For the first 50 years of the life of this Republic -- when things were pretty peaceful, from all reports -- America didn't even HAVE any police forces as we know them today. When was the Constitution amended, Former Officer Ron? When did they take the old part that says we're to remain "secure in our persons, houses papers, and effects," free from search and seizure unless a warrant is issued "upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation ..." and add to it your new section that reads "Oh yeah, unless someone calling himself a policeman decides to stop you and issue whatever arbitrary orders and commands he can dream up, at which point you have to 'submit' or else he can shoot you down like a dog"?
I've got my copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in front of me, Officer Ron -- the one every "public servant" swears an oath to "protect and defend," with no weasel words about "protecting officer safety." And I can't find that part.
The distraction on Capitol Hill this week has to do with the jackpot bonuses that executives at AIG recently received. The argument is over a relative drop in the bucket...
The big mistake was appropriating the TARP funds in the first place. A Johnny-come-lately bill of attainder won’t stop the spending epidemic. This whole situation is a perfect demonstration of why “doing nothing” and letting failing companies fail would have been much better than sinking valuable money and resources into them...
Bankruptcies are a net positive for the economy because more productive competitors are rewarded by opportunities to buy up remaining assets at bargain prices to strengthen their operations. In an economy that allows this kind of growth and change, any jobs lost by bankruptcy are soon replaced by new ones as the most efficiently managed businesses gain access to more assets and expand...
AIG, by losing money and maneuvering their operations to the brink of bankruptcy, was telling us that they were inefficient. So what did we do? We forced the taxpayer to assume the losses, and now we are supposed to be shocked that it is not working out. Had AIG gone bankrupt, it would have been impossible to hand out these bonuses. The taxpayer would have been fleeced for $170 billion less last year. Had they gone bankrupt, the world would not have come to an end, it would just continue on with one less engine of wealth destruction.
It says something about the dismal state of affairs in our country today, when you look at what outrages folks...
Where is the outrage about the ease with which politicians expropriated hundreds of billions of taxpayers' funds to do these bailouts?
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The more secure private property is in a given country, the more prosperous it is. Countries rated in the top 25 percent in secure and safe private property have on average nine times more income per person than those in the bottom 25 percent...
The easier it is to steal in any given country, the less likely the economy will function well there.
You really don't need a fancy business degree to predict this. One of the Ten Commandments, transmitted so many thousands of years ago, instructs us not to steal...
Yet basic truths such as this are becoming increasingly lost in our country, and this is what should be driving our outrage: that we now live in a country where our private property is no longer safe and the very government that supposedly exists to protect it has become the thief we have to worry about...
We can recall that the founders of our country intended the role of government to protect our lives and property, not violate them. And that, in times when we have respected that proper use of government, our country has prospered.
The right to peacefully dissent and oppose government deprivations of life, liberty and property, is an inalienable right as fundamental as any other. The right to question the government, even from a mistaken point of view, is at the heart of America's proud heritage. When America relinquishes this understanding, it comes to adopt the features of the supposed enemy...
So it is that much more important to speak up; to tell the truth; to defend the freedoms of all people to speak, live in peace, pursue happiness in a world of liberty, so long as they do not commit aggression against their fellow man. For defending this vision of a free and peaceful world, for sticking up for the rights of others no matter who they are or what they believe, we at the Campaign for Liberty and those of like mind have been wrongly targeted by an overbearing government.
But we who love liberty have the right ideas and the passion to stand by our principles. In the end, the national police, state governments, Homeland Security and all the SWAT Teams and spying powers in the world cannot defeat a idea that is true and whose time has come.
And it is this idea... -- the dream of peace and freedom for all Americans -- that truly frightens those who favor the total state, intimidation and fear directed abroad and toward peaceful dissent at home. It is the idea of liberty, not militias or terrorists, that most threatens the establishment, even as it offers nothing but hope and promise for the American people and the people of the world.
What this brief account has shown is that the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state. The ability of the media to ignore all of the massive government interference that exists today and to characterize our present economic system as one of laissez faire and economic freedom marks it as, if not profoundly dishonest, then as nothing less than delusional...
The Federal Reserve's policy of credit expansion based on the creation of new and additional checkbook money has thus served to give capital to unworthy borrowers who never should have had it in the first place and to deprive other, far more credit worthy borrowers of the capital they need to stay in businesses. Its policy has been one of redistribution and destruction...
A discussion of the housing debacle would also not be complete if it did not mention the role of government guarantees of many mortgage loans. If the government guarantees the principal and interest on a loan, there is no reason why a lender should care about the qualifications of a borrower. He will not lose by making the loan, however bad it may turn out to be...
The myth that laissez faire exists in the present-day United States and is responsible for our current economic crisis is promulgated by people who know practically nothing whatever of sound, rational economic theory or the actual nature of laissez-faire capitalism...
In claiming to see the existence of laissez faire in the midst of such massive government interference as to constitute the very opposite of laissez faire, they are attempting to rewrite reality in order to make it conform with their Marxist preconceptions and view of the world...
Very few of the professors and their students have read so much as a single page of the writings of Ludwig von Mises, who is the preeminent theorist of capitalism and knowledge of whose writings is essential to its understanding. Almost all of them are thus essentially ignorant of sound economics...
Their fear and hatred of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism, and their need to be able to denounce it as the cause of all economic evil, is so great that they pretend to themselves and to their audiences that it exists in today's world, in which it clearly does not exist even remotely.
By making the claim that laissez faire exists and is what is responsible for the problem, they are able to turn the full force of their hatred for actual economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism against each and every sliver of economic freedom that somehow manages to exist and which they decide to target...
In this way the enemies of capitalism and economic freedom are able to proceed in their campaign of economic destruction and devastation. They use the accusation of "laissez faire" as a kind of ratchet for increasing the government's power...
It seems that so long as anyone manages to move or even breathe without being under the control of the government, laissez faire allegedly continues to exist, which serves to make necessary yet still more government controls...
As the Internet grows in its influence, alternative views can get to a minority of educated people. The success of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in getting Austrian School economics in front of hundreds of thousands of young people, all over the world, who would never have heard about Mises or Rothbard had it not been for the World Wide Web, indicates that the foundations of the modern fascist economy are being undermined where it counts, which is in the minds of bright people who are no longer buying into the system...
These scholars agree: we are seeing the bankruptcy of every Western government that has made too many big promises to too many voters regarding free healthcare and guaranteed retirement. All of it will collapse. The tatters of the promises will point to the tatters of those who made the promises — politicians — and the tatters of the system that was supposedly going to guarantee delivery of the promises.
The academics still believe in the healing power of the state. The voters still believe this, too. But voters are catching on more rapidly than the academics that the state is running out of wiggle room. Millions of voters have figured out that they are going to get stiffed. They don't know what to do about it, but at least they understand that they really are going to get stiffed...
What I am saying is this: this time it's different. This time the fractional-reserve banking system has shot its wad. It is begging for ever-larger handouts from the Treasury Department, which needs central-bank fiat money to bail out the economy. The public is accepting this grudgingly, and the academic economists are cheering, but the reality is that this time it's different. You had better adjust your portfolio, your career plans, and your retirement plans accordingly.
