United Liberty

In his epic work, Human Action, Ludwig von Mises outlines three conditions necessary before a person will act. All three conditions must be met:

1. The person must feel an uneasiness with the current situation.
2. The person must have a vision of something better.
3. The person must have a belief that a particular action will make that better vision become reality.

If we hope to ever get large numbers of people interested in our ideas and willing to act to advance those ideas, we must devise a way to satisfy all three conditions in their minds.

The first condition presents no challenge. Most people already feel uneasiness with the current political setup. Nearly everyone wants a “change.”

But change, to what?

This is a tough question, and one that most people cannot answer. Most lack a clear and preferable alternate vision. They don’t meet Mises’ second criteria. This is what differentiates those of us who understand the philosophy of liberty. We possess the vision. We know what a truly free world would look like. And if we want people to go along with us, we must communicate and spread that vision.

But why don’t more of us do so? What prevents most of us who “get it” from dedicating ourselves to the cause of converting people? Why is there no domino effect, wherein our vision spreads from person to person, with each new convert taking purposeful action to spread the vision? Why do so many people become impassioned with liberty for a time, only to subsequently turn away from what seems to be an intellectual dead end? What prevents their flash of vision from turning into action? The answer is that many never fulfill Mises’ third condition. They lack hope for victory.

Unlike former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who supports Common Core and has even backed a campaign to boost it through his foundation, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is a fan of school choice and will soon be using some of his time to host School Choice roundtables with parents of certain communities in Milwaukee and Chicago.

According to RandPAC, Paul will be traveling to Chicago and Milwaukee on April 22 and 23, 2014 to talk to parents, students, educators and community leaders about the importance of having options when it comes to education.

Sen. Paul hopes to encourage parents to help school choice advocates to advance their message. According to Paul, “parents should have a role and a voice when it comes to their child’s education. These roundtable discussions will focus on raising standards, adding competition and strengthening our nation’s education system – a system that is broken.”

Many school choice advocates point out to the discrepancies in the speeches of those who advocate for Common Core.

“I never cease to be amazed that the loudest voices against the right to choice and access to a good education often send their own kids to private or parochial schools,” said Rachel Campos Duffy of the LIBRE Initiative. “These are also the same people who present themselves as the champions of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ for minorities and the poor.“ She is a mother and an activist in a mostly Hispanic community.

It seems that The New York Times is pulling directly from White House talking points about Obamacare. In response to the devastating CBO budget report released yesterday, the paper’s editorial board says that 2.5 million fewer full-time workers in the labor force by 2024 is actually a good thing (emphasis added):

The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law. Of course, Republicans immediately tried to brand the findings as “devastating” and stark evidence of President Obama’s health care reform as a failure and a job killer. It is no such thing.
[…]
The new law will free people, young and old, to pursue careers or retirement without having to worry about health coverage. Workers can seek positions they are most qualified for and will no longer need to feel locked into a job they don’t like because they need insurance for themselves or their families. It is hard to view this as any kind of disaster.

Uh. What? Obamacare incentivizes people not to work so that they can gain greater subsidies for insurance coverage, thus reducing their productivity. How can that be considered a good thing in the mind of any rational person?

If you’ve ever played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, you know about the level “No Russian,” in which the player goes undercover as “Alexei Borodin,” an American soldier who has infiltrated a Russian nationalist terrorist group.

In this level, the user joins the nationalists, led by antagonist Vladimir Makarov, in a massacre of innocent civilians at an airport in Moscow. It’s an important part of the game’s plot, as it sparks a war between the United States and Russia. The user can, of course, go through the level without shooting any of the fictional characters. The plot would remain the same, regardless.

But the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wants video game companies to subject players to war crimes in the games if they commit illegal acts or kill innocent people:

The International Committee of the Red Cross have called for video games to punish crimes committed in battle by adhering to real-life international war conventions.

“The ICRC believes there is a place for international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict) in video games,” the organization that works worldwide to provide humanitarian help for people caught in war zones said in a statement on their website.

Despite what those who say that the NSA’s spying programs aren’t a threat to Americans, James Otteson argues government snooping is, in fact, a real threat to our privacy.

In a new video from Learn Liberty, Otteson, a professor of philosophy and economics at Yeshiva University, explains that the NSA’s spying is part of a “serious and growing problem in this country” and that Americans might not learn how important the right to privacy is until it’s taken away.

“We have a serious and growing problem in this country. We’ve been asleep too long about our privacy,” says Otteson. “And when we’ve taken something for granted, we may not appreciate it until it’s taken away.

“When Edward Snowden revealed the NSA had been looking into the lives of every American, many people were shocked. Under the guise of protecting us from terrorism and crime, government agencies have dramatically expanded the spying that they do on us — on you, on me.” he explained. “The NSA and other agencies now record every single email, phone call, Facebook post, tweet, purchase, every digital transmission you make — no matter how personal or private you thought it was. No matter how anonymous you thought it was.”

Though the programs supporters say that the if “we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear,” Otteson points out that the invasion of our privacy “robs us of the power to say ‘no.’”

“When the slave can say ‘no’ to the slaveholder, when the serf can say ‘no’ to the Lord, when the child can say ‘no’ to the bully, that’s when each of them has established a boundary of freedom,” added Otteson. “That’s really the importance of privacy.”

Capitalism is truly a wonderful thing. This economic system is empowers the individual and limits government control over economies, which draws criticism and derision from the Left. They like to claim that capitalism is greed and they use that populist sentiment to push more state control and regulations.

But what the Left won’t admit is that capitalism is saving lives and reducing poverty in countries where free trade and market liberalization are being enacted. An editorial in the most recent issue of The Economist outlines the successes of capitalism:

The world’s achievement in the field of poverty reduction is, by almost any measure, impressive. Although many of the original Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) —such as cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters and child mortality by two-thirds—will not be met, the aim of halving global poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years early.

The MDGs may have helped marginally, by creating a yardstick for measuring progress, and by focusing minds on the evil of poverty. Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow—and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.

Over the weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave the commencement address at Michigan’s Hillsdale College. This school is known for its conservative bent, which is rare in academia today.

Cruz, who is considering a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, opened with a touch a humor and self-depreciation and then went onto discuss the values of freedom and liberty and also praised the American Dream and economic prosperity. he told graduates that one of the great ideals in the Constitution is that “power comes not from the monarch on down, but instead up from ‘We the People.’”

He also went onto directly challenge the culture of dependency on government that President Obama has pushed. You might recall that President Obama clamored for more big government and warned against the voices that warned of tyranny at Ohio State University earlier this month.

“Human beings are not happiest when they’re taken care of by the state. Areas under the yoke of dependency on government are among the least joyish parts of our society,” Cruz told graduates. “The story of Julia is not an attractive utopia. We all flourish instead when afforded opportunity, the ability to work and create and accomplish. Economic growth and opportunity is the answer that works.”

Watch the speech below. It’s definitely worth it:

A lot of Americans know that the US government is out of control. Anyone who has cared enough to study the US Constitution even a little knows this. Still, very few of these people are taking any significant action, and largely because of one error: They are waiting for “the good guys” to show up and fix things.

Some think that certain groups of politicians will pull it together and fix things, or that one magnificent politician will ride in to fix things. Others think that certain members of the military will step in and slap the politicians back into line. And, I’m sure there are other variations.

There are several problems with this. I’ll start with the small issues:

During a commencement address at The Ohio State University, President Barack Obama praised government, played down the role of the individual, and urged students to reject the voices of tyranny.

“We, the people, chose to do these things together — because we know this country cannot accomplish great things if we pursue nothing greater than our own individual ambition,” President Obama told graduating students. “Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works.”

“They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner,” he continued. “You should reject these voices.  Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”

The shot against “individual ambition” is ironic because President Obama himself is the defintion of that term. He was an Illinois state senator who gave a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Later that year, he was elected to the United States Senate. By 2007, he was campaigning full-time for his party’s presidential nomination, which he won in 2008, and would subsequently be elected president.

If that doesn’t define ambition, what does? That’s not a shot against him, by the way. President Obama’s personal story is one that should be admired. The problem with him, of course, is the policies he pushes, which leads us to the next point.

Sometimes, I just shake my head at the ignorance.  I mean, it must require a certain willful stupidity to put your head in the sand and believe that government can make all the bad men stop.

Right now, the left is trying to figure out how to destroy our freedoms in an effort to curb future terrorist acts like the Boston Marathon bombing.  Now, the irony of how they bucked at the right’s efforts after 9/11 isn’t exactly lost on me.  However, that’s something to chuckle about later…after we stop this kneejerk reaction and undo the Right’s kneejerk reactions from the last decade.

Over at ThinkProgress.org, they’re already wringing their hands at the idea of restricting various kinds of powder such as black powder, smokeless powder, and whatever the hell it is they put in fireworks: