Thought and Freedom

For all the flack I give the mainstream media (and they deserve a lot), I really appreciate the tough questions that some are asking.

Jake Tapper grilled Jay Carney (White house press secretary) about the illegal kill list that the Obama Administration has used. See the video below for the complete exchange.

Of course, Obama (and by proxy, Jay Carney) has no way to defend these actions. This was a U.S. citizen and there are pretty clear laws on the books that say the U.S. must give due process for all citizens. (See here for information on the president’s “Kill List”)

Mr. Carney has a very difficult job. How can you be the spokesman for an administration that is indefensibly violating the constitution in the name of expediency? How do you reverse hundreds of years of acceptable standards on due process?

Before the year 1300, the British Magna Carta contained language (originally clause 39, but now listed as clause 29) that required due process for the accused:

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

With such a long-standing tradition of due process, why would we allow any elected official to override such an established common right?

Several Democrat and Republican politicians alike have just started calling for the impeachment of President Obama over his use of a “kill list.” If congress allows such actions to go unanswered (through impeachment proceedings) they are complicit in creating Obama’s Kremlin style monster.

Note: This is a speech I gave to the 39b Republicans of Northern Dakota County on October 6, 2011.

I want to start by expressing my deepest gratitude to the many of you that worked so hard with my campaign last election. I also think special thanks need to go out to Mark Westpfahl for his efforts. He is a good friend and a great organizer. I would like to hope that while politics brought this great group of individuals together, it is friendship and neighborhood that binds us.

I have been pondering my role in this amazing process over the last several months. My mission, as a candidate, was threefold:

1. Give hope to a local party that seemed to have given up on the possibility of an electoral win in the legislature.
2. Aid in the defeat of the anti-freedom agenda of the current state representative.
3. Reform our party from within. Restore the party to once again embrace the freedoms that our founders recognized as God given and inalienable.

I think we as a group went a long way in accomplishing the first goal. We came closer with the second goal, and the jury is still out on the third. It is this third goal that has so concerned me of late. For if we give hope for electoral victory, but those victories are marred by individuals, who, for good or evil reasons, reject the freedoms we sought to uphold, what real good did we accomplish?

For years, I have told myself that I must accept the occasional missteps of members of our party who vote to steal my freedoms through tax increases and the like. But should I just accept this? My contention is that I should not. Therefore, I thought it prudent to pour my efforts into teaching members of our party why they should vote in support of freedom. I toiled to teach my fellow party members about the nature of freedom and the nature of economics. It is only with a solid footing that one will not be swayed.

Despite efforts by many like minded people, the third goal has been the most difficult to achieve.

With a supposed majority on the city school board, we managed to vote to put a tax increase on the ballot. The one officially endorsed school board member who currently sits on the board, ironically chose not vote. The other endorsed candidate that is running formally endorsed the tax increase last month.

What happened to living within our means? The promoters of such a tax increase stated that this will save the district money. Then I question the need for a ten year increase in taxes.

What happened to standing up for the rights of the individual? Do homeschoolers or private-schoolers enjoy the same luxuries of a state sponsored tablet computer? Or are their families going to be unnecessarily robbed to give to the public school child that is somehow deemed more valuable to society?

The inconvenient truth is that most residents of this town cannot afford such amenities for themselves, yet the school board deems it fit that they request to take from those who have not money or power in order to benefit those who have power.

Then I look to our city council.  Sometimes I feel that our endorsed candidates on the council vote less in favor of freedom than those on the other side do. We own a golf course and a fitness center, which both combined bleed in excess of one million dollars a year. (I do thank Tom Bartholomew for being a strong advocate against such government overreach.)

But that is not even the core of the issue. The issue is whether government should own such institutions. Our founding fathers did not think so. I don’t think so. Yet many of our duly endorsed candidates have chosen that very path; and for what reason? It has been for convenience and for reputation sake.

We subsidize multimillion dollar private businesses so that they can expand on the city residents’ paychecks. Yet we say we stand for liberty. When did liberty mean we take from those who earn their income and give to that which seduces those in power?

One need not search hard to find members of this very political party serving special interests, rejecting state and individual sovereignty and reducing the definition of freedom to mean “support of the state.”  There were corporate handouts, laws restricting freedom of speech, laws manipulating the private markets, and even laws that are so intrusive that compliance has caused small businesses to fail around our country. These were all passed with overwhelming support by members of our very own party who said they must compromise their values for our own good.

Our national representatives have been difficult to communicate with. Their staffers often filter messages as to not “upset the congressman.” Well, if the congressman is voting badly, I don’t think we should worry about upsetting the congressman. Our freedoms were paid for with the blood of our ancestors, yet are given away with an “aye” vote and the stroke of a pen. I want our congressman to agonize over every intrusion of freedom before his “aye” vote.

We do have a good deal of promising figures rising up and a few that have been with us a long time. I eagerly wait for them to increase in number and restore freedom to our nation.

From the examples above, I have serious concerns over the state of our movement. Those who understand freedom lightly have no place being endorsed by the liberty loving residents of this community. It is the elected officials who are tasked with protecting liberty. They are not tasked with creating it, nor organizing it, nor distributing it, just protecting it. That is all; just protecting it.

C.S. Lewis, a brilliant man from the twentieth century once said:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. “

One might say that I am making a big deal out of little votes. But may I remind you that our entire world was damaged by the small act of taking a bite of fruit. The corruption that comes when power is exercised wrongly is costly to extinguish, once ignited.

I want my children to have a good education, good places to grow and be nurtured, and good places to buy food and clothing. But more importantly, I want them to grow up in a nation that is free. I want them to experience a community that is free. I want them to understand that their rights and their responsibilities come from God and are not dictated to them by any man or institution.

The endorsements given by this body and the actions of certain endorsed candidates have caused me to second guess the nature of my relationship with the local party.  There are times when the bonds of a good and well meaning association need to be thrown off, in order to secure that which is more precious than the institution itself.

For me, the time is now. It is with much consideration and with a heavy heart that I announce my resignation from duties to the local party. Never have I believed more strongly in the rights that God alone has given us, but my efforts are only given to the party as long as the party remains the instrument for protecting such freedoms.

It may be for a time, or it may be longer, but until there is evidence that the cause of freedom can be advanced through this broken apparatus, I will choose to withhold and limit my dealings with this body.

I would remind you that the party is simply a means to an end. As a nation is a means to an end. The end of this party, the end of this nation, is the protection of our inalienable rights and freedoms. There is no addendum on this. I pledge to work for causes which support this end, but hold allegiance to no body; only to God, to my family, and to the inalienable freedoms that our founders gave their lives to uphold.

With that, I hope that our friendship continues. The people of this institution are the part that I cherish, not the institution itself. I wish you all the best and thank you for the time that I could work with each of you in advancing our cause.

In liberty and friendship and at peace with all,

Terry Pearson

Here is something, umm, funny in a Weird Al sense of funny, for your Tuesday!

Unfortunately, the best humor is made from things that are mostly true.

Judge Napolitano had some closing arguments on his show today. He asked some hypothetical questions about what you would do if America was no longer free…

Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Is freedom in America a myth or a reality? Tonight, what if we didn’t live in a free country?

What if the Constitution were written not to limit government, but to expand it? What if the Constitution didn’t fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, but betrayed it? What if the Constitution actually permitted the government to limit and constrict freedom? What if the Bill of Rights was just a paper promise, that the government could avoid whenever it claimed the need to do so? What if the same generation – in some cases the same people – that drafted the U.S. Constitution enacted laws that violated it? What if the merchants and bankers who financed the American Revolution bought their way into the new government and got it to enact laws that stifled their competition? What if the civil war that was fought in the name of freedom actually advanced the cause of tyranny?

What if the federal government were the product of 150 years of stealing power and liberty and property from the people and the states? What if our political elites spent the 20th century importing the socialist ideas of big government Statism from Europe? What if our political class was adopting the European political culture from which our founding fathers fought so hard to break free?

What if our political leaders no longer acknowledged that our rights come from our humanity, but insisted instead that they come from the government? What if you had to produce your papers to get out of or into our once-free country? What if you couldn’t board a plane, a train, or a long-distance bus without providing documentation telling the government who you are and where you’re going, without paying the government, and without risking sexual assault? What if your local police department could shoot down a plane? What if government agents could write their own search warrants, declare their own enemies, and seize whatever property they want? What if the feds could detain you indefinitely, with no visitors, no lawyer, no judge, and no jury? What if they could make you just disappear? What if the government broke its own laws in order to enforce them? What if the government broke down your front door in the middle of the night and shot your dog, and claimed it was a mistake?

What if you were required to purchase a product that you didn’t need, didn’t want, and couldn’t afford, from a company you never heard of, just as a condition of living in the United States? What if the government told you what not to put in your body as well as what to put into it; and how much? What if the government claimed that since it will be paying your medical bills, it can tell you what to eat, when to sleep, and how to live? What if the government tried to cajole and coax and compel you into behaviors and attitudes it considered socially acceptable? What if the government spent your tax money to advertise to you how great the services are that it provides? What if the government kept promising to make you safe while it kept stripping you of your liberties and committing crimes in your name that made you a target of more violence?

What if you didn’t have a right to every dollar you earned? What if the government decided how much of your earnings it will keep and how much it will permit you to have? What if the government took money from you and gave it away to its rich banking and corporate friends whose businesses were failing? What if the government thought it knew better than you did how to lead your life and had no problem telling you so? What if the government took the credit for every success your own human actions helped you achieve? What if the government told you that only it could build roads, run schools, keep you safe, and collect trash even though it’s never been able to do so efficiently before? What if the government spent nearly twice as much as it took in? What if it couldn’t pass a budget on a timely basis and funded itself just weeks at a time? And what if the government kept borrowing money against the wealth of future generations to pay for wasteful programs today?

What if you worked for the government and the government didn’t work for you? What if freedom were a myth? What if we don’t live in a free country? What do we do about it?

From New York, defending freedom; so-long America.

While surfing the net, there are a number of times that you don’t want to give out your real email address. For example, you come across a site that says you must enter an email address to view the content of a help article. Why do they need your email address?

Now, there is an easy solution: Disposable email addresses!

Just enter any address at mailinator.com, then go to their site, type in the address, and presto, your mail awaits.

1. Make it unique: Of course the catch is that none of the email is password protected. So you may want to choose a unique name that someone will not guess. Don’t choose bob@mailinator.com. Instead, choose bobddcc8888d3df@mailinator.com. That way,
2. Don’t use for private information: Someone could view the email besides you, so don’t use it for private information.
3. Delete the message: It works when camping. Leave the site as you found it! You can delete the messages. So if you really want to hide your trail, just delete it.

I just finished watching an amazing short documentary (about 30 minutes) by Ray Comfort. He interviewed several people, asking them a series of challenging questions.

In one of the first difficult questions, Comfort explains that the Nazi’s would bury people in trenches after an execution, even though some were not dead. He asked person after person if they would run the bulldozer if someone pointed a gun to their head and ordered them to.

Watch this video to find out what their responses were…

After the video, check out this website for a more detailed description…

A tradition of the American public school, has been to hold a referendum vote on new taxes every few years. A classic political discussion on new funding will hit on issues such as how important it is for the children, how those who reject new taxes on local families to pay for education do not care about the children, and how public education must be protected and nurtured to blossom into this yet unrealized dream.

Usually, the promoters of “more funding” tend to gather around the idea that new technologies are about to revolutionize the system, making it cheaper and better for all on board. Their solution; Just give us a little more money now so we can reform the system, then you will see savings and improvements down the road.

I may get into the idiotic nature of such logic in another article, but today, let’s just focus on what education really is.

When one says a person recieved an education, this is usually to imply that the person attended Kindergarten through 12th grade and now has a diploma to show for it. Unfortunately, a diploma is nothing more than the participants ribbon of the education system. Employers, seeing right through the charade, ask for more. They want experience or evidence that you had the drive to actually finish something on your own (like college).

I would like to challenge these assumption. Here are a few common myths and their rebuttles:

1. An education is simply a thirteen+ year journey that you take with your local peer group: Nothing could be further from the truth. As edusceptic argues, “the school system absolutely needs to accommodate families who are wise enough to know that learning is a whole world activity, and not restricted to a classroom.” Education is about learning, whether this comes from a trip to a museum, Nick Jr. TV, a Sunday School lesson, or a traditional classroom.
2. Cutting dollars to public schools diminishes the effects of education: This is a silly statement considering the above point. Sitting in a classroom can be a tool to help children learn, but we also need to look at the opportunity cost. What activities and what lessons are they missing?  Are they slowly having the burning desire to learn leached out of them by boredom and lack of challenge? By the public demanding more dollars from the student’s family, we could be siphoning off dollars that would have been used for valuable out of classroom educational opportunities. See myth #4 on this site.
3. We need standards. Without such standards, children would fall through the cracks: A one size fits all education system, fails most in the name of uniformity. Tell me if you truly believe that “no child left behind” or “profiles in learning” really made your kids smarter. The truth is that standards testing templates tend bureaucratize the education of children. What we really need is a system of local control where parents have measures to hold individual teachers accountable.
4. Education is too complicated to be handled by amateurs: The nature of how a person learns has not changed, only the subject matter has changed. In today’s world, technologies have made a K-12 education simpler, not harder. In the age of online encyclopedias, Google, and even post secondary education options for high schoolers, we are kidding ourselves if we believe that single teachers in classrooms can compete with the distributed forms of education that the internet brings. Ask most software developers (myself included) how they learned so much about computers. Guess what they will say. They self taught themselves by research and collaboration online. Sure I have a formal degree in computer science, but that only supplements my learning through other channels. Education is more about teaching people how to find and piece together the information and less about having an expert educator provide you with the information. He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn’t know.

Finally, I would like to leave you with the quote that has made me think many a time about how we educate our kids. (Thanks Bruce Little for the interpretation an critique of this quote):

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. -William Butler Yeats

I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject or if you have anything to add. If you found this post interesting, please subscribe to my posts here.

P.S. As long as we are speaking of education, can you figure out the spelling mistake in the article above?

It would seem there is something of a national phenomena sweeping the country. People, from both sides of the aisle are declaring themselves to be “libertarian.”

One interesting factor in this movement is the rise of the Christian Evangelical libertarian. In recent history, these terms may have been as polar opposites as East and West. But today, individuals are deciding that the proper politics of an Evangelical Christian is to be libertarian.

One such person, Jay Polk, is a Bible believing Christian who also chairs the Libertarian Party of Tennessee.  See his story below.

Polk makes a point that Jesus would probably not endorsed libertarianism, or any other faction or political party in this instance. What Jay Polk is getting at is that the most moral society is one where they submit to Jesus on their own free will.

It’s always wonderful to find a website that is full of good, well researched advice on a subject. I came across one recently called RealSimple.com.

I read through a couple articles like “How to fake clean your house” which would also work perfectly for college students when their parents come over!

Another great read was entitled “Surprising uses for your dishwasher.” The article included everything from washing action figures and GI-Joe guys to cooking a salmon in your dishwasher.

I have to be honest, I am not about to cook salmon in the dishwasher. But, if you were in a bind, it might be a useful thing someone would try.

The point is, our lives are often needlessly complicated. We are easily distracted by a number of concerns and issues that do not matter. Our lives can be so busy that it is hard to get done with those items we are expected to do.

These tips can come in handy for me when a surprise guest ends up announcing “I’ll be over in five minutes,” or my kids toys are in desperate need of a bath. For me, my time is a valuable commodity and I will take every tip I can get to recapture some of it.

John Stossel once said “I used to be a Kennedy-style “liberal.” Then I wised up. Now I’m a libertarian. But what does that mean? When I asked people on the street, half had no clue.”

Most of us are in the same boat. Is the libertarian an Ayn Rand supporter? Are they a reader of Mises? Do they support anarchy? Are they in support of home schooling? Do they drink raw milk?

The answer to this series of questions is yes. And no.

The fact is that libertarianism is a rather vague term, which roughly means that you believe coercive power should be limited, whether that power could accomplish good or evil.

Most libertarian thinking individuals fear the “worst that could happen” more than they anticipate the “good that could be done” when someone hold a certain power over another person.

Historically, this aversion towards the collection of power has merit. Societies that amass power tend toward state worship and servitude. Such practices create a very powerful, yet very corrupt state, eventually leading to the downfall of a civilization.

Christians, like other people, have this temptation to use power to advance their causes because, after all, they “won’t abuse that power.”  And yet, nation after nation has seen the consequences of giving one man, or group of men so much power.

Jacqueline Otto, over at Common Sense Concept, has a very good article on Christian libertarians. She references a number of scriptures that show that Christianity is about voluntary submission to Jesus. The whole nature of a relationship with God is that the relationship exists on your own volition.

This meshes with the core concepts of libertarianism. The core belief of a libertarian is to reject the use of force on others. They also have a tremendous respect for logic and for the various intricacies of human nature. Jesus never commanded the Christian church to” go out and make subjects of the Christian mission.” He commanded Christians to “go out and make disciples of all nations.”

The only true relationship is one that is entered into by your own free will. As a Christian I choose to support liberty wherever possible because I believe that our message is strongest when our fellow Christ followers arrived there, not by coercion, but by their own choosing.

Do you have a blog and consider yourself a Christian Libertarian? If so, post a comment with a link to your blog!