We found the above interview to be telling. The constitution was initially designed to protect individual freedoms — your innate (God Given, many argue) right to your body, the fruits your labor (e.g., you’re not a slave in any portion to man or state), and the rights to the fruits of past labor (in essence, you’re protected against after-the-fact slavery, protected from those who make noble arguments that stealing your property after you’ve earned it is nobler than simply stealing at the time you’re earning it as in true slavery, when functionally these acts are not different).

When it comes to regulating your life and all the goings on in this once great nation, the meddlers in support of big government have created a gigantic hole in the Constitution, carved carefully through an initially tiny hole in the commerce clause; one that has since been pushed so far open that violations to personal liberty are disregarded as if the constitution never existed, so long as the political enablers of such violations can somehow define said violation as covered by the commerce clause.

That said, in this video above the recent supreme court nominee, Kagan, seems to find no fault in driving the Titanic through this liberty stealing hole in the constitution: the government has the authority to tell you what you must eat.

Funny how neither major party will object to her nomination when push comes to shove. That’s because both generally love all the power that the commerce clause allows them to consolidate in Washington D.C. for their own purposes, largely to ply one voting base against another. It is a politician’s lifeblood, and both D’s and R’s would rather trade away your freedoms than stem the bleeding and shrink the power grab.

As for blame, you need only look in the mirror: They know that you — as a D or R voter — you can’t bear to give up the goodies you get at the expense of your fellow country man, funded by those other citizens’ wealth, production, liberty — funded at the expense of their basic, innate rights. Politicians know your lust to have the reigns of power in the hands of your team –for at least a little while, where government pushes your agenda when your candidate wins, is a reasonable trade-off you’ll gladly accept while watching your own liberties and rights erode when the other party is in power — or when they both collude together and screw the little guy, as the dirty truth tends to be when you really see what’s beneath well-sounding legislation that is purported to benefit you.

If you’re tired of this arrangement, it’s time to start voting like you mean business in protecting not just yourself from the giant, increasingly dangerous Big Government. It’s time to vote for liberty for one and all, and it all starts locally.

Vote libertarian!

Pittsburgh knows deficits. In the end, you can’t spend yourself to riches or indebt yourself to wealth. Neither the Republicans or Democrats seem to be capable of real change.

But it can change with Libertarian candidates, and it all starts locally. Vote Pittsburgh Libertarians!

August 25, 2008 6:32 pm EST

Here’s some very sober thinking on the Drug War at a recent Libertarian presidential candidate debate. Sober thinking on a crucial subject while Congress is busy-bodying itself on steroid scandals.

Los Angeles (April 10, 2008) – The Pennsylvania Turnpike is one of the country’s least cost-efficient toll roads, spending a whopping 62.4 percent of its toll revenues on operating and maintenance costs. Of 35 toll roads studied, only the Massachusetts and West Virginia turnpikes spend a higher percentage of their toll revenues on operating costs, according to a new report by the Reason Foundation, a free market think tank that has advised the last four presidential administration on transportation issues.

By comparison, the New York State Thruway has 51 percent more lane miles and handles 83 percent more vehicle miles traveled than the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but its annual costs are $39 million lower.

Over the last seven years the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s operating costs have more than doubled from $181 million in fiscal 2000 to $370 million in fiscal 2007. During that same time, the U.S. inflation rate was 23.4 percent, so the Turnpike’s costs grew at 4.5 times the rate of inflation.

“Anyone who doesn’t believe competition can make the Pennsylvania Turnpike a better, more efficient road is kidding themselves,” said Robert Poole, co-author of the report and director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation. “The data strongly suggest that a world-class toll road operator could generate substantial cost savings-which means they could afford to pay a premium to the state to lease the Turnpike.”

Read the Rest of the News Release here.

Let it suffice to say that Libertarians can’t help but question the real purpose of government-claimed monopolies on things like roads, education, and other services deemed too “vital” to be up against the free market for competition induced efficiencies.   In the end, these government monopolies are vast benefit systems for loyal voting unions and the clients of effective lobbying efforts. The taxpayer is sucker holding the bill, and that bill is increasingly coming due — just like all free lunches from politicians.

Yet Pennsylvanians choose to keep this system as it is by continuing to vote for democrats and republicans who simply toss the ball of power back and forth with little change from year to year.  It goes only to prove the warning that democracy is the theory that the people deserve to get what they want, and good and hard.

That’s why the U.S. is supposed to be a liberty protecting republic, and not a system that rewards those who can wrangle power and money for themselves at the parasitic trough.

Vote libertarian!

Every Republican I’ve spoken to is mystified that John McCain has sewn up the Republican nomination. For his entire career, he has been more statist on both domestic and foreign policy than even the typical Republican. He has been considered a “liberal,” and not in a good sense. He doesn’t share any of the values that are said to make up the Republican consensus on economics or culture or religion. His personal baggage is heavy and a mile long. He had no dedicated constituency within the party.Of course I’m not talking to the run-of-the-mill Republican. There are vast hordes of these people who have never read a book and vote only by the most sordid political instinct known to man. McCain is their candidate. It comes down to one thing only: the simple-minded, unthinking impression that he is a war hero and, more than anyone else, has what it takes to smash the evil foreign peoples who want to kill us. In short, he appeals to the militaristic, nationalistic impulses of the base Republican base.

The real question is why that one issue would trump every other concern alive among Republicans. How is it that imperialist nationalism has come to trump every other issue?

Many libertarians were formerly affiliated with the republican and democrat parties. Generally speaking, they found certain elements of one party or the other (and sometimes both) that they identified. But the also found a large and ever increasing element of both parties they didn’t like: the obsession to use government as the ultimate enforcer of solutions to the problems of humanity — at least as Congress and the President defined problems — and a willigness to sacrifice individual liberty as a mean to those ends.

Above is a passage from Llew Rockwell titled Triumph of the Red State Fascists. If you’re a believer in Ron Paul or just at a loss to explain why republicans can justify ending liberty while claiming to be for it, well — just give the piece a read. It explains a lot.   It explains why many republicans have finally given up on the Republican Party — the establishment pays short shrift to liberty, and believes you have no place to go. It explains how the R’s now use the fear you have of the “other party’ to get you to sacrifice your character, morals and ethics at the alter of “not wasting your vote.”

Welcome to the Libertarian Party. Even if you are not ready to join, please consider the importance of the libertarian ideology and its importance is keeping both Republicans and Democrats grounded in some way to the idealogy that founded this country. An ideology that said the individual answers to god, and that government is his servant and limited only to protecting the individual’s right to say no thanks to others meddling, be they robbers, foreign invaders, or mobs at the voting booth seeking to confiscate both dollars and freedoms for their own cause regardless of your consent. Our ideology is so strong and true, many of us would gladly vote for a libertarian minded person even if he or she was an R or D. Such is the case with Ron Paul. Its truly about your freedom and liberty.

Libertarianism is the key to freedom and a wealthy economy. Please support it one way or the other.

Above is a worthy discussion about the anti-consumer / pro big and connected business fraud that is anti-monopoly legislation with Ron Paul. While the video is some 25 years old, the content is perfectly valid today (if not also a testament to the consistency of Ron Paul since then).

A great myth perpetuated by those in government and many in academia is that absent regulation, the free market will do its utmost to increase profits via anti-consumer actions, with one of the biggest crimes being the formation of monopolies. As such, we endure day after day, year after year, ever more corrective reactions from Congress in the form of regulations that we are told will curtail the natural exploitative faults of the free market, thus improving the economy as a result.

Yet, when you dig just a little beneath the surface, you’ll find that’s an assumption built on a faulty premise. What you’ll see is that these many legislated regulatory actions are actually fixing the economic / market reaction to a previous legislated intrusion, and in many cases serve not to be pro consumer, but rather pro-big business and very much anti free market competition. These laws not only often fix prices artificially high (either outright or via anti-trade legislation), they flat out create massive hurdles — bureaucratic or otherwise — that serve as barriers to entry for legitimate free market competition.

A great example today is all the cries for further regulating the credit, banking, housing, and mortgage systems to “prevent further abuse and recklessness.” In reality, the bubble that is bursting was created by a money monopoly granted to the Federal Reserve and its many member banks, who are quite literally entitled to legally counterfeit. They call it fractional reserve banking, but in no uncertain terms the entire banking system engages in the constant and ongoing printing of money and credit out of thin air, which they in turn use to create loans and mega finance deals.

It was the artificial price fixing of credit and money well below the natural market rate that enabled and fueled the housing, mortgage, and credit bubbles into the stratosphere. Had the rate of money instead been free market controlled by a more honest currency, as demand for hot money loans increased, rates would have risen, nipping each of those bubbles in the bud. Instead, the printing presses of the banking system kicked into high gear and the bubble was off to the races.

Now that said bubble is in its corrective phase (yes, painful but natural and necessary to correct the massive clustering of errors it permitted), the Banking system wants to print more money and credit to bail-out the very problems their created thanks to their monopoly on money and credit. Meanwhile, our trusty servants in Congress are getting in the act by engineering stimulus packages while promoting even more legislation that will “fix the banking system.” Others want to regulate ratings agencies who failed to properly measure risk, failing to understand that prior regulation prevented competition from entering the market and restructured / bastardized the system into its current highly corrupted form. Yet the illiterate among us shout loudly from the rooftops, the Capital’s steps, or their media perches blaming “the free market” for creating this folly. Bunk! Absolute Bunk!

Alas, save for one or two in Congress — Ron Paul being the only politician getting any press, and now barely any at all — NOBODY bothers to address the real manufacturers and profiteers of the crisis: The massive banking cartel led by the privately owned Federal Reserve and its many member banks. Their highly lucrative monopoly is preserved, and so too are their highly important contributions and lobbying efforts that keep most of Congress firmly in power.

In other cases “pro competition” legislation creates a ramshackle set of rules that hamstring the particular sector of the economy so badly that the consequent market place is the consumer equivalent of some hodge-podge Frankenstein creature. The health care system in the U.S. is a prime example, where the heavily regulated byproduct — which is nothing but what’s left of the free market attempting to create something usable given the draconian rules governing it — ends up being a real disaster for consumers. Prices keep getting more expensive rather than cheaper, and the consumer continues to feel ever more compromised — which is the exact opposite of the norm in a truly free market.

Meanwhile, those major players that are most politically connected and capable of lobbying are the ones who dominate the industry, while the environment is so hostile to new entries that few bother to attempt to compete. The result? A defacto, legislatively-created monopoly for major hospital conglomerates, pharmaceutical companies, and regional health insurers. All levels of government get into the act, each exacting a toll to gain access, and each limiting the free market from doing what it otherwise might.

And, yet, these same politicians who soak up dolling out favors at the trough have the gal to blame the free market for being inadequate at providing good consumer products when what we’re all stuck with is a Frankenstein of their own making!

Meanwhile, the uninformed and socially motivated consumers and voters see the system only on the surface, and they demand change. The politicians are quick to blame free enterprise, and they propose more solutions to solve the problems created by decades of prior meddling. Meanwhile, steering the new legislation are the same ones benefiting from the old. They’ll have the economies of scale to deal with the new rules, while smaller players will invariably be knocked from the playing field. It’s always the same story.

This is a mess. Remember, if government forcing us into one of their solutions is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question! A true free market (one where businesses, industry trade groups, and other special interests are prohibited from hijacking freedom and economic resources in their favor) is naturally competing with itself to deliver ever more affordable quality to consumers. The natural tendency always is a better product for a lower price as entrepreneurs continually attempt to redefine efficiencies and opportunity in the search for profits.

If you want consumer driven solutions that please the most people, don’t force them into shoe-box solutions created by compromised politicians who are themselves experts only at politics and government. Let the market compete freely and openly, and then — and only then — will order start to be restored to an economy that increasingly is being exposed as systematically rotten to the core, having been slowly eaten from within by special interest parasites steering legislation in their favor.

So in the land of free, you think you might be able to play a little poker, especially to raise money for a charitable cause… Well, unless the “Land of the Free” is a slogan in memory only. That’s the subject of this most recent piece done by Drew Carey at Reason TV.

Enter the police state mentality of the United States local governments. What’s most alarming about this story is the abuse of force by the police, and the busy body neighbor who sent them to bust things up.

Is this the America you want? If not, learn more about libertarians!

Pittsburgh residents are all too familiar with “eminent domain”, the constitutionally sanctioned practice where governments take private land for legitimate public uses. Traditionally, that’s meant things like roads and schools. Over the past several decades, however, governments have gone hog wild with eminent domain, routinely condemning property (or freezing its improvement for years like 5th and Forbes with highly publicized threats of confiscation and development plans) and turning it over to well-connected private developers as a way of subsidizing economic development and increasing tax revenues (never mind that the grand promises always come up well short).

Above is another clip from Drew Carey and Reason explaining the problem with an example in National City, California, where the government plans to bulldoze a popular athletic center for struggling kids to pave the way for private developers to build new luxury condos. As tragic and absurd as this may sound, such outrageous affronts to property rights are an almost daily occurrence.

The poll, run by Terry Moddonna’s opinion research firm, found that a majority worried about increased underage drinking, although the figures were evenly split on allowing PA residents the same freedom as countless neighboring states where citizens don’t have to make extra stops to buy beer, and can buy the exact quantity desired vs. being forced to buy an entire case or an overpriced 6-pack at a bar.

The Post Gazette reports, “The group is opposed to beer being sold in supermarkets and convenience stores for both public safety and business reasons, (MBDAP President) Mr. (David) Shipula said.” Really? This wouldn’t have anything to do with the monopoly on beer sales in PA held by those Mr. Shipula represents? Really, is not Mr. Shipula representing the monopoly held by his membership’s Beer Cartel?

We agree with State Sen. Sean Logan, who dismissed the relevance of the poll suggesting “This sounds like somebody protecting their own turf.” No doubt, that’s what government power does so effectively for organizations that are able to buy such power from politicians — it goes hand in hand when your wealth, freedom, and liberties are consolidated and handed over to government.

As for public safety and underage drinking, we’d point out that neighboring states are not facing numbers any worse than those in PA despite their allowing consumers more freedom. We think it is high time to break the PA beer cartel’s strangle hold on beer sales.

Note: We also question the underage drinking age laws in the United States and PA. This prohibition has created its own problem where those under age 21 are still able to access alcohol in most cases, while learning to drink with other juveniles vs. with under the comparatively more responsible supervision among parents and close family friends, much like in Germany or other European countries where reckless underage drinking is far less common. When beer is not accessible, youth turn to other alternatives such as hard liquor or pharmaceutical and harder illegal drugs.

This is another example of failed prohibition in the United States, where common sense is abdicated to government force. Libertarian minded candidates will fight against this lunacy of those who think government can solve problems it instead makes much worse. Visit Choose Responsibility for more information on the benefits of changing the drinking laws in the U.S. for those under 21.