Libertarians should talk with the Left and need to learn how. Read More
–A top notch read, highly recommended, especially if you are a libertarian. A great blend of history and leveled critique of the modern libertarian. You may just realize that you’re not so “libertarian” after all after reading this.
By: Susan Cassidy
I went into teaching because I wanted to make a difference. Most of us do. I certainly did not go into it for the money or the pension. Hell, at the beginning of my career, at the ripe old age of 20, I didn’t even know exactly what a pension was, nor had I ever heard of the State Teachers’ Retirement Association. As for those that say we go into it for our summers off? Well, they just sound stupid. I was an idealist that wanted to change the world by teaching music to some of the world’s children. Read more…
“The cost of seeking office whether it’s for state legislature or a governorship or a member of the U.S. House or Senate, these costs have been going up for decades,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies elections and campaign finance issues. “It’s kind of amusing to look back say to the 1970s, and you’ll find many members of Congress then were spending, oh, $75,000, $100,000, $200,000 — now that would almost be a rounding error.”
In 2010, the average winning House candidate spent about $1.4 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s 70% more than a decade ago. The average price for winning a Senate seat reached nearly $10 million in that cycle. The high cost of running for federal office often puts newcomers facing well-known incumbents — who often have more financial backing from supporters and political parties — at a substantial disadvantage.
The big expenses will come a few months from now, when much of the money the candidates raise will go to advertising. A Wesleyan Media Project analysis of data provided by Kantar Media/CMAG found that television ads for candidates running for Congress in 2010 racked up nearly 1.6 million airings at an estimated cost of $735 million, an amount that represents 61% increase over 2008. Read More
By: Chris Edgin
The more I think of the Megavideo take down, the more it bothers me, and one simple ground..no due process was granted to them at all and at this point I doubt there will even be a trial. The arrested people will likely be given fines as an easy way out of jail, all the hardware will remain in government custody, and never will the process used by law enforcement be subjected to judicial review. Read more…
South Carolina Primary Results:
Newt Gingrich 243,153 40.4%
Mitt Romney 167,279 27.8%
Rick Santorum 102,055 17%
Ron Paul 77,993 13%
Rick Perry 2,494 0.4%
Other 8,192 1.4%
According to a statement from the Ron Paul campaign, Paul more than quadrupled his numbers from 2008 from 15,773 to 77,993. Also, “After tonight, only 37 delegates, or 1.6 percent of total delegates, have been awarded. The race for the Republican nomination is a marathon—not a sprint—and our campaign has in place a comprehensive plan to secure 1,144 delegates and win the nomination.”
According to other sources, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum did not qualify for enough state-ballots in order to win the necessary amount of delegates needed. Only Ron Paul and Mitt Romney have the staying power to try and win and it very well could come to a showdown at the GOP convention.
A spokeswoman for Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company’s anti-SOPA petition. Read more…
Michael Huemer asks his students to imagine being a neighborhood vigilante. Suppose, he says, you live in a crime-ridden neighborhood, and nothing’s being done about it. So you hunt down criminals and lock them in your basement.
After awhile, you bill your neighbors for keeping the neighborhood safe. You tell neighbors who balk that not paying means they’ll land in the basement brig with the criminals.
“Most people would recognize this as outrageous behavior,” observes Huemer, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Yet in Huemer’s thought experiment, the vigilante’s behavior is that of a rudimentary government, focused on preventing crime and collecting taxes. Read More
My wife Jodie Emery and I both receive thousands of letters and inquiries with impassioned pleas that read: “I want to do something to make a difference. I want to legalize marijuana. What can I do? Can you advise or help me start? Where do I begin?” This is a question, without rival, that we hear most often. Read More
Some folks have heard me beat this drum. But it’s a fresh-enough thought - going to fundamentals that run deep beneath normal politics - so that I am moved to raise it yet again. In part because someone recently asked me, as author of The Transparent Society: “Can transparency and libertarianism complement each other?”
Now let’s have the simple answer first. Yes. A sane, better-focused libertarianism would be utterly compatible with transparency. In fact, it should be the very top priority. Read More
Whatever his other shortcomings, I get plenty of entertainment from watching Mitt Romney on the news. His personality type — privileged white boy, executive-type hair, born with a silver foot in his mouth — reminds me of how much I miss Dan Quayle. And he — and his defenders — have certainly provided entertainment value the past few days. Read More
As soon as the federal government announced its trillion-dollar bailout (for starters) of Wall Street plutocrats, defenders of the bailout pulled out what they apparently believed was their secret weapon: the myth of Alexander Hamilton as the alleged inventor of American capitalism. Hamilton, they said, would approve of the bailout. Case closed. How could anyone dispute “the architect of the American economy”? Read More
By: Stephen Carter
An often repeated line by many liberals and even some conservatives, is that it is hypocritical for a libertarian to accept money from the government in any form. So is this true? Not hardly. Read more…
The percentage of Americans identifying as political independents increased in 2011, as is common in a non-election year, although the 40% who did so is the highest Gallup has measured, by one percentage point. More Americans continue to identify as Democrats than as Republicans, 31% to 27%.
This means independents let a small minority of the population choose the candidates they are to vote on in the general elections. Doing your duty as a voter is going to have to require more than just showing up at the polls come election day, it means going to the primaries and finding candidates beforehand. This and the support of third party and independent candidates are a must if we are to expect better outcomes.
By: Stephen Carter
Sometimes I need to work more than forty hours a week, sometimes I want to work more than forty hours a week, either way it’s to get ahead and be a little more financially stable. Often though, I’m unable to do so. Read more…
Germany’s promotion of renewable energy rightly gets singled out for its effectiveness, most often by me as an example of how to do things well versus the fits and starts method of promotion common in the US. Over at Wind-Works, Paul Gipe points out another interesting facet of the German renewable energy saga: 51% of all renewable energy in Germany is owned by individual citizens or farms, totaling $100 billion worth of private investment in clean energy. Read More
This Wednesday will mark the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo prison camp. In The New York Times, one of the camp’s former prisoners, Lakhdar Boumediene, has an incredibly powerful Op-Ed recounting the gross injustice of his due-process-free detention, which lasted seven years. It was clear from the start that the accusations against this Bosnian citizen — who at the time of the 9/11 attack was the Red Crescent Society’s director of humanitarian aid for Bosnian children — were false; indeed, a high court in Bosnia investigated and cleared him of American charges of Terrorism. But U.S. forces nonetheless abducted him, tied him up, shipped him to Guantanamo, and kept him there for seven years with no trial. Read More
How’s this for a crazy idea: a guy moves to a randomly selected city with $25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank—all within one year. Adam Shepard performed this exact feat and then wrote a book about it, titled Scratch Beginnings (SB Press, 240 pp, $13.95). According to Shepard, his experience proves that the American dream can come true. Read More
Over 26,000 Republicans participating in that party’s Iowa Caucus voted for Ron Paul.
According to data breaking down entrance polls conducted by Edison Research, Ron Paul won 43 percent of independents who voted in Tuesday’s caucus.
Conversely, however, he garnered only 14 percent of those describing themselves as “Republicans.” This seems a substantial obstacle to the Texas Congressman’s eventual nomination as he is running as a Republican. Read More
The most perplexing character in Congress, ideologically speaking, is Ron Paul. This is a guy who exists in the Republican Party as a staunch opponent of American empire and big finance. His ideas on the Federal Reserve have taken some hold recently, and he has taken powerful runs at the Presidency on the obscure topic of monetary policy. He doesn’t play by standard political rules, so while old newsletters bearing his name showcase obvious white supremacy, he is also the only prominent politician, let alone Presidential candidate, saying that the drug war has racist origins. You cannot honestly look at this figure without acknowledging both elements, as well as his opposition to war, the Federal government, and the Federal Reserve. And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview. Read More
By: Ron Paul
January 14, 2003
Two Democratic Congressman introduced legislation last week to revive the military draft, taking a race-baiting shot at the President and his war plans. Their idea is not new, however, as similar proposals were introduced by Republicans in the months following September 11th. Although the administration is not calling for a draft at this time, last week’s controversy shows while conscription has been buried for 30 years, the idea is not necessarily dead. Read more…
The benefits of his candidacy are widely ignored, as are the Democrats’ own evils. Read More
Excerpt from the article:
It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:
Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.
By: Gigi Bowman
My New Year’s resolution to my country. I will do everything I can to get Ron Paul elected and here is why: Read more…
By: Stephen Carter
Should it be illegal for a privately owned business to discriminate against people?
People discriminate every day. What instantly comes to mind with something like this is color of skin and gender. Discrimination can be any range of areas though, from looks, to speech, quality of clothes, pitch of voice, physical strength, etc. There are many things here that are discriminated against that people cannot control. Should we employ a bad singer over a good singer in order to avoid discrimination? Should we employ a weaker person over a very strong person to do a job that requires a lot of physical strength, just to avoid discrimination? How about the modeling business, isn’t that entire industry built on discrimination against ugly people? What of all female book clubs, doesn’t this discriminate against males? Scholarships that go to only black people? Businesses that will not hire people with visible tattoos or those who cannot pass a drug test but never show up to work inebriated? Read more…
IF you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.
The information I have just provided — about a constitutional doctrine called “jury nullification” — is absolutely true. But if federal prosecutors in New York get their way, telling the truth to potential jurors could result in a six-month prison sentence. Read More
Here’s the hurricane: In reality, no less than $29.616 trillion is the total emergency assistance provided by the Fed to foreign and domestic entities during the Global Financial Crisis. Let’s repeat that: $29 trillion. This astounding number is over twice U.S. gross domestic product, the nominal value of all goods and services produced for the year 2010. Read More