Two great bumper stickers from lpstuff.com:

“Vote Libertarian. It Only Feels Kinky the First Time.”
“Vote Libertarian — The Fast-Acting Cure for Electile Disfunction.”

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | No Comments »

I am proud to present this as the creation of one of our local Libertarians.

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | No Comments »

This is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote for the September-October issue of TK Magazine.

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Since this issue of TK Magazine is focused on politics, I am going to take the opportunity to provide some information about the Libertarian Party, of which I am an enthusiastic member.

The Libertarian Party is the third-largest and fastest-growing political party in the nation. We believe in personal freedom and individual responsibility. We are sometimes categorized as economically conservative and socially liberal.

For many years, American politics has been seen, overly simplistically, as a straight line, with the liberal folks on the left and the conservative folks on the right. The left wants personal freedoms and governmental control of the economy; the right wants economic freedom and governmental control of personal behavior.

It’s far more complex than that, of course. There are a few people who want the government to control almost everything, and a large group who want the government to control almost nothing. In 1971, David Nolan, one of the founders of the Libertarian Party, published the diamond-shaped chart that still bears his name. To see the chart, and to take a short quiz that will tell you where you fit on the chart, visit www.theadvocates.org/quiz.

I am not a spokesperson for the Libertarian Party, nor do I intend to paraphrase the party’s platform here. I was at the 2008 convention for much of the platform debate, and that was enough of that, thank you very much. That information, and much more, is available at www.lp.org for those who are interested.

Rather, I would like to present some of the ideas about libertarianism that I, personally, find compelling. They are in no particular order.

• The function of government is to protect your life, your liberty, and your property. It is not the function of government to provide for you.

• You should be able to live your life as you see fit until you start taking that right away from someone else.

• Voluntary charity works better that any government agency. Contrast the FEMA mess with the voluntary outpouring of help from all over the nation sent to the Hurricane Katrina victims.

• When you control your own charitable giving, you have the right to demand an accounting of how your dollars are spent. As things are now, you are required to contribute under threat of incarceration, and yet have no right to demand accountability.

• Lower taxes encourage and attract businesses, which in turn create jobs and lower the need for government programs. If taxes are low, there is no need to force citizens to ante up to entice new businesses to your town.

• The majority does NOT rule, for which we should be grateful. If it did, the majority could dictate to you where to live, what job you could have, even the name of your next child. It’s called Tyranny of the Majority, and has been explored by other writers. No, you should be in charge of every aspect of your own life, even if you are a minority of one, except in those few cases where the Constitution specifies that the majority, via the government, may compel certain behaviors of you.

• The federal government MUST be required to confine its activities to those allowed it by the Constitution. These are functions, such as national defense, which the states and the citizens cannot reasonably be expected to perform for themselves. All other functions are explicitly forbidden to the federal government by the Tenth Amendment. Education, for example, is forbidden as a function of the federal government, but required by the Kansas Constitution as a function of the state. Kansas, and Kansas alone, should be responsible for public education in our state.

• The government should be afraid of the citizens, not the other way around. The IRS is one of the most oppressive and frightening institutions around, and should be abolished, along with the Income Tax. If government were confined to its Constitutional limits, the Income Tax would not be necessary.

• We must end corporate welfare.

• Not everything that’s a good idea should be compelled by law.

• Not everything that’s a bad idea should be prohibited by law.

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The equinox is not a day.  It’s an exact moment when the center of the sun is directly above the earth’s equator.  That happened this morning at 11-something o’clock, Topeka time.  On the day that happens, the sun rises directly east and sets directly west.

In Topeka, numbered streets — at least the ones south of 12th Street – run due east and west.  And so it was that, at 7:10 this evening, I was standing in the middle of 23rd Street making darn sure the sun was doing what it’s supposed to do on this day, which is to set smack dab over the middle of the west end of my street. *

Sure enough.

I find something magical about the absolute predictability of our little solar system.  People who know about that stuff can predict eclipses centuries in advance, for cryin’ out loud.  I have no idea how that’s done, but I am doing my small part by checking up on the sun every March and every September.

And if I ever go out there and the cosmos isn’t doing what I expected, I plan to write my Congressperson and see if they can’t make a law to fix that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* Lest any of you are concerned, 23rd Street is residential, with little traffic at that time of day.  And I gave up a long, long time ago being concerned about what people think of me.

Posted by Sharon under Laughter | No Comments »

Having been out of town for a while, and then having had trouble getting caught up after being out of town for a while, and then having gotten out of the habit of writing anything after trying to get caught up after being out of town for a while, I can say with some confidence that I am back.  Sort of.

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