Halloween

Well, tonight is going to be our first Halloween handing out candy as a married couple.

I’m not quite sure what to expect, since I’m in a different neighborhood than those in which I grew up.

I don’t know what happens in the hood on Halloween. I have to imagine that its more interesting than in suburbia… more malicious tricks, like maybe, breaking into cars.

Do I open the door for trick or treaters? Will there be trick or treaters? Anyone ever lived in the inner city during Halloween that can help me out?

Thursdays are for Ludwig Von Mises

All those not familiar with economics (i.e., the immense majority) do not see any reason why they should not coerce other people by means of force to do what these people are not prepared to do of their own accord.

Ludwig Von Mises

This is how I hover over water

Republican Debate

I guess its telling that the Republican Elite of Florida is so pissed off about Ron Paul’s message that they act like two year olds whenever he says something they disagree with.

Really? A room full of of adults booing someone in a presidential debate. Classy.

Ron Paul, Poll Numbers, and McCain is Out of Cash

So, McCain is in the red. By about 100,000 dollars.

Sure, he does have 1.8 million for his general election fund, but he’s still running in third place. And he’s got no money for upward mobility.

And onto Ron Paul and poll numbers.

I found this link over at lewrockwell.com and they make a pretty good case as to why Ron Paul is dominating the internet, but his poll numbers are still lacking (but rising… up to 5% in the latest gallup poll)

Most of the polls taken are of likely republican primary voters. Which mostly means, people who voted in the primaries for 2004.

Wanna know what voter turnout was like for the 2004 Republican Primaries. 6.6%

And there’s a reason for that obviously. GWB was running unopposed. There really wasn’t any reason to vote. The nomination was a lock.

But that means, in many of these polls, the couple percentage points that Ron Paul is getting are from people who went out of their way to vote for Bush in the primaries in 2004. Those, I would imagine, are part of the 35 percenters that still support this administration.

And when Ron Paul wins this election, Phil Wilson is gonna owe me dinner at J. Alexanders.

We Love Big Brother and He Looks Out for Us

Now that the government feels like they are effectively cracking down on cigarettes, schools are now sending letters home to parents telling them that their children are fat.

No. I’m not kidding.

Welcome to America, where you children really belong to the State. We just let you keep them if you raise them to the correct standards.

I know most people reading probably don’t have a problem with the government taking away a child from a parent who is deemed “unfit”.  Even I have trouble mustering up too much sympathy for a parent who is on drugs and is not fulfilling their parental duties to their children. But there’s a problem with this logic that I had not thought of until recently.

What if the State decides that you are unfit to have your kids if you teach them about Jesus?

Or if you don’t give them everything they ask for?

Or if you paddle them?

We’ve got a runaway government here people. Ron Paul has been trying to tell us for almost thirty years, and we haven’t been listening.

Its time to listen.

As government grows, the amount of liberty you have shrinks. There’s an indirect correlation between the size of government and the amount of liberty a citizen has.

It all goes back to the wise saying, “He who sacrifices liberty for security deserves neither”. Thanks Ben Franklin. You knew what was going on.

A Point about Ron Paul

I’ve been wondering, as has Glen Dean over at MCB, how many of Ron Paul’s supporters understand that his other positions run completely counter to the leftist ideologues that are now in his camp.

I think most of them do.

Sure, there are still the lamebrain people who keep envisioning a Paul/Kucinich ticket… which is an obvious sign of mental deficiency, given that Kucinich is a huge statist with socialist dreams for the United States, and Paul, well, is for the abolition of the vast majority of Federal power.

But most of what I see in the Paul camp are a group of people discovering for the first time, that Libertarianism is not just “Republicans that like weed” (though I imagine there are a good number of people who call themselves libertarian who fit that description) but its a philosophy that asks the question “Would we rather live free lives that understandably involve risk, or would we rather trade our freedoms for temporary security that really can’t be guaranteed?”

I come at this from a Christian perspective, I believe. If we are forced to do “good” then what we are doing is in no way good. Am I a good person because someone comes up to me at gunpoint and makes me give 40% of my income to them to  redistribute? Am I a good person because I vote for laws to keep people from engaging in activities that are dangerous only for the people directly involved? I don’t think so. I think the only measure of determining good is being free to make choices, and doing the right thing.

Would anyone in this audience go to their neighbor, berate him for not helping the poor enough, then force him at gunpoint to give away 20-50% of his/her check every week to feed them? I doubt it.

But that’s what the government does. It legalizes stealing. A large mass that pays zero income taxes votes people into office who raise taxes exponentially on a minority of people that is so small, that they will never have a voice in what they pay. Think of it as being in a group of ten people, you being one of these, and the other nine have far less resources than you, so they determine you are going to pay for everything, and if you don’t like it, they will kill you.

That is our tax system. Its unjust. While it may be just for taxes to be progressive, it surely is not just for more than half a country to pay next to nothing, while a small percentage of the populous funds the entire system. One could argue that they do it all ready by creating companies where the masses are employed.

Also, they are coming to find out that a small government is not nearly as likely to create an empire around the world. Libertarianism is against force in any way. You don’t force people to redistribute what they’ve earned, and you don’t force people to have the same political structure as you. Libertarianism comes down to this; force is immoral. If someone is not free to make a decision, they can never become a better person.

Thoughts?

On Conversations With My Brother In Law

In the past couple days, my brother in law and I have hung out several times, and our conversations always tend to turn to the philosophical. Here are some examples of what we’ve been talking about.

Me: Its gotta suck for cats.

Him: Why?

Me: Well, beyond the fact that they are domesticated animals, they don’t seem to be able to perceive glass.

Him: Yeah, that is true.

Me: I wonder if there are things that humans are just unable to perceive, that definitely exist, but our brains just can’t comprehend them. Like cats and glass.

Him:  Yeah, its like, “Sometimes I walk out of houses, and its totally fine, and sometimes I walk out of houses and then I’ve got gashes all over my body”

We’ve also talked about euthanasia, postmodernism, how so much of our knowledge and understanding is based on the philosophical works of a few guys 400 years or so ago. But the cat conversation seemed the funniest, which is why I posted it verbatim.

Any of you have any random philosophical musings that most of your friends tell you to stop talking about, lest you ruin their good day with abstract concepts?

This Republican Debate is Mind Numbing

Seriously. Nobody up there is a conventional Republican. There are economic protectionists (Hunter, Tancredo) Meglomaniacs (Guilianni) big government types (Huckabee, Romney) and Thompson has yet to actually have an opinion on anything.

And its increasingly maddening how disrespectful the candidates are towards Ron Paul. And Guilianni should probably quit making quips at Ron. RP said that we haven’t had any imminent attacks that would require the President to act without the permission of the Congress. Guilianni asked sarcastically if Ron remembered 9/11. Ron interjected that 9/11 was an attack by 19 people with no ties to a country. Guilianni said that maybe if we’d sent some bombs to Pakistan or Afghanistan, it could have stopped 9/11.

Really???? How many of the hijackers were from those countries? How many were from Saudi Arabia?

Its too bad there are no thinkers left in the Republican party anymore.

GOP Needs Tough Medicine

And we aren’t talking Tylenol… though it is made with love.

Money quote

Well, when you’ve got a headache, you take an aspirin. When you’ve got the flu, you take something a little stronger. When you’ve got cancer, you need chemotherapy, which kill cancer cells but can come perilously close to killing the patient. It’s a sad truth, but the Republican Party has the political equivalent of cancer. The party is immune from internal reform. Only the nastiest medicine imaginable can save it, and four (but probably eight) years of Clinton, backed by a Democratic congressional majority, is pretty tough medicine.