However, we have a candidate in the PA House 35th district (Homestead, West Mifflin, White Oak) named David Posipanka who could use your help.

We are also doing what we can to help FACT with their Stop the Drink Tax referendum efforts.

We will be meeting up the next 2 Saturdays around 10AM to petition, and volunteers are needed!

If you can help out, please contact either David Posipanka at dposipanka_at_verizon.net or David Powell at depst8_at_gmail.com (replace the _at_ with @). We can arrange transportation, etc.

Thanks, and we hope to hear from you!
DaveP
Chairman, LP-PGH

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Do we here in the U.S. need to worry about hyperinflation?

There is a big debate on economics blogs about whether the U.S. is experiencing inflation or deflation. Perhaps it is some hybrid of both. Credit card and mortgage defaults should be deflationary, the money that is lost in foreclosure instead of being profit just goes poof (currently at ~$500 billion).

But prices are going up, everyone can see that. However, this is mostly due to the weakness of the dollar in buying all of these globalized goods, as the Fed is not actually printing more Federal Reserve Notes (dollars). What they are doing is loaning out their Treasury bonds (about half of what they hold so far) for toxic mortgage backed securites so the banks can stay in business. They are staying in business by buying the only thing making money right now, which is commodities, exacerbating the price rise.

Some have said that this is a de facto partial nationalization of the banks, because the Fed as lender cannot recall it’s loans when it wants, but instead has to wait for when the banks feel that they can pay the loans back. When you give $$$ to a business and can’t get it back until there is profit looks a lot like buying a stake in a business, no? We will see if the banks become ‘zombified’ ala Japan.

So, the U.S. faces a $52 (projected by GAO as of Nov ‘07 / [See .pdf Presentation Here] trillion deficit due to Medicare and Social Security in the next 30-40 years. The nation’s current household total net worth is $58 trillion, which means a burden to net worth ration of ~90%. How many times would our money supply have to double to print our way out of that, as we certainly shouldn’t just tax everything at 100%! (though I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried)

This San Jose University faculty website offers a fairly simple explanation of how a doubling of money supply leads to price increases of not only double, but 6 times previous prices.

Soooo, let’s see here, $4/gal gas *6 = $24/gal gas. Great.

If/When Helicopter Ben fires up the printing presses, watch out!

Dave Powell
Chairman, LP-PGH

P.S. There is an interesting list of Hyperinflation events here going from Roman times to interestingly, CIA induced inflation in the Kurdish areas of Iraq ( http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/CIAinfl.htm ) Here’s government ‘logic’ for you, and a great example of how our meddling foreign policy screws things up for other people and pisses them off: the US government wanted to buy off cooperation of the Kurdish leadership with a million dollars. So what does it do? Sends in a CIA spook with 44 pounds worth of hundred dollar bills, problem (for the govt anyway) solved. However, since nobody in the Kurdish zone had any $10’s or $5’s, the price of everything rose to $100, even a cup of coffee.

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What a classic example this video is of abuse of power, cowardice, and the nature of politics and politicians.

Let’s face it: It is human nature to try to live as comfortably as life will allow.  This is the human condition, and civil and government service folks are as human as anybody.  Yet for some reason - irrational idealism, we’ll call it — the average person can’t seem to comprehend that the same fallibility they see day to day in the average person translates directly to government. As the video above points out, politicians are as susceptible as any, if not more, to abuse of power and corruption — the E.U. being no different than any Congress or State Assembly in the United States.

Worse yet, most observers fail to understand that government has a tendency to attract people who are more inclined to abuse power than others.  Why do we make such a bold assertion?  Consider the methods those who love government power use vs. those who do not.

In the free market (and let’s, please, not confuse the free market with the current capitalist plutocracy that runs our governments these days in the United States, as they are entirely different things…) an entrepreneur must compete with others to earn the consumers trust and dollars. Those with the best ideas, products, and values end up with the most satisfied customers, and consequently the most wealth as a reward. Those who abuse their consumer, overcharge, or provide a lousy product will intimately find bankruptcy. At least that is the way it works in a truly free market without government handing out favors to this industry and business, or that.

What you find with government and those who gravitate to it, on the other hand, is entirely different.  Government and politicians set out to generally enforce what they usually can’t sell to the public via the free market / with the public’s consent.  If the public really thought whatever it was that politicians might want, they’d be doing it almost unanimously and without the threat of government force.

Granted, perhaps a voting majority may think a particular government solution is ideal. But in all cases the majority of citizens either voted for a candidate not supporting such solutions or abdicated from voting all together.  This simple truth is confirmed by the simply math / fact that less than 50% of the eligible U.S. population usually votes, and then candidates usually win with between 40-50% of the popular vote.

The winners of an election then use the tools of government to impose and enforce their particular solution on the entire population, regardless of if they would otherwise consent or not.  Hence, unlike the free market, more often than not we end up with the one-size-fits-all solutions, regardless of if they don’t work / exacerbate the problem purported to be fixed.  And, because cutting a government program is virtually impossible, we get the mentality of politicians like the ones in the video above.

At the heart of such a corrupt mentality, however, is that government attracts as servants and politicians the very type of people who are drawn to not having to compete for genuine consent.   Where they otherwise, they’d accept that the truest democracy of all is the free market, where we all make our own choices without middlemen like themselves.  Oh, thy irony!

Rather, these are the types who are completely at home forcing others into their Procrustean set of ideas regardless of if the other party agrees or not, all with the justification that they managed to rally some kind of majority at the ballot box.  The personality profile of the type of person who is drawn to such methods is one who is generally disrespectful of others rights to say “no thanks,” and is generally inclined to think of his or herself as superior to the others because, inherent in their actions, is the belief that those with whom they disagree, no matter how educated, are unqualified to make decisions regarding how they live their own lives.

Indeed, because government rules by force and threat  (e.g. if you or I don’t comply, we go to jail, or if we resist arrest / attempt to defend ourselves, we could also end up shot dead) and by a minority, it doesn’t really have to earn anyone’s consent day to day, a reality only made all the more immoral by the fact that thanks to the vast resources and rights collectivized in it coffers, each election is degraded to an advance auction sale to the highest bidders, normally organized as lobbyists and special interest groups.

Regardless of the product delivered, government agents (in the broad sense of the word) never stand much of a chance to lose their jobs, with employees protected by the only remaining vestige of rapacious union contracts, with programs that are never cut no matter how poor, and politicians more protected than ever with incumbency protecting campaign laws like the recent McCain Feingold Act, which makes mounting a resistance campaign and raising campaign funds as risk-riddled as ever.   Not only can most government workers not be fired regardless of their poor performance, taxpayer funded benefits are dramatically more generous than anything available in the private sector, representing a mere pilfering at the expense of the common man for benefit of the politically anointed.

It is sheer irony that so many in government claim to protect us from monopoly when that is the very essence what all associated with government enjoy: the ability to demand a monopoly on all things it can seize control of, and the capacity to always draw more resources from the public no matter what the horrid results are of those policies.

For example, sure — you can opt out of public school and go private, but you can’t take with you the resources confiscated by the authorities and used for public schooling.  Not going to school is illegal, never mind many schools are nothing but daytime warehousing for the young that educate poorly in things that matter, but provide an exceptionally well-rounded experience in things like group-think, pop-culture, fashion competition, ADD medication, mastering indifference and taming critical thinking to survive the mundaneness, crime, drugs, petty popularity, bullying, social pecking orders / clicks, athletics, reckless sex, partying, and prolonging adolescence — all acquired not by curriculum, but by merely being forced into these social experiment warehouses conceived 150 years ago as a means of producing dull-thinking factory labor.

Certainly some government schools are far better than  others, but in the overwhelming majority of cases those are in the wealthiest locations.  This, incidentally, leads defenders of government school to try to convince the masses that ever more money is the solution to faltering education, but that is a distraction from reality.  The most robust schools are in wealthy communities precisely because the residents in those communities have the resources to vote with their feet and move to another school district if the one in which they leave stinks.  Always the worst schools are where people are poorest and have little choice, so they accept what’s handed to them.  This is just as it is in any other area of the markets, retail or otherwise. Its should come as no surprise that city schools — always your worst — have among the highest cost per student, and still yield terrible results, which is explained by one word, monopoly, and what that implies with all associated.

Now, education is a subject of books and your author on this post will admit he’s gone off on a unintended tangent, so let’s save the remainder of that discussion for another day (one we’d gladly debate, though!).  But, education is still an example of a monopoly controlled by government workers with sufficient resources to prevent any threat to their power, and it is always seeking to destroy those who seek alternatives — such as the Teachers’ Union moves to create the most cumbersome hurdles for home schoolers and those teaching them in California and many other states.  Many apologists of government education like to demean the home-schooled as socially mal-adjusted freaks raised by fundamentalist parents, but in reality most are dramatically more socially stable than their government educated counterparts, and exhibit a far better comprehension of subject matter on many levels.  Moreover, most have not been indoctrinated to the pro-socialist agenda that, not so coincidentally, seems to permeate Union taught curriculum in Government Schools.

But alas, enough on education. It should be clear, however, that by pointing out that government is rife with problems, we don’t mean to convey that government has no purpose whatsoever, at least in a more limited sense.  Government should be limited exclusively to respecting and protecting the right of consent among sound-minded, adult individuals.

Murder, rape, robbery, kidnap, slavery, fraud, and so forth, are in the jurisdiction of government protection.  But when we expand beyond that and begin violating the basic precept of consent among sound minded adults, are we not simply engaging in group endorsed violations of the very same rights?   Confiscation by means of forced taxation IS the same act of robbery merely endorsed by a majority. Forcing people to work 1/3 or 1/2 of their year just to pay federal, state, and local taxes is a form of slavery when, if given the option to avoid such confiscation, most would surely take it voluntarily.  Incarcerating of those who don’t do what you want and just want to be left alone is kidnapping. Killing someone who is willing to protect his property and rights with his life is still murder! Merely laundering these acts through our mangled democracy does nothing to legitimize them!?!

And to those who say, “Without the government handling important things like X, Y, and Z, we’d have so many more problems,” we say, Balderdash!  Consider the variety and robustness of products on the shelves of what remains generally still free in the free market grocery and retail sectors, and compare that to the one-sized-fits-all failures in government coerced education, charity, and so forth?

Imagine, instead, if we treated grocery stores like public schools?  Separation of church and state would mean that no collectivized taxpayer dollars could be used to make available Kosher items, or Christmas items, or Halloween even. Everybody would have an opinion of what’s legitimate, so imagine the fights over which fruits or vegetables should be available that would ensue, and the politicization of electing the food district board members like we have running our school districts? Etc!

That sounds insane, does it not? But what could be more important than feeding the population — the poor with no resources, included?

Yet government is generally not in the business of supplying our food, and our generally free markets run quite nicely without such meddling (although so much legislation already infects the price of our food and what ultimately is allowed on our shelves — much more than most people realize!).  Why on earth would we need to add expensive administrators and middlemen to help manage getting us the food we need when the private sector handles it quite nicely?  And, by inference, then, why on earth do we need the same middle men and variety killing methods in education and so many other areas where we’ve abdicated our freedom to government authority?

But we digress again, although not so dramatically this time.  This post started with a video that serves as a typical example of political corruption. These same types of people, with the same type of self-interest are running the show at all levels, taking what they can so long as the fruit hangs low.  To think that we as individuals can’t do better by allowing citizens willing to compete for your trust to handle providing solutions to our problems vs. those who choose the ruse of political elections funded by lobbyists and special interests….  Well, you do the math.

When it comes to giving up your own rights and keeping them, please — Always choose liberty!

Over and out!

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“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”

H.L. Mencken

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“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood.

But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” [citation]

– Herman Goering, Commander German Airforce (Luftwaffe), Senior Nazi Party member, and Second in Command in the German Third Reich, behind Adolf Hitler.

This should make you think.  Your comments are welcome!

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Extraordinary Power and Privacy Grab. That’s exactly what the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is.  FISA empowers the government to spy on U.S. citizens communications — their emails, phone calls, etc. As Libertarian Presidential Candidate, Bob Barr, notes in the video above, the only requirement some bureaucrat needs to tap into your communications — phone, email or otherwise — and record them for posterity is that the other party is located abroad. That person does not need to be a suspected terrorist, or a member of Al Queda, or even engaged in committing a crime! — nothing!   The other party just needs to be at a foreign location.  Moreover, private telecommunication companies were previously doing this illegally, and FISA will simply grandfather their prior crimes — clear violations of law — magically turning them illegal.

No doubt U.S. citizens have been willing to allow for lost liberty and privacy in this so called War Against Terror. What many don’t realize is that many of the losses of liberty they thought would be used against terrorists are, instead, used by the Big Government to fish around on completely unrelated situations.

This is just as advocates of liberty and freedom like the LP argued would happen with the Patriot Acts I and II. Instead of being used exclusively for terrorists wanting to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil — the whole reason we needed to suspend constitutional provisions of individual privacy and the requirement for a judge to approve the constitutionality / need of a wire tap and surveillance — communication data that is mined indiscriminately using government hired super computers is sifted through at the convenience of whomever is surfing for evidence of something. Such ill-gotten evidence is being used to charge defendants in crimes completely unrelated to terrorism, and is functionally no different than having authorities entering one’s home to see what can be found as evidence. Worse yet, with the added structure of FISA, the government covers-up its own evidence gathering methods, preventing the public from ever knowing it is being spied on.

In these advanced stages of global interventionist U.S. policy, where the U.S. administrations and many in Congress — and many of the voters — demand that whatever the U.S. wants all over the world, the U.S. should get — U.S. citizens are paying both with a badly inflated currency and dramatically decreasing freedoms. This author is reminded of George Carlin’s quirky observation:

“If crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”

If that’s too pop-culture for you, we can just provide for you an original patriot from the era of the Declaration of Independence and an actual founding father, Samuel Johnson:

“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

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Dear Senator:

I do not support the rewriting of the FISA bill. Exaggerated statements about mushroom clouds aside, the administration has failed to show how the current FISA statutes do not allow sufficient intelligence gathering. Current FISA law allows wiretapping to begin before judicial
approval is granted, contrary to the administration’s characterization. Oversight of the Executive Branch is one of the core functions of the Judicial branch, and the credible threat of being made to answer for one’s actions is one of the big differences between our style of
government and, say, Saddam Hussein’s style.

The worst part of the bill is the retroactive immunity granted to the telecomm companies, whose counsel MUST have known that the administration’s requests were illegal (this is why Qwest refused). Granting this immunity will prevent any information about possible crimes committed by the administration from coming to light, all other avenues have been closed off by classifying everything in sight.

Equal protection under the law is a cornerstone of our society. The rewritten FISA bill will make some more equal than others.

I support Senator Feingold’s and Senator Dodd’s filibuster of this legislation, and vow to vote against any who support it.

In Liberty,
Dave Powell
Chairman, LP-PGH

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Libertarians are generally not supportive of the selective drink tax.    This event is a great way to spread the message!

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Sometimes humor says it best.

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The story of Owen Beck, his bone cancer, and medical professionals recommendations, and state and local government acceptance — all butting heads with federal government busy bodies, as told by Drew Carey. The video discusses the medicinal value of marijuana by doctors, and the Federal Government’s incarceration (with the use armed agents) of a very sick minor who was suffering from the effects of chemo.

Really, readers: We required a constitutional amendment to make alcohol prohibition illegal. Why not cannabis? And what of local laws — the very people who are affected — allowing for legal medicinal use, yet the Federal Authorities step in and disregard all? In federal trials, the jury will never hear that locally it is all perfectly legal! People will go to jail. Their families ruined. And for what?

If this strikes you as unjust, only the Libertarian Party has this issue on its platform!

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