L.A. Liberty

month

August 2011

Peaceful Anarchy →

Anarchy in its purest form is based on peaceful behavior and voluntaryism in a stateless society, while government is based on aggression, theft, force, and deceit. These two systems are completely opposite. The only moral social system worth having has to adhere to the ideas of non-aggression, private property, free and voluntary exchange, and self-responsibility. This ideology is based...

I do consider myself an Austrian, and some Austrians indeed harbor contempt for Milton Friedman primarily because of his support for a central bank (among other issues). Also, Austrians have legitimate gripes both on Friedman’s methodology and his opinions on praxeology and the Austrian school. But while I, of course, disagree with him (vehemently) on monetary policy among other things...

“When “fairness” replaces “freedom,” all our liberties are in danger. In Walden,...”

– Milton Friedman

July 2011

“If our Republican friends think that by increasing our debt by almost $800...”

– Senator Harry Reid, 2006 Obama, too, famously made similar remarks that year before voting against a debt ceiling increase. Reid never voted to increase the debt ceiling when Republicans were in control of the Senate, and he always voted to increase the debt ceiling when Democrats were in...

A Few More Charts That Should Accompany All Debt... →

This chart from the White House, which purports to prove, with the scientific magic of math, that basically everything bad that has happened to the budget is the fault of one George W. Bush, has been making the rounds. My colleague approvingly calls it “Another chart that should accompany all debt ceiling discussions”. I’m a little less enamored, considering that this graph attributes...

Yes, taxes have been worse - but not always. What’s missing from this cute cartoon is every single preceding president who sat on top of 0%. The federal income tax didn’t exist until Wilson. Where’s that historical perspective? Still, if your reasoning is essentially “pipe down - it used to be worse,” you’ve already lost. Something isn’t acceptable...

“Politics and crime, they’re the same thing.”

– Michael Corleone

The Gang of 545 →

This was written in 1985 but could have been written yesterday… Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them. Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high...

A Debt Default Would Be Wonderful →

Politicians, mainstream economists, and the media tell us that a U.S. government debt default would be catastrophic. Treasury bonds would be downgraded, interest rates would soar, and the massive government spending that has supposedly fueled the present (jobless) recovery would be severely curtailed, plunging the U.S. and possibly the world back into a deep recession. Perhaps that is true....

While this makes for a cute retort - I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone say “Government is for people who show up.” It’s a stupid phrase no matter who says it, which is why I suppose it makes a nice straw man. Not that anyone on the left would make something up just to lend validity to a point or cause…

“The question must be asked, what is to be done by the antiwar Left? This...”

– John Walsh, “Ron Paul’s Challenge to the Left” (via coeus)

“Those who try to manage the state, end up getting managed by the state.”

– Michael Baxter

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder...”

– George Orwell

BART rider beaten by police for loud cell phone... →

18goingon80: Wong alleges that on the evening of June 9, he was sitting at the West Oakland BART station listening to a “musical ringtone” on his phone. Officer W. Sanchez came over to Wong and asked him to turn down the volume, and Wong complied. Sanchez then asked Wong to turn off the music completely, and Wong also complied. Wong then exited the station with Sanchez following close behind....

agreatnation: “So given a stagnant economy suffering from falling government spending, what is all our political debate about? Spending cuts!” — Stagnation Nation - NYTimes.com The stupid thing is, the Republicans probably know this. This is part of their game plan to screw the economy while Obama is in office. What’s a mystery is why Democrats continue to play along instead of hanging...

coeus replied to your post: I just plucked a fly out of the air with two fingers - by the wings. Pics or it never happened. You dare doubt me?

I just plucked a fly out of the air with two fingers - by the wings.

“Both of these plans [Reid’s Democratic party plan and Boehner’s...”

Police Beat Man That Just Learned His Son... →

According to the report, the man was brutally beaten after calling the Loganville, Georgia police for help after his son had committed suicide. The man left the garage where he found his son after paramedics began CPR; the man then began pacing in his front yard. He says a police officer then grabbed his arm and told him that he needed to sit down. He jerked his arm from the officer and told...

The Stupidity Continues →

“Mother criminally charged for illegally boarding a school bus … because she thought her kid was dying… . [She] faces up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. The prosecutor says the bus company urged him to press charges. The bus company denies that. But here’s the best line by the idiot prosecutor: “Most parents aren’t a problem, but what do you do when a … sex offender wants to get on the bus...

Failure to raise the ceiling doesn’t mean default →

The popular narrative about this summer’s struggle to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling centers on the word “default.” If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we are told, the U.S. government will be forced to default on many of its financial obligations, reducing Uncle Sam’s creditworthiness and decreasing our government’s ability to effectively carry out its duties. Sounds scary. But a...

Is America a “Republic”? →

The United States [are] not now and [have] never been a republic. It, [collectively], is a federation of states, each of which, in Article IV of the Constitution, is guaranteed a republican form of government. But a federation of republics is not itself a republic any more than the federation of nations in the United Nations, or in the European Union, is a nation. A federation is a service...

Liberty Haiku #18

Tired of the Lies Weary of compelled Masters Dreams of Truth and Peace

“A right, such as a right to free speech, imposes no obligation on another,...”

– Walter E. Williams (via thoseboringpolitics)

Anonymous asked: "Median household wealth among Hispanics fell from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,325 in 2009. The percentage drop--66%-- was the largest for any racial or ethnic group, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends project. During the same period median household wealth declined 53% among black households and 16% among white households."

coeus-deactivated20120628 asked: Thoughts on the validity of a VAT-like tax?

libertarians asked: Pretending the US government defaults, do you think it will take a strong toll on the medical research industry (namely stell cell research)? I realize that's a general ass question, but I can't really understand what will happen directly after a default.

Boehner's B.S. Cuts →

Surprise, surprise. The Boehner plan backloads cuts into never, never land. The largest cuts will come in the year 2021. From the Congressional Budget Office, the budget cuts under the Boehner plan (in billions of dollars): 2012 -$4 2013. -$20 2014 -$58 2015 -$66 2016 -$73 2017 -$79 2018 -$87 2019 -$95 2020 -$103 2021 -$111 There really are no serious cuts coming. This is...

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of...”

– George Orwell

Red-light camera tickets? You can ignore them,... →

Good news for motorists slapped with red-light tickets in Los Angeles. If you got the citation under the city’s controversial camera program, you can ignore your ticket. You read that right. After a three-hour City Council committee hearing Monday on the future of the much-debated photo enforcement system, the session ended with a recommendation to stop issuing citations at the end of...

“Contrary to any claim of a systematically “neutral” effect of taxation on...”

– Hans Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Sociology of Taxation (via blistexfan)

Ron Paul: The Pesky Neighbor and the Debt Ceiling →

Imagine you had a pesky neighbor who somehow took out a mortgage on his house in your name and by some legal trickery you were obligated to pay for it. Imagine watching this neighbor throw drunken parties, buy expensive cars, add more rooms to the house, and hire dozens of people to wait on him hand and foot. Imagine that he also managed to take out several credit cards in your name. One by one,...

closetcommunist: “Being a Libertarian means you stand for nothing.” — my PSci prof. This is the only thing that has ever come out of his penis-reeking mouth that I agree with. There is nothing worse than a libertarian. At least conservatives have things they believe in, but libertarians don’t seem to know what they want, except for the U.S. to be one giant KKK orgy. Considering your...

Re: I'm slowly becoming more and more...

anti-stateaaron: But if someone can convince me that the owners of excess capital don’t always end up having the most power & being the most coercive, I may reconsider. Would you put a cap on an individual’s talents? His aspirations? His productivity? His drive? How much of his life (through time) he can trade for something he desires more? For property is merely a product of all...

A Timely Debt Ceiling Round-Up

Amidst the hype and hyperbole of the fear-mongering fairy tales spun by POTUS (and his equally disingenuous statist counter-part on the right) on national television today, it seemed appropriate to offer some links that properly explain the debt situation. The Debt Crisis and the Fiscal Leviathan State Five Facts About the Debt The Absolute Unreality of Budget & Debt-Limit Debates...

“I don’t want to hurt our local businesses and restaurants [but] I like the...”

– Mafia leader or Mayor? See here. (Really, the only difference is that the mafia leader exists outside the law…)

What Libertarianism is Not →

Libertarianism is not a violent political philosophy. Yes, libertarianism is anti-state. But, anti-statism should not be construed as a call to violence. All libertarians should abhor the use of aggression as a means of achieving an end. Indeed, libertarianism is based on the principle of social cooperation, which by definition is peaceful. We are individuals who recognize the advantages of...

“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to...”

– Frédéric Bastiat

On the Faith-Based Paper Dollar →

[James] Grant would prefer a monetary system tied to the amount of gold dug out of the ground to one based on the untrammeled discretion of Ph.Ds. The latter is what America got with President Nixon’s 1971 decision to close the Treasury’s gold window, breaking the last link to the classical gold standard, in which anyone was free to exchange dollars for gold at a fixed and guaranteed...

The Market is Personal →

At the macro level, which encompasses the entire production process of a pencil (or of green onions), markets are highly impersonal. But at each of the myriad stages of that highly complex process, between for example the buyers and sellers of the cedar or rapeseed or raw carbon, is a relationship that is necessarily personal to one degree or another. Of course, voluntary personal connections...

“We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We...”

– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Lobbyists don’t even bother going to his office. If their scheme doesn’t fall...”

– Tom Woods Jr. (via combattant-de-la-liberte)