Hey, Fellow Liberty Lovers: Let's All Make “Census Weasel” One of the Most Dangerous Jobs in Amerika!

It's not even 2010 yet, but that's not stopping our fascist overlords inside the Rome-on-the-Potomac Beltway from unleashing upon us hoards of otherwise unemployable losers to pry into aspects of our lives that are, not to put too fine a point on it, none of ROTP's goddamn business. How about us freedom lovers making this clear to them in no uncertain terms?

For the edification of the sociopathic scum who are behind this naked attempt at domestic spying for selfish partisan and power-seeking purposes, the United States Constitution that they routinely spit upon, but which they do not hesitate to use as weapon to justify ill-gotten power over us, has exactly this and this only to say about on the subject of what has come to be called “the census:”

The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. --Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution

For the benefit of the historically ignorant (i.e., the Majority), this passage merits some explanation.

The first meeting of Congress1 took place in March, 1789 after a sufficient majority of States (nine of them, the two-thirds required as stated in Article VII) ratified the Constitution, making it Law of the Land. The first “Enumeration” took place the following year at the decade mark, well within the three-year requirement for the initial count. So far so clear, right? Now let's look at the definition of the verb “enumerate” as offered by both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary online (a convenient lexical aid for webitorialists).

From the OED's "Ask Oxford" Web Portal:

enumerate
/inyoomrayshun/
• noun 1 to mention one by one. 2 to formally establish a number
— DERIVATIVES enumerable adjective enumeration noun enumerative adjective.
— ORIGIN Latin enumerare ‘count out’.

From the MWOD:
enumeration
Main Entry:
enu·mer·ate
Pronunciation:
\i-ˈn(y)ü-mə-ˌrāt\
Function:
transitive verb
Inflected Form(s):
enu·mer·at·ed; enu·mer·at·ing
Etymology:
Latin enumeratus, past participle of enumerare, from e- + numerare to count, from numerus number
1 : to ascertain the number of : count 2 : to specify one after another : list
— enu·mer·a·tion \-ˌn(y)ü-mə-ˈrā-shən\ noun
— enu·mer·a·tive \-ˈn(y)ü-mə-ˌrā-tiv, -ˈn(y)üm-rə-, -ˈn(y)ü-mə-rə-\ adjective

Note, if you will, that the Constitution's framers were careful to use the term “Enumeration” and not the word “Census”, which is defined here and here in the OED and MWOD, respectively. Also note carefully the differences in the definitions of the two terms: “enumeration” simply means counting, while “census” means surveying or assessing. This is not a trivial distinction. The founders intended for the “Enumeration” to be used exactly for the purpose of counting the population, nothing more. It was certainly not intended for gathering intricate demographic details about the citizenry for extra-constitutional partisan political purposes. A cursory glance at the original text of Article I, Section 2 reveals that the only demographic information of concern to the federal government was the number of slaves and Indians, and the only reason for this distinction (and the now-controversial enumeration of a slave as three-fifths of a free man) was to prevent the slave-holding states at the time from inflating the percentage of their citizens who held the franchise, thereby enabling them to gain Congressional representation out of proportion to the actual number of free citizens resident in such states and thus allowing slave-holding states to expand that institution through the Legislative branch. Otherwise, the only information sought was the number of persons in each state, period. Whether they were rich, poor, married, single, laborers, landowners, native-born, or naturalized was irrelevant.

All of which brings us back to the “Census”, a process nowhere even remotely authorized by the Constitution, that has been foisted upon us in an increasingly intrusive manner by Leviathan since at least the turn of the 20th Century and the dawn of the “Progressive” [sic] Era.”

So by what authority does Leviathan take a “census” of us, its hapless subjects? According to the Census Bureau's website, such authority is outlined in Title 13 of the United States Code. Reading the code, a typically long-winded pile of bureaucratic verbal excrement that is typical of its kind, you will note that while Section 1, sub-paragraphs (a) and (b) are written essentially in harmony with Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, it contains not one single reference to that clause. Fiats by federal courts or the Executive Imperium itself notwithstanding, any federal “code”, “executive order”, “instruction”, “policy”, “regulation”, or other executive fiat that does not contain a reference to or that is not based in substance upon an appropriate clause of the Constitution is null, void, and without force. In the case of Title 13 specifically, its substantive content beyond sub-paragraphs 1(a) and 1(b) actually violates Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution by authorizing mid-decade censuses for non-enumerative purposes and that such information gathered is not to be used for the establishment of Congressional districts or determination of Congressional representation. Such actions are, in fact, the only purposes for which the Constitution authorizes a census; it is not to be used for determining eligibility to feed at the unconstitutional federal slop trough that has become the bane of the citizenry. This alone is enough to drive a legal and moral stake through the current “census's” heart and render it legally null and void.

Last, but certainly not least, there is the issue of privacy. For those naïve and disconnected sheep who stilll believe tthat anything emanating from USG sources is anything but a lie, particularly the Census Bureau's official bovine excrement that census data is used only for the purpose of determining Congressional Districts, I have just three words for you: Japanese-American Internment. Yes, dear naïve fools, it was data from the 1940 Census that the government used to locate, dispossess, and intern, like common criminals, Japanese-Americans in the opening months of World War II. Is there any doubt in a reasonable person's mind that the fascist police state now evolving before our very eyes will have ANY qualms whatsoever about using the Census Bureau as just another weapon in its bureaucratic armory of tyranny tools? How many Americans (or is that Amoricons?) will follow in the footsteps of yesteryear's Nissei, and provide the State with the rope that will be used in their own execution? Most of these Japanese-Americans no doubt wanted to prove themselves “loyal and patriotic Americans” in the face of mass prejudice by obeying the State's diktat to provide personal information about themselves. The obviously never imagined that their demographic information would be used to strip them of both their freedom and human dignity, but that's exactly what happened. Contemporary Americans, having this history lesson as an example (whether or not they'll learn anything from it is another issue altogether), have no reason to be so trusting.

So to get back to the theme of this missive's title, what do we freedom lovers do when confronted by an officious busybody on the State's payroll who tries to pry into areas of our lives that are none of his employer's business? Montana businessman Gary Barnett posted this piece of advice on LewRockwell.com a little while back, and it's a great place to start. However, I propose some more direct action, consisting basically of the following three steps:

• Providing nothing but the number of members of your household on the Census 2010 questionnaire.
  
  
• Ditto the previous if visited by a census weasel. Tell them that you will provide the number of people living your household – nothing more! Cite Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution if necessary, reminding the weasel(s) that enumeration for the purposes of determining Congressional representation is the only legal justification for what they are doing and that therefore they need no other information than the number of residents in your household.
  
  
• If said census weasel tenaciously refuses to accept this information and threatens legal action, tell him in no uncertain terms to GET LOST, that you too are invoking your legal rights under the Fourth Amendment. Yes, you read correctly: personal information is property and you are under no legal obligation to cede such personal information to anyone without your consent or just compensation (tell the census weasel[s] that if they want any additional information other than the number of residents in your household, it will cost them and that you're willing to negotiate a price). Crazy and illogical, you say? No more so than the idea that a “Census” is constitutionally sanctioned and that the federal government has any right whatsoever to use such a process to collect personal information about you for the purpose of using the State to steal your money to dole out to the undeserving.
  
  
• If the census weasel attempts to use force to enter your residence or compel you to answer its questions, let them know in no uncertain terms that they are trespassing on your property and that if they do not leave your property within sixty seconds that you will employ deadly force against them. I, for one, intend to have such deadly force on my person and at the ready when making this promise just to drive the point home.
  

Dear readers, if every American takes this combination of approaches, these losers to whom the Census Bureau is paying a subsidy to commit identity theft against American citizens will think twice, thrice, or four times or more about taking the easy way to earning a living and will apply for jobs at the nearest fast food outlet, janitorial service, or some other private-sector business where they can earn their keep without robbing the taxpayers.

"Customer Service" From a Government Agency? C'mon Now!

Over the last few months I have lived a lesson in how “customer service” is an impossibility from any government organization. Of course I know that this is axiomatic to any libertarian, but it is only on rare occasions that the lesson is truly driven home through experience. While one of government's (and I mean all levels of government) favorite ruses over the past couple of decades has been to camouflage itself as “customer friendly”, “responsive to the needs of its citizens”,or some other such hogwash, the truth is that this is an impossibility. Simply stated, no matter how much government attempts to masquerade as just another business, it is insulated from the market forces that hold real businesses accountable for their performance. Allow me to illustrate this using recent personal experience.

As an information security consultant who works (for now anyway; my ultimate goal is to freelance) for a Fortune 500 firm, a large percentage of my clients are federal government agencies, many of them "defense" organizations (which tells you that I have a huge reservoir of material for future posts). In the course of my attempts to satisfy the terms of my contract with the customer, I am required to deal with an organization that is responsible for hosting Deparment of Defense (DoD) information systems. This organization charges the various DoD organizations, consisting of the military services, organizations and commands within those services, or executive-level agencies within the Department, a sliding scale of fees for hosting and maintaining these organizations' information systems. These fees vary according to a variety of factors, such as the size of the information system being hosted, or, as is the case with many customers, the number of systems being hosted; data traffic volume processed by the systems, level of maintenance and operations support required, and the types or frequency of "non-standard" services needed. A standard Service-Level Agreement (SLA) is drawn up between the organization within the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), that is responsible for hosting DoD information systems, and the customer organization for whom they are providing service, an agreement that contains specific terms of service, rates charged for the services rendered, the frequency with which charges are applied, specific customer and DISA responsibilities, and other factors affecting the provision of service. In other words, these hosting centers operate, at least theoretically, like a web hosting service or data service center in the commercial private sector. But appearances are deceiving.

The major differences between the DISA hosting organization and its private-sector counterparts are sufficient to render any resemblance by the former to the latter purely coincidental and superficial. For starters, the DISA hosting centers are staffed by career civil servants and contractors hired by the DoD to handle certain specialized technical tasks. As is the case with all civil servants, those staffing the DISA hosting facility cannot be terminated if they fail to abide by the terms of the SLA concluded with their customers. Nor can the contractors working for them be terminated for failure to satisfy the customer, they having been awarded the hosting center support work through contracts not tied to customer satisfaction. Therefore, while these contractors work hard at keeping their civil servant bosses satisfied, they have no direct incentive to assist actual costumers of the hosting center.

Second, the DISA hosting centers (there are at least two dozen scattered throughout the continental United States and over a dozen others at U.S. military installations overseas) are woefully understaffed and underequipped, even as they charge their customers fees-for-services that ostensibly fund them to sufficiently provide the level of service for which the customers are paying. The problem is that the money that these DoD organizations pay to these DISA hosting centers is simply money allocated to these customer organizations out of the overall DoD budget and, once paid to the DISA hosting center, goes right back into the DISA's general budget. The fees paid do not necessarily go toward funding the immediate operational need of the customer agency that paid them. Can you imagine a private-sector commercial data center taking money from a customer to host an information system, but rather than using this money to purchase and install the customer's equipment or to hire system administrators to provide the customer's system with 24/7 support, the data center spends this money on another customer or puts the money directly into the center's operating capital account? Needless to say, the ownership of that data center would be in court in a heartbeat, possibly even subject to criminal charges of theft or misappropriation.

But not the DISA. Like all bureaucracies of its kind, the DISA is not bound by the laws or ethics that bind the private sector. As a result, DoD organizations are paying money --often an obscenely LARGE AMOUNT of stolen taxpayer money-- for services they are not receiving. This has the effect of negatively impacting the customer organizations, causing them to waste even more tax money than they otherwise already would under normal operating conditions by having to postpone or otherwise work around delays and outages caused by the inability of the DISA hosting centers to fulfill their contractual obligations. Because these DISA centers are accountable not to their paying customers, but to a remote bureaucracy that controls their budgets independent of their customers' satisfaction, they do not suffer the automatic negative feedback that the market would provide. Since all DoD organizations are required by policy to host their systems within a DISA hosting facility unless they justify an exception for operational reasons, there is no market pressure on these DISA hosting centers to shape up their act and start providing the services for which their customers have paid. Customers cannot cancel contracts or sue for breach of contract when their mission needs are not met, because there is no market incentive for this bureaucracy to do so.

In the last six months I have sat through innumerable meetings and conferences with senior representatives of this hosting agency in which its operations manager has essentially said "We don't do what you're asking us to do, even if what you are demanding is a term of service contained in your SLA." If this individual worked for a private data services center, she would most likely be fired on the spot for making such a remark and her employer would quickly find themselves in civil court for fraud and breach of contract. But since this individual is a government "employee", she can get away with such statements with impunity, because she and her organization do not face penalties for non-performance. Worse still, while my client expects me to prepare documentation for the Program Office detailing certain aspects of system operations security, I am unable to do this without input from the DISA hosting center because it is they, not I or my client, who control the system in its operational environment. For this reason I am required to obtain certain artifacts from them that will enable me to document the seamless integration of my client's system with their hosting facility, producing an artifact that they require as well as my client. Yet they consistently refuse to "play ball", even though they are contractually obligated to provide this information to all of the customer organizations that they host. Once again, if this were a private data hosting center, they would be in front of a civil couirt judge facing a breach of contract suit. The list of their transgressions goes on and on, but I think the reader gets the idea.

The amount of money that DISA's hosting center charges my client to host their system is simply grotesque (hint: it's in the low seven figures for annual service for just one system), especially when one of my colleagues whose brother manages a private data center tells me that any private sector data center can host the same system, with full 24/7 administration and service support, for less than a tenth of what it costs the government to do it in-house without being able to even provide the services they promise. Of course the government's excuse for not pursuing this course of action is that its information systems process "sensitive" or "classified" data that requires extra degrees of protection. No problem. Just put out a request for proposals inviting all data hosting centers in the United States to compete for DoD business, with the caveat that at least some of their employees must obtain appropriate DoD security clearances, that they must reserve a portion of their facilities (or construct new facilities) that must meet certain DoD standards set forth in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM) before they can host any DoD systems, and that their facilities must be subject to period DoD inspection (at least those portions hosting DoD systems). Problem solved, and at a tiny fraction of the cost incurred by the government's inefficient in-house resources, even with the adaptations required by the private hosting facility to meet the DoD's needs. Granted, my readers know that I'd like to see the DoD eliminated altogether, but until we obtain that distant lofty goal, this is a step in the right direction.

For all of the caterwauling about "customer service", "saving the taxpayers money", "total quality service", and "being responsive to customer needs", it is quite obvious that it's business as usual for the governmment and its labyrinth of bureaucracies: that is, money is wasted nothing of substance is accomplished. The moral of this tale is clear: If you want customer service for your computing needs, go to BestBuy. Otherwise, be prepared to get robbed and lied to.

Buchanan Misses the Mark in "Carcasses of Dead Policies"

Pat Buchanan's latest missive bemoaning America's foreign and "defense" policy atavism, specifically its dedication to preserving and expanding NATO, leaves the libertarian reader with the feeling that Buchanan is either a liar or incredibly naive. Since Buchanan is a paleoconservative, the answer is probably "both." Regardless, many informed readers, especially libertarians, will find themselves irritated by this piece.

The upshot of the article is that America is foolish for not only preserving NATO, but actively expanding it twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seventeen years after the USSR's breakup and the end of the Cold War. Certainly this is a viewpoint that most, if not all libertarians share. We agree that NATO is irrelevant to today's geopolitical reality. Many of us will go even further and state that it never should have been formed to begin with, given its clearly interventionist intentions, albethey bathed in a veneer of "defense."

What the libertarian reader will take issue with is Buchanan's assertion that the United States' chief motive for maintaining NATO is a refusal to "giv[e] up its role as Defender of the West, [or to]...accept that the curtain had fallen and the play was closing after a 40-year run." Does Buchanan, who has spent most of his adult life wallowing in the filth that is Imperial American politics, really want us to believe that he does not know the real truth behind NATO's continuing existence? Does he really not know, and think that we do not see, that the real reason for NATO's continued existence and expansion is the undisguised goal of America's ruling class to rule the world, even if by partial proxy?

There is no lack of realization by the Powers That Be that the Cold War is over, nor is there a lingering fear of the corpse of the former Soviet Union. What there absolutely is, however, is a very deep resentment of the fact that the collapse of the USSR deprived the military-industrial-political complex of any rational raison d'etre. The arms industry that had been built up over the course of a quarter of a century could no longer be justified, since "the greatest enemy of democracy", the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was no more and therefore there was no longer any justification for mass productoin of armaments, even for export to "allies." The Establishment further realized that the obscene profits being made by perpetuating this pointless, freedom and economy-destroying arms race would come to an abrupt end unless a new enemy was manufactured from whole cloth. That new enemy, of course, became "Islamo-Fascism", later reduced simply to "terrorism", the Establishment having gone from fighting an ideology to fighting a tactic.

Buchanan's mock outrage at NATO's continued existence and his carefully crafted appeal to political common sense is pure windowdressing and has become a common feature of most of his recent work. As one of Richard Nixon's senior staff members (which by itself tells us volumes), one of Buchanan's functions was to spread disinformation about Nixon's political opponents, a job that enabled him to perfect this journalist art to new heights. He has continued to exist within the Beltway journalism subculture ever since and has gained access to every major political figure in the nation over almost the last forty years. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but Buchanan is for all practical purposes a member of the very Establishment that he would like us to think he opposes. Perhaps his greatest coup has been to

This is, alas, typical of far too many paleocons like Buchanan. While they at least paid lip servce to the idea of liberty and limited government in decades past, they have almost completely surrendered, quite willingly it appears, to the intoxicating lure of State power. Buchanan knows damned good and well that the unstated reason for NATO's continuing existence is to serve as a proxy legion for Amerika's global empire and the military-industrial interests that control it. But because he subscribes to the philosophy best described by the German phrase "Die Staat ueber Alles" {the State above all else), he either cannot bring himself to admit this, or, just as likely, has no qualms with it. Either way, his feigned frustration in print with the status quo simply is not convincing.

Perhaps one day very soon, Buchanan will come to truly appreciate the nation's founding principles as the current political establishment collapses from the rot within. Until then, look for him to simply continue shooting at shadow targets.

The Obamunist's Phony Electronic "Town Hall"

President Monkey Ears, apparently realizing that the sheeple are awakening to the fact that he is full of bovine excrement after having broken every last one of his campaign promises, has decided to throw them a rubber bone by staging an "electronic town hall" on line. For those with precious life minutes to waste, this dog and pony show (NOT the first of it's kind, by the way), can be accessed here, at least for now.

But it turns out that the Obamunist isn't really all that interested in what the hoi polloi have to say, since he's already stopped taking questions after just a day of having the electronic town hall forum open. Of course it's not as if it would do any of us liberty lovers any good even if he still was accepting them. Glancing briefly at a random sampling of the questions submitted in several categories, I notice that ALL of them assumed that it was His Holiness, Emperor Barack I the Divine's sacred duty to fix their every imaginable problem. Of course, what else would one expect? Does anyone really think that this megalomaniac scumbag and his puppeteer staff would even for a second allow, much less answer, any hardhitting questions that question his legitimacy? Please.

Nowhere did I see any questions that I, or indeed any liberty lover would have asked, such as:

"Did you not take an oath of office, on January 19, 2009, to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?'"

"If the answer to the previous question is 'yes', then can you tell me exactly and verbatim where within that document you swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend that you are permitted to do anything on your current agenda?"

"Do you even have the vaguest clue what you're talking about when you stand in front of the entire nation and spew forth streams of noxious verbal diarrhea in which you promise to fix each individual's every problem?"

"Do you have even a gnat's grasp of the fundamentals of economics?"

"Where were you really born?"

"Why don't you just admit that you're really a narcissistic Marxist authoritarian nihilist who intends to destroy every last vestige of individual and economic freedom left in the United States?"

"Based on the assumptions behind the previous question, do you intend to openly embrace Zimbabwean president and World Champion Murdering Thug Robert Mugabe as the ideological brother to you that he is once the United States (or what's left of them) finally achieve an economy identical to that now "enjoyed" by Zimbabwe?"

"Do you honestly believe that even one of your proposed "reforms" will actually work? Could you really be that stupid?"

Would that the imperial media gatekeepers had the intestinal fortitude or constitution of character to allow such raw, gauntlet-hurling questions to be directed at His Most Saintly and Blameless Majesty. As it is, it amazes me that so many sheeple actually thought that asking His Holiness for his divine protection would actually yield any meaningful results. Then again, looking and listening around me to what constitutes "American civilization", it really doesn't amaze me at all.

When will they ever learn?

My Letter to Paul Craig Roberts

It pains and irritates me greatly to see paleoconservatives either misinterpret or deliberately misrepresent libertarian beliefs in print. Paul Craig Roberts has done exactly that in his latest essay, reprinted on the VDARE.com web site today, titled "The American Criminal Injustice System." While I agree with 99 percent of Roberts' points in the article, he makes a statement about libertarianism and prison privatization that I simply could not allow to remain unchallenged. The full text of the email I sent today to Dr. Roberts is reprinted below.


Dr. Roberts:

Thank you for your latest contribution of another hard-hitting article on the continuing deterioration of the American Justice [sic] System (published as "The American Criminal Injustice System", reprinted on VDARE.com, Wednesday, March 11, 2009). While I agree with 99 percent of the article's content, you make the following statement about two-thirds of the way through to which I must take great exception:

"Libertarian free market types believe that the private sector can do everything better than the public sector. This ideology causes libertarians to be blind to the dangerous incentives created by the privatization of prisons."

While I would never presume to speak for ALL libertarians, I believe that I can say with a great degree of certainty that you misunderstand the commonly accepted libertarian consensus on imprisonment. Most libertarians are opposed the idea of imprisonment altogether, except for those who clearly and demonstrably pose an irremediable danger to society. The State, in judicial criminal prosecutions, habitually uses (or more accurately, abuses) imprisonment as a blanket form of punishment both for victimless acts that are not crimes against property or person, such as drug distribution and consumption, or prostitution, or for actual crimes against person or property for which restitution to the actual victim is the appropriate remedy. Worse still, and as you yourself have illustrated in a number of past editorials, the terms of imprisonment are often, if not usually grotesquely out of proportion to the actual offense.

To specifically address the issue of "privatized" prisons, if you look at a broad selection of libertarian writing on this subject (visit the lewrockwell.com archives for a cornucopia of such references), you will see that the prevailing libertarian view of "private" prisons is that these institutions, as currently constituted under the State's [in]justice system, are NOT "private" institutions at all according to the legitimate definition of that word. Rather, they merely represent the subcontracting of the penal system by the State to its preferred enablers in thestate-corporate sector (which, if you are familiar with libertarian economic philosophy, you will recognize as being not "free market" institutions at all, but "crony capitalist" entities that have co-opted the power of the State for their own monopolistic ends, at taxpayer expense). Under a libertarian market-oriented justice system, Persona A, the victim of crime (or their representatives) could not compel a disinterested third party, Person C, to pay restitution on behalf of or for the incarceration of Person B, the actual perpetrator. Under the current catastrophic tyranny imposed upon us today, the State merely transfers tax monies from the public treasury to one of its politically favored cronies, regardless of the fact that 1) the average taxpayer (Person C in the preceding example) has no personal stake or legal standing in the crime committed by Person B against Person A. This is the diametric opposite of "libertarianism" as you seem to envision it.

If you have not already done so in the recent past, I strongly recommend that you read the late Murray Rothbard's treatise "Punishment and Proportionality", an excerpt from his book "The Ethics of Liberty" (the treatise can be accessed here. This provides as coherent a summation of the libertarian view of justice, restitution, and punishment as anything of which I am aware. Note the clear implication in Rothbard's proposals that the idea of incarceration is a most unappetizing one to a genuinely freedom-respecting, market-oriented justice system that focuses on tangible restitution to actual victims of crime, as opposed to that undefinable abstraction called "the People", or "the State." Incarceration is prohibitively costly (remember, in a market system, there is no such thing as "tax dollars" or "socialized costs"), often counterproductive, seldom ever serves the cause of true justice or restitution, and is a punishment reserved only as a last resort, almost always for the crime of murder. By the way, and as Rothbard notes, it's no accident of history that governments in centuries past seldom ever resorted to imprisonment as punishment, preferring either to compel convicted criminals to make appropriate restitution to their victims, or to administer capital punishment for those convicted of murder.

Is the Rothbardian solution the ideal one? Probably not; is there any such thing as "ideal" in the real world? But in a world that respects liberty, one in which there is no State to play the role of omnipotent, coercive overlord, the "private prison" travesty which we now see playing out would cease to exist.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.


Sincerely,

[Liberranter]

Doing My Part to Starve the State-Corporatist Beast - Step One

I've finally gotten off the stick and taken the first step toward doing what I should have done months or years ago: divesting myself of all Wall Street-related assets. My biggest fear to date has been the tax implications of doing so, but I've decided that this is something I will no longer let hinder me in doing what needs to be done. If the Establishment is going to steal my money, I'm going to make them do it at the point of a gun (i.e., through taxation) rather than under a ruse of "investment."

Yesterday afternoon I phoned my employer's HR department and told them to stop my allotment to my Franklin Templeton Growth Fund, to which I have been contributing regularly each month for the past twelve years. Not only has the fund lost fifty (50) percent of its value in the last two months, but the fee increases that the brokerage firm has recently levied are almost as much as the monthly share purchases themselves. Sorry, fellas, but I ain't gonna subsidize with more of my own hard-earned money your recovery from a decade of recklessly (mal)investing my money! You'll just have to eat that without any more of my direct, voluntary help!

I would like to try to sell my shares in this fund, but I'm not about to jump through the hoops set up by the Illegal Ripoff Service to avoid their confiscatory crapital gains taxes. Besides, I'd almost feel guilty pawning this increasingly worthless pile of "assets" off on anyone else foolish enough to invest in them. Therefore I'll just swallow my losses for now and hold onto the shares that I have, preparing to watch twelve years of hard-earned money disappear down the crapper once the dollar crashes and the fund is reduced to penny stock, if it even holds that much value.

I'm debating whether to invest the money formerly allocated for this fund's share purchases in gold or other precious metals or to put it toward paying down debt. I'm leaning toward the latter, as being debt-free at the point of the dollar's collapse will be just as important as having something to use as hard currency.

More to follow.

To Lew Rockwell: See My December 9, 2008 Post

In your LRC article today, you correctly re-state the position of your book The Left, The Right, and the State that both the Right and the Left are equally toxic to the cause of liberty. You then make the comment that after eight years of Bush/Neocon right-wing insanity, the Obama administration should be anxious to avoid compounding the errors of their predecessors and not take their left-wing ideology too seriously. Near the end you make the following statement:

"It's not that [those on the Left] hate liberty as such; it is that they believe that it must always take a backseat to other social priorities like equality. "

Lew, I must strongly disagree with that statement, just as I disagreed, as my December 9th post makes clear, with the premise of your article of that same date that attributes the State's actions to economic ignorance. Let us be clear: The ideological Left, like its counterpart on the Right, despises liberty. Why? Because liberty undermines their vision of a perfect world, one in which they wield unchecked power over the people.

As I also make clear in my December post, the Left, like the Right, no more believes in the viability of its own ideology than do we libertarians. What both sides crave, about all else, is unconditional power and liberty is anathema to and an antidote against such power. The ideological vomitus that both sides spew forth to justify their political aggrandizement is mere window dressing, pap cooked up to feed the masses of frightened, gullible, and uninformed sheeple that make up the majority of the nation's population. It is a means to and end (that end of course being power), not an end in itself. It is equally certain that none of the senior leadership of either party, whether or not they currently hold power, have any intention of being enthralled by the suffocating totalitarian chains they intend to put upon the rest of us. Whether the State is dominated by fascists or communists, the ruling elite are never constrained by the chains they make the rest of us bear and never suffer from or for the harm they cause their subjects.

Once again, it goes without saying that I agree one thousand percent with you on everything of substance on which you've written. I simply think that it's time we recognized the evil that motivates those who rule over us and confront it accordingly.