What do the government and Miley Cyrus have in common?

What do the government and Miley Cyrus have in common? Apparently they both cannot be tamed. Miley Cyrus just released a new music video for her song “Can’t Be Tamed.” Throughout the video Ms. Cyrus is referring to how nobody can hold her back and she’s going to do whatever she wants. It makes me think of Congress.

No matter how many times we tell Congress that we do not want socialized healthcare; we do not want a financial regulation overall; we do not want an education reform bill; they continue to do it anyway. Congress can simply not be tamed. There is no cage big enough to hold Congress in. With the national debt reaching $13 trillion I have to wonder how ridiculous do you have to be to get elected into Congress.

Ever since I was little my father taught me the importance of saving and spending wisely. When I was 13 years old I broke one of my dad’s tools. My dad made me buy him a new one, except for I bought in on “credit.” My dad paid for it, but I had to pay him back with $1 interest every month. I realize that’s not very much money but it was the principle of the matter. I did not believe my dad would do that to me at first so I did not bother to pay it back...until after the first month my dad let me know that I owed him $51. I paid that tool off the next month including the interest and did not wait another month. I was tamed when I was 13 years old. Sen. Byrd is 92 years old and I do not think he gets it yet.

This is all to say that maybe Miley would make a pretty good Congresswoman.

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.