reason: Bailouts & Bull

Here is a link to the Reason Foundation's Bailouts and Bull:

Link to Bailouts and Bull

Comments

[Trailblazer]

[this is good] Hi Zak,

Saw the show. "Scratch Beginnings" should be mandatory reading in every Junior  High school. Now that's the American way . . . for too long we have pampered kids into thinking that mom and dad will always be there to pay the freight for them. Now mom and dad are in foreclosure, facing bankruptcy and eating in the local soup kitchen. 

[Zak Klemmer, ACS, ALB]

In reality it's the Fed's fault for mismanaging money and credit. Second would be Congress dating back years for spending beyond America's means; while the President bears some responsibility the ways and means is directly in the Congress of the United States!

[JudgeBob]

Medical Marijuana is fast becoming one of those issues moving me toward Libertarianism.  Okay, conservatives fought it, but now that the states are making it legal its entirely wrong to go after the marketers and leave the state and city authorities exempt from consequences.

On everything but the border security, I am in agreement with these guys' arguments.  On Border Security we should be expending huge amounts of our resources to ensure people are finding it more difficult to come here than to go through proper channels.  On proper channels, privatize it.  Its incredibly bureaucratic and laden down with regulatory BS.  My ex-wife had to go through that bureaucracy from England.  That was with my help and via our marriage.  What a nightmare.

[Zak Klemmer, ACS, ALB]

My son-in-law is from the Isle of Man, I sponsored him so he could marry my daughter. It is an endless shake down by the INS for more fees to keep his green card.

[JudgeBob]

He should be going for permanent resident alien.  This means he no longer has to do the green card thing.  Better yet, if he went for citizenship, all the BS would come to an end.  If its necessary to give up his English citizenship and he does not want to do that, permanent resident is the next best thing.  Maybe things have changed in the 15 years since my ex went through all that.

[Paleo]

re: immigration

A bit of clarification is in order: In a genuinely "libertarian" world, all property would be privately owned. This includes roads, parks, schools, and so forth. All private property owners would regain their right to form various (voluntary, mutually beneficial) covenantal relationships with each other. They could be as restrictive or non-restrictive as they like. And the personal liberty to discriminate as one sees fit would be fully restored, since all civil rights and affirmative action programs would be eliminated. Clearly, in such a world, there is no right to trespass. A man can only enter my house if he gets my invitation to do so; otherwise, he would be a trespasser. I may also put certain conditional rules on the person who enters my property. Hence, all immigrants would have to be invited (or receive the "OK" to) by the respected property owners to enter said property. In distinct contrast with today, men would accordingly have full control and freedom over who could and could not immigrate or travel into and onto their roads, private neighborhoods and towns. With that understanding, it seems fairly apparent that a total free-for-all of immigration would not be present in a libertarian society. That can only be the outcome of the central government running public property and controlling private property owners' (and their voluntary associations') right to discriminate. There would be no, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts it, forced integration or forced exclusion. In addition, there would exist no outside (statist) subsidization of immigration through various State programs (which, to note parenthetically, has included, e.g., a large chunk of immigrants coming to the U.S. because of the government-created bubble in housing).

Now when certain conservatives argue that only "illegal" immigration is a problem, it seems to me, they are muddled. Tomorrow government may just declare all immigrants, de jure, "legal." Ergo, for most men the immigration question goes beyond this specific consideration. (Websites, such as, VDare.com give many good reasons to think that today's mass immigration is not such a wonderful thing, notwithstanding politically correct dogmas.)

To loop back to libertarianism and what should be done in our current statist world (which is debatable among libertarians), one interesting essay to read would be "Liberty and Immigration" by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Murray N. Rothbard wrote about the subject in "Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State." "A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders" by N. Stephan Kinsella is also quite good. Finally, Hoppe's "The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration" (which is enlarged in his Democracy book) is likewise recommended.

***

P.S. Mises.org has an excellent resource on the economic crisis. Woods's new book, Meltdown, by the way, I highly recommend.

[Lexann]

Thanks for the link, Zak.  I watched & recorded the 20/20 special the night it was on, I always love John Stossel.  He's

really

a no BS kinda guy!  Great to have the link, too!

[Lexann]

By the way, I love your new tag line "Land of Ali Obama and the 535 thieves"!  Ha!

[Zak Klemmer, ACS, ALB]

Sometimes I crack myself up. ;)

[Zak Klemmer, ACS, ALB]

If I wasn't born here I don't think that I would become an American citizen- I'd rather be Manx born like my son-in-law. The stupid Republicans could not get rid of LBJ's "Great Society" [sic] and now we have Obama's socialist democracy.

[Zak Klemmer, ACS, ALB]

Open sesame! ;)