On February 27, the city of Austin was visited by the Libertarian National Committee and other LP leaders from around the nation for the 2010 Libertarian State Leadership Alliance. I had made the decision to attend for a while and was particularly looking forward to the “technology track” of speakers, which focused on spreading the libertarian message via the internet and other means of tech. In short, it’s all about good communication. Highlights included:

• Robert Butler’s session on email marketing, which built on methods of attracting media attention via email and communicating effectively with supporters.
• Dawn Westerberg’s session on using social networking and blogging to communicate.
• Jeff McGhee’s session on building effective websites for candidates. This was particularly great since I am interested in freelancing for candidates who need help making websites that are attractive and easy to update. (Contact me for more info if you are interested!)

The dinner that evening was centered around a debate between five individuals who are running for the Chair position of the Libertarian National Committee. I was not personally acquainted with any of them before that day, but I got to know John Jay Mayers and Mark Hinkle a bit. Ernie Hancock was my fave of the night, but everybody had great things to say and I’m excited to see what’s going to happen with LP-National in the coming years. There is a big push from many people to stay the course of principled libertarianism rather than become Republican-lites or Tea Partyists. (Side note: the best word of the day was “Teo-cons”, ha!) I’m just glad to see that even though we can disagree on certain aspects of libertarian theory, we can be united behind “hating the state,” which is what is important in the long run.

But the biggest surprise for me was that the Libertarian Party of Texas presented me with their first “Student Libertarian of the Year Award,” for my work with the Libertarian Longhorns over the past few years and LibertarianChristians.com. This came with no warning and I was at a loss for words (I know, shocking). It was great to be nominated for the SFL award a few weeks ago, but to be recognized by your peers, your colleagues, and so many people that you admire – well, let’s just say it was touching. Many thanks to Pat Dixon, Robert Butler, Art DiBianca, Jim Lark, and the rest of the awesome crew of LP-Texas. My only proper response is to continue serving others via the cause of liberty, and we will make a difference!

This is the second article in a series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by our friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct ways.

Communicating the same principled message in multiple mediums means a larger potential audience. In the past, somewhat dependent on the specific culture, ideas were transferred through spoken language, dance, and later, through books. Though they still play a role, other mediums, such as the Internet, television, and music, must too be broached as people access content via their preferred medium. This does not mean we have to rework our message but only add it to the larger conversation at different points. Otherwise, it’s as though we’re absent from the conversation entirely. For example, government bloat and hypocrisy provides ample fodder for The Daily Show, South Park, Stossel’s 20/20 [now he hosts “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network], and Pen and Teller’s: Bull****!, shows that influence the worldview of millions. And the same anti-bureaucracy, pro-freedom message can just as easily be communicated through Internet radio shows (like Free Talk Live), blogs (like The Austrian Economists), podcasts (such as Bureaucrash’s Podcrash), and webzines. If your interests and skills lie in one of these mediums, you can help reinforce those already countering pro-state rhetoric.

Technology helps us bypass traditional gatekeepers. The age of media being controlled by a handful of barons in bed with government is over (for one example of the harm this sort of relationship brought, read up on William Randolh Hearst, Harry Ansligner, and the criminalization of marijuana). We live in a time where the proliferation of technology has allowed virtually anyone, anywhere to share their ideas with others, whether via a blog post, uploaded video, Twitter message, or shared song. This empowers you, the individual, and threatens the status quo: the power of government and its frequent accomplice, the mainstream media. You no longer have to submit an op-ed to a newspaper editor and hope that they’re open-minded enough to run your piece. Instead, you can ignore them completely and share your thoughts with others via the Internet. Much to the chagrin of mainstream media companies, prominent blogs have readerships that rival the largest circulated newspapers. Using an inexpensive video camera, Joe Sixpack can create and post a video on YouTube that generates more views than movies released by mammoth Hollywood companies. Anyone with a microphone, a computer, and some free software can host a podcast.

Prominent cultural figures hold enormous sway. Like it or not, many folks take cues from the singer of their favorite band, a controversial radio talk show host, a graphic artist, or a documentary filmmaker. These figures could very easily introduce tens of thousands or millions of others to the ideas of liberty. Even if they just plant a seed, it’ll help to nudge their fans just a little bit more toward the ideas of freedom.

Cross-posted at LibertarianChristians.com.

A few of us Libertarian Longhorns will be attending the Austrian Scholars Conference this week at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. I’m really excited that one of our long-time members and my great friend, Daniel Krawisz, will be presenting this year in a panel with Hans Herman Hoppe, M. Garrett Roth, Bernardita Escobar, and chaired by Thomas DiLorenzo. His talk is called “Praxeology of the Knowledge Problem of Socialism,” and he will be discussing the often-missed details of Hayek’s knowledge problem in the context of, you guessed it, Misesian praxeology (which is the logic of human action). If you want to tune in, you should be able to listen live on Mises.org sometime between 1:00 and 2:30pm CST on Saturday.

I’ll have some articles prepped to post late this week, and I’ll try to do a little summary post each day at some point. Maybe we’ll see you at ASC? Come by and say hello sometime…

LL presents Barry Cooper! Barry Cooper is a former police officer who was considered one of the best drug officers in the state of Texas. Now, he has changed his ways and through two projects, nevergetbusted.com and kopbusters.com, he is fighting back against the evil War on Drugs!

Barry Cooper spoke to us last year and it was LL’s biggest event ever! Come help us make this one even bigger! Oh, there will also be free brownies for anyone that wishes to attend!

This event will take place this Tuesday (March 2) at 8:00PM in CPE 2.214. The facebook event can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=305721117033&index=1

Hope to see you there!

LL is proud to welcome back Chuck Young, founder and current treasurer of Texans for Accountable Government (TAG). Chuck will be talking about the various projects that TAG is currently undertaking, including battling with Vampire Cops and Fusion Centers! He is a very entertaining speaker and we hope many of you will be able to attend!

The event will be on Tuesday, Feb. 16 in ETC 2.114 at 8:00. As always, we will be going to the Posse afterwards for some more fun! Hope to see you there!

Fellow LL’er Daniel Krawisz will be giving an uber-exciting/awesome presentation on social classes from a libertarian perspective. Come discuss why class warfare is a creation of the parasitical State and what a libertarian society would be like!

The meeting will take place from 8:00-10:00 on Tuesday, Feb. 2 in ETC 2.114.

Also, we will be going to the Posse afterwards, like always, for food, drinks, conversation, relaxation, and karaoke!

We hope to see you there!!!

This is the first article in a series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by our friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct ways.

Communism is the vision of an egalitarian society with common ownership of property. Karl Marx, the father of communism, stated that the prevailing capitalist environment is responsible for class struggle and inequality among people. He believed that people’s lives are determined by their economic environment and in order to achieve the communist utopia, that environment has to be changed. For this change to occur, the working class (proletariat) must overthrow the existing regime, dismantle all capitalist institutions, and eliminate the possibility of a counterrevolution by the merchant class (bourgeoisie). Then, as a necessary pre-stage to communism, a socialist authoritarian government must be established to take complete control over the means of production—natural resources, infrastructure, tools, financial capital, and labor. Once people are thoroughly conditioned by this new structure they will morph into a “higher” man. Soon, government will wither away and in its place will emerge the stateless, egalitarian society that communists envisage. This may sound good in theory to some, but the communist experiments of the 20th century resulted in economic deprivation and murder on a massive scale.

Communism kills. Marx knew that winning the revolution would not be enough. He penned that “so long as other classes continue to exist, the capitalist class in particular, the proletariat fights it…it must still use a measure of force, hence governmental measures.” Lenin purged his ideological rivals, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries. Stalin, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, Castro, and Mao all eliminated whoever they suspected of opposing their regimes, whether by deporting dissidents to slave labor camps, subjecting them to sham trials in which the forgone conclusion was a “guilty” verdict and execution, or simply murdering them outright. In all, even according to conservative estimates, communist regimes have killed at least 150 million people. Not too peaceful…

Communism prohibits private property. As Marx saw it, private property is the primary cause of man’s alienation from his social nature and a limitation on his freedom: "The right of property is therefore, the right to enjoy one’s fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society…It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty." Marx agreed that private property is the basis of the capitalist system, creating enormous wealth and economic progress; but he claimed that such wealth and progress is limited to a small class of rich merchants at the expense of a large class of poor workers. But, as classical liberals such as Adam Smith and John Locke argued, private property is essential to securing man’s natural rights to life and liberty. Think about it: the right to life is the right to live, and to live in the way you choose; the right to liberty is the right to pursue what you need to survive and live a good life, so long as it does not entail violating the rights of someone else to do the same.

However, if the needs of others are the determinant of how much food, shelter, or clothing you are allowed to have or of the profession you may pursue—then, ultimately, your life depends on whoever can claim to have a greater need than you. That’s not freedom; that’s slavery.

Communism is full of contradictions:

• Communists claimed that their philosophy would outdo capitalism economically because it promotes the good of all rather than the narrow self-interest of a few greedy capitalists. Yet, if being self-interested means that one acts according to a set of values that one holds and wants to realize, then communism itself could not be implemented without self-interest. Capitalist economies far surpassed communist ones in wealth, evident by the fact that the least-well-off in the former have a greater standard of living than all but the top echelon of government officials in the latter. To achieve the economic growth necessary to alleviate poverty, productivity and innovation are key, both of which depend on the proper incentives. Under capitalism people get to keep and dispose of what they have produced, which gives them an incentive to produce and innovate more. This is absent under communism.
• Communist leaders hailed their societies as beacons for a more just, abundant society. Yet, one only needs to look at how people voted with their feet to know that was not true; many willingly risked death to escape the devastatingly brutal conditions of communist countries to obtain a better life in capitalist countries. Moreover, in areas once seen as “breadbaskets” of the world, communism (and the disallowance of private property) brought mass famine, as was seen in Russia in the early 1920s and in China in the late 1950s.
• Communists stated that their philosophy is ethically superior to classical liberalism and capitalism because it seeks to abolish inequality. Under communism, they claim, everybody is equally provided for but in reality only those in power (bureaucrats and party honchos) win while everybody else loses. The only level of equality reached by the common man is in the shared level of misery.

Cross-posted at LibertarianChristians.com.

Book Review of Panderer to Power, by Frederick Sheehan. McGraw-Hill: New York, 2010. Retail: $29.95

For the bulk of my life so far, I have lived in the age of Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank from 1987 to 2006. Mentioning a Federal Reserve chair like this in the past would not have been considered normal, yet Mr. Greenspan has a sort of legendary status associated with him. Well, at least some people consider him to be an iconic figure, but more and more the general public is coming to realize the destructive effect he has had on the world economy. Books like Frederick Sheehan’s Panderer to Power have something to do with the dispelling of the myth.

Sheehan’s book is the first critical, post-crash biography of Greenspan. Using Greenspan’s own words, Sheehan tracks Greenspan’s education as a young man, early professional life, his meteoric rise to stardom as a celebrity figure, and his tenure as Federal Reserve chair. The questions primarily raised are: What kind of man is this who has so much power over the world, and what did he do that has led us to today’s economic crisis? The answers are quite surprising. Here are some of the things I learned about Greenspan.

• Greenspan was supposedly a disciple of Ayn Rand, yet he probably did not understand what Rand generally was talking about. Nathaniel Branden wrote later, “I wondered to what extent he was aware of Rand’s opinions.” Apparently, he would even argue the question of his own existence with the objectivist coterie. Rand herself wondered, “Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?”
• Even in his pre-Fed years, Greenspan was actually a rather mediocre economist and forecaster. Time after time he would make highly-publicized predictions and yet the exact opposite would occur (see pages 43, 54, and chapter 7).
• Greenspan was a master self-marketer, which is probably the reason for his rise to stardom. He constantly engaged the media and the New York financier social scene, hence he had everyone’s ear without the wisdom to back it up. How else can you be both a professional economist and yet date Barbara Walters?
• Even though Greenspan has supposedly had a historically apolitical career, he was a master politician (read: liar). One only need look to his involvement during the Nixon and Carter presidencies to realize that he knew how to play the political game brilliantly.
• Greenspan’s policies during his Fed years were incredibly political as well. He frequently timed his actions in accordance with what was politically expedient. Wall Street and the fat cat Congress could count on the legendary “Greenspan Put” to be their savior when things were looking down.
• Post-crash, Greenspan has tried to play his own game of historical revisionism about his policies that led to the economic crisis. Sheehan exposes these and many other lies.
• Greenspan has been hired as a consultant by many of the firms who profited from the economic crisis via government handouts. Go figure, the man who enriches Wall Street and causes the meltdown gets the extra paycheck…

Clearly, there is much yet to learn about the man whom many called “the second-most powerful man in the world” for nearly twenty years.

In summary, Sheehan’s retrospective on Greenspan is a fascinating read, and I anticipate it will become a valued resource for those looking to understand the Greenspan years from a perspective that offers more than tacit approval of inflationism and government intervention in the economy. Keep in mind, though, it is not an easy read. Economics is discussed at a fairly high, but understandable level. You will probably end up like me, referring to Wikipedia and other sources to recall certain investment and econ topics. Nevertheless, Panderer to Power is worth your time if you desire more knowledge about the Greenspan legacy.

Cross-posted at LibertarianChristians.com.

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Visit Frederick Sheehan’s website.

A man with whom I went to high school, C. C. of Royal Oak, MI, just recounted to me a chilling tale.

I called them [the pigs] due to a noise complaint and he proceeded to call me “stupid for living there.” when i was explaining that we were in process of finding a house He went onto say something about how stupid i must be to live there around all these *s!9. And that I should have known. When i asked him his name and started writing down the quote; he hit me in an attempt remove the paper from my hands. It landed next to the drivers door; we were standing in front of the car. When i tried to pick up the piece of paper he pushed me, grabbed my arm and held me tightly. When i asked him why he was touching me he said “because I can.” He then went on to explain that he can do what he wants.

I asked for his name and number and he refused. when i asked the other officer for this information she refused several times. Finally they reluctantly give it up. When I finally started to write it down they asked me if i wanted to go down to the station and then proceeded to throw me against the other car. Handcuffed and tossed me into the cruiser; wrote me up for disorderly conduct.

While at the station they told the head officer that I was unwilling to cooperate.

I have never been arrested. I have a clean driving record.

Make sure you all read that correctly. This man called the cops for help and they arrested him instead! C. C. faces charges of disorderly conduct for absolutely no reason other than inviting a bunch of bullies over to his house.  What a horrible nightmare! We’ll post the video on this site as soon as we get it.

The lesson here? Never call the police if you can avoid it. You have no guarantee of being treated respectfully by them. Although I’m sure that many cops are not corrupt, you take a grave risk by coming in their presence.

If you are a cop and are reading this, please consider quitting your job and moving into a legitimate industry. If you are not corrupt, consider going into private security or subscription-based patrol and restitution.

Dear fellow Libertarian Longhorns and the Austin libertarian community,

I was surprised to find out a few days ago that I have been nominated for the Students for Liberty “Student of the Year” Award. I feel very honored to be among these other amazing nominees, and I am quite excited to join these nominees at the Students for Liberty International Conference in February for the award ceremony and some wonderful times with other fellow liberty-loving students.

In many ways, this nomination is a reflection of our group and the surrounding community; it has been a great blessing to be involved with the Libertarian Longhorns, the Texas Libertarian Party and Travis County LP, TAG, the Ron Paul movement, and more. I sincerely believe that the Libertarian Longhorns will continue to be at the forefront of libertarian activity in Texas and beyond. As UT-Austin likes to say, what starts here changes the world. That’s what we’re about.

Yours in liberty,

~Norman Horn

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See the original press release here. Find more information and see past winners here.

The Libertarian Longhorns extend their congratulations to all of these excellent nominees for Student of the Year and all of the groups nominated for Student Group of the Year:

Dennis Craig, George  Washington University Liberty Society, President
Dennis was the president of the Temple Libertarians during the Spring of 2009 and transferred to George Washington University in the Fall.  There he re-founded the GW Liberty Society, hosted Patri Friedman, hosted FIRE President Greg Lukianoff, organized an informational meeting on getting internships, hosted IJ’s Robert McNamara, and took leadership of the DC Forum for Freedom.

Jackie Silseth, St. Cloud State University College Libertarians, Former President
Jacqueline Silseth is the founder and former President of the St. Cloud State Libertarians, an assistant organizer for the Libertarian Party of Minnesota, Chair of Legislative Affairs at SCSU, and founding board member and Volunteer Coordinator & Executive Secretary of the Year of Youth project.

Mike Sertic, California State University-Sacramento Students for Liberty, President
Mike Sertic founded Students for Liberty at CSUS where there had been no previous liberty presence.  He organized regular group meetings along with round table discussions, held numerous Operation Politically Homeless outreach events on campus, passed out pocket Constitutions on Constitution Day, screened Indoctrinate U, and earned local media coverage on health care issues.

Liya P., George Mason University Economics Society, President
Liya was a Koch Summer Fellow in 2009; is President of GMU Econ. Society; published an article for Citizens Against Government Waste, “Beach Houses: Owned by the Rich, Paid for by Everyone”; earned the Southwestern Economic Development Award for Outstanding Scholastic Achievement and Howard R. Bloch Economic Scholarship; hosted numerous high-calibur speakers such as Robert Higgs, Larry Reed, and Peter Boettke; is active in the DC Forum for Freedom; published a healthcare op-ed in Philadelphia Inquirer; and was a participant in the SFL v. SDS debate.