The Liberty Lamp: Libertarian News & Editorials

Ever wonder who may be looking at your financial records? Here's a hint: it's not just the bank or investment firm employees. It could also be nosy government officials, ID thieves, or disgruntled former spouses or employees in certain circumstances. And we haven't even touched on the tax issues yet! Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to safeguard what's yours from prying eyes and various thieves? There is a way. In fact, there are several ways to protect your assets. Here are a few web sites that have some useful answers. I am a member of all three of these organizations, and have found them useful. I hope you will as well.

A. Keep Your Assets- Provides quality asset protection services at reasonable prices, much lower than the competition. Products include a private banking guide, the Invisible New Mexico LLC, Belize IBCs, trusts, and offshore banking/investment options. Take the Asset Protection Crash Course to learn more about these issues in a simple, easy to read way.

B. Power Privacy- This site is a little over a year old, and is quite unique. You can find information on private banking, Internet and telcom privacy, offshore mail drops, and pretty much anything else you could think of related to "staying invisible". Power Privacy also has a great members only forum!

C. Sovereign Life- Boatloads of information on offshore finance, travel, and living life as a "permanent tourist" ("PT") to minimize or eliminate income related tax hassles. The author, Dave McGregor, seeks to educate and enlighten readers by introducing them to the "sovereign individual" mindset. Learning this is powerful, and key to understanding the pro freedom libertarian world view. This site also contains many members only benefits, including a great on line forum.


In other news, this site will indeed be upgraded to a new format, using a CMS (probably Joomla!). When? No one knows for sure, but rest assured that it will happen sometime in the relatively near future. Thanks for understanding and stay tuned!

Labels: banking, privacy, website

The on-line payment system eGold has been brought to court by a federal Grand Jury and the Secret Service. The company has posted a press release defending itself:

"Dr. Douglas Jackson, Chairman and Founder of e-gold, speaking on behalf of his fellow Directors and both companies vigorously denies the charges, taking particular exception to the allegations that either company ever turned a blind eye to payments for child pornography or for the sale of stolen identity and credit card information.

Dr. Jackson states, "With regard to child pornography, the government knows full well that their allegations are false, yet they highlight these irresponsible and purposely damaging statements in order to demonize e-gold in the eyes of the public. During the Inquisition, accusations of witchcraft and heresy were used to sanctify torture and seizures of property. In post 9-11 America, child porn and terrorism serve as the denunciations of choice. e-gold, however, as a matter of incontrovertible fact, is the most effective of all online payment systems in detecting and interdicting abuse of its system for child pornography related payments. e-gold Ltd. is a founding member of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's (NCMEC) Financial Coalition to Eliminate Child Pornography. e-gold is the only member institution to demonstrate with hard, auditable data a dramatic reduction of such payments to virtually zero, while billions of child porn dollars continue to flow through other (heavily regulated) payment systems. [Most members, that is, all the banks and credit card associations are utterly unable to even provide an estimate of the volume of such payments processed by their systems. eBay's PayPal subsidiary, who may have the ability to make such a determination, has refused to do so and has indicated they destroy payment records after two years.] What is worse, until August 2005 when NCMEC courageously broke ranks with US law enforcement agencies and began directly notifying e-gold of criminal sites via the CyberTipline, component agencies of the US Department of Justice purposely concealed their knowledge of child pornography abuses from e-gold's investigators, subordinating actual crime fighting to a policy agenda designed to dirty up e-gold."

Labels: federal government, liberty dollar, online currency, precious metals

Counter-terrorism, or the practice of investigating and capturing or killing suspected terrorists has been a big issue among foreign policy and national security experts for many years prior to September 11th, 2001. The response to international terrorism has been largely a military one, based on obsolete Cold War strategies and tactics. It is true that Al Qaeda has been largely disrupted as a centralized, effective organization. Decentralized splinter groups are far less capable, but they are still a problem to be dealt with.

In this new essay, the author gives a good overview of the current national security situation, what the federal government is currently doing, and what should be improved. The argument focuses around three major suggestions:

1. The US military must be restructured to deal with a terrorist threat. Special Operations forces should be relied on, supported by improved intelligence gathering technology and pinpointed, targeted killings if live capture is not feasible. Doing this would improve the military's success, and reduce spending by as much as 50%!

2. The War on Drugs must end. Lacking state sponsorship after the end of the Cold War, terrorists have begun to finance many of their operations, including the Madrid train bombings in 2005 via funding from the illegal opium trade. Legalizing these drugs would cause prices to drop exponentially, thus robbing terror groups of their lucrative funding strategy.

3. Restore Americans' individual right to bear arms. Police can't be everywhere, and an armed, population would be more capable in deterring terrorist and generic criminal activity.

Click the title link to view this article, in PDF format.

Labels: federal government, military, war on drugs, war on terror