There is one thing that YouTuber franks2732 got right in his video “Bigotry & Libertarians.” Capitalism, which I take him to mean the exchange of privately owned goods, would not prevent discrimination. For good or bad, people discriminate all the time among various choices, of course. If they are wise, people discriminate between [...]]]>

There is one thing that YouTuber franks2732 got right in his video “Bigotry & Libertarians.” Capitalism, which I take him to mean the exchange of privately owned goods, would not prevent discrimination. For good or bad, people discriminate all the time among various choices, of course. If they are wise, people discriminate between those things that are injurious to their health and those things that are beneficial.

Even for the type of racial discrimination addressed in the video, a society of free exchange could not prevent racism. Nor could a free market prevent people from calling others hurtful names or falling in love with losers. For that matter, a free market could not guarantee that people would make good decisions either.

Those are only things that people can do. They have to take responsibility for their actions, and in free societies, individuals bear the responsibility for their deeds.

The YouTuber may not be aware of this, but it simply is not the case that “Laws passed by governments because people want to bring about social change to a society do [prevent discrimination].” Prior to the Civil Rights era, most of the government’s laws “to bring change to society” actively promoted discrimination against women, blacks and other racial and religious minorities.

In Jim Crow America, racial discrimination was de jure the law, including in many parts of the South as early as the Reconstruction Era in the 1870s.

These laws were heavily enforced for the very reason that existing government-privileged markets for labor, transportation and education could not be sustained under even a modicum of honest competition. White racists were not willing to trust that voluntary compliance among other privileged whites would maintain racial segregation. When the law was not enough, Klu Klux Klan terrorism was visited upon businesses not willing to keep blacks “in their place.”

To franks2732′s credit, he is not completely oblivious to this idea, even citing how the legal enshrinement of apartheid provided for systematic racial discrimination in South Africa.

In Montgomery, the bus company had unsuccessfully petitioned the city to repeal segregated riding after a prolonged boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr, whose later arrest gave prominence to a nationwide civil rights movement. Think how much more beneficial those protesters’ actions were than if they had simply sought a political compromise with the city. The bus company’s motivation was not to bring about greater social solidarity, but simple self-interest. It may not have been the most honorable intention, but it was the right thing to do.

franks2732 completely bypassed the fact that nonviolent civil disobedience rendered a great number of racist laws unenforceable. Through direct action, people were able to achieve a lasting social movement (before ultimately being co-opted). As Charles Johnson noted,

Woolworth’s lunch counters weren’t desegregated by Title II. The sit-in movement did that. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott onward, the Freedom Movement had won victories, town by town, building movements, holding racist institutions socially and economically accountable. The sit-ins proved the real-world power of the strategy: In Greensboro, N.C., nonviolent sit-in protests drove Woolworth’s to abandon its whites-only policy by July 1960. The Nashville Student Movement, through three months of sit-ins and boycotts, convinced merchants to open all downtown lunch counters in May the same year. Creative protests and grassroots pressure campaigns across the South changed local cultures and dismantled private segregation without legal backing.

Another claim in the video is that anti-discrimination laws have rendered racial conditions such that “There are no more discriminations” [sic]. I am puzzled by what he could possible mean. He either meant that racial discrimination no longer exists, which is laughable. Or he meant that racial discrimination is no longer formally legal.

Neither is true. Racial discrimination is still covertly practiced; it is just not as blatant as it had been under Jim Crow. In the private sector, racial discrimination just takes other, legal forms. Meanwhile, governments actively target blacks in the United States through various drug prohibitions, minimum wage laws, licensing regulations and zoning restrictions.

That leaves us with a problem. How then can racism be ended? As a practical concern, we cannot rely on the state to solve the problem. That would just give more incentive for government agents to make the problem worse so that they would accumulate greater authority.

In the past, I have been guilty of just saying that the market’s economic incentives will put an end to racial discrimination, and to a large extent that may still be the case. We have to remember also that we are the market; the market is just a nexus of our decisions. If racism is to end, laws are not going to do it. They may come after the fact to give a social movement the government’s endorsement. But racism and all other forms of authoritarianism will come to an end (or completely be marginalized from society) when people are not longer willing to tolerate it. In a fully libertarian manner, social and economic pressures, such as those employed in the civil rights struggle, returns power back to individuals and not to the state.

This is just too much. I am almost beyond words.

CBS News reports (also on YouTube) that Dallas police officers will have the cost of their cab fare paid with union dues if they have had too much to drink.

Arresting peaceful people and depriving people of their property can take its [...]]]>

This is just too much. I am almost beyond words.

CBS News reports (also on YouTube) that Dallas police officers will have the cost of their cab fare paid with union dues if they have had too much to drink.

Arresting peaceful people and depriving people of their property can take its toll, so I can understand why they would turn to the bottle.

I have also been posting weekly updates of local left-libertarian news, in addition to a commentary on some leaked embassy cables [...]]]> Posts has been sparse the last few weeks. With help from Mike Gogulski, I have been putting in time upgrading the DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left website to expand functionality.

I have also been posting weekly updates of local left-libertarian news, in addition to a commentary on some leaked embassy cables relevant to the Metroplex area.

The show got contentious when the discussion moved to immigration. From my understanding, Emanuelson is concerned that mass immigration will drive down [...]]]> I was listening to an episode of The Fuze, a local internet show co-hosted by Ken Emanuelson of the Dallas Tea Party, with former New Mexico governor Garry Johnson as his guest.

The show got contentious when the discussion moved to immigration. From my understanding, Emanuelson is concerned that mass immigration will drive down wages of those already in the country. As a self-described libertarian, he also made the point that those who advocate for open immigration “have to be honest” when stating its economic impact on wage rates. I can confidently state that historically and praxeologically the economic evidence gives overwhelming credibility for an open immigration policy.

A leading open immigration opponent in academia, George Borjas, thinks that existing immigration rates are a net positive to income. He said, “Although the entry of immigrants reduces the wages of comparable natives, it increases slightly the income of U.S. natives overall.” Coincidentally, Tyler Cowen wrote about a new study that demonstrates why immigrants create a demand for higher-paying management jobs and that immigrants compete more so with foreign labor than with existing native workers. Those might be some valid points, but I’m not ready to say they are conclusive just yet.

Clarifying Terms

Granted, the purpose of a quota system is to drive up prices (including the price of labor), so it is reasonable to believe that the immediate effect for a particular profession might be to experience decreased real wages if immigration were abnormally high for that profession compared to the rest of the labor market. With an open immigration policy, that problem could be minimized since open immigration would not be restricted to just one or a few classes of workers. But if real wages in a profession did fall, that only tells us that wages for that profession were too high for the market to bear, which was likely brought about by government manipulation of the market in the first place. One thing we know for sure is that the sooner an economic distortion is eliminated, the less harm it will do overall. Certain professions are assuredly propped up by the existing immigration restrictions (like border patrol agents), but they are being supported on the backs of other Americans through taxation and lost economic opportunities. In fact, Frederic Bastiat offers some great advice on this:

Every injustice is profitable for someone (except, perhaps, restriction, which in the long run benefits nobody); to express alarm over the dislocation that ending an injustice occasions the person who is profiting from it is as much as to say that an injustice, solely because it has existed for a moment, ought to endure forever.

Counter-intuitively, immigration restrictions do not raise wages; at best, they shift (or redistribute) wages from honest native workers to ones who benefit from privileged government intervention. Just as it would be a gross misrepresentation to say that sentencing a bank robber to jail time would ipso facto reduce his “wages,” it would be equally absurd to claim that returning to a free market would do anything but restoring the economy to the natural state it should have been in all along. If it seems odd why I would characterize immigration restrictions as theft, it might be helpful to read a past post in which I explained why immigration restrictions against peaceful people are a logical contradiction.

Free Markets, Free People

I said that “at best” immigration restrictions, or any prohibition of consensual activity for that matter, merely shift income patterns. It likely could be the case that increased competition leads to more specialization, more innovation, and thus more demand for the product of that profession, so real wages could rise with a greater influx to that labor market.

Historically, the periods of greatest growth in American living standards took place in a climate of lenient or almost non-existent immigration policies. Part of that came about because the founders had railed against the king’s immigration policy, even levying a charge of obstructing “migrations hither” in the Declaration of Independence, and so purposefully did not give the federal government any enumerated power to govern immigration (only naturalization), save for the importation of slaves into the 13 original states.

Contrary to the predictions of Keynesian interventionists, if we look to the greatest American wealth expansion in the 20th century, which followed the end of World War II, millions of GIs returned home and flooded the labor market, just as some anti-immigration hawks fear would happen with open immigration. As a matter of deductive logic, independent, rational people must produce more than they consume in order to remain alive, creating a surplus of products for the market and driving down consumer costs. Those consumer savings can then be spent on other products that before they could not afford to purchase. Freedom and self-interest provide not only the necessary components for consumer demand but also the supply and ingenuity to meet those demands.

Despite its patriotic backdrop, the contemporary anti-immigration stance has its origin in Marxism as it tends to view people as laborers only and not also as consumers who are going to desire products of their own. Our desires are limitless, practically speaking, and so a free market (if one existed) would never have a shortage of jobs. After Word War II, the economy expanded to accommodate the desires that were now possible to accomplish with an influx of new workers. With more workers, we increase our division of labor, and so we can become more specialized, which enables each individual to exert his or her comparative trade advantage. It was Adam Smith who called the division of labor the source of the “greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour.” Even those workers temporarily laid off could be somewhat placated with falling consumer prices that result from increased competition. They would be able to shift to sectors of the economy that have a greater demand for their labor, and so their real wages (the amount of products they can afford to purchase with their earnings) will increase (since consumer prices have fallen) even if their nominal wages do not increase.

Notice the effect here. People are able to save more because of greater competition, reducing the rate of interest to borrow money, which in turn reduces the costs of capital investments, which increase productivity to pull up wage rates. Various government interventions sharply reduce the availability of capital and raise the barriers to entry through a multitude of regulatory, credit monopoly, legal tender, and intellectual property controls, severely hampering this free-market mechanism from taking place today.

Lying for Liberty

What also stuck with me is Emanuelson’s view that people should be honest when discussing the reality of a political policy. I would agree further that people ought to always be honest, though we would probably differ on how we bridge the is-ought gap.

In reply to an inquiry of mine, he confirmed that he does equates honesty with, at a minimum, not knowingly making a false statement. As for myself, I do not think that honesty and lying (deliberately making a false statement) are mutually exclusive. The classic case is of an angry abusive husband knocking at the door looking for his frightened wife at the neighbor’s house. Would it ethical to lie to the husband? I hope so. The alternative of putting people in direct danger risks having their rights violated by the abusive husband. Honesty is fundamentally a recognition and acknowledgment of the facts of reality; integrity would be acting on behalf of those facts. Ayn Rand called honesty “the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.” To be acting honestly does not mean telling the truth no matter the context. Honesty means taking into context one’s full knowledge. In the case of a surprise party, it would be ethical to lie to the special guest because I am have not deprived him or her of any values. Ethics is not a matter of floating categorical imperatives — these principles are derived for the purpose of living happily, which requires the existence of rational values to achieve.

People who support immigration restrictions that stretch beyond those necessary to defend individual rights are necessarily advocating for aggression, as I explained before. In that context, it would be acting honestly to make a false statement about the economic consequences of immigration in the same sense it would be ethical to lie to a thief who wants my friend’s wallet. I am being honest. I am taking into account the full context of my knowledge, including a recognition of the fact that no one has a (natural) right to aggress against others. My lie would not be denying the anti-immigration hawk any rightful value of his or hers, but I would be protecting those values of prospective immigrants and native residents, namely their freedom.

For the record, I do not think it is necessary to lie about the political consequences of freedom, as there is no moral-practical dichotomy. With that said, I do not advocate lying to voters, if for no other reason than their net impact on the political process is negligible and does not present what might be called a “clear and present danger,” and because they are not ethically liable for the actions of the state. That responsibility rests with politicians and their agents, to whom it would be justified to lie given the proper context.

Fort Worth councilman Joel Burns received nationwide media attention [...]]]> Some of the latest work posted to the DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left’s blog are a commentary supportive of the efforts of those in the GLBT community to bring awareness to some difficult issues and an announcement of a new reading club event.

Fort Worth councilman Joel Burns received nationwide media attention last month for his speech during a city meeting in which he revealed some of the torment and abuse he faced as a gay teen. I also address the controversy of a transsexual Dallas high school student who was denied an opportunity to run for homecoming queen. I conclude with some remarks on the underlying source of the cultural challenges faced by those with an alternative sexual orientation and how libertarian principles can be used to overcome them.

On Dec. 6, DFW ALL will host reading club a featuring “The Production of Security” by Gustave De Molinari, who is considered by many to be the father (perhaps grandfather) of market anarchism. In his classic work from 1849, Molinari analyzes the possibility for the stateless supply of defense and arbitration services.

Already the most expensive weapons program in history and years behind schedule, writing of approximately 35 million lines of computer code and other testing could cost an additional $5 billion [...]]]> The tax sinkhole known as the United States military is projecting more development cost overruns in connection with the F-35 joint strike fighter.

Already the most expensive weapons program in history and years behind schedule, writing of approximately 35 million lines of computer code and other testing could cost an additional $5 billion on top of the already projected $50 billion to be spent for development alone, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Despite promises to the contrary, the estimated maintenance costs have also soared to some 250 percent than that of the plane the joint strike fighter is designed to replace.

By Justin Raimondo’s account, the plane was designed primarily to knock out Iranian tank forces following an American-endorsed invasion. Depending on your outlook, then it might be considered good news that the time schedule for deployment was recently pushed back an additional year for the Air Force and Navy versions and by as many as three years for the Marine version. Given that Israel will be the first foreign government to acquire this next-generation fighter, Raimondo’s belief has some merit.

In a Star-Telegram article earlier this year, the Defense Department acknowledged that the production estimate of $115.5 million for each plane, even after accounting for price inflation, was nearly twice the original estimate when the program began in 2002.

Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt call this practice “front loading.”

Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and it invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizable order. Assurances are always given that the system’s technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch.

Military contracts can hype promised results, offer rosy cost estimates, and profit from continuous modifications and repairs that are a consequence of the shortened testing schedule demanded by the military under political pressure to deliver a final product.

In their defense, Lockheed-Martin, the main contractor responsible for building the F-35, has said these estimates are much higher than the company’s own estimates.

Whatever the final price tag comes to be, the true opportunity costs of having to borrow money the government does not have will be exceedingly higher. The government plunders resources from honest people. If it doesn’t tax directly, the inflation tax strikes at the least advantaged among us. Even if we took a simple view and added up the government expenditure and calculated the the subsequent loan payments to finance the program expenses for 30 or more years, the total present-value cost in today’s dollars would likely be double. None of this factors in the higher costs for consumer goods, the higher interest rates for capital investments (and thus lower productivity), the resources and lives lost in conflicts, nor the positive effects of a division of labor with other so-called enemies nations that have a comparative trade advantage.

Ironically, Lockheed’s tagline for this program is “Unconventional. Unprecedented.” No, not at all, and that is part of the problem.

The first thing I want to know is if it would be better just to save my breath. I first have to know if the person I am are communicating with [...]]]> I was asked how I might resond to a political liberal sincerely concerned with the plight of the less fortunate in a liberatian society.

The first thing I want to know is if it would be better just to save my breath. I first have to know if the person I am are communicating with would want the message I am selling if the facts bear out my case. If the facts support it, would they want it? If not, then I tell the person that he or she sounds pretty happy with his or her current political beliefs and move on.

Assuming a person would like liberty if his or her concerns could be addressed, the first thing I would try to do is establish that I share his or her concerns for those in need. That is why I put more emphasis on cutting government programs like the military, which is far more destructive and wasteful than welfare.

However, the best books for these types of questions are Mary Ruwart’s “Healing Our World,” which is free online at Free Keene, or Harry Browne’s “Why Government Doesn’t Work,” also free at Liberty Activism. A recent podcast about mutual aid from Sheldon Richman is also good.

Initially, I might say something like this:

I understand how important to you to help those in need, and that is important to me as well. But let us suppose that tomorrow you won the lottery and decided to give half of your winning to help the poor. Would you give that money to a private charity whom you had thoroughly researched or would you give it to the government welfare department?

The answer is obvious and speaks for itself. Ruwart talks about how so-called intellectual property laws and other types of government intervention increase the costs of drugs and other life-saving devises (by causing artificial scarcities). I tend to get brushback from liberals, in particular, that these ideas are utopian or not realistic. To that, I think Kevin Carson of a Center for a Stateless Society sums up my own views when he said:

But apparently, in the mainstream liberal view of the world, it’s not utopian at all to believe that simple procedural rules and paper restrictions can prevent the state from being controlled by the same ruthless people for their own ends. …

It’s utterly naive and utopian to believe a majority of the public can exert meaningful control over the state apparatus. A minority of insiders will always have an advantage in time, attention span, interest, information, and agenda control over those of us on the outside. The average person on the outside only has a limited amount of time or energy for maintaining an interest in politics, after dealing with the primary issues of work and family, friends, and local community. But for the elites that control the state, politics IS a major part of their daily work and social life. Can anything be matched for sheer naive optimism with the belief that, in the long run, we can maintain a higher degree of vigilance over the functioning of the state than they can? …

So anything done by the state to make our lots more bearable will be done, not because the state is “all of us working together,” but as a side-effect of plutocratic and managerial elites pursuing their own self-interest. Apparently the same people who cannot be trusted in the economic sphere become fully trustworthy when they’re sitting in the “executive committee of the ruling class.

I always try to emphasize that I want more money to go to those in need, but unfortunately so much of it wasted on middle class social workers. So practically speaking, I do not expect the government to solve government-created problems. Proven alternatives like mutual aid societies are tangible solutions to the conditions of poverty and a whole host of social problems. The principle is that the social benefits of decentralism outcompete hierarchy all the time.

I tend to be patient though. Many people have never given consideration to how a market-based society would provide for people. One idea to get someone’s mind rolling is to ask how he or she might solve some of those problems in the community in the absence of a government to lean on. If he or she refuses to answer, then you know you are wasting your time and politely move on.

You can read [...]]]> I sent a letter to the editors of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram with regards to the widely publicized suspension of a local high school student wrongly accused of marijuana use in the wake of his father’s death. It had been more than a year since I last wrote to the editors.

You can read more about the latest flap on the DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left’s blog, among other places. Below is the letter I sent last week.

Regarding the story of the suspended high school junior exonerated of using marijuana (See “Grieving student who was accused of marijuana use is allowed back in class,” Thursday), a lot of people will be hand wringing the school administrators, but they will ignore the more underlying problem of trying to prohibit consensual acts, where there are no victims to make a complaint. Criminalizing consensual behavior enables big-government policies to invade honest people’s personal lives.

The use of government force and planning — fascism, really — to change behavior has not worked that well in the past. Maybe, that’s why 40 years after the war on drugs began, the government is in continuous need of more sacrifices of our liberties and our income. The war on marijuana can only be sustained by criminalizing peaceful users of their right to property, by abusing taxpayers out of hundreds of billions of dollars, and by sacrificing the privacy of us all.

To those of us who respect the peaceful decisions of others, let me remind you that returning our privacy and property rights do not require us changing the law. We only have to make it irrelevant.

I knew there would be a fair share of Republicans hitching [...]]]> I attended the Wake Up America Tea Party in Fort Worth on Saturday as part of a nationwide tea party event. While volunteering at the Campaign for Liberty booth, I got a lot of positive reaction talking with attendees about conventional constitutional ideals.

I knew there would be a fair share of Republicans hitching onto the liberty message, so I thought it was important to present a more comprehensive small-government message, even if I do not subscribe to those views myself. Mostly, I emphasized the importance of decentralizing political power and scaling back American foreign policy.

I was there with Debbie McKee, the CFL state coordinator in Texas, and her daughter Adrienne. Our most popular item was CFL’s newly released pocket constitution that included the Declaration of Independence and the Kentucky and Virginia nullification resolutions written by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively.

A few people scoffed when the saw Ron Paul’s Revolution or End the Fed on our table. We also had Bruce Fein’s new book American Empire. (I have not read Fein’s book, but here is an interview with Scott Horton on Anti-War Radio.) However, many more I spoke with expressed that they thought the government’s belligerent foreign policy was doing more harm than good.

The most talked-about speakers were Bridgette Gabriel, who preached the dangers of “Islamic supremacism,” and conservative commentator Ann Coulter. They received the loudest applause lines I heard from the booth outside the auditorium. From a post on “The Whited Sepulchre,” Gabriel asked all the military veterans to stand and take an applause, which garnered a thunderous applause. The veterans obediently remained standing well into her speech.

Debra Medina, the founder of We Texans, spoke of the declining freedom in Texas. She said that Texas has went from a top-10 state in terms of economic freedoms and has fallen 23 spots to 31st in the nation since Rick Perry has been in governor’s office. Despite an impressive showing against establishment candidates in the Texas Republican gubernatorial primary, Medina had a distinctly less friendly reception because she highlighted that conservative rhetoric does not match the empirical evidence of a decade of Republican rule in Texas.

A few minutes before I was planning to leave, a man who described himself to me as a “constitutional conservative” wandered to the CFL booth and said he did not want to listen to Coulter. I gave a sympathetic nod. He said that he wanted nothing do with the Coulter and went on the explain that she attends meetings with pro gay-rights groups. That, he said, was unacceptable.

He talked about the source of this information, and how a website had been tracking Coulter for the past 18 months. As I recall, he went on to say “There is no place in the Republican Party for homosexuals or anybody with them.” From my reading of the state party platform, he is probably right. I guess he felt comfortable confiding this nugget of bigotry with those of us at the booth.

I kindly asked if he supported making it illegal to practice homosexuality. Without hesitating, he said he would and that it already is according to the Bible. I asked, then “would you think that all sins should be made illegal under political government?” So I asked about divorce. I went on the say that the Bible calls divorce a sin, and I asked if he thought it should be illegal too.

He danced around the question, so I asked again. He said that couples who have underwent counseling before marriage and before splitting up should be allowed to divorce on the condition that they would forfeit custody of their children to already-married couples.

After some prompting, he reiterated that the Republican Party was a party for Christians only, and that I would have to do some “soul searching” before becoming a genuine Republican, which I have no desire of becoming anyway. He said I should become a Democrat instead. I didn’t bother telling him, but neither sound that appealing. I should have told him, “Fuck You (Very Much).”

Completely devoid of historical evidence, he then went on to explain for a second time that libertarianism and socialism were spawned by Karl Marx in “his communist books” and the political environment of revolutionary France.

Tea Party Reflections

The tea party has no founding principles on which the movement is based, and most of its grassroots members are political newcomers who have a deep-seeded resentment for the direction that the country is going. It does not take long to realize that the government has been royally screwing up, and not just for the last 20 months.

Originally, the tea party movement was focused on excessive government spending as a reaction to the bailouts of the same large financial bodies that enabled the current economic collapse. The loudest voices were crying “Socialism” when Barack Obama was just adding to the same policies of his predecessor. Even still, so long as the movement was a reaction to fiscal mismanagement, there was some possibility that it would affect positive policy changes. But more and more, the tea party has less to do with battling run-away spending than it does with embracing cultural conservatism. The undertones of the currently embodied movement are based in the fears of white Christians of losing political power, fear that the same government many white Christians have exploited to their own advantage will be turned against them. “To take back our country.” That is the root cause for the present wave of backlash against Muslims and immigrants.

A poll [PDF] published in March from the University of Washington said that those who strongly support the tea party had more hostile views of gays, racial minorities and immigrants. On average, tea party supporters consistently thought less of the intelligence, trustworthiness and work ethic of blacks and Latinos than did the average Republicans. In a separate poll [PDF], and for all their talk about liberty, supporters of the tea party were far more likely to favor indefinite detention without trial of anyone accused of a crime, less privacy, and racial profiling. They were also less supportive of equal rights.

Even for the self-described constitutional conservative I talked with, he was more than willing to set aside any pretence of a modern society for an opportunity to enforce his morality on peaceful people. The momentum I witnessed Saturday will springboard into big electoral gains for Republicans, including many of the same responsible for this mess, in the mid-term elections. It will not amount to many policy changes for more liberty. No major tea party candidate is calling for cuts to any of the largest expenditures, not the military empire nor entitlement programs like Social Security.

It is a sad reality, but the ditching of any libertarian sentiments is inevitable so long as tea partiers are concerned with gaining the reins of power instead of abolishing that power altogether.

The city council in Watauga has decided to launch an investigation into the alleged excessive disciplinary actions of the recently demoted police chief, and I talk about some reasons to be cautious of the [...]]]> I published two local stories on the DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left blog about some recent government bungling.

The city council in Watauga has decided to launch an investigation into the alleged excessive disciplinary actions of the recently demoted police chief, and I talk about some reasons to be cautious of the motives behind the investigation.

In Trophy Club, a student who was suspended from class because school administrators thought he was high on marijuana was reinstated after a drug test revealed he had no drugs in his system.