Liberty For All

by R. Lee Wrights

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

- Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857

There are laws regulating everything from the color you can and cannot paint your house to the kind of sex in which two consenting adults are allowed to engage. Why is it like this? Crime is big business, that’s why. In fact, crime is government’s biggest industry. Moreover, there is incentive for legislators to create new laws purely for the purpose of raising revenue. Thus they continue to engorge an already dangerously bloated bureaucracy. Elected rulers have birthed and nurtured a beast that feeds on the pocketbooks and rights of the very citizens they have sworn to protect.

Some will say that while it is true that government, at all its levels, has grown to a bloated beast of bureaucracy, I go too far when I claim that “…crime is government’s biggest industry.” It is not all that odd when you consider that the State derives revenue on both sides of the law. Remember, all those licenses and permits you are required to obtain in order to exercise your freedom are accompanied by fees. While on the flip side, every breech of the never-ending, self-perpetuating, always-growing bureaucracy carries a fine. You are forced to pay in order to abide by the law so you can avoid having to pay for breaking the law. We are forced to perpetually feed the State’s beast with a steady stream of scrumptious dollars picked from the pockets of citizen constituents.

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by Donald Beezley

Isn’t economics the “dismal science”; that thing you had to suffer through in college with graphs and equations, none of which seemed to make sense?

Economics is actually very simple. Human beings, by their nature, must be free to take action to achieve their goals. We don’t have fur, claws and instincts like lower animals. We must apply our minds to goal-directed action to satisfy our needs. Freedom works because it is consistent with our nature — our requirement to be free to take action to survive and flourish. Political liberty, in turn, is designed to protect that requirement.

Un-perverted by false incentives, people will always work and save based on their actual needs and priorities. It’s in our nature to do so in the quest for economic security, because we don’t want to starve today or tomorrow.

The quest for economic security starts with production, not consumption. Consumption is a given. It’s automatic. People have limitless desires and will consume if they can consume. Yet one hears constantly that consumption comes first, that we must “stimulate” the economy by inducing people to borrow and spend.

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by Richard C. Evey

There are many organizations that have been, for the best part of this Republic’s history, tax exempt. These groups are formed under what some call religion. The places of these religions are called churches, synagogue, mosque, holy places, and places of worship. I will use the term “churches” in referring to all religions. If I offend someone, get over it.

Churches are, in this Republic, tax exempt. Also tax exempt is the residence that the “churches” own for the Grand Pooh-bah of that religion. Then there are the other buildings that the “churches” use for many other things that are also tax exempt. For example, buildings used for schools, day care, various offices, rental office space, apartments, hotels, strip malls, etc.

This taxed exempt status also goes to those religious originations based overseas: Vatican, Church of England, Islam, Buddhist, Shinto, Judaism, Protestants and many more, too many to count.

This was my wakeup call to government and taxation.

In 1965 when I was working in Washington, DC, I visited a new apartment building, office complex and hotel. They were selling the apartments as a part of a condominium project. A one bedroom apartment was selling for $75,000, a three bedroom, top floor, with a view of the world was selling for $300,000; this was 1965! The office building was handled by a leasing agent and the hotel was leased by Howard Johnson. I toured the apartments with a lady friend, it cost $5.00 to get in, and you got coffee and snacks. It was wonderful and quite overwhelming. The complex was called Watergate. Sound familiar?

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by Barry Fagin

First, you should apologize to your children.

You should apologize to them because, if you’re my age, you came into the world when the national debt was about $100 billion. That was a lot of money back then, more than any generation had ever owed. But when your children came into the world, they inherited a national debt of around $3 trillion. That’s 30 times more, and it happened on your watch.

So the least you could do is apologize.

And it’s only getting worse. Democrats recently approved raising the debt ceiling yet again, to more than $12 trillion. It’s a burden future generations will shoulder for decades.

Your descendants may have had plans for their money that didn’t involve paying off Chinese and Japanese investors in US government securities, but too bad. They just had the rotten luck to be born after a few decades of unconscionable budgetary recklessness by their elders. Hey, nobody said life was fair.

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by George Phillies

Our national party is dying.

Since the year 2000, we’ve lost more than half our membership. Party income has fallen by nearly 3/4 in real dollars.

We cannot survive if we continue along this path.

How many state affiliates do we actually have? Certainly not 51. If you don’t believe me, go to the LP.org website, go through the web pages of our state parties, and ask yourself when each was last updated.

If we continue along this course, in a very few years our national party will cease to exist. Lady Liberty’s torch will lie extinguished. We will be united in history with the Whigs and the Federalists.

Surely no Libertarian can wish this fate.  Is there no better alternative? Is there no way we can set the good ship Liberty on a new course toward freedom?

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by Kevin Tuma

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by Roderick T. Beaman

Peter Boyle played the title character, Joe in the 1970 movie. Joe Curran was a profanity spewing racist blue collar worker, angry at the world for its perceived injustice.

Dennis Patrick, who made a career out of playing oily types, portrayed Bill Compton, a wealthy businessman who was trying to bring his wayward daughter, Melissa, played by Susan Sarandon, home. He confronted her drug dealing boy friend, Frank Russo, played by Patrick McDermott and they got into a fight. Patrick slammed him repeatedly against a wall, finally killing him in, what is for me, one of the best murder scenes in movie history. You empathize with Compton.

Compton, dazed by what he had done, then wanders around and into a bar, sits down while Joe, a few stools away, rants about ‘the f—-ng n—-rs (blacks)’, the hippies, the wealthy and just about anyone else that he had a gripe against. When he blurts out that he’d like to kill one of them, Compton says, “I just did.” The story goes on from there.

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by Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret.)

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or forcing me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat, or employment, of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gag banger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

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by Alan M. Gottlieb

The Washington State Supreme Court has issued a precedent-setting opinion in the case of State v. Christopher William Sieyes which holds that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights “applies to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment.”

This outstanding opinion was authored by Justice Richard B. Sanders, a Supreme Court veteran who clearly understands the history of both the state and federal constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Perhaps what makes the Sanders opinion so remarkable is that it places the Washington Supreme Court ahead of the United States Supreme Court in recognition that the U.S. Constitution’s recognition of the right to keep and bear arms applies to all citizens, and should also place limits on state and local governments, as it does on Congress.

Quoting Justice Sanders, “Lower courts need not wait for the Supreme Court the Constitution is the rule of all courts both state and federal judiciaries wield power to strike down unconstitutional government acts.”

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by Larken Rose

Rarely do I hear anything from Stefan Molyneux that I can substantively disagree with, so allow me to jump on this rare opportunity to take issue with something he said. (I’m hoping this rant finds its way to him, and I’m betting one of you forwarding it to him will work better and faster than me trying to find his e- mail address in my infinite, messy pile of stuff.) In a recent podcast, where he gave his thoughts on the Joe Stack incident, Stefan asserted that violence cannot be solved with violence. Partly true, partly false. Here is the link for that clip.  

I think Stefan would agree that the initiation of violence is a symptom of something not being right in the head of the aggressor. And it is absolutely true that the root cause of the aggression cannot be fixed via more violence. However, the effect (or symptom) of that problem can be. As a very simple example, if someone breaks into my house at night, my 12-gauge is not going to repair whatever mental damage led the guy to want to do such a thing. However, it has a good chance of stopping the effect of his psychosis. In such an instance, my goal would not be to “fix” what is wrong with the invader, but to prevent the potential symptoms of his psychological problems.

Likewise, the irrational belief in the myth of “authority” is the direct cause of the vast majority of theft, assault and murder in the world. The people at the IRS, for example, routinely commit harassment, terrorism, extortion and robbery, because they truly believe that when something evil is “legalized,” it ceases to be evil. They (and their victims) have been indoctrinated to believe that theft is bad, unless “authority” does it, in which case theft (”tax collection”/”law enforcement”) is good, and resisting it is bad.

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