The Liberty Lamp: Libertarian News & Editorials

According to USA Today (Yes I hate it too), the extent of the Federal, State, and Local government debt is such that each and every household in the US would have to pay over half a million dollars! Here's the commentary from the article:

"Taxpayers owe more than a half-million dollars per household for financial promises made by government, mostly to cover the cost of retirement benefits for baby boomers, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

Federal, state and local governments have added nearly $10 trillion to taxpayer liabilities in the past two years, bringing the total of government's unfunded obligations to an unprecedented $57.8 trillion.

That is the equivalent of a $510,678 credit card debt for every American household. Payments on this delinquent tax bill must start soon if financial promises to the elderly are to be kept.

The cost of retirement programs will start to soar when baby boomers — 79 million born between 1946 and 1964 — begin collecting Social Security in 2008 and Medicare in 2011.

"This is a monster financial problem that both parties are going to have to solve," says Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., a member of the House Budget Committee. "Most Americans and Congress members don't realize the terrific burden we are putting on future generations."

USA TODAY compiled a list of all taxpayer liabilities — federal, state and local — to provide a fuller look at the nation's financial condition. The numbers are based on official government reports."

Libertarians, as many know, are generally against war, especially foreign wars that are not the result of a real and direct attack on the United States proper. We tend to live by the adage that "if goods don't cross borders, armies will". As a case-in-point, check out this essay by Murray Rothbard, entitled "The War System and Its Intellectual Myths". It was written during the Cold War, but is applicable to the "War on Terror" today. Here's an excerpt:

"In the war mythology, the Enemy is never hesitant, never confused, never human, never fearful of us attacking him or of precipitating destructive war, and above all never ready to negotiate honestly to try to lessen tensions or to work out mutually satisfactory means of living in peace. The Enemy is always Luciferian, preternaturally cunning and evil, driven only and always by his predetermined goal to “conquer the world” at all costs, never honestly willing to make mutually satisfactory agreements. And yet this same superhuman Enemy, according to the myth, can be stopped from his ever-fermenting aggression in one and only one way: by force majeure, by the “hardest” of hard lines, by ever sterner ultimata delivered by the divinely appointed champion of the “democracies” or the “free world,” the good old U.S.A. And if, by some chance, the Enemy should then not really turn out to be a craven coward, and total war should break out, why then this only proves that war is the only answer and came none too soon. The lesson is then drawn that only extermination and unconditional surrender can suffice in dealing with the Enemy."

READ ABOUT IT.

Gold is hot in the financial news these days. But why? What does it mean? Where will the trends go? No one knows for sure, but this speech given to the Gold Investing conference held in Geneva on May 18th, 2006 sheds some light on the issue.

"Among the Anglo-Saxons, there is a school of thought called the "Whig view of history," which sees the course of events as an unrolling tapestry on which is woven a record of a steady, ineluctable progression from barbarity to civilization.

Yet, ironically, the Whigs' own supremacy — mostly enjoyed during Britain's years of commercial and military triumph in the 18th century — was underwritten by a system of rapidly expanding government debt, deviously and often corruptly financed through the offices of the fledgling Bank of England.

As a result, the period was not unblemished by periods of wild, speculative excess and interposed monetary panic, the most spectacular instances of which were the two, partly interrelated schemes whose respective Mississippi and South Sea Companies served to give us the word "bubble" itself.

No one who reads the accounts of those roistering times can fail to be entertained by the tale of human folly they contain, though not without a rueful reflection that they also prove the Whigs were hopelessly optimistic in their perception of man's relentless self-betterment.

For, indeed, our own experiences of just the past decade show that, if we follow a recipe that mixes the eternal human failing of avarice with the oft-recurring mass delusion that one lives in a "New Era," and which allows the kitchen to be supervised by sharp-minded financiers, it will produce just as explosive a cocktail today as it did nearly three centuries ago.

But there is a more enduring lesson to be had from such events, beyond the satisfaction of deriving a suitably uplifting moral from such a juicy tale of scandal and excess.

Shortly after the excitement of the two bubbles had passed, a much more momentous and enduring change began to unfold."

The long story short? Gold is your friend. It can help you maintain your wealth against inflation.

Cato Institute and the Pew Research Foundation have released a study that gives hope to libertarian activists and voters alike:

"The Pew Research Center measured political ideology based on six questions from one of their 2004 surveys. Three of the questions concerned economic liberty, the others social freedoms. Liberals scored high on social freedoms, conservatives on economic liberty, and populists had little regard for either. Libertarians, as you might expect, consistently supported liberty in both dimensions.

Pew estimates that 9 percent of Americans are libertarians. That might seem low until you realize that 18 percent are liberal, 16 percent populist, and 15 percent conservative. Pew calls the rest of the nation “ambivalents” who have no firm ideological outlook. As Scott Keeter, the author of the Pew study, concludes “libertarians, though the smallest of the ideological groups, represent a substantial percentage of the population.”

A lot of what Pew discovered about libertarians may not surprise you. They are more likely than the rest of the population to have a college degree, to be in the highest income category, and to come from the West. On the issues, libertarians are more likely to think homosexuality should be accepted, to favor stem-cell research, to believe businesses make a fair profit, and to find free trade good for the nation.

But some of Pew’s other findings about libertarians are more unexpected, at least to me. Libertarians are 50 percent more likely to declare themselves “secular” than the general population. Still, only about 12 percent of the libertarians surveyed identified themselves this way. Libertarians are also more likely than the general population to identify as a “white Catholic.” Finally, almost two-thirds of the libertarians said they go to church at least once a month. That’s a little less than the general population, but a lot more than I would have guessed."

This looks like a prime outreach opertunity if I ever saw one. Get out there and get active!

ACT ON IT.

The Great Depression. This loaded phrase has different meanings for different people, but unless you happened to be a gansger or a select group of politicians, bankers, and industrialists, the time period was not known to be a whole hell of a lot of fun for the most part. Yes, color film started becoming cheap enough for studio use, but how big of a deal was that really?

The answer, certainly, is "not very". But if you'd like to get a very detailed (about 400 pages!) account of the Depression from the perspective of Austrian School economics, check out our newest book archive, America's Great Depression, published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Additionally, click the title link on this post to get a glance of our new Activists' Web Directory, which aims to be the one-stop shop for political and social activists of all kinds. If you have some relevant links you'd like to see added, feel free to submit them, for free! Thanks.

Good news for DC Downsizers and civil/not-so-civil libertarians at large! It appears that the Free State of New Hampshire's legislature will likely pass a resolution nullifying the Congressional RealID Act. The governor says he will sign it when it reaches his desk, but we need your help encouraging the state Senate there to vote for it. All NH residents and even residents of other states should e-mail or call in to voice support. Click the title link for the DownsizeDC Blog entry for more details!

ACT ON IT.