Freedom's View

Is Medical Care a Right?

2010-01-01T14:08:00.004-06:00

Medical care, in all its manifestations is a good in economic terms and it is not a free good. Someone has to go to school for a long time, work, invest, take chances to create medical care. So, if we are not going to physically enslave all the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, technicians and steal all the capitol equipment used for health care, someone has to pay for it.

Shall the user of the medical service pay for it or shall the government use its guns to make someone else pay for it? That is the stark reality of the situation. Which is the moral and ethical choice?

Calling it a right violates the very concept of rights. Most rights recognized by our founders and the constitution were negative rights-the right not to be interfered with. No one can interfere with your right to speech, religion, your decision to carry a gun and such. In each of these cases, no one has to supply you with anything. They just have to leave you alone.

But a right to medical care or food or a home is a positive right. It implies that someone owes you something that is not a free good. This is nothing less than armed robbery.

Freedom vs Tyranny-Your Choice

2009-12-01T18:13:00.002-06:00

I see all sorts of letters to the editor where liberals blame conservatives for our problems and Democrats blame Republicans and vice versa. I am here to say that those terms do not mean very much. So-called conservative George Bush spent money like a drunken sailor on foolish wars and bailouts and then liberal Barack Obama spends money like two drunken sailors continuing the foolish wars and even more bailouts. The one thing they all have in common is growing the size and power of the government with one story or another. I rate them all as tyrants and not fit to run a free nation.

We need a new breed of politician who wants to shrink government to its proper size and function, as defined in the constitution. I would rate such a person as a freedom lover and that is the only type of politician that we should allow to run our country.

So you decide, tyrant or freedom lover-based on what they have done in their lives, not what they say in the heat of a campaign. And if the Democrats and Republicans both give you only tyrants to choose from, go to the third parties and don't worry about wasting your vote. A vote for either tyrant is much worse than wasting a vote.

The Libertarian Party is just waiting for you'all to understand that freedom is the most important value you have. No government giveaways or social control of others is worth giving it up.

Is the Global Warming Hoax Defeated?

2009-11-30T20:28:00.004-06:00

Those of us with some scientific background and a little historical perspective always understood that carbon emissions had nothing to do with global warming. A well documented natural cycle fully explains the warming that has been going on for four centuries and will continue for 5 more centuries, no matter what we do.

Last week's release of e-mails from climate researchers tell us that the scientists who claimed such a connection were not just wrong. They knew they were selling a hoax and did everything in their power to silence those pointing out the truth.

Those of you who were fooled by this hoax and don't want to be fooled again take note. When someone says that the science is finished and no further debate is warranted, the red flag should go up. That is an attempt to silence the opposition and an acknowledgement that they know full well that they are lying.

In the warming literature, they take much pleasure in showing us a chart that seems to say that average temperatures have been constant since the beginning of history until they suddenly spiked up 60 years ago. They call this the hockey stick graph. We know that is nonsense but it is a good lesson in how you can make numbers say anything if you manipulate enough. That is why, when you look at a graph of anything, be sure you understand what is being plotted. A true graph of temperature over time will display an approximate sinusoid shape with a period of 15 centuries and a peak to peak range of seven centigrade degrees. Our current temperature places us in the rough center of that range.

Based on the history, we can expect a period of 4.5 to 5 centuries of slow warming (0.8 centigrade degrees/century) with irregular deviations that might last for decades. We will then reach the same peak that the Earth reached in 1100 AD with no catastrophic results.

The hockey stick graph is some mathematical collection of deltas and derivatives that would make any number series do whatever the maker wished. It accomplishes only deception.

Now the question is, will this do the trick. Will the evidence of fraud stop our crooked politicians from imposing cap and trade or other similar devastating plans to put us all under the thumb of the bureaucracy in order to get the energy we need? Sorry to say I don't know the answer to that. When the growth of government is involved, the truth does not necessarily set you free.

Libertarian vs. Conservative

2009-08-30T16:35:00.006-05:00

I spend a lot of time at various public events manning what we call an OPH booth (Operation Politically Homeless). We ask people to take a short quiz and then use the results to place them on a chart that shows a political spectrum. Our point being that the simple left right line is totally inadequate to show most people. If interested, you can take the quiz online at www. self-gov.org.

I often hear the question-What is the difference between conservatives and libertarians? That question is getting harder and harder to answer because the definition of conservative is so fluid. It changed drastically during the administration of W.

Nevertheless, as a minimum we can say that Libertarians agree with conservatives on most economic issues and probably free speech and press. Beyond that, there is way to much variation among conservatives to make a definitive statement.

Do conservatives believe in due process. For the most part, sure but they were easily swayed to ignore that for alleged terrorists. Thus they gave a totally unacceptable power to government to name someone as a terrorist without the need to prove the facts. We still have hundreds of prisoners in GITMO and BAGRAM whose guilt is still unknown but whose time in prison is many years. Libertarians find this not just shameful but horribly dangerous.

How about gay marriage and all the other issues around homosexuality? Libertarians are true to the freedom philosophy here. Adults may make any living and/or loving arrangements they please without interference from the state. Conservatives apparently put their ideas of a proper society ahead of freedom on this issue.

The longest running debate is about the drug war. Libertarians have always advocated personal freedom. We recognize the massive damage done to people and society from attempting to prohibit the use of mind altering substances. We learned the lesson of alcohol prohibition all too well. Conservatives believe that they have a right to tell other people what they may use for enjoyment and apparently just refuse to learn from the alcohol prohibition disaster. Indeed, I am sure there are some that would want to try alcohol prohibition again, just with more police this time.

Right now, this looks like irreconcilable differences. One can only hope that people who are basically freedom lovers will realize that there is no compromise of freedom with tyranny possible.

If you would have freedom for yourself, you must grant similar freedom for all others!

Do you really think that your freedom to practice Christianity, for example, would survive if you allowed the government to ban some other religion that you found distasteful? Once such decisions are in the hands of the government, even a democratic one, the allowed religions become a matter for majority vote. That is definitely not commensurate with freedom.

Death Panels

2009-08-30T09:32:00.003-05:00

Some have said that the phrase DEATH PANELS was a silly attempt to scare the daylights out of the public. The real problem is that it was immediately paired with a provision in the bill for end of life counseling. That muddied the water to where no one knows what anyone is talking about. Good trick for the media.

End of life counseling is not the provision that will cause the mass death of older folks with expensive illnesses. It will actually help them deal with things when that happens. The real problem comes from a provision for a study of "comparative effectiveness". Initially this will be a data gathering panel that will publish statistics on the cost and results (in terms of additional months or years of life) offered by many possible treatments. There are a bunch of problems with this.

First is the usual issue with anything done by government. It will not be updated very frequently and will not include newly developed treatments for years after they are available.

Secondly, and far worse is that it will become the standard of care. If it is shown that a particular treatment only buys an average of 12 months of additional life at a cost of more than some standard-let's use $20K per year, then it will be declared not sufficiently effective and be made unavailable under the government paid system. This will happen without regard to individual circumstances which might make it far more effective for you.

We know this is the intention of the plan. Obama has stated so. Howard Dean has stated so and our friends in England already do this in their wonderful public health plan. So, prepare to become like poor Bessy the cow who is too old to give milk anymore. Why should the farmer spend any vet money to keep her alive. When the government runs your health care, you are reduced to a farm animal who has to justify your continued life by productivity. If you can't work, no longer pay income tax, what is the point of spending money to keep you alive. After all, it is their money now.

Only idiots who think that are going to get something for nothing will give up this control of their lives.

Obama's Goal

2009-08-23T10:02:00.005-05:00

In politics, things are rarely done in a straight forward manner. By that I mean the goals stated are usually not the whole story. There is almost always another motive that they don't dare state. You have to divine this from the details of the proposal as it relates to the stated goals.

So for example, we are told that we need health care reform because we have 47 million uninsured. No discussion how many of those have made an intentional choice to save the premium costs. For the purposes of this discussion, let's take that number as correct. That is roughly 15% of the population. That means that 85% of the population is insured and probably satisfied with their insurance coverage.

So now, is the new plan the best and cheapest way to get that 15% insured. Clearly not!! The dictum "First do no harm" should be kept in mind always. It seems pretty foolish to upend the whole system and mess around with the satisfied 85% when we need only subsidize the 15% and be done. To understand what I am saying, think how we help those who cannot buy enough food. The government did not take over the food industry. They gave money to poor people who met certain criteria, via the mechanism of food stamps. They buy their food like everyone else, in a free market with all the efficiency and innovation that comes with it.

The equivalent method for health insurance is "HEALTH STAMPS. Just set up a needs based requirement for getting a voucher which I like to call health stamps and the stated problem is solved and the 85% are not affected or disturbed.

So the stated reason is not the true reason for this massive 'reform'. What might the true reason be? I am assuming that there are two driving forces for this. We know that Obama has spent his whole life espousing big government intervention and the Marxian dictum, "From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs". Apparently he wants a monstrously expensive system that will justify raining taxes even further on the already most taxed group of high income earners. When experience shows this as still inadequate, let's go after those comfortable middle class folks. Let's share every one's poverty. Socialists do not understand incentives and disincentives very well.

Rationing is also inevitable in an always cash short system so this will give the leaders the power of life and death over the populace. I hope that is not a driving force but it cannot be discounted.

In any case, the plan is idiotic since the problem can be solved much more simply with "health stamps".

Please don't take this as an endorsement of a broadening of the welfare state. I merely point out that health stamps would solve the problem without creating a disaster. A still better but longer term solution is eliminating the state and federal laws and rules that make health care more expensive than it needs to be. Thus I offer as an alternative the HEALTH STAMPS PLAN as a short term fix with a deregulation move to follow. That will have a goal of lowering the costs so that nearly everyone will be able to afford good insurance and fewer will need health stamps.

Government Run Health Care Part 4

2009-08-16T09:48:00.004-05:00

Today, let's talk about tactics. In the mid 1990s, when the Clinton clan decided to save the world from freedom, they presented their health care reform as a complete package. All the details were available with all the flow charts, payment methods and new crimes defined fully. They were so proud of their monstrosity, they published a book with all the details.

Obviously, this gave the opposition the opportunity to read, understand and explain the contents. A lot of people thought it was unstoppable, so they started making plans to live through it. Several entrepreneurs announced plans to build floating hospitals several miles offshore all around the US to treat people who could not or would not wait for the system to care for them. The main lesson that Obama took from this was to go lightly on the details. Sell it as a somewhat vague concept and maybe you will get it through. It is very difficult to fight a phantom plan that can change or redefine terms as the opposition attacks.

That is why I feel we need to battle the basic assumptions, not the details. Let us stress the basic idea that some bureaucrat will decide if we get a particular treatment based on our life expectancy is a horrible idea and no matter how they laugh, rationing is inherent in any government run system. It cannot be otherwise because all our money has been placed in one pot and it is not bottomless. It is suddenly of no consequence that we scrimped and saved all our working lives to have a comfortable retirement with good medical care. Our resources got thrown into that same pot with the person who was a spendthrift all his life and we will get the same care, for better or worse. We might point out that this puts us in the position of pets brought to a vet. The vet and the owner decide if the treatment is cost effective or if the patient should be put down. Is that how you would like to be treated-like a pet or farm animal?

Another important issue for us is to decide what alternate we propose. We could take the position that the Status Que is far better than this plan. This is true but the Status Que is not great. I have seen alternate plans from so-called conservatives that astound me. I have seen plans that include full price controls and mandated purchase of insurance actually suggested by these so called conservatives. I have seen a Republican plan that is mostly double talk, i.e. platitudes about taking care of yourself.

My favored solution is, of course, individual freedom. We know that the system currently suffers under reams of state and federal regulation that drastically increase the cost of medical care and medical insurance. The direction to go is to undo those regulations.

One other thought. Have you all noticed the logical contradiction that we hear all the time from the politicians pushing this? We have to pass this to control costs but we also have to raise taxes to pay for this cost saving improvement. Makes by cognitive dissonance (BS) alarm sound.

Government Run Health Care Part 3

2009-08-14T15:51:00.003-05:00

It amazes me that this Health Care discussion has simply ignored the constitution. This is our founding document and creates the pact between the people, the state governments and the Federal government. In fact, this is what brought the federal government into existence. Its every word and phrase is designed to clearly limit the authority of the federal government to a short, explicit list of functions, leaving all else to the states or the people.

That short list, embodied in Article 1 Section 8 absolutely does NOT contain health care as a federal function. Of course, that has never stopped them from doing the myriad things they do under the "elastic" clause as they have misnamed the commerce clause. Most of the things they have done in this vein have been terrible for the nation and it is time we started demanding compliance with the founding charter of the government. A government that ignores its founding charter is not a legitimate government but just a gang of thieves writ large.

Are the following things appropriate for a nation that considers itself free?
1. Force, at gun point, all employers to buy health insurance for all employees or pay a large penalty fee based on payroll.
2. Force, at gun point, anyone not otherwise covered to buy a government approved health insurance policy or pay a penalty tax.
3. Take money from people, deemed to rich to complain, at gun point, extra taxes, over and above what everyone else pays to supply health insurance to others.
4. Prevent people, at gun point, from spending their own money to buy health care if refused by the government system. Refusal based on something called comparative effectiveness or, in effect, setting a maximum payout per year of extended life. (I think this is what Sarah Palin meant by death panels except there will be no panel to argue with. Just a bureaucrat with a calculator.)

Government Run Health Care Part 2

2009-08-14T15:24:00.003-05:00

Now let us assume you are adamant that the government must DO SOMETHING about the 10 or 15% of the population that does not have health insurance. Shall we revamp the entire system and put it all under government control, even for the 85% that is happy with what they have?

If we had followed that same plan when we were worrying about food security, we would have handed the entire food industry over to the government and then we would all get our food from government run warehouses. I am sure it would be delicious. Instead we gave money (via food stamps) to the poor and disabled so they could buy their food where everyone else does. We did not bother the self sufficient very much at all (except for the taxes) and did not interfere with normal market forces that create good quality and innovation.

The equivalent function in the health care realm already exists-Medicaid. It seems we should only be discussing changes to the qualifications to receive Medicaid.

Now I in no way endorse Medicaid, food stamps or any other aspect of the welfare state. I am just pointing out the total lack of necessity to revamp the whole system when small and comparatively cheap adjustments will meet the goal. The fact that the welfare state and the high taxes it causes is a self perpetuating disaster should be obvious to all. But that is how government grows. It messes things up with a foolish intervention and then uses the consequences of that intervention to justify the next. And so it goes on a spiral into fascist or socialist hell.

The political goons at the Town Hall meetings

2009-08-09T16:22:00.003-05:00

The Democrats just seem to know that all the demonstrators and Town Hall Attendees who think the health plan is a bad idea are all hired goons. Must be how they normally handle a problem.

The truth is that the people who are against the health care plan are in fear for their lives, and justifiably so. No one has to pay me to demonstrate against this health care plan. We have all the notice we need that rationing for older people will be a feature. It is already in place for Medicare and there is no other way to limit the spending when everyone is covered.

I have a passion for and a self interest in stopping this plan. I don't mind if some group helps to get all us political amatuers organized. We need all the help we can get finding where our congress Critters are hiding.

It has occurred to me that this might be part of the plan to cure the Social Security bankruptcy in our future-just knock off the Baby Boomers early by denying them care. The plan includes bureaucrats that will make decisions on denying care to older folks if the cost of keeping them alive exceeds some unnamed standard for the additional years of life. I want to make that decision. Otherwise, we are no better than farm animals where the farmer decides how much it is worth to keep Bessy alive after she no longer gives milk.

My preferred alternative is not just do nothing but rather undo all the regulations that make health care and insurance far more expensive than they need to be.

Government Run Health Care Part 1

2009-08-01T19:44:00.006-05:00

The prospect of health care reform brings up many issues. It will need to cover several blog posts to keep matters clear. Today we shall look at the basic assumptions involved. In future posts we will look at the economic forces on the rest of the economy and the constitutional issues.

It seems apparent that many of the people who voted for Obama thought they were going to get something for nothing. In their magical thinking, the health care system was going to be just like it is now, but FREE. Those of us who have grown up understand the first rule of reality: THERE AIN'T NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH!! (TANSTAAFL)

Medical care, in all its manifestations is a good in economic terms. Someone has to go to school for a long time, work, invest, take chances to create medical care. So, if we are not going to physically enslave all the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, technicians and steal all the capitol equipment used for health care, someone has to pay for it.

Shall the user of the medical service pay for it or shall the government use its guns to make someone else pay for it? That is the stark reality of the situation. Which is the moral and ethical choice?

Now, let's say that you decided for the use of government guns and you still want your "free" health care. How might this work? The government has to collect taxes from everyone under some rule or another. Maybe you will be in a less taxed group, maybe not but, in any case, the government will take a pile of money from us and then pay for our health care-right?

Well, they have a budget. For any given year they have a sum allotted to health care. There is, after all, a limit to what you can steal from a productive person before he decides to stop producing. What if the demand for services exceeds that budget amount? They have to deny services to someone. By what standards do people get denied and who decides? AYY-there is the rub. Your money has been taken from you. You no longer have it available to pay for care. Some government functionary decides who gets care and who doesn't.

In Canada, it is just waiting lists. Let's see if you survive with your 90% occluded coronary arteries until your name comes up on the list. Or maybe it will be something like they are already doing with Medicare patients. How many of the government's dollars is it worth to extend your life? Notice that money became their dollars now-not yours any longer. Is there anything more foolish than giving up control of your very life?

The Economic Crisis

2008-11-28T12:03:00.003-06:00

People, please stop falling for all the excuses that the government and its subservient media is handing you. This is not a matter of too little regulation, greed, stupid homeowners or whatever.

Those are consequences of the root cause-excessive money and credit creation by the Federal Reserve Bank. They did this to keep interest rates artificially low in the face of massive government deficits and borrowing.

Normally, the borrowing, being so huge to finance both the welfare state and two nonsensical wars, would have driven interest rates very high. By creating new money, they bought back much of that debt and pushed interest rates back down.

The consequence of all that is a rapidly increasing money supply and higher prices for everything. Now how could an ordinary person not notice how the prices of real estate kept going up and interest rates stayed low. It was like manna from heaven and people took advantage of the situation to make money on a "sure thing". Tell me that you did not think that real estate only goes up in price.

This is the classical bubble described in text books for hundreds of years. It is an old game played by government that ALWAYS bursts giving drastically lower prices and bad debts.
The best solution is drastically reduce government spending so no new borrowing is needed, lower taxes and get out of the way. The economy will recover in a year or so.
But instead, our brilliant leadership (both the R and D kind) think that the hair of the dog is the solution. Let's spend even more and inflate the money supply even more to get things back where they used to be, Let's try to reinflate the bubble.

That can't work and never has though it has been tried. The 1930s was an example of further money creation (and they even raised taxes and tariffs) causing the economy to stay bad for a decade. That is right folks, the New Deal did not work. The New New deal will fail just the same.

If you don't learn from history, you get to repeat it!

The Meaning of Words

2008-08-24T08:40:00.003-05:00

Words like liberal, conservative, progressive, change over time. Parties like Democrats and Republicans change their principles over time, sometimes by takeover by stealth, sometimes by natural evolution. The main lesson for us plain folks is to never get married to the name of a philosophy or a party, blindly following it after it has abandoned the principles that brought us to it in the first place.

I decided that I was a conservative in 1964 when Barry Goldwater ran for president. I recognized that, despite what I was told during my upbringing in New York City, it was not a good idea for poor folks to be Democrats and liberals. What was best for everyone was a small, unobtrusive government that let you keep the fruits of your labor. I registered Republican at the first opportunity (age 21 at that time). Today, I have noted that the Republican Party that nominated Barry Goldwater does not exist any longer. It has drifted into something very different.

A lot of folks who spent their lives saying they were conservative apparently did not notice when a group that called themselves neoconservatives took over their movement and changed it drastically. Today, when you say you are conservative, people don’t think of a freedom lover. Today, to be recognized as a conservative, you need to support the Iraq war and future wars that the neo-cons think is right and proper. You must stand silent to the violations of due process that are everyday doings of the Bush administration. You must be in favor of government interference in interpersonal relationships. Today, if you are against the war, you must be a liberal. If you think that the government should not tell people whom to love, you must be a liberal. And you certainly cannot be a conservative, if you think that sick people can use that devil weed, marijuana to ease their suffering.

Well, I am against the war and I am not a liberal (as currently defined). I believe that the most important value of this nation is its tradition of individual freedom. We have a constitution that protects that freedom. I will support a candidate who supports individual freedom and is obedient to the constitution, no matter what his party label. I will not support a candidate who thinks that obeying the constitution is optional, no matter what his party label.

I am a Libertarian now, because it is the only party that actually takes individual freedom seriously. To prevent long term drift of the party away from this basic principle, We require a simple pledge of new members-

I certify that I do not advocate the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals.

We also have a statement of principles that requires a 7/8 vote at convention to change. We are well aware of the danger of drift and infiltration and have taken steps to slow or prevent it. Apparently the Republicans did not.

I supported Ron Paul for president and I have joined The Hope for America Coalition because these actions help to further my desire for a restoration of the individual freedom that used to by the primary feature of this nation. I care about this because I want my kids to spend their lives in freedom, not in tyranny.

I urge you all who are conservative, to ask yourselves if the Republican Party deserves your support any longer. Please don't answer that the Democrats are worse. Choosing the lesser evil, election after election, gets you the evil that is happening today. Open your mind to the Libertarian Party and its principles.

Group Guilt

2008-03-08T15:35:00.005-06:00

In the last few weeks I have met two different people with the same fantastic opinion. They both stated proudly and loudly, with no shame, that it is right and proper for us (the United States) to kill millions of Muslims. They believe that the attacks of 9-11 and all the insurgent activity in Iraq and Afghanistan are caused by religious zealots and that this justifies our killing them by the millions.

In their opinion, it doesn't matter that only a few hundred crazies were responsible for the 9-11 attacks and the prior attacks on the WTC, the USS Cole and the various embassy bombings. It doesn't matter that the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are merely getting revenge for the deaths of their relatives at the hands of our military invasion and occupation forces.

Mass murder based on group guilt spread liberally without cause to all Muslims is just fine by them. This is mass murder, no different in kind from what Hitler had the German army do to the Jews and Gypsies during WW2. Again there, a whole religion or ethnic group was judged guilty for the crimes of a few.

How can this happen? How can Americans go along with this. It is massively evil and shameful! Yet they do not see this.

So, the next time you are thinking about the Holocaust and wondering how it happened, how the German people let it happen, you will know the answer. With sufficient propaganda and a sufficiently dumbed down populace, you can sell anything. You can convince a strong and powerful nation that they are in mortal danger from a few hundred crazies with minor weapons. You can attack a nation without cause and thereby create new enemies and use their revenge tactics as a causus belli for the next advance in your war plans and get away with it.

I just want to remind those advocates of mass murder that Germany was defeated and was forced to admit their horrible and evil wrongs and pay massive reparations. The world looks upon that period of history with horror and disbelief. Do you really want to try it again? This time against a target religion not of a few million like the Jews but a few hundred million Muslims.

Sound Money

2008-01-19T18:27:00.000-06:00

Dr Ron Paul has been advocating a return to sound money. If you don't want to be paying a continuous inflation tax, you should want sound money as well. Historically, the only way to prevent inflation is to strictly limit the amount of money in circulation. How do you do that? Why you make the money warehouse receipts for some commodity. That way, there can be no money printed that is not matched by stocks of the monetary commodity available at all times for redemption of the paper money.

Again, history teaches us that gold or silver have been the best commodity to use as a medium of exchange. They each have intrinsic value because of their usefulness (jewelry, electronics, chemistry) and can easily be made into coins and subdivided endlessly. The key to sound money is the concept of a commodity that is interchangeable with the paper money. It is less important what the commodity is, so long as there is a limit on the issuance of paper money (or its electronic equivalent).

Today, the Federal Reserve Bank can create new money at whim to lower interest rates, bail out defaulting financial institutions, buy votes or finance wars. The result of this money creation is exactly the same as when Uncle Vinnie down the block prints up his really good counterfeit $50s. The money supply goes up and all the money becomes worth less. Did you get that? There is no difference to you whether the Fed issues the money or Uncle Vinnie issues the money. The effect on the economy is the same.

It only makes a difference to the guy who gets to spend the money the first time. Either Uncle Vinnie gets to buy his new car or the political cronies of the Fed get the money. Either way, after that first spend, it is just more money in circulation.

So now let's look at some evidence to back this up. Oil has gotten very expensive lately. It is running between $90 and $100 per barrel. But that is when you measure it in terms of dollars. If you measure it in terms of gold, it is still about 1/10 ounce of gold per barrel-mostly unchanged. So the price increase you see is really the lower value of the dollar caused by all that counterfeit money, mostly from Uncle Fed.

So next time you hear some media expert laughing at Dr Paul for advocating the gold standard, you give him a good laugh. He is the idiot!

Why I Support Dr Ron Paul for President

2007-12-08T11:25:00.000-06:00

What follows is a transcript of a speech that I gave on 12/07/07 at a caucus held under the auspices of the National Presidential Caucus. It was designated as a Republican Caucus for Johnson County, KS

Dr Paul is the only Republican candidate who is unequivocally against the Iraq War and who pledges to bring the troops home with all deliberate and safe speed. He understands that the war in Iraq was pointless, illegal, unconstitutional and a moral horror.

The vast majority of the US public agrees with this. What chance does any other Republican candidate have to beat the Democrats while arguing for continued war?

The war has brought us only bad. We have lost roughly 4000 US soldiers, killed Iraqis totaling close to a million and displaced more than 2 million. This has won us no hearts and minds. Rather it has made us new enemies. Every dead Iraqi has an extended family who wants revenge.

How do the other Republican candidates, who wear their pro-life credentials proudly when it comes to abortion, have no problem with killing innocent Iraqis?

We have increased our national debt by almost $1 trillion to achieve these dubious results. This huge increase in the debt, coupled with runaway spending at home, has placed our economic future in grave peril. The dollar is collapsing before our very eyes. The Federal Reserve is out of options. Their trick of creating new money out of thin air doesn’t fool the suckers any longer.

Dr Paul understands that money only works as a store of value if it is commodity based. Fiat money, like we have now, has a 100% historic failure rate. It always, eventually, inflates away to nothingness.

Conservative Republican candidates always tell us they want a small government and strict constructionist judges. This is their talk, but that is not their walk. Violations of the constitution are an every day event.
Where in the constitution does is say that:
• The president can lock people up without charge or trial
• Wiretaps can occur without search warrants
• People can be kidnapped from one country (without extradition) and sent to another for torture
• The Federal government can have anything to say about anything not on the short list of functions in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution

Our freedom is melting away as we look. We are significantly less free than 6 years ago. We can not stand idly by. We owe it to our children to give them as much freedom as we inherited from our parents. The only candidate who will help us get that freedom back is Dr Ron Paul.

Ron Paul vs the Establishment

2007-11-18T15:06:00.000-06:00

We are seeing some interesting politics these days. It will be something to tell our grandchildren about. After decades of the two party system handing us a pair of really bad candidates, over and over again, so bad that sometimes we really could not discern who was the lesser evil, we finally have a potential candidate who actually knows the rules.

Ron Paul has apparently read the constitution and knows what the federal government is not supposed to do. Unfortunately, if he wins, he will upset quite a few apple carts. There are many special interests that have made careers and fortunes from the idiotic and tyrannical (not to mention unconstitutional) actions of the government. This has been going on for so long that the average Joe cannot conceive of the nation operating without all these expensive and wasteful federal programs. I guess that multiple generations of public schooling is part of that problem.

Folks-When the government takes money from you in the form of taxes approaching 50% of your earnings and promises you benefits in exchange, do you really think this will be beneficial to you in total? Do you think that someone else will pay for your benefits and you will profit? You know that is not going to happen! The average Joe will surely lose on that deal. The majority will surely lose on that deal. You will lose control of how your money is spent.

Consider a single segment of socialism to see that is cannot be good on balance. Let us say that the government takes on the job of every one's health insurance company. They do not charge actual premiums but rather raise some tax to cover the cost. Now federal medical spending becomes a matter of congress passing budgets. Let us suppose that in some future year, they want to fight another pointless war to profit some contractor friends. They decide that the risk from the current demon is so great that we have to cut health spending to pay for it. They set up rationing such as waiting lists for expensive operations. Maybe they decide that folks over age XX have very little life left anyway, so why waste the government's money on them. Let them languish on the waiting list till they die. So now that older person, who paid plenty of taxes toward health care has no control over that money that he needs to save his life. It is now the government's money, not his.

Nevertheless, after a few years of that program, people will get used to it and be unable to conceive of medical care without the government as intermediary.

Most everything the government does for you could be better done for yourself if you had control of the tax money back.

If Ron Paul wins, we will start the long process of ending these programs, which are doomed in the long term in any case.

I have heard people say but what about medical care for the poor. Do you how many fewer poor there would be if there were no income tax? How much better every one's standard of living would be without the income tax and the inflation tax?

Support Ron Paul for president if you want:

To get our freedom back from the rapidly expanding police state,
To end the idiotic war in Iraq and prevent an even more idiotic war in Iran
To stop the debasement of the dollar and return to a sound currency
To stop imprisonment without trial
To stop torture in our name
To stop extraordinary rendition (outsourced torture)
To stop wiretapping without warrant
To stop the empire from bankrupting us
To ensure a future of freedom rather than tyranny for our posterity
To stop some horrible civil liberties violations just too numerous to list here.

We find ourselves at a key turning point in the history of our nation. For many decades, we allowed the government to grow in power and take much of our wealth to support welfare programs. It has been a continual loser for us but many of us know nothing else and cannot conceive of freedom. But we owe it to our posterity to preserve and restore freedom. Otherwise they will curse us for our apathy, for putting them in the position of having to physically fight for their freedom back. We can still get it back with a vote. Let's not pass this opportunity by. We won't have another in our lifetimes.

An Epidemic of Taser torture and death

2007-09-22T20:08:00.000-05:00

In the last week, there have been two incidents of police brutality using a Taser in circumstances where it was completely unnecessary. In the two incidents in Florida and California, a peaceful person was arrested for questionable reasons and then tasered for insufficiently quick compliance with police orders.

I am particularly scared by this since in the past, police would be careful to have no witnesses when they used excessive force. In both instances, they did this in front of numerous witnesses and did not mind multiple people video taping close up. This means to me that they believe that the police state is so far advanced that they no longer have to worry about consequences.

I watched three separate videos of the incident in Gainesville FL from different angles. The victim was asking questions politely of John Kerry when, quite suddenly, he was pulled away forcibly by police. He was clearly astonished. I guess he thought that we still live in a free country where there was no penalty for asking a politician an embarrassing question. Well I guess he now knows better. The police state is upon us and torture is OK, not just for Muslims in GITMO but for US citizens as well.

The other astonishing item is that Kerry appeared totally unaware of what was happening. He was actually answering the student's question as he was being tasered in the back of the room. I don't think that he heard the answer.

I think that it is our responsibility right now to visit our respective city councils, county commissions, etc to be sure that they put rules in place to prevent this casual use of Tasers. Police have got this story that they are not lethal and can be used freely. Torture or pain compliance is OK with them. Well torture or pain compliance is not OK with me.

We also have to stress that deaths have occurred and they are not entirely non-lethal. There is risk based on the health of the victim. The officer will likely not know the health of his victim at the time so using a Taser should be considered the use of lethal force. It should not be used except where lethal force would be clearly justified.

One more important point. The neo-con talk radio and TV contingent: Hannitty, O'Reilly and Glen Beck are all laughing at "Taser Boy". They are all down with the police state.

An American History Teachers asks

2007-09-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

A comment from a teacher of American History

As a teacher of American history I never cease to be impressed with how little the American people understand their history, particularly the relationship between government and society. Many citizens equate "freedom" with the unfettered right to "do their own thing", and that government regulation constitutes an abuse of personal liberty. To me, this is not "liberty", but "license"; excessive undisciplined freedom, constituting an abuse of liberty. Our freedom as a people has always been tempered by the government's "power to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States." (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8.) I would submit that regulating where smoking is permitted falls within the province of protecting the "general welfare" of society. We would all do well to heed the whole of the U.S. Constitution's provisions, rather than employing a selective "buffet table." Instead of picking and choosing of those liberties which emphasize individual rights we should not subordinate the best interests and general welfare of the whole society.

That a teacher of American History has these opinions is not surprizing. It is also not surprizing that our freedoms are melting away like a snowball in the Florida sun when our kids are taught this.

In so far as the powers of the federal government, they are strictly limited by Article 1 Section 8. It was the intent of the founders to ensure that ordinary citizens would have little contact with the federal government or its laws and that most areas of daily life would be regulated by the states. This desire was reinforced in the Tenth Amendment.

It is certainly true that the government has been able, through disengenuous arguments, to slip the leash of the constitution and we suffer as a result. I remember, even lo these many years later, when I was in the sixth grade, reading an American history book that extolled the virtues of the "elastic clause". They were refering to the commerce clause of Article 1 Section 8 and how just about everything could be turned into commerce and thus regulated. The courts ran with that and concurred that congress could even regulate what a farmer planted on his land for his own use and call it commerce.

The intention of the founders and the definition of freedom is that the default position is that people did what they wanted and it was not the business of government, at any level, to interfere unless others rights were being violated in the process. This left some grey areas, but they were to be resolved at the state or lower lever. Certainly not at the federal level.

They also set up a system with checks and balances. Every power had a check, and no law which contradicted the constitution had any effect. Those laws would provide no protection and impose no penalties.

So what was the check they had in mind for silly laws passed by the legislature? It was the twice repeated right to trial by jury for ALL CRIMINAL TRIALS (no deminimus) and ALL CIVIL TRIALS (where more than $20 was at stake). Is that in effect today? Do juries know that they are supposed to judge the law as well as the facts? Of course not! They have never been educated in the basics of what our freedom means and how we are to maintain it. Most don't even know that it needs maintenance.

Now. moving on to the states and their sub divisions, we again have some limits imposed by the Federal constitution and some limits imposed by the state constittuion. We also have the same checks and balances between the Governor, the legislature, the courts and the people through the ballot box and the jury box.

Now to the specific matter of smoking limitations: We have specific protections for our property rights. In both the 5th and 14th amendment. We were promised that we would never be deprived of our property without due process. When the city or county government tells the owner of a bar, restaurant, or such how he may use his property, they diminish its value and deprive him of property without his having committed any prior crime. The proposed statute and that in other cities in the area impose fines for violating this law that will be adjucated in municipal court without benefit of trial by jury.

Yes, I am saying that every single charge needs to be adjudicated by a jury so that the people will have their check on what I consider an unjust law. Will it be very hard to get a conviction? You bet! That is because there is a significant minority that will defend the rights to property and hung juries will be the order of the day. Prosecutors will stop bringing charges and the law will melt away. That is what is supposed to happen to unjust laws. That is how minorities can protect themselves from overbearing, politically driven, majorities. It is a key ingredient to keeping a government in check and governments must be kept in check.

History shows us that, with the passage of time, power leaves the people and goes to government. Government must protect us from all manner of evil. This is why we must always have some demon to fear. In my lifetime it was communists, terrorists, Kadaffi, Saddam, Osama, Islamofascists, druggies, homosexuals, foreigners in general and on without end. Government makes new laws to violate our rights in order to protect us from the demon of the day and the people cheer. "Thus is freedom lost, to wild applause."

Do you teach about the function of juries in your American History class? WHY NOT?

Pro-War Libertarians?

2007-08-02T16:07:00.000-05:00

Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Randy Barnett, a self proclaimed libertarian in which he chided anti-war libertarians as giving libertarianism a bad name. He specifically had it in for Ron Paul whose candidacy, he thought, would set back the cause of libertarianism by scaring off the pro-war folks.

The logic was so perverse that I was moved to write a Letter to the Editor. Alas, my letter was not published so I am reproducing it below for your reading pleasure.

Start letter:
Randy Barnett in "Libertarians and the War", (7/17/2007) sure has a funny idea of Libertarian philosophy and moral standards.

The first principle of a libertarian is non-aggression. One must never initiate force against another. Clearly this leaves plenty of room for self defense, where the other party initiated the force. So, to determine the morality of the Iraq War, we must ask ourselves if the force we applied to Iraq and its people was, in fact justified as self defense. If it was not, it is mass murder.

Mr. Barnett attempts to paint a picture where our nation, having been attacked by a handful of Muslims on 9/11 and some earlier incidents where the number of aggressors was small, can now attack all or any of 800 million Muslims in the world and call it self defense.

I think not! This is using the principle of group guilt. This is the same principle used by Hitler to massacre Jews and Stalin to kill any anti-communists he could find. This is not a fit principle for this nation or any nation that claims the moral high ground.

We also know that the first excuse given for the invasion, to defend ourselves against the imminent use of Weapons of Mass Destruction was not just false, it was known false by our government as it was being claimed. We are probably approaching one million dead souls from this war and all that blood is on the hands of this administration.

Anyone who self identifies himself as a Libertarian but thinks the invasion of Iraq was justified needs a refresher course in our principles. Congressman Paul understands these principles quite well and none of the other Republican candidates even comes close.

Freedom vs Tyranny

2007-07-14T12:25:00.001-05:00

Maybe the title seems too self important for a discussion of a smoking ordinance but that is how I see it. Every violation of property rights makes the next violation easier. Pretty soon, it seems perfectly normal and if you think that I am making a big deal over a smoking ordinance, then you have already fallen into that trap.

Now, let me start out by saying that I do not smoke and do not own a bar or restaurant whose business will be affected by the ordinance. What I am is a citizen of the United States and Kansas and I know that property rights are the underlying rights for all others. Without safe property rights, the other rights become theoretical constructs. They can no longer be reliably enforced. If you are always a tenant, then the government controlled landlord is truly your master. You really need your own property to assert many of your rights.

At its July 3rd meeting, the Lenexa, KS City council passed an ordinance that would make it illegal to smoke inside any building that was not a private residence. There was a small exception for a business that was entirely a tobacco seller. The vote was 7 to 1 and the one guy who dissented had no problem with the concept of the government controlling private property. He only wanted to carve out one more exception for his favored special interest.

There was little advance notice to the public about the action so only myself and one bar owner from across the street were there to speak against it. We both had heard about it accidentally at the last moment. There were plenty of representatives from the special interests that like to run our lives (for our own good, of course) who apparently had plenty of notice.

A further insult was to take this vote on the eve of the Independence Day celebration. This shows us the disdain that our leaders have for our tradition of freedom. We need to fight to get our freedom back. We have lost a major share and we cannot let any more violations occur, no matter how trivial this individual item seems and even if you don't smoke or own an affected business. Today it is restaurant owners, tomorrow it might be your business or your political interests that are savaged.

To have freedom for yourself and your posterity, you must grant it to others; even if you don't exactly like what they do with it.

I Went to a City Commission Meeting

2007-07-04T14:31:00.000-05:00

On the eve of our Independence Day celebration, I attended a Lenexa, KS city commission meeting. The primary purpose for my attendance was to speak about a proposed smoking ban. I came away with at least 3 blog subjects.

I will take the outrages in the order that they occurred. First on the agenda was a period of open communication where people can address the august governing body on any topic not otherwise on the agenda for the evening.

Two ladies complained about their newly built houses falling apart and wanted the city to do something about it. They thought that the city should be liable for their huge loss because the building inspector did not do a good job. The Mayor and the council let them rant through their allotted 5 minutes and then ignored them.

I find this very disrespectful. They deserve a meaningful answer. Of course the city isn't liable. The Mayor should tell them so. He should explain that under Kansas Statute 75-6104 no state or municipal employee is civilly liable for any failure to perform and their only recourse is to sue their builders.

The public should be aware that, notwithstanding the taxes we pay for police, fire, building inspectors and a host of other "discretionary" services, there is no liability if the municipality fails to perform well or even fails to perform at all.

The public needs to be more aware of this statute so that they do not foolishly rely on municipal services as these two ladies apparently did to their catastrophic sorrow.

This has application in other matters such as gun control. They would know that the argument that you don't need a gun because the police are there to protect you is an empty and false promise. A right to protection that cannot be enforced is a gift that can arbitrarily be withdrawn. This is certainly not a right by any common understanding of the word. It doesn't matter that you paid taxes specifically to secure the right.

So, if the Fire Department doesn't show up for an hour when your house is on fire, you have no claim on the city for negligence. You better have taken care of yourself with fire alarms and fire insurance.

Iraq War Funding

2007-06-09T14:50:00.000-05:00

I was outraged when I found that my congress critter, Dennis Moore, the man who is supposed to represent my interests in Congress, though a Democrat who professes that he is unhappy about the war still voted for the supplemental appropriations bill to give the Idiot in Chief enough money for another year of mass murder.

Here is what I sent him immediately after the vote:

Dear Congressman, I am terribly disappointed that you voted for the Iraq Supplemental money bill. Besides the pork included as a sweetener which is a terrible waste of the people's money you allowed the mass murder to go on for many more months.
At the rate that deaths have been occuring, you probably signed on for at least 20,000 more deaths (if you count Iraqis as human beings, that is).

Since money is the only lever that congress has to stop the war, with an evil man in the White House, you gave up the opportunity to stop the slaughter till this pile of money is used up.
Can you explain why you did this other than some cynical vote calculus? end

Today, I received his answer. It is a three page letter but I shall distill it down to three paragraphs that actually answered the question and we shall see what it all means.

Dennis Moore wrote:
"This passage of this legislation marks the beginning of the end of the Iraq war. H.R. 2206 brings accountability to the war for the first time and ends the previous policy of blank checks and open ended commitments.

I understand and share your frustration with the continued U.S. military involvement in Iraq, but to cut off all funding for the troops by voting against this bill would have been irresponsible and unrealistic. In early May, Congress sent the President an emergency supplemental spending bill for Iraq that provided every dollar President Bush requested for military operations in Iraq. It also provided a plan to bring this war to a responsible end, including language to start to redeploy our troops in four months, and to have the majority of them out by 2008, apart from a small number that would remain to continue training Iraqi Security.Forces. I supported this legislation, but President Bush vetoed this bill on May 1, 2007, and repeatedly stated his intention to veto any future bill containing a timeline for withdrawal. Due to the unwillingness of the Administration to compromise on this matter, Congress was forced to alter portions of the original bill in order to ensure our troops currently serving in Iraq have the equipment and supplies they need. While President Bush may be willing to play political games with this issue, I am not. As long as U.S. military personnel will remain in Iraq, I will do everything I can to ensure they, and their families back home, have the protection and support they deserve.

My support for the supplemental to ensure our troops have necessary funding does not mean I support the current strategy in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group (ISG) report, which was published in December 2006, contains several key strategies that I believe need to be implemented in Iraq as soon as possible. As you may know, the most important recommendations from the ISG call for new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region, and a change in the primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq that will enable the U.S. to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly." end of letter

So, when 50% of congress could cut off money and end the war, they passed that opportunity by and gave Bush enough money for another year. Now it will take 2/3 to take the money back or otherwise force the end of the war (needed to over ride the expected veto). What do we do now?

What Are They Smoking?

2007-06-05T07:05:00.000-05:00

I sometimes wonder what the Republican mainstream is thinking. Are they thinking at all? Are they all under the influence of some dastardly drug? Maybe the Democrats drugged them to induce this idiotic self destructive behavior.

How can they expect to win an election with a pro-war candidate? Yet they have put up 9 pro-war candidates and apparently are holding 2 more pro-war candidates in the wings. They ridicule their one and only anti-war candidate.

The Republican candidate will be up against an anti-war Democrat (of variable degree of believability) in November of 2008. Do they really think the public will vote for more war by then? The war is an increasing disaster. It will be unbearable by 2008.

The results will be a Democratic victory and we will then suffer all the other baggage that comes from economically illiterate Democrats. We will have socialized medicine and more welfare state generally. It will be a disaster.

Making sure that Ron Paul is the nominee is an absolute necessity. Any pro-war candidate is idiocy of the first degree.

As a Libertarian, I should probably shut up and watch the Republicans commit party suicide, but I cannot remain silent when the risk to the nation is so great.

Who Is Ron Paul?

2007-06-03T10:34:00.001-05:00

Today's title is an unabashed reference to Atlas Shrugged. Who is John Galt? That question permeated the book. Of course, if you persevered, you eventually met the hero of the book and the savior of civilization from the dark cloud of collectivism.

I don't know if Ron Paul can save us from the death of civilization that big government collectivism is leading us to. It may be too late. Nevertheless, we had better give him a chance.

In the past, the two party duopoly got people to vote for the lesser evil over and over again by keeping the existence of a libertarian alternative a secret. If anyone asked, he was told that he would be wasting his vote on the Libertarian and he should pick the lesser evil of the duopoly.

Election after election, the lesser evil won and the evil consequences have cumulatively put us into a precarious situation. Total government debt, including all the welfare entitlements, now exceeds the net worth of the entire nation (that of the government and of the people).

What is different this time is the libertarian alternative is running with a major party label. Of course, the main line Republicans can't stand this and will do their best to kill the only chance the nation has to break free from the evil of the two party lesser evil choice. For the most part, they are using the 'ignore him' approach. I suppose we will see how well that works for them.

The polls are giving mixed results. The polls taken immediately after a debate from debate viewers give Paul the lead. Polls taken of the nation as a whole do not. It appears that name recognition is the difference.

Ron Paul

2007-06-02T19:16:00.000-05:00

Today I joined a group of people at the Plaza in Kansas City who were supporters of Ron Paul. These are not paid campaign workers. They are just citizens who know that something is very wrong in our nation. The government ignores the limits on its power put in place by the constitution and that is just not acceptable.

Because the government ignores its limits, we have confiscatory taxation to pay for things that the government should never be paying for. We have bureaucrats telling us what to do and what not to do in every aspect of our lives. We have a rapidly disappearing dollar and a huge debt. We have citizens and non-citizens alike locked up without charge or trial and our government is torturing people in our name.

These people, of many ethnic and party affiliations, all understand what is wrong-too much government. They want desperately to do something to support the one major party candidate that openly favors smaller government and means it. His lifetime voting record proves that he means it.

He is the only Republican candidate who is against the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. Since the vast majority of the public is also anti-war, one wonders what the other nine candidates are thinking. How do they think that they can win a general election?

Is it their expectation to be running against a pro-war Democrat and then give us the usual "lesser evil" story. Well no more lesser evil for this voter. The lesser evil that was elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004 has killed hundreds of thousands of human beings for no reason. How is that a lesser and acceptable evil?

If neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have an acceptable, peace loving and freedom loving candidate, then I urge all voters to elect the Libertarian candidate. We cannot survive a lesser evil again. You are not wasting your vote. You would waste it voting for the lesser evil one more time.

They Know They are Doing Wrong

2007-06-02T07:44:00.000-05:00

There has been some debate in anti-war circles about the motives of the administration. Are they just idiots who do not understand human nature, the horrors of war or the consequences of their actions? Maybe they know full well what they are doing but consider the war profits worth the price that the American and Iraqi people are paying.

Some recent under the table activity might help us decide. They show shame! The website of the Kansas City architectural firm, Berger Devine Yaeger showed artist sketches of the proposed Baghdad embassy that they are designing. When it started getting noticed and linked to in anti-war websites, where it was referred to as the The Colossus of Baghdad, the Pentagon got upset. They did not want the nice pretty details made public. The excuse was that it might give terrorists information, but there was insufficient detail for that. The real reason could only be shame.

The firm's website was scrubbed and the Google cache of disappeared web sites was also scrubbed. Of course, in today's world, that is not nearly good enough. Anyone, anywhere in the world might well have saved copies and, in fact, they did. Take a look at what your tax dollars are building in a city where the locals still have no reliable public utilities four years after our government's illegal invasion.

http://dissentradio.com/embassy/embassy.html

I believe that this proves that the administration and the Neo-conservatives behind them know full well that they are doing wrong and they are a group of evil people, working toward their own riches and power. We, as a nation, have an obligation to renounce them and their actions up to the point of criminal action. We owe the world nothing less to remove the stain on our honor.

Ron Paul and the nine war mongers

2007-05-16T18:53:00.000-05:00

I had a lot of fun last night watching the Republican presidential debate on Faux News. Nine candidates who think the war in Iraq should go on and torture is OK if you call it enhanced interrogation techniques vs. one lone sane man named Ron Paul.

The moderators surely did their best to marginalize him and try to make him a laughing stock. He held his ground and kept on message. What we are doing in Iraq is very wrong and it must end, ASAP.

After the debate was over, the commentators went out of their way to tell us he was nuts and should not be allowed in future debates. Then came the high point of the evening. They announced that Ron Paul was leading in their text message poll with 30% of the vote. Romney was a close second and Guliani a distant third. The others were in the mud.

Hannitty was only speechless for a moment and then everyone accused Paul of having his people stuff the ballot box. It could not possibly be right.

Later in the evening, more votes pushed Romney ahead and left Paul in second place with Guliani still a distant third. The rest, including McCain and our favorite son, Brownback, remained in the mud. I would like to formally accuse Romney's people of stuffing the ballot box at the end to achieve that first place finish. I have as much evidence as Hannity does.

Can someone tell me how the Republicans expect to win a general election with candidates who openly profess that they want to continue the slaughter in Iraq, torture folks and institute a police state including 'tamperproof identity cards", no habeus corpus and enemy combatants.

Twenty Questions

2007-05-06T13:14:00.000-05:00

What follows is a list of questions to be asked of our current Federal representatives and Senators and any future candidates. I see it as kind of a litmus test. If they can't answer these questions in a satisfactory manner, they are clearly unfit for office in a constitutional republic.

For the record, this is not entirely original. I took the idea from a posting on a Yahoo group, where it was 17 questions and edited it to include some of my personal hot buttons.

1. Do you still support our United States Constitution, as written, and all of the Amendments to our Constitution, as you swore (or will swear, if you are a candidate) to do in your Oath of Office?
2. Do you believe that American citizens have a right to expect that every elected official obey and support our United States Constitution in its entirety?
3. What recourse do you believe American citizens should have when a public official acts, or proposes a law, contrary to the American Rule of Law, as set down in our United States Constitution? Please explain!
4. Do you believe that all branches of government, including regulatory and tax collection agencies, should support and obey our United States Constitution?
5. Please explain under what authority you may feel that government agency could be immune from the rules set down for government by our Constitution.
6. Do you support the right of an American citizen to protect life, family and home against all intruders, with the exception of officials who have a duly sworn warrant and have given proper notice of that warrant as required by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution?
7. If not, please describe any situations where you believe the Fourth Amendment no longer applies, and why.
8. Do you support the right of an American citizen to move around and function in society as they please, unimpeded by any government agent, so long as they do not interfere with other citizens with their activities?
9. What restrictions to personal liberty do you support, and why?
10. Do you support the right of American citizens to acquire, keep and if necessary to defend, real and personal property free from restriction by the federal government?
11. If not, please explain under what Constitutional authority the federal government may restrict the use of personal and private property.
12. What exceptions do you support to the Bill of Rights, and how may these exceptions be justified under the law without amending the Constitution?
13. Are there any areas of human behavior or activities that cannot be regulated by the federal Government? If so, please list any ten that come to mind.
14. Will you certify that you will reject any bill coming before you that does not conform, strictly, to the United States Constitution as written?
15. Furthermore, will you work to repeal all laws, rules, regulations and executive orders not conforming to the written words and intent of the Constitution?
16. Can you name any situation where it is appropriate for the executive branch to imprison any person on US soil and hold him without charge or trial and deny Habeus Corpus process to that person?
17. Is there any situation where you would advocate torture of prisoners?
18. Is there an upper limit to how much of a person’s earnings can be taken by the
government in taxation? Is 50% the upper limit? Is 75% OK? Is it permissible to take it all?
19. If a person is ill, is it within the power of government to deny him the right, under
threat of prison, to use any substance, process or equipment to deal with his illness, even if the government thinks that it will not work?
20. Is it permissible for government to prevent private individuals, spending their own money, from advocating for or against any candidate for office?

Gun Control? Are you crazy?

2007-04-18T18:43:00.000-05:00

Mike Hendrick's of the Kansas City Star wrote an op-ed on 4/18/07 suggesting that the solution to mass shootings is more gun control. This is the most perverse logic.

Can you imagine a world where someone is free to shoot and kill 32 people with probably hundreds of witnesses, all of whom would have had an easy shot to put a stop to the killing after his first or second shot. But not one of them had the tool needed to end the killing and the killing went on till the maniac was satiated.

Virginia is a must issue concealed carry state but the university campus is under special laws. The state legislature, in its idiocy, made the campus (and every campus in Virginia) a gun free zone. Thus, the crazies that will always be among us can shoot up a school without opposition till the police arrive. Even if they show up in 5 or 10 minutes, many will die because no one on the scene can stop the insanity.

Isn't it obvious that it was gun control that killed all but the first few fictims? Isn't it obvious that more of the same poison is not the solution?

The results are in. Where people can defend themselves, mass shootings do not happen! It is an unspeakable crime to force people into a defenseless position.

Those Dirty, Rotten Taxes. The Burden on Civilization.

2007-04-14T14:38:00.000-05:00

Liberals worry about the regressive nature of the Social Security tax (FICA) and the sales tax is somewhat regressive as well. We are also burdened with a very progressive (in the sense that the rate goes up the more you make) income tax. Conservatives used to worry about that a lot. The combined result of both of these taxes is a full fledged caste system. It prevents new upstart families from having a fair shot at getting rich. It locks the already rich families into positions of wealth and power.

In a lightly taxed (free) nation, the path to wealth is to get an education, learn a useful skill and use that knowledge to earn some money via salary. By working for someone else, you get the advantage of his capital investment and you can accumulate savings until you have enough to invest in your own business and start making more money. At this point, savings becomes capital.

Our current tax system impedes your progress in two ways. When you are young and still learning, you are heavily taxed by the regressive taxes. This is a burden but not a full fledged stopper on your path to wealth. But when you start earning a good salary, the income tax comes in to suck up your surplus and prevent that critical capital accumulation phase. This hurts you terribly and it also hurts society. Society at large should have its standard of living improved by the capital accumulation of individuals as overall productivity increases. We have that down to a trickle thanks to the progressive income tax.

The leaders of our current, very unfree, nation care more for their wealth and relative privilege than they do your standard of living. This is not any different than the Kings, Sultans, Pharoahs, etc of the past. They lived well at the long and short term expense of their subjects. In our nation, we do have the power to stop this if we could just got over the two party paradigm and start thinking as free people again. I prefer that to being a subject.

I consider the income tax as fractional slavery. If they are taking 40% of your earnings, how is that different from requiring the surfs of the Middle Ages to work 40% of their time on their master's crops before they could work on their own?

Political Theatre

2007-03-24T10:11:00.000-05:00

The Democrats, who just got control of congress with a clear mandate to end the war have passed a bill to give the president the money to continue the war for more than another year. It has about 20% vote buying gravy built in and has some restrictions that might just end the war in time for the 2008 presidential election. I wonder if that timing is an accident.

Of course, the president is unhappy about it and threatens to veto. There will be pious talk about the need to support the troops, that if we do not give the president the money he is asking for we will be leaving the troops in Iraq without food or bullets. All the while, the administration will be demonizing Iran, setting us up for another disastrous misadventure.

We need to cut to the chase! Congress can say no more money for fighting. There is only money for leaving. If the president vetoes that, he is the one leaving the troops without food or bullets.
No compromise that continues the war for any amount of time is acceptable.

If Congress compromises away their anti-war mandate, it will be time for massive civil disobedience. Either they cut off the money to the war or we cut off the money to them.

As a child growing up in New York City in the 1950s I was surrounded by Holocaust survivors (with tattooed numbers on their arms) and constant discussion about how it happened. How did the German citizens let it happen? Didn't they know it was happening? Didn't they notice all the people disapearing from their midst? Did they let their civil liberties melt away before they realized what was happening and then it was too dangerous to speak out? Of course, we thought that it could not happen here! Not in America with our free speech, free elections and the constitution!

But it is happening here. Our civil liberties are melting away and it will soon be too dangerous to speak out. Of course we are not there yet. We can still stop it. We just have to wake up and understand what is happening. We must see that the two party system is a race to the bottom. Each party wants total control and that is the first value. It doesn't bother them that the price of their total control is your future, your live and your weatlh.

The government is using our money to commit heinous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are kidnapping and torturing prisoners at GITMO, and other prisons around the world. Does Congress become accomplices by funding this activity? Are we not accomplices by continuing to support the government?

YOU WANT TO LEGALIZE DRUGS! ARE YOU CRAZY?

2007-02-04T19:42:00.000-06:00

In America, everyone knows that drugs are the worst possible things on Earth and we must do everything possible to prevent people of any age using those terrible things.

As a result, we as a nation have spent many decades trying to arrest ourselves out of drug usage.

We have more of our population in jail than any other nation in the world, even those evil Godless Communist dictatorships.
We routinely kill people during no-knock raids because we fear that those dastardly druggies will flush the evidence down the toilet.
We deny sick people access to useful medicine because they might enjoy it.
Our government has even shot down a private plane full of missionaries in the Andes because it was flying a course that drug couriers often flew.
Tobacco kills 400,000 people a year but is legal for those 18 or older. Alcohol kills over 100,000 people a year but is legal for those 21 or older. Marijuana has never killed one person in all of human recorded history but is illegal for everyone. It is responsible for three quarters of a million arrests a year.
By continuing this War on Drugs, we make a common weed more valuable than gold by weight and enrich a whole industry of growers, transporters, sellers, police, prison guards, prison builders, and prosecuting and defense attorneys.
The cost to society is on the order of $100 billion per year when you include the lost productivity of those poor souls rotting in jail for nothing.
Your children are placed in danger from the law if they chose to engage in harmless experimentation. There is nothing that marijuana can do that is anywhere near what an arrest can do to your child’s future.
We, all of us, are placed in danger of drug related crime needed to pay the black market prices of "illegal" drugs, or to settle disputes between dealers who cannot use the courts.

If you want to live in a free nation, it has to be free for everyone. If you want to be free to go to a church of your choice, drink an occasional cocktail, go to political meetings, smoke cigarettes or whatever you might like to do that someone else might think wrong, then you must support similar freedom for everyone else. If you want to be secure in your home and not have to worry about a dangerous no-knock search by police based on the word of paid informers or personal enemies, then help us end the insane War on Drugs.

We tried, in the last century, to prohibit alcohol. It did not work out, did it? Alcohol use increased, we created a criminal underworld to supply it and locked up a bunch of people. It is time to rethink the anti-drug paradigm and restore freedom for us and future generations. In the process, we will put the seedy underworld that now supplies drugs out of business overnight.

One more impeachable offense

2007-01-06T10:37:00.000-06:00

To add to the already impressive list of impeachable offenses by our current president, we have one more insult to our constitutional order and the rule of law.

It seems that, just before Christmas, the president signed a bill related to the post office. That bill reaffirmed existing law that clearly states that mail can be opened by the government only with a search warrant. The Fourth Amendment allows no other option.

Our lawless president took the opportunity to add a signing statement http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/12/20061220-6.html to assert that the law did not apply when he, the decider, thought it was an emergency national security situation. As usual with such assertions, there is no definition or limits on this asserted power.

So, to sum up, the decider can decide to:

Lock people up indefinitely without charge or trial
Listen in on phone calls
Record all the phone numbers you call or that call you
Investigate what books you read, what movies you see
Track all your monetary transactions
Monitor your e-mail activity
Read your paper mail

All this without the concurrence of any judge or needing to state any prima facia reason to do so. How is this functionally different from the actions of the KGB in the old USSR? You know, the country of the Godless Communists. Oh Yeah! That is the difference. We have God on our side.

I am so glad that I live in a free country under the rule of law where the government exists to protect my rights, not to take them away.

3000 dead

2006-12-31T14:46:00.000-06:00

I just got the news that the 3,000 th American Soldier died in Iraq fighting for the glory of Who?The only clear winner is Halliburton and other friends of George Bush.

Clearly, there was no legitimate purpose for this war. There was no US national interest involved. There were no illegal weapons to make a self defense claim, no connection to 9-11 to even make a revenge claim.

We can only guess about the thought processes of the idiot in the White House. He is probably just following the directions of some cold blooded plotter whose intent was to get rich. Surely the war has disrupted the world oil market and raised the price of oil for ALL suppliers. Domestic suppliers have won the oil lottery.

How does anyone's personal financial gain justify 3000 American dead, at least half a million Iraqi dead and the waste of a trillion dollars or so?

How will history report this war? Where will the worst long term affects be felt? I think that it will be in the economics. The huge debt that the Federal government is assuming to pay for this fiasco will burden our people for generations. I can conceivably bring down the dollar and create economic devastation such as this nation has never seen.

The economics will take precedence because that is what we will know about. We wont know about the people killed who might have done great things for the world.

Immigration

2006-12-31T10:18:00.000-06:00

One of the hottest topics of discussion in the last year or so has been immigration. The focus has been mostly on illegal immigration but I see a lot of negative feeling about legal immigrants as well. This is probably because most folks are fuzzy about the difference.

I have received many widely circulated e-mails telling me the great net cost of immigration over the benefits. I find the basic premise hard to believe because I know that this nation grew great and strong from the large waves of immigrants that came here from war torn strife all over the world. Indeed my own grandparents came to these shores running from the ravages of World War 1 (father's side) and the Czarist Pogroms in Russia (mother's side).

What is different now from that time, 90 or so year ago when my grandparents arrived? There was no welfare state in America then. Immigrants came here with the expectation to work but here they would get to keep the product of their work and could make a life for themselves and their children. They did not expect any handouts and none were given. They formed mutual help organizations with other immigrants from the same town in the "Old Country", called friendship or benevolent societies. This is how they took care of widows and orphans in the early years. In the later years, these organizations turned into burial organizations and have largely disappeared since our society offers other means (life insurance) to deal with those problems.

Today, we have developed a massive welfare state in the US that has bad effects in every aspect of our lives. First of course we have the huge tax rates, collected mostly by a progressive income tax that is clearly designed to prevent any new upstart wealthy families. The way to progress in a capitalist society is education, get a good job and earn a high salary, accumulate wealth to invest in a business and become wealthy. The progressive income tax breaks that chain when you start earning a high salary. It starts sucking your money up and prevents the capital accumulation phase. It should be no surprise that the progressive income tax was invented by Karl Marx and was a prime feature of the Communist Manifesto.

But I digress. I will state unequivocally that open immigration is not compatible with the welfare state. The welfare state tends to attract those who would benefit from it rather than workers who want to make their own way.

So we know from experience that immigration with no welfare state is a positive good and that the welfare state is damaging to the productive people in society. I will be so bold as to say that the welfare state is evil. It depends on continual organized theft from the productive to the non-productive members of society (immigrants or native born).

So what is the correct (moral) position for a freedom loving Libertarian? Should we accept the evil welfare state as an unchangeable fact of nature like a mountain or an earthquake , that we have to learn to live with and rant about immigrants using that welfare state. I say NO.

We should respect the rights of individuals, no matter what geographical area they were born in, to freely interact with any other individual on a voluntary basis. The demise of the welfare state should be the goal of our activities.

The War Prayer

2006-12-16T09:22:00.000-06:00

How is it that the same people who quote the bible and are strongly pro-life when speaking of embryos do not even wince when they hear the Iraqi body count?

In the course of our Libertarian outreach activities, we came upon a person who told us that, in the runup to the 2004 election, the pastor in their church had threatened all the parishioners that if they did not vote for Bush, surely the world will end. See how things never change. Here is a little article written by Mark Twain a long time ago.

"The War Prayer" was a vivid commentary on the misappropriation of religion on behalf of nationalistic causes. It begins with a church service in which the pastor calls down the blessings of God upon American military forces and concludes with, "Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!"

A frail old man makes his way into the church and, waving the pastor aside, explains that he has spoken with God Himself, who wishes to hear the other half of that prayer - the half that was only in their hearts and uttered but implicitly.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! With them - in spirit - we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

The story ends abruptly, with the people considering the man a lunatic - and, presumably, carrying on as before.

Are Iraqi lives worth less than American lives? Are they worth less even than American embryos? Are they worth less than a brain dead Terri Shiavo? What is the exchange rate for Iraqi lives versus American lives? Is it 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 10 to 1? I am sure that, if there is a God, he loves all his children equally and the correct ratio is 1 to 1.

How then do the strongly pro-life (anti-abortion) folks support the president who kills all these Iraqis? I have no answer, it is a question for the ages. Mass stupidity and moral blindness is a constant theme throughout history.

As a people, we have a moral obligation to keep our government in control. We are responsible for the damage it does if we are negligent in our duty. To maintain our moral standards, we have no choice now but to demand impeachment and prison for Bush, Cheney and his accomplices in this heinous crime.

Why Do People vote for Either of the Two Big Government Parties

2006-11-30T18:18:00.000-06:00

I know I have written on this before, but the quote following brought it back to mind. It also offered a possible explanation.

WHY WE LOVE GOVERNMENT: "We love government because it enables us to accomplish things that if done privately would lead to arrest and imprisonment. For example, if I saw a person in need, and I took your money to help him, I'd be arrested and convicted of theft. If I get Congress to do the same thing, I am seen as compassionate. "This vision ought to bother the Christians among us, for when God gave Moses the commandment "Thou shalt not steal," I'm sure He didn't mean thou shalt not steal unless you got a majority vote in Congress."
-- syndicated columnist Walter Williams.

What should clearly be understood as theft becomes an honorable example of charity when you fall for the big government paradigm. After growing up in this nation, with its government run schooling and its media that dares not criticize the government, it is easy to fall into that trap. Now that you have read this, you are under a moral obligation to rethink the issue.

You give honorable charity when you give your own property. You are a thief when you advocate or cooperate in the giving of someone else's property, assuming the owner has not consented. There is no honor to be had in that situation.

The dishonor is not just upon the congressional representatives that vote for the "charity at gunpoint". It extends to citizens who pressure for it, to the government clerks who collect the taxes and pay out the goodies and even to the newspaper editors who assist in the propaganda that got it passed.

Conservative-What does it mean?

2006-11-23T10:02:00.000-06:00

When I first became politically aware as a teenager, Barry Goldwater was running for president. He called his philosophy conservative. He believed in small and obedient government, obedient to the constitution. That notion attracted me and the majority of the 1960s Republican Party and he was the 1964 candidate for president.

Lyndon Johnson (widely known as landslide Lyndon for his 48 vote victory in a Texas Senatorial election where several ballot boxes went missing) did a very good job of convincing the public that if they voted for Goldwater, he would blow up the world and certainly escalate the Viet Nam war. He did such a good job that even Kansas went Democratic that year.

Johnson left office in disgrace for his Viet Nam war mistakes and Republican Richard Nixon won a squeaker in 1968. This was the year of my first vote and I voted for Nixon. He was from the same party as Goldwater and I expected the same philosophy. Boy was I disappointed!

Many people of my generation became disenchanted with the Republicans as a source of conservative thought and action and the Libertarian Party was founded in 1971 as a reaction to Nixon's treachery. Other conservatives stayed with the Republicans out of some misplaced loyalty, true hate for the Democrats or just an example of the power of faith over experience. They are still conservative in the original meaning of wanting a small, obedient government.

Come we now to the present and a small group of war mongers wanted to make a splash on US foreign policy. They adopt the name of neo-conservative for themselves and manage to convince the large number of conservatives in the Republican Party that to be conservative means to do what they say. To be conservative today is to espouse a large and unruly government. Their style of government gets into wars at the drop of hat. It finds reasons to terminate long held civil liberties on lame excuses. It finds no problem in ignoring long held moral values of this nation and engages in massive torture, the disappearing of unwanted folks and all the other trappings of a police state.

Well all you small government conservatives, I ask you, has the Republican Party served you well? Have they kept the government small, kept spending down to a minimum and been obedient to the constitution? Of course not!

Since the Democratic Party is certainly not the party for small, obedient government, what will you do?

The only national party today that advocates what you say you want is the Libertarian Party. When we say we want a small government that will be obedient to the constitution, we mean it.
You should have joined us in the 1970's after the Nixon debacle but you must do it now. There is no other hope for the nation. If you want freedom for yourself and your posterity, join and support the Libertarians. It is the only reasonable alternative.

The Mainstream Coalition

2006-11-12T22:33:00.000-06:00

Sunday, I sat in on a panel discussion sponsored by the Mainstream Coalition. The topics ranged from the separation of church and state to our relationship to Israel. Apparently the main focus of the Coalition is support of public education including increased finding and careful separation of religion and government.

How do we make them see that their goals are contradictory?

A substantial number of parents want their kids to be bible believers and to hear no contradictory facts and that is their right. This is the reason for the vehement battle over teaching evolution vs. Creation. What this battle really teaches us is that public education and religious freedom are simply not compatible.

The constitution says that there shall be no establishment of religion but it also says that there should be no laws interfering with the free exercise of religion. How do you protect the free exercise of religion for a fundamentalist Christian at the same time that you do not provide support for a religion with tax funds? As long as you run a tax supported government school system you simply cannot meet both goals.

The way to satisfy both requirements is to develop a program of choice in education. Then each parent can send his kid and the tax money that supports the school to the school that teaches what he wants his kid to learn. So tell my why the Mainstream Coalition is opposed to school choice?

Of course there will be many more benefits than just support of religious freedom.

Education, like any other service or commodity, gets better and cheaper when it is supplied by a competitive market. On the other hand, the Coalition believes, in a demonstration of the power of faith over experience, that all we need to make education better is more money.

Why would one expect that school board managers would use the extra money in the most efficient way? If anything, they have incentive to do poorly since they can use poor test results to ask for still more money. This is a classic example of adverse incentives. A private school manager, on the other hand, has every incentive to do the best job possible. He has to worry about dissatisfied parents removing their kids AND their money to some other school that does better.

Choice in education will cut the cost of education, probably in half. We just might be able to get government out of education all together which will mean a huge reduction in state taxes.

Rights of the first and second kind

2006-11-05T16:51:00.000-06:00

People use the word 'rights' in a sloppy manner. They talk about one kind of right such as the right to free speech, or right to remain silent but then they confuse themselves by talking about another, very different type of right, such as the right to health care or the right to a living wage. When you use the same word you place these quite different concepts in apparent equality. They are not equal.

The first type of right is known as negative rights. Negative rights are the rights that allow you to be left alone, to make your own decisions, to be free from interference in living your life. The key is-No other person has to give up any of their rights for you to have yours. They just have to mind their own business. Examples: freedom of speech , press, religion, property, due process, bear arms, etc.

Positive rights are quite a different animal. When someone asserts a right to medical care, he asserts a right to make a doctor into a slave (or to make a taxpayer into a slave to pay the doctor). When you talk about the right to a living wage, you assert the right to force an employer, at the point of a government gun, to pay some particular wage rate that you arbitrarily determined. These are not rights, they are assertions of arbitrary power similar to the assertion of power made by an armed robber. "Your money or your life". They are moral obscenities. They do not deserve any consideration in a nation that claims its primary principle is freedom.

The concept stems from the old socialist saying-From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The evil content of this saying has been written on for generations. I recommend Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand for a detailed exposition.

Questions!!

2006-10-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-10-21T10:23:00.000-05:00

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

2006-10-01T19:37:00.000-05:00

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.

Eminent Domain Abuse

2006-09-17T13:33:00.000-05:00

During the last session of the Kansas legislature, we nearly got a state constitutional amendment through the house that would have ended the abuse of eminent domain in Kansas once and for all. It was a well written amendment that covered all the loopholes. You can look up the details on the state's website. Look for HCR 5025.

A 2/3 vote was required and we missed by 3 votes. Most of the Johnson County delegation voted against it, most particularly the incumbent for the 17th district. She did ultimately vote for a legislative version (S 323). It is ineffective.

Firstly it does not take effect for a year, giving the property thieves a full year to take property with no problem.

Secondly, it provided an override for the legislature to give permission to take property for private use.

Thirdly, and worst of all, it is really easy to amend. A constitutional amendment would need to go to the voters to undo. Already the opponents of private property protection are talking about amendments to the act to provide for more exceptions that would not need legislative approval. Even the dreaded word, BLIGHT, has been mentioned.

Blight is a terrible sounding word with no definition. If they allow cities and counties to take property by calling it blighted, we have lost the war. Around the nation, houses have been labeled as blighted because they have a 1 car garage in a 2 car garage neighborhood, because it is painted an unusual color, because the grass has bald spots and every other imaged issue.

They will probably have it amended to nothingness before it takes effect. The only way to stop that is to ensure that the state representative candidate you vote for understands the importance of property rights. Libertarians understand this by nature. It is in our political genes.

Just what does the war on terror mean?

2006-09-11T21:34:00.000-05:00

Terrorism is a tactic. It can be used by anyone, anytime, when they feel themselves aggrieved and have no other good way to get revenge.

The president speaks of winning the war on terror. What does he mean? Does he think that there are a finite number of terrorists in the world and if we kill them all, we will have won the war? That is silly. No matter how many you kill, more are being created. All you have to do is violate some people's rights in such a way that they cannot fight back.

The one and only thing that we can do to stop the terrorists is to stop creating new terrorists with foreign policy abuse.

My issues

2006-09-03T15:23:00.000-05:00

Like all good politicians, I have chosen three issues to concentrate on during the campaign. I assure you that I have opinions on many other issues. But here goes.

I am running for the Kansas House of Representatives for district 17. This covers parts of Lenexa and Shawnee in Johnson County.

As a Libertarian, my first value is individual freedom. Republicans and Democrats all promise you big government solutions to our problems. They are always telling us that if we give them just a little more in taxes everything will be great. History teaches us that big government solutions are expensive and don’t work.
If elected, I will be a voice for your rights, all your rights, all the time. I want to hand a free nation over to my kids and yours. Aren’t you disappointed in how poorly the other two parties have served your interests?

1. If you are interested in protecting your property rights, I am your man. Property rights are fundamental to securing all other rights. Eminent domain abuse has to be prevented in no uncertain terms. It cannot be left up to political decision making. This requires a state constitutional amendment. My opponent voted against such an amendment and voted instead for an ineffective substitute.

2. If you are interested in real improvements in educational opportunities for your kids, I have a novel idea for you to consider. In everything else we do, we depend on competition to get us the best quality at the lowest price. That is the right choice for education as well. I propose that every parent have the option to take their kid and the money for his education to the school of the parent’s choice-public, private, parochial or to cover home school expenses. No longer will you be locked into your assigned neighborhood school. They will have to compete for your business with a quality education. What recourse do you have now if your neighborhood school is doing a bad job? With my plan, you will have plenty of options. I don’t expect that this will be a permanent solution but rather a transition path to the ultimate separation of school and state. Many benefits will come from this including a huge monetary saving and the end to the fights over what is taught in public schools. Every parent will decide for their own kids.

3. If you are concerned about medical freedom, Libertarians are the only party that supports you all the way. We will support no interference in medical research such as the use of stem cells. You have no idea how many people you might be killing when you delay a medical discovery.

Patients that can derive medical benefits from marijuana should not have to fear arrest. We do not have the right to use the power and guns of government to interfere. It is a terrible evil to deny sick people a medicine that can help them deal with their problems.

If you want freedom, vote for freedom. Vote Libertarian!

Appeasement

2006-09-02T10:02:00.000-05:00

Well, it seems that the newspaper letter calling me an appeaser in the tradition of Chamberlain was just the first inkling of a nationwide Rovian attack on anti-war folks. Anyone who wants to stop making enemies of innocent people in the Middle East is an appeaser.

Arguing to NOT drop bombs on people who never hurt us is suddenly the equivalent of offering Poland to Hitler so he would not attack England. I am sorry, all you Bushbots, that logic just does not pass the laugh test. Rove must be getting desperate.

If the Republicans lose control of either house of Congress in November, Washington will be flooded by subpoenas for hearings on the misuse of intelligence to start an unjust war. We might actually find out how the WMD scare story was born and survived the obvious evidence against it.

Here is hoping that happens and the whole sordid mess becomes general knowledge. There will be nothing better than the nation coming to realize how they were fooled. It might just prevent a recurrence for the next 20 or 30 years. Unfortunately, because of generational turn over, these lessons need to be relearned periodically. If that wasn't true, the lesson of Viet Nam would have prevented Iraq.

Am I walking in the footsteps of Chamberlain?

2006-08-24T19:17:00.000-05:00

I submitted a shortened version of my last blog entry to the Kansas City Star and they published it as a letter to the editor. I was immediately greeted by several personal phone calls and comments to the KC Star blog, unfettered letters, agreeing with my position. I felt that there was hope for this nation yet.

A few days later , the Star published a reply from a fellow that compared my position to Neville Chamberlain. For those too young to remember or who learned their history from public schools, Chamberlain was the British prime minister in 1938. He made a deal with Hitler ceding Poland to Hitler in exchange for peace with England. He came home holding aloft a piece of paper claiming: Peace in our time!!

Obviously that did not work out well. Hitler had already proven himself an aggressor and no promise of his was worth the paper it was written on. On the other hand, between the US and Iraq, it is the US government that is the clear aggressor.

Does admitting that we made a horrible mistake and backing out with the fullest apology we can manage equal appeasement? I think NOT!

Remember that neither the government nor people of Iraq had anything to do with 9-11 and there were no threatening WMDs.

Of course, as long as G. W. Bush is in power, he will never admit to a mistake and the killing will go on. That is why we MUST, to save our nation, impeach and imprison him. Mass killers should not get to retire to a Texas ranch.

The Never Ending War on Terror

2006-08-12T17:00:00.000-05:00

Well the terrorists had a new idea and a new way to threaten us. Now, even though they did not get to put their idea into operation, we have new restrictions and new security measures forever more.

Next month or maybe in six months they will come up with still another idea and we will have still more security measures to watch for that. These security measures are cumulative. Pretty soon you will not be able to turn around without a Federal officer approving.

This is just not working. We cannot successfully defend ourselves from our enemies by security measures. We also cannot kill all our potential enemies because we are making new ones at breakneck speed. Every time we kill someone at a checkpoint in Baghdad or Israel kills a Lebanese civilian with our "precision" arms we make enemies of the entire extended family of the victims. We are definitely losing ground in the War on Terror.

We have to stop creating enemies. That means that we must withdraw from Iraq and apologize profusely for invading in the first place. We have to stop supplying weapons to any side in the Arab-Israeli war and pressure both sides for a permanent cease fire. Israel is more likely to agree to that if they are convinced that American armament will no longer be free flowing.

We also better stop believing the President and his minions. "They" do not hate us for our freedoms. "They" hate us for our actions that cost the lives of their compatriots. Tit for Tat is a child's game. It is not for adults who use real guns and real bombs.

Hypocrisy

2006-07-23T16:53:00.000-05:00

George Bush just used his first ever veto to prevent government funding of stem cell research on frozen embryos that were destined for destruction. The parents may, of course, destroy their embryos that are no longer needed rather than pay for frozen storage till the end of time. Heaven forbid though, that they may contribute these frozen embryos to a scientist for research that has a fair shot at developing treatments for some horrible diseases.

Of course, it is only government funded research that is blocked, so privately funded research can go on, at least for the moment. I wonder how many election cycles that will last.

During the very same week, this "culture of life" president announced that the US would interfere with the world wide pressure for a cease fire in the Middle East. He also rushed the delivery to Israel of precision guided munitions. They are using up their inventory very quickly. The world was told that Israel would have at least an additional week to kill people in Lebanon before there was any interference by the rest of the world.

I guess that the lives of actual Lebanese people, of any age, are not worth anything near the potential life of a frozen embryo. I think that the president had better stop using the "culture of life" sound bite. The hypocrisy smells far too foul.

Who Still Supports Bush?

2006-07-17T18:23:00.000-05:00

I realize that the majority of Americans now understand that the Iraq War was a terrible mistake, but a significant number still support the man who made it happen. They find excuses for his mistake. He was misled by bad intelligence. His plan may still work. He is too good a man to do evil intentionally.

To hold those beliefs, you have to give the man credit for his self description and ignore all the facts. Should we really forgive monstrously evil actions from a man just because he says that he means well or because he describes himself as a Christian? I think not!

Without a doubt, Bush lied to the nation about Iraq's possession of illegal weapons. Indeed, the entire substance of the Valerie Plame affair was to punish a whistle blower who revealed the deception and to dissuade other potential whistle blowers who might be waiting in the wings. Thus, he started a war against a nation that was no threat to us and 100,000 plus souls are dead as a result. The cost in blood and treasure of this mistake is incomprehensible and it continues to grow.

The Bush Doctrine, the one that says that it is acceptable to start a war on the slim possibility that some nation might be able to hurt us came up wrong on its first time out of the box, yet they are using the same evil logic to try to justify attacks on Iran and North Korea. I cannot abide that my country would do such evil.
Now, if all that is not enough, George Bush has been guilty of some more crimes. Let's count:

Locking up American citizens as "enemy combatants" without charge or trial.
Locking up and torturing citizens of other nations in a totally random way. They are accused of "terrorism" but are unable to defend themselves. We know that the vast majority of prisoners in GITMO, Abu Graib and Bagrab are innocent of any wrong doing. They were largely turned over to our forces for bounties. For enough money, anyone can be a terrorist.
Kidnapping citizens of one nation and forcibly transporting them to another where they can be tortured (extraordinary rendition).
Wiretapping international phone calls without a warrant when warrants are trivially easy to get.
Recording phone numbers called by nearly everyone in the nation under the excuse of searching for terrorists. The process they claim to use cannot work. False alarms would swamp the system. The only use of that data is to search for dirt on specific individuals. Reminds me of the Nixon enemies list.
Searching through financial data of nearly everyone. See number 5.

To all you folks out there that still think that Bush is a good Christian soul and can do no wrong, please think again. The nation can not survive this evil and remain free. Impeachment, removal from office and prison is the only option.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum

2006-07-16T09:20:00.000-05:00

Did you ever get the feeling that very little that happens makes any sense? It seems to me that our legislators, both state and federal, are living in some Bizarro world, where logic does not exist. Let us look at one small area of legislation, the drug war.

Tobacco, an addictive drug, kills about 400,000 people per year in the United States. It is freely available to anyone over the age of 18.

Alcohol, an addictive drug, kills about 115,000 people per year from its direct effects on health. It probably kills another 25,000 via traffic accidents to which it contributes (not all of these dead people drank alcohol, of course). It is available freely to anyone over the age of 21.

Aspirin is not addictive but kills about 2,000 people per year. It is available freely to everyone regardless of age. You can send your elementary school age child to buy it for you.

Marijuana kills exactly ZERO people per year and has maintained that record through all of human recorded history. There simply is no known lethal dose of Marijuana. It has several proven medical uses. Nevertheless, it is not legally available to anyone, of any age, for any purpose and is the cause of 700,000 arrests per year.

Can anyone explain to me the logic of this situation?

The possibilities that I see are:

Our legislators are, for the most part, insane.
Our legislators are in thrall to the alcohol industry. They fear that if Marijuana were legal, most users, being rational, would switch from alcohol (mostly beer) to Marijuana because it was safer from a health standpoint. You can get your gentle buzz without risking your liver and pancreas.

Maybe it is time to get some sane people into office; people who honor your personal right to run your own life without a nanny state making bad decisions for you. Maybe it is time to vote for Libertarians. The current two party duopoly is what gets us these insane legislative situations.

Why People Don't Vote

2006-07-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

There are probably several reasons that cause people to fail to vote. Avoiding jury duty comes to mind, but mostly it is because it looks like a waste of time.

People who have decided that their vote doesn't matter because the two parties are both horrible are acting rationally as far as they know. The two party paradigm has been so thoroughly banged into everyone's head that the thought of a third party is not realistic to most. The main stream media openly suppress knowledge of third parties.

Think back to the 2004 election. You heard about every word and throat clearing of Bush and Kerry. Obviously Bush was pro-war and Kerry tried to be both pro and anti-war. The ONLY unequivically anti-war candidate was Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party. Did you even know he was a choice? His candidacy was one of the best kept secrets of the whole campaign. I bet that a whole lot of anti-war people did not vote because they thought that they had no viable alternative, when, in fact they did.

Electronic, unauditable voting is another reason that people might choose not to vote. Why vote when the powers that be will do what they want with the vote totals no matter what you do?

I simply don't know how we got into such an idiotic position. People, a computer that you may not examine is not an adequate voting system. Cheating the system is trivially easy. Now, you can use computers to print out paper ballots that are then inspected by the voter and voila!, we have an audit trail. Anything else is laughable.

The only solution to the unauditable voting issue must come from the courts. They must start to overturn any election that is not subject to a full, audited recount.

To overcome the deadly two party paradigm, we have a small window of opportunity now to learn about third parties on our own. The media will not help us. This must happen soon. The police state trap is about to slam shut on us.

Let's solve two problems at once

2006-06-22T17:12:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-17T08:51:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-11T09:10:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-10T08:45:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-04T10:16:00.000-05:00

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:

It didn't happen. It was a bomb. It was self inflicted. Etc. They never give up on the cover up attempts.
It might not be an accurate report. Wait for the facts.
In war you do not know who the enemy is. Even women and children can carry bombs.
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.

The Nation has no alternative. Bush must GO!

2006-05-29T13:32:00.000-05:00

Each month we find out about another illegal surveillance program that our government is running in complete disregard of our constitutional system. First they admit to tapping international calls and now we find out they are recording called numbers for nearly every domestic phone call in the nation. What comes next month, surfing all the calls for key words?

We know our government is kidnapping people and shipping them to secret black prisons for torture. We also know that both US citizens and others have been locked up without any charges or anything even resembling due process.

These actions are just not what America is. We never used to believe that Might Makes Right. We used to be a nation that had moral standards. We used to be a nation where the government and especially the president obeyed the law. Now anything the "decider" says is needed for his vision of the War on Terror is OK. That is not who we are.

Now if all that illegal activity was not enough, the administration is planning another pre-emptive and pointless war against Iran. Our government is already responsible for over 100,000 deaths and several hundred billion dollars wasted in Iraq with no end in sight. It was started under obvious false pretenses. How can we sit here and let this happen again in Iran?

To use the quote the president could not get right, Fool me once, you’re a fool. Fool me twice, I’m a fool. If congress and the people let ourselves get fooled again, at the expense of tens of thousands of more deaths, the rest of the world will rightly consider us a dangerous rogue nation with no moral standards at all.

If we let this continue without opposition, we lose our heritage and our freedom together with our moral compass. This generation simply does not have the right to sell our children’s birthright for anything, let alone a series of nonsensical scare tactics. We need to remember the advice we got from Benjamin Franklin, "If a people give up their freedom for temporary security, they deserve neither" and will have neither.

To recover that moral compass and the reputation that goes with it, we can do no less than impeach the president. If we do not force him to suffer the supreme penalty that a president can suffer, we will never get our proud nation back. Letting him get away with all this criminal activity will set the precedent for future presidents. They will just start at today’s level of moral depravity and push the envelope even further.

Immigration, legal or otherwise

2006-05-29T09:23:00.000-05:00

The entire body politic has gotten wrapped around the axle discussing illegal immigration from Mexico. This has taken over the media and has completely obscured the run up to a new, pointless, deadly and expensive war with Iran.

Cynics might just conclude that is the purpose of the sudden interest in immigration. There surely is no crisis, since people have been sneaking over the border for decades.

I would ask those of you who favor mass deportation, fences or similar measures, just what is bothering you:

Are you worried the Mexicans might benefit from our welfare state policies?
Are you worried that they might take your job by working cheaper than you are willing to?
Are you worried that terrorists might sneak across our poorly patrolled border?

I am upset that they might benefit from our welfare state but I am just as upset that native born Americans benefit from the welfare state. Taking money at the point of a government gun (the only way that taxes are collected) to hand out to anyone is just theft. The existence of such a system is our shame and no reason to deny immigrants entry.

BTW, the stress on the adjective, illegal, is pretty silly. Congress passes foolish and immoral laws all the time. Treating those laws as holy gospel is stupid. The only reason for Mexicans to sneak in is a quota system that limits immigration by country of origin. Many Europeon quotas go unused while the Mexican quota has a 16 year waiting list.

If we eliminate that quota limitation, people who want to work can come in legally, get all the proper paperwork to work and pay taxes and be treated the same as everyone else. We can then have a meaningful approval system checking for communicable diseases, criminal records and such. You might remember, this was how the grandparents of much of today's population came here after each War.

They will produce and consume just like everyone else and grow our economy to everyone's benefit. If we get rid of that immoral welfare state, there will be no cost, only benefit. The immigrants will self select. Only those wanting to work will come. With no welfare available, others will not come.

Building a fence is truly idiotic. Just look at a map and note the two huge borders and the two ocean seaboards. Do you really want barbed wire traps across every beach on both oceans? Closing our border is just not doable and you wouldn't want to live in a nation that tried.

The national security argument is pretty silly as well. The terrorists that might actually do some damage have money. They have enough money to buy whatever documents they need to come in through the front door. They do not need to risk their lives walking across the desert.

Individual people are free agents, no matter where they were born. That means they are free to come and go as they please, do business with whomever will do business with them and live free as long as they do not impose themselves by force. We commit a grave offense when we interfere at the point of a government gun.