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.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Those Dirty, Rotten Taxes. The Burden on Civilization.
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?
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?
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Political Theatre
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?
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?
Sunday, February 04, 2007
YOU WANT TO LEGALIZE DRUGS! ARE YOU CRAZY?
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.
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.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
One more impeachable offense
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:
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.
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