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It wasn't too long ago that there were laws still in effect that outlawed homosexuality. The liberal argument in favor of abolishing these laws was simple and powerful: what consenting adults do is none of the State's business. Unfortunately, many liberals do not extend this logic to the realm of economic actions between consenting adults. For these same people, letting two consenting adults agree on a wage level below the one proscribed by the State is simply out of the question.

How can liberals repair this obvious inconsistency? One possible argument might be that the State can interfere in the economic realm in order to protect people from their own bad decisions. However this argument proves too much, as then the State could logically put everyone in a cage to make sure they only ate the right things and only did non-dangerous things. Logically such an excuse only leads to the totalitarian state, and as such is rejected.

Yet this inconsistency persists, even in other issues of civil liberties as compared to economic liberties. Of course the conservative has it the other way around, claiming economic liberties to be protected but not the civil liberties. Libertarians are the only ones who remain consistent with regard to all liberty in that we should be at liberty to act as we will without aggressing upon another person's rights.

Politicians have been ignoring the problem or putting band-aids over for a while now, but it will undoubtedly start to have a larger and larger effect over the next decade. This problem is the massive national debt, including the unfunded entitlement liabilities. Both together total over $100 trillion, an impossibly large number that will never be paid for. For the first time in many Americans' lives, we will see massive cuts to government spending. Not the kind of "cuts" we've had lately, where there is no decrease in spending but just a decrease in the rate of spending growth. No, there will have to be huge spending cuts. There is no amount of tax increase that can pay for this spending, it will have to be done.

Government, particularly the Federal government, will have to start shrinking for the first time in decades. There is no way around this. People will not understand why, and accusations will fly about supposedly unnecessary austerity measures meant only to protect the wealthy, as we are seeing right now. But over time people will begin to see that it is the idea of government as benefactor that is the real problem. The promises made could never have been fulfilled and thus were lies from the start. This mass deception will reveal to the people that the emperors have no clothes, and they will lose faith in government as the solution to every problem.

The pain of it cannot be avoided, but it could be lessened if reasonable people accepted this truth that massive spending cuts must be made. The sooner it is done the lesser the pain will be. For those that dogmatically believe in government entitlement programs, if you don't want your entire system to completely collapse and cause the populace to completely reject it, you should be at the forefront advocating for immediate massive cuts. As for me, I know that the sooner it all collapses the better. A long, drawn-out collapse will take that much longer to repair. Better to rip the band-aid off now and get it done with.

I hear a lot of myths and misconceptions about libertarianism and free market capitalism around here, so I decided to put them in a list for easy reference.

1. Government is society. This is by far the most common misconception I hear. The usual way this comes out is in an accusation that if I don't want the government to do something, I must not want that thing done at all. This is of course, absurd. It's like saying that because I don't want the state to maintain a state religion that I'm for no one being allowed to follow a religion. Government is a minority part of society. It is a separate and distinct group of people. Saying the government does X is a convenient metaphor since it is actually persons A, B and C who are part of the government minority who are doing X.
   

2. Laissez-Faire, free market capitalism means anyone can do any terrible thing they want. This comes about occasionally as people have a false idea about what free market capitalism is. It is primarily a system of property rights protections, not a free-for-all. As such, crimes like theft and fraud are still against the law. People and firms cannot just do as they please. In addition, firms cannot pollute anywhere they want as that would be an invasion of other people's property rights. In some ways, capitalism would be a far stricter regulation upon people's behavior. This is of course in addition to economic and social regulations which also act as a check upon actions.

3. You want the poor and old to die in the streets, or some other bad outcome. This comes about from a complete denial of the possibility that there might be other ways to achieve similar results. People think like this because they have been living under government control of such things as health care and education that they cannot conceive of a world in which the government did not supply these services. If the government provided everyone with "free" shoes and I advocated an end to this, these very same people will decry, how will the poor get shoes? This is simply because the institutions that would replace the government bureaucracies don't exist and so people cannot imagine what life would be like without government providing certain services. Thus they see only one possible outcome and anyone who desires such changes must, in their minds, desire the only possible outcome imaginable to the myth-believer.

4. Your ideas are utopian. None of my ideas require a perfect world/conditions to exist nor do they claim to create a perfect world. In fact, they are based on the fact that the world is not perfect, that resources are scarce, that disputes will commonly arise. It is never the case that I am claiming that liberty will create perfection, only that my system is better than other systems. There will still be crime, disease, poverty and the like. I only claim that libertarianism can reduce these undesirable things better than other systems. No political/economic system can eliminate them.

5. You care only about the wealthy and not the poor and unfortunate. This is similar to number three in that since people disagree with me about the outcomes of my ideas, they believe that I want the outcomes to come about that they think will happen. In reality I believe my ideas will be beneficial to everyone in society, from top to bottom. It is certainly fair to disagree with me about the outcomes of my ideas, but it is not fair to impugn my motives.
   

6. You only want X because X personally benefits you. This often comes up regarding taxation, as in I only want to end taxation because of personal greed, or in regards to some other policy which it is presumed must highly benefit me. This is wrong for two reasons. First, my views are based on a wide-reaching moral philosophy of personal rights. It would be highly inconsistent of me to only support liberty when it didn't affect me or when I had nothing to gain. Second, my views of liberty are that increased liberty is beneficial to everyone in society. The myth seems to be that I wish to gain at someone else's expense, however I believe that my ideas will benefit everyone. It is fair to disagree about the amount and breadth of the supposed benefits, but not to impugn my motives.

7. You want to legalize X, so you must support X. This comes up with issues like ending drug prohibition or legalizing prostitution. Just because I think it should be legal do something doesn't mean I think it's moral or wise to do something or that I want people to engage in it. My views are based on rights and liberty, not on how I want to craft society.
   

Barack Obama will obviously be running as the Democratic candidate. He won in 2008 and while his popularity has waned, he still polls closely or slightly ahead against any of the potential GOP candidates. If Ron Paul wins the GOP nomination then it will be either him or Obama that wins the election.

However if Paul does not win the GOP nomination, then Barack Obama will definitely win. Here's why: Paul will run as a third party/independent candidate and take votes primarily away from the GOP candidate. Paul is retiring from Congress, is 76 and has nothing to lose. This is his last attempt to influence American politics as a candidate and he doesn't have to worry about earning his party's scorn by costing them an election. In addition, there is a chance that he could win significant votes if the economy takes a sharp turn for the worse.

Paul's rise to prominence came about largely because of his accurate positions on the economy like predicting the housing boom and bust years in advance. When mainstream economists failed to explain what happened and Ron Paul and the Austrian economists successfully did, it created a wave of support for Dr. Paul, particularly among young voters who are concerned about the long-term future of this country. Another blow to the economy in 2012 would further prove that Ron Paul was right about the failure of Obama's Keynesian economic policies and swell his support even further.

Lastly Ron Paul's supporters are die-hards who will not hold their noses and vote for a Gingrich, Romney or Perry just to get Obama out. To us those candidates are just as bad, if not worse, than Obama, and voting for any of them makes no sense. So if any other Republican candidate is nominated, Paul will siphon enough votes away to ensure an Obama victory, hence it will be either Ron Paul or Barack Obama taking the oath in 2013.

Facts are a troublesome thing for some people, and especially for the die-hard étatist who doesn't like facts that don't agree with his beliefs. voevoda is one such person. Faced with the facts about the Great Depression and Herbert Hoover's failed stimulus and public works programs, voevoda could not accept reality and decided to create a fictional one of his own. He dismisses all sources that disagree with his ideology as "dubious" without giving any reason why. This is how dogmatic believers behave. Then he announces that he has searched the "true" records and found them devoid of the facts which make him so uncomfortable.

"No article published in a reputable academic journal makes any mention of Hoover coming up 'with the 'stimulus' and public works programs.'"--voevoda

Perhaps he should have asked Hoover himself. In his acceptance speech on August 11, 1932, Hoover brags that instead of doing nothing, his administration created the "most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic."

When the facts don't agree with your ideology, the dogmatic true-believer denies the facts and inserts his own. Unfortunately for voevoda, the truth doesn't care what he wants it to be.

Capitalism is a system based upon property rights. In a capitalist society the primary function of government is to protect individuals' rights to life, liberty and property. Liberal policies are based upon having the government violate individual rights, particularly the right to own property. They want the government to confiscate ever larger portions of our property, dictate to us how we can use our property, or even take our property entirely from us at the whim of the state.

This is what makes poor countries like Somalia poor--the lack of property rights. Without property rights there is no incentive to invest, no incentive to improve, no incentive to even maintain property. Somalia is what the US would become if liberal policies were to completely rule. The US has enough economic freedom that the engine of wealth creation--capitalism--is still working, albeit weaker and weaker. As liberal policies continue to violate property rights the incentive to invest weakens causing further poverty.

Consumer spending levels have already returned to pre-recession levels and government spending is higher, yet the economy is not recovering. This is because investment is down, thanks to weakening property rights. Somalia is where liberal policies lead us. Lack of property rights protections remove the incentive to invest and improve property, and it's no wonder that firms have been seeking to invest elsewhere in the world and away from the US government's reach.

I know this was just partisan politics, but it was funny all the same:

"POTUS says downgrade due to slowness in debt plan. Forgets to mention he has yet to offer a plan."

I love it when I hear that the financial crisis was caused by deregulation. Inevitably when asked, the statist always replies by pointing towards Gramm-Leach-Bliley. At first they always claim that GLB repealed a depression-era act called Glass-Steagall. The truth is that only two lines were repealed out of that act, section 20 and section 32. Nothing else in Glass-Steagall was repealed. When pressed with these facts, the statist then continues with the preposterous claim that these two sentences were all that stood between prosperity and depression.

Here's another fact: GLB actually added over 100 pages of new regulations. So the original claim was that deregulation caused the financial crisis, but the evidence given is always this example of an increase in regulation. It's so laughably silly yet I've seen people repeat this explanation for this myth 100% of the time. The problem is that of confirmation bias. The statist wants to believe that deregulation caused the financial crisis, so he seeks out any kind of deregulation, no matter how miniscule and irrelevant, and then claims it to be the source of the crisis. So even though there are thousands upon thousands of pages of regulations and the government controls the economy in many different ways like via interest rates, prices controls, wage controls, monetary policy and fiscal policy, the government that the statists worship can't be blamed. Instead freedom is blamed.