What Do You Own?
Do you own a house? If you are
like most homeowners, especially younger ones, you have a mortgage. The
mortgagee (holder of the loan) actually owns it. If you get behind on your
payments, the mortgagee can foreclose – kick you out and sell the place. If you
own your home free and clear, you still have to pay taxes on it till death do
you part. If you don’t keep up those payments, some government agency will kick
you out and sell the place. Even if you keep paying your taxes, you can’t
necessarily do what you to maintain it. If you want to replace your furnace,
for example, you can’t put any new unit in. As of May 1, 2013, regulations kick
in that demand new furnaces must be at least 90% efficient instead of 78%.
Furnaces that meet the new rating cost about twice as much as the older ones.
This is but one example of the police state’s share in the ownership of your
house.
Do you own a car? Cars are
expensive, so people often borrow money to buy them. Lenders can repossess
cars, too. But even if you own your car outright, do you really own it? Suppose
you want to remove the seatbelts or disable the airbags. You’re not allowed. In
fact, most states force you to wear the government-mandated seat belts. Don’t
get me wrong – I like the fact that seatbelts and airbags can save lives, and I’ve
been using seatbelts since 1962. But why must the bureaucratic buttinskies make
you buy and/or use this safety equipment? If you don’t use these protective
items, you will be the only one to suffer in case of a crash. The police state
strikes again! You don’t own that car!
Well, if you don’t really own
your house or your car, what do you own? Surely you must own something. How
about yourself?
Do you own yourself? “Of course!”
you might say, scoffing at such a dumb question. You can’t, of course, use your
body to harm someone else, except in self-defense (in the US). Suppose you don’t
like beer, but you’d like to try some other drug for pleasure. The central
government says, “No, you can’t!” Even if your state has legalized marijuana
(as my state of Colorado has), toking up still carries the risk of arrest by
the feds. And cocaine, heroin, meth, LSD and the rest of the banned list could
get you jail time anywhere in the country.
Suppose you’d like to earn money
by renting your body? You can do this in some areas around Las Vegas, but in
most places, you’re screwed if you’re caught screwing where money’s involved.
Can you sell body parts? If you
own something, you should be able to sell it. But no, you can’t sell a kidney
while you’re alive, or have your heirs sell your corpse when you’re freshly
dead. You can give away parts, but thanks to the National Organ Transplant Act, you can’t part
yourself out for profit. (FYI, Nobel Laureate and former cable news tycoon Al “Jazeera”
Gore headed the effort to pass this law. What a humanitarian!) Thousands of
people die in the US every year waiting for “free” organs. The free market
would save lives, but collectivists would rather confiscate your parts (“mandatory
donation”). The police state is three for three!
So you don’t fully own anything. You have partial ownership, to be sure –
you can paint the inside of your house any color you want, you can put a loud
sound system in your car, and you can suck down all the ethanol you want to get
drugged up. Tip your glass and celebrate the land of the nominally free!
Labels: free market, organ donation, ownership
A Modest Proposal for Certain Assault Weapons
Anti-gun people like to remind us
that when the Bill of Rights was adopted, the Second Amendment referred to
muzzle-loading arms such as muskets. But tools for the First Amendment’s
guarantees of freedom of speech and the press were equally primitive by today’s
standards: a person’s voice within earshot of another person, a quill pen, or a
manual printing press. Furthermore, delivery of anything written or printed was
accomplished by human, animal or sail power.
Technology for transmitting
writing and spoken words improved over time. In the early 19th
century, steam began to power ships and railroads. The telegraph came into
being about the middle of the century, allowing messages to be sent and received
as fast as the telegraphers could click their keys. By the 1880s, telephones
became available. In the 1890s, linotype machines began to replace the old
printing presses. The use of typewriters was also beginning about that time.
The early 20th century brought instant, widespread transmission of
words via the new medium of radio, and by mid-century, television was common.
Although personal communication
had become somewhat easier by the 1950s, it wasn’t until the 1980s, when
personal computers and networking became relatively cheap, that an individual
could easily send messages to a wide audience. Today, anybody with a computer,
tablet or smart phone can send or publish his ideas to thousands or even
millions of people. The founders of our nation never imagined the communication
power that untrained, non-professional writers would have.
Our Founding Fathers understood
the power of words, even though the dissemination of ideas was at a much more
leisurely pace than today. In 1796, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to
Thomas Paine: "Go on doing with your pen what in other times was done with
the sword." And we have seen the damage bad ideas can do. The writings of
Marx, the ravings of Hitler and the repressive rhetoric of Mao led to about 100
million deaths during the 20th century.
Nowadays, a single individual
with a computer has more power to publish ideas than the entire world did in
the final years of the 18th century. One person can spread ideas to
millions of people at the speed of light. Certainly, nobody who intends to use
free speech peaceably needs the kind of power today’s assault-word weapons
have. Therefore, I offer the following modest proposal of new regulations to
ensure improved public safety.
1. All
computers with a processor capacity of 32 and 64 bits will be outlawed. 16 bit
processors are powerful enough for law-abiding citizens to exercise their nonviolent
free speech.
2. Computer
memory will be limited to 640 kilobytes. No person who intends to use a
computer peacefully needs the billions of bytes available in high-capacity
computers.
3. All
computer mice will be confiscated and replaced with government-approved
battery-powered cordless mice. These will be limited to 10 clicks, after which
the user must remove and replace the batteries to get another 10 clicks.
4. Email
clients must immediately be upgraded by the software providers to limit the
number of rounds (recipients) to 10 per message. If the sender tries to send to
more than 10, all addresses after the 10th will be removed. It will
be a minor inconvenience for an email user to send messages round to 10 people
at a time.
5. Internet
web site software must also be changed to limit the number of clicks per page
to 10. This will help protect against those lawless users who failed to replace
their mice with the legal 10-click limited ones.
6. Users
of smart phones and tablets must upgrade their software to the 10-click limit
for their virtual clicking devices.
7. Users
of smart phones and tablets must also obtain concealed-carry permits to keep
these devices on their persons. The fees, training and reciprocity for such
permits will be left up to the states.
8. All
persons convicted of violating these new laws will receive a mandatory minimum
sentence of 10 years and 100,000 hand-written words of contrition.
Because of the
power of language, assault-word weapons must be restricted even more than others.
The common-sense restrictions I propose clearly do not violate the Founders’
intent for the First Amendment. For individuals, this means hunting &
pecking, and common-sense limits on clicking. These changes merely protect the
innocent while still allowing law-abiding citizens to communicate with far more
power than the Founding Fathers with their quill pens and printing presses.
These unneeded, deadly, overpowered weapons must go!
Labels: assault, ban, bill of rights, weapons
Laissez-faire Learnings
Once upon a time, I was a
standard-issue liberal who believed in government control. At the time, of
course, I thought I believed in freedom. Eventually, I figured out that most
government control was bad - evil, in fact. In this post, which I'll update from
time to time, I've written some brief notes on what I've learned about being
left alone versus having the bureaucrats forcing stuff on us. Any comment
without attribution is my own thought.
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Big government is a big black
hole. It distorts reality, and anything that comes too close is sucked in and
destroyed.
Trusting Congress to regulate
business is like trusting the Mafia to regulate the Boy Scouts.
To call Social Security and
Medicare “Ponzi Schemes” is to insult the memory of Carlo Ponzi. Ponzi couldn’t
force people into his pyramid scheme.
Nowadays, “public servants” run
roughshod over the public they are supposed to serve.
Equal pay for equal work! That
means every government worker should have a 50% pay cut to be in line with the
poor schmucks in private business.
Since civilian government
employees earn about twice what private employees do for the same work, each
government job costs 2 real jobs.
The more “free” stuff you get
from your government, the more you are a slave to that government.
The left deplores honest,
private self-interest as “greed” while honoring politicians’ limitless lust for
power and insatiable appetite for other people’s money as “public service”.
The commerce clause of the
Constitution is the stealth zipper Congress uses to get our pants off and rape
us.
The commerce clause of the Constitution apparently means that our dear leaders can force us to do some things and force us not to do other things. It's really the Coerce Clause.
I’d rather be mugged than give
money to a politician. At least the mugger won’t use the money he’s stolen to
take away more of my freedom.
You cannot fix government-caused
problems with more government.
Entitlements are eminent domain
abuse on your earnings.
The welfare state is not a
safety net – it’s a dependency trap.
Obama’s children attend a
private school with 11 security personnel. Seven of those are “Special Police
Officers” and presumably armed. Sandy Hook had no armed guards. To paraphrase
Orwell, “All children are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
The nanny state is the velvet
glove hiding the iron fist of the police state.
Nothing is more equitable than
the inequities found in a free market. Nothing is less fair than
government-forced “fairness”.
Nothing is more secure than the
uncertainty of the free market. Nothing is more uncertain than the “security”
of the welfare state.
If you pull out the race card
for nearly every issue, you’re not playing with a full deck.
So-called “civil rights” leaders
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton find racism everywhere, except where in really
exists – in their mirrors.
I am a free American, not a cell in the Big-government Borg.
Many
states have “click it or ticket” campaigns. To which I say “Click it or stick
it!” I say “It’s my body and I’ll die if I want to.”
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Quotes from H.L. Menken
Government is a broker in
pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods.
And what is a good citizen?
Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are
maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point.
A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young
and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from
head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
The kind of man who wants the
government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas
are idiotic.
All government, in its essence,
is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the
implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.
The
urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule
it.
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Quotes from P.J. O’Rourke
Giving
money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage
boys.
The
good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for
everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're
rich.
When
buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought
and sold are legislators.
If
government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
The
mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
The
Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller,
richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party
that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
Labels: libertarian, quote
The Dole-ful Warning Deniers
The US has a vast welfare bureaucracy
consisting of many programs. Most of these programs don’t use the word “welfare”
in their names, but that’s what they are. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare,
food stamps, farm subsidies, student aid – all of these are in effect welfare
programs. These programs make up the vast majority of the central government’s
budget. And about 40% of the budget is borrowed, causing the national debt to
increase rapidly.
It was reported recently that
President Obama told Speaker of the House Boehner that the US doesn’t have a
spending problem. So the government’s Expander-in-Chief is a
dole-ful warning denier. He denies that
the spending on our welfare state (or “dole” as the Brits would put it) is
unsustainable.
President Obama is just the
latest in a long line of big spenders and big borrowers. FDR, of course,
created Social Security, LBJ gave us Medicare, and George W. Bush added
Medicare Part D. Many other dole-ful programs were also created during other
administrations. And all of these programs have worked exactly as designed –
they have bought votes and increased the scope of government. But sooner or
later, the Titanic of state will hit the iceberg of entitlement debt. If the
dole-ful warning deniers keep rearranging the deck chairs with tweaks and taxes
instead of real reform and drastic reductions in spending, we’re sunk.
Labels: denier, government spending, national debt, welfare
