Life's Inanities and Ironies

The body of Rancher Rob Krentz and his dog were found shot to death on his ranch. Krentz, who always was good-natured and willing to help people, had called in that he had found an illegal alien and was assisting him. That was the last that was heard from him before his body was discovered. Rob Krentz was a lifelong rancher in Southeastern Arizona, 12 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border and 25 miles northeast of the city of Douglas. He was the father of three children. The ranch has been in his family for three generations, more than 100 years - since 1907, and sits on about 35,000 acres with 1,000 head of cattle. Running a ranch is hard work and with the influx of illegal aliens increasing, Rob was at ground zero of the stampede that is destroying the fragile desert landscape. The Krentz family has received numerous threats in the past by illegal aliens trespassing on their property. In 2002, the family was physically threatened when one of them stumbled upon a group of 39 illegal a...

During the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key wrote a song about a star-spangled banner waving over the land of the free. Is this land still free? Are you free to earn a living as you see fit? More and more jobs now require a license to practice. The licensing board, made up of your would-be competitors, can block your entry because they better connected politically than you are. Are you free to enjoy the fruits of your labor? The government takes roughly half of everything you earn. In addition, the government is encumbering your future earnings (and the earnings of future generations) by amassing ever increasing debt. Are you free to use your property as you see fit, as long as you do not infringe on the rights of others? You are required to get the permission of bureaucrats before you can build anything on your own property. Even if you submit to all of the government's use requirements, your home and property can be taken from you in favor of a "public use" (such as a fur...

The reason that conservatives bit the dust in the recent health-care battle is simple: their fateful decision to abandon their principles many decades ago cost them any chance of defeating President Obama's socialist health-care plan. Think back to the 1960s, when liberals were celebrating the enactment of LBJ's Medicare and Medicaid plans as much as they are celebrating Obama's plan today. Those were the halcyon days when the statists were proclaiming that Medicare and Medicaid would bring a health-care paradise to America. At the time conservatives were warning Americans against traveling down this road to socialism, a road to serfdom, a road that would lead to national bankruptcy, a road to where socialism has led Greece today. But Americans wouldn't listen. Surrendering to the siren's song of the statists, the American people embraced Medicare and Medicaid (and the welfare state), in the process ditching what was once the finest health-care system in the world, ...

See who you should be voting out of office this November.

Mr Donnelly, Many times in the year I have written with my concerns and opposition to the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” What are you going to do if Mr Obama does not issue the promised executive order? Or more likely the suits that will be filed to reject the order succeed? To quote Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List. "The executive order on abortion funding does absolutely nothing to fix the problems presented by the health care reform bill that the House will vote on this evening,” she said. “The very idea should offend all pro-life Members of Congress. An executive order can be rescinded at any time at the President's whim, and the courts could and have a history of trumping executive orders. Most importantly, pro-abortion Representatives have admitted the executive order is meaningless." What are you going to do this November Mr Donnelly when you are removed from office for not listening to those you swore to represent, for ...

Nancy Pelosi just unveiled Plan B. If she can't strong-arm the votes she so desperately needs to shove ObamaCare down your throat, she's going to simply "deem" the Senate version of ObamaCare passed in the House of Representatives without actually voting on it. House Minority Leader John Boehner called this latest development a "controversial trick." Rep. Thaddeus McCotter used the phrases "acme of arrogance" and "shredding the U.S. Constitution" to describe what is going on right now. But even Boehner's and McCotter's descriptions might be gross understatements. Think about it... why stop at allowing radical leftists in Congress to "deem" that laws have passed without votes? Why not disband the Senate and the House of Representatives altogether and allow Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to simply invoke laws the American people oppose by direct declaration? Isn't that, after all, what they ar...

It has been almost a week since President Obama gave his first State of the Union address, and it has been analyzed from the left, right, center, front, and back. Of course, the speech is really about the performance of the federal government, particularly its wonderful accomplishments under the leadership of the sitting president. This is not peculiar to the Obama presidency. As far back as Jefferson, presidents have used the Constitutionally-mandated stump speech to do a little self-promotion, although what they promote has certainly changed quite dramatically. However, if the speech is supposed to reflect the accomplishments of the federal government, then we should expect that it will contain specifics about how that government has fulfilled its purpose, which is, as we all know, to secure our rights. At least that's what our founding document tells us. Therefore, if a president is going to do a little bragging about what a great job he has done, it would be logical to assume t...

Last week's Supreme Court ruling striking down the ban on corporate and union spending at election time is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, removing a legal barrier to free speech is always a good thing in itself. Government shouldn't dictate who can speak or from where people may get their information. This is more than a matter of abstract freedom; it's also a practical matter. More contentiousness in politics is better than less. Free-wheeling debate is more likely to produce good outcomes than a controlled flow of information. But there is a downside to the ruling that we should freely acknowledge. If history and recent times are any indication, big corporations and unions will use their new freedom of political speech to promote bad ideas. By "bad ideas" I mean proposals for more government interference with our lives and liberty. (Not that the spending ban kept them from doing that in other ways.) It's a great myth that businesses, especiall...

Wednesday night, I suffered through Mr. Obama’s speech . I noticed the overarching theme was: in 2010, the administration will finally getting around to all it promised for 2009, as well as a whole other year worth of miracles. He begins by taking credit for saving the economy from a second Great Depression. “[W]e acted, immediately and aggressively. And one year later, the worst of the storm has passed.” Except for the massive unemployment, which he notes in his next breath. Wasn’t the worst of the storm the pain of the American people? Or was it the so-called credit freeze that Mr. Obama seems to imply is still happening: “[W]hen you talk to small-business owners in places like Allentown, Pennsylvania, or Elyria, Ohio, you find out that even though banks on Wall Street are lending again, they’re mostly lending to bigger companies. Financing remains difficult for small-business owners across the country, even though they’re making a profit.” Here’s another thing that doesn’t add up fo...

The dust is settling on the rejection of President Obama's government and corporate takeover of American Medical care. But lovers of liberty must remain vigilant for attempts to compromise that will actually create the same problems for Americans. Obamacare was always about one thing only: control of medical care and medical spending by parties outside of the patient-physician relationship. Sadly, there are many in the Republican party who support the same thing: control by third parties. They will be now be tempted to pursue these "cost control" measures -- to satisfy their own special interests and to appear to offer "solutions" for political reasons. They will be making a mistake and the American people must reject compromises of principle for political expediency. Obamacare's core elements fell into two broad categories: 1) covering the "uninsured" and 2) controlling medical costs. "Universal coverage" has been a holy grail of Statist...

It is one thing to know something intellectually, and quite another to see it suddenly happen before your eyes. I experienced such a moment in 2005, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when I watched (via the Internet) as police officers went door-to-door in New Orleans neighborhoods, forced law-abiding citizens into the streets, cuffed them, and then searched their homes for firearms before leaving them bewildered and helpless. There were no warrants involved. No probable cause was mentioned. No charges of wrong-doing were filed. Intimidation and brute force were the order of the day. And as much as I wish I could believe otherwise, I'm afraid that what we saw in New Orleans is merely a preview of coming attractions. Since September 11, 2001, the federal government has been busily advancing preparations for the day when it might impose martial law throughout the United States, thus presenting us with the specter of the sort of thugery we witnessed in New Orleans being carr...

In his extraordinary book Democracy: The God that Failed , Hans Hermann Hoppe points out that the process of civilization is stopped when government continually violates property rights. The natural process of civilization comes through delaying consumption, saving, and building capital. Undoing it leads to higher societal time preference. When natural disasters strike or a gunman robs you in an alley, "the effect of these on time preference is temporary and unsystematic," Hoppe explains. Victims are entitled to defend themselves against the individual aggressor and prepare themselves for the calamities of the occasional act of God. Resources will be reallocated to defend one against potential robbers, and provisions will be made for potential natural disasters. However, when government aggresses, it is considered legitimate and "a victim may not legitimately defend himself against such violations." Democracy legitimizes this government aggression because the violen...

If you think the Obama administration doesn't need help in dreaming up new schemes to reinterpret the Constitution and add new restrictions on our freedom, think again. President Bush, for all his mistakes and miscalculations, never allowed his U.N. representatives to participate in such negotiations. But President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reversed course and agreed to join the negotiations. Secretary of State Clinton announced in October that the U.S. would join the negotiations "if they are based on consensus," implying that the U.S. could exercise a veto if negotiations went off course. That implies that the U.S. would reject any treaty that violates our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. The problem is she can't make that promise or guarantee that outcome. The truth is it is very dangerous for the U.S. to go down this road no matter how many assurances are given by President Obama and his minions. Once committed to the "process...

December 15 is neglected by most Americans for its historical significance as the anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Even worse, American politicians neglect the actual Bill of Rights on a day-to-day basis. Whether or not the Bill of Rights can ever be an effective means of limiting the government is open to debate. However, the Bill of Rights does offer a fairly good outline of a free society, and it shows how far our country has strayed. In an America with a full respect for the Bill of Rights, there would be no Federal Communications Commission regulating the airwaves and forbidding certain speech, no Federal Election Commission limiting how much Americans can donate to political candidates or what they can say in independent political ads, no Food and Drug Administration harassment of pharmaceutical and wine producers regarding their commercial speech, no federal laws that have anything to do with religion whatsoever, and no federally established "free-speech zones." Ther...