NY Man Gives Life in Struggle Against Odious Federal Nanny State

Freedom Isn't Free

Teabagger GOP Official In No. Carolina Busted For Collecting Unemployment After Libertarian Party Laid Him Off

Election campaign rode wave of anger against incumbents, opposed tax increases and Big Government™; you can't make this shit up, folks!

Kevin Maurer reports at the Wilmington Star-News:
New Hanover County Commissioner Brian Berger was getting unemployment benefits for at least five months from Washington, D.C., according to documents obtained by the StarNews.

Officials at Washington's Office of Unemployment Compensation sent a “wage audit notice” to New Hanover County in January asking the county to provide Berger's salary information after he was elected in November and sworn in Dec. 6.

The notice is used by the Benefit Payment Control Branch to make sure “payments are proper” and is part of the agency's fraud detection program, according to the letter. The agency confirmed that Berger's benefits stopped May 21, but would not release how much he was collecting. A New Hanover County commissioner earns about $17,000 a year, and it is not considered a full-time job. Having a part-time job does not stop the benefits, officials said, but only adjusts the benefit amount from the agency.

Berger said Thursday after a commission agenda review meeting that he worked inhouse for a trade association doing nonprofit management. He declined to name the group or when he worked there. He said the group cut staff and he lost his position.

Erna Vance, a customer service specialist at the Office of Unemployment Compensation, would not verify how much or how long Berger received the benefits. She said it is not uncommon for people to live outside Washington and get benefits because they worked in Washington. ...>more

Ron Paul Comes Out Of The Crypto-Segregationist Closet

Says Basic Freedoms Secondary To Property Rights



Muriel Kane reports at The Raw Story:

On the same day that he announced his candidacy for the presidency, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) made waves by telling MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act if he had been in Congress at the time.

Paul dismissed claims that he is a racist as “outlandish” and said he would have voted to desegregate public facilities. He insisted, however, that private business owners have an absolute right to decide what to do with their own property. ...>more

The Gold-Standard Hustle

Does Anyone Here Speak Paul-Tard?

Mark Ames writes at The eXiled:

Does anyone here in this house speak goldbug-babble? Anyone who can make sense of Dr. Paul’s logic in the clip below, I’m curious what the fuck this man is trying to hawk to his 1988 C-SPAN viewers. I mean I know it’s snake-oil, but even snake-oil pitches have a logic to them. This one just sounds like bat-shit blather.

As far as I can tell, the reason why the Koch brothers hire tools to promote the gold standard is the same reason that robber barons of the 19th century loved the gold standard so much: Gold locks in the power and wealth of those who have all the power and wealth; and gold locks out everyone else who’s not so lucky, condemning them to serfdom. Which leads to Populist uprisings, labor unrest, and all that century-old misery. That would explain why Koch fronts like Ron Paul hustle the gold standard to us suckers as the equivalent to “freedom”–just like coal companies pitching the public the lie about “clean coal”–you want the suckers to believe that a gold standard will offer them the very opposite of the misery it delivers.

That part of the scam I get. Fair enough. But this 1988 gold standard pitch? Makes no sense.

Over the years, Congressman Ron Paul, hero of the libertarian cult, has hawked his beloved “gold standard” as the cure-all for [NAME OF CURRENT CRISIS], logic be damned. In this video, Dr. Paul promises that the gold standard will solve the trade deficit with Japan, the hot topic in 1988–in fact, Dr. Paul says there won’t even be a trade deficit to worry about if there’s a gold standard, and moreover, people won’t even have to keep accounting records anymore! ...>more

Pimp Hard, Libertard, Pimp Hard!

In which Reason editor Matt Welch grabs an anti-Koch conspiracy theory in his teeth and runs with it like a big dog

Matt Welch writes at Reason:

Back in 2008, if you pressed a libertarian planning to vote for Barack Obama, chances are he’d yelp out the name Austan Goolsbee. The Libertarians for Obama website (which, appropriately, shut down after November 2008), claimed “Obama’s chief economic adviser—a friend from the University of Chicago, where they both taught—sounds an awful lot like a libertarian.” The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle repeatedly pinned her preference for the Democrat on his closeness with Goolsbee, “one of my favorite professors, and a hell of an economist.” The libertarian economist David Friedman cited Goolsbee when musing to the San Francisco Chronicle that Obama might end up emulating the liberals who launched New Zealand’s wildly successful deregulation project in the 1980s.

Two years later there probably isn’t a libertarian-leaning person on earth who still thinks Obama has it in him to pull a Nixon-goes-to-China when it comes to downsizing government. The president has followed up George W. Bush’s big-government disaster with a big-government catastrophe, setting consecutive annual records for spending, deficits, and debt while extending the pernicious too-big-to-fail doctrine all the way to the auto parts business. And every day on the hustings in advance of the Democrats’ midterm drubbing, Obama campaigned against a wholly fictional Bush record of deregulation and spending cuts.

“Between 2001 and 2009,” the president falsely claimed in September, “a very specific philosophy reigned in Washington: You cut taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires; you cut regulations for special interests; you cut back on investments in education and clean energy, in research and technology. The idea was if we put blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everybody to fend for themselves, America would grow and America would prosper.” As any good 2008 libertarian for Obama could tell you, that description does not square with Bush’s record of jacking up federal education spending by 58 percent in real terms, increasing significant regulations and regulatory spending at rates not seen since Richard Nixon, and boosting discretionary spending more than any president since Lyndon Johnson.

And what about our University of Chicago hero Austan Goolsbee? In September he became chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Just before the appointment, Goolsbee gave a background briefing to reporters on behalf of the administration in which he trashed the most influential donors the libertarian universe has ever seen: Charles and David Koch, funders of the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, and much more. (David Koch sits on the Reason Foundation’s Board of Trustees.)...

...>more (if you can stand it)

Anatomy Of A Libertard

Will Wilkinson: Libertard With Sadditude

Mark Ames writes in The eXiled:

Ever since Yasha and I first broke the story about the Koch brothers financing the Tea Party Campaign in February of 2009–a scoop that the New Yorker plagiarized from us a mere 18 months later, waytago fellas!–ever since then, I’ve been wondering: Have all those billions that the Brothers Koch invested into their libertarian brain-washing project paid off?

The answer: You betcha.

Let me demonstrate how the Kochs’ investment into libertarianism has paid off by way of a near-stroke experience I just had a couple of days ago. There I was, just wasting time on Reddit, when I came across one of those beyond-idiotic-and-evil headlines that bite you if you’re not careful: “Is rising inequality in America exaggerated?” The headline linked to an article in The Economist.

H’m, is inequality exaggerated? Gosh, let me get my ol’ chin-scratching machine out for this one…

Naturally, I did the exact wrong thing and clicked the headline, which brought me to an Economist article titled, “The Inequality Myth: Is Rising Inequality in America Exaggerated?” It was an oddly meat-headed headline for The Economist–usually that magazine’s formula is to zap the reader with somewhat more nuanced right-wing shock value, counteracted with elitist irony and know-it-all charm. Not this time:

SLATE’S Timothy Noah has just wrapped up a ten-part series on the rise of economic inequality in America. Most of Mr Noah’s instalments are devoted to examining the impact of one of the usual suspects—immigration, trade, de-unionisation, education, executive pay, etc—on the level of inequality in the United States. I found Mr Noah’s series disappointing from the start because he failed squarely to confront recent findings that challenge the premise of his exercise.

Many popular narratives about inequality are grounded on the alleged fact that wages and incomes at the middle and bottom of the distribution have been stagnant for decades. It appears that this, too, may be an artefact of insufficiently sophisticated methods for building the price indices used to calculate rates of inflation.

The author of this Economist blog post, identified as “W.W.”, sounded nothing like one of those sly Economist correspondents I’ve known in the past, and everything like a typical ham-fisted right-wing libertarian, the sort that are a dime a dozen in this country. So I wondered: Are the Kochs debasing even their own natural propaganda ally, The Economist, by dumbing it down with one of their own Koch-sponsored libertard meatheads? Who was this “W.W.”? ...>more