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Don Lobo Tiggre at Laissez Faire City Times - The Baptist Temple Standoff that Wasn't: Don visited the Indiana Baptist Temple. This is his report. [grabbe]
On the way back to pick up the new petition in the morning, someone hit on a new idea: the original showdown was scheduled for a safe week beyond the elections, but now the elections have smeared out into a seemingly never-to-end mess. Could it be that the DOJ was under orders not to do anything that could look bad for the administration, and hence the anointed heir, until the votes can be recounted enough for a more satisfactory outcome? Could it be that nationally televised scenes of Feral Jack Booted Thugs dragging Christian men, women, children, and their ministers out of their temple, in chains, would make the candidate who sounds more conservative look better? Nah--political considerations never affect the administration of the law, not in Amerika.
The 12/11 and 12/18 issues of The Libertarian Enterprise have been posted. 12/11 was late because Ken Holder is running out of money to pay for the hosting service. He thanked the 6 of us who sent donations. Keep it going. Send in your donation today. TLE is taking a vacation. The next issue will be published on January 8, 2001.
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The Inauguration Speech of George W. Bush by David Roberson - a
humorous fictional prediction.
First of all, I am grateful to the American people for the trust you expressed by electing me to the highest office in the land. Now, if you want to get technical, I will admit that more than half of the voters in this country, when faced with the prospect of me as president, chose to vote for someone else. But that majority of American voters couldn't come to a consensus on who the "someone else" should be, and so here I stand before you today as your new president. Down in Texas we have a colorful phrase to describe such dilemmas. It goes something like this: "Tough titty."
...
Finally, I made a number of pledges to the American people during my campaign for the presidency. I want to assure you that I will work diligently over the next four years to make good on those pledges, and to manage the affairs of our country more skillfully than I managed the affairs of those companies I bankrupted back in my cokehead days.
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Thoughts on Forms of Political Economy on Mars -- Part 1 by Alan
R. Weiss: the Martian government will initially be statist, but by
dwelling on efficiency and cost savings, we may be able to turn it in
a libertarian direction.
Marginal tax rates for Americans are actually well over 50% for most people if you include sales taxes, franchise taxes, fees, local, state, federal income taxes, taxes on business activities, and so on. In fact, Americans work mostly for Government of some kind or another for most of the year (except for the very poor, who are punished because they live in a statist society dominated by a government that stifles their ability to create wealth). Canadians are even worse off. Europeans, of course, are in the tank as of this writing (December 2000) and are taxed at over 80% of earnings--perhaps more.
But that's the economics. The personal liberties side is even worse off. Waco was not an abberation--it was an expression of the US Government's inherent belief that guns are evil (unless they own them all), lots of guns are therefore very evil, religion is to be suspected, and weird religions are by definition cults (better hope that the First or Second Coming of Jesus, depending on your faith, doesn't happen while these clowns run things. He's likely to face another Roman hanging party). You can't own sex toys in at least 8 states, you can't marry whoever the hell you want to, you can't ingest a natural weed that has medicinal properties (like saving you the awful pain of cancer), you can't exist on the planet for the most part without wearing authorized textiles, and you can't remember which goddamn TV channel lied less than the last one because every 60 seconds you are bombarded with advertisements that commit fraud as often as they entertain.
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Why Not Attack the Real Enemies? by Harry Brown - A good response
to L. Neil's attacks in
"Why
I'm Doing It".
"Which brings me to my third reason. I'm tired of apologizing for, and being embarrassed by, the Watergate's (and their predecessors') weak and stupid campaigns. I'm fed up with the LP's nominee never getting more than 900,000 votes, and their conclusion always being that we must make the next campaign even more flaccid and cowardly. I've had enough--30 years of enough--of the Watergate's (and their predecessors') inability and unwillingness to mount a tough, effective, principled, uniquely libertarian campaign."
My experience indicates that at least 80% of Libertarians believe my campaign stands are too radical. I want to reduce the federal government to just its constitutional functions, with a budget of only about $100 billion, and do it in a hurry. I want to do away with the income tax immediately, not gradually. I want to end the Drug War completely, not just legalize medical marijuana. I want to free you completely and immediately from the Social Security tax. I want to repeal all the gun laws, not enforce them. I want to bring all the troops home and stop foreign interventions by our government. I want to treat the Bill of Rights as a literal document and end all the discussions of whether the government has a "compelling interest" in overruling the Bill of Rights in some instance.
