In this, the fourth and final installment of our Saturday morning screenings of the economic education films of John Sutherland, we take a good hard look at what the state panacea crowd are selling.

Mediocrity and Tyranny.



Having also watched screenings one, two and three it should be apparent to you that Socialism's advocates are little more than hucksters; using class warfare, racial hatred, religious intolerance to cloud the issue. Private property and free enterprise are the pillars of American greatness. All of our freedoms are extensions of self ownership, and our right to property. Once you allow your property rights to be infringed, all other rights will follow.

Conspiracy: An agreement between two or more parties to deprive a third party of legal rights without their knowledge, or to deceive a third party to obtain an illegal objective.

Political conspiracies usually involve a group of people working toward overthrow of a government, or system of government. Since the 1960’s there has existed within American politics an International Socialist conspiracy to manipulate the Democratic Party into removing the last obstacle to world government, by transforming the United States into a socialist nation.

This conspiracy was hatched by the “New Left” in America. The red diaper babies born after World War II to McCarthy era communists, who viewed the progressive movement in the United States as too tied to authoritarian institutions. They rebelled against Cold War realities, seeking the direct democratization of society, and the destruction of “The Man”. The resulting Marxist and Alinskyite culture convinced many African American leaders of the time that theirs should be an agenda of “Social Justice”; claiming that the redistribution of wealth under socialism would force white culture to make reparation for slavery. In this way the New Left derailed the higher objective of the civil rights movement, that of the full and equal participation of African Americans in society.

One of the principle organizations created out of the New Left was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the spring of 1962, sixty members of the SDS met for four days at a lakeside camp near Port Huron, Michigan. The product of this meeting was a political manifesto, that later came to be known as the Port Huron Statement .

In the statement, the SDS called for the fundamental transformation of America from a Constitutional Republic into a "participatory democracy", discarding our free enterprise system for a Socialist economy:

The economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.

The document also calls for international disarmament, international cooperation/governance under the United Nations, and redistribution of the United States’ wealth throughout the world; making American productivity the engine by which the rest of the world would become industrialized:

The United States' principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation.

The primary author of the document as a man named Tom Hayden, who was president of the SDS from 1962-1963. Hayden was born in 1939 in a suburb of Detroit; he attended the University of Michigan, and was editor of the Michigan Daily. Hayden founded SDS after becoming disillusioned with other socialist activist groups which he viewed as not radical enough.

Though SDS recruited prodigiously and was very active in the anti-war movement following the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965, the organization made little legislative progress toward its goals as laid out in the Port Huron statement. But the SDS created a lasting legacy in indoctrinating young radicals to Socialism. Before its break up in 1969, Tom Hayden and the SDS inspired thousands of students to become politically active.

SDS members went on to found several other radical organizations, like the Weather Underground, The National Welfare Rights Organization, and ACORN.

Envy is the language of Socialism.

The Democrat's mid-term strategy is the same as always; pandering to wealth envy, and buying off the middle class. The Obama administration is keen to hike taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Americans, invoking the perennial "Soak the Rich!" mentality the left has stuck to since FDR.

Of course the rich did get richer under President George W. Bush, but not coincidentally they also paid an ever increasing share of the federal tax burden. The 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts got the economy moving again after 9/11 and by 2007 the top 20% of earners were wealthier than ever... as a result they were paying a staggering 86 percent of all the income tax collected.

If that seems like a giant contradiction to you, you need to read up on the Laffer Curve.

But class warfare is what Democrats are best at; I mean, when they're not dodging taxes on their 76 foot yachts, or busy planning their daughter's $5 million wedding. They don't have the best ideas, or the most competent candidates, so an appeal to man's baser nature is their best bet. They run again and again on the premise that they will use their legislative powers to allow the poor and middle class average "JOE" to openly victimize the wealthy minority. But in doing so, the person they hurt the most is "HENRY".

High earner, not rich yet.

There is an unspoken assumption among those who back the class warriors that if someone inhabits the Upper Class that they have always done so. There is no allowance in their envy for the Nouveau Riche, or the small business man who after years of scraping by just managed to string together two good years. To people like that the poor are poor because the rich made them that way. They simply cannot fathom of a person building wealth upon their own merits. They cannot accept that any one person could be more capable or prudent than another. They cannot accept that they themselves aren't wealthy because they didn't work hard or long or smart enough. They cannot accept that decisions matter, and that maybe they've made a few bad ones along the way.

Their envy is an insult to themselves. If they're poor, they'll remain that way, because they don't trust in their own ability to achieve enough to really try. That's just what the anti-capitalist, anti wealth Obama agenda is counting on.

The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

Of course, that seems to be the one thing the Obama administration won’t do.

They’ve got Democratic water carriers from every part of the media waging a war of words against the GOP, trying desperately to shift the blame by resurrecting memes like “failed Bush policies” and “Party of No”. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner smiling his most reassuring smile, insisting the impending tax tsunami is no big deal, and that letting the Bush tax cuts expire won’t affect growth. Joe Biden has spent the summer busily circling the wagons ahead of the mid-terms, selling voters on the idea that their tax dollars haven’t been utterly wasted on stimulus spending.

The American people have long known that Obama’s economic policies were leading the country down the wrong path. Now with the release of Friday’s Mid Session Budget Review we have hard data backing us up.

The report predicts the federal government will borrow $.41 of every dollar it spends, fueling the largest budget deficit in American history; at $1.47 trillion, roughly 10% of the U.S. economy. With just the current spending programs already in place, the deficit will never fall below $698 billion, ultimately leaving a national debt of at least $18.5 trillion by 2020. Of course that’s assuming the economy will grow at a rate of 4% over the next few years, which it hasn’t done since 1997-2000 during the .com boom. Things just get worse from there.

Remember that when President Obama sold the $862 billion stimulus spending plan, it was on the strength of the claim that it would prevent unemployment from rising above 8%. Seeing that unemployment is currently 9.5%, it’s clear the administration was pulling that promise out of thin air. The expiring Bush tax cuts will increase taxes on the majority of small business owners, further weakening private sector job growth. Expect to see unemployment in excess of 8% until at least 2012.

So just what did we get for all of that stimulus money? Bigger government. The Bush/Obama stimulus plans drained funds from the most productive sectors of our economy, and increased federal spending, crowding out investment from private capital markets. The administration has consistently guarded the public sector from the same contraction affecting the rest of the economy, “saving and creating” government jobs, by taking money out of your pocket and mine to give a civil servant a paycheck. Obama’s economic advisers are telling him to go all in, to borrow and spend even more to try to shock this economy back to life. It’s a convoluted Keynesian nightmare threatening to sink any hope of recovery once and for all.

But we can stop it.

All we need to do to get America moving again is to remove the boot of government from the throats of the people, and allow the private sector to breathe again. Firms are flush with cash, and entrepreneurs are waiting with the knowledge to create and sustain growth for years to come. But to get the capital markets moving we’re going to have to send a very clear message that if they start spending money and hiring workers, they’re going to make money.

First, repeal the income tax and abolish the Internal Revenue Service, instituting a flat or fair tax system. Given that a repeal will be a long process, immediate extension of the Bush tax cuts will be necessary.

Second, drastically shrink the size of government by passing a Constitutional amendment mandating a balanced Federal budget, and that the rate of taxation be fixed in accordance with the first proposal. This will force balancing measures to come from spending cuts rather than higher taxes.

That’s it.

We’ll eventually have to deal with the mass of toxic government regulation of the private sector (Dodd-Frank and Obamacare spring immediately to mind), but much of that will come naturally as government is forced to tighten its belt. We must get hold of Congress and let them know these items are absolutely essential to the continued viability of our nation. Contact your representatives and instruct them to take action, or you will by voting them out.

The problem of central economic planning is one of calculation.

In order for an economy to function, a means must first be in place to allocate scarce resources. A free market economy uses price to convey information to individuals about the scarcity or desirability of resources. Then they make a decision about how to get the best use or utility out of available resources, based on their own rational self interest. As a result markets allocate resources very efficiently.

In a socialist system the resources and means of production are owned by the state. This makes trade an internal transfer of resources within the state. Since goods never really change hands, there is no rational means to determine price, so the state sets one. Man has never yet achieved a means of accurately determining human utility through calculation. When coupled with how sensitive complex calculations are to initial conditions, efforts to allocate resources in socialist economies are at best highly inefficient. Even on paper, socialism only appears viable if one removes the problem allocating scarce resources by assuming resources are infinite.

I call this the Star Trek supposition.

In the fictional world of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, the Earth has adopted a one world government, through membership in a vast United Federation of Planets. The Federation utilizes a socialist economy in which the member planets share ownership in the resources of all other members. The calculation problem is eliminated through interplanetary expansion, providing access to practically unlimited resources, and advanced technology which abundantly provides cheap energy. As a result, the inefficiencies inherent to central planning do not render the system in-viable.

But this is the real world, and resources are finite. It is necessary to allocate resources as efficiently as possible, so as not to exhaust our resources before we have the technology to seek reserves elsewhere. Until that time, like Star Trek, socialism's viability will remain a work of fiction.

Libertarians strive to maximize freedom and individual opportunity. We believe that each person owns his or her own property, to include one's life, and has sole discretion about what to do with that property.

Simply put we believe in leaving everyone the hell alone.

It's rare throughout human history that a majority of a people have been willing to stand up for their own liberties. Our own electoral history makes a strong argument that a majority of Americans desire at least as much government as we currently have now. It's as if the only thing people despise more than oppressive big government, is the lack of government protections when they want them.

Don't let this discourage you, the opinion of the majority is no proof of justice. Your rights as an individual are unalienable and you cannot be deprived of them by any majority. The founders wrote checks upon government encroachment into the Constitution to ensure this would always be the case. The political class in America laughs at the "quaintness" of the Constitution, distorting it with each new generation. Someone has to put a stop to their abuses. Are you going to wait, going to let your freedom be whittled away until you can convince a majority of people that maybe being free is a “good idea”?

No, you’re going to take action. Samuel Adams said, it does not take a majority to prevail but an irate and tireless minority. The few can triumph over the many, over the majority. They’ll call you an elitist, an ideologue, and they’ll be right. In our modern Republic it is incumbent upon the Libertarian to trust his own judgment over that of his fellow men. We're not out to restrict people's rights, but to remove the restrictions placed upon them. To stare into the face of the majority and say "At least on this issue, I know better than you do."

Of course, we have to be more diplomatic than that. If we’re going to change the world we have to convince as many of THEM, to become one of US as we can. We have to break the hold of the political class on the masses. That starts with knowing that we're right.

In overhauling and expanding this blog, I recently came to the realization that I've been doing this almost a year. I have been blogging off and on for years, but feel as though I've finally found my niche with The Warning.

I never set out to be a political blogger. Almost exactly a year ago today I was writing a now defunct blog called SendPet.net about the online game World of Warcraft. I was politically aware and even deeply concerned, but wading into the arena to write on the subject was the furthest thing from my mind.

That all changed when I read a great piece by Michelle Malkin on the corruption surrounding ACORN and their connections to the Obama Presidency. I was struck by how angry I was after reading her piece, and how the simplicity of her writing gave the facts that much more weight.

From that day I knew I too would have to speak out. As I wrote in my dedication, I cannot leave it to other people to defend a Constitution that I swore an oath to protect.

I've enjoyed the writing immensely for it's cathartic effect upon me, and my growth as a person. I probably enjoyed writing one piece about hunger in America the most. As someone who grew up conscious of how hard my mother worked to keep her children fed, I felt like I had something helpful to say on the subject. I hope that my writing provides value to my readers, helping people understand subjects more complicated that just what a Libertarian is. I've written posts which weren't very good but had great titles, posts that too few people have read, and some which spurred great discussions with friends.

It's been a good time and as I take things to the next level, I'm looking forward to what the next year will bring.

In the wake of a voter intimidation scandal regarding Barack Obama’s 2008 primary election against then Senator Hillary Clinton, the Daily Caller has uncovered documents showing left wing media groups conspired to bury stories about Barack Obama’s close association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The plot involves members of Journolist , an annotated list of journalist resources, and includes several hundred journalists for mainstream news organizations; including employees of Time, Politico, The Huffington Post, and The New Republic. In one post Wired.com’s Spencer Ackerman, formerly of The Washington Independent wrote:

If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

While that kind of rhetoric isn’t surprising, it certainly is telling. That many in the mainstream media were firmly in the tank for Camp Obama, is already well documented. The sheer volume of sycophantic coverage lavished upon him in the 2008 presidential race has lead people to write entire books on the subject. But that the left would pick a conservative, any conservative and attempt to manufacture racist allegations goes far beyond the much used race card and deep into the tactics of Saul Alinsky.

It points to this being part of the much larger conspiracy that is the Obama Presidency.

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

It’s understandable then that the dialogue on Washington’s performance has shifted away from people’s approval or disapproval, to whether politicians are destroying our economy out of ignorance, or malevolence. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans see government and politicians as the biggest threat to America.

The Obama administration’s policies have been demonstrably anti business, and anti growth. These economic policies are driving us into a double dip recession, and because government economists are still clinging to false premises, they're clamoring for an infusion of cash into the system in the form of more stimulus spending. They argue that the money supply is shrinking, and if capital doesn't start moving, a double dip could easily touch off deflationary depression. There simply wouldn't be enough currency is circulation to meet current demands. You might still have a job to go to, and you'd find the dollar worth quite a bit more, but good luck trying to cash your paycheck.

I can't argue with their prediction, what I take exception to is their solution.

TARP, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the threat of Cap and Tax. The private sector is bracing for the fallout of what is arguably the largest increase in regulatory governance in United States history. As a result, financial institutions simply can’t afford to part with their capital until the regulatory landscape stabilizes. But they do have capital, America's top financial institutions are sitting on $1.8 Trillion dollars in cash reserves. We just need to make them feel safe in lending with it.

I contend that the Obama administration is foolishly persuing a drilling moratorium, when what we need is a moratorium on new government regulation. Hundred of economists, four of them Nobel prize winners, agree with me. They've banded together to speak out against the Keynes inspired stimulus spending programs.

To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

Simple, yes. But it also works time and again. If we continue to follow the path we're on, we will find ourselves in a lost decade, a period of recession followed by several years of very slow growth. The result being that it takes years, even a decade, to grow the economy back to where it started.

Forward the petition to everyone you know, so that people will know there's an alternative to the anti prosperity Obama agenda, and vote accordingly.

The media you grew up with isn't just dead, it's decomposing.

There are no more Walter Conkrites on the horizon, the nightly network news everyone once relied on for information lost more than a million viewers over the last year.

Once powerful newspapers that lost relevance with the advent of the Internet are now relegated to the status of niche media. Thought of as the "forth branch" of government, the mainstream media has become so riddled with bias and cronyism, it is little more than a marketing wing for the political class.

Though people in droves have flocked to cable news shows and talk radio in search of independence, they're still very much within the mainstream, and receiving slanted coverage. I watch Fox News as much as anyone, but I harbor no illusions about their motto of “Fair and Balanced” coverage. Going out of their way to allow those with opposing viewpoints on, doesn't alleviate the center right skew in commentary.

The solution to the mainstream media's hidden agenda isn't more balance, it's more bias.

I contend that in a 24/7 news age, the citizen journalist is the surest guarantee of integrity. Bloggers aren't just open about having an agenda, they are explicit about having one lest you miss it. Because you're shown right up front their ax to grind, you are conscious of being influenced, and the experience becomes participatory. Citizen journalism is crowd sourced and distributed, possessed of an agility unmatched by traditional media outlets.

The blogosphere has become the fifth estate of modern society, the unfiltered voice of the people. Subscribe, keep reading, and I'll keep you ahead of the game.

In another video produced by John Sutherland for Harding college, we examine the profit motive and the effect it has on the lives of those operating in a free market. If you take just one lesson from the video, let it be that profit motive is a positive force, Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.



If you take two lessons from the video, let the second be this: competition prevents monopoly, thus only when competition is prevented can one occur. When Fudso and Sudso form a cartel to fix prices, they do so with the intent of limiting competition, because they're no longer competing with one another. But because the market was unregulated, little barrier existed to market entry and a competitor soon arose to undercut them.

In the presence of market regulation, the barriers to market entry are higher. Sometimes insurmountable. It prevents market entry of new firms, and monopolies occur as a result. So, though our government claims to protect its citizens against monopoly through anti-trust laws, it is only through interference of our government that it occurs in the first place.

This is the last word I care to say on the subject of race relations for quite some time. It is the habit of the Democratic Party in this country to claim the moral high ground on the subject of racial equality.

The logic goes something like this: "Those on the right (anyone who opposes Democrats) want to remove the social spending programs we put in place to "help" minorities, therefore they wish to "harm" minorities. Those racists."

That fallacious logic and the horrific track record of social spending programs aside, can Democrats legitimately claim a history of helping racial minorities?

As Frances Rice, chairman of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) at the time wrote in this article, Dr. Martin Luther Kings Jr. counted himself among the ranks of Republicans with good reason.

The Democratic Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

You see it was the Democrats in congress fighting to keep blacks in slavery, while the Republican Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Democrats longing for the old south started the Ku Klux Klan to punish black for the events of the Civil War. It was a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who began segregation with the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats fought against the passage of every civil rights law from the 1860s, right up to the 1960s when we are to believe they experienced some magical transformation.

Now after 30 years of ever increasing social spending designed to lift blacks out of poverty, the racial wealth gap is more pronounced than ever. Too many blacks are still poor, uneducated, and voting Democratic. Should the Democrats wish to lay claim to defense of African Americans, history is certainly not on their side.

But surely with the election of a Black President they're leading the fight now, right? From the Democratic platform:

Democrats will fight to end discrimination based on race,sex, ethnicity, national origin, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and disability in every corner of our country, because that’s the America we believe in.

Bold words are good, right? But they're just that, words. I belong to the only political party in America with a proven track record of both adherence to the Constitution, and unrelenting battle for the rights of all. The Libertarian Party.

From the Libertarian platform:

3.5 Rights and Discrimination

We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant. Government should not deny or abridge any individual's rights based on sex, wealth, race, color, creed, age, national origin, personal habits, political preference or sexual orientation. Parents, or other guardians, have the right to raise their children according to their own standards and beliefs.

The statement of Libertarian values in regard to race is is of the same character as, and I would say even more strongly worded than, that of the Democratic party.

Plus, history is on our side.

It's official, I am a racist.

Startling I know, but let's consider the evidence:

I have on numerous occasions used the phrase "personal responsibility".

The mainstream media has made it clear they believe this to be a loaded term, nothing but coded phraseology masking racism. This would presuppose a term like personal responsibility was targeted at an ethnic minority group. The only minority group I was referencing, was irresponsible people. In crying racism, is the media telling us they believe minorities are irresponsible?

I have publicly taken the position that we should ignore a person's race in our dealings with them.

This is a deep infraction. The politically correct culture warriors of the American left say we have to not only acknowledge the differences between us, but celebrate them, and let every human interaction be driven by the goal of greater diversity. I guess I was hanging on to an antiquated idea that I should judge a person not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. But then, people don't have character anymore.

Finally, if all that wasn't enough to seal my fate...

I have attended and participated in a Tea Party protest.

The NAACP put out a resolution this week condemning the Tea Parties as condoning racism. Indeed the Tea Parties which have no central ideology, no central leadership, and no requirement for membership failed to decry racist elements which may or may not exist, and who may or may not be Tea Party members...the bastards!

All BS aside, frivolous allegation of racism like this only serve to desensitize people to genuine racial prejudice. They undermine any shred of credibility organizations like the NAACP may have once had. They say "Raaacist!" and all anyone hears is "Give money to the Democratic paaarty!" They're desperate to capitalize on anti tea party sentiments among the left wing base, and old fears of racism, to maintain some cultural relevance in the face of a dismal midterm outlook.

The real reason they think of the Tea Party as a racist organization, is because they argue for personal responsibility and against excessive government spending. If I didn't know better, that sounds like an advertisement against social welfare spending. Despite downward trending of the most recent figures, the TANF program still reports the largest portion of its participants are African Americas. Take a black person off of the dole because you refuse to allow someone to pick your pocket, and you've crossed the NAACP's racism line.

All of those race whores and poverty pimps should look up the definition of "advancement", and realize that you can't make the weak strong, by making the strong weak.

As though the largest tax hike in U.S. history weren't enough to get you down, now it seems Senator Harry Reid is gearing up to debate a Cap and Tax bill in earnest.

From the Washington Post:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Tuesday he had assembled a "rough draft" of an energy bill and would aim to bring the legislation to the Senate floor the week of July 26.

Senate Democrats are scrambling like roaches when the lights are flipped on. I'd guess they aren't feeling too confident of their midterm chances, and would rather try to pass legislation while they can. This dovetails nicely with speaker Pelosi's planned lame duck session. The message is a clear one. We may defeat Democrats in November, but they're determined to give America a big middle finger on the way out the door.

Find your Senator and commit their number to memory, we've got to melt the phone lines on this one.

I've been doing the show out of Des Moines Amplified for the last ten weeks or so now, and am starting to realize just how powerful of a platform it is.

DMA is a multimedia channel featuring content produced by dozens of independent hosts from around central Iowa. Started by three local entrepreneurs, it is the first venture of its kind; a high functioning cowork environment centered around broadcasting. Some bill it as a networking hub with broadcast capability.

Coworking involves people coming together in a common work place, but who engage in separate activities. The exposure to other areas of endeavor facilitates creativity and allows individuals to work better together than they do alone. Beyond just creating better places to work, coworking spaces are challenging ideas about collaboration, openness, and accessibility; as a result they're quickly gaining prominence for bootstrapping and start up incubation.

While the hosts may not have a uniformity of background or values systems, we do all value engagement. Everyone is trying to create the most compelling content possible, and so I know when I step into that studio what it means to be there.

I always bring my "A" game.

We had a chance at a post racial America, we really did.

It was within our grasp.

But there are the race pimps, practicing the politics of division, for whom racial division is the source of their power. The mainstream media is selling the narrative that an African America President has ignited old tensions, that race relations in America have never been worse. The alternative media sees the only fault with Obama supporters for playing the "race card", rather than accepting that people have honest disagreement with his politics.

Regardless of how it started, things are coming to a head. The New Black Panther Party is as much as threatening violence against Tea Party protesters during the 8/28 rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Should violence occur, you can bet the mainstream media will blame the Tea Party, and that the federal government will use it as an excuse to have Eric Holder's Department of Justice run crackdowns on all pro-liberty groups.

Don't be drawn into this. It's not black versus white, and it hasn't been for a long time. It is the government versus the people. For every Reverend Wright, King Samir Shabazz, or Tom Metzger; there's just 1000 people who are too busy trying to keep government off of their backs to care about race.

The post racial America won't materialize until one of two things happens; people of all the various races get together and make plenty of mocha babies until race itself is a thing of the past, or everyday people again control the political process. We must eliminate race from our vocabulary, cease to think of each other as black people and white people.

United We Win.

The “recovery” the Obama administration is so desperately selling this summer does not exist. It is clear now that we’re in the early stages of a double dip recession, and exactly how bad things get depends largely upon the government’s next move.

The standard government answer of “Double down! More spending, more stimulus, damn the torpedoes!” has been thoroughly proven to be the wrong one.

Government has already spent an amount equal to 11% of GDP on stimulus efforts only to realize growth of just 70 cents on the dollar. Despite pumping those Trillions of dollars they confiscated, borrowed, or created out of thin air out into the economy; the money supply is contracting at the fastest rate since the Great Depression. Unemployment could soon be the least of our worries if there’s not enough money circulating to pay those who do have jobs.

But President Obama either out of sheer stupid obstinacy, or from a deliberate act of sabotage, seems determined to become FDR 2.0. Amity Shlaes had a great piece about their similarities in today’s Washington Post. He and Congress are running up the debt trying to bring the economy back to life, while ignoring the fact that they’re choking out the private sector with ridiculous levels of regulation that seem designed more to punish Wall Street that prevent another financial collapse, and massive increases upon taxation coming soon.

We need tax cuts to free up capital, and spur private investment. We need to remove the regulations that have gutted private-market securitization. This bundling of individual loans into bonds is the major source of credit in our economy, it’s down more than 90 percent since 2006, and without it there will be no recovery. What we need is to encourage strong but sustainable economic growth in this country, and that can only come from private sector investment. The money is out there, America’s top 500 financial institutions are sitting on $1.8 Trillion dollars in cash balance reserve that they would love to lend to someone and earn some money. But business is frankly afraid to part with it's money for fear of what they'll be socked with next by this administration, and consumers don’t feel any safer.

We can’t allow the anti prosperity Obama-nomics agenda to continue. Turning the economy over to Democrats has been like trying to fix a leaking boat with a drill. We must remember in November.

I believe that Libertarian ideals are antithetical to the socialist agenda dominating our national dialogue, and that their dissemination could prove a potent inoculation.

As a result there's a great deal of push back against Libertarianism happening within the political class, because they have a vested interest in pushing socialism. By maximizing the role of the state in society, you maximize the role of politics and the power of the political class.

These reductio ad absurdum attacks are aided by the fact that we fight battles among ourselves, pissing contests to see who is ideologically "pure" enough to represent the party, and as a result there are as many definitions of Libertarianism as there are Libertarians. To clear things up by way of moderation, I offer you in 33 words an easy to understand definition, that any of us should agree with:

Libertarians believe in civil rights like the Democrats used to, in small government and fiscal discipline like the Republicans used to, and believe in leaving people the hell alone...like America used to.

In this era of increasing government control the Law of Unintended Consequences is talked about a great deal. In social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are results beyond or apart from the intended successful outcome of a particular action.

In this context it is the premise that actions taken by government will always have effects which are unintended or unforeseen. These effects may be positive, negative, or even perverse (opposite of the intended outcome).

That the unintended consequences of government action are so often negative or perverse is no happenstance. Governments sole means of affecting outcome is through force. Once exerted, it is exceptionally difficult to take back. As Milton Friedman once said, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

There are many reasons why action taken by government through the political process so often go astray; perverse incentive, cognitive or emotional bias that prevents accurate account of human nature, and more often than not just the sheer inherent complexity of the issues. Chaos Theory is the study of how initial conditions affect calculations involving complex systems. Failure to account for a variable in a calculation, or even minute variations in initial conditions can produce wildly different outcomes, and make long term predictions nearly impossible.

Simply put, the law of unintended consequences is what happens when simple systems attempt to regulate more complex ones. The political process is simple; it operates with limited information, low feedback, and a short time horizons. On the other hand, markets are complex ever evolving, high feedback systems.

Markets aren’t one massive calculation encompassing infinite variables made by individuals with a low incentive to achieve positive outcome. They’re millions of small calculations, millions of decision making processes with few variables, made by people with a very high incentive to achieve a positive outcome. As a result, the market has in general a far better track record than government. That’s not to say that the free market is infallible. Individuals make bad decisions all of the time. But unlike government, they have more agility than governments to correct the error, realigning toward more desirable results very quickly.

Freedom of individuals to choose is preferable to government control.

In another video produced by John Sutherland for Harding College, we examine the myth propagated by Socialists that labor is the source of all value in production, and we see how important owners of capital are.

The message is simple, and timeless; competition and innovation within a free market is and will always be the way to provide the greatest good, to the greatest number.

People are excited about the prospects for Republicans in the fall midterms.

People have bought in to the lies of establishment Republicans who convinced them their party will easily take back both chambers of Congress, and that when it happens "Poof!" all of the Socialists will disappear, and constitutionally limited government will be magically restored.

Who can blame them? At first glance the Republicans do seem better than Democrats. People are burned out. One of the consequences of getting some many people engaged in the political process is that as they have become more informed, they've become jaded, resigning themselves to some degree of government control in their lives. They will vote for the "lesser of two evils".

But while Republicans may be a useful tool, they are just a stepping stone to where we need to be, not the objective. They bear equal responsibility for the growth of government, and will lead to decline as surely as Democrats, if more slowly.

I for one, will not be voting Republican.

It is not for those who would defend liberty to play political games. If we're going going to find ourselves on the right side of history, it will be by defending what we know to be right and true without fail. Without exception.