Montoni For Mesa County - Survey Answers for CRV

Colorado Candidates: I don't know how many of you are answering candidate questionnaires from groups that typically oppose Libertarian or non-government solutions, but I answered the rather long survey from Colorado Rural Voters.

My answers were rather long, too --there wasn't a text limit in the entry boxes, and I saw no notice that they preferred <100 words until I got to the confirmation screen.

Oh, well.

In any case, Colorado Rural Voters would be better named "Colorado Gimme Your Money and Rights Voters" -- look at their wish list on their main page.

Some of those wishes might sound good upon first blush to Libertarians.  But the tyrannical reality is how they want to implement them.

Anyway, most of my answers on their survey questions were copypasta from things I'd written earlier (in one case I copied something I wrote in 1999).  While some would quip that only proves I'm a closed-minded jerk, what I believe it means is that the takers are making the same arguments and coveting the same rights and property in 2020 as they were in 1999.

And in 1899.

Here is the actual survey.

Jeriel Clark is the contact person for this thing.  I have not looked into who funds this "nonpartisan" group (nonpartisan my ass).   If I remember correctly, before this she was a paid staffer for another group that was trying to saddle up the taxpayers of Grand Junction and every other municipality in Mesa (including the county itself) and take them for a sweaty ride on a massive debt load for a city-owned gym/fitness/pool/recreation center.   It is my fading memory that she was the person who came before the Mesa Libertarians and did a presentation for the gym.

I'm in the wrong business.  It apparently pays to be a leftist activist.

But getting on with the story, here is how I answered their survey:

Are Content Providers Free to DePlatform?

In the last few years, we have heard many stories of alternative viewpoints -- including Libertarian ones -- being "deplatformed" and "unpublished".

Some Libertarians are excusing this behavior by claiming those content providers are private property, and they can decide for themselves what they provide a platform for.

I fully understand the argument.  However...

That position is, at best, naive, and at worst, willfully ignorant.

It has become abundantly clear: Content providers are not really private companies any longer.

1) They get a huge government subsidy in the form of "artificial personhood".

2) All of the major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are subscribers to the "services" of a spook-run "non-government organization" called the "Atlantic Council". 

3) Most of the spooks "advising" the oligarchs as to who to deplatform and what to censor are Obama-era players.

4) Dragging Zuck before congress wasn't meant to elicit information. It was a horse's head in the beds of the content oligarchs.

5) All of the content providers claim to be platforms and thus not liable for their content -- in public. However, in court, they claim the opposite.  Content carriers need to decide if they are publishers or platforms, and duck the hell out of gaming the system.


6) There have been multiple instances of spookish government bureaucrats visiting the C suites of all of the tech titans. Of course the records of what these spooks say to the execs is not made public, but here's a guess: "My, Mr Chairman, that's a beautiful twelve year old daughter you have there. It would be a shame if someone from our office visited her tonight."

7) The takedown of Backpage.com and the bankrupting of its principals in order to prevent them from hiring sufficient legal counsel was another horse's head.

No. The oligarchic providers have been captured by Leviathan. They are now functioning as management arms of the police state.  Almost all of the internet content providers are now deeply compromised.No corporation should be regulating political speech; and certainly no corporation -- which gets the government subsidy of artificial personhood -- should attempt to meddle in American elections in this manner.

It isn't the Russians who are interfering in our elections.

It's tech oligarchs, the mainstream media, and the military-industrial-spook complex.

The fix for this is to reduce government employment at all levels by 99% across-the-board, and shut down government agencies -- including the national-security-spy-state complex.

Hopefully the few thousand remaining government bureaucrats will be able to concentrate on activities that actually protect the individual rights of Americans. rather than violating them.

The elimination of corporate personhood and requiring businesses to bear the full cost and responsibility for their own actions that violate individual rights is also required.

Vote Libertarian.

Additional reading:

1.  Your taxpayer dollars are funding the Atlantic Council -- the organization "advising" Facebook on which viewpoints to censor.

2.  Facebook submits various content to an Atlantic Council lab that "detects" unacceptable opinions.





3.  More to come!

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, November, 2019.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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The Power of One Libertarian

DID YOU KNOW...

Roy Scherer is only one man, but he accomplished some rather incredible things.  Medical marijuana was just one of Roy's signature accomplishments: Virginia was the first state with it!

Roy convinced enough members of the Virginia General Assembly to liberalize the law in the late seventies -- long before the California initiative that addressed the issue there in the nineties. Virginia's MedMar reform passed quietly into law mostly due to Roy's patient, quiet persuasion.  Unfortunately, it wasn't a self-executing law, and remained mostly unused.

However...

A little-known secret is that the only doctors in Virginia who could legally suggest it without the DEA raiding their house, shooting their kids and dog, and revoking their medical license, were those at the V.A. hospitals.  If I recall, most of the couple of dozen legal federal users of the late seventies and eighties were residents of Virginia, and, several of them were VA patients.

Some cracks in the wall eventually appeared in the rest of the country: The federal government finally said in 2010 that patients treated at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics will be able to use medical marijuana in the then-14 states where had been legalized.  Read more about this here.

Another example of Roy's handiwork is the historically-lenient Virginia possession law (under, again going from memory, 1/4 ounce is (or was) a rather cheap misdemeanor fine, rather than a jail-able offense).

And Roy has been exceptionally successful in stopping bad legislation in committees by pointing out flaws even the sponsors had to agree with.

Yes, more would get done with numbers, but no one should be quick to dismiss the incredible success Roy has had as a single lobbyist.  So many times it can be just a matter of remembering that lawmakers are human (or at least resemble them), and having an interested citizen around to do a "second reading" from a hands-off starting point often shows legislators where their ideas smash up against reality.

It often takes only takes one or two Libertarians in the right place at the right time to get what can be huge reforms enacted.  For instance, the only time in U.S. history that a state income tax was abolished happened to coincide with the terms of just two Libertarian Party legislators -- Dick Randolph and Ken Fanning -- in the Alaska state legislature.  It was the Libertarians who introduced the repeal bill, and persuaded their 18th century holdout political opponents to support it.

[NOTE: This article was first published in Old Dominion Liberty Letter Issue #39 on Monday, 26 July 2010.  Old Dominion Liberty Letter was an email newsletter that was periodically sent to Libertarian Party members and prospects in Virginia.  This author served as the editor of the publication for most of its run.]



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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, May, 2019.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Allegedly Gouging

Price Gouging: It may not fare well in the court of public opinion, but increased prices in the face of high demand and low supply is the market's way of conserving a resource.

If a hurricane blows through and I'm the first one to the store, I'm going to buy a dozen cases at $3 each and there will be none left for you.

If the price goes up to $25 a case, I'm going to buy 2 and the will be some available to you when you get there, albeit at a higher price point.

Here's a story about a guy named Chris. Just a regular working guy. He doesn't worry about stocking up on bottled water. Because Chris is smart. Before the hurricane blows through, he fills up containers from his tap water. And he also fills his bath tub full of water. It's not rocket science.

The fact that people are hysterical and idiotic should cost them money.

Every business owner is "price gouging" at all times. That is, they are all charging the highest price they can currently get for their product. All that changes in this scenario is the price that people are willing to pay. You aren't going to buy anything today that hasn't been prices at the highest price the provider thinks they can get the largest amount of people to pay.

Eliminating price gouging means fewer and fewer stores will bother sending employees to make emergency supply runs to stores further away from endangered areas so they can have product to sell.

So more "out of stock" signs.

That must be a good thing.

Right.

Libertarians aren't here to placate the ignorant voter.

We're here to speak to the exceptional voters who know the bullshit ignorant voters vote for is... bullshit.

Stop trying to kowtow to children, economic illiterates, moral relativists, and thieves -- all of whom were vaccinated to be that way by 12 years of government's coercion-funded forced- indoctrination penal colonies.

New College Major: "Useless Studies"

You know what those "_________ Studies" college major courses are?

They don't exist because they impart any useful skills for the demands of life after graduation.  Unless of course you can figure out a way to make ginned-up outrage into a paying occupation.

They exist for two reasons:

1) To enable the institution to meet hiring and student quotas. They serve perfectly to meet the ever-multiplying affirmative action laws and regulations (both in the faculty and student populations).

and,

2) To revenue farm, because universities are among the largest of our society's welfare queens (roughly a $100 billion cash sink at the federal level, a similar amount comes from states and localities). Think about it: Weak faculty members, and weak students, were once a market universities were neither interested in nor were they a market the university was able to tap.

Enter federal and state welfare (as well as donors who wanted to do a bit of cash virtue signaling). Now that the tap was turned on, administrators have become dependent upon the growth lathered on by debt-addled students who could never get into a rigorous program, hence never get into university.

And now we're going to "free" college for everyone.

Keep it up, y'all. Break that bank.

The sooner the country goes bankrupt, the sooner you'll crash the entire scam.

A Libertarian Response to The Fat-State Address by Jared Polis, 2019

In his first "state of the state" address, new Colorado governor Jared Polis proved something: Namely, he is just another in a long line of tax-spend-regulate-subsidize-suppress-penalize political hacks who think they have any moral right to govern the affairs of private individuals.

Libertarians in Colorado listened, where we could stay awake, to Polis' comments with same understanding we have had with every other new governor:

• Taxes will go up
• Spending will fatten
• Regulations will suppress more and more entrepreneurs
• More individual rights will be trampled upon
• Transparency will fade further
• More citizens will be killed by police enforcing ever more new laws
• The war on the recreational choices of individuals will rage on and expand
• Health care will be further taken over by the state
• Bureaucrats will expand their drive to choose economic winners and losers
• Colorado will continue to become the exclusive playground of the upper classes

In short, Polis will do all of the same things that every other governor has done.

Some Libertarian reactions to Polis' fat-state policy desires:

THE ECONOMY

POLIS: "Our economy is strong. From agriculture and outdoor recreation to aerospace, bioscience, energy, and cannabis, we've watched industries succeed and create jobs."

LIBERTARIANS: Meanwhile, the political class, including Polis, have endeavored mightily to destroy and marginalize industries they don't like, ruining the jobs those sectors supported.

Libertarians call for a free, unfettered market economy and elimination of regulations that stifle growth and eliminate hobs.

BIPARTISANSHIP

POLIS: "We've become a model for how we can put politics aside and work together."

LIBERTARIANS: That's what everyone is afraid of.  Thinking individuals know that whenever politicians agree with one another, your right, liberties, and property are at risk.  Gridlock preserves liberty to some degree.

The only reason that statesmen should put aside differences and work together is to repeal and eliminate the Byzantine layers of law and bureaucracy in Colorado.  The state code could be halved, and no one would die and everyone would benefit.

THE POOR AND MARGINALIZED

POLIS: "Despite all of our progress, far too many people are either barely getting by, or falling behind."

LIBERTARIANS: Well, when you increase the tax and regulatory load on taxpayers, some of them break and can no longer keep up.

The cure for that is to eliminate the load on the taxpayer by eliminating taxes.

BROADBAND INTERNET

POLIS: Seeks local government takeover of broadband internet.

LIBERTARIANS: Competing with the private sector is never a good idea.

And what happens when "communities" decide they can disconnect or deplatform individuals or groups who wish to freely exercise their right to freedom of speech or religion?

It's bad enough that private-sector entities sometimes refuse to allow uncensored speech (much of that so-called "private sector" censorship, by the way, is driven by government pressure).

It will be much worse if there is only the government monopoly provider and no other outlet for free speech.  And cost per user will skyrocket, same as with everything else bureaucrats take over.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM

POLIS: "We [must] address the inequities in our criminal justice system. That means tackling discriminatory practices that make people of color, individuals living with mental illness, and Coloradans experiencing poverty more likely to face incarceration. And it means working to make sure Coloradans who do serve prison or jail time are able to live a dignified and fulfilling life after they've paid their debt to society."

LIBERTARIANS: The biggest single issue looming over criminal justice is the number of nonviolent drug offenders who go through the system.

Libertarians suggest the one reform that would eliminate much of the injustice of our current syustem is to fully decriminalize all victimless crimes, including all recreational drugs, sex work, and gambling.  It's time to end our national experiment with the Progressive Era's national socialist legacy of Prohibition.  Prohibition has been a disaster, costly in both human lives and in expense.  It has decimated several generations of young men in minority communities -- which were revenue-farming targets for law enforcement for decades prior to Prohibition.

Private, consensual behavior is none of the government's business. 

Ending state prosecution of drug and other victimless offenses will eliminate the need for many drug warrior jobs, allowing government employed individuals currently fighting that utterly unwinnable war to seek productive work in the wealth-producing private sector.

EARLY CHILDHOOD INDOCTRINATION

POLIS: "[We will introduce] state-funded early childhood education."

LIBERTARIANS: Hasn't government done enough to our children?  In Colorado the average public school spends a little over $10,000 for each child already, and the results are sub-par.  Meanwhile, homeschoolers and private schools continue to outstrip their government indoctrination centers' results.  The real reason for the push to get kids into the government's indoctrination system earlier and earlier is... well, to increase the amount of time the state has to indoctrinate.

The same kind of bureaucrats who can't seem to deliver mail or keep violent criminals locked up should not be trusted around children.

PARENTAL LEAVE

LIBERTARIANS: Polis' budget package coming up on the 15th includes a formal request to provide paid parental leave for all state employees.

He also wants to force the private sector to establish a paid family and medical leave program.

So he's going to make it more expensive for the private sector to pay their own employees, and then he's going make sure they pay for his patronage of Colorado bureaucrats too.

Where does he think that money is going to come from?

Libertarians call for government to stop regulating everything in life.  Whether one's employer provides leave or not is a private matter that should be left to negotiation by employers and employees.

As for leave for government employees, it would cost a lot less if government employees simply left.

HEALTH CARE

POLIS: Wants to lower "the outrageous cost of health care".

LIBERTARIANS: The only way to do that is to get the fickle fingers of bureaucrats completely out of the health care pie.  A good start would be to eliminate the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, end all government funding of or subsidies to the health care industry, and begin eliminating state licensure so that private certification can take over.Perhaps the most laughable of Polis' demands is his proposed "Office of Saving People Money on Health Care".

Maybe this will buck the trend of government agencies being created for a purpose but then having the exact opposite effect in reality (and growing to gargantuan proportions in the process), but that's probably a pipe dream.

PRESCRIPTION DRUG COSTS

POLIS: Wants to "address the appalling costs of prescription drugs", and cites the factoid that "Canada has the same drugs from the same manufacturing plants that we have here in the United States; but often at one-half, one-third, yes, even one-quarter of the cost."

LIBERTARIANS: And the reason for that is Canada's government lets those manufacturers sell their drugs there only at the prices the government sets -- edicts which do not take into account drug development costs.  So when Colorado and other states start buying drugs from Canada and elsewhere at regulated prices, and re-importing them here, expect the pipeline of new life-saving drugs to start drying up.

Polis is just like every other politician in that respect: They are too shallow and ignorant to look for the real reasons why things are the way they are.

ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE DEBATE, GREEN ENERGY

POLIS: Wants "good-paying jobs in the clean-energy sector that can never be outsourced."

LIBERTARIANS: This is an example of politicians thinking they have any moral right, or the authority, to pick winners and losers.

What the green energy sector needs is for the government to get completely out of meddling in any kind of energy -- green or not.  Eliminate the subsidies, eliminate the penalties, and protect property rights, and the markets will gravitate towards clean energy just fine and without government help.Perhaps the most ironic part of Polis' state of the state speech was his twin arguments for spending billions and writing impossible-to-comply-with regulations to mitigate climate change, and forcing a changeover to electric vehicles on the one hand, but then building more and bigger highways.

If Polis really wishes to reduce emissions, then he should be working towards eliminating land-use regulation by localities that force builders to spread out developments further and further away from city centers.  He should also be looking at privatizing infrastructure so that users pay the full cost of building and maintaining it.

In the meantime, one of the methods Polis and populist politicians like him use to "help" get electric vehicles into use is by penalizing the use of fossil fuels.  Libertarians suggest instead getting government out of the way: Don't subsidize or penalize **any** form of energy.

It is also ironic that Polis cited the all-solar coffee shop and windmill plant in his address.  Politicians like Polis, by making mining the minerals needed to build windmills, solar panels, and other tech either impossible or costly.  Which means that mining such minerals goes overseas, where slave and child labor is used and where environmental oversight is lax or nonexistent.

Polis says he wants to "help" businesses of all kinds start, grow, thrive, and create good-paying jobs.  Once again, this means he will attempt to pick economic winners and losers, when the only thing he needs to do is to get government out of the way by eliminating taxes, fees, licenses, permits, and regulations.  This is clearly not what he intends.  He wants to protect the "right" of communities:

"to have a voice when it comes to industrial activities within their borders. It's time for us to take meaningful action to address the conflicts between oil-and-gas drilling operations and the neighborhoods they impact, and to make sure that all of our communities have clean air and water."

"Communities" don't have rights.  Governments don't have rights.  Only individuals do, and only by protecting the right of individuals to do what they wish with their own honestly-acquired property will liberty be preserved.  If a company damages neighboring properties, the solution is to allow those damages to be addressed in court.

STATE INCOME TAXES; TAX CODE

POLIS: Wants to "make our tax code more fair, so that we can reduce rates for Colorado families and small businesses. Our tax code gives too much power to the special interests who can afford expensive lobbyists, while forcing ordinary families to pay more. As legislators, I know that many of you find these tax giveaways offensive."

LIBERTARIANS:  Again, this is because previous iterations of Polis have tried to pick winners and losers using the tax code.  Rather than continuing to trifle with who gets the better deal at tax time, the Libertarian Party suggests making all taxpayers the winners by eliminating taxes for all and allowing the private sector to provide better services at lower cost -- and without the free rider problem.

Polis referred to alleged "tax breaks" for this or that group as "tax expenditures".  In other words he assumes every penny of your money actually belongs to government, and if the government deems you worthy of keeping some of it, that's "spending" by the government.  That is a disease just about every politician suffers from.  A name for it might be "Grabitis".

Libertarians think you and everyone else in the private sector own every penny you have earned, saved, and invested; while the leeches of government should not expect a penny.

So yes, Jared -- let's modify the tax code.

By eliminating it.

SALES TAXES, OTHER TAXES

POLIS: "90 percent of the retailers in our state are small businesses. It's time to cap the vendor fee, which is a giveaway to the largest and most profitable retailers in the nation, and use the savings to lower rates, which will benefit small businesses and millions of working Coloradans."

LIBERTARIANS: Again, Polis wants to use the tax code to pick winners and losers.  But the only way to level the playing field is to abolish the vendor fee (tax) altogether.

POLIS: Wants to implement "true tax reform that reduces taxes for hardworking Coloradans instead of giving breaks to special interests while forcing families to pay more."

Families pay all taxes.  No corporation pays one cent of tax -- because taxes for corporations are just one more expense of doing business.  If you buy a loaf of bread one day for $1.00, and the next day a new $1.00 per loaf tax takes effect, that family will then have to pay $2.00 for the same loaf of bread.

Libertarians want an "economy where Coloradans from all walks of life don't just get by, but thrive," same as Polis said he wants.

But the difference between Polis and Libertarians is Polis wants you to believe he can wave his wand and do that by saddling Coloradans with higher taxes and more regulation; while Libertarians would eliminate barriers to producing wealth and improving one's lot in life.

MAKING THE STATE "WORK BETTER FOR ALL"

POLIS: He says he "will work tirelessly to make our state work better for you - so that you can earn a good living and share in our special way of life. And I know that this Legislature will do the same, because every single one of us wants to see every single Coloradoan succeed. A Colorado for all."

LIBERTARIANS: What he doesn't say:

• Except oil workers, whose industry is slowly being restricted into oblivion.
• Except the poor, who are being displaced rapidly from their homes due to escalating real estate taxes.
• Except gun owners, who are being threatened with confiscation.
• Except for antique car hobbyists, who are being regulated and harassed out of working on their own cars.
• Except for Republicans, Libertarians, Constitutionalists, and other political minorities.
• Except for the victims of police shootings and beatings.
• Except for those who believe Freedom of Association is an inalienable right.
• Except for those who say unpopular things.
• Except for people in alternative relationships, like polyamory.
• Except for singles.

Polis asked a few rhetorical questions.

Which, unfortunately for him, are easy to answer.

POLIS: "Will our ideas be good for Colorado?"

LIBERTARIANS: Nope.  His ideas will mean more job security for bureaucrats, and more looting from taxpayers.

POLIS: "Will they reduce health care costs?"

LIBERTARIANS: No.  Polis' "solution" for health-care costs are no different than any other worshiper of state meddling.  They will increase costs and make the health-care system even more difficult for patients to navigate.

POLIS: "Will they improve our schools and help our kids get a strong start?"

LIBERTARIANS: No.  Schools will continue to deteriorate and leave students further behind homeschoolers, private schools, and the rest of the world.

POLIS: "We all agree that every child deserves a great education, so let's start there."LP: Excellent idea.  A terrific start would be to begin transitioning government indioctrination centers by selling them to parents.

POLIS: [Detailed a long laundry lists of things he wants to burp forth using other people's money.]

LIBERTARIANS: Sigh.

In summary, Polis is just another in a long line of tax-spend-regulate-subsidize-suppress-penalize political hacks who think they have any moral right to govern the affairs of private individuals.

Libertarians suggest an alternative to politics-as-usual:

• Get government out of the way.
• Eliminate taxes.
• Stop allowing localities within the state to violate individual rights; including property rights.
• Slash spending.
• Eliminate government jobs.
• Abolish regulation.
• Repeal all all unconstitutional regulation of freedom of speech, conscience, religion, expression, and Freedom of Association.
• Privatize government functions.
• Allow the private sector to work.
• Leave people free to improve their own station in life, and don't penalize them for doing so.
• Get government out of education.
• Cease all regulation of private, consensual behavior.
• Eliminate all state laws that compromise citizens' rights as protected by the Bill of Rights; particularly the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments.

And leave us the hell alone.

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, January, 2019.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Blue Wave?

What "Blue wave"?

I am no Trumpkin, but the Left needs to up its game.

Obama lost SIXTY-THREE House seats and SIX Senate seats in his first midterms in 2010.

Clinton lost FIFTY-FOUR House seats and NINE Senate seats in his first midterm in 1994.

And THEY had an adoring press.

[Bush actually bucked the long trend and gained 2 Senate seats and 8 House seats in 2002.]

Trump has been under unrelenting, vicious attacks by most of the press, yet he is going to GAIN at least 2 seats in the Senate and will lose only between thirty and forty seats in the House.

Y'all are in trouble. Because the 2020 elections just started today, and what you thought was going to be a rout, really wasn't.

In addition, you squandered your opportunity to work with Republicans to get a more balanced Supreme Court by your underhanded treatment of the Kavanaugh nomination.  Your handling of that nomination assured that you will be run over if there are any more vacancies -- two more may well be in the cards within the next year.

Playing the "If you aren't a leftist, you're a creepy racist woman-hating redneck ignorant nazi gun nut homophobic bigot" card is probably too yesterday to work anymore.

What might work better for the left is working on actually solving problems.

Like, repealing the Prohibitions on drugs, gambling, and prostitution that drag the poor and minorities into the justice system disproportionately, ending all the wars, and working towards accountability and transparency for government workers -- including the police, who inflict such a horrendous toll on minorities through policing for profit and revenue farming in general.

And fixing those absolutely corrupt, murderous, bankrupt, and broken Left-led major cities all over the United States.

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, October, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Bootlickers Want YOU Out of Your Car

Eric Peters, a car enthusiast in Virginia, wrote on Sept 7, 2018, about something that's been gnawing at me too:

The average cost for insurance for a new teen driver is now north of $250 per month.

How is he supposed to get a car – or afford gas – when he is obliged to pony up $250 each month to the insurance mafia? ... How is a teenage kid working a minimum wage/part-time gig supposed to deal with it?

Faced with this extortion – and that’s exactly the right word; there’s no choice about paying the $250 per month, if the kid wants to drive legally – many simply opt out. A record-high percentage of 16-25-year-olds haven’t even got a driver’s license and forget the car. They stay home instead, game and text. When they need to get somewhere, they ride share or Uber or something that doesn’t require them to spend a minimum of 20-25 hours working at minimum wage (currently $10.50 er hour) gig hauling pizzas or some such just to tithe the mafia.... More and more of them just don’t care about cars – or driving.

Mission accomplished.

One way to get people out of cars – an agenda that has existed since at least the early ’70s in furtive “urban planning” circles but which has become aggressively obvious in recent years – is to make sure they never get into them. And the easiest way to do that is to make driving prohibitively and unavoidably expensive for new drivers especially. If they never learn to drive, they’ll never miss not driving.

I agree with Eric Peters that the dramatic increases in the cost of insuring new drivers is INTENTIONAL on the part of bureaucrats. It is government policy that allows insurance companies to do this. Just one of those policies is mandatory insurance -- which is nothing more than a massive subsidy to rent-seeking insurance companies.

It's many times more expensive to repair accident-damaged cars now than it was at the peak of Car Culture USA. That is again a direct result of federal policy: Cars must be built to federal standards, rather than customer standards. So what might have been a fender, hood, and grille replacement in 1968, now requires dozens of large and small parts, each one engineered to comply with federal crash standards, air bag systems (required by the feds), and crumple-zone standards -- and each one predictably pricey as a result.

Not long ago, there was an article in a car magazine where a GM engineer was reviewing past GM greats -- like the 1966 Chevrolet Malibu.  He said his department had actually studied the idea: that with the identical manufacturing, engineering, and features as one had in 1966, the same identical car would cost a buyer around $15,000 in today's dollars.

He also said that with modern regulation, all of the changes to every part of the car to comply with current regulations, you'd end up with a car that was almost unrecognizable, twice the weight, about the same power, and roughly three times the cost -- and either impossible to repair or horrendously expensive to repair.

The Murderous Left wants people out of cars. The single greatest liberator of all time -- the personal automobile -- is anathema to bootlickers who want to know who you are, where you are, what you're doing, who you're with, and what you have in your possession. AT ALL TIMES.

Bootlickers are control freaks who want the unwashed masses shuttled around in cattle cars that they can centrally shut down for whatever reason, and grab who or whatever they want.

They don't give a rat's ass about the environment, or deaths and injuries from accidents. All they are really after is CONTROL. And one way to get there is to make mobility-at-will all but impossible.

The Libertarian answer is to:

1) Abolish mandatory insurance requirements, like all other regulations

2) Abolish all government-issued identification regimes.

3) Eliminate all government-owned or operated transportation systems, and allow private ownership to mitigate the harm done by poor drivers.

4) Abolish government-operated police, and allow road owners to provide the kind of traffic control that suits them and their paying customers.

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, September, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Pole-Shifting and Shifty Alarmists

Earth's magnetic poles are never stable; they move constantly -- and sometimes they flip altogether.  Which is understandable, because the earth's core is actually a giant spinning magnet.

Some scientists who study the earth's internal magnet have noticed that the magnetic poles have moved a lot over the last few years.  There is some speculation that the increased speed of their wandering means they are about to flip.

Check out this article about emerging science on pole shifts.  It's fascinating stuff.

A complete flip from N to S is actually about 500,000 years overdue.

Shifting magnetic poles can change the climate immensely -- particularly, the amount of cloud cover (water vapor).  After the sun, more or less water vapor is the main determinant of temperature.

Which brings us to the politicization of the pole movement by the alarmist environmentalist left.

One would think that the climate models -- the ones the alarmist Left uses to blather up panic about the climate (and the taxpayer grants and book deals for their adherents) -- would have in included adjusting those models for the effect of magnetic pole shift .

So have they?  Have alarmists added the effect of moving magnetic poles into their models?

Not exactly.

They did the reverse: Now that acceleration of magnetic pole movement has become a topic of discussion, alarmist scientists have latched on and are suddenly claiming that melting glaciers and warmer temperatures on the surface are the drivers of the pole movement activity.

So someone else brings it up, whereupon it is adopted to mangle cause-and-effect into further support for their alarmist model -- even though there has been no connection yet proven.

Climate scientists -- at least the mainstream alarmist ones -- are inexcusably sloppy about their work.

Many of the earliest of the alarmists' models relied on data supplied by poorly-maintained weather stations, or stations where development, addition of a large parking lot, etc would rather obviously have had a significant effect on what data was recorded (see http://www.SurfaceStations.org/ ).  For years, the alarmist industry flat-out denied that those surface station assumptions needed to be tested or that the data they were supplying was unreliable.

It took a skeptic to start an audit movement.  Volunteers did all of the auditing because the multi-billion dollar alarmist-industrial complex couldn't be bothered to fund such an audit itself. 

Even gas stations have to get their measuring systems assessed and certified every few months -- but an alarmist industry that depends on the measuring instruments doesn't?

Come on.

Alarmist pseudoscience really got rolling in the late eighties and early nineties. Scientists looked at their data tables and saw that temperatures appeared to be climbing, and then they published, and started the cycle of alarm.

They forgot something major, however: The disappearance from the dataset of stations in more remote regions of Russia / USSR as the state collapsed and stopped maintaining, operating, and checking them, was not in any way accounted for.  Many of the abandoned stations were in Siberia.

If you have 1,000 stations all over the planet and 50 stations in some of the bitterest-cold areas on earth steadily drop out of the calculation, 5th grade math says the temperature average of the remaining stations will go up.

But alarmists glossed over it.

Alarmist scientists have also directly diddled with directly changing data tables they use in their models without either explaining the reasons for doing so or adjusting the assumptions the model builds on that data as a result -- and they pass off their diddled data and the conclusions they derive from it as "science" and claim anyone questioning it is just an apish knuckle-dragging throwback who has no place to talk.  Fudging data is in itself an academic and scientific crime for which none have been called to account.

But the real problem with alarmism is that the alarmist-industrial complex (a multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-funded white elephant), is that everything it "produces" is designed to affect government policy.

If you convince vote-happy politicians that the sky is falling, your budget for the following year will get a lot more lard slathered on it.  "Green" corporations and compliant scientists and other hangers-on get huge new government contracts and grants, while more efficient corporations using traditional energy sources or methods in their production, and skeptical scientists, are ignored.

I'm as concerned about the environment as anyone.  The biggest skeptic thinker I know is completely off-grid, uses solar for all of his home and business energy needs, and otherwise is completely self-sufficient.  Even his personal transportation is the ultimate in re-use: He buys ancient 50 mpg Geo Metros and fixes them up.  Compare the resources that went into his 1990 Metro to the local watermelon's brand-new 2018 Prius. The Prius can't quite beat the Metro on MPG, and its curb weight is roughly twice that of the Metro (twice the curb weight means at minimum twice the resources went into it).

I don't know a single watermelon writer or thinker who has as small a footprint.  I'm sure they exist.  But the mainstream watermelon is usually just the latest snob who moved into the local neighborhood of McMansions and wants to slam the door against anyone trying to follow him into that shiny new neighborhood -- as if taking a few plastic bottles to the curb once every two weeks makes up for the McMansion and the Prius.

All governments should abandon all funding of science and limit their activities to their legitimate role of protecting individual rights (and with them, property rights).

Libertarians suggest that only freedom and a lack of government meddling will bring about the lasting change in individual behavior that is necessary to protect our environment.  Private individuals should be left free to engage in education and persuasion activities for better, more efficient practices.

Using the sledgehammer of government policy to get the compliance you want only breeds waste -- and, eventually, backlash.  Abolition of government spending, including that which goes towards so-called 'science', would actually do much to improve environmental health.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, August, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Bottom-Shelf Sustenance

[Editor's Note: This article was written in 2010 by Chad Quella, who retains all rights to it.]

With a cartful of our staple groceries at the usual family trip to the Mechanicsville Kroger, we got into the shortest checkout line and waited.  But after a while of staying in one spot and not advancing in line, I began to pay attention to what was going on ahead of me.

It appeared that there was a new trainee on the register with a more seasoned employee beside her, but what had caused the delay was a non-standard transaction that required some hands-on training.  She would get plenty of experience with that type of transaction by the time her customer finished checking out.

Lined-up on the conveyor belt were five separate clusters of items, each topped with a receipt-like strip of paper.  It immediately struck me as poor decision-making that this customer in front of me had selected several gallons of milk, but also several pints of milk.  The milk in a pint bottle of course is more expensive than the milk in a gallon bottle, and anyway I couldn’t imagine what might be going on in this woman’s home that would require that much milk, or even allow it to all get drank before it spoils.  But hey, it isn’t my milk.

There were a few other things too, I recall a package of individually-wrapped cheese food slices, and a tub of cottage cheese.  Big dairy fan, I chuckled to myself.  But there was one last cluster of items, different from the rest in that it didn’t have a slip of paper on top, and rather than dairy, it was a package of seafood salad, a styrofoam tray containing a pair of deviled crabs, and a bag of fresh lobster from the seafood counter.

As I stood and waited and watched, these clusters of food slowly made their way down the conveyor belt being rung up in separate transactions, I realized that the little slips of paper were not coupons or shopping lists, they were being used as payment!

For the first time, I took a look at who was making these purchases.  A couple, probably in their mid-30’s, both quite overweight, sporting sweat pants and t-shirts.  No kids were to be seen.  I began to put together that the paper slips must be some kind of government-issued vouchers, and the pints of milk and other small items were probably rounding out the value of each voucher.  I was informed later that this is the form that WIC benefits are paid in, and the fact that it was the first of the month made this the likely case.

I watched, incredulous, as the gallons upon gallons of milk went back into the cart, and the lobster, crabs and seafood salad were rung up.  The lady produced a card for payment of these items.  I couldn’t see what kind of card it was, but the standard “debit or

credit” question went unasked.  The dairy-laden couple went on their way, allowing the Kroger bagger to take their load out for them, and leaving us to bag our own items.

Now maybe I’ve led a sheltered life, but I don’t recall ever having seen such a thing before.  I went home and googled “WIC lobster” on a whim.  Turns out I’m not alone!  A quick search turned up these results:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/new-jersey/333767-middle-class-food-stamps-9.html

http://www.topix.com/forum/city/grand-rapids-mi/TA3IUSIOJUJT93DGV/p2

Almost right on cue, local media added a little more insight – just not in the way they intended.  First, a story in the 8/10/10 issue of Style Weekly highlighted a Whitcomb Court mother of six, and her monthly early-morning dash to the nearest supermarket to exchange her government-provided purchasing power for food.  The story was meant to call attention to the “food deserts” that exist where, coincidentally, the few food stores that remain do almost all of their business at the beginning of the month, and almost exclusively in government benefits.

Then, our local TV news monster ran a similar story into the ground on their channels 12, 35, and 65 afternoon, evening, and night broadcasts on 9/1/10.  It was meant to highlight another Whitcomb Court resident who was fit to be tied because a government computer system snafu had delayed the automatic deposit of money-for-nothing into her account.

The TV story even went so far as to bemoan the plight of a sink full of dirty dishes – dirty because the woman couldn’t afford to buy soap.  But after she called an automated service for the umpteenth time that day and discovered that she had received her handout, the last shot in the story showed her at last standing over the sink scrubbing a frying pan. 

What the article and TV news report really did for me was provide some perspective on the welfare state and the establishment and political attitudes that produce it.  In neither case did the journalist inquire about how these poor, downtrodden mothers ended up single, living their pathetic existences in government-funded housing, clinging to government-provided money to go to some horrible store and use it to buy bottom-shelf sustenance for themselves and their children.

All they focused on was the fact that they were waiting for that check, and couldn’t wait to spend it when it came.

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Chad Quella lives with his family near Richmond, Virginia.

The Elites Will Run You Over, and Not Lose Any Sleep Over It

A couple of years ago, Karen Kwiatkowski  was out campaigning at the Rockingham County Fair.  I had been acquainted with her and considered her to be a friend, so of course when my family and I spotted her, we all stopped to talk a bit.

As I was speaking to her, a bureaucratocade (motorcade) drove into the exhibition area we were in.  The kids were fascinated.

I watched them come in, inwardly chuckling at the arrogance of the elites.

But then the two lead motorcycles with two very over-sized cops turned straight towards my children.  I was expecting them to hard right behind the pavilion, but then they cut diagonally across the grass without really slowing down.  I grabbed my child and pulled him behind me, as we were out of room behind us; we could not back up any further.  The elitists of the state missed me and my 5-year-old old by inches.  I was backed all the way up and holding him behind and beside me.

Couldn't have the governor walking more than a few feet to the big top, now, could we?

It was Bob McDonnell, the state's top Republican.

Besides the kingly driving, I was flabbergasted by the waste of it all.  There were at least twenty cops around the pavilion, and the motorcade disgorged a half-dozen more on motorcycles with disco lights flashing and a few more the big ol' full-size SUV the Guv was riding in.  There were maybe fifty people milling about to meet elected officials, including McDonnell.

You'd think Republicans supposedly interested in smaller government would order the police escort to go fight crime instead of showboating the self-importance of the political class -- and drive himself to the Fair himself in a second-hand, gas-sipping, 41 mpg city Ford Fusion hybrid.

Or maybe even an old, paid-for 1990 Ford Escort or Chevy Cavalier.

Why I Hate Flying

Why do I hate flying?

One of course is the gate rape one gets from the TSA.

The TSA is a massive government jobs program designed to combat the *last* terrorist attack.  Actually, that's not accurate.  It isn't designed to combat *any* terrorist attack,  All the TSA is is garden-variety, boring security theatre.  A pointless and expensive show, it is.

As far as people getting on board a plane to commit a terrorist act, well, that simply won't happen again, regardless of the $100 billion security state apparatus we pay for every year.

When the passengers on that flight that crashed into the field in Pennsylvania heard what had happened in New York, they took matters into their own hands.  Those passengers changed the paradigm, hopefully forever.  People will no longer assume if they don't resist, they will likely remain unharmed and released after a while.

After 9/11, passengers will all assume death is imminent.  People will now assume they will be flown into a building unless they take action themselves.

Listless government employees did nothing to stop the attacks on 9/11.  Individuals did.  The ability of terrorists to take over a plane -- at least without substantial and determined resistance -- largely ended on 9/11/2001.

Yet in response to its complete, total, and abject failure to prevent the attacks on 9/11, the government was given huge new powers and a huge new budget and a huge new agency -- all of which promptly failed to prevent the shoe bomber from getting on board yet another plane.  Once again, passengers stopped the attack, without any help from their government.

So I absolutely reject the authority of my government to force me to assume the "surrender" posture at the gate, before they allow me to exercise my right to travel as I choose and where I choose.  Security theatre is nothing more than an idiotic joke to me.

The other reason I hate to fly is... well, flying.

I remember watching the news back in the 80's or 90's when an airliner lost its wing and fell to the ground.  Yes, I completely understand that flying, as modes of travel go, is one of the safest.  Nevertheless, if I die in a crash, if it's in a car at least they might have enough of me left to bury.

While taking off and landing during some vacation flying in 2013, I found myself holding onto my little 7 year old's arm, thinking silently that if we did begin to have a crash, I wanted him to know I'm right there with him.

Yeah, I know it's irrational, but so be it.

NY: Subways Stolen!

The subject of the NY subway system is a fascinating read that shows the true greed and hypocrisy of government-run operations.

The private NY mass transit operators were driven out of business in the 20s to 40's by government edict.

The tools used were regulatory -- denials of permits for infrastructure maintenance, denial of permits for expansion to new areas, a cap on fares of 5 cents, and other tactics.

The federal government prints money -- and as it prints more and more of it to cover deficit spending, the cash becomes worth less and less. This phenomenon was happening with federal money in the 1930's, just as it is today. With their nickel fares being eroded in value by federal inflation and the refusal of the city government to permit the companies to raise fares or do just about anything else, the handwriting was on the wall.

How long could **you** run a business if you could only charge one price for your product or service?  For the 42 years since the first subway opened in 1904 the fare had remained a nickel -- by law.

It is by no means a rare occurrence for governments to slaughter the golden goose in this way. For example, Vladimir Putin stole an oil empire from the private sector using the state's monopoly on force and handed the empire over to close political cronies at fire-sale prices.

Something very similar happened in New Jersey just a few years ago (late nineties), in the insurance business: wildly unpredictable, out of line liability awards made insurance in several industries impossible to write. The state government limited premiums on the front end, and allowed outlandish awards on the other. When insurance companies began to lose their shirts, and some began closing their NJ operations, the NJ government quickly stepped in with a law prohibiting the insurers from leaving the state -- so many went bankrupt instead.

Another similar tactic was used by the New York bureaucracy with regard to the subway system.

Check out the sanitized version of the story on the Metropolian Transit Authority's website.  Example: "Around the time the Independent was first conceived, in 1920, there was severe overcrowding on the subways. They were victims of their own success. The word "unification" was very politically correct during this time. The idea behind unification was to have the City of New York buy out the privately owned Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) Corporation. On April 25th, 1921, the New York Transit Commission was formed to develop a plan to resolve the overcrowding and delays on the current lines in any manner it saw fit, including "recapturing" existing lines from the privately owned rapid transit subway and elevated lines."


[NOTE: Links in the above paragraph were added by this author.]

"Recapturing" is bureaucratese for "stealing".

Notice the sleight-of-hand there?  The bureaucrats assume everything belongs to The State, and you only get title to it by the good graces of ... bureaucrats.  Because if you're not in their good graces, they get to "recapture" whatever they "loaned" to you.

There is a fairly good Wikipedia article about the shady history of the government takeover of the private transit system.

The "progressive" pols of New York from the twenties to the forties followed a well-worn path to seize the private subway and elevated train operators.  And other forms of mass transit.

One of the politicians, Mayor Hylan (also see this), a Democrat, involved in bankrupting the transit companies had earlier been fired from one of the subway companies. Once in a position to do so, he wrought his revenge - big time.

If the subways were crowded, then they were profitable! Thus, the city could have allowed the PRIVATE companies to build more lines. Instead, they put up the Independent (IND) lines in direct competition - right UNDER them - the 6th Avenue subway was put right under the 6th Avenue El and the Fulton Street subway in Brooklyn was put right UNDER the Fulton Street El.

Now, if there was a need for more subway & elevated lines, why not build them in other places not yet covered (for example, 5th Avenue or 10th Avenue?).  In fact, on the East Side of Manhattan, there were 3 IRT owned lines : Lexington, 3rd Av, and 2nd Av - back in 1921.  Now, under GOVERNMENT ownership to "relieve overcrowding", there is just the Lexington!  Transportation bond issues to raise money for another 2nd Av line came about in 1946, 1967, the 1970;s, etc. and were passed - but no subway line was built.  What the government was very good at was TEARING DOWN existing lines (and selling the scrap to our ally Japan who used it on Pearl Harbor).

After tearing down lines, the city then used the Maintenance budget as a slush fund.  The politicians became tools of the unions and paid ridiculous contracts.  "Chic" politicians like John Vliet Lindsay and his ilk encouraged graffiti "artistes" for a while.  As a "public accomodation", they were not allowed to remove winos, bums, beggars, etc. who slept and stunk up the subways.  After hitting rock bottom about 1980, there has been a little bit of a resurgence but more and more people take cars into Manhattan.

One of the few lines built by the City in the last 50 years was a tunnel from 63rd Street Manhattan into Queens that dead ends in Queens with no connections - not even to Queens Plaza a mile away - something like $2,000,000,000 for a tunnel to nowhere!


Mass transit was evolving naturally before government got involved.   The death of it was largely coincident with government interference.  its rebirth as a socialist government enterprise is fraught with waste and delay.  Any student of economics should study the history of mass transit in America -- especially with regard to subways -- if he wants a good picture of the corrupting hand of government.


For additional reading on the topic, here are a few links:


1.  "Subway Hijinks", by Gregory Bresiger, on Mises.org.

2.  "Subway Tax in the Rancid Apple ",  by Gregory Bresiger, on Mises.org.

Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying Organization Loses One!

I was floored to read of the first crack in the stranglehold the Virginia Association of Counties (VACO) has on county-state politics.  Kudos to Goochland County.  I don't know how the Board of Supervisors came to the conclusion they did, but it is a pleasing development.

For a long time, I wondered how public debate always seemed to be so well-funded in favor of fatter government and getting more financial lard slathered all over its teeming bureaucrats.  Then I served a term on the Lord Fairfax Soil and Water District, and discovered that a good portion of the money we were given to fund operations was given to an organization called the Virginia Association of Soil & Water Conservation Districts (VASWCD).  Looking into it further, I discovered that VASWCD was essentially a "Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying Organization", or a "TFLO".  A large portion of the annual dues the Lord Fairfax district sent to them were used to fund lobbying efforts at the local, state, and even federal level.  I also learned that even the small bureaucracy that was the Lord Fairfax SWCD wasn't just funding VASWCD, but was also funneling cash to additional TFLO-type groups such as the Shenandoah Resource Conservation & Development (RC&D) Council.

Being a Libertarian, I objected to the District's membership in these organizations every year, because I think it is absolutely wrong for government to lobby government.  Legislators should adjust policy according to the wishes of the citizens, rather than doing so at the behest of highly-paid lobbyists who represent the 1% elite bureaucrats and politicians who presume to know what's best for the rest of us!

Unfortunately, I was the minority on the Board, and as a result the District continues to throw cash at lobbying front groups.

What VASWCD was to the Soil & Water District, the VACO is to county governments.  There are many other similar NGO's for every type of government under the sun.  The Virginia Municipal League, the Virginia Court Clerks Association, etc all have some lobbying component, and all of them are one way or another funded by taxpayers.

So VACO is the definition of a Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying Organization.  The reason that it and similar organizations should be of serious concern to every taxpayer is this:  the things they lobby for are almost always beneficial to governments and bureaucrats, and almost always detrimental to taxpayers.

County bureaucrats cannot lobby the government while on taxpayer time.  But they can do the same thing by setting up a front organization, call it an NGO, throw some taxpayer cash at it, and perform an ethical skirt-and-dodge.

Political hacks and bureaucrats should not be allowed to grab cash from the government trough, and shovel it at "non-government organizations" ("NGO's") so the NGO can then hire legions of paid lobbyists to work against the wishes of the taxpayer; government should never be given any opportunity to influence itself!

There are literally thousands of NGO's similar to VACO in the United States, and they all exist for one purpose: to get more taxpayer loot (or power) shoveled into their gaping maw.

The legislature should eliminate the ability of local and state bureaucrats or government bodies to lobby any other government body.  Membership in any NGO that lobbies (directly or indirectly) for anything that would favor the individual or originating government should be absolutely forbidden.