Questions!!

As a candidate for public office, I gets lots of questionnaires to fill out. Some are from special interest groups and they are pretty short and to the point. I really like the ones with broad questions that let you speak your mind without word limits. You can really define yourself in such a situation. Take a look at this one.


1. Do you support the three-year, $466 million school funding plan the Legislature passed this year? If not, what is the next step to address the school funding issue?

There is no way to judge the adequacy of funding absent any real competition. What few comparisons are available suggest that the public schools are over funded and wasting money wholesale. I would certainly NOT vote for more money to be wasted down the bottomless pit of public education.
Therefore, I would vote against the additional spending and also against any taxes intended to fund it. To fix this problem, we need to introduce real competition to education. This will save a major fraction of the spending and give the education consumer, the parents, some power to protect their kids from inferior education. What can a parent do now if their local public school is providing poor quality education? Going to meetings, complaining, writing letters to the editor are all trivial annoyances to the bureaucracy. Taking his kid and the money away is not so trivial and would get attention if it was an option.


2. In the push to fund K-12, some say higher education has been forgotten, and Kansas universities report more than $600 million in deferred maintenance costs. What should be done about the needs of Kansas’s institutions of higher learning?

It is hard to judge from current knowledge what the correct path to take is. I am quite sure there is waste and inefficiency in the system. I am quite sure that, besides the deferred physical maintenance, there is the same sloppy book keeping that hides future costs such as pension obligations (see question 4 below). I would support the status quo for now and push for a commission to study the system, determine the true costs and look for cost saving possibilities.


3. Shawnee is one of many cities looking to move forward with bioscience districts. Should there be a law to further regulate research in these districts, such as Missouri’s stem cell initiative?

If we want private interests to invest in medical research in our area, we had better give them assurance that they will not be subject to irrational regulation in the future which might destroy their investments. The battle going on in Missouri today over a constitutional amendment to ensure that the research will remain legal illustrates the problem. Without that amendment in place to protect them, no one will risk the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to reach useful treatment options for the sick.
Sooner or later, some jurisdiction will provide the needed protection and the world will get the benefits. I want it to be sooner rather than later and preferably here in the Kansas City Metro area so we can reap the economic benefits. You have no idea how many people’s lives you are shortening or ruining by delaying medical research!

4. The Kansas Public Employees Retirement System has a $5.1 billion gap between the value of its assets and its future obligations to provide pensions. What should the legislature do to ensure public employees have money for retirement?

The first step here is to start being honest with the taxpayers. The cost of employees is being fraudulently underreported in the budget. We need to know the real cost of government services so we can determine whether they make any sense. With honest accounting, it just might become obvious that government supplied services are much more expensive than similar services supplied in a competitive market environment. Unfortunately, the taxpayers will have to make up the shortfall in assets for current employees of the state. We had best get control of government spending before it bankrupts us. I support the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR) amendment as a first step in controlling spending. I stress the first step. TABOR only slows the growth of spending. We need to actively cut out large chunks of spending by shutting down wasteful programs. We need that honest accounting to figure out what is wasteful.

5. What do you think the state should do in regard to illegal immigrants?

Nothing! The status of a resident of the state with a Federal bureaucracy is no concern of the state government. The state is obligated to treat everyone equally by the 14th amendment to the constitution.

6. Is there anything else you would like to see the Legislature address? What issues do you think are most important to voters in your district?

First I would move to protect property rights in two respects. I would fight for a state constitutional amendment to forbid the use of eminent domain for transfers to private interests. The legislative enactment passed last year is too full of loopholes and too easy to override to offer the protection of our property that is the basis of our freedom. I would also advocate stopping the practice of civil forfeiture. This is where police seize property based on suspicion only that the property may have been involved in a crime, without the need for that inconvenient due process.
Secondly I would fight for medical freedom. There are many sick people who can benefit from the use of Marijuana. Kansas should join 11 other states that have moved to protect patients from arrest. I can think of no greater evil than denying sick people their medicine.

7. Are there any statements your opponent(s) has(have) made in their campaign (whether about you, the issues or themselves) that you would like to address?
I challenge mostly the unspoken assumption that all the public schools need is more money and all will be well. We know that, in general terms, the quality of public education is poor. Surely it is better in some places than others, but we find, if we look at the facts from all around the nation, dispassionately, that there is no correlation between spending and results. There is no reason to expect more spending to make things better because there is no incentive for the managers of the system to do better. They get the money from taxes no matter how poorly they do. In fact, they use bad results as an excuse to ask for more money. Give them more money and they will merely waste more money. For every other class of goods and services in our nation, we depend on competition to supply the best quality at the lowest cost. That is what we need to do with education. This means that we should make it possible for a parent to take his kid out of public school and get the benefit of the tax expenditure attributable to his child to use at a private or parochial school of the parent’s choice. He can, of course, add to that money if he wishes but that will probably not be necessary. After some adjustment time, there should be plenty of private schools that will take the allotted amount and do a much better job of education.
As a minimum, the parent will be able to make an individual choice about what is taught to his kid on the burning questions of the day. I refer here, of course, to evolution vs. creation science, sex education and prayer in schools. This will also help with decisions on teaching methods like phonics in early childhood reading lessons. A whole generation was destroyed by education bureaucrats who insisted on what was once called “look-say” reading and is now called “whole language”.
Don’t you want control of your kid’s education? Don’t you want some bargaining power when talking to school administrators? They won’t miss your kid if you remove him from public school but they will miss the money.

8. Why should people vote for you?

If they want freedom for themselves and, most importantly for their kids and all future generations, they will vote for me and other Libertarians. Republicans and Democrats have proven again and again that they do not care about your freedom, only their power.
For those that need to put people in categories, I am a traditional conservative. That means that I believe in small government that restricts itself to only those functions permitted it in the constitution. I am aghast at the runaway spending and taxing that has become the hallmark of both Democratic and Republican administrations, state and Federal. I also stand dismayed and aghast at the civil liberties violations that have flowed from the “War on Terror”.

Stop voting for the lesser evil. You have not and will not be served well. If you want freedom, vote for freedom! Vote Libertarian!

Why Do People Support Tyranny?

In the course of manning our Libertarian outreach booths and during campaigning for public office, I occasionally run into people who are adamantly opposed to freedom. Sometimes this is general and sometimes it is rather specific. The three specific questions where this happens the most are education, drugs and gun control.

I am always trying to figure out why others come up with such different conclusions than I do on these topics. First, I am always checking my own conclusions based on any new facts. I am always looking for that one overwhelming and devastating argument that will convince my opponents of the error of their ways. That is why I never get angry at people who argue with me; I see it as a learning opportunity.

I recently had such an encounter on the subject of concealed carry of guns in Kansas. Of course, the constitutional argument was powerless against this individual. He thought he was protecting his children by blocking concealed carry of weapons. How do I make him understand that the real danger to his children does not come from the rare and random nut who decides to shoot up an area? Do I tell him that if there was a good supply of armed citizens in the area, the nut will not live to get his second shot off? That will probably not work for the simple reason that his life experience does not include such incidents. That is a consequence of the rarity of the occurrence in the first place.

If he knew history well, he would know that the real risk to his children will come from the government. Those of us well schooled in the history of how governments go awry see all the signs around us and wonder how little time we have left before the police state closes down and the disappearances start happening. How do you explain to someone who got his watered down history from public schools that widespread gun ownership and the unquestioned ability to carry those guns wherever you go is the only thing that will stop a runaway government.

He doesn't even know that all the great genocides of the twentieth century started with gun control. You cannot commit genocide against an armed population. He doesn't see that as a realistic risk to his children because he never learned the important details of history.

You get the same line of thought with drug prohibition. "We have to protect the children". Why do they not understand that the drug war is what is endangering their children? Occasional drug use does not have anywhere near the consequences of being arrested for drug use. Prohibition makes the worst part of society wealthy and powerful. It encourages all sorts of secondary crime to pay the high prices of black market drugs that would be dirt cheap if legal. Worst of all, it gives the government the excuse to violate other rights under the "War on Drugs" banner. Overall, drug prohibition is all bad stuff but people blindly accept it to "protect their kids" from themselves. How have you protected your kid when he gets a criminal record for smoking a joint?

A Modern Enabling Act

This week, both houses of congress violated their oaths of office and passed a bill that will allow agents of the federal government to torture human beings. Not just known terrorists but alleged terrorists or anyone the president says is an "unlawful combatant". This includes US citizens that have never left the US and never held a gun.

The bill lets the president define what is and what is not a violation of the Geneva conventions. Isn't that clear enough? He can define anything as 'not torture' and still say we are obeying the convention.

Congress has given the president a blank check to torture anyone. Guilt is not relevant. An innocent person picked up by mistake or for political revenge has no course of action left. The 800 year old protection against wrongful imprisonment, Habeas Corpus, does not apply when the president does not want it to apply. Due process, what is that? Good bye, Magna Carta. Goodbye fourth, sixth and eighth amendments.

Kansas Senators Roberts and Brownback and Congressman Dennis Moore voted FOR this horror. The courts have been told they have no roll.

It is time to remember Pastor Niemoller's famous quote, updated.

• When they came for the terrorist suspects, I did not speak out since I was not a terrorist.
• When they came for the Democrats, I did not speak out since I was not a Democrat.
• When they came for the Libertarians, I did not speak out since I was not a Libertarian.
• When they came for the anti-war activists, I did not speak out since I was not an anti-war activist.
• When they came for the atheists, I did not speak out since I was not an atheist.
• When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

For those who got their history from public schools, the Enabling Acts were a series of laws passed by the German Reichstag (parliment) in 1933-34 that, quite simply, gave the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, the power to do all the horrible things he did during the Holocaust. The name was given to them in retrospect, of course. The immediate reason was to stop those terrible communists that had burned down the Reichstag building. The Fatherland needed to be protected, you see.