Let's solve two problems at once

Everyone is all upset about the large number of illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico, that live in our nation.

I, being a leading edge member of the baby boom generation, worry about not getting the social security benefits that I paid dearly for during the last 40 years. We boomers apparently did not have enough children to support us through payroll taxes on the working generation.

Here is a suggestion that would solve both problems.

The reason that Mexicans come here without visas is that there is a quota limiting the number of immigrants per year. There is a waiting list of 16 years to come in legally from Mexico. Let us open the quotas up and let, for example all able bodied Mexicans between the ages of 20 and 40 come in legally, get all the needed permits, visas and social security cards. Then they can openly take jobs, pay taxes, open bank accounts and everything else that any American can do. Ten or twenty million productive, tax paying additional citizens just might put off the social security collapse by several decades.

To be honest, we would have to warn them that they have little chance of collecting social security benefits that they will have paid for. Us boomers will be taking that money, but they just might want to come anyway.

Illegal Searches

Once, a long time ago (1914) the Supreme Court made a decision. They wanted to enforce the 4th amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure and they needed a remedy that would dissuade police from engaging in this illegal activity. The choices were to make police criminally liable for missteps or, in the alternative, ban the use of any evidence gathered with the illegal search in any criminal trial.

The chose to exclude the evidence rather than see policemen go to jail. They reasoned that it would dissuade the illegal activity since the evidence resulting would be useless. This was a reasonable bargain that held till this week.

The Supreme Court of today seems to have forgotten the well thought out compromise of yesteryear and has just said that under some circumstances, that evidence might still be admissible. After all, some bad people might get away with something.

Now, what is dissuading police from violating the rules? Absolutely nothing!

Score one more point for the police state folks. They are making rapid progress. At the rate that our rights are melting away, we might not have any freedom left at all in less than 5 years. This is happening because the public seems blissfully unaware of the degradation.

I guess that we are frogs in warm water and do not notice the increasing temperature. Only a few of us freedom loving curmudgeons seem to care.

The Two Party Paradigm, A Recipe for Disaster

Our nation seems to assume that our "two party" system is built in and we cannot change it. Why, it must be part of the constitution!

Well it is not built in, it is not part of the constitution. In fact, if you will study the words of the Founders, they understood that parties (they called them factions) were quite dangerous. People might well be more loyal to their party than to the nation. Boy those Founders were smart folks. They learned from history and that history is repeating itself right now.

In 2004, the nation was presented with two awful candidates. It was really hard to figure out who was the lesser evil. Of course there were other candidates, but they were mostly secret or laughed at. You were told you would be wasting your vote if you voted for the freedom loving Libertarian Michael Badnarik, for example. As if your vote for one or the other of the two awful candidates wasn't wasted from the start.

The fact is that the two big parties do not care at all what happens to you. They care to maintain their power and each uses its own line of patented cow manure to get blocks of votes. They work together to keep the upstart parties out of the running.

First it was ballot access laws. Many states had draconian rules for getting on the ballot. Many times the rules were not the same for everyone. An example is that a Republican or Democratic candidate can pay a small filing fee to get on the ballot while a Libertarian or other person needs a huge number of signatures on a petition. The Libertarian party spent the first 30 years of its existence fighting those laws in court and in referenda and finally some progress has been made.

The newest attack on political competition is the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. BCRA is just like its name says. It functions to keep campaigns Bi-Partisan by making the legal reporting requirements so expensive that it is prohibitively expensive to launch a competing campaign for Federal office. Imagine that for the Libertarian Party of Kansas to field candidates for the 4 congressional seats, we would need $30,000 for legal and accounting help before we spent the first dollar on campaigning.

Now let us look at the party loyalty issue. We have a Republican president who is breaking all sorts of laws and has become a total danger and embarrassment to the nation. If any president has earned and deserved impeachment it is GWB. Do you see the Republican controlled congress doing anything about this? Of course not! Loyalty to the party is preventing them from saving the nation from a lawless administration.

When we need Congress the most, to stop the illegal spying, the torture, the wild spending, the ongoing war in Iraq and the brewing war in Iran we have a Congress that is unwilling to perform its duty of checking an out of control presidency because of blind loyalty to a party.

All you conservatives out there, the kind who care more about individual freedom than gay marriage or other social issues, I have a message for you. When you vote for Republicans like Bush, you are wasting your vote. He is just as anti-freedom as any liberal Democrat. If freedom is your desire than vote for freedom.

Eminent Domain Abuse

For twenty or more years cities and counties have been taking property under the guise of eminent domain and handing the property over to policitally favored private interests. After all, politicians will always serve their patrons. (Patrons are not the same as constituents. Constituents can only give them a vote. Patrons pay!)

Libertarians have been fuming about this all along but making no headway. When we told people about it, they thought we were nuts. It was so obviously unconstitutional, that it couldn't possibly be true. It took losing a case in the Supreme Court to get the attention of the public.

So now everyone knows what the government has been doing in this sphere and there is pressure on state legislatures to fix this. Thus the politicians need to find a way to make it appear that they have fixed the problem but leave enough loopholes to continue to serve their patrons.

Look at what happened in my state of Kansas. We started the session with 8 different versions of proposals to end eminent domain abuse. The strongest was an amendment to the state constitution that would have forbidden private transfer unconditionally. This failed to get the required 2/3 vote by only 3 votes in the house. It would have been a shoe in with the Senate and the voters. (HCR5025)

Instead we got a law, that lets the restriction on private transfer be overridden by a simple majority of the legislature and is not effective for more than a year. Thus the patrons have a full year to steal your property and after that they can still get your property, they just have to induce enough legislators to go along.

Property rights are much too important to be left to the random wishes of a transitory majority. They need to be absolute. Otherwise, there is no true ownership of property. You only rent your property. Anyone with enough money to offer the local government more in real estate tax than you are paying and can influence enough votes in the legislature can outbid you for what you thought was your property.

Remember that our founders set this nation up as a constitutional republic, not a democracy. That is because temporary majorities can be assembled, in an unfettered democracy, to violate the rights of any minority. A little greed or a little fear can work wonders.

We need the hard and fast limits on government power that a constitution provides to protect the minority. Remember please that you will be the minority some day in some debate and you will want your rights protected.

My Lai Revisited

Suddenly, we are inundated by reports of US military personnel intentionally shooting Iraqi civilians. First there are the cover up attempts. This is followed by the expected defenses from the pro-war side:

1. It didn't happen. It was a bomb. It was self inflicted. Etc. They never give up on the cover up attempts.
2. It might not be an accurate report. Wait for the facts.
3. In war you do not know who the enemy is. Even women and children can carry bombs.
4. They had it coming. Don't they know we are only there to help.

Well, all that might be true. Historically, everything suggested has happened. Terrible things happen in war all the time. You take nice American kids who grew up amongst us in a remarkably peaceful society and you place them in an outrageous situation where they must kill or be killed and they are scared out of their wits. They see their friends dying and they want revenge. Between revenge and fear, a person can be pressed to do some horrible things that he would never have dreamed of at home.

This is not unique to Iraq. This is how war is. The generals know this. The president certainly should know this. That is why war is to be avoided at all costs. There should never be a war for economic benefit or vague imperialist ambitions. The horrors of war should be reserved for actual self defense, not the kind of shifting rationales that we have been getting for Iraq.

When an administration starts a war for no valid self defense reason but some cow manure about spreading democracy, that administration is responsible for EVERY death that occurs. The blood of every American soldier, every Iraqi civilian, every Iraqi insurgent, every reporter is on the hands of George W. Bush and his small group of co-conspirators in this monstrous war.

Has anyone learned anything at all by this experience? Apparently not! They are preparing the groundwork for a similar war with Iran. They are using the same arguments, the same rumor generation methods, the same demonization process. The difference is that this time we do not have the manpower to do an invasion. We have too many soldiers bogged down in Iraq and Iran is a much larger country. They must have either a nuclear war or a draft in mind, or maybe both.

Of course, to minimize debate, we are keeping everyone busy debating immigration reform, a gay marriage amendment and other trivia. Both will end with little or no action when the Iranian war starts.

This is just one more very big reason to impeach Bush now.