Happy Halloween!

I completely disagree with the anti-consumerist overtones, her self-admitted progressivism, and the egalitarian critique of home schooling but the critique of public schools is downright inspiring.

@ 7:00 Peter Schiff reviews his taxes, explains how he’s paying 50% of his income in taxes

federal 35%
Connecticut 6.5%
Medicare 5 %
Property, Social Security, Sales, Corporate Taxes
Time spent in compliance and fees

one other reason for the naked photo machines: ex-officials like Michael Chertoff and Rudy Giuliani make millions selling them to the TSA.

Many airports still only have one scanner per terminal, so it is quite easy to make sure you get in one of the screening lines that only directs the cattle through metal detectors. Today, I did just that, scooting over to a different screening line at Charlotte Douglas International. A young gentleman ahead of me, who was traveling with a violin, also tried the same tactic. A blue-shirt called him out of the line and tried directing him to the backscatter xray machine, at which point he “opted out.” The blue-shirt made the typical fuss explaining to the man that his choice would mean that he would be subject to a pat down and would likely be delayed. He stood his ground.

As I approached him as I was headed for the metal detector, I congratulated the violinist for standing his ground. This apparently irked the bureaucrat in blue, and she directed me to the porno scanner line myself. Apparently my comment to the violinist showed disrespect for the security apparatus, an offense that the blue-shirt could not abide. She attempted to exert control and make an example of me for speaking up. Of course, I opted out as well, and she launched into her spiel.

I’ve read enough on LRC and elsewhere to know that above all else, we commons must be polite to our oppressors, lest they decide to subject us to greater humiliation and control. When she completed her spiel, and had me stand aside to wait for the male thug, I told her that my family came from Germany after WWII, and that they had seen similar behavior in the 1930s. A police state starts by restricting peoples’ rights to freely travel. The brown shirts in Germany may have thought they were being patriotic and protecting the homeland, too. She did not like the direction my conversation was going and asked if I wanted to tell this to her supervisor, or would I stop talking. I replied that I was just making conversation, was I not allowed to talk to her? After that she avoided eye contact with me as she turned to direct other sheeple towards their irradiation treatment.

She was much relieved when the male patter-down came to escort me to the inspection area. He asked if I wanted to be patted down in private, but I told him I preferred to have witnesses when I was subjected to a search against my will. He asked if I was rejecting the search as he reached for his walkie-talkie to call in his supervisor. I told him I needed to get to L.A., so I didn’t have any choice but to submit to his unconstitutional search. He didn’t like this, and I saw him beckon some of his comrades closer to be ready for trouble. As he proceeded to make himself familiar with my person, I asked him what I was suspected of. He said he was “protecting the flying public.” I told him that my understanding was that the constitution forbade searches of people unless they were suspected of a crime. His response was to point out a sign that said all persons are subject to search. “So the sign overrides the constitution?” I asked. He clammed up. No response to that one. . . .

I’m not sure there’s much hope for the flame of liberty in the U.S. Still, I wasn’t alone. There was the violinist. (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

See Also: A security checkpoint supervisor at Newark Liberty International Airport has been charged with stealing from travelers and accepting bribes from a co-worker who allegedly stole money from passengers during screenings, prosecutors said.

Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts

So the agitation for greater liberty is nothing but the “movement of the moment.” It’ll pass, just like Fresca and drive-in theaters.

But when it comes to ideology, it [the Tea Party] has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas.

It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon.

Um. Are you saying we should only read popular texts by living writers?

All told, the canon argues for a vision of the country where government’s role is to protect private property — against taxes as much as against thieves. Where religion plays a bigger role in public life. Where any public safety net is unconstitutional. And where the way back to prosperity is for markets to be left free from regulation.

Yes. No. Mostly. Yes.

Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, asserted that the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration forced BP to set up to pay damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill circumvented “the rule of law,” Hayek’s term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of “personal ends and desires.”

This is a distortion to discredit the theory in the above mentioned books. Most libertarians/Austrian economists (Lew Rockwell) were against Obama’s interference in the BP disaster, but, and this what the NY Times neglects, advocated a 100% liability instead of the artificial cap which Obama placed on the company’s liability.

(Read more from nytimes.com)

Excerpted from a great Mises Daily article by Lew Rockwell:

The trends are gleaned from US Census data, which provide a look at how economic downturns can devastate a society, and offer a glimpse into a theme that the Austrian tradition has long emphasized. Economics isn’t just about trade statistics, retail sales, or GDP. It is the very pith of life.

What the Census data indicate is that our mobility has been drastically curtailed from what it was a few years ago. The number of people who have not moved from one home to another, from one community to another, has risen substantially. . . .

Another trend is the delay in marriage. For the first time since the data have been tracked, the share of women 18 and older who are married fell below 50 percent. The share of the population age 25 to 34 that is unmarried jumped from 34.5 percent in 2000 to 46.3 percent nine years later. This is a massive social trend, dictated by economic realities. . . .

We’ve also seen a jump in the number of people working from home, which also makes sense given the tighter labor markets and growing resistance to hiring. Another option besides working at home is one that Europeans know very well: going back to school. This trend has taken hold in the United States in the last two years. . . .

The tendency to plunge back into school is also dictated by economic realities. We are now in the third straight year of college graduating classes whose earnings potential is far less than they had expected during their years in school. During these years, students accumulated six-figure debts that they figured they could pay off in a reasonable time with their high incomes. Those incomes have not appeared. So rather than accepting pay at the prevailing rate, they have reenrolled in school to defer having to service the loan.

We might as well bring up the striking trend of young people moving back in with their parents after a period of living by themselves. This phenomenon has given rise to the phrase Boomerang Generation. In 2000, some 17 percent of Americans age 20 to 29 lived at home. Today, some estimates put that figure at 34 percent. And this compares to 1960, when only 9 percent of people in this age group lived with their parents. . . .

Tragically, labor-force participation among American youth age 16 to 24 continues to fall. Most recently, it fell to 60.5 percent in July 2010, which is the lowest July ever recorded. Before 20 years ago, the typical labor force participation rate ranged between 81 and 86 percent. In other words, four out of five kids in this age group gained hugely valuable experience for a lifetime of work. Now only three out of five kids do. The most dramatic drops we’ve seen in these figures have been in the past three years. . . .

This is a striking fact of our times, one made even more devastating as we look at the economic fundamentals such as the unpayable public debt and the out-of-control spending in Washington and the states that continues to consume vast amounts of private capital.

However, if we take a longer-term look, we can see that these trends date back decades, with the turning point being the severing of the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971. This is the event that set up the explosion of government growth, of credit addiction across the population, of massive malinvestment in housing and many other sectors, of the gutting of American savings, and, most seriously, of the loss of freedom to the national-security state. . . .

Having established the trend lines, let us now speak of cause and effect. In every case, we can easily trace these trends to economic realities, which in turn are profoundly affected by government policy trends and monetary policy in particular. Monetary policy is truly the hidden hand behind the strangulation of the American dream. It is the secret force at work that erodes our living standards, funds the growth of the leviathan state, and makes every sector of economic life dependent on rising debt.

But there are other factors at work here, too. Antitrust law hobbles business as never before. Taxes drain productivity from corporations, small businesses, and households. Protectionism keeps the best products at the best prices out of the hands of consumers. Edicts issued by a thousand bureaucracies keep American enterprise constantly guessing about the legal climate. Patent mania has created a minefield for innovation in every sector from medicine to software. Imperial wars have drained away capital and labor resources from the private sector.

The leviathan state is the great enemy of American prosperity, the monster that devours wealth. Every bit of economic growth that we experience is due not to the presence of this leviathan, but to the ingenuity of American enterprise in getting around the barriers. . . .

you can count me among the skeptics that the Tea Party is going to achieve anything like a restoration of liberty. It isn’t clear that many of these activists really understand that ending despotism will require a gutting not only of the current crop of state managers, but the entire apparatus of state management itself. That means ending all forms of government intervention, domestic and international.

It is not enough to cut back or even end the welfare state; the imperial warfare state must also be dismantled. That means taking apart the national-security apparatus as surely as we end the economic intervention in domestic life. To oppose one while supporting the other — and this is the very essence of the Republican Pledge to America — is self-defeating if not deliberately deceitful. We know the results of this kind of intellectual incoherence because we’ve seen it so many times before.

Tea Partyers proclaim themselves to be against socialism, but reflect on the often-overlooked forms that socialism takes in our time. The first type is corporate socialism that puts large banks and corporations in the driver’s seat of public policy, leading to bailouts for the most well-heeled firms out there. In an effort to keep home values from falling and to keep American automotive companies from going belly up, the whole of the American mortgage market is socialized and American car manufacturing put on the public dole.

A second type of American socialism comes in the form of a gargantuan military-industrial complex that plows through more than a trillion taxpayer dollars each year to sustain the American empire around the world — and be enriched, of course.

Yet a third type is that which provides social security and medical benefits for older Americans, people who believe that because they have paid into these systems their entire lives, they are entitled to receive back as much as possible.

These three systems of socialism are a main cause of the American bankruptcy. They are absolutely unsustainable. A consistent application of the principle of liberty must take aim at these programs, across the board, with no exceptions. . . .

the current revolutionary atmosphere in political life will be subverted by the political machinery of Washington. The radical sentiments you heard during the primaries are already being changed to please the establishment. . . .

If this next round follows suit, the Republican elite will benefit from the energy and enthusiasm of naive activists but will trim and curb the antigovernment agenda in the interest of “responsible governing.” The most we can hope for is a wonderful gridlock.

But the next question becomes, What exactly are we waiting for, and how do we bring it about?

. . . . In this fight, I believe we are working with the most powerful tool of all, one that is stronger and more effective than all the armies, guns, and drones in the world. In the end, no government can rule without at least the passive consent of the people. This is why government works so hard at the manufacturing of ideologies to justify what it is doing to us. Our job is to counter this with education of a different sort, one that debunks the rationales behind despotism and then explains the meaning of liberty.

See also: wtfcnn.com

The vaccine industry has now decided that injecting senior citizens with the “standard” vaccine dose just isn’t working. (Gee, really?) So now they’ve decided the way to make it work better is to offer a quadruple viral potency vaccine that packs 400% more viral fragments into one toxic shot.

The target for this quadruple vaccine injection? Senior citizens, of course — the very people most likely to suffer the most serious side effects from a vaccine overdose. The FDA reportedly approved the new vaccine in April even though no scientific tests have ever been done to show it reduces flu symptoms. Then again, since when did vaccines have anything to do with real science in the first place?

Why do people need a quadruple vaccine all of a sudden?

What’s especially entertaining about all this is that the FDA’s approval of this quadruple potency vaccine is a blatant admission that single-dose vaccines just don’t work! Obviously, if the single-dose vaccine was working as advertised, then it would be 100% effective and there would be no need for a double, triple or quadruple-dose vaccine. But all of a sudden, now that the quadruple-dose vaccine is available, the regular single-dose vaccine “isn’t good enough.”

So all that propaganda about “get a flu shot and you won’t get the flu” just turns out to be marketing quackery, because what you really need is a quadruple shot now! Forget the single dose. It’s no longer strong enough for you. (Read more from naturalnews.com)

Great anecdotes in this discussion:

“Nothing good comes out of Congress.”