A fundemental misunderstanding of "free market"

BBC NEWS | Special Reports | Free market flawed, says survey

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.

In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.

Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.

There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.

In a world where governments (and unions) continue to dictate how much employees may be paid, who companies are allowed to trade with and where they may trade, and collecting permission fees (a.k.a. "taxes") for their ability to operate, someone please tell me exactly where this fabled free market is and how I can get there.

How government works

Please read The Longest Yard and a Half at The Daily WTF.

These people are incapable of thought. They are mindless automatons, and they are exactly the kind of sub-humans who want to be in control of making your health decisions, and pretty much your decisions for everything else.

Patriot's Day posts worth reading

I'm sure there are many, but here are some that stood out for me.

April 19 by Jay21.

April 19th by Whose Paranoid.

This Day in History: April 19 and April 19 a day for gun owners to reflect on sacrifices by David Codrea.

Detroit's war on the south

Interesting comments by KarenDeCoster:

I've got news for all the non-thinking journalists who keep saying that "Detroit is collapsing." Detroit is not collapsing (whatever that means). Three automakers born of Detroit are no longer financially able to continue to operate their businesses. They are financially failed because they long ago sold their souls to union thugs who have run their businesses in the best interests of the UAW's very-highly paid executives and managers and their autoworker constituency. Boom times and credit bubbles (and recent bailouts) masked dead business models and insolvent companies. Now that the veneer of phony prosperity and excesses has been stripped off the economy, the naked auto companies are a frightening sight to behold - sort of like the Hollywood celebrity bikini/cellulite photos in the National Enquirer.

So now, Detroit automakers and unions seeks to use aggressive tactics against the others to maintain their current status. The automakers seek the theft and redistribution of other peoples' money in order to sustain their failed businesses. The UAW seeks to use legislative fiat to extend the power of their union and plant their gangs in the South. In the South, the market has spoken in one aspect - the unions are not wanted by the workers.

I should point out that the Toyota plant in San Antonio isn't doing so hot, either.

Marshall Fritz

You may have seen some bloggers linking to The World's Smallest Political Quiz on occasion. You may have even taken it. The creator of the quiz, Marshall Fritz, passed away recently from pancreatic cancer. Advocates for Self-Government has more.

New Carnival!

I'm a little late on this since I've been busy with other things, but The Line Is Here has started a Carnival of the Libertarians. Check it out.

Stomping on the First Amendment

David Codrea of The War On Guns has been warned in a sideways fashion to stop posting information about Ryan Horsley's trial. Read the whole disgusting thing at Taking the Bait.

Your message has been received loud and clear--along with your warning that you will not hesitate to come down and arrest anyone you suspect of violating this law. Before I give you my reply, I want to make it clear that my response is mine alone. Any retaliation is mine to face, and taking it out on the man who passed your message along at your direction will not be something you can now do outside of a brightly focused light.

That said, OK, I recognize bait when I see it. I'll bite. Here is my considered response. Now that you've snagged me, hang on tight.

First off, if you have anything to say to me, say it directly. Don't go presuming sovereign citizens are your personal messenger boys.

Second, how dare you?

Don't presume to have authority to impose any prior restraint on what I write. Don't presume to warn me about what you will or will not allow me to say.

For you to imply any of my work might be illegal is a vile slander and you know it--if it wasn't, I'd already be in custody (assuming I was allowed to survive the arrest). Hell, you even admitted as much, but qualified that while I hadn't broken any laws, people who comment on this blog might.

David Codrea's public and identified blogging is what has kept me from "going anonymous" so to speak. Several months ago, I did begin an anonymous blog, but I haven't used it very much. I think the only honorable thing for me to do is to transfer those posts over here. Since I've commented and linked to The War On Guns, I'm probably already on the list, anyway.

No more free speech at Cato

The Cato Institute, a so-called "libertarian think-tank" has canned adjunct scholar Dom Armentano.

Why? Because he wrote an op-ed discussing the implications to our lives and our government if it were to be publicly proven that UFOs do exist.

The most astonishing news story of all time would be the confirmation of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Such a discovery would have multi-faceted social, religious, scientific and economic ramifications that can only be described as out-of-this-world. As an example, try to imagine the price of crude oil or the gyrations of the stock market just one day after such a revelation. The existence of off-the-planet intelligence could change what most people believe about almost everything.

Yet in some ways an even more significant story, perhaps even more significant than the discovery of extraterrestrial life itself, would be the revelation that certain elements of the U.S. government may have known about — and covered up — that discovery (even from elected officials without a “need to know”) for more than 50 years.

Now, that story, a deliberate half-century of deception to cover an inconvenient truth, likely would shake this nation to its very political foundations. That outrageous disclosure could change almost everything, too.

Yet outrageous as it may seem, many who have studied the UFO phenomenon now conclude that starting with Roswell in July 1947, elements of the U.S. government may have systematically lied to the American people (and to elected officials) concerning the actual nature of the UFO phenomenon. The evidence for that deception is substantial and is to be found in thoroughly documented books, dozens of declassified “top secret” documents, and many sworn testimonials from key military-intelligence community insiders.

He didn't say UFOs were full of little green men. In fact, the opinion he proffered was this:

Heavily censored information, billion-dollar “black budgets” and super-secret “black projects “ (UFOs are likely a very black project) ultimately make open government and representative democracy a joke and a sham.

The above sentence, possibly excepting the parenthetical remark, should be something that everyone except big-government statists can agree with. But what does Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz say?

“I won’t deny that this latest op-ed played a role in our decision. Some day we may look back and wish we’d listened to you. But for now this strikes us as not an issue that we want to have as part of Cato’s research agenda.”

No research into black budgets? What's up, Cato?

Disappeared in Connecticut

From the Department of Lesser Evils, thanks to Hartford Business:

Federal officials admit they keep detainees in covert prisons around the world, most notably at Guantanamo Bay, where many were held for years before their names were released to the public.

But it comes as a surprise to some state officials that federal detainees are also held, secretly, right here in Connecticut.

It’s all part of a contract between state and federal authorities: In exchange for a per-inmate fee, state officials agree to house federal prisoners arrested by homeland security.

Connecticut has had such a contract with the federal government since 1995, but it was only after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that new regulations clamped down on information about those prisoners.

According to legal arguments by state Assistant Attorney General Henri Alexandre, state authorities are prohibited from releasing any information about the federal detainees held behind bars in Connecticut prisons.

via Bill of Rights Defense Committee

The difference

I think (and this is an assumption, of course) that most readers of this blog originally came here for the gun-related content, and that many of you consider yourself conservatives, so you might not read some of the blogs that I do. I try to keep up with several (cough) "libertarian" blogs, and I have noticed a difference.

There are some who seem to think that guns are icky. They don't like to talk about them. When they do, they gloss over the issue and quickly find something else to focus on. They are more focused on promoting hedonistic behavior than they are on promoting actual liberty. Even the leading LP candidate is one of those "reasonable regulations" people. (Spit!) As far as I can tell, the other ones aren't so hot, either.

And then there are others who don't think guns are icky, like Karen DeCoster, who recently posted a link to the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot.

What's the point? Some of those who allegedly advocate freedom are really only advocating the freedom to be a jackass. And then there are some who advocate real liberty. Make sure you are informed enough that you don't get them confused.

Drawing the line

Ted Bronson draws the line with I am no longer a child:

Did things go wrong when someone decided that little Johnny (who still can’t read) deserved a trophy just like the MVP of his little league team? Doesn’t that kind of negate the purpose of trophies if EVERYONE gets them?

Did things change when the Fed decided it knew best how to protect us and make seatbelts mandatory for everyone? I used to ride on the shelf in the back of our Chrysler New Yorker. The car would drive up a forty-five degree hill just by putting it in gear and never touching the gas. She was a tank, as evidenced by the beating she took at the hands of my older brother when he inherited it. Even after her final undignified crash, seatbelts were optional…no one in the Boat got hurt even though she was never the same afterwards.

At what point did the politically correct crowd decide to nanny us?

An excellent statement from a new blog that's going right into my blogroll.

via Samizdata

The Bill that no one will talk about

From the Hartford Advocate:

Full disclosure: according to a staff member from the office of Hartford’s own Congressman John Larson, this article is “not a good story.” It wasn’t worth our time to write it, nor the Congressman’s time to discuss it, and probably not worth your time to read it either. Nothing to see here, people. Move along. Worthwhile or not, the story’s about a bill that recently passed the House of Representatives and looks on track to pass the Senate and be signed into law. Over 98 percent of Congressmen, including all five from Connecticut, voted in favor of it (the final count was 404 to 6), and when a bill passes with such a high majority it’s usually easy to find among that 98 percent a few Congressmen willing to go on the record to say “I voted for this incredibly important bill because blah blah blah.”

Not this time. No one who voted for the bill wants to talk about it. And when we called Larson’s D.C. office hoping to chat, staff member Emily Barocas said: “I used to be a journalist — I was on NPR — so I know where you’re coming from. I know what it’s like to want to get that big scoop, but this isn’t it … I know a good story from a bad story. This isn’t a good story.”

[...]

What is this Bill of Mystery, that Congresspeople will vote for yet not discuss? It’s called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, also known as HR 1955, and one of the first things it says is that “Congress finds … The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to ... terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.”

Four hundred and four Congressthugs voted for it, and yet this newspaper can't get any of them to say why they voted for it. The only answer they can get is, trust us, it's not really that important anyway.

“Violent radicalization,” one of the threats the bill seeks to curb, is defined there as “the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically-based violence to advance political, religious or social change.”

Extremist views such these, for example:

Gun Control is a conspiracy to enslave us starting with the removal of our ability to either defend ourselves or forcefully change our government.

All judicial authority resides with the people. The jury, not the Judge, directs trials and can nullify laws they do not approve of.

U.S. sovereignty is being surrendered to the U.N., World Court, and World Bank, with the U.S. becoming an economic region of this New World Order.

And as Kucinich said in the article, acts of violence are already illegal. This is nothing but the criminalization of thought.

And if this is mere paranoia, then why won't those who voted for it explain why and how it is not criminalization of thought, instead of just saying, trust us, it's really no big deal.

Besides, we're way past slippery slope time. Just ask this Constitutionalist.

The sheriff said the decision to use SWAT team force was justified because the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

UPDATE: Here's another source for that last linked story, via Say Uncle.

via Bill of Right Defense Committee and The War On Guns

In the black

Privacy International has a handy color-coded world map of leading surveillance societies in 2007. Also at the link are details on how they calculated the rankings.

via Samizdata

Who really got punked?

Ha ha! So the Ronulans got punked. Ron Paul was never excluded from any debate, because the "debate" never existed. But...

There's a really big but here.

So in fact it was a hoax perpetrated by Big Head DC. But then the MSM picked it up. It was broadcast all over the news media. It was accepted as truth. Ron Paul supporters--understandably--got really upset.

But it was all a joke so everybody can laugh now.

No, the ones who really got punked are those who think this was no big deal, that it was all pretty funny, actually. And here's why.

It has shown the difference between those who want real debates, those who are interested in the freedom to voice opinons and ideas, and those who are interested only in maintaining the status quo and perpetuating the meaningless debate theater that we are subjected to every four years.

UPDATE: Oops. The punkers get punked?

"Ubiquitous use of biometrics"

From WaPo:

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

Raise your hand if you can think of a group of perfectly law-abiding people who have undergone criminal background checks and turned a complete set of prints over to the FBI, and who employers or others may want to be able to identify.

If you can read this article without your skin crawling, you must be dead. Another particularly heinous passage jumped out at me:

In the world's first large-scale, scientific study on how well face recognition works in a crowd, the German government this year found that the technology, while promising, was not yet effective enough to allow its use by police. The study was conducted from October 2006 through January at a train station in Mainz, Germany, which draws 23,000 passengers daily. The study found that the technology was able to match travelers' faces against a database of volunteers more than 60 percent of the time during the day, when the lighting was best. But the rate fell to 10 to 20 percent at night.

To achieve those rates, the German police agency said it would tolerate a false positive rate of 0.1 percent, or the erroneous identification of 23 people a day. In real life, those 23 people would be subjected to further screening measures, the report said.

Twenty-three people per day, who, under current guilty-until-proven-innocent standards of combating "terrorism," would likely have their lives ruined. Sure this was in Germany, but if you think our own Only Ones would be any different, you haven't been paying attention. And get this:

In 2004, the Electronic Privacy Information Center objected to the FBI's exemption of the National Crime Information Center database from the Privacy Act requirement that records be accurate. The group noted that the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001 found that information in the system was "not fully reliable" and that files "may be incomplete or inaccurate." FBI officials justified that exemption by claiming that in law enforcement data collection, "it is impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and complete."

Translation: Everybody's guilty. Deal with it.

"The long-term goal," Hornak said, is "ubiquitous use" of biometrics. A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and looking into a camera, he said.

"That's the key," he said. "You've chosen it. You have chosen to say, 'Yeah, I want this place to recognize me.'"

Those who don't choose it will be dealt with.

via The Liberty Papers

Gun Control and the Supremes

L. Neil Smith writes on Gun Control and the Supremes:

Thirty years ago or so, I predicted that, if the Supreme Court ever rules against the Second Amendment, that will be the end, not of the Second Amendment, but of the Supreme Court. It should be clear now that, without the rule of law -- without a legal government -- there's no need for a Supreme Court. All that we have left is a dictatorship, running on terror and brute force. Maybe that's what those currently in power actually want, but the age in which an arrangement like that is stable has been over for quite a while. It is most likely to come to an end more quickly than its proponents anticipate, and also very badly.

As usual, read the whole thing.

Via JPFO.

Related: Bill of Rights under Bush: A Timeline via The War On Guns.

RPDS

The Agitator writes on Ron Paul Derangement Syndrome:

My colleague Dave Wiegel calls it "Ron Paul Derangement Syndrome," and there certainly seems to be something to it. Here you have a Republican running for president who's actually serious about downsizing the federal government, who gives a damn about individual rights, and who understands that big government overseas breeds big government at home, and reaction from the Beltway right is to dismiss the guy with eye rolls, patronizing lectures about "seriousness," and lame ad hominem attacks.

Yep.

A monopoly on wealth

GordonUnleashed points to some reports that the offices of the Liberty Dollar have been raided by federal agents and everything was stolen confiscated.

In 1999 the Treasury Department reviewed the Liberty Dollar and stated that it was not illegal as long as it was not printed with the words "legal tender."

Apparently they changed their minds.

Via New Liberty Creation.

UPDATE: The Liberty Papers takes a look at the other side: how the Liberty Dollar can be viewed as a money-making scam, but not as big of a scam as the "legal" Federal Reserve.

Propaganda Posters for the New Police State.

Via The Club Above.

Meet your friendly neighborhood homegrown terrorist

Details at The War On Guns.

I don't know if this would turn out well on a t-shirt, but I think I'm going to try it out.