eltigrechico:

I see a completely ignorant post attacking ron paul 

I go to the person’s blog

I see a picture of them in a fedora

I close the text post

eltigrechico:

If watching Cops doesn’t make you hate cops then you’re an idiot

The Cops literally purchased a bicycle FOR THE PURPOSE OF HAVING PEOPLE STEAL IT

and then leave it unattended in a poor, black neighborhood

when this guy rightfully takes property that he paid for 

3 cops with guns drawn attack him and arrest him

and for what?

who was the victim of this ‘crime’?

besides the poor guy who got his ass beat and got arrested

All taxation involves coerced exchange. That is, you’re forced to give up the money—in this case the tax—for a good, whether or not you value the good more than the money. And by the very fact that you’re forced, that is, there’s a threat of force— if you don’t pay your taxes your income will be forcibly garnished, your assets will be seized, and if you continue to resist a SWAT team will surround your house and drag you out, and if you resist it could involve fatal force against you—the presumption is that people, for the most part, value the tax money more than the goods they’re getting. They don’t value the public schools as much as property taxes they’re paying for it.

— Joseph T. Salerno, The Myth of a Fair Tax (via eltigrechico)

eltigrechico:

remember when ron paul asked bernanke if he thought gold was money?

and when bernanke said no ron paul said, “even if it’s been money for 6,000 years, somebody reversed that and eliminated that economic law?”

and the look on his face was just

that was awesome.

eltigrechico:

“I am a Libertarian. I am a Conservative.”

eltigrechico:

“Let’s End Poverty by Picketing Walmart!”

Yes because clearly Walmart is the cause of poverty…

you mean the place with low prices that pays more than minimum wage?

The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties →

laliberty:

[I]t is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as “cruel and inhuman”.

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration’s true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as “regular Americans”. Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman - once the most vocal defender of Bush’s vast warrantless eavesdropping programs - suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when - as inevitably occurs - they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn’t take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much.

A ruler always assures his victims that their loss of liberties is the price they must pay for the additional security (order) he purports to establish.

Well might we question whether the ruler has either the intention or the capability to reduce the degree of social disorder. Plenty of evidence exhibits state-ridden societies boiling with disorder. In the United States, for example, a country brimming with official “protectors” of every imaginable stripe, the populace suffered in 2004, according to figures the government itself endorses, approximately 16,000 murders, 95,000 forcible rapes, 401,000 robberies, 855,000 aggravated assaults, 2,143,000 burglaries, 6,948,000 larcenies and thefts, and 1,237,000 motor vehicle thefts (U.S. Census Bureau 2007, 191). The governments of the United States have taken the people’s liberties—if you don’t think so, you need to spend more time reading U.S. Statutes at Large and the Code of Federal Regulations, not to mention your state and local laws and ordinances—but where’s the protective quid pro quo? They broke the egg of our liberties, without a doubt, but where’s the bloody omelet of personal protection and social order?

— Robert Higgs (via eltigrechico)

If you look at [The U.S. Government’s] Farm Policy many economists say it’s irrational. First you pay the farmers not to grow stuff, pay them to grow less, pay them not to grow food. That’s one thing, but then another division of the Department of Agricultural pays them to grow more food. So, on the one hand the Federal Government increases their production, on the other hand, the Federal Government pays them to cut production. It seems irrational. It’s irrational from our point of view. It’s not irrational from the point of view of two groups: The Department of Agriculture - they get more and more bureaucrats — and the farmers — they get paid both ways, they get paid for producing more and they get paid for producing less, it’s great! So irrationality depends on which point of view you’re talking about.

— Murray Rothbard (via eltigrechico)

The IRS scandal is that they steal your money at the point of a gun—and they’re doing more and more of it right now—not that they question some conservative group’s tax exemption.

— Lew Rockwell (via eltigrechico)

Lauryn Hill told the judge who sentenced her to prison that she planned to pay her taxes; it was just a question of when.
The judge reminded her that citizens don’t get to choose when to pay the government just before ordering her to spend three months in a federal prison.

—

CNN Article “The Tax Education of Lauryn Hill”. All the media I’ve seen on this has parroted the same line. Namely, that Lauryn Hill was either an idiot or trying to get away with something nefarious.

Absolutely disgusting.

The word ‘profiteering’ has always been used in a smear context. ‘Profits’ plus ‘I hate the son of a bitch’ equals ‘profiteering’.

— Walter Block, Defending the Undefenable (via eltigrechico)