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added: Tue, 20th September 2005 | 450 views | 0x in favourites
feed url: http://www.ReasonToFreedom.com/rss.xml
Weekly libertarian magazine with articles on subjects such as politics, health, homeschooling, golf, toll roads, SUVs, national debt, humor, and the Free State Project. Motto: Reason is a natural life-giving activity of the mind. We regard independent thinking as the most important virtue, as well as the best hope for a free society.
When the world is melting down around you remember what matters. There is power in you that you have never tapped. Find it this Christmas at home, where you least expect to find it.
"I am furious about the continuous and covert robbery of the American worker by the banks. I worked in the debt negotiation industry for a few years and daily heard the heart-rending stories of people who had used credit cards but then fell on hard times. The hard times we were able to use as acceptable negotiating tools to reduce credit card debt was loss of job, divorce, serious illness.
"Folks had to stop paying on the debt to get the credit card companies to agree to settlements. Most were terrified of ruining their credit ratings and were so brainwashed on this point that they did not realize that they had no credit, could not borrow another dime and would spend the next 30 years paying back the card companies 5x what their purchases actually cost to satisfy the penalties imposed."
Which makes me wonder where this will all end- if taxpayers continue to bail out any and all industries that are having cash-flow problems, who might we see trying to stick their hand in our pockets? After all, both Wal-Mart and Target have come out with financial reports of lower quarterly earnings; how dreadful would it be if Americans were not able to buy cheap Chinese crap this holiday season?
"It’s not often that we’re treated to this spectacular an example of how absurd it is to put any faith in elections, democracy, and “majority rule.”
"First, it must be pointed out that even if there were a perfect way for democracy to be administered, it would still be utterly immoral and completely illegitimate. As Benjamin Franklin put it, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. To put it even more bluntly, there’s another good example of true democracy in action: gang rape.
...
"The federal government, in their zeal for campaign finance reform, have given Libertarians a great gift. Quite simply, they have created the framework for a decentralized way of campaigning, a system perfectly suited to our way of doing politics.
"From the Libertarian perspective, it was easy to predict that so-called campaign finance reform would not succeed in banning anything. People would simply find new creative ways to raise the money to do whatever they wanted anyway. And indeed this has come to pass. In the last election, we saw this new form of politics in action. It is the 527.
A nice sparkling wine. For a Brut, not too dry. Good by itself or as part of a Mimosa.
The holiday season is full of fun, family, festivities and, sadly, political correctness. So even as we observe the traditions of Thanksgiving and Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and Festivus and Winter Solstice and New Year's Eve and Chinese New Year and others too numerous or little known to number we continue to be creatures of political correctness. Not only do we question which wine is correct for the occasion (does a wine from Brest go best with a turkey breast? What do you decant for a Santa's Day soirée? What is a quality quaff for Kwanzaa?) but we continue our angst over who we are and where we belong in the grand political-social-cultural scheme of things...
A little over a year ago I predicted the present melt down. It will get worse. That said, this is still a time of promise. We can change the present course; we can establish for ourselves and our children a future more wonderful that we ever imagined. Go Home to the Real America.
The Founders declared Individualism and Individual Rights as the starting point. Our presidential candidates have replaced these with “country first” and “public service.” Rather than enabling us to produce and trade, they want to redistribute our wealth. If they persist in their madness we will soon have no economy, no life of our own. We will have no Liberty and our own Happiness will be almost impossible to pursue. What kind of Life is that?
America is still the vision of a people who stand on their natural rights and govern themselves. In these dark days remember and go home to your community. Look into the eyes of your neighbors and come together. The people will govern themselves
With news this week that Congress is poised to consider a new stimulus package, I am forced to again ask a question that seems silly in Washington: How will we pay for this?
While a few Members of Congress have raised the issue, it certainly was not the primary concern of the House Budget Committee when they interviewed Ben Bernanke on Monday. And, when they did direct this question to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, his answer was the standard rhetoric about how Congress needed to make tough choices. Needless to say, not many specifics were discussed.
Now there is real hope. Americans have experienced the melt down of illusion and can see that what matters is community. That is where we live. It is home. Now, we can have what matters most, experiencing a security we build together on a foundation of freedom.
In the midst of highly unpopular bailouts of Wall Street, many justifications have been given about why Washington feels the need to act. Some claim that capitalism and the free market are to blame, but we have not had capitalism. If you compare our financial capital to our aggregate debt, this would be obvious. In the same way, we have not had a truly free market. The monetary manipulations of the Federal Reserve, a complex tax code, the many “oversight” agencies and their mountains of regulations show that we are far removed from a free market economy.
Another unsatisfying argument is that certain entities have to be bailed out because of their economic importance. Supposedly, some entities can be so big, so important, that no matter what they do, citizens must perpetually sustain them.
It has been long understood that our federal government is going deeper into debt, consistently raising the debt ceiling and demonstrating no fiscal restraint. In recent years, debt ceiling increases have been placed in “must pass” legislation as a means to guarantee that Republicans as well as Democrats would vote for them when Congress was under Republican control.
We also know our nation’s “negative savings rate” reflects the habits of private citizens, showing those habits to be not tremendously different than the habits of the public sector. Yet, the signs of decline are becoming ever more apparent. So apparent, in fact, that it seems unlikely that bailouts or other gimmicks will have even short term success. More inflation, and creating moral hazard by bailing out egregious offenders, is a recipe for disaster. These activities can seem to provide some short term relief, but it seems we are now at a significant crisis point, where monetary policy gimmicks don’t provide the band-aids they did in the past.
For more than 175 years, messengers known as pages have served the United States Congress. Currently, approximately 100 young men and women from across the nation serve as pages at any given time. Pages must be high school juniors and at least 16 years of age. Pages are appointed and sponsored by a Representative or Senator for one academic semester of the school year, or a summer session. The right to appoint pages rotates among Members pursuant to criteria set by the respective chamber leadership. Academic standing is one of the most important criteria used in the final selection of pages.
It has not been a good week for the Republic. It took quite a bit of trampling of the Constitution, but the bailout bill passed, as I suspected it would.
The bailout failed the first time it was brought to the House. Undaunted, the Senate pressed on by attaching the bailout as an amendment to another House passed bill that was pending in the Senate. The new bailout version had new taxes, so according to the Constitution it should not have originated in the Senate.
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