Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool. ]]> http://www.lpct.org/2012/01/18/the-lpct-2012-presidential-poll/feed/ 1 http://www.lpct.org/2012/01/18/delegates-and-convention-update/ http://www.lpct.org/2012/01/18/delegates-and-convention-update/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:48:59 +0000 Dan http://www.lpct.org/?p=553 At tonight’s SCC meeting, we’ve decided to vet and select delegates

for the national convention during February and March. The final

delegate selections per Article III, Section 1 of our bylaws will occur

by selection of the SCC in March.

Our convention is tentatively scheduled for April 1st, but we’re looking

for a date that works for most of the presidential candidates Saturday, April 7th.

If you have any questions, drop us a line and let us know.

In Liberty,

Dan Reale

Chair, LPCT

Candidate for Congress, CD-2

dan.reale@lpct.org

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A supposed Chinese curse says may you live in interesting times. Well, the 21st century so far has not disappointed with depressed economies, wars overseas, and authoritarianism and cronyism at home.

But, we can make these curses into blessings. Already there has been stiff shifts in public opinion and conventional wisdom and massive grassroots movements to activism. Governments surely govern by the consent of the governed, and the governed lately are expressing their disapproval en masse.

Tax resistance increased early in the century by individuals unwilling to support U.S. government wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, believing them to be immoral actions. These military interventions, the government argues, are in response to the massacre innocents suffered on 9-11 (itself a response to U.S. government military activities over several decades) and the war on terrorists that the government claims encompasses a global battlefield

But, there are many skeptical of the government’s motives, the righteousness of these aggressions, and the alleged benefits to our security, our troops and to the unfortunate individuals and communities overseas we harm.

This militarism and the extension of human rights infringements on individuals’ privacy and guarantees of due process by The PATRIOT, Military Commissions, and Real ID acts, along with invasive Transportation Security Administration body searches and the discovery of U.S. secret prisons and torture programs lead many to anti-war and pro-civil liberty protests.

The Ron Paul revolution/presidential campaign in 2007-08 enlightened many to the universal benefits of greater peace and prosperity that only liberty and non-intervention allows, exposing millions to the Austrian School of Economics’ business cycle theory and how the inflationary practices of central banks benefit certain bankers, impoverish the rest of us, and allow for the warring that harms so many. Paul’s supporters hit the streets and the Internet with his message.

It was the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the trillions of taxpayer dollars handed out to private financial institutions, essentially the socializing of private losses, the economic recession caused by Federal Reserve Bank and U.S. Congress interventionist policies that created moral hazards and perverse incentives on Wall Street, and the Fed’s quantitative easing that rapidly expanded tea party and tax day rallies. The passing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, legislation seemingly written for the benefit of health insurance companies rather than patients, further inflamed the movement.

Currently at Occupy Wall Street (and elsewhere) rallies, individuals are rightly protesting other types of unjust crony capitalism, that is the collusion between private business and the government, and other such corruption. It’s true that many private players receive from government unfair advantage.

Civil disobedient Mohandas Gandhi said, “If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.” But, historically and currently, dissenters are bullied, silenced, and purposefully mischaracterized impulsively by statists who tend to be intolerant of resistance. Since most public policies are coercive, it’s right they be debated and for dissenters and victims to voice objections. And, may they be indefatigable, regardless of how they are treated.

There are four issues so basic, universal, and important to human wellness, fairness, peace and prosperity that most individuals will agree upon and on which we ought to unite to effect positive change – ending government wars, protecting human rights to due process and against unreasonable searches and seizures, ending corporate subsidies and similar crony capitalism, and auditing, if not ending, the Fed. These are the positions promoted for so many decades by independents, Libertarians, Greens, constitutionalists, and even a few politicians, like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader and Gary Johnson.

United on these principles we can achieve terrific benefits for mankind. Imagine it. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” I hope today you’ll join us.

It’s often said that if someone doesn’t like something the government is doing, he or she should convince enough people to change it.  Is this our idea for community, granting government the power to push through special interest will and expect that if innocent individuals want not be obstructed or burdened, they need toil and spend their resources to try to persuade others and gain power within the government to stop the intrusions on their human rights?  This isn’t the blueprint for a harmonious society. It usually has a way of turning would be cooperative participants into adversaries and is a terrible waste of human creativity and capital.

Do we want our rights and property always at the whim of the voting majority and those best able to curry government’s favor or rather a government that protects every individual equally? Some wrongly believe that perceived positive ends justify and are achievable by aggressive means.  They accept infringements on innocent individuals as an acceptable trade-off, proceeding with the temerity to impose their preferences on and at a cost to others.

Many policies are illegitimate uses of force.  As our government violently imposes democracy onto overseas communities, appreciate that individuals under such arrangements often lose. Consider black individuals under the Fugitive Slave Act and the Jim Crow South, dispossessed Native Americans, women prior to suffrage, draftees under military conscription, Germans under the democratically-elected Nazi Party, alcohol-consumers under prohibition, ill patients forbidden therapies, gays denied equal legal marriage recognitions, raw milk drinkers, homeowners blocked by zoning laws from growing gardens. Hair-braiders, eyebrow-threaders, home decorators, yoga instructors, coffin makers are some of the many would-be entrepreneurs boxed-out by regulatory barriers erected by “captured” regulators and legislators influenced by those in the industry maneuvering for competitive advantage and to limit others’ entry.  What mass of citizens is banning together for their cause?  The costs of these regulations to taxpayers and private actors in the economy is enormous.  Such interventions limit our choices, protect cartels, increase prices, and decrease quality and safety, diminishing our qualities of life.

Diffuse costs and concentrated benefits is when the cost of a given policy to each individual is much smaller than the benefit to an enriched industry, corporation, or special interest group.  It is not worth the effort and expense to individuals to form an organization and spend for lobbyists and advertisements, because their sugar costs are $12 more each year, to go up against sugar producers defending their protective sugar tariff.  There are thousands of unfair policies that together compose a substantial burden.  Other interventions externalize costs, losses, and risks, socializing private costs.  Think taxpayer-provided bank bailouts and caps on BP’s liabilities.

Let’s revoke our consent for intrusions on individuals.  In karmic fashion, we are all harmed when we initiate force. Non-coercive, voluntary cooperation and community reward best.