Something Stinks...

One would think that being a libertarian for as long as I have, there might be more similarities between my position and other libertarians. That's the beauty of the cause: freedom doesn't require any conformity. Take illegal aliens, for example. I join with most libertarians when I say that people wishing to enter this country should do so legally. We are, after all, a nation of laws. However, I find myself parting company with many libertarians on the issue of what is to be done with those that have already entered illegally.

I recently listened to a podcast where an argument was presented that we needed to allow these people to remain in this country so that many low paying jobs could be filled. This argument is not dissimilar to those presented by Bush the Duller, predecessor to our current Big Brother. While I agree that we need to implement some improved immigration solutions, including a more accessible work program, I don't condone excusing illegal aliens from their past transgressions for any reason.

What confuses me about these arguments is that they come from people supposedly versed in the machinations of a free market. If there are indeed jobs to be filled, the market will fill them. If they are to be filled using labor rates too low for Americans to accept, the market will drive the value of these jobs higher, thereby creating an incentive for Americans to fill the positions. To use this supposed need of cheap labor to justify circumvention of existing law is indefensible and stinks of social engineering (yes, Barack, that smell was aimed at you).

Paying The Piper

Although I covered this issue in my equally obscure blog of several years ago (Maximum Wage), I thought it worth revisiting in light of comments made in this piece: Minimum Wage Hikes Deserve Share Of Blame For High Unemployment. At the time, the minimum wage in the U.S. was $5.15. I engaged in a discussion with someone who couldn't see the harm in raising this wage one dollar per hour. On the surface, this seemed a reasonable thought. After all, what is a dollar between friends? However, as I pointed out at the time, it amounted to a nearly 20% increase to the minimum. Money has yet to be found springing forth from trees.

The Bush administration, in its finite wisdom, allowed the newly crowned liberal congress of the time to pass a bill that would increase the wage in each of the next three years. The change in the years from 2007 to 2009 was $.70 per hour per year. The first year amounted to an increase of nearly 14%. The second was an increase of 12% from the previous year, 27% cumulatively. In 2009, the increase amounted to 10.7%, a mere 40.8% cumulatively. This means that any business employing people at the minimum needed to increase their payroll for these people by 40% over that three year period. Why do we have an employment problem? I can't imagine.

Four years later, we sit mired in an economic slump from which there appears little relief. After eight years of general ineptitude, we are now subjected to a more specific economic ineptitude seldom rivaled. Nations around the world are waking up to the fiscal reality of social engineering while our current incarnation of Big Brother takes us down that same path. The minimum wage is another of the many examples of such engineering at work. While there's no reason to expect this or any administration to come to its senses about the minimum wage, there is little doubt that such tampering has had an impact.

Don't Let Them Eat Cake

“Any time you want to institute a behavior change, policy changes are really quite effective,” said Lisako McKyer, a professor at Texas A&M in response to a decision by the San Antonio city manager to ban sugared sodas, among other things, in city facilities (San Antonio city manager wages war on sugar). Why stop there, I would ask. If behavior change is your goal, why allow anyone entering or utilizing these government facilities to be overweight? For that matter, we should start requiring all users of public facilities to perform some feat of strength before being granted access. After all, improved public health is our goal.

In fact, there’s no reason to stop there. Each person needing to wade through some bureaucratic red tape should first be required to prove a minimum number of community service hours. Depending on the complexity of the need, they should also be forced to perform some function specific to offsetting their carbon output. Better yet, require them to surrender their time in a state sanctioned charitable endeavor.

As long as we have the power of the government, and its implied force, there’s no limit to the number of behavior changes we can achieve.

Ignorance is Strength

It comes as no surprise that the current incarnation of big brother, having ridden the wave of technology into the White House, is now descrying the evils of those same media and the information they provide: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era.

When I heard the line "information becomes a distraction" I could think only of the title of this post which, of course, shares the same origin with the term "thought criminal". To be fair, Mr. Obama's quote is partly an attack on entertainment diversions of the Xbox and PlayStation variety:

"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter," Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.


"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said.

Had he limited his comments to entertainment, he might have had a valid point. Instead, he pointed out that we are bombarded with content that is often not true. Of course, being a man of unquestioned integrity and considerable intellect, he would be happy to perform his big brotherly duties by shielding us from those things which he believes not to be true. He proves once again that the First Amendment to the Constitution was written for a specific reason: to ensure our ability to speak out against those who would exceed their constitutional mandate. What's next on his hit parade, "Freedom is slavery"?

We have always been at war with ecocide...

The latest in Orwellian legislative activity, albeit in the world community.

"Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute 'climate deniers' who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change."

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.

Tanstaafl

Breast feeding: your patriotic duty

Several months back, the Ministry of Information (formerly the Main Stream Media), began running "news" articles about links between obesity and sugar in soda. More recently, pieces of "information" were subsequently released linking sugared soda to cancer. It is little surprise, therefore, that Big Brother would now be championing additional taxes on this insidious threat to our well being. Now that Big Brother has taken over the reigns of the health of his citizenry, what other causes might be on the horizon?

Well, look no further than breast feeding. Yes, the Ministry of Information has recently been stressing both the economic and health benefits of breast feeding. Will this amount to additional taxes on baby formula, or will we see Rita the Riveter stressing the patriotism of lactation? One can be sure that the creativity of our betters will be evident when the potential of this new revenue stream is fully realized.

Tanstaafl.

Where there's smoke...

I considered myself, at least for a short time, a tea party activist. This is largely because my very first overtly political act was to attend an anti-tax rally in the spring of 2009. Since then I've attended one organized tea party event as well as protested, with a loosely organized band of activists, the passage of the health care reform abortion.

I say that this was for a short time mostly because I don't join any group or cause as a rule. I've been a Libertarian for nearly thirty years yet have never been a member of the Libertarian party. It's just not in my nature to join things. I couldn't tell you if my four year stint in the Marine Corps was merely anomaly or catalyst for this aversion.

From what I can tell, this is the case for most of the early participants in the tea party movement. These were people awakening to political activism because they had simply had enough of the lies and drunken spending sprees that are a staple of Washington politics. These were libertarians, independents and moderates who felt that the eight years spend fest of "compassionate conservatism" under Bush the younger, combined with the thinly veiled socialism of the current administration, warranted a call to action. While this remains the case in general, the movement has steadily been co-opted by disaffected conservatives who share, at least in part, the disgust of these other political neophytes.

While my acceptance of the movement is tepid at best, specifically because of the moralizing and selective application of liberty championed by some of the speakers at these rallies, my support of the movement grows with each attempt by the administration and its mouthpiece, the mainstream media, to demonize its participants. Clearly the movement is having an affect on directing the discussion. If this were not the case, we wouldn't have the ministry of truth and other agents of big brother so aggressively attempting to silence this growing voice of the people.