The Libertarian Minute

The following is a short excerpt from Libertarianism in One Lesson.
Take a minute to follow the link above for the full lession.

Note under "Philosophy"
The 16th Amendment is invalid! States rights!

"Government

• Libertarians invented outrage over government waste, bureaucracy, injustice, etc. Nobody else thinks they are bad, knows they exist, or works to stop them.
• Enlightenment comes only through repetition of the sacred mantra "Government does not work" according to Guru Browne.
• Only government is force, no matter how many Indians were killed by settlers to acquire their property, no matter how many blacks were enslaved and sold by private companies, no matter how many heads of union members are broken by private police.
• Money that government touches spontaneously combusts, destroying the economy. Money retained by individuals grows the economy, even if literally burnt.
• Private education works, public education doesn't. The publicly educated masses that have grown the modern economies of the past 150 years are an illusion.
• Market failures, trusts, and oligopolies are lies spread by the evil economists serving the government as described in the "Protocols of the Elders of Statism".
• Central planning cannot work. Which is why all businesses internally are run like little markets, with no centralized leadership.
• Paternalism is the worst thing that can be inflicted upon people, as everyone knows that fathers are the most hated and reviled figures in the world.
• Government is like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearsome master. Therefore, we should avoid it entirely, as we do all forms of combustion."

This Libertarian Minute brought to you by:

The AnyRand Libertarian Zapper- (TM)


















.

Thoughts On Capitalistic Greed

"Like my old man always says, capitalism sounds good in theory but it doesn't work; look around you and see what it has done to our country. And what it is going to do to our country -- if we let it."
Edward Abbey

"Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others -- misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement -- failure is not a mortgage on success -- suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence -- man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone's altar nor for anyone's cause -- life is not one huge hospital."

Ayn Rand

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Jesus

Once Again, Jack Bauer Is On The March...

Why Doesn't Jack Bauer Show His Face In Public?

Exposing The Fruits & Nuts Of Jack Bauer

You're "small town" newspaper ain't want it used to be!

Since 1990, Forum has acquired 19 smalltown dailies and weeklies in southern, western and northern Minnesota. It also entered western Wisconsin buying weeklies in Hudson, River Falls and New Richmond.
---
Here's in interesting story detailing what's happening corporately with some of our local daily and weekly newspapers.

Read the whole story @ BussinessNorth.com.

A Birthday Card From Ayn Rand...

...of why she didn't work for Hallmark.


“Gift giving is altruistic, therefore evil. I hope your birthday is a happy one, but I will do nothing to make it so.”

More libertarian "humor."

Woody Guthrie: Born July 14, 1912

Woody Guthrie, he's the man! As a fan of American folk music, Woody is right at the top of my list...or a main brick in the foundation. Along with Jimmie Rodgers, the Cater Family, Bill Monroe, Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Guthrie's work belongs in everybody's record collection -- if you don't believe me ask Ramblin' Jack Elliott or Bob Dylan. His

If you don't have something by Woody, "Dust Bowl Ballads" is an excellent classic to start with. "Ramblin' Round" is a double CD with much of the "Ballads" material include and much more. That his work is still being record and presented in a variety of musical branches is a tribute to this man and his music. "Bound For Glory" is a good movie about his early life. It is based on his autobiography by the same name

Happy birthday!

Learn more about Woody Guthrie.



Learn more about cartoonist Milt Priggree.

Their View aka This Might Help Explain The Blurred Visionaries at OTBL

A local undercover agent operating under the code name of Jack Bauer took this picture of a local Hudson blogger before the start of the weekly, Wednesday night meeting to review the local media for mention of their exploits.

CATO's Cook Book (sold only at fine objectivist websites)

If you've followed the banter at ontheborderline.net long enough, there's no
doubt you've heard some terms repeated by the Dr.s of Liberty
time an time again. Some of my favorites are "Collectivists","Statists"
"Government Schools","Free Will","Federalism" and The Right to Bear Arms".
Dr.Bill rages against "Altruism".& Dr. SpiritofBS rants about Free Speech, The
Right to Property and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Sometimes you just wonder "Where do they get this stuff?" It makes you feel
like if you only had a program you too could follow along. Well fear not.
Net-tel has collected all your favorite borderline buzz words and concepts and
compiled them into one single easy to read source.
"CATO's Cookbook" The Pocketbook Objectivist Reader.
(Forward by Ayn Rand)
Also found online here.
All your favorite borderline terms a here in an easy to find fool proof outline.
If a question is posed to CATO and you want to know his response before he posts
it, this invaluable resource will do the trick. A lot of time he just never answers.
Ever wonder why?
It's simple, it not in the CookBook.
So don't delay, join in the fun and learn to talk & think like a borderline Doctor.
Order before midnight before someone calls you a socialist.
Call 1-800-DRbill. And tell them Andy sent you.

Quotes of Note: Margaret Mead

"If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place."

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Read more: Margaret Mead

Pablo Neruba: Born 7/12/1904

The Dictators

An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence

Pablo Neruda
1904-1973
International acclaimed Latin American poet

Read more of his poems.

Read his biography.

Let's Play That Overnight Game Sensation "Pick Your Pie Chart"

My new friend CATO and I have covered a lot of ground today. From Kierkegaard to Aristotle, from Islamic justice to the federal budget. Whoooo I'm getting light headed from all this discussion.
Somehow we ended up with the National Debt and Budget Deficits. My friend CATO says " Most of the debt piling up is actually because of his social programs which rival The New Deal." I was always taught the "New Deal" was a good thing. But then again, I went to the government school's propaganda mill not the good ol'
1950s Catholic School where the nuns beat the crap out of you.
Regardless, my curiousity was aroused so I thought I try to find a chart to disprove Cato's assertion. What I discovered is that a whole lot of people out there are making pie charts and they're all different. The one thing you can be sure of is that when someone puts a chart out on the internet that they make sure to get one that reflects their bias.
Here's one example: ( Yes, I know it's a Bar Chart ) Now you know these guys are big supporters of the military. Why else would they make up a chart to show how much more the military gets than things like schools?





















And here's another fun one: I haven't asked CATO, but I think he'd like this one.











I really like it because it's a cool design. Because it looks so cool, I don't realy mind that it lumps Social Security and Medicare into that evil "Social Spending" category.
The fact that Social Security and Medacare spending comes from seperate Trust Funds outside the Federal Budget really doesn't matter when you can make a chart look this cool.

Here's my all time favorite: What's great about this one is they don't go along with the myth that 100% represents the whole pie. For these guys 7.65% is close enough for them to just round up to 100%.



I don't think I learned anything about how the government spends money from these charts. But I'll tell you what I did learn. If you want to find a chart that proves the other guy is wrong, be sure you go to a website that has the same bias as you have. It's really the best way to play "Pick Your Pie Chart".

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

The Intelligent Universe

by	Ray Kurzweil

Within 25 years, we'll reverse-engineer the brain and go on to develop superintelligence. Extrapolating the exponential growth of computational capacity (a factor of at least 1000 per decade), we'll expand inward to the fine forces, such as strings and quarks, and outward. Assuming we could overcome the speed of light limitation, within 300 years we would saturate the whole universe with our intelligence.

One of many articles by Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence . All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray's Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.
CATO says some jobs could be done by monkeys:
Who need monkeys
Capitalist Stock Brokers Beware: You're outsourced to an algorythm.

How a Computer Knows What Many Managers Don't

Check out Ray's astounding technical innovations:
Ray Kurzweil- Inventor

A poem for Cato...

Invictus
by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.


In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.


Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.


It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

---
PSSST: I take out the garbage when the wife tells me to -- even though I really don't want to.

Those Who Can, Do… TEACH!

In Front of the Class

by Max Fischer
EducationWorld.com

Max Fischer recently attended a local Chamber of Commerce meeting. The evening's motivational speaker got Max thinking about how successful businesspeople and successful teachers have much more in common than either of them might think.
Some of the harshest critics of education can be found in the business world. Steeped in the highly competitive atmosphere of business, local entrepreneurs are way too focused on overcoming competition and other obstacles, and on the almighty bottom line, to possibly comprehend what goes on in the classroom. Drop any business leader from your community in a classroom, and watch them flail!
The converse is also assumed true: Educators could not possibly understand what running a business is like. "Those that can, do; those that can't, teach," business people have often said with an air of disparagement.

Read more!

Former Hudsonite awarded tenure at Yale University

By Shalena Janis, Hudson Star-Observer

Published Friday, July 07, 2006

Brian Scholl, a 1990 Hudson High School graduate, will soon be honored with tenured status as a psychology professor and researcher at Yale University.

After only five years at the New Haven, Conn., school, the 35-year-old researcher nailed the opportunity of a lifetime in his profession.

See Full Hudson Observer Story

"Why you dirty libertarian socialist rat!"

Just when you thought it was safe to take a toaster into the shower...

Our comrades over at www.ontheborderline.net like to call us "collectivists," "socialists," and even -- gasp -- "scum." We've only occasionally discribed them as pocketbook libertarian rednecks who demand the right of bring automatic machine guns into their local convenience stores to buy a pack of Backwoods cigars. So I put two words together in the Google search engine and bingo! I find there is such a thing as a "libertarian socialist."

What is such a political animal:

Libertarian Socialism is a term essentially synonymous with the word "Anarchism". Anarchy, strictly meaning "without rulers", leads one to wonder what sort of system would exist in place of one without state or capitalist masters... the answer being a radically democratic society while preserving the maximal amount of individual liberty and freedom possible.

Libertarian Socialism recognizes that the concept of "property" (specifically, the means of production, factories, land used for profit, rented space) is theft and that in a truly libertarian society, the individual would be free of exploitation caused by the concentration of all means of wealth-making into the hands of an elite minority of capitalists.

Read more!

Top 40 Political Groups: Fabian Socialism

A short history of the Fabian Society
Our comrade Cato mentioned Fabian socialism in a post and, in the interest of educating our millions of readers, we thought we'd provide a link to help background you on the Fabian socialist.
---
The Fabian Society was founded in 1884 as a socialist society committed to gradual rather than revolutionary social reform. The name comes from the Roman general Quintus Fabius, known as Cunctator from his strategy of delaying battle until the right moment. The Society's early members included George Bernard Shaw (later described by Lenin as 'a good man fallen among Fabians'), Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Emmeline Pankhurst and H G Wells.

From the first Fabian Tract (Why are the Many Poor?) and the original Fabian Essays, published in 1889 in the wake of the Match Girls' Strike, the Society has been characterised by a passionate commitment to social justice and a belief in the progressive improvement of society. It has always maintained a diversity of opinion, motivated by the desire to stimulate debate rather than to promote a particular political 'line'. Its publications represent only the views of their authors.

Read more!
More on the Fabian Socialists.

Former Hudson sports standout achieves success as Vanderbilt

Hoops or links: Difficult college decision paved Freitag’s life path
By Brett Hait, bhait@nashvillecitypaper.com

In 1991, Martha Richards was handed a painful ultimatum: choose basketball or golf.

The message, coming from Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer, was clear but still too difficult for Richards to accept.

Richards was, after all, a certified sports nut. In addition to playing golf and basketball, she hunted, fished, skied and watched sports on television as feverishly as any couch potato. She wanted to slice none of it from her life.

Still, VanDerveer drew a line in the sand with Richards, who at the time was a member of the Stanford women’s golf and basketball squads. VanDerveer was demanding a year-round commitment.

“She told me I had to choose,” said Richards, now Martha Richards Freitag. “I didn’t want to choose, so she kind of chose for me. That was tough, because I was recruited to play both, and I went there with the understanding that I would be able to play both.”

Just like that, Richards’ basketball career was finished.

Read more of the story from the Nashville City Paper.

Read the Vanderbilt University bio of Martha Richards Freitag.

Libertarian DA will ignore the "war of drugs"

"Softens" Stance on Certain Crimes

Hollister - San Benito County District Attorney John Sarsfield announced Tuesday that he no longer plans to charge people accused of some minor drug offenses, citing a desire to spend the dwindling days of his tenure focusing on more serious violations.

"The so-called 'War on Drugs' is an absolute and utter failure," Sarsfield said. "These are such unimportant crimes and we don't have the resources to prosecute them."

Read more!

PSSST: Maybe they can called Rush Limbaugh for a "stiffener?"

Where would they keep their wallets?

Libertarians kept from nudist camp

A court order bans commercial activities at Kansas nudist camp. The state Libertarian Party chairman counters that a political fundraiser isn't a commercial activity.

Read more.

PSSST: What if they wear duct tape?

Free Movies In River Falls

From time to time, we plan to show free, thought-provoking movies at the Pierce County Democratic Party office at 115 E Walnut St. in River Falls. Our first show begins at 7:00 PM, Wednesday, July 12th with:

Wellstone!
Sometimes you've got to start a fight to win one.

This 88-minute documentary of Paul and Sheila Wellstone's lives reminds us how we as individuals can make changes by getting off our seats and into the streets to organize. With the upcoming elections this fall, there's still work to do -- and it's up to us to do it.

We have chairs at the office for about 25 people. Bring your own popcorn, beverages and tissues (it may make you cry). Afterward, feel free to stay for an informal discussion.

If you have ideas about, or have access to other movies we could show in the future, please let me know.

See you there!

Tammy Tollefson, Vice Chair
Pierce County Democratic Party

War Profiteering: The Government Waste You Won't Hear About at OTBL.

Now here's the kind of wasteful government spending you won't here our
friends on the other side of the borderline complain about.

Billions doled out to "security" companies like Halliburton and
Custer Battle for
services they never delivered.




See 60Mins Report:


Our new friend CATO gets upset about the government forcing him to help Katrina
victims, but where's the outrage over this grotesgue waste of taxpayer funds?

CATO: "But why should the government put a gun to my head and tell me I should be helping people solely because they made a stupid decision to live in New Orleans? You cannot make such a justification. They are not my problem. "

A few selected quotes from the 60 Min. Report:


"The United States has spent more than a quarter of a trillion dollars during its three years in Iraq, and more than $50 billion of it has gone to private contractors hired to guard bases, drive trucks, feed and shelter the troops and rebuild the country."

"It is dangerous work, but much of the $50 billion, which is more than the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security, has been handed out to companies in Iraq with little or no oversight."

"Complaints about Custer Battles performance at the airport began almost immediately. Col. Richard Ballard, the top inspector general for the Army in Iraq, was assigned to see if the company was living up to its contract, such as it was."

"And the contract looked to me like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka," Ballard says. "Complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes, to be filled in later. They presented it the next day, and they got awarded a — about a $15 million contract."

"In a memo obtained by 60 Minutes, the airport's director of security wrote to the Coalition Authority: "Custer Battles has shown themselves to be unresponsive, uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war profiteers. Other than that they are swell fellows."

"How did Custer Battles perform that contract?

"Absolutely abysmally. I mean, it was beyond a joke," says British Col. Philip Wilkinson.

Wilkinson was a colonel in the British Army and was assigned to the Coalition Authority’s Ministry of Finance and charged with providing security to convoys that traveled all over Iraq, loaded with $3 billion in cash. The trucks were supplied by Custer Battles."

"And you can imagine, open trucks with that sort of money on the back, was just a red hot target for not only terrorists, but criminals," Wilkinson says. "And, therefore, we needed trucks that were going to work. When those trucks were delivered to us, some of them were physically dragged into our compound."

"Wilkinson says some of the trucks "were towed into the camp."

And Custer Battle’s response?

"When questioned as to the serviceability of the trucks was, 'We were only told we had to deliver the trucks.' The contract doesn't say they had to work," Wilkinson says. "Which, I mean, when you're given that sort of answer, what can you do?"

How did they get away with it?

"Oh," says Wilkinson laughing, "I really don't know. I mean it was just a joke. The assumption that we had was that they had to have high political top cover to be able to get away with it. Because it was just outrageous: their failure to deliver that which they were contracted to do."

Comments on the haves and have-nots

"I don't see how we can maintain a decent society if we have a world split into haves and have-nots, with the haves subsidizing the have-nots. In our current educational system, close to 30 percent of the youngsters who start high school never finish. They are condemned to low-income jobs. They are condemned to a situation in which they are going to be at the bottom. That leads in turn to a divisive society; it leads to a stratified society rather than one of general cooperation and general understanding. The effective literacy rate in the United States today is almost surely less than it was 100 years ago. Before government had any involvement in education, the majority of youngsters were schooled, literate, and able to learn. It is a disgrace that in a country like the United States, 30 percent of youngsters never graduate from high school. And I haven't even mentioned those who drop out in elementary school. It's a disgrace that there are so many people who can't read and write. It's hard for me to see how we can continue to maintain a decent and free society if a large subsection of that society is condemned to poverty and to handouts."

Milton Friedman
July 2006 Issue of Imprimis contains the interview from which the quote was lifted.

The last Socialist mayor to run a major US city is dead
---
"My father always defined himself as a democratic Socialist. Someone who believed in the democratic process but that public enterprise should step in when private enterprise couldn't solve the problem."

Jeanne Zeidler
----
Since over comrades at the OTBL blog like to label us as the "local socialist" blog, we would be remiss in not pausing to reflect on the recent death of Frank Zeidler and the Socialist movement that reigned in Milwaukee in much of the first half of the 1900s. Zeidler's obituary contains an interesting glimpse of Socialism in Wisconsin. I found it interesting the concept of "Socialism" was discredited when Hitler and Stalin used it in their rhetoric. There's a parallel there with the complaining the OTBL'ers do about the change in the meaning of the word "liberal."

Read Zeidler's obit from the Journal-Sentinel.

Read more about Socialism's Impact on Milwaukee.

Vouchers vs. Vultures

"The Libertarian Threat"

Over the past few weeks you've been conducting a ranging discussion with a couple of your members and Cato that -- I my view -- have outlined the pros and cons of the libertarian philosophy. I made a couple of comments during those discussion and decided to sign up for this blog to post some interesting information on liberatarian idealism.

This article gives an overview of the historic perspective of the libertarian ideal and points out the difference between libertarianism and populism. The author of the article is Julian Edney.

I will follow up with additional information, as my busy schedule permits.
----

We are losing ground against a rhetorical assault.

The Libertarian star, hurled by the upward burst of American business which occurred in the Reagan era after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has risen. This global expansion over the last two decades is capitalism's second Big Bang, and it still accelerates. Mercantile missionaries have been flying to remote and backward nations in Indonesia, Latin America and the Middle East to show them liberty, democracy and wealth. The message: business is the solution; as your nation gets richer, it will benefit everybody.

The actual sequence is floridly exposed by writers like John Perkins (1). Ostensibly we send bold venture capitalists traipsing from country to backwater country, nailing freedom into place and unfurling banners of abundance. In practice it takes money to get started. First, corporate reps fly in and propose to arrange gargantuan loans for improvements. The lenders include the World Bank, and the loans may be used partly to bribe local officials, but they come with many rules and conditions that the construction work be done by American contractors. It is big money and it is made clear to local politicians they will get a fabulous rakeoff. The paperwork is set. Next the contractors move in and install concrete ports, iron factories, fences, oil wells, roads, telephones and mines. The factories fill with local workers. The big money loans also come with big interest payments (always in American dollars.) If the loans are not paid off quickly (they never are - these improvements take time) they compound into mountainous obligation. This brings whole sectors of the nation under the control of the foreign lenders. This may be used to extort political changes. Obstructing local leaders may be removed.

The pattern is an old one. On a local scale it used to be called carpetbagging. After the American Civil War northern profiteers traveled south taking advantage of Southern chaos and loss, buying property and plantations from devastated landowners, hiring at starvation wages, getting rich, and leveraging themselves into political office, arguing that the employment they brought benefited all. They were hated as exploiters. A poster from the period shows the KKK threatening to lynch carpetbaggers.

Our international version has brought backward nations in Indonesia, Latin America and the Middle East phones, satellite TV, and clinics, while natural resources are taken under the lender's rules. This was supposed to lead to local wealth but most of the money goes to pay off the contractors and the lenders.

On this side, reports seep back to American shareholders of indigenous people working twelve-hour shifts for five dollars a day in the new concrete sweatshops surrounded by barbed wire and having no standards and no labor laws; walled hells of exploitation – but cheap labor means bonanza profits. Some mansions appear on the hillside. But not everybody is lifted. Years later, there are acres of slums. Instead of gratitude come street demonstrations against Americans.

But challenge the working conditions and you get corporate table pounding: ‘Five dollars a day is much better than the dollar a day they made herding goats.' And if you object that it doesn't look like liberty for the workers – ‘but we saved them from communism.' Perkins goes on to relate how corporate reps, poolside at shimmering hotels, talk about civilizing the savages, the way the colonial British talked a century ago.

Click here to read the entire article.

"Why save the wilderness?"

"I am weary of the old and tiresome and banal question “Why save the wilderness?” The important and difficult question is “How? How save the wilderness?” I am not much concerned with the state of the world a thousand years from now, for in that long-range view I am an optimist: I think that the greed and stupidity of industrial culture will save us from ourselves by self-destruction. What I am concerned about is the world my children will have to live in, and maybe, if my children ever get around to it, the world of my grandchildren."

Edward Abbey