Month: November 2013

(From Volume 18, No. 20 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!)   NEEDLING US: “You need the haystack to find the needle.” – Gen. Keith B. Alexander, National Security Agency(NSA) director, quoted in the Oct. 14 Washington Post, defending the NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S. call records and the harvesting of hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal emails, email address books, and instant messaging accounts. ROBERT RINGER – SHUT IT DOWN FOR GOOD: “While the theatrics continue in D.C. over a world-ending, temporary government shutdown, there are those of us who are dreamers and like to fantasize about a PERMANENT government shutdown. That would be the only action that could actually bring about total freedom to a people for the first time in history. Anyone who believes that man cannot survive without government should do some reading – Murray Rothbard … Friedrich Hayek … Ludwig von Mises … Lysander Spooner … Frederic Bastiat … for starters. Warning: Conformists with weak tickers should not take the plunge.” – bestselling author and libertarian Robert Ringer, Sept. 30, 2013. THE GENDER PAY GAP DOESN’T EXIST: “To claim that a significant portion of the raw wage gap can only be explained by discrimination is intellectually dishonest and completely unsupported by the empirical evidence. And yet we hear all the time from groups like the National Committee on Pay Equity, the American Association of University Women, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and even President Obama that women ‘are paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to men.’ And in most cases when that claim is made, there is almost no attention paid to the reality that almost all of the raw, unadjusted pay differentials can be explained by everything except discrimination – hours worked, age, marital status, children, years of continuous experience, workplace conditions, etc. In other words, once you impose the important ceteris paribus condition of ‘all other things being equal or held constant,’ the gender pay gap that we hear so much about doesn’t really exist.” – economist Mark J. Perry, “Ceteris paribus,” Carpe Diem blog, Sept. 3, 2013. GETTING ALONG JUST FINE: “We seem to be getting along just fine without a government during the shutdown. I just pray that when the shutdown is over, all nonessential employees  – about 800,000 of them – will be back at their nonessential jobs.” – David Letterman, Oct. 14. 2013. BLOODTHIRSTY ZOMBIES:  “If you’ve never seen ‘The Walking Dead,’ it’s basically a bunch of bloodthirsty zombies slowly devouring what’s left of America. No wait, that’s C-SPAN.” – Craig Ferguson Oct. 11, 2013.

(From the Intellectual Ammunition section in Volume 18, No. 20 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!) Here’s some sound advice from conservative commentator Erick Erickson that libertarians would do well to heed. Erickson is writing about the recent IRS scandals and how Republicans should react. But his words apply to all of the recent scandals, including the NSA spyings, foreign policy fiascos, Benghazi, Obamacare, government spending and more, and his suggestions are especially applicable to libertarians: “This is about big government. This is about ‘a government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take it all away.’ … “’Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.’ George Washington [is often quoted as having] said that. The GOP should remember it. “The talking points the GOP uses, the press conferences the GOP holds, the ads the GOP runs – all of them need to be directed at the idea of government being the problem. It has moved outside the scope of reasonable reasonability into the micromanagement of our lives. “But – and this is the most important part – Republicans must remember that the problem is not Democrats in charge of government, but government itself. The argument falls flat if Republicans revert to ‘big government conservative’ arguments of ‘put us in charge’ and we’ll do better with the same. No they won’t. “Government is the problem. The vastness, complexity, and nefarious encroachment into our personal lives should be fought, not just blamed on the other side.”