Hawaii Liberty Chronicles

Reason.tv’s Michael C. Moynihan talks about the long history of corruption in Chicago politics and the current troubles of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich with Terry Michael, former press spokesman for the Illinois House Democrats and former press secretary for Sen. Paul Simon, and Mike Flynn, Director of Government Affairs at the Reason Foundation.

By Ken Schoolland

I’m not much of a risk taker. But I am in awe of those who are. I’m impressed by my brother. For years he has built a business selling parts to airline companies. He always seems to be at risk of losing everything whenever the airline industry is in trouble. I’m impressed both with his abilities and his nerve.

I’m also in awe of mountain climbers, daredevil surfers, and snowboarders. Their lives seem always at risk. I don’t have the nerve to do it myself, but I love watching their stunts. I delight that there are risk taking cameramen who capture the stunts on film.

It would never occur to me to try to stop them from taking risks. When they risk their own lives, they know that they will take the glory or the gore all to themselves.

I’m not a gambler either. I don’t take risks on games of chance. It may not take the same kind of risk as mountain climbing to gamble, but surely it is something everyone can do easily if they have the nerve. Some will claim that street smarts or savvy are helpful, depending on the person and the game.

Violent Risk Avoidance?

I wonder. What if my neighbor wanted to play a game of chance at his home, at a party or at some casino? Would I let him? Or would I go over to his home and threaten to harm him or threaten to put him in a cage if he dared to take risks that I wouldn’t take? No way.

I don’t do this with risk takers in business. I don’t do this with risk takers on mountain cliffs or ocean waves. So why should I treat the garden variety of risk takers any differently?

If I wouldn’t personally threaten my neighbor to stop him from taking risks, then would it be okay to ask a politician to do this for me? No. Asking a politician to do something is the same. If I don’t have a right to do something myself, then I don’t have the right to ask a politician to do the dirty work for me.

I understand that some people just aren’t good at judging risk. Some people risk too much or too often and they get burned. Some businesses fail. Some mountain climbers fall to their deaths. Some gamblers go deep into debt. So should risk taking be forbidden to everyone because some people are poor judges of risk?

No. Risk takers learn as much from their successes as from their losses. Risk is part of the rush and they usually wise up. Those who don’t wise up should take the full responsibility for their losses. Often they don’t. They ask politicians to soften the blow of their losses.

Businessmen want bailouts. Climbers and surfers want rescue squads. And unsuccessful casino junkies want handouts. The rescue is expected to come from risk averse taxpayers. Thus, the taxpayers’ cushion against poor judgment makes it easier for risk takers to use poor judgment the next time around. Then taxpayers clamor for politicians to prohibit all risk taking.

It seems to me that risk takers should absorb the costs of their own risk. How else to become better judges of risk in the future? For risk takers who find this too risky, there is always insurance. What a great business that is. People who are actually in the business of taking on other people’s risk — for a price, of course. And why not. Unlike the tax system, it’s voluntary.

Insurance and Charity

A businessman can buy insurance of all kinds from other willing businessmen. Climbers and surfers might buy rescue insurance if it wasn’t offered to them for free by the politicians. But what about the chronic gambler? It is sad and tragic that some people suffer continual losses. And I certainly believe in voluntary help when it is inspired by humanitarian or religious concern.

But threats of violence against risk takers and taxpayers is no substitute for the lessons of personal responsibility. The very threat of violence is immoral as well, whether practiced by me acting alone or by me through some politician.

And who is this politician who presumes to set the moral standards for us all? I’ve seen surveys of public trust in politicians. These surveys conclude that politicians are trusted less than people in virtually any other profession. Of nearly 20 occupational categories, there were two professions that ranked lower than that of politicians.

I hesitate to mention those other two professions, however, for people in those categories would be outraged at such a comparison. Those other two professions never use force against people the way politicians do.

Every election year we wonder which politicians to select. Wondering if they will be more trustworthy and finally keep their campaign promises. Now that is a gamble I wish we could avoid.

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much.  Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.

~ Pope Benedict XVI

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.

~Thomas Sowell

“Well, you still have a right to complain,” I conceded, feeling caught in a little white lie, “but you wouldn’t be justified in complaining about those who are elected if you didn’t participate in the selection process.”

I felt noble. Surely she would now see the importance of voting. But she wasn’t convinced. She tested me saying, “And if I vote for the winner, could I still complain afterward?”

~Ken Schoolland & Kenli Schoolland, Get Out the Daughter Vote

Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.

~President Andrew Jackson, 1832

Under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the federal government will be authorized to purchase these assets from banks and other financial institutions, which will help free them to resume lending to businesses and consumers. I know many Americans are worried about the cost of the bill, and I understand their concern. This bill commits up to 700 billion taxpayer dollars, because a large amount of money is necessary to have an impact on our financial system.

~ President George W. Bush, 2008

By Ken Schoolland

Following the McCain/Obama Presidential debates, Hawaii Pacific University hosted students who wanted to watch. Afterward, “both” presidential candidates had been heard and journalists wanted to know which of the two were favored by the students.

No one seemed even the slightest bit curious why there were only two candidates on the platform. Perhaps there were only two candidates because alternative parties have been roughed up so badly. Take the 2004 election for instance.

BOTH OTHER PARTIES

Michael Badnarik and David Cobb, respective presidential candidates for the Libertarian Party and the Green Party, were both arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted, and jailed on October 8, 2004 while the presidential debate of the Democrat and Republican was being broadcast nationally from St. Louis.

These arrests took place when Badnarik attempted to serve the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) with a court order from an Arizona Superior Court judge. The Arizona judge had ordered the CPD to prove that a debate scheduled in Arizona for October 13 did not constitute special treatment for Democrats and Republicans.

Despite legal action, the debate in Arizona proceeded without interruption. Badnarik protested the expenditure of $2.5 million of tax funds for this event by public institutions, Arizona State University and the City of Tempe.

Badnarik’s lawyer argued that these expenditures constituted an illegal, partisan campaign contribution of taxpayer funds because they excluded officially recognized candidates who appear on the Arizona ballot, as they did on ballots all across the country.

http://badnarik.org/supporters/blog/2004/10/08/michael-badnarik-arrested/ and http://www.lp.org/lpnews/0411/arrest.html

CAN’T STAND UP TO WHOM?

The irony couldn’t be more crisp. We had George Bush and John Kerry boldly claiming that they were the ones to stand up to terrorists and Al Qaeda in order to bring democracy to the Middle East. But these same guys were unwilling to stand up to legitimate challengers in a public debate.

Bush and Kerry even signed a pact with the CPD that they would not be on the same platform with any other party during the election season. McCain and Obama did the same thing this year to freeze out “confusing competition.”

Was it too confusing to have more than two candidates? Democrats and Republicans didn’t think so during the primary season when they had as many as nine Democratic or nine Republican candidates on the same platform last year.

Thus, Democrats and Republicans have engineered a system of control over public debate in America that is so thorough that their opponents are arrested, the media doesn’t even report it, and few, if any, in the audience question it. How many people even know there are alternative parties, much less the names of their candidates until they walk into the voter’s booth on election day?

Is this a model of democracy for other nations?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE VOTERS GONE?

With 80% voter turnout in Afghanistan, it is somewhat embarrassing to US officials that voter turnout in America is so low. Only half the population registers to vote and only half of the registered voters show up at the polls on election day.

Non-voters are accused of being apathetic. But this misses the point. Among these non-voters are highly concerned, patriotic, and intellectual citizens who have become cynical about the rigging of the American political system.

Every year I survey hundreds of university students asking:
1)    Do you believe the campaign promises of politicians? Amidst laughter, the overwhelming answer is, “No.”
2)    Who is more likely to be elected, an honest politician or a dishonest politician? Still chuckling, the overwhelming answer is, “The dishonest politician.”
3)    Do politicians have higher, lower, or the same moral standards as you have? Solemnly, the overwhelming answer is, “Lower.”

Try it sometime. It’s scary.

The problem of low voter turnout in America is that people don’t trust politicians. If the public doesn’t trust the messenger, they won’t buy the product. “Why should I bother to vote?” people say. “Politicians will do whatever they want to do after the election anyway.”

A CURE?

A cure for distrust in the political arena is the same as it is in the commercial arena—competition and choice.

Suppose that General Motors and Ford were able to outlaw all of their competitors and have joint advertising campaigns. Would we expect GM and Ford to make better cars and to have greater integrity in their advertising and in their service agreements? Hardly!

Likewise, competition and choice are essential to all the things we dream for in our political system: innovation, integrity, accountability, and involvement. This will never happen so long as competition is muzzled and jailed.

By Dan Douglass

Every 10 years Hawaii’s voters select whether or not they want to conduct a constitutional convention. With Election Day now only one month away, I will briefly address why our state needs one. A state constitution is a document that sets forth the governing structure of a state. It is not a legislative document. The Legislature already has the role to write, amend and repeal our laws. Whole articles in our current constitution are by nature legislative and must be reviewed and necessarily changed. It can be argued that articles IX-XV (Public Health and Welfare; Education; Conservation, Control and Development of Resources; Hawaiian Affairs; Organization-Collective Bargaining and Code of Ethics) should be addressed legislatively rather than within our constitution.

In prior constitutional conventions delegates actively amended the constitution for their special interests. One example is the establishment of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to hold title to property held in trust for native Hawaiians. Thirty years later, OHA has become a lead institution in forwarding a federally funded bureaucracy (Kau Inoa) within our state. It may not have been the intent of the 1978 delegates for this to result. A constitutional convention can serve as a public audit, forum and session to correct where special interests have misled or harmed our state whether intentional or not.

One specific area that must be amended is the judicial selection process. Article VI Sec. 4 states: “The deliberations of the commission shall be confidential.” There must be openness in this commission for the sake of public trust. If we don’t amend our process to elect judges as other states do (after weighing out the pros and cons), it is my opinion that we must at the very least change the judicial selection process to be transparent.

The fact that there is opposition to having a constitutional convention by bureaucratic and special interests should encourage those of us here that see the need for current change. As Jefferson said, “When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” The legislative majority currently fears the public empowerment of a con-con. They fear less political influence through bottom up change. That’s the real reason. They have made it less attractive to voters by reporting that it will be more costly. Cost is the ‘reason’ they’ll give to not have it. We can see past the smoke and overwhelmingly vote ‘Yes’ for Con-Con. The public’s voice must be heard for freedom’s sake.

2008 is not the year for local politics as usual. It must be the year when the goodness of Hawaii’s public as a whole rises up and tells the corrupt in power that they are wrong. It can be the year the following generations in Hawaii look back on and celebrate our acts.

Part 1

Part 2

By Thomas E. Woods

These remarks were delivered at the Rally for the Republic, Target Center, Minneapolis, on September 2.

About fifteen years ago a conservative columnist wrote that Americans are faced with a choice between the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. And that once in a while the two parties get together and do something that’s both stupid and evil, and that’s called bipartisanship.

If anything, that view was too optimistic. On so many issues that matter, we may as well have a one-party system.

Some people on the Left are finally discovering to their chagrin that the so-called change Barack Obama would make to American foreign policy is just cosmetic. What did they expect? His foreign-policy panel, a who’s-who of the establishment, includes Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State who said “the price has been worth it” when asked on 60 Minutes what she thought of the fact that the Bush/Clinton sanctions on Iraq had led to half a million dead children.

So that’s the “change” candidate. Well, how very refreshing.

On taxes, the Democrat favors a top income tax rate of 39.5 percent, and the Republican favors a top rate of 35 percent. Well, ain’t democracy grand! We get to debate a whole four and a half percentage points.

Forget about spending. The Democrat spends his time devising new ways to throw away money we don’t have. Who knows what additional billions the Republican nominee’s foreign-policy bellicosity will saddle us with. But he pledges to balance the budget without a tax increase by 2013, while also strengthening the dollar and closing the $70 trillion entitlement shortfall. And we’re expected to believe this.

Been there, done that.

And by the way, if I may be forgiven for stating the obvious, you are not a fiscal conservative – or any other kind of conservative, for that matter – if you think it’s a-okay to stay in Iraq for one hundred years.

The subject I’ve been asked to address here, though, is yet another one that finds the two major candidates – let’s call them McBama – in agreement: namely, money and the Federal Reserve System.

Since the Fed was established in 1913 the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value. The Fed has given us more financial bubbles than we can count. When it inflates the money supply it lowers the value of the dollars in Americans’ pockets and hurts society’s most vulnerable. It redistributes wealth from the middle class and the poor to the politically well connected, by means of what economists call distribution or Cantillon effects.

What’s more, F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics for showing how central banks like the Fed create the boom-bust business cycle in our economy. When the central bank manipulates interest rates, it causes massive discoordination. The interest rate is supposed to coordinate production across time, but it can do so only when it reflects an aggregate of voluntary choices, not the whim of the Fed chairman. Entrepreneurs are misled into making investments that make no sense in light of current resource availability. The Fed’s intervention starts the economy on an artificial boom that ends in an inevitable bust.

More and more financial analysts are coming to accept Hayek’s view, known as the Austrian theory of the business cycle, because it corresponds so closely to what’s happening all around us. In the 1920s, when so-called mainstream economists were foolishly assuring us that permanent prosperity had arrived, economists of what’s known as the Austrian School of economic thought, to which Ron Paul also belongs, stood alone in predicting the Great Depression.

Yet in spite of all this, we’ve had no serious discussion of the Federal Reserve System for nearly 100 years. It has been fantastically successful in depoliticizing itself. No politician even mentions it. And although he is too genuinely humble to acknowledge it, one man is responsible for finally blasting open this forbidden question: Ron Paul.

Look at how members of Congress treat the Fed chairman when he appears before them. He gets asked only the most inane, sycophantic questions. Members of the Banking Committee, decked out in their “I Heart Bernanke” T-shirts, wave incense before him.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, looks him in the eye and says, “You are stealing from the poor!”

The economic and historical arguments against sound money (that is, money that government can’t just print up at will) are surprisingly weak – really just a string of fallacies. For now I refer you all to the education page at CampaignForLiberty.com for plenty of resources in defense of sound money.

But Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, said that even if you accepted all the bogus economic arguments against gold, it still made perfect sense to favor it. Why? Because it is the only system compatible with freedom.

If “fiscal responsibility” is your issue, you’ll never get anywhere as long as the government can create out of thin air all the money it wants. If the federal government is an addict, then the Federal Reserve System is its enabler.

Or suppose you’re concerned about war and what Ron Paul calls our government’s “bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy.” (By the way, that’s a concern shared by the genuine Left – people like Kirkpatrick Sale and Gore Vidal – and the genuine Right, by which I mean traditional conservatives like Russell Kirk and Robert Taft, not today’s neoconservative death cult.) Well, you, too, should care about the Fed, since the central bank is the lifeblood of the empire. If you want to stop the war machine, you’ll have to go after the money machine.

How did Lyndon Johnson get away with his war spending in Vietnam? By a deliberate policy of concealing the cost through inflation – a cost the American people bore only later, in the stagflation of the 1970s. Just the cost overruns on two Pentagon projects added up to more than the combined GDPs of North and South Vietnam. By silently looting the American population, the government was able to get away with much more spending than would otherwise have been possible.

Then there’s the disastrous war in Iraq, the propaganda for which was fed to us by America’s Pravda, the New York Times. How has that war been funded? By borrowing from foreigners, and creating new money out of thin air.

As for our current economic mess, McBama agree with the president, who summed up his own business cycle theory in these words: “Wall Street got drunk.” Their solution? For starters, hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts to the alleged drunkards. Bailouts and scapegoating – anything other than pointing the finger where it belongs – are all McBama can think to do. To hear them speak, you’d never know the Fed’s mad money creation spree and its resulting economic distortions had even occurred.

And no, the free market doesn’t cause housing bubbles and mortgage crises. The federal government has been pushing unsound loans on banks for years, both through legislation and by a Federal Reserve policy of flooding the economy with cheap credit. This new money went overwhelmingly into the housing market, the result being the housing bubble that is now bursting. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are Government Supported Enterprises (GSEs) that get special tax and regulatory breaks, and that everyone knows will be bailed out if it should come to that. So there’s nothing to stop them from buying up risky mortgages from banks. And banks in turn are more likely to make risky loans in the first place if they know Fannie and Freddie will be happy to buy them up.

This crazy system is a layer cake of moral hazard, not the free market. But as usual, the free market is being blamed for the stupidity and recklessness of the blockheads who rule us.

Every four years we’re subjected to a pair of empty suits whose only real argument is over exactly how and through what channels they plan to squander Americans’ wealth. It’s enough to make the non-comatose segment of the population despair. What can we do?

For starters, you can do what Ron Paul does, which is to start your day by reading LewRockwell.com. You can go to amconmag.com and read and subscribe to The American Conservative magazine.

But above all, today we have a special suggestion. If you’re tired of having to choose between two wings of the same bird of prey, then help us change America: go to CampaignForLiberty.com and join Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty!

H.L. Mencken put it this way: “The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it.”

Publishers Weekly says Dr. Paul “gives new life to old debates.” But you know what? Without him, we wouldn’t be having these debates in the first place.

Ron Paul reminds us that our future is not cast in stone, and that if we as a people so choose, we do not have to live in the kind of America the two major parties have in store for us.

Thanks to all of you for the sacrifices you’ve made on behalf of this great American cause – and above all, thank you, Ron Paul.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [http://www.thomasewoods.com/]is senior fellow in American history at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is co-editor (with Murray Polner) of We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now and co-author, most recently, of Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. His other books include Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass, 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (get a free chapter here), The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards), and the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.