Wake YAL Talks about the Fed and Kittens

I gave a talk at the April 8 meeting of Wake YAL on the Federal Reserve entitled "A Case Against the Federal Reserve," of which the video is posted below.  My goal was to simply lay out two base arguments against the Federal Reserve -- that it is a root cause of the disastrous boom-bust cycle, and that it is antithetical to freedom.  I finished up the talk with a brief question and answer session.  I definitely am a writer, and not a public speaker, so please excuse my natural goofiness and erratic train of thought.  I've divided the talk up into three short parts for convenience's sake.

Part 1 - Origins of the Fed, Boom-Bust Cycle: 

Kevin Carson: The Founders Were Extremists

And they were right.  Carson comments on the fact that questioning the government, a concept that is simply unbelievable to many in our day in age, is the very principle upon which our country was founded.  He writes:

...Today I heard Bart Stupak, referring to Michelle Bachmann’s allusion to Jefferson (“it’s a good thing to have a revolution every twenty years or so”), respond that we just had one in the last election.  In this country, he said, we have our revolutions through the electoral process.  “That’s what Jefferson meant by that quote,” he said.  Um, no, it wasn’t.  What Jefferson meant was the kind of revolution that Captain Shays was fighting in western Massachusetts at the time he wrote...

...As the anarchist Voltarine DeCleyre noted over a century ago, from the public schools’ accounts of the American Revolution you’d have difficulty understanding why it was even called a revolution, as opposed to just a patriotic foreign war against another country...

The Delusion of Modern Liberals

There’s an old saying about the definition of a liberal, as opposed to a radical:  a liberal is someone who thinks the system is broken and needs to be fixed, whereas a radical understands it’s working the way it’s supposed to ... A liberal who doesn’t think the system is working, doesn’t understand what it’s supposed to do.

So writes Kevin Carson in his recent piece at the Center for a Stateless Society on why people who play by the rules in American society rarely end up reaping the full benefits of their actions.  

While I know that not everyone at YAL agrees with many of the tenants of C4SS, I find great value in this organization as a bridge for the liberty movement to the standard "left" side of the political spectrum.  We need to be drawing people to libertarianism from all sides of the political spectrum, and one great way to draw in sincere leftists is to show them that the welfare/warfare state in which they have put their faith is in fact the originator of most of the societal ills that they wish to correct.

Prohibition-era US Government Killed 10,000 People By Poisoning Alcohol?

That may sound crazy, but Deborah Blum of Slate has done her homework:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

While shocking at first glance, why should this piece surprise us? The state is willing to slaughter and maim innocents overseas to achieve its "grand vision." Do you really think Americans -- if they can get away with it -- are off-limits?