Born Free

INSANITY IS DOING THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AND EXPECTING DIFFERENT RESULTS. 

Chicago has arguably the most and the strictest anti-gun laws of any city in the country and it also has the highest murder rate with guns. 

If you sincerely support this legislation, you must believe that Chicago’s murder problem would go away if it just passed enough gun control laws based on the illogic that criminals count the number of laws they intend to break before they commit a crime.  With that logic they should just pass tens of thousands of laws and then all crime would stop, not just murder.

Criminals by definition break the laws, many of them.  PASSING MORE GUN LAWS WILL NEVER STOP CRIMINALS.  But they do hinder the right of law abiding citizens to keep and bear arms and to defend themselves.  If you are serious about reducing violent crime you should be passing laws that make it easier, not harder for law-abiding people to protect themselves with guns. 

Twelve studies, including one by the US Dept. of Justice, found that guns are used to deter or stop crime between 1-2 million times per year in the United States, including prevention of rape. 

Several of the laws being proposed this year also violate the due process clause of the constitution, by allowing police to act as prosecutor, judge, jury and enforcer on an arbitrary basis.  IT INVERTS the concept of INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY into GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT.  Is this still America?

The opinions of 15,000 peace officers across the country from departments of all sizes supports the conclusion that more gun laws don’t deter crime but do interfere with citizen’s ability to defend themselves.  Survey results include:

• More than 91 percent stated that the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime should have stiff, mandatory sentences, and no plea-bargains. 
• More than 91 percent stated they supported the Right-to-Carry by law abiding Americans. 
• 80 percent believe legally armed citizens can reduce casualties in incidents of mass violence. 
• Nearly 80 percent said that a ban on private transfers of firearms between law-abiding citizens would not reduce violent crime. 
• More than 76 percent indicated that legally armed citizens are important to reducing crime. 
• More than 70 percent opposed the idea of a national registry of legal gun sales. 

Representatives should be standing in opposition to all new laws that hinder citizens in their right to have and bear arms and protect themselves and their families with them, and promote laws that make it easier to do so if they really care about the safety of law abiding California citizens.

One of the episodes of “Back to the Future” had Emmett Brown building a train as a time machine.  In the end the train had to hit 88 mph and skip through time or it would end up at the bottom of a deep canyon because the bridge in real life had not been completed.  Their only hope was to defy the laws of physics and time and skip into the future where the bridge had been built.  As they approached disaster and certain death at the bottom of the abyss, they had to speed up, throwing “magic” logs into the train’s boilers to accelerate it faster and faster. 

In our time, and in reality, we see a very similar mental process unfolding as the statist elite tell us that they are going to take us to Utopia, a place where there is no suffering and everyone has everything they need without having to do anything for it.  Like Emmett Brown who believed he could defy the laws of physics, they believe they can defy the laws of economics and human nature, and skip over reality into a future promised land.  Their progressive train that is spending ever increasingly massive amounts of future income is also heading for disaster and certain economic death and possible destruction of Western society if they are wrong.  When they catch a glimpse of the abyss before them, like Emmett, they cry “Faster, faster.   We have to spend more.  We haven’t done enough.  We just need to print trillions of dollars to solve the problems (created by their own policies) to blast through the barriers of selfishness and greed that are keeping us from Utopia.  We need to throw magic stimulus logs into the boiler to get the engine of state going faster.”   They believe they can fix the bubbles they have created with excessive debt by blowing ever greater bubbles and debasing our currency.  The difference is that this political train is hurtling through reality not a Hollywood movie set and the bridge to the future isn’t there and never will be.  But the abyss will be there, and they will take us all down with them, unless they can defy the laws of economics and human nature and do what no country has done before, borrow and spend their way into prosperity. 

History is strewn with the train wrecks of Utopian philosophies.  If you believe that Emmett Brown could blast into the future if he reached 88 mph in the real world, then you are justified in believing that the statist elite will be able to get us to Utopia.  But even if we arrive in “their” Utopia, you will find that you have lost all personal liberty and freedom of choice about what you do with your life.

Pure democracy, without limitation, is mob rule

Pure democracy has been tried several times in history and has always failed.  In Greece, democracy and oligarchy alternated with blood baths with each transition.   Democrats murdering the aristocracy and aristocracy killing the democrats each time there was a change.  The French revolution was an orgy of mobs in the streets raping and beheading the nobility in the name of democracy.  

Democracy fails for two reasons.  First, it gives all power to the majority.  Whatever the majority wants to do, it can.  It is wants a black minority to be slaves, tuff luck for the blacks.  If the majority is less motivated than a minority of innovators and entrepreneurs, it can enslave them through taxation.

A democracy cannot be any better than the majority of its citizens.  If enough of the citizens can be bought off by a ruling elite or fooled by a demagogue, it becomes the tyranny of the majority.  And when the majority becomes tyrannical and destroys liberty, it is the most difficult of all systems to correct. 

Hitler came to power in a “social democracy” by manipulating the people, promising a restoration to national and prosperity.  What they got was the privilege of dying in his army. 

Democracies are only as good as the small percentage of “citizens” who tip elections in one direction or the other.  With that in mind, ask yourself how long American democracy can survive with people like this:

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Government is and acts like a coercive monopoly, constantly raising the cost of doing business and wondering why businesses move abroad

WSJ:US Firms Move Abroad to Cut Taxes

Many government leaders believe the way to increase government revenue is to raise the price of government, aka raise the tax rates.  Try raising prices in business and see what happens to revenue.  The strategy only works for coercive monopolies, like the government where you can force people to buy your products no matter what the price. 

Since companies have to compete to stay alive, they are moving abroad to decrease their costs, specifically their tax costs.  They have to compete with companies that operate in countries with wiser leaders who understand that lower taxes entice business to move into their sphere of influence, providing jobs, growth and a broader tax base that generates more government revenue at lower tax rates.

If we really want job creation here in the US, we should eliminate corporate taxes all together.  There would be a flood of businesses moving into instead of out of the country.  Then there would be more jobs with more people earning more money and paying more taxes.

California that was losing good jobs even before the recession and is continuing to lose jobs at a high rate because of its high taxes and regulation could learn something from this idea but won’t until it goes bankrupt.   

What happens when local officials invest hundreds of millions and billions of dollars for the "people" when they probably aren't comptent to manage their own retirement account?

CNBC:  City Plan Backfires(cache)

Local governments across the country hit on the solution to the underfunding of their generous pension funds a few years ago.  They borrowed $64 Billion by issuing “pension obligation bonds.”  The idea is simple: borrow money by selling bonds at fixed interest rates and invest the money in something that makes more that you have to pay, like stocks (also called a carry trade).  It is like you taking out a loan against your future income (not your home because the local governments have no assets but future tax revenue), then going to Las Vegas to try to make more than you owe.  Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? 

If you are Stockton, CA (which is now in bankruptcy) you sell $125 Million of bonds in the Spring of 2007 to play this game.  Then, when you lose money and can’t pay it back, you complain that the investment bank that sold the bonds didn’t tell you the risks. 

Let me see if I understand.  We have people in office who have the power to obligate the tax payers to pay $125 Million in the future that don’t understand that the low interest rates they planned to pay are low because there is little risk to bonds and that interest rates they expected to receive are high exactly because there is risk.  Now, when their gamble didn’t pay off, they claim they were duped and somebody else should pay for their “error”.

A few good questions arise from this story: 

1. Can we depend on our brilliant civic leaders and professional bureaucrats to solve our problems, as we are constantly told we should? 
2. Why does government at all levels attract such “brilliant” people?  And what can we do about it?
3. Why have we entrusted these people with managing enormous sums of money when most of them have never run a business, met a payroll or accumulated anything in life except a hansom government pension and benefits package?
4. Why don’t civic leaders have any personal responsibility for their actions as a business executive or owner who made such ignorant decisions would?  They have no skin in the game and that is the problem.  The stand to win if they succeed but take no personal responsibility if they lose.
5. Would it be better to take this kind of power away from government and let people plan for themselves, for their own retirement, etc.  We are told that the people are too stupid to do this, but how can you be any more ignorant than those running government.  The only difference is they get to blow other people’s money while we only get to lose our own. 

How honest do politicians really want to be about Social Security?

Politicians say we need to be honest about Social Security and admit that we will have to cut benefits for those who don’t need them, increase the retirement age and increase taxes. 

If they really want to be honest about Social Security, how about admitting that it is the Greatest Ponzi Scheme in the history of mankind and was from the beginning.  Bernie Madoff’s con was child’s play by comparison.  His suckers voluntarily turned over their money to Bernie while Social Security’s victims are forced to participate. 

Like Madoff on steroids, the Social Security system collects enormous amounts of money, pays out abnormally high returns to early participants, and wastes the rest on whatever they want to spend it on.  Social Security’s supposed trust fund of over $2 trillion has been stolen by the politicians to pay for their pork barrel vote buying schemes and to pay interest on the national debt.  It was never invested.  All that is left is IOUs from Uncle Sam who has promised to find the money somewhere sometime in the future. I guess that's what printing presses are for, which means, of course, that the money paid out in the future will be worthless.

R. Allen Stanford was just sentenced to 110 years in federal prison for masterminding (cache)a $7 billion Ponzi scheme and Bernie went to prison for a miserly $50 billion Ponzi ; why do the masterminds who created, perpetuated, and looted a Ponzi 500 times larger than Bernie's go to their vacation homes in the Caribbean instead of San Quentin?

Yes, let’s be honest about Social Security.

See Social Security Greatest Ponzi Scheme Ever

Those who are unwilling or too busy to sacrifice their time in the political and philosophical battle for liberty will end up sacrificing their own lives and the lives of their children in the real and imagined wars of their elite masters and upon the alters to their altruistic gods.