than a horse could gallop," said one survivor of the devastating blaze. Its hurricane-like fury uprooted trees, blew away buildings and destroyed millions of dollars of property across four counties.

This disaster produced an outpouring of generosity from Americans everywhere. In fact, the Michigan fire became the first disaster relief effort of Clara Barton and the newly formed American Red Cross. As the smoke billowed eastward across the nation, Barton's hometown of Dansville, N.Y., became a focal point of relief. According to the officers of the Dansville Red Cross, a call from Clara Barton "rallied us to our work."

"Instantly," they said, "we felt the help and strength of our organization (the Red Cross), young and untried as it was." Men, women and children throughout western New York brought food, clothing and other gifts. Before the Red Cross would send them to Michigan, a committee of ladies inspected each item and restitched garments or replaced food when necessary.

Speed was important, not only because many were hungry, but also because winter was approaching. Bedding and heavy clothing were in demand. Railroads provided the shipping. People left jobs and homes and trekked to Michigan to get personally involved in the rebuilding. Soon, the Red Cross in New York and the local relief committees in Michigan were working together to distribute supplies until "no more were needed," according to the final report from the Red Cross.

The Red Cross' assistance was much appreciated. And it made disaster relief faster, more efficient and national in scope.

But even if such help had not come, Michiganians were prepared to organize relief voluntarily within the state. During an 1871 fire that left nearly 3,000 Michigan families homeless, Gov. Henry Baldwin personally organized the relief efforts and gave about $150,000 out of his own pockets ­ a sum equivalent to more than $3 million today. Few, if any, thought it necessary to create a federal relief bureaucracy.

Baldwin and the Red Cross met the true definition of compassion. They suffered with the fire victims and worked personally to reduce their pain. Baldwin, the Red Cross and the fire victims themselves might even have felt that aid from Washington, D.C., might dampen the enthusiasm of the volunteers who gave their energy and resources out of a sense of duty and brotherly love. And this was in a year when the federal budget had a $100 million surplus, not the $400 billion deficit of today!

Government relief is in fact pre-emptive. There is little reason to believe that politicians are more compassionate or caring than the population that elects them. There is little reason to believe that politicians who are not on the scenes of either poverty or disaster and don't know the families affected will be more knowledgeable about how best to help them than those who are present and personally know the victims. There is even less reason to believe that politicians spend other people's money more effectively than those people to whom it belongs in the first place. Instead, when government gets involved, there is good reason to believe that much of its effort simply displaces what private people and groups would do better and more cost-effectively if government stayed home.


"Government Should Not Support the People"
All of which leads me to a few words about a president who happens to be among my personal favorites: Grover Cleveland ­ our 22nd and 24th president (the only one to serve two nonconsecutive terms), and the humble son of a Presbyterian minister.

Cleveland said what he meant and meant what he said. He did not lust for political office, and he never felt he had to cut corners, equivocate or connive in order to get elected. He was so forthright and plain-spoken that he makes Harry Truman seem indecisive by comparison.

This strong streak of honesty led him to the right policy conclusion again and again. H.L. Mencken, who was known for cutting politicians down to size, even wrote a nice little essay on Cleveland titled "A Good Man in a Bad Trade."

Cleveland thought it was an act of fundamental dishonesty for some to use government for their own benefit at everyone else's expense. Accordingly, he took a firm stand against some early stirrings of an American welfare state.

In "The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton," Marvin Olasky noted that when Cleveland was mayor of Buffalo, N.Y., in the early 1880s, his "willingness to resist demands for government handouts made his name known throughout New York State," catapulting him to the governorship in 1882 and the presidency in 1884.

Indeed, frequent warnings against using the government to redistribute income were characteristic of Cleveland's tenure. He regarded as a "serious danger" the notion that government should dispense favors and advantages to individuals or their businesses. This conviction led him to veto a wagonload of bills - 414 in his first term and 170 in his second - far more than all the previous 21 presidents combined. "I ought to have a monument over me when I die," he once said, "not for anything I have ever done, but for the foolishness I have put a stop to."

In vetoing a bill in 1887 that would have appropriated $10,000 in aid for Texas farmers struggling through a drought, Cleveland wrote:

"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution; and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."

Cleveland went on to point out, "The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune." Americans proved him right. Those Texas farmers eventually received in private aid more than 10 times what the vetoed bill would have provided.

As a devoted Christian, Cleveland saw the notion of taking from some to give to others as a violation of the Eighth and Tenth Commandments, which warn against theft and envy. He noticed what 20th century welfare statists did not, namely, that there was a period after the word "steal" in the Eighth, with no added qualifications. It does not say, "Thou shalt not steal unless the other guy has more than you do, or unless a government representative does it for you, or unless you can't find anyone who will give it to you freely, or unless you're totally convinced you can spend it better than the guy to whom it belongs."

Cleveland had been faithful to the Founders and to what he believed were God's commandments, common sense and historical experience. I can't say the same for certain of his successors who, in more recent times, cast wisdom to the winds and set America on a very different course.


"Slaves to the System"
For the first 150 years of American history, government at all levels played little role in social welfare. In a 1995 Heritage Foundation document titled "America's Failed $5.4 Trillion War on Poverty," Robert Rector and William Lauber point out, "As late as 1929, before the onset of the Great Depression, federal, state, and local welfare expenditures were only $90 million." In inflation-adjusted dollars, that would be under $1 billion today. By 1939, welfare spending was almost 50 times that amount, but at least the politicians of the day thought of it as a temporary bridge for its recipients. Welfare spending then fell and wouldn't return to the 1939 levels until Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" in the mid-1960s.

And now we know, after $5.4 trillion and a series of catastrophic fiscal and social consequences, those old-fashioned virtues and principles generally embraced by America's 19th century presidents were right on the mark.

More than 100 years ago, the great intellectual and crusader for liberty Auberon Herbert offered a cogent observation from his native Britain. His remarks neatly summarize the views of the men I've discussed here:

"No amount of state education will make a really intelligent nation; no amount of Poor Laws will place a nation above want; no amount of Factory Acts will make us better parents. ... To have our wants supplied from without by a huge state machinery, to be regulated and inspected by great armies of officials, who are themselves slaves of the system which they administer, will in the long run teach us nothing, (and) will profit us nothing."

In March 2005, an international commission called on wealthy countries like the United States to dramatically increase their foreign aid. Many of the governments of Europe are in full support.

But what would American presidents of the 19th century have had to say about that? I can imagine Cleveland, Johnson, Pierce, Van Buren, Jackson, Madison or Jefferson reacting in disbelief at the very suggestion. Cleveland might have said, "Aid to foreign countries? We don't even dispense aid to Americans." And he would have had a century of unprecedented progress against poverty to point to as his example.

For the benefit of welfare statists here and abroad, I think Cleveland and the others I've spoken of today would be very comfortable echoing the sentiments of the 19th century French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat:

"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works."

#####

Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Foundation for Economic Education, one of the oldest free-market organizations in the United States. He is also president emeritus of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. This essay was given as a speech by Mr. Reed at the inaugural conference of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in April 2005.

http://www.mackinac.org/7050

Who is John Galt?


I predict: Liberals & conservatives are going to go ape, in a negative way, when Atlas Shrugged comes out on April 15. -- Jacob Hornberger

http://ow.ly/49kLs

Defending the Constitution means not enforcing unconstitutional laws

"Marriage is a contract between two individuals and possibly, depending on your personal belief system, God Almighty. Government has no place in the mix. What would you say if someone told you that your husband or wife was ill-suited for you and therefore your marriage was illegal? You would probably tell them, "It ain't none of your damned business who I marry and I will thank you to keep your big fat nose out of my affairs." You would also be one step closer to understanding the true foundation of libertarianism … the absolute superiority of individual rights."

Defending the Constitution means not enforcing unconstitutional laws
by R Lee Wrights on March 6th, 2011

Most decisions in life are matters of individual choice. When faced with a decision you may ask a trusted friend or beloved family member for their advice or guidance, but most people have no need or desire to have someone else make the decision for them. They certainly don't want someone from the government to make the decision for them. In fact, I agree completely with Thomas Sowell who wrote, "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

Yet everyday pandering politicians and Big Brother bureaucrats conjure up new ways to insert their collective noses into every individual, personal decision Americans make. Government rules and regulations dictate what color you can paint your house, what substances you can ingest into your body and how you run your business or how much you get paid for your work. Policymakers forget their pledge of "public service" as soon as they are elected and become bureaucratic busybodies determine to insure we live sober and moral lives… each and every one of us.

Government intrudes into even the most intimate and personal decisions a person can make -- who they can love and who they must hate. Government tells us whom we must hate when it sends our young men and women to war. Government even assumes they have the right to decide for us whom we can love by making criminal certain types of sexual relations and tell us whom we can marry by mandating that we purchase a permission slip.

Marriage is a contract between two individuals and possibly, depending on your personal belief system, God Almighty. Government has no place in the mix. What would you say if someone told you that your husband or wife was ill-suited for you and therefore your marriage was illegal? You would probably tell them, "It ain't none of your damned business who I marry and I will thank you to keep your big fat nose out of my affairs." You would also be one step closer to understanding the true foundation of libertarianism … the absolute superiority of individual rights.

The very idea of a marriage license was concocted specifically for the purpose of barring people of color from marrying white people. These laws were eventually recognized as clearly unconstitutional and unenforceable and are no longer on the books. Yet today we hear arguments very similar to those used to justify these Jim Crow laws employed to justify banning same-sex marriages.

What is even more bizarre is that President Obama, whose parents would have been labeled criminals in an earlier time and place in America, takes the misguided view that he must enforce what he himself says is a clearly unconstitutional law, the inappropriately named Defense of Marriage Act.

The issue of gay marriage is not about marriage at all. It is a civil rights issue. It is an issue of the rights of the individual being considered paramount in all legal matters. Marriage is an individual choice to be someone's mate. It is another area of personal human endeavor that is none of the government's business.

Let me be clear: in the Lee Wrights Administration no unconstitutional law will be enforced. Should I be elected, the oath I will take as president, nearly the same oath I swore to when I enlisted in the United States Air Force, will bind me to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States …" I intend to live up to that oath. As president, I will not enforce any unconstitutional law, nor will I allow anyone in my administration to enforce unconstitutional laws.

The goal of the Wrights Administration will be to stop all war not only on other nations but also on the rights of individuals to make their own decisions. In order to live in peace, we must allow others to be at peace. We must remain vigilant in our insistence that the rights of each individual should be safeguarded, rather than disregarded, by government bureaucrats.

 


R. Lee Wrights is a writer and political activist living in Texas. He is the co-founder and editor of the free speech online magazine Liberty For All. Lee is considering a run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. Contact Lee at rleewrights@gmail.com.


http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=5623

The Constitution and the Zero Aggression Principle


The Constitution and the Zero Aggression Principle
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise


The Zero Aggression Principle holds that nobody has a right (that is, no such right exists) to initiate physical force against anybody else for any reason whatever. Neither is it ethically acceptable to advocate or to delegate the initiation of force. Observe the central importance of the word "initiate". What libertarians call the "ZAP" is not a call for pacifism. It does not prohibit the legitimate act of self-defense.

Although I've always understood perfectly that it won't solve all human problems, I've been known, from time to time, to defend the ZAP -- which is the very heart and soul of libertarianism -- by pointing out that, if an individual absolutely refuses to take or live by the non-aggression pledge, I have no other choice than to believe that he's reserving some right he mistakenly believes he has to initiate force against me whenever he finds it convenient, or the mood strikes him.

Let me repeat that, so there can be no misunderstanding whatever. Anyone who rejects the Zero Aggression Principle has to be regarded as reserving some right that he mistakenly believes he has to initiate force against me whenever he finds it convenient, or the mood strikes him.

Precautions will be taken accordingly.

Believe me, after 49 years in the freedom movement, I'm quite adamant about this. If you aren't willing, formally, to forego the initiation of force, then you're not a libertarian no matter what you claim.

Recently, it occurred to me that a similar relationship exists between the Constitution -- especially the Bill of Rights­= -- and politicians. Every office holder is required to take a formal oath, one hand on a Holy Book (make mine Atlas Shrugged), the other hand in the air, to uphold and defend the Constitution against "all enemies foreign and domestic". Sometimes these oaths even add "without mental reservation".

And yet, every office holder violates that oath within the first half hour of his term -- giving or accepting paper money, for example -- and keeps violating it until he dies, quits, or the voters turn him out.

Some politicians have the decency, at least, to pretend to be apologetic about this. We can probably forgive Ron Paul, for example. He's done his absolute damnedest to get our battered country back on a Constitutional basis, including shutting down the Fed and making real money legal once again. Others are considerably less so. One, asked about the constitutionality of her behavior, infamously snapped back, "Are you kidding?" Another, known widely as a buckethead, snarled that the Constitution is "just a piece of paper", which, in point of fact, is inaccurate. It's vellum, the prepared skin of some unspecified mammal.

Some politicians claim the Constitution is a "living document" -- that it somehow mysteriously morphs all by itself to fit the political correctness of the times. It's extremely common to hear members of the parasitic class blather that, because the document in question is so old, it's clearly obsolete and therefore, somehow, no longer the highest law of the land. One particularly bean-brained chair-warmer asserted recently that because it's more than 100 years old -- it's 222 years old at the moment -- nobody can possibly understand what it means.

Somebody should point out to this clown that Shakespeare's works are twice as old as the Constitution, and plenty of people still seem to enjoy them. Beowulf is probably a thousand years old and remains perfectly understandable to those who expend the minimal effort required to learn the almost-English it's written in. And would this guy claim that nobody understands the five thousand year old Ten Commandments?

If a politician denies the historical validity and the ultimate legal authority of the Constitution -- particularly the first ten amendments -- it isn't any different than with the Zero Aggression Principle. He's reserving some right he mistakenly believes he has to violate the law whenever he finds it convenient, or the mood strikes him.

Let me repeat that, too, so there can be no misunderstanding. Any politician who denies the Constitution has to be regarded as reserving some right that he mistakenly believes he has to violate the highest law of the land whenever he finds it convenient, or the mood strikes him.

As with the ZAP, precautions should be taken accordingly.

Understand clearly that nobody is ever forced to take the Zero Aggression Pledge. As the great Roger Price observed many years ago, that would be like all of us who believe the Earth is round, gathering up all those who believe the Earth is flat -- and shoving them off the edge. As it is, and like it or not, the pledge/no pledge dichotomy has established two tiers within the libertarian movement, those who can be trusted to be left in a room with your baby daughter, and those who cannot.

But I digress.

All public officeholders, on the other hand, are required by law to take an oath with regard to the Constitution. If they do so with the immediate intention of disregarding it, then they have committed perjury, a felony. If they violate it at any time while in office, that is a crime, as well, for which they must be made to pay the price.

The price that I have long suggested is that they be transported to a little town in Pennsylvania called Nuremberg where, with money donated voluntarily, a great hall will be erected, in order that these criminals be indicted and tried -- as conspicuously as possible in our age of technology -- for their many and heinous crimes against the Constitution.

We will call these the "Nuremberg II Tribunals".

Upon conviction, they will be transported to a brand new 100-story prison, black and windowless, built atop the ruins of the old federal prison on the island of Alcatraz, exclusively designed for government miscreants. Prisoners will be allowed out once a day on its unrailed rooftop. Tourists on excursion boats will pay happily for meat past its expiration date to chum the shark-infested waters of San Francisco Bay.

Life in solitary confinement might be appropriate for those who have abused Bradley Manning and wish to abuse Julian Assange the same way.

It's a small dream, but my own.

Feel free to dream it with me.

It's no coincidence at all that "Constitutionalists" are just one of dozens of perfectly respectable American groups against whom Sisty Step-ugler Janet Napolitano has repeatedly tried to arouse local law enforcement. Such folks must be dealt with; they understand that she's a criminal. Happily, Napolitano couldn't arouse anything but another warthog.



Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of more than 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.


http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2011/tle609-20110306-05.html

Re: Eric Holder Rejects GOP Framing of Black Panther Voting Incident

I've seen this video of this so-called "voter intimidation". There was
none.

HILARIOUS!

Guys in military garb with weapons, at the front door of a polling
place, yelling, "You are about to be ruled by the black man,
cracker!"

Nah. Nothing there at all.

But a Bush/Cheney sign at a Pizza joint across the street from the DNC
in Boston.

Shut it down!

LOL

On Mar 4, 7:55 pm, Sage2 <wisdom...@gmail.com> wrote:
>         They were already convicted when they defaulted on their court
> appearance. The Government had already won the case. Eric ( the
> racist ) Holder dropped the charges simply because they were brothas !
>
> ***************************************************************************­*****************************************************
>
> On Mar 4, 2:02 pm, the daily search <thedailysea...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > *Attorney General Eric Holder rightly rejected
> > <http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0311/Eric_Holder_Black_Pan...>
> > *the accusation of a GOP House Appropriations committee member that:
>
> >  *"There's clearly evidence, overwhelming evidence, that your Department of
> > Justice refuses to protect the rights of anybody other than African
> > Americans to vote". *Video of "incident<http://www.thedailysearch.com/2011/03/eric-holder-rejects-gop-framing...>
> > "**
>
> > * *
>
> > I've seen this video of this so-called "voter intimidation". There was none.
> > People just presumed that because they were black and with wood clubs they
> > were there to stop white people from voting, instead of just ensuring no one
> > was stopped from voting, black or white. The error is in attributing or
> > projecting intent based on their looks - in this case African American -
> > without there being any actual attempt to suppress votes. It basically
> > reveals...*Read the rest*<http://www.thedailysearch.com/2011/03/eric-holder-rejects-gop-framing...>- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

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Re: Just in Case You Are Taking the Republicans Seriously

Larry Vance again?

There's a reason I don't quote Glenn Beck, ya know.

On Mar 5, 3:00 am, Keith In Köln <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Geesh Studio,  you begin to post the most ludicrous crap these days.
>
> Social Security Medicare and Medicaid were all started by socialists within
> the Democrat Party, and were opposed by conservatives who were within the
> Republican Party. All are dismal failures, and all are going to have to be
> reformed,  of course by conservatives who are within the Republican Party.
>
> What does a kid who violates the law have to do with anything that's within
> the political spectrum?
>
> Wake up and smell the coffee Studio!
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 7:30 AM, studio <tl...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > On Feb 28, 7:00 pm, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> > > Just in Case You Are Taking the Republicans SeriouslyPosted byLaurence
> > Vanceon February 28, 2011 04:31 PM
> > > . . . like, when they say we need to repeal Obamacare because it is
> > socialism. Remember that Social Security, Medicare, and public education are
> > three of the greatest socialist schemes on the planet. When Republicans say
> > that they too need to be eliminated because they are socialism then we can
> > begin to take them seriously.
>
> > Not many people are taking Republicans seriously.
> > Their party is in divisive shreds at the moment, and isn't likely to
> > get better anytime soon.
>
> > Even stalwart Conservatives like George Will are saying he wouldn't
> > trust them with a lemonade stand much less nuclear bombs.
>
> > No the 4th social program is the military industrial complex and para-
> > military police state.
> > You know, the people who will send 3 cops who spend 2 hours apiece in
> > paperwork arresting a kid smoking a joint (app. $600. retail value),
> > who then goes in front of a judge for 15 minutes (app. $250 retail
> > value) and who is then found guilty and fined $50. ... those people.
>
> > --
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> - Show quoted text -

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