We don’t know how or why this is necessary, but it certainly is not normal. For 200 years we did just fine without this kind of garbage.

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.

Hello? Anyone there? This SHOULD concern you!

This really should come as no surprise with so many voters in the United States growing accustomed to, and even welcoming gladly, a police state mentality.

We’ll let you come to your own conclusions of what transpired with this woman’s strip searching in Ohio by watching the news report. However, if this is the country you want your children to grow up in, keep voting for the same, old, lesser of two evils.

Let it suffice to say that Libertarians err on the side of personal rights, and this sort of behavior by any local police department would be dealt with severely.

In the meantime, expect to hear more and more about this sort of thing as the paramilitarization of police departments grows in order to fight the many inane problems caused by government, including the War on Drugs and the subsidized breakdown of society with welfare. Its a police state mentality among our politicians that trickles downward to make this sort of behavior seem normal to far too many people, including the officers involved.

It’s not normal. It’s sickening. It’s medieval. Welcome to the USA 2008.

Letters to the Editor
Pittsburgh Business Times
2313 East Carson Street, Suite 200
Pittsburgh, PA 15203

Dear Editor,

With regard to the recent article on the development of the Don Allen site at Baum and Liberty, it was interesting to note that the story is quite different than the story presented in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in which it was disclosed that public funding is expected to be involved.

As a customer of Don Allen’s who chose them primarily because of their urban location (I can walk there for service from my house in Oakland), I will be very disappointed if public financing is indeed involved. So far, public funding of “big box” (or at least “bigger box”) developments has cost my neighborhood our local Giant Eagle and hardware store, as well as Rollier’s Hardware in Shadyside. While I wish local entrepreneurs every success in achieving the highest value, this should not be done with the public sector distorting the market and subsidizing what is essentially disinvestment. I will be watching closely to see whether TIF or other funding is involved with this project, and hope that others will do the same. I have learned from decades of experience that the private sector can never compete with the public sector.

In the meantime, I thank the 80 employees of Don Allen for their years of loyal service to their customers and express my personal regret that it seems that the prospect of public financing has helped to make their employer worth more dead than alive.

Sincerely,

Henry Posner III
Chairman

cc: City Councilman Bill Peduto

We thank Mr. Posner for allowing us to publish his LTE about the recent closing of Don Allen. There are several articles on this locally, each providing some detail below.

• Don Allen dealership is being sold — Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Friday, January 4, 2008
• Don Allen to be sold — Pittsburgh Post Gazette Friday, January 04, 2008
• Huge mixed-use development planned for Baum-Liberty — Pittsburgh Business Times, Thursday, January 10, 2008
• Major development riding at Don Allen site — Pittsburgh Post Gazette Friday, January 11, 2008
• Newcomer makes big splash on local development scene — Pittsburgh Business Times, Friday, January 18, 2008

While at the moment, only one suggests public financing will be sought, we’ll be keeping our eyes out.   After all,  the employee’s of Don Allen, nor the dealership itself, should not have their tax dollars used to subsidize their own demise.  Moreover, let’s not forget that there are many other local Pittsburgh natives already paying taxes and in the business in which this new development will compete.  In other words, it’d be morally wrong for their tax dollars to be used to compete with them.

Unfortunately, that’s an all too common problem here in Pittsburgh, and a reason why many local operations close shop.  Newly arriving competition is lured in by the Pittsburgh region’s politicians, who don’t seem to care they’re burying the locals by using tax incentives to put the long-time resident out of work. Other times we end up with the stupidity that was the Lazarus building or the infamous Allegheny Center in the North Side.

Government’s only job should be to get out of the way and certainly not pickpocket hard working residents to lure in their competition.

Libertarians are about freedom and liberty… We’re for you’re right to say “no thanks” to bureaucrats and meddlers (and worse) who like to round up voters so they can hijack democracy and rife into to your wallet and rights. To libertarians, the government has one job: to protect your right as an individual to say “no thanks!” That means protecting your life, property, and rights of freedom and liberty — something it hardly does in its current form.

Libertarians being a party of such principles can’t help but be pleased to see Ron Paul, a Republican, doing well on a platform we support. It is a platform so rare today among Republicans and Democrats — and rarer than it was in the early 1970s when we were formed. But do we can that Ron Paul is an R? Nope. He’s an L at heart and in action, and for most of us, that’s what counts. Go message of freedom and liberty! Go Ron Paul!

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!

That’s Ron Paul on a recent episode of CBS’s “Meet the Press.” Libertarian ideas are libertarian Ideas, and Ron Paul generally speaks them well. That’s what makes the Libertarian Party different than other political parties. We are not about power and political convenience “just to get elected.” We are about a belief system of freedom, liberty, and the right to say no thanks. We believe the government’s sole role is to protect your freedom to live consensually among your fellow citizens without threat to body or property — that fundamental right to be yourself and think for yourself. Hence, you’ll find libertarians use the terms “small l libertarians” and “big L Libertarians”, with the former being those who believe in libertarian ideas of freedom, and the latter being Libertarian Party members.

Ron Paul agrees with us on freedom and very much on government’s role. He may be an R by party affiliation, but he is a libertarian at heart.