Let us be....The People
Continuously we fight for change, in the same ways, we fight for diplomacy and we crave hope of a better tomorrow. The thing is, we have yet to try anything significantly different, we fear the outcome of failure so we hold ourselves and the rest of the world back. There is no real trial and error, because we fear the error and as such we fear trying.
We continue to fight for the same results, using the same methods (even if we change the name) INSANITY!
Let’s REALLY try something different, let’s abolish government, form a constitution with ourselves and uphold our own standards as individuals and be held accountable by ourselves for our own actions and what we have stated in our personal contract to us….
Let us be the people we know we can be, and follow the path illuminated before us. Let’s not hold out for hope of a Savior and be our own saving grace. Let’s stop war, and sieze the chaos of unjust fairness to those we deem different, let’s not vote, let’s just self regulate, let’s not delegate power, let us take the power into our own hands. This is the true measure of change, the true virtue of upholding cause and effect, let’s have real causes and get up from under false pretenses, religions, and rights.
The Liberty to pursue happiness starts with the pursuit. Let’s stop being INSANE and awaken from our deep slumbers. Try doing it differently, you’d be amazed at the outcome!
The Conservative Welfare State
reason.comWhen it comes to infringing on personal liberty, Ann Coulter is just as bad as her lefty enemies.
Conservative crank Ann Coulter has made a career out of bad manners, so it was no surprise when she slammed her libertarian hosts at the annual International Students for Liberty confab in February as “pussies.” That was almost a compliment, compared to “drunks” and “horny hicks,” two other terms Coulter has used to describe her political opponents.
A student raised Coulter’s ire by questioning her hawkish drug war stance: “How is it your business what I choose to put in my body?”
“It is my business when we are living in a welfare state,” Coulter responded. “Right now, I have to pay for…your health care. I have to pay your unemployment.…I have to pay for your food, for your housing.…Get rid of the welfare state, then we’ll talk about drug legalization.”
One doesn’t have to choose between the drug war and the welfare state. But if one must, the drug war is worse. The welfare state confiscates one individual’s wealth to give to another. That’s unfair. But putting people behind bars for smoking a joint that is less harmful than the alcohol and tobacco that Coulter pumps into her body is a travesty.
Before Richard Nixon kicked off the drug war in 1971, nonviolent drug offenders constituted less than 10 percent of Americans in state and federal prisons. Now they are more than 25 percent of the (much larger) prison population.
What’s really rich about Coulter’s jeremiad is that had it not been for libertarians, her anti-welfare-state sentiment might have been banished from respectable company. In the six decades between the New Deal and the 1996 welfare reform, Republicans had been largely content to play tax collectors for the welfare system.
As Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jason Riley has noted, many of FDR’s New Deal redistributionist schemes, such as Social Security and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, had their roots in Republican initiatives, including those of his predecessor, Herbert Hoover. GOP presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford expanded Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Even Ronald Reagan, a conservative hero, refused to touch Social Security or Medicare. And George W. Bush boosted everything from food stamps to prescription drug coverage.
This didn’t happen in an intellectual vacuum. Conservative intellectuals over the decades criticized the welfare state but mostly on prudential grounds. Irving Kristol, the founding father of neoconservativism, averred in 1976 that the GOP must “fully reconcile” itself to the welfare state if it were to have a political future. Even National Review founder William F. Buckley, who came closer to being a principled advocate of liberty, mostly recommended petty reforms like requiring recipients to do “street cleaning or general prettification work.”
Through all of this, libertarians were making the lonely, principled argument against the welfare state, noting that a government that habitually takes from one to give to another hurts both. It was this central insight that libertarian Charles Murray deployed to demonstrate welfare’s soul-killing consequences for its beneficiaries, paving the way for something resembling its genuine recalibration in 1996.
The welfare state suits conservatives just fine. Its existence gives them an excuse to regulate individual choices. And it’s their trump card for stopping liberty-oriented reforms they dislike.
Refusing to end the drug war is one example. But conservatives also have used the welfare state to rally public sentiment against immigration reforms, portraying poor Latino workers as welfare queens. And in the name of stopping abuse of taxpayer dollars, Republicans have enthusiastically backed invasive drug testing of welfare recipients and prohibited them from using cash assistance to buy morally dubious goods such as alcohol and lottery tickets.
The liberal welfare state and the conservative anti-sin state are two arms of the same statist pincer, squeezing out individual liberty. Libertarians should raise hell against both, because Ann Coulter doesn’t have the cojones to do so.
“These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
—Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania v Casey
The Supreme Court on personal liberty
“Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others. This means, above all else, keeping government out of our lives. Only this path leads to the unleashing of human energies that build civilization, provide security, generate wealth, and protect the people from systematic rights violations. In this sense, only liberty can truly ward off tyranny, the great and eternal foe of mankind.”
— Ron PaulAn increasingly unchecked surveillance state
aljazeera.comThe US government extensively monitors its citizens’ internet activities, with dangerous effects on personal liberties.
This is chilling! O.O!
“Why should government agents spy on us? They work for us! How about we spy on them? On cops when they arrest and interrogate people or contemplate suspending freedom; on prosecutors when they decide whom to prosecute and what evidence to use; on judges when they rationalize away our guaranteed rights; and on members of Congress whenever they meet with a lobbyist, mark up a piece of legislation, or conspire to assault our liberties or our pocketbooks.”
—Judge Andrew NapolitanoPersonal Freedom
We’re told that soon, the sky will be filled with drones, spying on us. …The predictions that Americans will soon be under constant surveillance by drones fail to take into account American ingenuity. Navy Admiral Jonathan Greenert unveiled video of a successful test of a new type of laser that can shoot a drone out of the air at a cost only about a dollar a shot. And on the domestic front, the animal rights group PETA said it’s considering buying small drone aircraft to fly over woods and fields, to “stalk hunters” and monitor them with video cameras. This sounds like an idea they haven’t thought through yet. In fact, judging from Internet comments, some hunters can’t wait. PETA already tried this last year on some pigeon hunters in South Carolina. Their drone was shot down within minutes. What PETA calls “stalking hunters with drone aircraft,” hunters call “skeet shooting.”
