Nanny Statism – Page 15 – The Libertarian Standard

Christianity in Action — the Obama Presidency

Imperialism, Nanny Statism, Police Statism, War

By Norman Horn / August 10, 2010 / 1 minute of reading

Ever wondered what Christianity looks like in practice? Look no further than… President Obama!

I saw this on August 9 at a demonstration at UT-Austin in front of Gregory Gym and the library. Of all the ridiculous things I’ve seen in the past year, I think this takes the cake.

I asked the gentleman how Obama could be “Christianity in action” if it requires aggression against a neighbor to act. His response, I kid you not, was that back in the first century they had despots as leaders, and now we have representative government. After laughing hysterically, I then proceeded to ask how he justifies his task of blowing up the Middle East, I mean, they’re still his representatives of Christ, right? On the contrary: “Love for neighbor cannot be delegated” said Pope Benedict XVI.

I just can’t wait for Obama to go back to DC so he can put more Christianity into action!

Come back to TLS tomorrow for the full report on the demonstration. Thanks to Heather from LP-Texas for taking the picture. Heroic!

Crossposted at LibertarianChristians.com.

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Back to Basics: Self-Ownership and Organ Donations

Health Care, Libertarian Theory, The Basics, Victimless Crimes

By Matt Mortellaro / August 7, 2010 / 4 minutes of reading

Ronald Bailey, over at Hit & Run, asks, “Should a person who is dying of an incurable illness be allowed to donate his organs before the disease kills him?” This strikes me as a very odd question to ask, especially given who is doing the asking. Hit & Run is the blog for Reason Magazine, a publication I have been led to believe has some libertarian bent. Yet, oddly, it seems they are still mulling over the most fundamental principle of libertarianism: self-ownership.

Once it is recognized that the fellow from the story, Gary Phebus, is a self-owner, the answer to Bailey’s initial question becomes blindingly obvious – a resounding yes. What would it mean to be a self-owner but be unable to use one’s body and its parts as one wished? Surely, any libertarian must recognize the right to commit suicide and the right to donate one’s organs after death, which is all this amounts to. Why the struggle?

…

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Back to Basics: Self-Ownership and Organ Donations Read Post »

Drinking and stage diving don’t mix

Nanny Statism

By Brian Martinez / August 5, 2010 / 1 Comment / 1 minute of reading

At least not according to Washington state booze-acrats:

In the middle of the Tripwires’ performance at the Sunset Tavern last October, guitarist Jim Sangster noticed his cocktail had gone missing. “I had a Makers Mark and a beer on a road case beside the stage; I turned around and they were gone.” Sangster’s drink had been confiscated by a representative of the Washington State Liquor Control Board. Sangster was in technical violation of a provisional rule, WAC 314-11-015, that forbids drinking by “any person performing services on a licensed premises for the benefit of the licensee.”

As nanny statists sink their hooks ever deeper into the still-twitching corpse of American individualism, their rules manifest themselves in increasingly ludicrous ways, with judicial commentary to match. Consider that last year, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the state’s smoking ban included on-stage actors, claiming that public health concerns trumped freedom of expression. The lone dissent opined that “character and plots would lack depth and expressive force without such effects as smoke hovering on stage or an actor’s poignant puff.” Hell, never mind mentioning property rights; now judges have to be theater critics, apparently.

Drinking and stage diving don’t mix Read Post »

A Government Program Which Works?

Business, Finance, Nanny Statism

By Michael Barnett / August 5, 2010 / 2 Comments / 2 minutes of reading

food stamps — Apparently 13.2% of you have some of these in your wallet.

Is it possible? Has free-market anarchist and Austrian School Economist Michael Barnett finally discovered a government program which appears to be achieving its stated goals? Yes, my friends, I think I actually may have done just that. Now look, I understand that correlation does not imply causation, but I think there’s a strong case to be made here. I’m talking, of course, about the multitude of state and federal outreach efforts over the last two years to spread awareness of and encourage participation in Food Stamps Programs. Record numbers of Americans are receiving food stamp assistance now, more than ever before. Illinois, Oregon, Florida, and Idaho are just four of many US states which have never had so many people dependent on government to feed them. I wanted to make a play on the words “superpower” and “soup lines” (souperlines? souperpower?) to describe America’s new position in the world, but my joke writers aren’t as good as Jay Leno’s.

soupline — The world's only souperpower? See, it just doesn't work.

Specifically, according to the US Department of Agriculture 40.8 million Americans are recipients of “supplemental nutrition assistance.” Subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April. Participation has set records for 18 straight months. Well, there’s an economy in recovery! I think a little perspective is in order.

Suppose we created a new country out of every recipient of government food assistance programs in the US and named it The Stiglitzian Commonwealth of Krugmania. This new Commonwealth would be tied with Kenya as the 32nd most populous country. It would have more citizens than (in no order) Argentina, Sudan, Poland, Iraq, Venezuela, and Malaysia, just to name a few. It would have twice or more as many citizens as Chile, Niger, Netherlands, Cameroon, Angola, Cambodia, and Kazakhstan just to name a handful of the more than 160 countries which would fall into this category. But what about America’s Neighbor-to-the North? The United States has 6.5 million more people relying on food stamps than Canada has people period. My first instinct is to call that hilarious, but as that comparison sinks in, it’s rather revolting. This must be the economic recovery I kept hearing about.

Don’t despair, people. Let’s not forget the silver lining I launched this post with: we may just have discovered a government program which achieves its stated goals. That’s something, I guess.

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

(Austrian) Economics, Nanny Statism, Vulgar Politics

By David C / July 14, 2010 / 3 minutes of reading

According to this Boston Globe article, How facts backfire, people are not persuaded by facts, and this does not bode well for the future of democracy as people’s perceptions (and voting decisions) are unaltered by “evidence”. In one experiment researchers ask people to guess how much the government spends on welfare and how much they should spend. One group is told the “correct” answer of 1% ahead of time, while the other one is not …

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Apparently some ideologues are unpersuaded by facts, but others manipulate them to justify their agendas. Looking at US Government Spending, lets find out what government welfare spending is …

If one excludes about $987,400,000,000.00 dollars in social security/retirement, and excludes another $1,046,600,000,000.00 dollars in education, and excludes another $1,090,200,000,000.00 dollars in health care expenses, and includes only federal spending leaving out about another $200,000,000,000.00 dollars in state spending. That leaves about $557,000,000,000.00 dollars in the welfare category, which is about 15% of total federal-only spending, and about 8.3% of total government spending including the states.

However, if one digs down into the sub-categories of the welfare category and excludes another $194,000,000,000.00 dollars in unemployment, and excludes another $77,000,000,000.00 dollars in housing, and excludes another $186,000,000,000.00 dollars in “social exclusion” (which sure looks like welfare, but lets give them the benefit of the doubt). That leaves about $99,000,000,000.00 in the “Family and Children” category. Which would be about 2.6% of federal-only spending, and about 1.5% of total government spending including the states, which in theory could be rounded down to 1%.

So in theory it could indeed be argued that the correct amount that government spends on welfare is 1%, but it could be better argued that facts, statistics, and semantics are being manipulated using a pointless definition of “welfare” to associate it with all entitlement spending in general and confound people who correctly and intuitively know we live in a world where entitlements have run amok.

The article is right about one thing. Some people (including the mainstream media) are not persuaded by facts, and the future does not bode well for democracy (not to be confused with liberty).

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