United Liberty

“America started with a concept of limited government, designed to protect and improve the life, liberty and property of citizens, and has ended with a concept of unlimited government, capable of restricting our life, liberty and property in the name of protecting us from ourselves. America started with a concept of residual individual sovereignty, designed to respect the autonomy and equality of citizens, and has ended with a concept of limited liberty, presumptively unavailable and parsed out reluctantly by an all-powerful sovereign. America started with a concept of federalism, designed to better protect individual liberty, and has ended with a concept of nationalism, exercised vigorously to stifle controversial liberties recognized by the state. We have done all of this, experienced these foundational changes, without the benefit of a constitutional amendment.

Rep. Ron Paul visited the Cato Institute last week to discuss the Federal Reserve Transparency Act (HR 1207), which currently sits in the House Financial Services Committee with 245 co-sponsors (218 votes are needed to pass the House).

It doesn’t get anymore obvious than this, folks:

H/T: Health Care BS

John Boehner says what most people are thinking:

Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) had a few choice words about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) landmark climate-change bill after its passage Friday.

When asked why he read portions of the cap-and-trade bill on the floor Friday night, Boehner told The Hill, “Hey, people deserve to know what’s in this pile of s—t.”

President Barack Obama spent his Saturday address to the nation urging passage of the bill by the Senate.

I had to put aside my very pressing work on the biography of Edward C. Harwood to honor my subject’s great respect for the gold standard and sound commercial banking, when I saw an ad on the front page of Section 2 of the Financial Times today. Unfortunately, I can’t locate a link to the ad itself, but it says:

“THE FAST TRACK OUT OF THE CRISIS
The New Global Payment Unit
Troy Ounce Fine Gold 999.9
Paper money or real gold?
It’s your call.”

I immediately realized this was the handiwork of either a madman or a genius, or some combination of both, and so I set about finding out more about the fellow. Indeed, he is both.

The debate over HR 2454, also known as Waxman-Markey, is underway in the House of Representatives. Democrats managed to win a procedural vote earlier in the day that moved the bill one step further to passage, despite 30 members of their caucus (including Jim Marshall and John Barrow) voting against debate.

So Bureaucrash got too centralized for libertarian tastes. It goes without saying that the “support Iranian freedom” campaign sounds a little too similar to the current neoconservative fantasy for regime-change in Iran. Libertarians should be accustomed to high turn-over rates.

Enter FR33, the “freedom activist network”—  social network for the die-hard core, or “the remnant”, to borrow a popular term. If I am reaching too far into the obscure and clouded heart of the fight for freedom, this is because the obscure part is, indeed, the heart of the movement.

New York City spends $65 million a year for 700 teachers to do absolutely nothing:

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

“You just basically sit there for eight hours,” said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. “I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.’ `I’ve been sitting here for six months.’ That sort of thing.”