Forty-six new bills were introduced on Wednesday, March 18th. Here are some of the more obnoxious ones:
HR1590 – To provide assistance for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland.
HR1583 – To further competition in the insurance industry. [Huh? the only reason there is any lack of competition is due to government regulation and intrusion!]
HR1582 – The Executive Bonus Repeal Act: To amend the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to strike a provision included in a recent amendment of such Act. [How many bills of nature do we need? There is already HR1572 to steal 90% of the bonuses as well as HR1542 which proposes to steal 100%.]
HR1581 – To optimize the delivery of critical care medicine and expand the critical care workforce. [Government interference is what has impeded the best emergency care possible. So now the "benevolent" hand of government is going to come in with more regulation to fix it?]
HR1580 – To authorize the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to award grants for electronic waste reduction research, development, and demonstration projects, and for other purposes.
HR1603 – To require institutions receiving large amounts of assistance under TARP to restrict compensation increases for officers, directors, and employees to the Federal civil service pay increase. [Again, such bills would not be necessary if there were no unconstitutional TARP in the first place.]
HR1600 – To amend title 10, United States Code, to provide for the treatment of autism under TRICARE.
HR1599 – To require survivor annuity payments made to disabled dependents to be disregarded in eligibility and benefit determinations under the supplemental security income (SSI) and Medicaid Programs.
HR263 – Expressing support for designation of the month of September as “National Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month”. [Hahaha, wouldn't this conflict with HR255 which would be “National Atrial Fibrillation Awareness Month”?]
HR262 – Expressing the strong concern of the House of Representatives about the actions of the Taliban in Swat, Pakistan, to restrict girls’ access to education. [Do they think that people in Afghanistan care what the U.S. House of Representatives is concerned about? Or put the other way, how would we like it if the government of another nation were to stick it's nose into our way of life? Granted, I do not agree with how females are treated in some cultures, but it's not the business of the Federal Government to be concerned with such things.]
HR258 – Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives regarding drug trafficking in Mexico.
S-637 – A bill to authorize the construction of the Dry-Redwater Regional Water Authority System in the State of Montana and a portion of McKenzie County, North Dakota, for other purposes.
S-636 – A bill to amend the Clean Air Act to conform the definition of renewable biomass to the definition given the term in the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002.
S-635 – A bill to amend the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to designate a segment of Illabot Creek in Skagit County, Washington, as a component of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.
S-634 (also HR1585) – A bill to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to improve standards for physical education.
S-633 – A bill to establish a program for tribal colleges and universities within the Department of Health and Human Services and to amend the Native American Programs Act of 1974 to authorize the provision of grants and cooperative agreements to tribal colleges and universities, and for other purposes.
This week’s episode of Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano is in the bag. This week Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Peter Schiff, Campaign For Liberty President John Tate, Tracy Byrnes (from FBN), and John Stossel joined the Judge for more discussion on liberty.
They discussed Obama’s plan for education, the endless bailouts, and more. John Stossel joined the show during the final minutes via telephone and discussed his upcoming special on 20/20 Friday night at 10pm EST called “Bailouts, Big Spending, and Bull.”
Ron Paul was on for the first 15 minutes or so. John Tate joined during the last half hour. Please spread the playlist below around the net. And be sure to join the Facebook “Fans of Freedom Watch” group if you haven’t already.
Watch what many are calling the liberty power hour below. All 6 parts should play in succession via the playlist here.
The gift agreement stipulates that WCU’s College of Business will use the money—plus another $500,000 in matching funds it hopes to obtain from the state Legislature—to create a new “BB&T Distinguished Professorship in Capitalism” and develop a program exploring “the moral and ethical foundation of capitalism,” according to the school’s Nov. 17 announcement. While the new program will encompass “all points of view,” the agreement specifically focuses on just one, “the philosophy of objectivism as portrayed by Ayn Rand in her classic novel Atlas Shrugged and in her essays,” the announcement states.
There are some who believe this is dangerous territory for colleges to tread upon saying that corporations should not have this kind of influence on what gets taught in the classroom. I believe we need more of this, not less. In essence this is free market capitalism at work.
If a college doesn’t want to abide by the stipulations accompanying any monetary gift then they can refrain from accepting the gift. According to the article some already have.
It is stories like these that give me hope that capitalism isn’t quite dead yet.
(Thanks to Tim Peck for pointing us to the article)
In Time Magazine Ron Paul makes his nomination for Person of the Year:
Amid a horrific financial crisis, all we hear are calls for more of the money-printing, spending and subsidies that created this mess. So I choose my great teacher, Ludwig von Mises, champion of the Austrian School of economics, who taught us how a central bank like the Fed causes booms and busts and how to build prosperity through sound money and economic freedom.
The story of socialism at Plymouth Rock is one that few Americans are taught in their public (i.e., government) schools. On landing at Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims established an economic system in which all their crops would be owned in common and whose harvest would be distributed to each family in accordance with its needs. The colonists felt that such a socialist system would be consistent with their deep religious convictions.
There was one big problem, however, with this spread-the-wealth economic system: starvation. When everything was owned by everyone, people would look for excuses to avoid working in the fields and the harvests were not sufficient to keep everyone fed.
Finally, after repeated food shortages Plymouth Rock Governor William Bradford declared an end to socialism at Plymouth Rock. He announced that every family would be responsible for planting and harvesting its own crops and would be free to keep the bounty.
The result? No more starvation! Instead, a bountiful harvest and more than enough food for everyone.
And that’s what the first Thanksgiving was all about — to give thanks for the plentiful bounty that had been brought into existence through the “miracle of the market.”
Hornberger goes on to lament the fact that Obama strongly supports socialistic programs, which does not bode well for our future. Read the whole article here.
And you can read more about the system of socialism the Pilgrims put into place (the Mayflower Compact) in this article by Chuck Muth.
As a teacher for 25 yeas in the nation’s second largest school district, Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), I find myself increasingly isolated in defending public education to my conservative and even liberal friends. Unlike many of them, I continue to appreciate the fact that public schools in the U.S. are already in place, at a huge investment, and that they help millions of children, many more than they hurt; I must say, however, that as the years have passed, government, with the help of teachers unions, has made it increasingly difficult for me to face my critical friends, because what’s good about American education in recent years has been in spite of government, not because of it. From the U.S. Department of Education to state boards and even to many local boards and districts, teachers face dictums from imaginative dilettantes who are never asked to be responsible for their actions. A brief history of my career will make the problem clear.
My first assignment as a new teacher was in South Los Angeles, in what was then a predominantly black neighborhood. The school population was entirely low income and thus eligible for substantial Title I money, designated for schools with at least 40% low income population under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. So much Title I money flowed into the school that we had a designated office just to manage it. The school was filled with hundreds of brand new computers in fully staffed labs. Music and art programs abounded. All classrooms were air-conditioned years before any schools in the much hotter but largely affluent San Fernando Valley. It would be mean spirited indeed for me to begrudge the children at my school any of these benefits, and I did not. What I did notice, however, was that test scores at the school had not risen at all over the years of federal largess. It appeared that money, by itself, was not sufficient to help these children. It took me a few more years to learn what was missing.
A new article by Liberty Hero Thomas DiLorenzo over at LRC entitled “Tales From an Academic Looney Bin” discusses the frightening reality that so-called ‘Cultural Marxists’ have infiltrated and taken over many higher-learning institutions. We’ve heard this type of thing for years, and DiLorenzo’s examples at Baltimore’s Loyola College are no exception.
…[Cultural Marxists] took over and began acting, well, like lunatics. I learned from the local media that the former academic vice president had rejected an applicant for a top job because the applicant “wasn’t black enough.” The job was academic vice president for diversity and the interviewee was an African-American man with very impressive credentials. According to news reports, this man was told that he was well qualified, but that the College preferred an African-American with somewhat darker skin.
So here was a man who had probably been discriminated against in employment during his lifetime who had reached the peak of his professional career, and was interviewing for what was probably his dream job. And he is told he wasn’t getting the job, once again, because of his skin color. And you probably thought “lunatic” was too strong a word.
This is a very entertaining article. Highly recommended. Read it here.
Most rational people agree that in the face of the current economic meltdown, all levels of government- federal, state and local- should spend less money. What no one agrees on is how to spend less. One person’s pork is another person’s vital service, and we usually don’t have trusted third parties to figure out which is which.
A case in point is the school district where I teach, Los Angeles Unified, the second largest in the nation. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been issuing increasingly dire assessments of the state economy, with increasingly dire implications for education. His latest assessment of likely cuts to education could swell LAUSD’s current $375 million deficit to more than a half-billion within this school year. There is no debate about spending less. Everyone in the district has become a spend-less conservative.
The disagreement, of course, is on what to cut. The teachers’ union wants to cut the bureaucracy (while demanding a raise). The school board wants to cut teacher perks like health care (while offering no raise).
Here’s what I want: All district “literacy coaches” should be sent back to classroom positions, all publishing enterprises that duplicate the expense of state approved textbooks should be discontinued, and district “literacy cadres” should be disbanded.
And here’s the rub: you the reader, well informed though you may be, have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s local, insider stuff. One can’t rally the troops with calls of “Down with literacy coaches!” as one can with teacher accountability or pay raises.
One of Liberty Maven’s (soon-to-be) Liberty Heroes, Thomas DiLorenzo, was interviewed by columnist Ilana Mercer. DiLorenzo, who recently wrote Hamilton’s Curse, discusses at length Hamilton’s strong desire for mercantilism in this country, and throws the stated desires of Obama and McCain into the mix for comparison purposes.
Obama is a slick politician, so I expect him to continue to administer the neo-mercantilist, Hamiltonian empire that has been built up by both parties over the decades, with all of its schemes for corporate welfare for defense contractors, investment bankers and myriad other politically active businesses which, in turn, provide financial support for the regime. But Obama is also a hardcore leftist who spent his earlier career working with some of the craziest socialists in America, groups like ACORN, who advocated such things as kicking doctors off the boards of hospitals and replacing them with “the poor,” and Soviet-style nationalization of the energy and health care industries.
In the course of political discussions with friends and family (most of whom are firmly in the grasp of the inanity of the two-party system), the subject of education and “public schools” arises. I make the case that so-called public schooling (i.e. schools provided by government) is really bad idea for a variety of reasons, mainly because government has failed in its efforts. In a recent article at The Future of Freedom Foundation, Jacob G. Hornberger accurately portrays government schools for what they are: an example of socialism.
While the nation is on the subject of socialism, we really ought to talk about public schooling. With the possible exception of the military, it’s the best example of a socialist institution one could ever find. It’s not a coincidence that public schooling is one of Fidel Castro’s favorite government programs.
Actually, “public schooling” is a misnomer. It would be more accurate to call it “government schooling” because it’s a government operation from start to finish. That’s different from, say, public movie theaters or public restaurants. Those are private businesses that are open to the public.
Like the military, public schooling operates in a top-down, command-and-control manner. It’s a perfect model of socialistic central planning, a system in which government officials plan and direct the activities of the citizenry rather than simply leaving the citizenry free to plan and direct their own affairs.
Whether the control comes from the state government, through the state department of education, or the local government, through a school board, the principle is the same — a group of appointed or elected government officials is directing the educational decisions of multitudes of students. That’s different from the private sector, where consumers, through their spending decisions, determine the direction of entrepreneurial and business activity.
Government officials decide the textbooks and the curricula in government schools. Thus, they decide the substance of what is to be taught to the students. In socialist countries like Cuba, we usually call that process indoctrination.
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