Social Consciousness

It's always fun to read one of the many "Why I'm not a libertarian" articles that continually pop up on the Internet year after year after year, even as libertarianism continues to be discovered and captured by ever more open and excited minds.

Typing the phrase "Why I'm not a libertarian" into Google, with quotation marks, will get you page upon page of results of postings and videos, all with the identical title.

While non-libertarians have endless reasons for rejecting their own freedom they apparently have a paucity of imagination when it comes to titling their articles.

All your life you were looking at their lies and thought the National Parks were the One Good Thing. Think again.

Arthur C. Pillsbury changed the way we see the world. He said, "Knowledge Commons." We use the term, Open Source. You did not know his name but you see through his eyes.

American veterans and military are being thrown away, broken with Traumatic Brain Injuries and PTSD. We can change that. Doing the right thing matters.

"Now that the Copenhagen political games are out of the way, marked as a failure by any realistic standard, it may be time to move on to the science games."

"Perhaps the most sensational came from a Nov. 16, 1999, email from Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), in which he referred to having “completed Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature.

If anyone still doubted that this administration’s foreign policy would bring any kind of change, this week’s debate on Afghanistan should remove all doubt. The President’s stated justifications for sending more troops to Afghanistan and escalating war amount to little more than recycling all the false reasons we began the conflict. It is so discouraging to see this coming from our new leadership, when the people were hoping for peace. New polls show that 49% of the people favor minding our own business on the world stage, up from 30% in 2002. Perpetual war is not solving anything. Indeed continually seeking out monsters to destroy abroad only threatens our security here at home as international resentment against us builds. The people understand this and are becoming increasingly frustrated at not being heard by the decision-makers. The leaders say some things the people want to hear, but change never comes.

I received an email from a disillusioned Democrat who's attracted to libertarianism. Naturally, she has a multitude of questions, so I'd like to point her toward some online resources that specifically aid recovering Democrats rather than ones designed to wean people from their Republican addictions.

In my last column, I joked that with public spending out of control and the piling on of the international bailout bill, economic collapse seems to be the goal of Congress. It is getting harder to joke about such a thing however, as the non-partisan General Accounting Office (GAO) has estimated that the administration’s health care plan would actually cost over a trillion dollars. This reality check may have given us a temporary reprieve on this particular disastrous policy, however an equally disastrous energy policy reared its ugly head on Capitol Hill last week.

The Cap and Trade Bill HR 2454 was voted on last Friday. Proponents claim this bill will help the environment, but what it really does is put another nail in the economy’s coffin. The idea is to establish a national level of carbon dioxide emissions, and sell pollution permits to industry as the Catholic Church used to sell indulgences to sinners. HR 2454 also gives federal bureaucrats new power to regulate a wide variety of household appliances, such as light bulbs and refrigerators, and further distorts the market by providing more of your tax money to auto companies.

"If public schools taught the unbiased facts about Franklin D. Roosevelt, Americans would know that the New Deal was an abysmal failure"
...
"Unemployment never went below 14% during Roosevelt's first two terms and the average over his entire reign of error was 17% causing Treasury Secretary Morgenthau to lament "We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot.""

We came so close to losing it all. Day to day we have been hearing the stark predictions of famine, want, civil unrest. We see the Google maps of FEMA camps and the 1984 redux of control, reflected in the simple minded fascist edicts, for instance the Missouri Directive, issued by the of small minded bureaucrats of that state. These still have the power to shock us.

But if you really watch you will see the unfurling of freedom happening like the springtime, blossoming out from every tree. Across America something profoundly wonderful is happening. People at the most local level are taking action to return the power of governance directly to the people. Without noise or the flurries of big fundraising and from both right and left people are coming together to say NO to a government and corporate presence that is out of control.

Socialism has been proven a failure. It has been soundly refuted in theory by Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. It has been proven a failure in practice all around the world, in Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and it is even being abandoned by China. Why would we want to try it here in the United States? This is sheer insanity.

Why are today’s political plotters so hot for a military draft and mandatory civil servitude?

Why are so many of them so eager to turn their once-sovereign fellow citizens into political string puppets? Do they know something we don’t? Do they know that the public treasury will be raped so long and deep and wide and hard that the only way the country will survive is to create a workforce of slaves? Do they know we’ll be fighting wars of conquest forever and need an endless supply of human drones?

38) It’s the corruption, stupid
Mother Jones
by Nick Baumann

“Lawrence Lessig has a new cause -- and new job to go with it. For
more than a decade, the Stanford law professor and Creative Commons
founder has focused his efforts on Internet and copyright issues,
advocating a ‘free culture’ that puts fewer legal barriers in the way
of artists who adapt and build upon the works of others. Now he says
he’s finished his final book on the topic, Remix, and he recently
announced that he will leave Stanford to run the Edmond J. Safra

Lying is now considered simple corporate policy. In that way it dovetails neatly with government policy. But you have a natural right to the truth reinforced by the First Amendment to the Constitution. This year give Truth for Christmas

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.