Attacking Our Rights

ATTACKING OUR RIGHTS!

This section will cover the Rights (Privileges) and Liberties granted in the U. S. Constitution that are being attacked by the far Left.

Democratic Socialism – the new name for slavery

Source; https://personalliberty.com/democratic-socialism-new-name-slavery/The political philosophy of democratic socialism is ascendant in the Democrat Party, even though no one seems to know what it is or be able to explain it beyond “free stuff.”
As Senator Bernie Sanders challenged the witch from Chappaqua for the Democrat nomination in 2015, some media outlets sought to get an explanation of social democracy or democratic socialism from him. His explanation fell short, according some political science professors.
“When you call your fire department or the police department, what do you think you’re calling?” Sanders babbled to the crowd in one of his stump speeches. “These are socialist institutions.”
“If he were to write this on an exam for me? That’s an F,” Andrei Markovits, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, said.
Nor is the latest darling of the movement, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez any better at telling us what she believes beyond basic platitudes of “free stuff” for everyone.
When asked by “The View’s” Meghan McCain whether the future of the Democrat Party is socialism, Ocasio-Cortez responded:
First of all, there’s a huge difference between socialism and Democratic socialism. Democratic socialism, and really what that boils down to me, is the basic belief that I believe that in a moral and wealthy America and a moral and modern America, no person should be too poor to live in this country.
That vacuous response is all it took for the biddies in the audience to erupt in cheers and applause worthy a sport team’s championship victory. And perhaps that’s what it is, because there is no substance at all to what she said… it’s all bread and circus.
No less than the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, called Ocasio-Cortez the “future of our party.” And Sanders insists Democrats can’t win 2018 midterms without him and a push for “universal health care, tuition-free public college, [and] a $15-an-hour minimum wage.”
So what is democratic socialism? Samuel Goldman, an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University says it is “achieving collective control of the economy.”
The previously-mentioned Professor Markovits said democratic socialism is an attempt to create, “a property–free, socialist society.”
Making the rounds on social media is a meme that purports to explain it that seems to coincide with Goldman’s and Markovits’ description:
A Democratic Socialist is not a Marxist Socialist or a Communist. A Democratic Socialist is one who seeks to restrain the self-destructive excess of capitalism and channel the Government’s use of our tax money into creating opportunities for everyone.
Democratic Socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically – to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few.
A Democratic Socialist does not want to destroy private corporations but does want to bring them under greater democratic control. The government could use regulations and tax incentives to encourage companies to act in the public interest and outlaw destructive activities such as exporting jobs to low-wage countries and polluting our environment. Most of all, socialists look to unions to make private business more accountable.

Perhaps someone should send this meme to Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. At least they wouldn’t sound like blithering idiots when pressed to describe their belief system.
Now when we look closely we see that democratic socialism is nothing new after all. It’s merely an old system with a new name. It’s the addition of the code word “democratic” to the old system of collectivism – previously called national socialism (Nazism), communism and Marxism – in order to put lipstick on a pig.
But even this is not new. Hitler referred to his National Socialism as “the great democracy.” Nazism or National Socialism was only a generic form of collectivism exactly as Italian Fascism, Russian Communism or American democracy.
What’s that you say Bob? That’s right, both socialism and democracy are anathema to human liberty. Democracy is an esoteric belief system that manipulates the people in such a way that all power flows to the state. As with pure dictatorships, power flows from the top down.
Democracy implies freedom in the public’s mind while power and wealth is constantly channeled to the federal government. Human liberty is regressively crushed under the one simple word, “democracy.”
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their ilk see their fight as one between capitalism and something else, with their something else being a form of mob rule collectivism. They falsely believe – or at least claim to believe — that America is a capitalist society. It’s not, and hasn’t been for 150-plus years.
Capitalism is a social system in which an individual’s rights, including his rights to own property, are recognized and all property is privately owned. In a capitalistic society, governments acknowledge that individuals and companies can and should compete for their own economic gain, and the prices of goods and services are determined by the free market. The role of government in capitalistic societies is to ensure that markets function without interference and to protect individuals from fraud and/or the use of physical force by others.
What we have is crony capitalism or corporatism, which is a form of fascism. It’s a marriage of business and government that involves government passing legislation and enabling federal alphabet soup regulatory agencies to create rules favorable to certain businesses and unfavorable to others. Congressweasels pass tax laws to encourage and discourage behaviors – exactly what democratic socialists are advocating.
Like all statists, democratic socialists want to grow government to solve a problem created by government, and to do so under cover of mob rule (the vote).
Socialism is a philosophy of envy. When one sees something another has and decides he wants it, rather than earn it on his own merits he wants the power of government to take it and either give it to him or redistribute it to the masses. Often the socialist doesn’t want that something for himself as much as he doesn’t want someone else to have it.
Socialism is also a philosophy of racism, weakness, ineptitude and collectivism in that it assumes one gained what he has by way of special privilege not afforded everyone if they are of a different race or creed or social standing; and that one cannot obtain a thing or advance economically without the assistance of government or the collective.
Manipulating minorities who are naturally drawn to socialism is a basic political strategy to justify government politics and plunder.
Who are minorities? They are, of course, the racial minorities. But there are a whole lot more than that. There are homosexual minorities, feminine minorities, so-called “civil rights” minorities, cultural minorities and all the minorities that make up the “diversity” of the nation.
Democratic socialism is a disguised system of stealing the wealth and production of the producers of wealth with spurious laws under the legitimacy of the vote. Stealing or taking from producers and transferring it to nonproducers is very sophisticated and concealed class warfare.
Democratic socialism is anathema to human liberty and is a concealed form of slavery.
However, it’s naïve and wholly inaccurate to ascribe this philosophy only to Democrats. Almost all politicians, Democrat and Republican, embrace socialism in many forms.
Always remember: The government has nothing good or nice to give to you. The government is in the business of shrinking freedom (and wealth), not expanding it.
Socialism is by no means limited to a political system. The definition of socialism under any masquerade is the pseudo-morality of groupism over the individual.
All political power is derived from this. This definition must be understood.

Scholar: America’s Constitution isn’t about “Inventing New Rights”

February 8, 2017, Malcolm A. Kline
Don’t expect the Senate hearings on prospective Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch to get into the question of natural law, not because it isn’t worth it but because it is.
Really relevant questions are anathema to politicians and pedagogues alike and the question of whether our rights come from God or government is one of them, particularly since most people working in either sphere would like you to think your liberties are the product of a benevolent state. At his nomination hearings, sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was pilloried by Senate Democrats because of his interest in natural law. Johnny Carson, then the king of late night television, took sharp aim at one of them.
Noting that the hearings hinged on the question of natural law and that it is “a dicey thing to explain,” Carson said, “To Ted Kennedy it means that part of the cocktail waitress that hangs over the table is yours.” Scholar Hadley Arkes offered a more rarefied description in a speech delivered six years ago, but then, he actually entered academia, where he served for many years as a professor at Penn, in search of truth.
“We announce here nothing new to the world, much in the way that James Wilson, at the origin of the Constitution, proclaimed that we were not, under this Constitution, inventing new rights,” Arkes said in a speech which has been reprinted by the James Wilson Institute that he founded. Wilson was one of the early Supreme Court Justices, who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution.
“The object of the Constitution, he said, was ‘to acquire new security for the possession or the recovery of those rights’ we already possess by nature,” Arkes argued. “The great Blackstone had famously said that, on entering civil society, we give up those unqualified rights we had in the State of nature, including the liberty of ‘doing mischief.’”
“To which James Wilson asked, in a Talmudic question, ‘Is it part of natural liberty to do mischief to anyone?’ In other words, as Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Aquinas had it, we never had a ‘right to do wrong.’”
Posted in Perspectives. Tagged as Accuracy in Academia, AIA, Constitution, Hadley Arkes, James Wilson Institute, natural law, Neil Gorsuch, SCOTUS, supreme court, U.S. Constitution
Scholar: America’s Constitution isn’t about “Inventing New Rights”
February 8, 2017, Malcolm A. Kline, 1 Comment

Oligarchy Of Thieves May 8, 2014
By KrisAnne Hall

Our government has been infected by Federal Supremacists. They commonly assert that the Supreme Court has the power to ultimately interpret the Constitution through judicial review and therefore sovereignly determine the limits of the power delegated to the federal government. They sometimes assert that federal law itself is superior to the Constitution. In reality, the Supreme Court does not have the authority to limit or expand the power of government. Neither does Congress have the authority to pass a law that is contrary to the Constitution itself. To allow such action means that the Constitution has NO MEANING and the government has NO LIMIT.
The power being wielded against the states and the people is stolen power. It is power neither authorized nor delegated. Dear friends, this is NOT what a Constitutional Republic looks like…this is a KINGDOM of stolen power, an oligarchy of thieves.
Here are FIVE simple FACTS that must be taught to our Representatives, so they can honor their oath to support and defend the CONSTITUTION, rather than their politics of stolen power. Review these points and the words from our framers and ask yourself how much simpler can it be.________________________________________________________________________________
 FACT #1:The Constitution is a compact (contract) that must be legally interpreted using contract law. Contract law dictates that a contract is properly interpreted through the framers of the contract and their intent, i.e. the “meeting of the minds.”
“the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact–as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that, in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose…” James Madison
“…the powers of the federal government as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties;” in other words, that the federal powers are derived from the Constitution; and that the Constitution is a compact to which the states are parties.” James Madison
 FACT #2: The federal government does not have the authority to determine the limits of federal power, since it is not a party to the compact but a creation of the compact.
“for the federal government to enlarge its powers by forced construction of the constitutional charter which defines them…so as to destroy the meaning and effect of the particular enumeration…the obvious tendency and inevitable result… would be, to transform the present republican system of the United States into an absolute, or, at best, a mixed monarchy.” James Madison
 FACT #3:The Supreme Court is PART of the federal government not OVER it and possesses no power greater than the executive or legislative branches.
“dangerous powers, not delegated, may not only be usurped and executed by the other departments, but that the judicial department, also, may exercise or sanction dangerous powers beyond the grant of the Constitution…must extend to violations by one delegated authority as well as by another–by the judiciary as well as by the executive, or the legislature…” James Madison
 FACT #4: To allow the federal government (i.e. SCOTUS) to determine its own limits is CONTRARY to the Constitution, to the principles of a Republic, and to the limited and defined nature of our government.
“The doctrine…which would vest in the General Government (it matters not through which department) the right of determining, exclusively and finally, the powers delegated to it, is incompatible with the…Constitution itself, considered as the basis of the Federal Union.” John Calhoun
 FACT #5: The federal government cannot write laws that are contrary to the Constitution.
“No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.” Alexander Hamilton
“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” Supremacy Clause
After review of these FACTS it is very difficult to accept the argument that we are simply subject to the federal government’s will and whim. These facts need to be shared far and wide. Shouldn’t we be able to rely on words of the “father of the Constitution” instead of the judges, lawyers, and politicians who have been taught that THEY are the supreme determiners of their own power?
http://krisannehall.com/oligarchy-thieves/

The Regulatory State – Central Planning and Bureaucracy on a Rampage
May 13, 2015 | Author Pater Tenebrarum

The New 10,000 Commandments Report – It’s Worse than Ever
Before we begin, we should mention that the US economy has long been one of the least regulated among the major regulatory States of the so-called “free” world, and to a large extent this actually still remains true. This introductory remark should give readers an idea of how terrible the situation is in many of the socialist Utopias elsewhere.

Even in the US though, today’s economic system is light years away from free market capitalism or anything even remotely resembling a “laissez faire” system. We are almost literally drowning in regulations. The extent of this regulatory Moloch and that the very real costs it imposes is seriously retarding economic progress. It is precisely as Bill Bonner recently said: the government’s main job is to look toward the future in order to prevent it from happening.

A great many of today’s regulations have only one goal: to protect established interest groups. Regulations that are ostensibly detrimental to certain unpopular corporatist interests are no different. Among these is e.g. the truly monstrous and nigh impenetrable thicket of financial rules invented after the 2008 crash in a valiant effort to close the barn door long after the horse had escaped. They are unlikely to bother the established large banking interests in the least. The banking cartel is probably elated that it has become virtually impossible for start-ups to ever seriously compete with it. The same is true of many other business regulations; their main effect is to protect the biggest established companies from competition.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) – evidently named after a species close to extinction – has just released its 2015 report on the regulatory State, entitled “The 10,000 Commandments” (download link at the end of the article). Here is a summary of the grisly highlights (now would be a good time to get the barf bags out):

“Federal regulation and intervention cost American consumers and businesses an estimated $1.88 trillion in 2014 in lost economic productivity and higher prices.
If U.S. federal regulation was a country, it would be the world’s 10th largest economy, ranking behind Russia and ahead of India.

Economy-wide regulatory costs amount to an average of $14,976 per household – around 29 percent of an average family budget of $51,100. Although not paid directly by individuals, this “cost” of regulation exceeds the amount an average family spends on health care, food and transportation.

The “Unconstitutionality Index” is the ratio of regulations issued by unelected agency officials compared to legislation enacted by Congress in a given year. In 2014, agencies issued 16 new regulations for every law — that’s 3,554 new regulations compared to 224 new laws.

Many Americans complain about taxes, but regulatory compliance costs exceed what the IRS is expected to collect in both individual and corporate income taxes for last year—by more than $160 billion.

Some 60 federal departments, agencies and commissions have 3,415 regulations in development at various stages in the pipeline. The top six federal rule making agencies account for 48 percent of all federal regulations. These are the Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, Interior, Health and Human Services and Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The 2014 Federal Register contains 77,687 pages, the sixth highest page count in its history. Among the six all-time-high Federal Register total page counts, five occurred under President Obama.

The George W. Bush administration averaged 62 major regulations annually over eight years, while the Obama administration has averaged 81 major regulations annually over six years.

(emphasis added)

Look at it and weep: the estimated cost of federal regulations and interventions alone in 2015 – click to enlarge.

If one adds taxes and the damage done by the Fed’s incessant money printing to these regulatory costs, it is a miracle the economy hasn’t imploded yet. Note the deeply undemocratic nature of the regulatory process: The vast majority of the rules – all of which have the power of law – is concocted by unelected bureaucrats in the form of “administrative law”. It would otherwise simply be impossible to make up thousands of new rules every year. As unproductive as the bureaucracy is, it is still smothering the economy with this onslaught. This will probably never change, unless the entire system collapses one day. After all, the people tasked with making the rules need something to do.

The cost of federal regulation per US household, compared to various major household expenditure items – click to enlarge.

Growing Like a Weed

A look at the Federal Register shows that the growth in regulations is essentially a permanent feature. There are no longer any significant time periods during which the number of rules actually declines. It is probably no coincidence that the charts below are eerily reminiscent of charts showing total federal debt or charts depicting the growth in the money supply. The only thing that is no longer showing any respectable growth is the economy. Of course, no-one should be surprised by this.

Federal Register pages per decade. One wonders how people survived the practically lawless 1940 – 1970 period. Note that if we were to go back in time by another 30 years, we would see that the federal government wasn’t even a footnote in most people’s lives.

Over the past 22 years, almost 91,000 final rules and regulations were published cumulatively. We are just guessing here, but we believe that between the time the average citizen gets out of bed until shortly after he has slurped his morning coffee, he has violated at least five laws or regulations already – click to enlarge.

Cumulative regulations published in the Federal Register – almost 91,000 in the past 22 years alone – click to enlarge.

Monetary costs are just one aspect to this. There is also the wasted effort and psychic cost that is incurred when people realize that there are many things they simply cannot do, even though they would harm no-one and would actually provide a service to their fellow men. It will often prove extremely difficult to fight the red tape and still establish a successful business venture at the same time. Certain sectors of the economy have been closed off to the private sector completely (see the example of roads below). Very often start-ups with little capital cannot hope to compete in certain business sectors, as the regulatory obstacles are simply impossible to overcome.

Recently a US trucking organization has penned a manifesto in which it is bitterly complaining about crumbling roads and bridges across the US and urging the government to “do something”. The authors should take a long, hard look at their sad collection of statistics and realize that this is what actually happens when the government monopolizes a sector of the economy.

Another aspect is of course social control. By making a criminal or a potential criminal out of everybody, the mountain of laws and regulations can always be brought to bear against citizens or organizations that have somehow displeased government officials or managed to attract their wrath. One can see a variation of this principle at work in modern-day criminal court cases. People who are indicted for a crime are usually faced with a whole plethora of charges apart from the main charge. The intention is to force them to accept a plea dealwhether or not they are innocent. The point is obviously not to serve the cause of justice.

However, we don’t want to digress too much here. The purely economic cost on which the CEI report focuses is distressing enough all by itself. One only has to think the problem properly through. Similar to other government interventions such as interest rate and money supply manipulations by the central bank, these enormous costs hamper the economy to such an extent that economic progress is slowed to a crawl. Who knows what we could have achieved by now if this were not the case? Perhaps people would already be able to reach the ripe old age of 150 and still feel like spring chickens in their early 100ds. Concerns over material well-being that continue to bedevil so many people today may already be orders of magnitude smaller. As Israel Kirzner once remarked in this context:

“We are not able to chart the future of capitalism in any specificity. Our reason for this incapability is precisely that which assures us . . . the economic future of capitalism will be one of progress and advance. The circumstance that precludes our viewing the future of capitalism as a determinate one is the very circumstance in which, with entrepreneurship at work, we are no longer confined by any scarcity framework.”

However, for this to be true, free market capitalism must be able to breathe. We won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of entrepreneurship if it is smothered at every opportunity.

ConclusionAs revolting as the full picture is, we recommend reading the entire “10,000 Commandments” report, which can bedownloaded here (pdf). Above we show only a very small selection of the charts and data contained in the complete report. One thing should be clear to everyone reading it: This is a major problem that deserves a lot more attention than it usually seems to get.

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=37392

Land Grab Library

More For The Land Grab Library
Executive Orders and Presidential Directives

Under Grand Staircase Escalante
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju72142.000/hju72142_0.htm and

Clinton 's National Monuments: A Democrat' s Undemocratic Acts
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1697&context=elq

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Behind closed-doors-escalante-report from American Lands Council

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John Adams on Property

Posted on December 1, 2014 by David Linton

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors.

Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this?

[See also, “U.S. Decline: Ranks #36 for Protecting Private Property.”]

The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them.

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If “Thou shalt not covet,” and “Thou shalt not steal,” were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.

– John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America,” Vol. III, Chapter First: The Right Constitution of a Commonwealth Examined, 1787-1788; Works 6:8-9

Read more at http://politicaloutcast.com/2014/12/john-adams-property/#ChUrw63VQU4aRz2X.99

Thomas Sowell Quote;

"It doesn't matter what rights you have under the Constitution of the United States, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights. And it doesn't matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials' power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences. In other words, the Constitution cannot protect you, if you don't protect the Constitution with your votes against anyone who violates it. Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped. As long as millions of Americans vote on the basis of who gives them free stuff, look for their freedom -- and all our freedom -- to be eroded away, bit by bit. Our children and grandchildren may yet come to see the Constitution as just some quaint words from the past that people once took seriously."
-- Thomas Sowell
(1930- ) Writer and economist
Source: Freedom Isn't Free, March 4, 2014

Voter Fraud Claims

Vote Fraud News9/26/14: Connecticut Democrat state representative arrested on 19 charges of vote fraud
Democrat State Representative Christina Ayala has been arrested on 19 charges of voting fraud, including: eight misdemeanor counts of fraudulent voting, ten felony counts of primary or enrollment violations and one felony count of tampering with or fabricating physical evidence. Her arraignment is scheduled for October 7.   Bridgeport State Rep. Christina Ayala arrested on 19 voting fraud ..., NH Register, September 26, 2014

9/18/14: Ex-Kentucky judge disbarred due to vote fraud
Former Clay County Circuit Judge Cletus R. Maricle has been permanently disbarred following his guilty plea of committing vote fraud. Court documents showed Maricle had used his position to bribe officials, candidates for county offices, defendants in his court, and family members of defendants in his court. Ex-Judge Convicted of Vote Fraud , Lexington Herald-Leader, September 18, 2014.

9/9/14: Georgia launches fraud investigation into voter registration group
A preliminary investigation into the New Georgia Project has revealed significant illegal activities including forged voter registration applications, forged signatures on releases and applications with false or inaccurate information. The New Georgia Project is an offshoot of the organization Third Sector Development, a group founded and led by Democrat GA House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams. State launches fraud investigation into voter registration group , Channel Two Action News, September 9, 2014.

8/25/14: Fairfax County Electoral Board Refers Potential Voter Fraud Cases for Investigation
The Fairfax County Electoral Board referred 17 individuals to the DOJ for investigation of possible voter fraud. The individuals seem to have voted in both Fairfax County as well as throughout Maryland in the 2012 elections, and in the case of some individuals, multiple elections over the last decade. Fairfax County Electoral Board Refers Potential Voter Fraud Cases f..., Fairfax County Press Release, August 25, 2014.

8/21/14: Investigations underway, suspected voter fraud in Virginia and Maryland
Virginia Voters Alliance drew attention to multiple duplicate voter registrations in Maryland and Virginia. They said there are 14,646 duplicate registrations between Fairfax County, VA and Maryland alone. If a voter is convicted of voter fraud in Maryland, they are still allowed to vote, as it is only a misdemeanor; in Virginia, it can result in a year in prison and $2,500 fine.   Investigations underway, suspected voter fraud in Virginia and Mar..., Daily Caller, August 21, 2014.

6/27/14: Allegations of Voter Fraud in Hotly Contested Minn. House DFL Primary Race
More than 140 people are alleged to have listed their current address as a mail center in the basement of a Minneapolis, Minn. commercial property while registering to vote. An investigation has been started as to whether or not there is a coordinated effort to register voters using the 419 Cedar Avenue address in Minneapolis. Some of these “voters” may also have been registered without knowing. Allegations of Voter Fraud in Hotly Contested Minn. House DFL Prima..., Eyewitness 5 ABC News, June 27, 2014.

6/20/14: Dothan commissioner’s girlfriend indicted on voter fraud charges
An Alabama grand jury indicted the girlfriend of Dothan, AL commissioner Amos Newsome on 23 counts of vote fraud in the campaign to re-elect Newsome last August. The alleged vote fraud scheme includes two additional women – one charged with 20 counts of vote fraud, the other charged with 10.   Dothan commissioner’s girlfriend indicted on voter fraud charges , Dothan First, June 20, 2014.

6/12/14: Judge orders new election in Weslaco City commissioner race due to vote fraud
A Texas judge invalidated a city commissioner election as a result of vote fraud. The judge carefully evaluated each of the 44 contested votes and found many of them were cast by people who deliberately and illegally voted under a “home is where the heart is” residency standard – they registered at homes belonging to the fraudulently-elected commissioner’s friends, neighbors, and relatives. Judge orders new election in Weslaco City commissioner race , KRGV, June 12, 2014.

6/10/14: NH man pleads guilty to voting illegally
A Massachusetts man pled guilty to illegally voting in both the 2008 and 2012 NH primaries. He was charged with one felony county and two misdemeanor counts of “wrongful voting” under NH law for traveling from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to cast votes in both primaries. He was fined $5,000 and given a suspended prison term of one to three years. Carver man pleads guilty to voting illegally in NH , Taunton Daily Gazette, June 10, 2014.

5/22/14: Former Bolivar city council member sentenced for vote fraud
Former Bolivar, TN City Councilwoman Brenda Woods was sentenced for corralling felons to vote for her in the city’s 2009 municipal elections. Woods transported three felons to the polls to case votes for her. She used this method for her election to city council and her failed mayoral bid. She received a suspended sentence of two years in prison, and has lost her voting rights and her ability to run for elected office.   Former Bolivar city council member sentenced , JRN News Channel 5, May 22, 2014.

5/12/14: Nashville election worker fired over double voting
A Tennessee state elections commissioner is questioning whether to certify election results after six people voted twice in a Davidson County election last week. The fraudulent voters cast absentee ballots and also appeared at the polls on Election Day. The election worker has been fired. Nashville election worker fired over double voting , Tennessean, May 12, 2014.

4/21/14: Complaint Against Robert Garcia Suggests Voter Fraud
A California mayoral candidate is alleged to have recruited between 15 and 20 non-voters to cast absentee ballots illegally in April. The formal complaint submitted to the Los Angeles County District Attorney states that candidate Robert Garcia hired a bus to transport the individuals into the district to request absentee ballots. Complaint Against Robert Garcia Suggests Voter Fraud , Hews Media Group, April 21, 2014.

4/21/14: Woman Arrested in NV on Voter Fraud
An illegal immigrant with a Nevada ID was arrested in California on two felony charges for allegedly using a false ID to register to vote and also for casting ballots in NV elections. Authorities confirmed that the woman also voted in both the 2008 and 2010 elections. Woman Arrested in NV on Voter Fraud, KOLO News, April 21, 2014.

5/8/14: Final Report: 117 fraudulent votes found in investigation
A two-year investigation of voter fraud in Iowa uncovered 117 illegally cast votes resulting in six criminal convictions. The crimes included non-citizen voting and felony voting. Final Report: 117 Fraudulent Votes Found in Investigation , The Des Moines Register, May 8, 2014.

5/9/14: Three Houston County Women Accused of Felony Voter Fraud
Houston County Sheriff’s Office arrested three women on charges of voter fraud after the narrowly decided election. Police conducted a thorough investigation in which they discovered that the three women created and submitted false ballots in August 2013. Three Houston County Women Accused of Felony Voter Fraud , WTVY News, May 9, 2014.

4/23/14: Two more indicted for vote fraud in Hamilton County
A poll worker in Hamilton County, OH is the eighth person to be indicted on charges of illegal voting in 2013. Authorities say that Ellen Elizabeth Duncan submitted an absentee ballot and also appeared at the polls on Election Day. Two More Indicted for Vote Fraud in Hamilton County , WVXU News, April 23, 2014.

5/8/14: Arraignment Postponed for Paterson Councilman, Wife in Election-Fraud Indictment
New Jersey authorities arrested mayoral candidate Rigo Rodriguez and his wife on charges that they submitted ballots as votes for people who did not vote in 2010. Prosecutors also stated that Rodriguez instructed campaign workers to lie to authorities investigating the allegations. Arraignment Postponed for Paterson Councilman, Wife in Election-Fra..., Examiner, February 17, 2014.

5/13/14: Wild Acres Man Charged with Voter Fraud in Board Election
Pennsylvania police have charged a man with ballot tampering in Pike County. Myron Cowher allegedly stole 70 ballots and planned to use different colored ink pens so the ballots did not all look the same. Wild Acres Man Charged with Voter Fraud in Board Election , The News Eagle, May 13, 2014.

5/1/14: Alabama Supreme Court to Look at Voter Fraud Allegations
The Alabama Supreme Court will reconsider allegations of voter fraud by college students. The students allegedly received illegal alcohol in exchange for their votes. Alabama Supreme Court to Look at Voter Fraud Allegations , WIAT News, May 1, 2014.

4/15/14: Two Accused of Voter Fraud in 2012 Election
Texas officials recently arrested two felons for alleged voter fraud after voting in May 2012. The two men allegedly knew they were not eligible to vote in the election. Two Accused of Voter Fraud in 2012 Election , Alice Echo News Journal, April 15, 2014.

2/17/14: New York: Noncitizens to Vote in New York?
Under a plan being pushed by de Blasio and the council, noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, would be given city-issued identification cards. . . .GOP State Senator Greg Ball this would open the door to noncitizens, including illegal aliens, to vote illegally in New York State Elections. N.Y. GOP Sen. says Bill de Blasio plans for illegal voting in New Y..., Examiner, February 17, 2014.

1/27/14: New Hampshire: Temporary Campaign Staffer Continues to be "Voted" After Moving
We confirmed with the city clerk’s office that a vote under Former Jeanne Shaheen spokesperson Caitlin Legack's name and address was recorded. But Legacki moved out of New Hampshire shortly after the 2008 election (in which she voted) and was in St. Louis on Election Day 2012, working for U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill. ." Vote fraud: It, and mistakes, happen, Union Leader, January 27, 2014.

1/27/14: Texas: Hispanics are the Victims of Vote Fraud
In one example listed in the lawsuit, 23 voters who cast a ballot in favor of Rivera were registered to a home on East 6th street in Weslaco. Controversy over voter fraud continues in Weslaco, Action 4 News, January 27, 2014.

1/12/14: Texas: Campaign Workers trade cash, drugs, beer and more for votes
Three women working as politiqueras in the 2012 elections in Donna were arrested by F.B.I. agents in December and accused of giving residents cash, drugs, beer and cigarettes in exchange for their votes. Texas Vote-Buying Case Casts Glare on Tradition of Election Day Goads, New York Times, January 12, 2014.

See additional information dating back to 2012 here: http://www.libertynewsonline.com/ressort_63.php

Executive Power and Overreach

May 22, 2014, Spencer Irvine

Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, gave some remarks at the Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center centered around the increase in executive power and the power of executive agencies under Republican and Democratic presidencies.
This worrisome trend, which Hamburger called “administrative law,” was supposedly “developed to deal with the problems of modern society.” Yet, in his words, this increase in administrative power “could not have been anticipated by the Constitution.” Although administrative powers are “very old,” Hamburger warned that the checks and balances as well as the separation of powers were “exactly was [what] the Constitution developed…to prohibit absolute power.”

Too often, critics of increased administrative power focus on government benefits, welfare programs and abuses, but he said, “The problem consists of attempts to bind and constrain Americans, legislatively or judicially, through acts other than acts of Congress or of the courts.” He admitted, “Our government is full of puzzles, but none are more serious than administrative power.”

This new administrative power is a “fourth type of power” in addition to the three branches of government, which are the legislative, executive and judicial branches. Where did this all begin? Hamburger surmised it “begins in 1887, when Congress creates the Interstate Commerce Commission” and delegated powers to executive agencies like it. Ever since then, executive agencies have expanded and defenders say such expansion is a “pragmatic response to practical American problems in life” and a result of “indigenous or empirical growth.” This “apology for administrative power,” as Hamburger called it, empowers administrative law that “developed after the Constitution.” Supporters also push the view that opposing the expansion of administrative power “is anti-modern and [it is] quixotic to resist this power.”

But this bureaucratic overreach may not be so modern after all. There was no separation of powers in old Britain, ruled by kings, but merely a “division of power” between the king and Parliament. Under that system of government, Hamburger said, “The executive evades law with administrative power.” It became their “defense, their justification” to enact certain laws and bind their people to royal decrees.

Hamburger pointed out, “Over the past 120 years, the Americans have reestablished the very central powers the U.S. Constitution most essentially forbade.” Now, administrative power “binds Americans not through laws, but through mechanisms.” “Absolutism,” said Hamburger, “has returned.”

He urged, “Read the Constitution, read the first verse” to get that point across. He read the first verse, which says, “All legislative power shall be vested in Congress.” Hamburger said, “None of them can be elsewhere” and that these powers were “put there precisely to” protect against delegation by Congress. Now, “procedural rights” have been used by executive agencies, but had been intended to protect against absolute power. He urged, “One must take back the language of law” to limit the growth of administrative and absolute power.

http://www.academia.org/executive-power-and-overreach/

The Piketty Fallacy

May 5, 2014Defining Ideas

by Richard A. Epstein (Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow and member of hoover ip squared working group steering committee)

The upside of economic inequality is that it makes life better for everyone, especially the poor.

Right now, our economic prospects look grim. To classical liberals like myself, future growth is unsustainable in an age dominated by progressive politics. There are two reasons for this: an extensive system of regulation of all key sectors of economy—including labor, real estate, health care, and financial markets—and a combination of progressive income taxes, specialized levies (like the medical device tax), and a heavy estate tax, whose proceeds are used to fund an ever-expanding system of transfer payments.

Today’s unending cycle of regulation, taxation, and transfer payments induces non-stop political competition, which lets strong voting coalitions take from their adversaries in order to enrich their friends. This dynamic leads to crony capitalism that reduces the return to both capital and labor. States like Texas that work hard to resist these various trends do well in comparison to those states like Illinois that yield to political temptation. The solution requires systematic deregulation coupled with flat taxes to induce higher levels of competition that will in turn produce greater economic growth and human satisfaction.

The Piketty Vision
This vision for a just and prosperous society turns out to be a giant mistake—at least under the doomsday predictions of Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty’s key assumption is that the rate of return on capital will always (except of course in wartime) exceed the rate of growth in the economy, so that the long-term trend necessarily leads to a vast concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny group of rentiers—those investors who reap a return in the form of rents, dividends, and interest payments from capital assets.

Accordingly to Piketty, a French economist, that concentration of wealth in the hands of the few creates the risk “of significant political upheaval. Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents.” These economic rents, he argues, do not result from some market imperfection, but are instead “the consequence of a ‘pure and perfect’ market for capital, as economists understand it,” so that “each owner of capital, including the least capable of heirs, can obtain the highest possible yield on the most diversified portfolio that can be assembled in the national or global economy.”

The cure for these dangers cannot be stopped by market reforms. Instead, Piketty thinks boldly: “The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation.” These taxes can range up “to 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros.”

The proceeds can be collected locally and spent globally. Combine his wealth tax with a progressive income tax, and these fortunes will surely dissipate, not only for the heirs but also for the long list of wealth creators, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Charles & David Koch, Michael Bloomberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg.

The Upside of Income Inequality
One of the most striking defects of the Piketty analysis is its flawed understanding of the relationship between social wealth and income inequality. The initial point goes to the question of how ordinary people ought to regard the accumulation of vast stores of wealth by the few, much of which gets passed on by inheritance to other people. For Piketty, their greater wealth leaves (all else being equal) poorer people worse off because of their apparent loss of political influence to the great and mighty.

Not so fast. First, as an economic matter, the increase of the wealth of some without a decline of wealth in others counts as a Pareto improvement, which is in general to be welcomed, even if it increases overall levels of inequality. But to egalitarians like Piketty, the increased wealth inequality is bad in itself, as their objective is to minimize differences in wealth and income, rather than to increase their overall totals. Piketty’s assumptions lead to the conclusion that a world in which the rich average 1,000 and the poor average 10 is less desirable than a world in which the rich average 300 and the poor average 5, given that the absolute and relative differences in wealth are lower in the second state of the world than the first.

Piketty does not actually state this conclusion in those bald terms. Instead he makes the argument that the wealth of the rich gives them too much influence over political affairs in a democratic society. But in so doing, he misses the key point that the wealthiest among us include the two Koch Brothers ($40 billion each), and also Bill Gates ($76 billion), Warren Buffet ($58.2 billion), and George Soros ($23 billion) whose political preferences move in decidedly different ways.

It is pure fantasy to assume that the super rich move as a unified political bloc. Nor should it be assumed that they have disproportionate influence. To James Madison, the great concern with democratic (as opposed to republican) forms of government was that voters with more influence in the political arena could satisfy, as it is put in Federalist 10, “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.”

Progressive writers in the twentieth century and after have taken strong exception to Madison’s views. But my point here is descriptive, not normative. The place of large concentrations of capital in a democratic society is deeply vulnerable to majoritarian politics, as evidenced by the strongly progressive income tax rates and estate tax rates. In other words, the great wealth of the few makes them politically vulnerable, not politically unstoppable. In a political climate that treats as a major political objective the rectification of inequalities of fortune, the net transfers in the United States are not to, but from, the financial elites.

What About Social Trends?
Unfortunately, the fixation with economic wealth and income also leads Piketty and other egalitarians to overlook many key social trends of enormous importance. Theoretically, measures of wealth are convenient ways to attack the inequality of individual well-being. Though they are relevant to that question, they are far from the only measure of individual well-being. There are all sorts of other indicators that are distinct from income and wealth, including many measures of the length and quality of life. Piketty does note the dramatic increase in life expectancy throughout the developed world in the modern era, but, oddly enough, he does this only to rebut the point that longer life expectancies reduce the danger of inherited wealth.

What he should have done is exactly the opposite. There is no way that overall social gains on matters of life expectancy and health can be concentrated in the top one percent of society. To be sure, it is worth noting that infant mortality has always been inversely correlated with wealth. The children of richer people do better than those of poorer people. But look next at the actual numbers. By one British study, infant mortality ranged in 1901 from 247 per 1,000 live births in the poorest group to 94 per 1,000 in the highest group, the so-called “servant-keeping class.” One hundred years later, those numbers dropped to 3.7 per 1000 for the first group and 8.1 per 1000 for the second.

Looking solely at the mortality ratios, you could conclude that, relatively speaking, things have gotten a bit better for the poor, as their children are about 2.19 times as likely to die as the children of rich people, compared to being 2.63 times as likely to die a century before. Yet this analysis misses the forest by looking at the trees. The actual decline in mortality rates at the bottom was about 240 lives per thousand; for the top, it was 90. The huge increases in both areas, where the poor had the most dramatic gains, is the real story. The egalitarian ratio is a side-show.

That same point can be replicated by many other measures of well being. To turn to the United States, life expectancy for the average person born in 1900 was about 47 years. By 1920, that number had jumped to 54 years. By 1998, the number was about 76 years. Throughout this period, life expectancy for females was greater than that for males, even though earned income was greater for men. Try the same experiment by race and the results are still more dramatic. Black life expectancy in the United States in 1900-1902 lagged white life expectancy by 15.8 years (49.8 versus 33.8). By 2010 the gap had narrowed to 3.6 years (78.7 to 75.1).

These figures tell a story that is wholly concealed by Piketty’s income and wealth figures. They show the huge positive influence of technological advances on human welfare. Sadly, his lengthy book is silent about the massive advances in basic science, public health, and medicine that fueled this revolution, creating widespread benefits for the population at large. It is also worth noting that these increases were more dramatic by far in the first decade of the twentieth century than they were in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Neither technology nor politics can explain the difference, but greater regulations and higher tax rates can. The Piketty obsession with income inequality conceals more than it reveals.

Richard A. Epstein, Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University, and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, researches and writes on a broad range of constitutional, economic, historical, and philosophical subjects. He has taught administrative law, antitrust law, communications law, constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, employment discrimination law, environmental law, food and drug law, health law, labor law, Roman law, real estate development and finance, and individual and corporate taxation. His publications cover an equally broad range of topics. His most recent book, published in 2013, is The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2013). He is a past editor of the Journal of Legal Studies (1981–91) and the Journal of Law and Economics (1991–2001).

http://www.hoover.org/print/publications/defining-ideas/article/177406

Piketty’s Rickety Economics
by Richard A. Epstein (Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow and member of hoover ip squared working group steering committee)

Our real problem is not income inequality; it is the lack of economic growth.

The relationship between inequality, whether of income or wealth, and economic growth is perhaps the defining issue of our age. In my previous Defining Ideas column, The Piketty Fallacy, I urged readers to take a critical view of Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century for two reasons. The first is that we should welcome any increase in wealth to the rich or the poor that does not leave other people worse off, whether that change increases or narrows the gaps in wealth between rich and poor—any such Pareto improvement meets the gold standard of economic welfare. The extra wealth increases the scope of human possibilities no matter where it is lodged. Over time, market and charitable transactions will spread that wealth across society.

Second, this contention is borne out by looking, ironically, not directly at wealth but at individual utility, happiness, or satisfaction. These outcomes are notoriously difficult to measure, which is why all systems of taxation and regulation are keyed to wealth rather than utility. But wealth is just one of several imperfect proxies for personal utility. A far better proxy for utility, however, is overall life expectancy. In the United States that figure has increased by over 30 years per person since 1900, and by over 40 years for African-Americans. A black/white longevity disparity of 15 years in 1900 has shrunk to 4 years today.

Much of that gain comes from overall improvements in public goods, like from better sewage management and vaccinations. Wealth, not utility, funds these advances, so that most of their costs are necessarily borne by the wealthy. But the resulting gains are not concentrated in the top 1 percent. Piketty disregards this massive benevolent and uncontroversial redistribution in his calculations of inequality.

Pitney v. Piketty
In taking this view, Piketty misunderstands the sources of social wealth creation. Thinking that capital accumulation drives social inequality, Piketty favors progressive taxes. Yet he is oddly indifferent to the virtues of competitive markets and the damage that monopolies and cartels can inflict on social welfare.

Piketty may not have made this fatal mistake if he had read the opinion of a great if unappreciated Supreme Court Justice, Mahlon Pitney, who addressed this issue in the 1915 Supreme Court case of Coppage v. Kansas. At issue inCoppage was whether an employer had a constitutional right to insist by contract that his workers not join a union so long as they remain in his employ. Pitney held for the employer:

A little reflection will show that wherever the right of private property and the right of free contract coexist, each party when contracting is inevitably more or less influenced by the question whether he has much property, or little, or none, for the contract is made to the very end that each may gain something that he needs or desires more urgently than that which he proposes to give in exchange. And since it is self-evident that, unless all things are held in common, some persons must have more property than others, it is from the nature of things impossible to uphold freedom of contract and the right of private property without at the same time recognizing as legitimate those inequalities of fortune that are the necessary result of the exercise of those rights.

The gist of Pitney’s argument is that any contract between an employer and employee is one for mutual gain: Why else would the worker make it? Indeed the right to contract is, as Pitney stresses, “as essential to the laborer as to the capitalist, to the poor as to the rich, for the vast majority of persons have no other honest way to begin to acquire property save by working for money.” To argue in this case that some level of inequality of bargaining power between the parties is reason enough to block their contract misses the point altogether, for it imposes limitations on the employees’ freedom of choice.

Unionization, of course, will benefit the position of those workers who voluntarily join the union. Yet unionization dims the prospects of excluded workers, and of the suppliers and customers who are put at the mercy of a monopoly union, armed with extra political powers and able to engage in well-timed strikes to the massive inconvenience of everyone else.

Piketty does not address the nitty-gritty of labor market regulation, and thus misses Pitney’s point that gains from trade are necessarily blocked by taxation and regulation. Even if these fall nominally on the employer, both sides are hurt from the contraction of the labor market.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 is similarly blockheaded on this point. It contains the outlandish claim that “The inequality of bargaining power between employees . . . and employers . . . tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.”

The inequality of bargaining power has little role in well-defined competitive markets, where employers have to meet the going wage. The “purchasing power of wage earners in industry” includes the loss in wages from workers who are excluded from union activities. Business depressions are more likely to arise in rigid labor markets where firms and workers cannot incrementally adjust to changed conditions. Stabilization of wages is an oblique way of referring to how labor cartels force outsiders to bear all the costs of uncertainty from any exogenous shock to labor markets.

Piketty’s Fatalism
Unfortunately, Piketty’s preoccupation with inequality blinds him to the huge hit to growth that comes from union organization and, more generally, from regulations across the labor, product, and real estate markets that artificially set wages, prices, or the terms of trade. Ignoring these mid-level institutions leads Piketty to assert that overall growth rates are constrained by some invisible Malthusian hand so that “there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1– 1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted. “

What economic nihilism! Countless systems of direct taxation and regulation reduce gains from trade in countless economic areas. One key way to spark growth is to reduce the repressive income and growth taxes that Piketty favors because, ironically, he thinks that overall growth is not sustainable. It would also do him a world of good to look more closely at current schemes of industry-specific direct regulation that result in the inefficient deployment of capital. He might, for example, consider the adverse impact on pharmaceutical innovation that arises from the unduly risk-averse attitude of the Food and Drug Administration, or the perverse distortions of energy markets from the equally misguided efforts to subsidize wind and solar energy in ways that make it harder to take advantage of the enormous advances in traditional fossil fuel technologies.

Moreover, one of the most persistent threats to growth occurs in Piketty’s home court, the misguided regulation of capital markets. As Tyler Cowen points out, Piketty writes as if all capital falls within a single undifferentiated lump. But in practice, the efficiency of capital markets depends critically on recognizing the distinction between venture capitalists, coupon clippers, and everyone else in between. Capital of course never runs without management and investor expertise; it is essential to match entrepreneurs and investors with the right holdings. It does no good to have retirees take large stakes in risky new ventures, while industry experts hold treasury bills.

Hence, capital must be mobile over the life cycle of new innovation. Most high-risk start-ups fail. But the extraordinary returns from successful ventures more than compensate for the dry holes. But those successful ventures need to find cheap and effective ways to go public so that high-risk players can start new ventures, and risk averse investors can reap solid returns.

Standing athwart this enterprise lies the Securities and Exchange Commission and the multiple agencies under theDodd-Frank Act whose disclosure and regulatory polices can add unreasonably to the cost of going public. A reliable exit option will increase initial investment levels, which will in turn drive up the demand for labor and with it overall wages. For better or worse, capital and labor are intertwined. It is wrong to think that the infinite array of intermediate institutions and practices do not have a huge impact on overall levels of growth.

In my academic career, I have devoted much time to examining the rise of the regulatory state and the havoc it wreaks on economic growth. The poor growth rates of the last decade are not the unavoidable consequence of natural events or huge impersonal forces. Many of them stem from our boneheaded choices on regulation and taxation. Simplifying the tax code and easing back on regulations could easily bump that growth rate above Piketty’s dire predictions. But so long as policy makers take Piketty’s lead, preoccupying themselves with inequality, our prospects for growth are grim. We will continue to pay a high social price if we place our faith in Piketty’s rickety economic theories.

Richard A. Epstein, Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University, and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, researches and writes on a broad range of constitutional, economic, historical, and philosophical subjects. He has taught administrative law, antitrust law, communications law, constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, employment discrimination law, environmental law, food and drug law, health law, labor law, Roman law, real estate development and finance, and individual and corporate taxation. His publications cover an equally broad range of topics. His most recent book, published in 2013, is The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2013). He is a past editor of the Journal of Legal Studies (1981–91) and the Journal of Law and Economics (1991–2001).
http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/178046

BLOCKBUSTER: Straight from a rancher's mouth

Immediate family friend of the Bundy's tells it all in a mail sent to Jimstonefreelance.comThis is the jackpot of details you have never seen anywhere else, and if you did, they originated here, spread it around, ARCHIVE AND POST! (please link back to here when posting elsewhere)
A Rancher TELLS ALL:

B Hunt wrote:

I live in SW Utah. I grew up on a ranch less than 100 miles from the Bundy's ranch. My father knows Cliven Bundy. I know Cliven's son Ryan. This is not a hoax, it is an action of force by the BLM.

The BLM was going to sell the cattle at one of the smallest cattle markets in Utah. No cattle markets in Nevada would take the cattle without a properly signed brand inspection (which the BLM cannot obtain without Cliven Bundy's signature). The BLM paid the owner of the Utah cattle market $300,000 to do the sale ('R' Livestock Connection in Monroe, Utah, owned by one Scott G. Robbins, according to the Utah Business Entity Search). Utah Governor Herbert stepped in and forbid them from bringing the cattle into Utah without the legally required health and brand inspections (which again, require Bundy's signature) and that no feral cattle are allowed to be imported at all (per Utah statute). Because Bundy claims ownership over maybe 350-500 head of branded cattle, the other 500-700 estimated head of cattle would all be considered feral. BLM officially backed off, but we suspect they are still secretly shipping them through Utah without any permission to do so, to "private" buyers in Colorado. The contract cowboys that the BLM hired to do the roundup are from Sampson Livestock in Meadow, Utah (traitors one and all).

From what I understand, Cliven Bundy owns both the Water Rights and Grazing Rights to all of the land where his cattle run. If Bundy failed to use them, the Grazing Rights would revert to the BLM and would be retired, while the Water Rights would revert to the State of Nevada, likely to be sold to the highest bidder (which would probably be a bidding war between mineral companies that are behind this action with the BLM and the City of Las Vegas which is thirsty for water and has had multiple attempts to buy water--through eminent domain from Utah farmers and ranchers--from Utah, which were all blocked by the Utah Legislature and Utah Governor Herbert). Chances are, the BLM has already filed a claim on the water rights so that they can sell to the highest bidder (instead of the state) and are trying to get the cattle off to show that Bundy cannot use the water beneficially (much like what the US Forest Service and BLM both tried to do to Wayne Hage).

Now, for Cliven Bundy, he's not fighting this for his cattle or his own livelihood. He recognizes that he will probably die before this fight is over. He has said multiple times that he is fighting this to wake people up about the tyranny of the Federal Government and also to help wake up the western states about getting the rights to their own land back from the federal government, which has repeatedly shut down ranchers and closed off land. (MO = 1st, get all the ranchers, farmers, Native Americans, and foresters that use the land for positive, sustainable production off of the land; 2nd, grab up all the resources; 3rd, close off the lands to public access including camping, hiking, horseback riding, hunting, fishing, boating, shooting, etc; 4th, sell off the resources to the highest bidder regardless of what that will do to the land, the local environment, or the economy; 5th, collect royalties on the resources in perpetuity; 6th, reduce and eliminate all SLS and PILT payments to the states, impoverishing them beyond belief.)

Anyway, thanks for posting about this. It is important for us to be able to raise the appropriate resistance.

My Response:
Thank you for sending your valuable insight. This contained the details we were all missing.

From this we can now firmly conclude:

1. The BLM's actions are not only flatly illegal, they are unlawful, and not only unlawful, they are so unlawful that it took bribing someone with a $300,000 payoff to get them to accept stolen cattle from a Government agency. I do not think that could be topped ANYWHERE else in the world, other than with something like a Mexican drug cartel.

So we have a clear cut case of unlawful and prosecutable actions by the BLM in this case.

2. The real goal is to shut down public access to these lands. Obviously Cliven Bundy was not a jerk, and he let people go back there to explore. I myself have done a LOT of back country exploring, and noticed in the early 2000's that they closed down all the back roads about a half mile before the destination they used to go to to discourage people from exploring the wilderness. Rather than drive the whole way, you had to get out and walk a considerable distance to scenes such as Swazy's leap, Paul Bunyans Wood Pile, and practically anywhere else you would want to go while out 4 Wheeling. And in the desert sun, that long of a walk was usually tough to do. This resulted in these types of locations no longer being visited, which effectively equaled a shut down.

3. The motives are for profit. Rather than manage the lands responsibly, the BLM is stealing it from it's rightful holders via corrupt actions and legal loop holes, and selling it off to corporate interests. This is cold hard proof that America is not a democracy, or more importantly a Republic, it is in fact a facist dictatorship where corruption rules and rights, freedom and honor are irrelevant.

The BLM killed hundreds of desert tortoises on purpose
They say they had to kill them because they did not have the funds to care for them. Here are two really good solutions to that "problem." 1. Just take them out in the desert and turn them loose. -OR- 2. They could have taken the three million dollars they said the Bundy raid will cost them, CALLED OFF THE RAID, and SAVED THE TURTLES with that three million. If they had three million to destroy Bundy, they had it for the turtles as well but did not use it for that because tyranny comes first.

Steeped in arrogance and incompetence, once again a Federal agency fails to see the obvious. Or perhaps they do see it but they could care less about nature and instead operate as the enforcement arm of a band of high ranking thugs.

The truth, in the words of a Bundy
Mike Combs By SHIREE BUNDY COX:

I have had people ask me to explain my dad's stance on this BLM fight. Here it is in as simple of terms as I can explain it. There is so much [more] to it, but here it is in a nut shell. My great grandpa bought the rights to the Bunkerville allotment back in 1887, around there. Then he sold them to my grandpa who then turned them over to my dad in 1972. These men bought and paid for their rights to the range and also built waters, fences and roads to assure the survival of their cattle, all with their own money, not with tax dollars. These rights to the land use are called preemptive rights.

Some where down the line, to keep the cows from over grazing, came the bureau of land management. They were supposed to assist the ranchers in the management of their ranges, while the ranchers paid a yearly allotment, which was to be used to pay the BLM wages and to help with repairs and improvements of the ranches. My dad did pay his grazing fees for years to the BLM, until they were no longer using his fees to help him and to improve. Instead, they began using these money's against the ranchers. They bought all the rest of the ranchers in the area out, with their own grazing fees. When they offered to buy my dad out for a pittance, he said no thanks and then fired them because they weren't doing their job. He quit paying the BLM but tried giving his grazing fees to the county, which they turned down. So my dad just went on running his ranch and making his own improvements with his own equipment and his own money, not taxes.

In essence, the BLM was managing my dad out of business. Well, when buying him out didn't work, they used the endangered species card. You've already heard about the desert tortoise. Well that didn't work either, so then began the threats and the court orders, which my dad has proven to be unlawful for all these years. Now they're desperate. It's come down to buying the brand inspector off and threatening the County Sheriff. Everything they're doing at this point is illegal and totally against the constitution of the United States of America.

Now you may be saying,"how sad, but what does this have to do with me?" Well, I'll tell you. They will get rid of Cliven Bundy, the last man standing on the Bunkerville allotment and then they will close all the roads so no one can ever go on it again. Next, it's Utah's turn. Mark my words, Utah is next.

Then there's the issue of the cattle that are at this moment being stolen. See, even if dad hasn't paid them, those cattle do belong to him. Regardless where they are, they are my fathers property. His herd has been part of that range for over a hundred years, long before the BLM even existed. Now the Feds think they can just come in and remove them and sell them without a legal brand inspection or without my dad's signature on it. They think they can take them over two boarders, which is illegal, ask any trucker. Then they plan to take them to the Richfeild Auction and sell them. All with our tax money. They have paid off the contract cowboys and the auction owner, as well as the Nevada brand inspector with our tax dollars. See how slick they are?

Well, this is it in a nut shell. Thanks
http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/

"Don't Squat With Your Spurs On"

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain." Maya Angelou

Missouri’s state motto : Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.

Treat your body like a temple-not a dumpster.

Provided by The Initiator

Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society
Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.

By CHARLES G. KOCH
Updated April 2, 2014 7:47 p.m. ET

I have devoted most of my life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives. It is those principles—the principles of a free society—that have shaped my life, my family, our company and America itself.

Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation's own government. That's why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. I have been doing so for more than 50 years, primarily through educational efforts. It was only in the past decade that I realized the need to also engage in the political process.

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that this could happen. "The natural progress of things," Jefferson wrote, "is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." He knew that no government could possibly run citizens' lives for the better. The more government tries to control, the greater the disaster, as shown by the current health-care debacle. Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.

Instead of encouraging free and open debate, collectivists strive to discredit and intimidate opponents. They engage in character assassination. (I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.) This is the approach that Arthur Schopenhauer described in the 19th century, that Saul Alinsky famously advocated in the 20th, and that so many despots have infamously practiced. Such tactics are the antithesis of what is required for a free society—and a telltale sign that the collectivists do not have good answers.

Rather than try to understand my vision for a free society or accurately report the facts about Koch Industries, our critics would have you believe we're "un-American" and trying to "rig the system," that we're against "environmental protection" or eager to "end workplace safety standards." These falsehoods remind me of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Here are some facts about my philosophy and our company:

Koch companies employ 60,000 Americans, who make many thousands of products that Americans want and need. According to government figures, our employees and the 143,000 additional American jobs they support generate nearly $11.7 billion in compensation and benefits. About one-third of our U.S.-based employees are union members.

Koch employees have earned well over 700 awards for environmental, health and safety excellence since 2009, many of them from the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. EPA officials have commended us for our "commitment to a cleaner environment" and called us "a model for other companies."

Our refineries have consistently ranked among the best in the nation for low per-barrel emissions. In 2012, our Total Case Incident Rate (an important safety measure) was 67% better than a Bureau of Labor Statistics average for peer industries. Even so, we have never rested on our laurels. We believe there is always room for innovation and improvement.

Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs—even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.
Koch Industries was the only major producer in the ethanol industry to argue for the demise of the ethanol tax credit in 2011. That government handout (which cost taxpayers billions) needlessly drove up food and fuel prices as well as other costs for consumers—many of whom were poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Now the mandate needs to go, so that consumers and the marketplace are the ones who decide the future of ethanol.
Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people's lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal.

If more businesses (and elected officials) were to embrace a vision of creating real value for people in a principled way, our nation would be far better off—not just today, but for generations to come. I'm dedicated to fighting for that vision. I'm convinced most Americans believe it's worth fighting for, too.

Mr. Koch is chairman and CEO of Koch Industries.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286.html

Saul Alinsky - Rules for Radicals

Below is a great way to look at Saul Alinsky: It is exactly what is happening in America today!

Many of you have heard his name but know little of the man and what he believed.

        Saul David Alinsky, was an American "community organizer" and writer (remind you of anyone else?). He is generally considered to be the founder of the modern community organizing movement. He is most noted for his book Rules for Radicals and is a self proclaimed Communist.

        Died: June 12, 1972, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA
        Education: University of Chicago
        Spouse: Irene Alinsky
        Books: Rules for Radicals,   Reveille for Radicals

        Here's how to create a socialist state Saul Alinsky-style:

        ***There are eight levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a social state.

The first is the MOST important.

        1) HEALTHCARE – Control healthcare and you control the people.

        2) POVERTY – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.

        3) DEBT – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.

        4) GUN CONTROL – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.

        5) WELFARE – Take control of every aspect of their lives .(Food, Housing, and Income)

        6) EDUCATION – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.

        7) RELIGION – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.

        8) CLASS WARFARE – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.

        All of this is well underway in the U.S. Do not make the bad judgment of thinking that Obama is screwing everything up because of "inexperience"... It's all planned and everything is going according to plan.

This has been around before, but it is always going to be valid until the Government comes clean.

Who died before they collected Social Security?

KEEP PASSING THIS AROUND UNTIL EVERY ONE HAS HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO READ IT...THIS IS SURE SOMETHING TO THINK
ABOUT!!!!

THE ONLY THING WRONG WITH THE GOVERNMENT'S CALCULATION OF AVAILABLE SOCIAL SECURITY IS THEY FORGOT
TO FIGURE IN THE PEOPLE WHO DIED BEFORE THEY EVER COLLECTED A SOCIAL SECURITY CHECK!!!

WHERE DID THAT MONEY GO?

Remember, not only did you and I contribute to Social Security but your employer did, too. It totaled 15% of your income before taxes. If you averaged only $30K over your working life, that's close to $220,500. Read that again.

Did you see where the Government paid in one single penny? We are talking about the money you and your employer put in a Government bank to ensure you and me that we would have a retirement check from the money we put in, not the Government. Now they are calling the money we put in an entitlement when we reach the age to take it back.

If you calculate the future invested value of $4,500 per year (yours & your employer's contribution) at a simple 5% interest (less than what the Government pays on the money that it borrows) After 49 years of working you'd have $892,919.98. If you took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $26,787.60 per year and it would last better than 30 years (until you're 95 if you retire at age 65) and that's with no interest paid on that final amount on deposit!

If you bought an annuity and it paid 4% per year, you'd have a lifetime income of $2,976.40 per month.

THE FOLKS IN WASHINGTON HAVE PULLED OFF A BIGGER PONZI SCHEME THAN BERNIE MADOFF EVER DID.

Entitlement my foot; I paid cash for my social security insurance! Just because they borrowed the money for other government spending, doesn't make my benefits some kind of charity or handout!! Remember Congressional benefits? --- free healthcare, outrageous retirement packages,
67 paid holidays, three weeks paid vacation, unlimited paid sick days. Now that's welfare, and they have the nerve to call my social security retirement payments entitlements?

They call Social Security and Medicare an entitlement even though most of us have been paying for it all our working lives, and now, when
it's time for us to collect, the government is running out of money.

Why did the government borrow from it in the first place? It was supposed to be in a locked box, not part of the general fund.
Sad isn't it?

CATO wrong about state nullification of federal gun laws

by Kyle Ebersole on September 17, 2013
Robert A. Levy, chairman of the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute, recently came out against states seeking to nullify federal gun laws.
“[W]hile states are not powerless in the face of federal law,” writes Levy in his New York Times op-ed. “There are limits to what they can do to prevent enforcement of constitutionally valid regulation.”

Central to his argument, Levy says that states do not possess power to nullify — or, declare “null and void” — any federal gun-control legislation because Supreme Court opinions allowing such action are lacking. In other words, since the Supreme Court upholds current gun-control laws as constitutional, he believes that no state has the right to combat them.

Placing such an emphasis on the supremacy of Court opinion is where Levy errs, as do many others who discredit state nullification efforts. The idea that the Supreme Court has the final say on what is or is not constitutional is a dangerous position, and one at odds with American legal tradition.

The federal government is not the final authority of constitutionality as the states, who formed the federal government, never intended it to be. Thus, the same is true about the Supreme Court.

Consider the words of Spencer Roane — a Virginia judge whom Thomas Jefferson intended to appoint as Chief Justice*:
“It has, however, been supposed by some that… the right of the State governments to protest against, or to resist encroachments on their authority is taken away, and transferred to the federal judiciary, whose power extends to all cases arising under the Constitution; the the Supreme Court is the umpire to decided between the States on the one side, and the United States on the other, in all questions touching the constitutionality of laws, or acts of the Executive. There are many cases which can never be brought before that tribunal, and I do humbly conceive that the States never could have committed an act of such egregious folly as to agree that their umpire should be altogether appointed and paid by the other party. The Supreme Court may be a perfectly impartial tribunal to decide between two states, but cannot be considered in that point of view when the contest lies between the United States and one of its members… the Supreme Court is be a department of the general government. A department is not competent to do that which the whole government is inadequate… They cannot do it unless we tread underfoot the principle which forbids a party to decide its own cause.” (emphasis added)

Under our federalist system, “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” aren’t all within Washington, despite what history books may claim. Powers are divided not only within the federal government — between the congress, the executive, and the court — but also between the federal government, the state governments, and local governments.

No particular government in our multi-tiered system can claim absolute interpretive power over the Constitution. The founders designed it that way.
Tell Your State Government to NULLIFY Gun-Control Legislation! Sign your state petition.
___
*See: James J. Kilpatrick’s The Sovereign States (p. 156) or Thomas E. Woods’ Nullification (p. 6).
http://www.conservativeactionalerts.com/2013/09/cato-wrong-about-state-nullification-of-federal-gun-laws/

Charley Reese's Final column!

A very interesting column. COMPLETELY NEUTRAL.

This is about as clear and easy to understand as it can be. The article below is completely neutral, neither anti-republican or democrat. Charlie Reese, a retired reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, has hit the nail directly on the head, defining clearly who it is that in the final analysis must assume responsibility for the judgments made that impact each one of us every day.

545 vs. 300,000,000 People
-By Charlie Reese

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. ( The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.)

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House?( John Boehner. He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. ) If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to. [The House has passed a budget but the Senate has not approved a budget in over three years. The President's proposed budgets have gotten almost unanimous rejections in the Senate in that time.]

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it's because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan ..

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.
Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees... We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.

Teaching with Eyes Closed

It would be difficult to find a more staunchly left-leaning profession than teaching — at both the public-school and university levels. Although individual instructors may hold conservative views, teachers as a group are firmly progressivist, committed to “social improvement” through state intervention. Solidarity with the putatively oppressed has led schools to embrace a variety of ameliorative causes, most recently, in Canada, agay-oriented anti-bullying campaign that is at times stridently anti-Christian (though also, ironically enough, pro-Muslim) and a zealous environmentalist philosophy that teaches children to condemn oil and gas production.

Perhaps the most notable and pervasive form of teacher progressivism is egalitarianism, the commitment not only to equality of opportunity but also to equality of outcome as a social goal. This is a form of utopian thinking that radically minimizes or outright denies innate differences in human ability and intelligence, ascribing to social factors such as class privilege and “ableism” all significant variations in student performance.

According to this ideology, young people are held back from achieving their potential by factors not of their own making: by poverty, social prejudice, or pedagogical obtuseness — factors seen as ingrained and pervasive in contemporary North America. Official affirmation, cultural sensitivity, and institutional support are necessary to combat these conditions. Thus a document produced by the Ontario Ministry of Education (2009) finds it necessary to devote close to 100 pages to stressing how Ontario schools should work to reduce “bias and barriers” in the classroom so that “all students feel engaged in and empowered by what they are learning.”

Throughout this document and in North American schools at large, the overwhelming emphasis on “bias and barriers” means not only that poor performance is almost never understood to be a student’s fault and that responsibility for failure is social and systemic, but also that individual achievement, the result (as the worldview holds) of unmerited privilege, cannot in good conscience be admired or applauded — must even, in fact, be minimized. The only exception to the attitude of downplaying both achievement and failure is the case of the oppressed person who achieves success; his (or more often her) achievement can and must be celebrated, even beyond its worth. Only those deemed shackled by poverty or prejudice can be applauded.

As a result of this philosophy, schools are now dedicated not to recognizing and promoting individual merit but instead to hiding the fact of individual differences from both the achievers and from those who struggle or fail. Schools also seek to devise systems to accommodate and overcome difference in order to produce the equality they believe to have been distorted and denied. Such pedagogical practices as group projects and alternative means of evaluation (”Service learning” is the latest example, whereby students earn part of a course grade for volunteer work) are measures towards this end.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/teaching-with-eyes-closed/

Progressive Keynesian Myths Debunked: The Coming Redistribution of Political and Economic Power Among the States

Cover of "The End of Prosperity: How High...

Ongoing effective economic experiments among the 50 states are sharpening, and definitive results will pour out in the real world, editorial and opinion fallacies to the contrary notwithstanding. That sharpening is the result of the increasing political segregation among the states, with 25 now in complete control of Republicans in the Governor’s office and in majorities in the state legislatures, and 15 in the same complete control by the Democrats.

That sharpening is further exacerbated by the overconfidence of so-called “progressives” in reaction to the election of 2012, which they are certain heralds the greening of America – the abandonment by rising American majorities of the foundations of traditional American prosperity and success, in favor of European concepts of social justice and neo-Marxism. That overconfidence is leading the Democrat controlled states to embrace more radical left nostrums.

Hence we see accelerating tax rate increases in California, New York and Illinois, combined with overregulation driving out dramatic, emerging, real world opportunities in resource development and other market prospects.

The likely outcome of these economic experiments is carefully presented in the recent publication by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) of Tax Myths Debunked, authored by economists Eric Fruits and Randall Pozdena. That publication wields both meticulous logic and authoritative empirical support to definitively grind to dust economic myths advocated by “progressives” with religious fervor.

One such myth is the hopelessly outdated Keynesian notion that increased government spending stimulates the economy during recession. As the authors note, “The Obama Administration and its liberal allies in Congress forgot the dismal performance of Keynesian-type deficit spending as a stimulus of growth in the 1960s and 1970s and embarked on an aggressive deficit spending policy anyway.”

That was the nearly $1 trillion dollar so-called “stimulus” that Obama and the Democrats waived through Congress as the first major act of the Obama Administration in February, 2009. Keynesian policies failed so thoroughly in the 1970s, leading to both double digit inflation and double digit unemployment, that it is puzzling as to why Obama returned to them, as if he is ignorant not only of what happened then, but of everything that happened after then, from 1980 on. Ronald Reagan explicitly scraped Keynesian nostrums, embracing instead the new, modern supply side economics, which focuses on incentives for increased production to restore economic growth and prosperity, rather than increased demand. Inflation was quickly subdued, shocking the Washington Establishment, and the economy took off on a generation long, 25 year, economic boom from 1982 to 2007, which Art Laffer and Steve Moore called “the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of the planet,” in their 2008 book, The End of Prosperity.

That is why I have called Obama’s economic policies Rip Van Winkle economics, because Obama seems to have slept through that 25 year economic boom, and to be totally unaware of everything that happened then, in his own country.

The myth of Keynesian economics is based on a failure to take into account basic double entry bookkeeping. If the government spends more, where does the money for that increased spending come from? Either from increased borrowing, or increased taxes, which both take an equal amount of resources and spending out of the private economy as they finance in increased government spending. So not only can there not be a net increase in aggregate, or total, demand from these policies, the spending is in truth a net drag on growth, as the private economy spends money more productively and efficiently than the government. That is why this Keynesian nostrum never worked in the 1930s, as the recession of 1929 extended into the decade long Great Depression, and it hasn’t worked anywhere else since.

But most fundamentally, economic growth is not driven by increasing demand, which is insatiable, but by increased production or output (supply), which is driven by incentives for productive activity. In other words, just as an individual cannot spend himself rich, neither can a nation. Prosperity is determined by production, just as an individual increases his or her income by becoming more productive.

Demand can never be inadequate in a market economy. If the demand for any product or service is not strong enough, the price of the good or service will fall, until demand equals supply. The people can never spend more than they produce, and so increase “aggregate demand.” And they will never spend less than they produce, leaving demand inadequate, for they will either consume or save every dime that they earn or produce. The consumption goes into consumer spending, and the savings goes into capital spending (which is actually what makes us richer and more prosperous over the long run, as discussed further below).

Fruits and Pozdena recount the consequently all too predictable, dismal results, from Obama’s Rip Van Winkle, 2009 “stimulus,”

“The president’s economists predicted that by the fourth quarter of 2010 the stimulus would have led to employment of 137.5 million. Instead, actual employment was 7.3 million lower than the administration’s projections, and unemployment rates reached 10 percent. They projected that 2012 unemployment would be only 5.75 percent. Instead, unemployment is hovering around 8 percent, with much of that ‘improvement’ coming from individuals leaving the labor force unable to find employment.”

The only reason that Keynesian economics has survived for so long in western thinking is not because it works, or even makes any sense, but because it justifies what liberal politicians already want to do – spend with reckless abandon, run bigger and bigger deficits so they don’t have to explicitly pay for it with higher taxes today, and run up the national debt, which will be someone else’s problem later. The truth is, as Fruits and Pozdena explain, “A large and long-standing body of literature finds that increased or higher government spending tends to reduce economic growth rather than increase it.”

They cite Baumol, W. J. (1967), “Macroeconomics of unbalanced growth: The anatomy of urban crisis.” American Economic Review, 57(3): 415–426 as showing 45 years ago that shifting resources from high productivity growth sectors to low productivity growth sectors, such as government services, will cause the growth rate of overall productivity to decline. They cite Barro, R. J. (1991), “Economic growth in a cross section of countries.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106(2): 407–443 as showing that government consumption has no effect in increasing private productivity, or in other words in restoring economic growth. Instead, Barro found that increased government consumption lowers saving and growth through the distorting effects of taxation or government expenditure programs.

A review of data from the G-7 countries by E. Hseih and K. Lai (1994) found no evidence that increased government spending increases the rate of growth of per capita GDP. Barro, R. J. (1996), “Determinants of Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Study.” Working Paper No. 5698, National Bureau of Economic Research found that most government spending does not increase productivity, and that increased government spending relative to the economy reduces investment and growth.

Harvard Professor Alesina, A., along with Perotti, R. in “Fiscal Expansions and Adjustments in OECD Countries.” Economic Policy, n.21, 207-247 (1995) found based on a cross-country analysis of OECD studies that reducing the share of public spending in the economy would increase economic growth by increasing investment. Alesina A., Ardagna, S., Perotti, R., and Schiantarelli, F. (2002), “Fiscal Policy, Profits, and Investment,” American Economic Review, Vol. 92, no. 3, June 2002, 571-589 argue that government spending cuts are the most stimulative policy for economic growth in a recession.

The bottom line is that Keynesian economics has long been refuted by experience, empirical evidence, and logic, and the failed doctrine now needs to be put to bed, in American colleges and universities, and throughout the councils of government. Moreover, Obama should have known better, given that Keynesian economics has failed so badly every time it has been tried, from the 1930s to the 1970s, and all around the world since then. He had a responsibility to the American people to know better.

Another “progressive” myth debunked by Fruits and Pozdena is that raising tax rates will not harm the economy. Often cited is that tax rates were very high in the 1950s, yet the economy still grew. Perhaps if we bombed to smithereens all our economic competitors, as had recently been done in the 1950s, high tax rates would not be as harmful. But Kennedy did not think those high 1950s tax rates were harmless. He campaigned in 1960 against what he saw as the weak Eisenhower economy, and advocated an across the board 30% cut in tax rates. After that was mostly enacted after his death, the economy boomed, and revenues actually soared.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/04/14/progressive-keynesian-myths-debunked-the-coming-redistribution-of-political-and-economic-power-among-the-states/

Actual Letter From the White House!! Obama Response to 2nd Amendment letter!

Dear Friend:
Thank you for taking the time to write. I have heard from many Americans regarding firearms policy and gun violence in our Nation, and I appreciate your perspective.

From Aurora to Newtown to the streets of Chicago, we have seen the devastating effects gun violence has on our American family. I join countless others in grieving for all those whose lives have been taken too soon by gun violence.

Like the majority of Americans, I believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. In this country, we have a strong tradition of gun ownership that has been handed down from generation to generation. Hunting and sport shooting are part of our national heritage. Yet, even as we acknowledge that almost all gun owners in America are responsible, when we look at the devastation caused by gun violence—whether in high-profile tragedies or the daily heartbreak that plagues our cities—we must ask ourselves whether we are doing enough.

While reducing gun violence is a complicated challenge, protecting our children from harm should not be a divisive one. Most gun owners agree that we can respect the Second Amendment while keeping an irresponsible, law-breaking few from inflicting harm on a massive scale. Most also agree that if we took commonsense steps to curtail gun violence, there would be fewer atrocities like the one that occurred in Newtown. We will not be able to stop every violent act, but if there is even one thing we can do to reduce gun violence—if even one life can be saved—then we have an obligation to try.

That is why I asked Vice President Joe Biden to identify concrete steps we can take to keep our children safe, help prevent mass shootings, and reduce the broader epidemic of gun violence in this country. He met with over 200 groups representing a broad cross-section of Americans and heard their best ideas. I have put forward a specific set of proposals based off of his efforts, and in the days ahead, I intend to use whatever weight this office holds to make them a reality.

My plan gives law enforcement, schools, mental health professionals, and the public health community some of the tools they need to help reduce gun violence. These tools include strengthening the background check system, helping schools hire more resource officers and counselors and develop emergency preparedness plans, and ensuring mental health professionals know their options for reporting threats of violence. And I directed the Centers for Disease Control to study the best ways to reduce gun violence—because it is critical that we understand the science behind this public health crisis. From improving mental health services to looking more closely at a culture that too often glorifies violence, we must leave no stone unturned when working to keep Americans safe.

As important as these steps are, they are not a substitute for action from Congress. To make a real and lasting difference, members of Congress must also act. As part of my comprehensive plan, I have called on them to pass some specific proposals right away. First, it is time to require a universal background check for anyone trying to buy a gun. Second, Congress should renew the 10-round limit on magazines and reinstate and strengthen the assault weapons ban. We should get tougher on those who buy guns with the purpose of selling them to criminals, and we should impose serious punishments on anyone who helps them do this.

These are reasonable, commonsense measures that have the support of the majority of the American people. But change will not come unless the American people demand it from their lawmakers. Now is the time to do the right thing for our children, our communities, and the country we love. We owe the victims of heartbreaking national tragedies and the countless unheralded tragedies each year nothing less than our best effort—to seek consensus in order to save lives and ensure a brighter future for our children.

Thank you, again, for writing. I encourage you to visit www.WhiteHouse.gov/NowIsTheTime to learn more about my Administration’s approach.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama

Visit WhiteHouse.gov

FL Sheriff Arrested by Governor Scott For Defending Right to Bear Arms

This week Liberty County Florida Sheriff, Nick Finch was arrested by Governor Rick Scott for standing in defense of the Constitution and honoring his oath of office. Sheriff Finch believes the Second Amendment means what it says, our Right to keep and bear arms SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. What Sheriff Finch did was well within his authority and in full compliance with the rules and regulations for records retention and destruction. What Sheriff Finch did was stand in the gap where the government is trying to erode your Liberty.
Read more.... http://krisannehall.com/

EPA accused of singling out conservative groups, amid IRS scandal

By Eric Shawn Published June 04, 2013 FoxNews.com

It's not just the IRS.

A second federal agency is facing a probe and accusations of political bias over its alleged targeting of conservative groups.

The allegations concern the Environmental Protection Agency, which is being accused of trying to charge conservative groups fees while largely exempting liberal groups. The fees applied to Freedom of Information Act requests -- allegedly, the EPA waived them for liberal groups far more often than it did for conservative ones.

The allegations are under investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is also holding hearings on the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups.

"I don't think it is fair at all. It is not fair to the American taxpayer -- the American taxpayer should expect and demand that the EPA treats everyone equally in regard to these requests," said Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Tim Murphy, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "This cannot be tolerated. As we see more federal agencies with this kind of bias, it is and should be a concern for all of us."

Research by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, claims that the political bias is routine when it comes to deciding which groups are charged fees. Christopher Horner, senior fellow at CEI, said liberal groups have their fees for documents waived about 90 percent of the time, in contrast with conservative groups that it claims are denied fee waivers about 90 percent of the time.

"The idea is to throw hurdles in our way," charged Horner, who says he decided to look into the fee structure after the EPA repeatedly turned down his group for waivers.

"In 20 cases of ours, since the beginning of last year, we were expressly denied, or denied by them simply refusing to respond, in 18 out of 20 cases," said Horner, explaining that the batting percentage for fees waived in favor of liberal groups is overwhelming.

"Earth Justice was batting 17 out of 19, the Sierra Club was the worst, at 70 percent granted, 11 out of 15. You add up some other groups and we found that 75 out of 82 groups granted, because these are the groups that the EPA has decided are the favored groups."

The EPA has denied any favoritism.

Acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe told the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 16 that "our policy is to treat everybody the same," and the agency is considering pursuing an investigation.

In a statement to Fox News, the EPA said: "The Office of Inspector General received from the Environmental Protection Agency the official request to look into this matter just over a week ago, so the request is currently under review by the OIG at this early stage."

But Horner, who has studied federal government agency practices as the author of "The Liberal War on Transparency: Confessions of a Freedom of Information 'Criminal,'" says that charging fees or denying information requests is a underhanded method that government agencies use to try and stymie the free flow of information or political dissent.

"This is no different than denying a group that you don't agree with ... whether you are the IRS or the EPA, their tax-exempt status," said Horner.

"You're talking about essentially making or breaking them, or at a minimum, snuffing out their ability to pursue their objectives."
Murphy said treating groups differently is simply not right.

"We are hoping that the acting administrator of the EPA can already send a message out to his people that this will not be tolerated," Murphy said. "It is wrong. Similar with the people with the IRS who testified that, 'well some of things may not be illegal,' they can still be wrong. People expect their government to not be acting in these ways, but to be fair and just and truthful in these informational quests and in their investigations."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/04/epa-accused-singling-out-conservative-groups-amid-irs-scandal/?cmpid=NL_FNTopHeadlines

ALSO see the EPA Report - SURPRISING!!

BRIBE MONEY TO VOTER BLOCKS

HOW OBAMA ILLEGALLY BOUGHT THE BLACK AND LATINO RURAL VOTE

By Ron Ewart
May 16, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

"I just received the following note from my generous Daddy. Dear Jack: Don't buy a single vote more than is necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide." —President John F. Kennedy

The following paragraphs outline a story about blatant, in-your-face political corruption, racketeering, graft and fraud by former President Clinton, Obama, the Obama Administration, along with Obama appointees in the Justice and Agriculture Departments and certain members of Congress that included a scheme to buy off Black, Latino, Indian and women farmers for their votes with your tax money, for alleged racial discrimination by the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It is a story of unbelievable twists, turns, corruption and graft at the highest levels of government.

Andrew Breitbart actually broke the story several months ago but he was vilified by the press and those belonging to the Donkey party, as being a bigot, a racist and a sloppy reporter that was loose with the facts. It turns out that Breitbart was uncannily accurate, as proved out by a 5,000 word expose' on the front page of the New York Times on April 25, 2013 ..... the New York Times mind you, no friend of conservative issues! Read the article. You won't believe that your government could be this reckless with your money!

The case started back in 1997 with a lawsuit by one Timothy Pigford against the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for racial discrimination between the years 1983 and 1997. (see: Pigford v. Glickman) The case became a class action and rose quickly to 2,000 Black farmers that claimed racial discrimination against USDA for withholding loans based on race alone. However, two government reports showed that racial discrimination was not systemic in USDA and that Black farmers only showed a slightly higher incidence of discrimination over White farmers. Yes, the report showed White discrimination as well as Black discrimination.

Early on in the Pigford payoff scandal, it was reported that President Clinton ordered USDA to pay 60% of the Black farmer claims and reject 40% of the claims as a template for the payouts. President Clinton also suggested a payout amount of $50,000 to Black farmers and that became the standard. No wonder he was labeled the first "Black" president.

After the initial payouts to Black farmers, Senator Menendez, a Hispanic senator, and other sympathetic Democratic senators in September of 2009 cried foul and said that Hispanic farmers were also discriminated against and should be compensated as well. Menendez wanted the same payout for Hispanic farmers who had been allegedly discriminated against by USDA. With such a large payout for alleged discrimination, claim filers, Black and Latino, crawled out of the woodwork to get their share of the loot. In one county alone, claims filed were four times the number of farmers in the county.

It got worse from there. Women and Indian farmers suddenly showed up on the scene and said they were discriminated against too and they wanted an ill-gotten piece of illegal government generosity. $760,000,000 was allocated for Indian farmers alone.

Even though the U. S. Supreme Court ruled against most of these cases, after Obama was elected president in 2008, his Administration and political appointees in the Justice Department and USDA set aside $1.33 billion for payouts to farmers making discrimination claims. But here's the rub. All Black, Latino, Indian and Women farmers had to do was to file a claim to reap their reward. They didn't have to provide the slightest evidence or proof of discrimination. The rationale was that paying them off (and that is what they did) was cheaper than fighting multiple Class Action lawsuits and it made good political sense, especially with the 2012 presidential election looming in the distance. Except that, legal scholars and some attorneys in the case stated multiple times that such Class Action lawsuits had no chance to prevail.

Pigford and his class of Black farmers sued USDA again, once in 2002 and then again in 2005, requesting a modification to the 1999 U. S. Supreme Court Settlement agreement. In an arrogant move rarely seen, the Black “class” wanted their lead class counsel disqualified and they wanted more money from the government. However, by 2005, 13,500 Black farmers had already received $830,000,000 from the government, which works out to over $61,000 per Black farmer. They had the audacity and unmitigated gall to ask for more of your money.

Unilateral political decisions by Obama's White House, the Justice Department, USDA and Democrat and Republican members of Congress were made to buy off these farmers of alleged discrimination, in spite of negative decisions by the U. S. Supreme Court against these types of racial discrimination claims. According to the New York Times article, the government is now on the hook for an estimated 90,000 Black, Latino, Indian and Women farmers, to the tune of $4.5 billion of your dollars. Most of these farmers cannot prove discrimination and a large share of them are not even farmers. Many of the claims were filed in the names of children by relatives. Many claims were filed using inner city addresses and from apartment buildings.

Under the Pigford Class Action lawsuit and further extensions of its application to certain minorities, there were time limits for filing claims. President Obama, his administration, the Justice Department, USDA and members of Congress moved repeatedly to keep extending the filing dates so that more Blacks, Latinos, Indians and Women could take advantage of the undocumented, illegal payoffs. Attorneys on both sides of the Pigford scandal reaped profits exceeding $130,000,000.

Read more at http://www.newswithviews.com/Ewart/ron101.htm

Obama and his entire Administration has lost the confidence of the American people - his tyrannical overreaching - ignoring the laws and the Constitution - deciding which of the thousands and thousands of laws he will allow to be enforced. He must always create a straw man to attack and make out as evil - stopping him from doing all the good things he promised.

Well we all know better now a this ploy will no longer serve him. If he can stay in office after these breaches in law - lying to the people about Benghazi - will not say where he was as the fighting went on - lied for two weeks about some dreamed up video - well, the MSM said this was just Politics - next came the IRS discriminated against Tea Party, Patriots, Constitution and bill of rights groups and then even gave our income and tax paid by the famous Conservative Koch Brothers - these are CRIMES and we must demand prosecutions - next is that his Attorney General got a court to issue a warrant so they could SPY on the AP - tape phone calls monitor emails and list contacts -

This is a government that PUNISHES all that take issue with the Administration's positions - talk about enemies list of Nixon! - how about the Obama Chicago style HIT list - destroy those that stand in our way.

Yes, Mr. President you have lost our support and trust - you are now to be questioned in every move you make - your Administration will be watched - each new rule or regulation will be evaluated - YOU HAVE LOST THE PEOPLE'S CONFIDENCE.

5/13/13 States Rights: Use Them or Lose Them

There has never been a time when it has been more important than now to be proud and wave the flag of your home state. Our friends in the Southern tier have been shouting this for 160 years, but finally the rest of the nation is beginning to get it. States’ rights are a huge deal and we have been giving them away without thinking about the consequences.

I rarely like to give Kyle Bauer, my radio partner on Rural Route Radio, any credit but this time I have to give him major kudos. While Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is the one who made it happen, Kyle told me about it.

I am curious to see how many of you are like me and could not begin to tell anybody what the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is. Everybody knows the First Amendment and most likely you’ve been overwhelmed with media attention to the Second Amendment, but what about the 10th?

So here it is: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Direct and concise, lacking a bunch of lawyer-influenced language that makes it a bunch of mumbo jumbo, this amendment clearly says that we, as states united, have been giving power to the federal government for no good reason at all.

When speaking of the 10th Amendment, James Madison, “the father of the Constitution,” explained it this way: “The powers delegated to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, (such) as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.”

In the past couple of weeks, it has been actions within the state government of Kansas that have once again brought the issue back into the spotlight.

Brownback signed the Second Amendment Protection Act, nullifying a wide range of federal attacks on the right to keep and bear arms in Kansas.

Language in the law states: “Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.”

The new law also makes it illegal for any federal agent to enforce any law, treaty, order, rule or regulation regarding firearms manufactured, owned and remaining within Kansas’ borders. Violators could face felony charges. State prosecutors will serve federal agents who have violated the law with a complaint and a summons.

As you may have heard, the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder immediately wrote a letter to Brownback telling him that Kansas can’t do that. The governor, not intimidated by Holder’s threat, responded by saying, “The people of Kansas have repeatedly and overwhelmingly reaffirmed their commitment to protecting this fundamental right. The people of Kansas are likewise committed to defending the sovereignty of the state of Kansas as guaranteed in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”

He closed the letter by saying “The people of Kansas have clearly expressed their sovereign will. It is my hope that upon further review, you will see their right to do so.”

I truly believe the time has come for all states in the union to follow the lead of Kansas and implement their sovereign will. The Constitution clearly says that the role of the federal government is only to provide for the common defense, manage foreign relations, protect citizens’ constitutional rights, establish federal courts, apply and explain federal law (in the judiciary’s case), and a few other minor issues.

Complacency continues to be our only true challenge. As citizens and as states, we the people have rights and the old saying could not be more true than when it is applied here today: “Use them or lose them.” Spread the word, share the message, contact your state leaders and take back our rights!

Editor’s note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.FacesOfAg.com, or email Trent at trentloos@gmail.com.

http://www.hpj.com/archives/2013/may13/may13/0507LoosTalesdbsr.cfm

A MUST WATCH VIDEO!!

Please, please watch at least part of this video! And then, write your representatives! Mainstream media will NOT cover this!!

Navy SEAL Extortion 17 EXPOSED - Obama Failures

SEAL TEAM SIX KILLED IN EXTORTION 17 SHOOT DOWN
OBAMA COVER-UP!
MUSLIM IMAM PRAYS "CURSES" OVER DEAD AMERICANS

EXTORTION 17 SHOOT DOWN OBAMA COVER-UP! MUSLIM IMAM PRAYS "CURSES" OVER DEAD AMERICANS In less than 48 hours 100,000 people have watched this explosive Press Conference! FEATURING Families of our American warriors killed on Aug 6, 2011 Read more....https://www.facebook.com/theunitedwest?ref=stream&hc_location=stream

Swatting at Flies
Posted by Ben Lewis

Have you ever had that experience of swatting an annoying fly only to have it get back up, dazed and confused, and come back around for another smackdown? That’s the life of your typical advocate of nullification. It seems that no matter how many times you swat down the same argument, it pops right back up, convinced as ever that it is right.

This brings us to a May 2nd editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser titled, “Alabama can’t nullify federal gun regulations.” The article’s confused purveyors of myth launched into a 470-word diatribe against the Alabama Senate for supporting Senate Bill 93, a measure that would declare that “All federal acts, laws, orders, rules or regulations regarding firearms are a violation of the Second Amendment.” The editorial mocks the bill’s author, State Senator Paul Sanford, as “plainly” not a constitutional scholar.
Exactly how a bill that affirms the Second Amendment to the Constitution is so patently foolish is not readily apparent. However, this doesn’t stop the editorial board from hitting all of the basic anti-nullification talking points.

Trying to strike the balance between labeling nullification as ridiculous and linking it with racism, the author points out that nullification has allegedly been unsuccessful since the 1830s, and only used by Southern politicians in response to the Civil Rights movement in the mid-20th Century. The runaway slaves protected by Northern nullification of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act would probably have a different opinion. So too would the federal proponents of the 2005 REAL ID act who have seen their legislation unceremoniously ignored by 37 states. And those 19 states defying the federal government on weed? They’re just doing it because they hate black people, right?

Anyone who wants you to believe that resisting the federal government today is somehow associated with disgusting racists of the past is either totally ignorant or just big, fat liar. Or both.

The editorial also directs attention to the Supreme Court who “in case after case and by court after court” have struck down what Alabama is trying to do. Leaving aside the obvious fact that the Supreme Court’s decisions do not redefine reality – the esteemed Court did, after all, declare in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that African-Americans were not, nor could ever be, citizens – let’s investigate first just what Alabama SB93 is, and then the claim that all Supreme Court decisions squash the attempts of states to resist unconstitutional laws.

SENATE BILL 93
Alabama Senate Bill 93 (SB93) declares that “All federal acts, laws, orders, rules, or regulations regarding firearms are a violation of the Second Amendment,” and therefore, “are invalid in this state, shall not be recognized by this state, are specifically rejected by this state, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in this state.”

If passed into law, the immediate effect would be that no state or local agent, employee, or asset would be authorized for us in the enforcement (or assistance in the enforcement) of any federal gun control measures – past, present, or future. Bill Sponsor Senator Paul Sanford affirmed as much during debate on the bill. He said, ”They’re not going to use our law enforcement officials to enforce their law that is unconstitutional.”

This would make a HUGE dent in any federal effort to further restrict the right to keep and bear arms in Alabama – and would be a big step forward for gun rights supporters there. As Judge Andrew Napolitano has said recently, such widespread noncompliance can make a federal law “nearly impossible to enforce” (video here). And in those limited situations where enforcement does occur, Rosa Parks has taught us all the power of “NO!” Passage of SB93 would mark the beginning of the end of federal gun control in Alabama.

In case the full state and local noncompliance doesn’t work as intended, SB93 includes a mechanism to take additional steps in the future. It reads, “The Legislature shall adopt and enact any and all measures as may be necessary to prevent the enforcement of any federal acts, laws, orders, rules, or regulations in violation of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

But, nothing is set and stone and the exact manner and process would have to be determined at a future date.

THE SUPREME COURT

There is absolutely ZERO serious dispute about the fact that the federal government cannot “commandeer” the states to carry out its laws. None. Even the Supreme Court has affirmed this multiple times.

In the 1992 case, New York v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress couldn’t require states to enact specified waste disposal regulations.could not specify how the states were required to dispose of radioactive waste.

In the 1997 case, Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not command state law enforcement authorities to conduct background checks on prospective handgun purchasers.

In the 2012 case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court ruled that a significant expansion of Medicaid was not a valid exercise of Congress’s spending power, as it would coerce states to either accept the expansion or risk losing existing Medicaid funding.

In each of these cases, the Supreme Court made is quite clear that their opinion is that the federal government cannot require the states to act, or even coerce them to act through a threat to lose funding. Their opinion is correct. If the feds pass a law, they can sure try to enforce it if they want. But the states absolutely do NOT have to help them in any way.

SUPREMACY
Toward the end of the editorial we finally get to the would-be coup de grace of the anti-nullifiers, the claim that federal law trumps state law. Adherents to this argument cite Article VI, Clause 2 of the Constitution, the so-called Supremacy Clause. The clause does actually say that federal law is supreme, but only those laws “which shall be made in pursuance” of the Constitution. Inasmuch as a federal gun laws violate the Constitution, they are not supreme.

Anyone who has passed sixth-grade civics is supposed to ignore this, which is likely more of an indictment of what is being taught in civics classes than of the constitutionality of nullification. Apparently sixth-grade civics class is where we learn to ignore basic logic. After all, nobody who adheres to the broad interpretation of the Supremacy Clause can explain why the rest of the Constitution exists. Why did the men who wrote the Constitution bother with all of the other enumerations and divisions of power if that could all be swept aside with one clause? That would be a little like building a fireplace to safely provide warmth and then lighting the couch on fire.

Become a member and support the TAC!

CONSTITUTIONAL
Nullification is not unconstitutional, bigoted or ineffective. Quite the opposite.

Nullification is constitutional. Nullification helps end racist programs like the federal war on marijuana. And nullification is absolutely effective. And these facts are probably why the partisan hacks at the Advertiser don’t want you to support it.

It is the best option for a people who would preserve their liberties.

If Alabamans seek the preservation of the right to keep and bear arms, it is legislation like SB 93 that should receive support.

http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2013/05/05/swatting-at-flies/

Ben Lewis is the Education Coordinator for the Ohio Tenth Amendment Center.

The Good Guys Are NOT Coming To Save Us

FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE • Apr 23rd, 2013

A lot of Americans know that the US government is out of control. Anyone who has cared enough to study the US Constitution even a little knows this. Still, very few of these people are taking any significant action, and largely because of one error: They are waiting for “the good guys” to show up and fix things.

Some think that certain groups of politicians will pull it together and fix things, or that one magnificent politician will ride in to fix things. Others think that certain members of the military will step in and slap the politicians back into line. And, I’m sure there are other variations.
There are several problems with this. I’ll start with the small issues:

1.   It doesn’t happen. A lot of good people have latched on to one grand possibility after another, waiting for a good guy to save the day, and it just doesn’t happen. Thousands of hours of reading, writing and waiting are burned with each new “great light” who comes along with a promise to run the system in the “right” way, and give us liberty and truth. (Or whatever.) Lots of decent folks grab on to one pleasant dream after another, only to end up right back where they started… but poorer in time, energy and finances.
2.   Hope is a scam. It’s a dream of someday, somehow, getting something for nothing. People who hope do not act – they wait for other people to act. Hope is a tool to neuter a natural opposition: they sit and hope, and never act against you. Even the biblical meaning of hope is something more like expectation (or sometimes waiting) than the modern use of hope.
3.   Petitioning an abuser for compassion. The “good guys” are considered to be a few people inside the abusive government. But if the good guys were really good, wouldn’t they have dissociated themselves with an abuser some time ago? By pleading for the good guys to rise up, people are asking one sub-group of the abusers to save them from the rest of the abusers. However, they all work for the same operation; they all get paid out of the same offices; according to the same rulebook. And if the good guys are so willing to turn against their employers, why would they have waited until now?
4.   Movies. We all grew up in the company of movie heroes who rode in at the last minute to save the noble victims. From John Wayne to Star Trek to Bruce Willis, the story line differs little. These are pleasant stories, of course, but cinema is not reality, and hoping for it to become reality is something that we should get over prior to adulthood.

But, as I say, those are the smaller issues. Let’s move on to the serious ones.

The Magic System
A lot of Americans believe that the American “Founders” created a system that automatically fixes itself. They talk about the “balance of powers,” and think that it will always save them from a tyrant. The balanced powers of the US Constitution, however, were trashed within fifteen years and doubly-trashed just a century ago.

In the Constitution, the states balanced the power of the national government (the one now in Washington, DC.) Not only did the states control half of the legislature, but they decided if and how they would implement the edicts of the national government. And that included deciding whether a law was constitutional or not.This changed in 1803 with the Marbury v. Madison ruling. This ruling – taught as a work of genius in American schools – was a fraud against the US Constitution. In it, the Supreme Court held that they understood the Constitution better than James Madison, the man who wrote it!But worse than even this, they held – with absolutely no basis – that it was they who would decide what was constitutional or not. The states were tossed aside. Even the sitting President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, called it “a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”Marbury’s Judicial review (the Supremes ruling on constitutionality) merely involves one branch of the national government providing a check on the other branches of the national government. After Marbury, no one could check the national government.

Washington DC was unleashed with Marbury v. Madison. What made it almighty was the 17th Amendment of 1913, which took the powers of the states and transferred them to Washington, by mandating the popular election of senators.

With senators being elected directly by the populace, the states were cut-out of the equation. In their place, political parties gained massive power, and nearly all power was consolidated in the city of Washington.

And so it is today. Washington is an unfettered beast. The system will NOT fix itself; the mechanisms to do that were lost a long time ago.

The Easy Way Out
Standing up against a beast like Washington DC is scary, to be sure. Understandably, not many people want to do such a thing. But if the beast is abusing you, what other choice do you have? You can certainly avoid or evade the beast, but we all know that the beast hurts people it catches avoiding it, so the risk of doing this isn’t zero either.

So, what’s a person to do? They hate their abuse, but outright disobedience would be scary. Unfortunately, many people have come up with a third option: Get someone else to do it for you.

Lots of writers have done this, for example: Write flamboyantly about the abuses people face and stir them to “rise up against the power.” Fairly seldom does the writer take big risks himself – he just stirs up others to do the scary stuff.

Something very similar happens to basically moral people who don’t want to risk pain and suffering: they imagine good guys riding in to save them.

But, as I say, these are genuinely decent people, and they are willing to take smaller risks to help the good guys: They will spend time and money promoting them, and they will even accept name-calling in many cases. They just don’t want to become full-blown rebels and outcasts.
The result of this is predictable: abuse by the political class. If the politicians show them a viable possibility every election cycle, they’ll keep voting their way forever… and the hero never really has to show up.

The Sad Truth
Let’s just say it:
No one is going to ride in and save you.

If you want things to get better, then YOU will have to make them better. YOU will have to stand up and take the arrows, yourself. Liberty, at this stage of human development, requires risk and pain.

I trust that you will remember the end of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount: That it is not those who call upon his name who will be saved, but only those who DO the things he said.

Likewise in this situation, our only hope of salvation lies in DOING.

Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com
http://www.freemansperspective.com/good-guys-not-coming-to-save-us/

The Lonestar Weekly

April 17, 2013
SERVING TEXANS IN THE SENATE SINCE 2002

2nd Amendment Is Not a Take-It-Or-Leave-It Proposition

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is not merely about hunting, recreational shooting, or marksmanship. Nor is it discretionary. It is not a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

In order to bolster the freedom of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms, I offered legislation that would allow Americans with concealed handgun licenses issued by their own states to exercise those rights in other states whose state law authorizes the issuance of a concealed handgun license.

If you're driving from Virginia to Texas, you don't have to obtain a separate driver's license for each state you drive through. But you do have to obey the speed limits and other laws of the state in which you are driving.

If this legislation becomes the law of the land, someone with a concealed carry permit in Texas would no longer have to worry about obtaining a separate one when he or she travels across the country.

For all of us who are worried and concerned about these episodes of senseless gun violence, I think we can actually find a solution, not by encroaching on the freedom of law-abiding citizens who are exercising their constitutional rights, but by focusing on the areas where we can actually make a difference.

Showing Us Who He Really Is

By Linda McKinney / 14 April 2013

“How easy it is to abuse truth and language, when men, by habitual wickedness, have learned to set justice at defiance.” — Thomas Paine, “Common Sense on George III’s Speech”, 1782
“An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. To begin with, he does not have a fixed truth — truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.” — Saul D. Alinsky, Rules For Radicals, 1971

As many of us know, the President is one of the most ardent followers of Saul Alinsky. For both, the truth is relative. Consider what the President said earlier this month in his speech in Colorado:

“And so we’ve seen enacted tougher background checks that won’t infringe on the rights of responsible gun owners, but will help keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.”

Conveniently wrong, but truth is relative.
In the same speech he says,

“Over the past 20 years, those background checks have kept more than 2 million dangerous people from buying a gun.”

If that mattered a hill of beans to him why has his administration prosecuted only 44 “of the 15,700 fugitives and felons who tried to illegally purchase a firearm” in 2010 alone?

During the 2008 elections, in a comment about the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, he said that he believes:

“‘[T]hat the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right.’”

I’m sorry. If he admits that the “Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms” isn’t the next part of his statement a bit contradictory with the rest of the Second Amendment’? You know, that part that says “shall not be infringed? Either we have the full right, un-infringed or we do not have it at all. It’s not a half and half thing. (And since when did our rights get “conferred” upon us? Those delineated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights come from GOD as the Founding Fathers acknowledged.)

The Founding Fathers, in backing the Second Amendment said things like,
“The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.”
That’s Alexander Hamilton, who later added,

“If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government.”

Sounds to me more as if the Founding Fathers — and the words they chose — meant for the people to be able to defend themselves against the government! That’s who “the representatives of the people” are: the President, the House and Senate, the Courts and the State and local governments. So the President’s assertions that it “does not mean that the state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right. [my italics]” is not just wrong, it’s in direct opposition to what Alexander Hamilton and other Founders have said!

Now the President is using the Sandy Hook massacre to further his cause via using the parents as backdrops, and one of them taking his place in the weekly radio address (and traveling at our expense to do his bidding). Their grief, difficult as it is to say anything negative about it, is being used to stoke fear into the hearts of the rest of us. It happened to their children. It could happen to ours. Thus, “gun control” must be the answer. We must take the guns away from everyone.

No. They don’t start there. They start with alleged “assault rifles” and high capacity magazines, then they go to other weapons and their ultimate goal: no one will have guns but the government. (Oh, and the people they say can have guns: celebrity body guards, gangsta-rappers; you know. People who need them.)

The President using fear — and, yes, grief — to try to control those who do not know their rights, do not think for themselves, do not do their own investigating of the facts, is (to me) despicable. He’s relying on the least informed, least educated and weakest of us to be able to control the rest of us, pitting one set against the other. Divide and conquer is his forte and he has used it for quite a while now. No, I’m not saying the parents of Sandy Hook are the least informed, etc. I’m saying that the parents’ loss is being used against those who are least informed, etc.

When a President uses tragedies of the Sandy Hook sort to start the process of disarming the people he has an agenda that cannot be good for the people. When he uses a tragedy like Sandy Hook’s parents’ loss as a backdrop and a selling point, he’s selling fear. When he uses fear…

“Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.” ~ John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

He tells us who he really is.
http://girlsjustwannahaveguns.com/2013/04/showing-us-who-he-really-is/

He said in his lifetime he had come to the conclusion that "one useless man is a shame.. two useless men is a law firm .... and three or more usless men is a congress"... ~ John Adams

Obama, Washington DC and Getting it Right…What Does the Second Amendment Actually Limit?

Bill of RightsAs we all know, Obama called for three new pieces of legislation and issued twenty-three Executive Orders…all in violation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Read the last part of the sentence again;Second AMENDMENT to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights AMENDED the existing Constitution as it was ratified in 1788 to place further restrictions onto the newly created (created by the States, by the way) “federal” government.From Merriam-Websters Dictionary, amend:
    to put right; especially
    to make emendations in (as a text) to change or modify for the better, improve; “amend the situation”
    to alter especially in phraseology; especially to alter formally by modification, deletion, or addition

As you read some of the later States’ ratification documents and debates, it becomes quite clear that many were quite nervous about the Constitution and its ability to stop the federal government from growing. Their fears appear to be well-founded.

When the States began ratifying the Constitution, many were afraid that the Constitution wasn’t strong enough to prevent the federal government from expanding and becoming despotic. When you read the State ratification documents, you see some States offering Amendments to try and further restrict the newly-formed government.

For example, when New Hampshire ratified the Constitution they apparently wanted to make it clear they were not surrendering their sovereignty, by suggesting the following Amendment to the Constitution:

I. That it be explicitly declared that all powers not expressly and particularly delegated by the aforesaid Constitution are reserved to the several states, to be by them exercised.

Virginia, apparently, was very nervous and offered forty Amendments, or changes, to the Constitution. Like New Hampshire, they were also concerned about the newly-created government growing too large when they offered this in their ratifying document:

17th. That those clauses which declare that Congress shall not exercise certain powers, be not interpreted in any manner whatsoever, to extend the powers of Congress; but that they be construed either as making exceptions to the specified powers where this shall be the case, or otherwise, as inserted merely for greater caution.

Back to the Second Amendment, after the Constitution was ratified (approved) by the States, there was still that lingering fear. James Madison had agreed during the Virginia Ratification Debates that he would promptly introduce a Bill of Rights once the first Congress convened. Even though it was difficult, Madison did as he promised and the Bill of Rights was passed by Congress and sent to the States for ratification.

It is VERY important to read the Bill of Rights, but more importantly, it’s important to start with its Preamble because it states the purpose of these ten Amendments. If we miss the Preamble, we miss the entire purpose of these Amendments and end up negotiating how much of these rights we’ll give up to the federal government. So, with that, read the Preamble to the Bill of Rights below, concentrating on one particular boldfaced part:

The Preamble to The Bill of Rights Congress of the United States begun and held at the City of New-York, on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

Translated, “we’re a bit nervous that the Constitution by itself will not stop the government from growing and as it grows, trampling on the States and the People of the States. So, we’re going to add additional crystal-clear limitations on what you can do as a federal government!” Do you agree that is what the Ratifiers of the Bill of Rights were attempting to do, based on your reading of the Preamble? If you agree, this has profound implications in the steps that need to be taken via the Ninth and Tenth Amendment.

So let’s see why this matters to the current debate about the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment states “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

It doesn’t matter where the commas are, as the Supreme Court or pro-big government Think Tanks or Congressmen would like you to think.

It doesn’t matter what technical definition of militia is.

All that matters is that the federal government, which according to the Preamble to the Bill of Rights was the object being restricted, was legally bound from INFRINGING on our God-given right to protect ourselves.

The Second Amendment essentially says federal government, you cannot do anything, not one single thing, not even a hint of anything, to regulate even our State Militia!” Why do you suppose they put that in there? As James Madison himself wrote in Federalist #48: “The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.”

Obviously Madison is writing that mere paper (the Constitution) was not going to be enough to stop the natural progression of a government towards despotism and tyranny. Thus the need for the Second Amendment – because it prohibits the federal government from infringing on our personal unalienable right to bear arms as a final protection against the government, as they head toward tyranny and despotism. Additionally, the federal government is not allowed to infringe on the right of a State to raise a militia to ensure the States’ freedom from an out-of-control federal government dead set on acting tyrannically.

Do you see the difference when we look at the Second Amendment as a restriction on the federal government instead of a debate to be had in Congress about how much of a “right” we have? This is a critical distinction.

So, reading the Second Amendment properly, we conclude this:

We rightly assert our unalienable right to protect ourselves in our States when the federal government goes rogue by pointing to the Second Amendment and saying to DC (Obama, Congress and the Courts) that they have zero, zip, nada authority to regulate firearms of any sort. That regulation is up to the People of the States, not DC. This is important because when we cede to the federal government the ability to “negotiate” over the unalienable right to protect ourselves by bearing arms, we essentially cede to them the ability to grant or arbitrate all of our unalienable rights. A VERY big and profound mistake! Governments don’t grant or arbitrate rights, God grants them or they are observed as part of our humanity. Failure to defend our God-given rights against tyranny is completely our fault because most of us don’t understand these distinctions.
We wrongly defend our unalienable right to self-defense when we assert that we have some mystical Second Amendment Right to bear arms! We do not have a right to bear arms, we have an unalienable right to defend ourselves, even from a rogue illegitimate government, using weapons if necessary. The Second Amendment simply states that the federal government has NO AUTHORITY delegated to it to do anything with our guns whatsoever.

Why does this matter? Because if we don’t understand the difference, we do what we do now…beg them not to do anything that infringes on our God-given unalienable right. Emphasize the term “beg.” We’re fighting them on their battlefield, folks, and they control the battlefield! It’s that simple. Which is why we lose so often…we keep fighting them on their turf and liberty is getting its butt kicked!

What should happen is this:

You should resign yourself to the fact that Washington DC is rogue and therefore it is morally and constitutionally illegitimate. It refuses to stay within the limits of the Constitution and could care less about what the Constitution actually says. Stop begging them…hint, it’s not very becoming and they’re not listening to us anyway.
Recognize that you are the sovereign, not the federal government. Getting to this point is actually quite liberating. Failure to do so will cause you irreparable harm going forward. You will simply keep begging.
Connect with folks at the Tenth Amendment Center to learn about the power you have to stop Washington DC. You’d be surprised how much power you have at your disposal.
Connect with us here a RRG. Become a member today, go into the Pub, one of our forums, and tell us what State you’re from. As more and more people join, we’ll be able to connect and begin the process of organizing a real effort in our States to stop DC. You’ll also get great strategies on how to advance liberty in your state.
Be optimistic. There is a subtle change occurring. People are exhausted with the big-government types on mainstream talk radio, Washington DC Think Tanks, and even “conservatives” in Congress regurgitating the same tired options that never work. Options like hoping the Federal Courts will side with liberty…remember Justice Roberts and Obamacare? That worked out well! Or the typical “we just need to do better next election cycle!” There is nothing new coming out of the Washington DC Think Tanks or mainstream talk radio–conservative or liberal–folks. It’s the same old message and the same request: “send us $25 now to help us stop Nancy Pelosi and big government!” Or, “Tune in tomorrow where we’ll complain some more about how bad things are but not offer any real solutions!” Sure, that’s worked so well the last 80 years!

This is just round one of what will be a long uphill climb, folks. None of us should be surprised by what Obama did related to gun control. What you will see though, is that the “conservatives” in Washington DC will not even make the proper argument about the Second Amendment. They’ll try to “negotiate” the least damaging outcome.

That’s the kind of leadership we DON’T need!

Help us make 2013 the Year of the States!

http://www.redefinegov.com/obama-washington-dc-and-getting-it-right-what-does-the-2nd-amendment-actually-limit/

Read other good articles about our 2nd Amendment rights here.

Joe Biden Describes 2nd Amendment Supporters as ‘Black Helicopter Crowd’

April 9, 2013 by Sam Rolley

Disagreeing with the policies of the current Presidential Administration makes you an insane conspiracy theorist, at least according to Vice President Joe Biden.

“Kinda scary man, the black helicopter crowd is really upset,” Biden said of people opposed to universal background checks during an anti-gun speech at the White House.

The Vice President went on to suggest that it is idiotic to believe that governments would oppress their people.

“No way that Uncle Sam can go find out whether you own a gun because we’re about to really take away all your rights and you’re not going to be able to defend yourself and we’re going to swoop down with Special Forces folks and gather up every gun in America,” Biden mocked. “It’s bizarre. But that’s what’s being sold out there.”

HT: The Examiner

http://personalliberty.com/2013/04/09/joe-biden-describes-2nd-amendment-supporters-as-black-helicopter-crowd/

Fantastic: Colion Noir hammers “American Elites” for their hypocrisy on gun violence!

Posted by The Right Scoop on April 4th, 2013

This is probably his best monologue yet:

In “American Elites,” Colion Noir takes on the politicians, media personalities and celebrities who would deny for others the same level of protection they depend upon themselves.

Ted Cruz explains opposition to UN Arms Treaty and universal background checks

The Right Scoop on April 3rd, 2013

In a recent radio interview, Ted Cruz explains why he is opposed to the UN Arms Treaty and why it must never be ratified as well why he opposes universal background checks:

15 Year Old Young Woman Leaves Maryland Gun Grabbing Politicians Speechless

April 3, 2013 by Tim Brown

In another video provided by The Maryland Minutemen, a fifteen year old young woman addresses the Maryland state legislature and in doing so some of the most hardcore gun control politicians. While some girls are running around attempting to be the next Lady Gaga, Madonna or Beyonce, it’s nice to know there are young women with some priorities in their lives. This young lady gets it, at least where arms are concerned. Take a look as see what you think.

Though I have attempted to discover the name of the young woman that spoke, I have yet to do so. However, she is a very well-spoken young woman and carried herself with poise and ease before the legislature.

She has been shooting for almost eight years. This indicates that her parents began teaching her at an early age. She has been a part of the Maryland Rifle Club and Maryland State Rifle Team since she was eleven. To the horror of the bun grabbers, she declared, “We shoot semi-automatic AR-15s and my personal rifle is a Bushmaster.”

Because of her experience, she has become so proficient that she has become eligible for various shooting scholarships from around the nation “from a wide array of even the most prestigious college shooting teams.”

“Stricter gun control laws would have obliterated any opportunity I would have had could have had to attend a decent college on a shooting scholarship,” she said.

She also declared that ever since she began to learn to shoot, the issue was clear in regards to gun violence, “Guns aren’t the problem; people are.”

In addressing the legislature concerning their gun grabbing legislation, she said, “By signing this legislation, you are not signing away gun violence, but instead liberating American citizens of our constitutional rights. You are not eliminating guns from society, but eliminating our ability to protect our lives, liberty and pursuits of happiness.”

The young woman then went on to point out the dismal record of Barack Obama’s city of Chicago, Illinois, a city with arguably some of the toughest gun laws in the country. “It is twice as likely for you to be killed in Chicago as it is to be killed in the Afghani War,” she stated. She then backed up her bold statement. “For the past eleven year and four months, in the Afghani War, 2,166 people have been killed (obviously referencing American people). Now in only eight years in Chicago 4,265 people have been killed and 3,371 of them were from being shot.”

“Is that really something we want to model our state laws after?” she asked rhetorically.

She went on to drive the point home that of the 3,371 that were killed in Chicago, only 37 of them were killed with a rifle. That’s barely 1%! Since 98% were killed with a handgun, the young lady says that “gun control legislation that targets assault rifles (Yes, I know, it’s semi-automatic rifles and so does she, but she’s rubbing their noses in it) has statistically proven to weed out only less than 1% of the problem if you’re lucky.”

She also pointed out that none of the firearms used in the Chicago shootings were either licensed or registered to the people who used them. This statistic alone should be enough to argue against background checks of any king or any type of registration or permit. After all, you don’t have to have any of those things to exercise any of your other rights, so why is that imposed on the Second Amendment? (Hint for liberals: It’s to control you.)

She then recounted the fact that restricting guns will not stop criminals from hurting people and pointed out that the same day of the Sandy Hook shooting that a knife wielding man injured 22 children and one adult outside a primary school in China.

“Guns are not needed for mass murder and robbing American citizens of our rights to own them won’t solve anything,” she said. “You must also consider the fact that the majority of gun violence occurs in low income neighborhoods. Raising the overall costs of owning a gun through higher licensing and registration fees denies the ability of low income individuals to protect themselves from the crime focused in the areas they live in.”

She then points out that passing legislation such as the Maryland legislature was considering was discrimination against the low income citizens, who are actually at the higher risk of becoming victims of crimes.

Concluding her remarks, she summarized what Maryland’s legislature and its governor were seeking to do.

“To abolish or severely limit the right of the Maryland residents, as a whole, to bear arms, which is the intent of the proposed legislation is to essentially defeat the purpose of our own U.S. Constitution. The entire foundation of the United States was formed on the principle that the government, our government, is a government of the people, for the people and by the people. Taking away the people’s right to bear arms is taking away the people’s power in the government.”

It is the Second Amendment that was put in place to make sure that the government understood that men keeping and bearing arms is not at the granting or the benevolence of government. Government is simply to protect that ability from infringement, even when it is the one seeking to infringe. In fact, I would say that any American is not only acting irresponsibly in not owning a firearm, but they are neglecting their duty to their families and country (their individual state) by not owning a firearm. Bravo to this young lady for speaking the truth and doing so very precisely and poignantly!

Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/04/15-year-old-young-woman-leaves-maryland-gun-grabbing-politicians-speechless/#ixzz2PVGZIl00

From My Cold Dead Hands Edition

Tyranny always wears a face of mocking, condescending faux concern on the Left, as Democrat dominated Blue States compete to see who can come up with the most egregious laws to make an ordinary citizen exercising their constitutional Second Amendment rights expensive, difficult and even shameful. New York’s law actually banned non-existent magazines and is now going through the embarrassment of having its governor appeal to the state legislature to repeal a law he shoved through in the dead of night that would make it illegal for any New York resident to own a firearm… even the police.

California and Connecticut, who already have ridiculous anti-gun laws on the books, have proposed sweeping bans on owning over 100 different types of weapons by law abiding citizens and are now weighing proposals to charge an annual fee for the right to buy ammo and slapping heavy ‘sin’ taxes on the purchase price.

Since these laws would make it prohibitive for minority families to protect themselves, such laws are not only unconstitutional and in violation of both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, but racist.

A number of other states are not far behind. And in the UN, the Obama Administration instructed its ambassador to vote for the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which would create a national firearms registry overseen by UN bureaucrats that is currently prohibited by federal law.
Make no mistake that the desired end result by our ruling class is confiscation and a disarmed populace. As Machiavelli said in The Prince, when you’re disarmed, you’re not only helpless but despised.

http://www.trevorloudon.com/2013/04/watchers-council-nominations-from-my-cold-dead-hands-edition/

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