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Well, folks, it’s been a fun ride. Or, more appropriately, a fun tea party.
The Sam Adams Alliance Tea Party blog is officially closing. However, don’t be sad—we’re launching a new and exciting web project that you’re going to want to get involved with.
It’s called Blogivists.com.
A blogivist is an online advocate of liberty and the principles of limited government—someone who isn’t content with simply saying something about the need for greater liberty, but someone who does something about it.
And Blogivists.com is a free blogging platform and online community of these very people.
We know there are plenty of other blogging platforms out there—but Blogivists.com is different. By signing up for a Blogivists blog, users will be joining an online community where they will benefit from increased readership, contests, prizes, events, and networking opportunities geared toward those involved in the liberty movement.
The Blogivists network is continually growing (there are already around 40 blogs)—and we hope you’ll join the fun, too.
(You can even continue reading the work of former Tea Party bloggers. Visit Nic, Katie, Sarah, Drew, Anastasia, Christina, and John over at Blogivists.com!)
To quote Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, “and the hits just keep on coming.” Hits of voter fraud, that is. Three separate cases in
In
In
Am I the only one slightly concerned by the adeptness of these state reps, not to mention their staff members, in signature forging? If we don’t get some accountability in government, be it at the local, state or federal level, we’re only going to continue having skewed elections and disenfranchised voters.
The Ohio presidential primary is on Tuesday, and it promises to carry on the illustrious tradition of Ohio elections: making a big mess.
Apparently, an Ohio law allows for Republicans and Independents to vote on a Democrat ballot, while maintaining a closed primary system. Which raises the question—should this sort of thing be allowed, or is it acceptable to change parties for the upcoming primary? And how can we be sure that this entirely excludes open primary voting behavior?
This is the state where, last May, a man was brought to trial for voting twice in the November 2006 elections in different counties. Mere coincidence? As C.S. Lewis once said, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”
In California, child protection services recently took Nate Tseglin, a 17-year-old autistic boy, out of his home after a teacher filed a complaint about the arm braces he wore to keep him from scratching himself (such behavior is not uncommon among autistics). The California government forcibly removed Nate from his home and he is currently institutionalized at a hospital, labeled a danger to himself and others.
But that is not the most frightening part of the story. The most frightening part is that the caseworkers told the Tseglins, who are Russian-Jewish immigrants, that they had “the wrong set of beliefs” and for that their son should be removed from their care.
This is an extremely scary example of the government intervening where it has no business whatsoever. The Tseglins say they have provided a home for their son, have sought therapy for his autism, and have taken measures to see that he does not harm himself. If all of this is true, the state had no right to take Nate from them. And they absolutely had no right to cite the Tseglins’ religious beliefs as cause to remove Nate from his home. Ilya and Riva emigrated from Russia to escape an oppressive government. They should not have to experience it in America of all places. Happenings like this represent the first steps on the road to totalitarianism, and must be resisted by free people everywhere.
A public good is an economic commodity most efficiently provided by the government. Public goods include things like national defense and border control, the benefits of which cannot be withheld from any single consumer. That means these services are rarely marketable commodities.
But the nature of public goods is debatable. Is government the most efficient entity for providing health care, or education? Experiences in Canada and the United States (respectively) suggest it may not be.
Things get fun when one starts to consider services the government nearly always supplies. Should the government be in charge of snowplowing?
Residents of Michigan know that local Road Commissions often can’t keep up with the deep snows blustering off Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron. And even when those big orange trucks clear the main highways, time constraints force them to ignore the still impassable back roads.
Perhaps the market is the answer. Ottawa County, near Grand Rapids, is expanding a contract with Countryside Snowplowing, which will now be responsible for clearing 192.5 miles of roads. It allows the county to reduce its unionized work force, and avoid laying off employees during the summer. They also expect Countryside will clear of the back roads quicker, happy news for those a few miles outside of town.
There’s one “public” good sent back to the public markets. What’s next?
Since 1995 Mary Jane Wolf has told the Avon School Board that she does not want to sell them the land she has lived on for almost all of her life. Unfortunately, as we know all too well, politicians are often not really that concerned about what citizens want. The board is currently moving forward with eminent domain proceedings to take most of Mary Jane's land for a new middle school.
Wolf, who was widowed in 2005 and diagnosed with cancer shortly after, has faced increasingly aggressive attempts by district officials to buy 25 of the 30 acres she lives on. Though she would get to keep her home she would be forced to give up most of what is left of land that has been in her family for generations.
As with so many of the other victims of eminent domain, all that Mary Jane wants is to be left alone on the property that she rightfully owns. The use of eminent domain in cases like this show the politicians in favor of such takings to have a complete disrespect for the property rights of citizens, one of the most fundamental rights we have. If politicians are unable to respect the peoples' right to trade their property at their own discretion, then it is unlikely they will respect many of the peoples' other rights.
A republic cannot long function when those who are elected to represent the people have no respect for the very rights they are elected to defend.
Last week, I posted a column by Brad Flory about legislative shenanigans in Michigan. It’s so good, it’s worth bringing up again. Here’s an excerpt from the second page of the article:
Committee members kept asking a spectator in the room for his opinions. The spectator gave advice freely, so I assumed he was a Department of Education bigwig. After the meeting, I approached the man and learned he was a lobbyist. My opinion of lobbyists is higher than average but even I was stunned to see politicians make so little effort to hide the fact lobbyists often write laws.
Michigan has many effective and dedicated lawmakers. But it’s clear that not everyone knows what they’re about.
Strong lobbyist influence in Michigan is only increasing. The Associated Press reported last week legislative lobbying spending is up six percent in the last year, to $32.1 million. It’s notable that most of these are multi-client firms—consolidated agencies roaming the halls of the Capitol like mercenaries, rather than citizens or corporations advancing their own interests.
There’s a space, and perhaps a need, for various industries to band together and bandy legislators for support. But it’s important that individual citizens and businesses are aware of and active in their government. Only then can we guarantee that writing laws is not some circular activity, built to please those with the power and those with the influence.
When I took microeconomics my sophomore year in college, the professor asserted that teachers make bad economists because they live in a world where the concept of limited resources doesn’t exist. The Rhode Island public school system is certainly giving credibility to that theory.
That concept of limited resources is rearing its ugly head in Rhode Island. In protest to prospective budget cuts, public school teachers are acting like the children they instruct every day: refusing to do anything beyond show up and teach for six hours until the state forks over the money. But some in the state legislature are fighting back by pushing through a constitutional amendment that would financially penalize striking teachers.
The people of Rhode Island do not deserve to be gaffed out of more of their money because the public schools want it. The Rhode Island State Legislature deserves credit for not folding up like a cheap two-dollar suitcase in the face of the educational establishment and defending citizens’ right to their income.
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Welcome to beautiful
Three years after an initial probe into the 2004 voting problems in
The governor of
The report attributes blame to poor record keeping and error-prone poll workers. Keep in mind this is the state where, back in January, a Milwaukee man was sentenced with a felony charge for voting while still on probation from a previous felony charge. Such mix-ups would happen less often if states like
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A big part of my day consists of reading and scanning news items and policy research from all over the country and around the world. Far more often than I would like, I come across a report of something that sounds like it came from the pages of one of my favorite novels, George Orwell's 1984. Plans by Kansas City, KS police to install cameras to record citizens on city streets is one of those reports.
In 2008, we are not too far from that: in many cities all across the country we are recorded nearly everywhere we go by various private and public surveillance systems. In addition to the cameras in office and apartment buildings, gas stations, parking lots, shopping malls, and virtually every other type of private establishment, there is now a growing number of government cameras that monitor activities on public streets. Kansas City is merely following a trend set by New York, Washington, Chicago and other cities.
As one Kansas City official says, "It is just a tool that law enforcement can use to not only locate and identify criminals, but it is the wave of the future." He is right, it is the wave of the future; unfortunately, like the world portrayed in 1984, that future might not be so bright. The cameras are always put in place in the name of public safety and security, but are we really so unsafe as to need our moves monitored by the government? Does such monitoring make us safer or perhaps less safe? One thing is for sure: police monitoring of individual citizens in public space can only be a threat to liberty, not an aid to it.
