Hollering For Liberty

I love this guy (Penn Gillette - though Beck’s okay in my book, too). Great interview. I don’t really understand the hesitancy of Beck to support the rally. He is, after all, supporting many of the same causes every night on his show. A few crazy people shouldn’t stop him from putting his stamp of approval on the event that will hopefully serve as the major catalyst for the advancement of the cause of liberty in our time.

And you and I get to pay for it.

Ron Paul was on his game yesterday (Wednesday - 7/16).  He appeared first on C-SPAN where he confronted Fed chairman Ben Bernanke in the most stunning 6-minute indictment of the Federal Reserve using summarized Austrian economics.  At one point, he calls Bernanke and the Fed the biggest taxers in the nation — to his face!  Bernanke’s response?  He agrees!…in a round-about way.  Then he explains that all he can do is work toward aggregate price stability.  This little 7-minute segment is so laden with ideological overtones that it is hard to express its importance without diving into discussion about the difference between the monetarists (tempered Keynesians) and the Austrians when it comes to their views on the central bank.   Hopefully I can find the time to come back to this and discuss some of the theory behind the soundbites and the some of the implications of Bernanke’s reactions.  For now, here is the clip.

Then, he [Paul] goes on Kudlow & Company on CNBC, where nearly everyone expresses their agreement. I’m not going to post those but you can get to them from the Campaign for Liberty post here.
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Time Magazine is running an article titled ‘Libertarians: A (Not So) Lunatic Fringe’. While the article misrepresents libertarianism out of ignorance on a handful of occasions, it is great to see the movement getting some press from the mainstream media. Rather than produce a lot of unique thoughts on this subject, I’m going to link to the best write-up of the article that I’ve seen floating around the blogosphere. To the Western Standard blog you go!

For those of you who are relatively new to the libertarian movement (while I’ve considered myself a libertarian for a long time, I myself am new to the movement), hopefully someday soon I’ll be able to write something intelligent about the different sects of libertarianism that exist (as referenced in the Western Standard blog post)…for instance the differences between organizations like Reason and The Cato Institute versus those like LewRockwell.com (LRC) and The Mises Institute. For now, if you think you might have some small libertarian streak in you, go to any or all of them.

I’ve never thought about the classic 80’s movie Ghostbusters in this light, but it kinda makes sense. Guess it just goes to show how much your worldview can determine what you get out of your experiences.

Just for fun (and it is fun) go take the libertarian purity test at Bryan Caplan’s site. My results:

Your score is…
116

What Your Score Means
…
91-130 points: You have entered the heady realm of hard-core libertarianism. Now doesn’t that make you feel worse that you didn’t get a perfect score?

Yes, I do feel worse, but I just can’t bring myself to believe that the government is completely unnecessary. And to date I have not read / heard a good enough argument to abandon the idea that the government should provide services of rights protection (laws, courts, police) and certain infrastructure (roads). Although I am completely open to the idea of privatizing roads wherever it is feasible; I am just afraid mass privatization might not be practical. I admit that I could be very wrong here.

FYI, the scale goes up to 160.

Which school of economics do you agree with most? This quiz from the Mises Institute is a great way to see how you stack up to the economic schools of thought. 25 questions…4 points for the Austrian school answer, 2 for Chicago school, 1 for Keynesian / Neo-classical, socialists get nothing! It’s a little time-consuming, but just reading the questions and the answers is a learning experience in itself. To my embarrassment, I actually scored a 94, but I adjusted it because somehow I accidentally marked the wrong answer on the union question — yeah I know, but it happens (ask my wife). So I took the liberty of adjusting my score up 2 points to correct the error. I was surprised that I didn’t come away with 100% considering I just got done reading a handful of Rothbard books. Still, I’ll take a 96 at my stage in the learning process. Full disclosure, I answered the monetarist answers on the interest and monopoly questions…I would have answered the monopoly question in the Austrian fashion had I actually taken the time to read through the entire answer.

Make sure you look over the results. Not only does it tell you what school of thought each answer lines up with, but it gives you a reading from the Mises Institute that corresponds with the Austrian school’s answer.

Liberty Maven is featuring an article begging for the support of libertarians for the Barr campaign. They pose some pretty good arguments, my favorite of which is the answer to my sentiments — that Bob Barr is no Ron Paul.

No one is Ron Paul except Ron Paul. No politician has the unblemished 30+ year record fighting for liberty like him. It is unfair and unwise to measure every candidate with the Ron Paul yard stick. There is a plus side to Bob Barr not being another Ron Paul. Bob Barr is trusted by conservatives who would never have considered voting for Ron Paul. Bob Barr gives these voters an open window to climb through into the liberty house.

My apologies for the lack of updates in the past week and a half. I was on vacation in Mexico with my wife and some friends. Apparently, there is no public access to the Internet down there — who knew? But I’m back and I have a few things I feel are worth mentioning. Hopefully I’ll get the time in the next week to write out a few of the potential posts that are swimming around in my head.

This guy, Brian Singer, apparently spent about a year collecting satellite feeds that were not meant for public consumption. The result was compiled with some commentary and turned into ‘Spin’, a documentary about the media and politics behind the scenes. While it is nothing new to most that the media is quite biased and that our politicians are fed sound-bites from advisers, the footage here is pretty interesting…especially the part where Larry King informs Bill Clinton that Ted Turner is a big fan and would be willing to ‘work for’ him. What I wouldn’t give to find out if anything ever came of that offer! Although it hardly matters; whether the bias is planned or just inherent in the process, the result is still the same.

I would love to see one of these revolving around this election cycle!