Category Archives: Liberty

Aaron Swartz: Parasites Have the Power To Kill The Host

Government, Human Accomplishment, Intellectual Property Rights, Liberty, Private Property, Technology

Aaron Swartz got too big for his boots, so the government decided to make life unbearable for the gifted young man, who had created more value for shareholders and customers when just a kid in short pants than any of the nogoodniks who prosecuted him. Yeah, freedom baby.

US media tries to forget the late Mr. Swartz . RT has not:

Swartz was a 26 year-old information transparency activist, who took his own life nearly two years ago, having faced a standoff with the government.
When he was just 14, tech prodigy Swartz helped launch the first RSS feeds. By the time he turned 19, his company had merged with Reddit, which would become one of the most popular websites in the world.
But instead of living a happy life of a Silicon Valley genius, Swartz went on to champion a free internet, becoming a political activist calling for others to join.
Swartz drew the FBI’s attention in 2008, when he downloaded and released about 2.7 million federal court documents from a restricted service. The government did not press charges because the documents were, in fact, public.
He was arrested in 2011, for downloading academic articles from a subscription-based research website JSTOR – at his university – with the intention of making them available to the public. Although, none of what he downloaded was classified, prosecutors wanted to put him in jail for 35 years.

Women Go For Government Giganticism

Democrats, Elections, Gender, Liberty, Republicans

No thinking person equates the GOP with liberty. That debate has been settled among liberty loving people. The Republican and Democrat Parties are both “partners in government giganticism.” However, in as much as voters mistake the Republican Party with smaller government—a vote for or against the GOP is a good proxy for statism. (No, Mark Levin did not invent the statism term; Ludwig von Mises did, and libertarians have used it forever).

What the “silly sex’s” political proclivities mean for freedom lovers is that Republicans will seek to become even more like Democrats, if at all possible. The convergence will be almost complete. Fittingly, National Journal is rejoicing in women’s statism.

Why “Republicans are nervously watching the gender gap widen as Democrats press their advantage with female voters”:

The “gender gap”—the difference between Republicans’ usual margin of victory among men and Democrats’ usual margin of victory among women—is nothing new. It has been evident for years in almost every election up and down the ballot. But a National Journal analysis of public polls, and interviews with strategists from both parties, suggests that the gap has ballooned to historic proportions across 2014’s battleground states. Democrats are running campaigns designed to press an advantage among women that is helping the party compete in a number of races despite an unfriendly political climate and steep GOP advantages among men. Meanwhile, Republicans are searching for issues to combat the trend with female voters.

“I think the gender gaps are growing compared to past election cycles,” said Matt Canter, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s deputy executive director. “We’ll see how that turns out, but that’s certainly what the public and internal polling shows, in every race across the board.”

It’s a trend several Republicans privately admitted they are watching nervously …

MORE.

Crime And No Punishment

Constitution, Liberty, States' Rights, Taxation

More proof that the Constitution is worse than useless: John Boehner is “taking the president to court,” for “amassing power at the expense of the legislative branch.” This infraction, pronounces a Washington-Post liberal, correctly, has been a trend “not just for the past five years but for a generation or more. The Prince of Orange is mostly right about the problem, if not the time frame.”

Equally futile for our liberties is the grandstanding against the d-cks from the agency whose job description is to oppress and steal: The Internal Revenue Service. You abolish such a den of iniquity and vice, you don’t tweak it.

But what makes Boehner’s “long-shot litigation” meaningless is that, other than impeachment, which seldom happens, and the chocking off of finances (also a rarity)—the marvel that is the US Constitution offers no serious remedies for punishing officialdom.

Mark Levin talks-up the idea of a state convention. Yeah right. As I countered in “Secession, Not Convention, Offers Salvation,”

To reclaim the republic, Levin and his listeners hold out hope for the atrophied states and their unexercised role in the amendment process, as stipulated in Article V of the Constitution. Never mind that the states, contrary to the mistaken predictions and hopes of the Constitution makers, have never initiated a constitutional amendment; and never mind that even in the event that the states demand a constitutional convention, there is no mechanism to compel Congress to act.

The great constitutional scholar James McClellan was no “neo-confederate.” Yet even an ardent defender of the Constitution as was McClellan conceded that, sadly, “the Framers relied on the good faith of Congress for the observance of the requirement” and that, when it came to a constitutional convention, “there was no way to force Congress to act.” (“Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government,” p. 310.)

Ultimately, the legislatures of two-thirds of the states have to unite to call on Congress to hold a national constitutional convention for the purpose of amending the dead-letter Constitution. Levin and his listeners are deluded if they think that the states, which are hardly bastions of freedom, will unite for this purpose; salvation is more likely to come from dissolving dysfunctional political bonds.

UPDATED: GOP, RIP, AWOL On IRS

Democrats, Ethics, Liberty, Republicans, Taxation

Seventy one percent of Americans want the Internal Revenue Service investigated for targeting tea-party groups (presumably for opposing Barack Obama).

Pat Caddell is perhaps the only Democrat (other that Dennis Kucinich) capable of expressing righteous indignation over such stuff—stuff that should outrage every moral human being with some affinity for the principles of liberty, namely a government subject, at the very least, to the same laws as the governed.

“Establishment Republicans want the IRS to go after Tea-Party groups,” contended Caddell. These groups “are an outside threat to their power hold, the lobbying-consulting class of the Republican party. The IRS now may also proceed against businesses that are cutting their work force. It is a lawless organization that no one will investigate.”

AND:

“This is about preserving privileges and arrangements that benefit these people over the country. And I’d say… it is worse than seedy. It is worse than corrupt. It is the issue that no one is allowed to speak up and the American people in the polls know it. This is a corrupt political system that doesn’t function, and as Michael Dukakis once said: It rots from the head down.”

Lest you think I’ve been taken in by Caddell, here is another instance, documented on BAB, where Caddell cannot contain his visceral revulsion for the abuse of power to which Americans are subjected. Is Caddell perhaps an Old Democrat; one of those good Dixiecrats?

Former polster Caddell was able to get to the crux of the arrest and attempted prosecution of a parent for questioning the pedagogues about the Common-Core Curriculum.

“What we saw here is bigger than just this. The people are the slaves to the office-holders: superintendents who won’t take questions, the EPA that goes to Alaska on to conduct a … raid, SWAT converging with guns on a gold-mining operation in a little town; the things that government does now to oppress people; the laws that we have, the NSA, the fear people have of the state spying on them and imposing on them–this is a kind of soft despotism, whereby if you get out of line, we’ll get you. We work for them. Public servants are the masters; we are the servants of the political class.”

UPDATE (6/24): “Seventy six percent of voters think IRS emails were deliberately destroyed.”