Do you talk about politics with fellow citizens? You may be a “grassroots lobbyist.” The governments wants to know.

IJ fighting a mandate to register with the government before becoming a “grassroots lobbyist.”

At least 36 states have laws requiring people who engage in this kind of activity to register with the government. In Washington, which has one of the most extensive regulations affecting citizen political participation in the nation, if you spend above an artificially low government-imposed cap to urge your fellow citizens to contact government officials, you are forced to register with the government and report your name, address, business, and occupation, the names and addresses of anyone with whom you are working to spread your message, and the names and addresses of each person who contributes as little as $25 to your efforts.

In other words, in Washington, if you speak too much about politics, the government wants to know about it. Moreover, the government does not merely collect this information—it makes it available to anyone with access to the Internet. Your name, address, business and occupation are provided to the world because you dared to exercise your fundamental First Amendment rights.

The Institute for Justice to file suit against the members ofWashingtons Public Disclosure Commission. Many Cultures, One Message et al. v. Clements seeks to vindicate the fundamental right of all Americans to engage in political activity without governmental interference.

Motorcyclist jailed for 26 hours for videotaping gun-wielding cop

Cop Wielding Gun

After spending 26 hours in the Baltimore County Jail, Anthony Graber still doesn’t understand what he did wrong.

Sure, the 24-year-old man admits to speeding on his motorcycle, but does that merit having a plainclothes cop pull a gun on him?

Does that merit six state troopers raiding his parents’ home and seizing four computers at the crack of dawn?

Does that merit getting charged with a felony and threatened with five years in prison?

Of course it doesn’t.

This is nothing but an obscene case of police intimidation. A Constitutional violation against a man who has served six years in the Air National Guard and who has never been arrested before. (Read more from carlosmiller.com)

Libertarianism in Ancient China

by Murray Rothbard

By far the most interesting of the Chinese political philosophers were the Taoists, founded by the immensely important but shadowy figure of Lao Tzu. Little is known about Lao Tzu’s life, but he was apparently a contemporary and personal acquaintance of Confucius. Like the latter he came originally from the state of Sung and was a descendant of lower aristocracy of the Yin dynasty. Both men lived in a time of turmoil, wars and statism, but each reacted very differently. For Lao Tzu worked out the view that the individual and his happiness was the key unit of society. If social institutions hampered the individual’s flowering and his happiness, then those institutions should be reduced or abolished altogether. To the individualist Lao Tzu, government, with its “laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox,” was a vicious oppressor of the individual, and “more to be feared than fierce tigers.” Government, in sum, must be limited to the smallest possible minimum; “inaction” became the watchword for Lao Tzu, since only inaction of government can permit the individual to flourish and achieve happiness. Any intervention by government, he declared, would be counterproductive, and would lead to confusion and turmoil. The first political economist to discern the systemic effects of government intervention, Lao Tzu, after referring to the common experience of mankind, came to his penetrating conclusion: “The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished — The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”

The worst of government interventions, according to Lao Tzu, was heavy taxation and war. “The people hunger because theft superiors consume an excess in taxation” and, “where armies have been stationed, thorns and brambles grow. After a great war, harsh years of famine are sure to follow.”

The wisest course is to keep the government simple and inactive, for then the world “stabilizes itself.”

As Lao Tzu put it: “Therefore, the Sage says: I take no action yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves—” (read more from informationliberation.com)

Questions about Polish Plane Crash

President Obama, Prince Charles, Chancelor Merkel, President Sarkozy, and Prime Minister Berlusconi all canceled their appearance at the funeral on short notice.

Poland refused the Swine Flu vaccine. They had their own Central Bank and wouldn’t submit to the Euro zone. They wouldn’t jump in bed with the IMF and were not suffering a recession but were prospering.

According to the big wobble, “Author of the video seen by everyone by now has been stabbed near Kijow on 4.15 and transported in critical condition to the hospital in Kijow. On 4.16 three unidentified individuals unplugged him from life support system and stabbed him 3 more times. Andrij was pronounced dead that afternoon. Russian government claims it was a coincidence.”

Predictably, CNN’s report reinforces the official explanation and ignores everything unusual, like the shots heard in the video above.

“When I found the first piece of fuselage, I was shocked. It was flimsy, the thin metal easily twisted back on itself.”

“If you look down this bank, you begin to see all these bits of broken wood from the trees where the plane is beginning to hit as its coming down.”

“Looking up at the top, you can really see how the plane cut into them [the trees]. What investigators are going to focus on are the black box recorders. They say they’re still looking at the possibility of human error, the possibility of bad weather, . . . when the crash happened 24 hours ago there was thick fog, and they’re also saying there’s a possibility that it could have been mechanical error, so they’re not ruling out any of those things right now. The bodies have been removed from the site here. Most of them already taken to Moscow for identification. ”

Talk about framing the debate.

40,000,000 Americans Receiving Food Stamp Assistance

The latest food stamp data for January of 2010 shows that 39,430,724 Americans are receiving food stamps or are part of the supplemental nutritional assistance program (SNAP). If you make the acronym and name long enough and with a neutral undertone average Americans won’t fret that 40 million of their fellow neighbors are one government debit card away from being unable to eat. Yet this is the new corporate funded recovery and somehow things don’t seem to be improving for the middle class and definitely not for those at the lower rung of the socio-economic ladder. In fact, we may have more than 40 million on food assistance today. Since the start of the recession in December of 2007, we’ve added on average 474,000 people each month to SNAP. Since the data lags a bit and we only have January 2010 data, it is likely we now have between 40 million and 41 million Americans on food assistance.

There is little to doubt where the trend is heading. (Read more from mybudget360.com)

Why work when I can get £42,000 in benefits a year AND drive a Mercedes?

The Davey family’s £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265508/Peter-Davey-gets-42-000-benefits-year-drives-Mercedes.html#ixzz0lUIzQiwn

. . . .

‘It’s really hard,’ said Mrs Davey, 29, who is seven months pregnant. ‘We can’t afford holidays and I don’t want my kids living on a council estate and struggling like I have.

‘The price of living is going up but benefits are going down. My carer’s allowance is only going up by 80p this year and petrol is so expensive now, I’m worried how we’ll cope.
How it adds up.jpg

‘We’re still waiting for somewhere bigger.’

Mrs Davey has never had a full-time job while her 35-year-old husband gave up his post in administration nine years ago after realising they would be better off living off the state.

At their semi on the Isle of Anglesey, the family have a 42in flatscreen television in the living room with Sky TV at £50 a month, a Wii games console, three Nintendo DS machines and a computer – not to mention four mobile phones.

With their income of more than £42,000 a year, they run an 11-seater minibus and the seven-seat automatic Mercedes. (Read more from dailymail.co.uk)

The Beholden State. How public-sector unions broke California

The camera focuses on an official of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), California’s largest public-employee union, sitting in a legislative chamber and speaking into a microphone. “We helped to get you into office, and we got a good memory,” she says matter-of-factly to the elected officials outside the shot. “Come November, if you don’t back our program, we’ll get you out of office.”

The video has become a sensation among California taxpayer groups for its vivid depiction of the audacious power that public-sector unions wield in their state. The unions’ political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state’s public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation’s and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination—high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes—has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state.

How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses—that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state’s politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California’s unsustainable government.

California’s government workers took longer than many of their counterparts to win the right to bargain collectively. New York City mayor Robert Wagner started a national movement back in the late 1950s when he granted negotiating rights to government unions, hoping to enlist them as allies against the city’s Tammany Hall machine. The movement intensified in the early sixties, after President John F. Kennedy conferred the right to bargain on federal workers. In California, a more politically conservative environment at the time, public employees remained without negotiating power through most of the sixties, though they could join labor associations. In 1968, however, the state legislature passed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, extending bargaining rights to local government workers. Teachers and other state employees won the same rights in the seventies. (Read more from city-journal.org)

It’s the Central Bank, stupid

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA HEADS the list of Americans who believe that the continuing financial crisis should be blamed on excessive risk-taking by bankers who had an unbridled desire to make money in mortgages. These would-be reformers want stronger government regulation of the bankers to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Obama blamed “fat cat bankers” for causing the crisis, putting America through its “worst economic year…in decades.” He went on to chide Wall Street banks for “fighting tooth and nail” the new regulations he believes would be vital in preventing future crises.

A deeper examination, however, reveals that this is neither a housing crisis nor a Wall Street banking crisis. This is a monetary crisis, rooted in the lending of money created out of thin air. This is what leads to economic booms and busts. (Read more from barrons.com)

7 States seek dismissal of federal gun laws

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and six other states filed a brief in federal court in Montana on Monday, arguing that the federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate firearms manufactured and sold within their borders.

The friend-of-the-court brief seeks to bolster arguments made by the Montana Shooting Sports Association (MSSA) that legislation passed in that state exempts Montana-made guns from federal taxation, registration, licensing, marking or record-keeping requirements.

Utah adopted similar legislation last session. Tennessee, Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota and Wyoming have done so as well, asserting it as an exercise of their authority under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The brief asks that court to recognize that “the 10th Amendment is not an empty promise to the states, but a vital guarantor of rights retained by the states, including the right to regulate purely intrastate activities.”

Alabama, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming joined in the Utah brief. (Read more from lewrockwell.com)