End the War on Freedom

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real. Money is an end result. -- Peter Drucker

Thomas L. Knapp at Rational Review - Did You Ever See a Meme Walking? - The power of the libertarian idea. "Play nice."

Long-held ideas, of course, are difficult to dispel. No living American can remember the time when children were not schooled by government. Few can remember the time when a citizen might walk unquestioned down any street, carrying the weapon of his or her choice; or the time when a paycheck included all of the pay due, without withholding for income taxes or Ponzi-like retirement and medical insurance schemes.

And, not remembering those times, few are likely to connect the growth of government power with the decline of education, the rise of violent crime, the sprawl of regulation or the disastrous conditions attending retirement and medical care in their country.

Scott Bieser at Rational Review - Liberty Raped - cartoon commentary on the U.S. government. My title. Mr. Bieser didn't provide one.

P.J. Gladnick at Laissez Faire City Times - I Was a Commie Writer - Some of Mr. Gladnick's work was published in Krokodil, a Russian humor magazine, shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union. He chronicles a visit of the magazine's publishers to UCLA.

George F. Smith at Laissez Faire City Times - Speaking Safely on Public Issues: A Guide for the Confused - How to win friends and influence people by using all the proper political newspeak. Hehe.

The most glaring fact common to all political issues is the monopoly on coercive power we've assigned to the government. We have a Constitution limiting that power, but it's been found guilty of impeding progress and has been imprisoned in a glass case. Now mostly unrestrained by that document, the government regards the private sector as one vast bank account it can draw on without limit and as a herd it will sacrifice any which way it can.

Geov Parrish at Seattle Weekly via MAPInc - A Junkie's Confession - a man who has taken OxyContin "every few hours for the last seven years because of persistent pain stemming from an operation that saved my life" differs strongly with the drug warrior party line that its effects are like heroin.

An invaluable drug is being portrayed as a menace to society, with a handful of tragedies being expropriated as proof. It's the sort of fiction that has used a very real problem--drug abuse--to justify a decades-long grab for government power--the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is dead; it hasn't worked, and with new laboratory-designed drugs, it will soon be completely unenforceable. We should instead be teaching people how to use mind-altering substances responsibly. ( We could start with alcohol. ) Meanwhile, keep your hands off my OxyContin. It's time for my next pill.

The Week Online with DRCNet - Interview: Kenneth Curtis, the South Carolina Urine Felon - Mr. Curtis was sentenced to 6 years for selling urine. All but six months were suspended by the judge, who probably felt guilty about not allowing him to present any evidence to the jury. He's not currently in prison while his appeal process is underway.

My business is a platform for free speech directed against the urine testing industry. What we do is provide complete substitution kits that allow anyone to substitute our certified, pre-tested urine sample, because of our objections to the urine testing industry. They can find out a lot more than whether someone is using illicit substances. They can find out medical information that they aren't allowed to ask you by law. I was a pipe-fitter, and got tested about a dozen times a year.

I'm an American, I believe in civil liberties, and I was being presumed guilty without any presumption of innocence. I lay awake at night because I felt raped by the whole experience. I wanted to demonstrate how ridiculously invasive this whole thing is. I wanted to make a point. I'm not trying to help people pass drug tests; I'm trying to attack the whole idea that drug tests are proper in the workplace.

Vin Suprynowicz - His noblest fantasy had little to do with elves and wizards - part of The Libertarian series. The politics of J.R.R. Tolkien. Power corrupts.

Frodo's quest is not to deliver the One Ring to the right king, but rather to haul it back to the mountain of fire where it was forged in darkness, and destroy it.

What's that? Not merely to reassign government power to its rightful heirs, but to reduce and limit it for all time? To declare that the solution is not merely to make sure "the right party" manipulates the existing levers of power, but rather that such unrestricted power is to be banished from the globe for good, setting men free to seek their own mortal (albeit often misguided) destinies?

This is the conclusion Prof. Tolkien drew after watching Europe wracked by 30 years of (briefly interrupted) total war between the struggling factions of fascism and collectivism.

It's also -- coincidentally enough -- what America's founders attempted 215 years ago, when they set about constructing a government "of limited powers, sharply defined."

Do most of our present-day rulers still share that vision? Is it a common thing to walk into a federal court these days and find a judge scratching his head and declaring, "You know, the defendant has a point -- I can't seem to find any specifically delegated power in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution for the Congress to enact laws or create agencies to meddle in this field of human endeavor, at all. I thereby rule this entire section of the federal code to be unconstitutional and null and void, and order the agency whose agents have brought these charges to be dissolved forthwith. Issue yourselves severance checks, turn out the lights and lock the doors; case dismissed"?

Of course not...

GZigZag is a Java implementation of Ted Nelson's ZigZag, "a tool for representing arbitrary structures of information." Michael Swaine mentioned it in the February 2002 issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal. I haven't played with it yet.