This is the first of what I hope to be many libertarian oriented blog carnivals hosted at Happily Oblivious. I’d like to thank everyone who submitted articles. Now, get reading!

Trevor at the Will to Exist takes a look at 10 “crimes” that aren’t really hurting anybody.

Libertarians believe that for something to be a crime, there must be a victim. Therefore, we believe that consensual acts between legal adults cannot be crimes. They might be morally repugnant. They might be unhealthy and disgusting. They might be tasteless and silly. But they aren’t crimes.

Winton Bates at Freedom and Flourishing writes about the pros and cons of banning drugs and other substances.

I told him that as a businessman he should be aware of the pressure for governments to ban and regulate a lot more things including mixed alcoholic drinks, tobacco, gambling, pornography, vitamin supplements, fatty food, and high calorie food and drinks. I said he should be particularly concerned about pressure for governments to do more to protect people who are vulnerable to advertising and the debtaholics who can’t resist spending up to their credit card limits.

Bill at Liberty’s Life Line tells us about a frightening experience, and the reason that his freedom of choice saved his family’s life.

They are alive because I have the liberty, so far, to buy any vehicle that I choose and can afford.  The choices are many and I have made many choices through my life.  That is primarily because the government has not yet taken away that liberty and demanded what types of vehicles can be built and by whom.

Market Urbanism warns about the dangers of zoning laws to your personal freedoms.

While well intentioned, like many progressive interventions of the eary 1900s, zoning has contributed to sprawl (which has begun to be demonized by progressives over the recent decades) and served to inhibit the vitality and diversity of urban neighborhoods.

Masters in Criminal Justice provides us with a list of the top 50 Constitutional Law blogs. This is a great resource for those who would like to learn more about our rights as Americans.

Steve at The Super Gas Saver explains why an auto industry bailout may lead to higher gas taxes. Yikes!

Many politicians and others would love to see higher fuel taxes. That would raise fuel prices, and that, in turn, would force American drivers to turn to smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles. Driving smaller vehicles that would consume something closer to “our fair share” of the world’s resources would make some tickled pink. That group would not include the majority of American drivers.

Allison from The Smoking Argus Daily wrote a wonderful 4 part series about how to save the republic.

If the Republic is to be saved, the Senate must be restored to its Constitutional position and foundation upon Federalism.  While it is my estimation that many “progressives” were of good and genuine intent to see government reformed and corruption eradicated, their movement was merely co-opted by those who sought a total centralization of power unto themselves for purely selfish desires, not to the benefit of “We the People”.

Wisdom from Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket gives us the truth about the economy and job creation.

I fear, with Democrat rule and the incessant need to make supposedly better decisions for us than we can for ourselves—for that, they need our money. This means that the tax benefits would likely end, along with beneficial trade policies that kept many of us working up until this point.

Greg Laden explains why race, as a concept, is harmful to society and people should be viewed in the context of their humanity instead.

They (racial boundaries) are temporary contrasts that emerge because of the movement of people — but that immediately, or shortly, begin to meld. Even as we assert the reality of the boundaries, measure the boundaries, use the boundaries for medical, social, economic, and political purposes, people on both sides of the boundaries are busy doing the horizontal tango and making babies that sillify the boundaries by the very existence of these babies.

Derek Clark from Geek Politics questions the sanity behind billion dollar bailouts and propping up big business while small businesses (the bread and butter of America, folks) can barely make ends meet.

If we stop doing things right, we will stop making money just like all of these big businesses. Unfortunately, at that point, we will all start to look for new jobs because Uncle Sam will not be writing us any checks. So my question is, why are AIG and GM more important than small businesses around America. Why are their stockholders protected at the expense of the taxpayer?

Greg at The Holy Cause examines whether or not the Bible makes a case for minarchism.

When the Lord created Adam and Eve, there was obviously no strong human form of government; there was what is best described as anarchism (note that this does not mean disorder).

The Frugal Libertarian gives us reasons that the Universal Service Fund (that pesky charge on your phone bill…go look, we’ll wait) amounts to socialism and theft.

Their website says “[t]he fund is maintained through contributions made by telecommunications providers across the country”.  They make these contributions sound as if they are voluntary.  I assure you that they are not.  These “contributions” are mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Orna Ross examines the idea of freethinking.

Freethinking originally arose in the nineteenth century as a reaction against organised religion.  Today it still defines itself in that reactive and limiting way and is often used as a synonym for atheism or agnosticism.

James at Rise Up Rochester explains why individualism is better than collectivism (and why there’s nothing wrong with that!).

An individualist philosophy does not necessarily imply a selfish philosophy. Rather, it implies a philosophy which unbiasedly values personal liberty, freedom of expression through choice, and non-violence.

Kavmerica clues us in to the problems created by a two party system.

Democrats and Republicans are the only two parties capable of raising enough money to compete on the national political stage.  Over the years the campaign finances laws have been crafted in such a way that they benefit established parties and not the smaller ‘independents’.  Perhaps they didn’t do so intentionally but it is a by product of their dominance over the years.

Archvillain at Imagination gives us a defense of something that’s largely missing in today’s society: personal responsibility.

Some circumstances can be beyond your control, but how you react to those circumstances is your responsibility. You made the decisions. Choosing not to make a decision is also a decision, so you can’t escape your responsibility that way.

To those of you who are avid or occasional readers of this blog, I wanted to say that I’ve been working more hours lately with scarce internet access. I’m doing my best to keep putting up articles for you and Nick has been kind enough to fill in and do extra work while I’m “away”. If this blog should go severals days without an update, I can assure you that it hasn’t been abandoned and we’ll be back soon enough. In the meantime, let’s keep fighting the good fight!

Friday night I went to Hannaford’s, one of the local grocery stores, to pick up a few items. I left the store fuming after spending 15 minutes standing in line as the cashier and bagger stood around chatting with eachother, completely ignoring the line of customers. They would gab for two to three minutes between each customer’s order, didn’t make eye contact with any of the customers who stepped through their line and handed back change to the woman in front of me in the most rude way possible–without counting it and with the coins on top of the cash.

Is this really what our families are accepting as behavior from children, now? America has a lot of problems, but this is one that could easily be solved if only parents started instilling values in their children. Unfortunately, many families these days can’t be bothered with teaching their children proper manners or respect for their fellow human beings. Besides, if manners and morals are really that important, many families think that the government will teach those fundamentals at school. Sadly, that isn’t how the system works. Children will only learn how to respect others if they are taught at home in a family environment. A teacher in a classroom with 30 ill behaved 2nd graders is not equipped to teach much of anything, let alone proper etiquette! Parents, please start showing your children what constitutes proper behavior by behaving properly yourself. The first step in “fixing” the younger generation is for the older generation to fix itself.

I can’t believe I’m saying this as a 28 year old, but I do frequently become frustrated with the younger generation for its lack of a work ethic, lack of morals and general lack of social etiquette. If I have children, their education in morals and respect will be done at home without any unrealistic expectations that the government should do my job as a parent and instill proper values in my kids. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go drink my prune juice and drive very slowly across town.

Every once in a while, a news story turns up that absolutely astounds me. Oh, the hilarity!

Authorities say they’ve arrested a man who broke into the home of two California farmworkers, stole money, rubbed one with spices and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing.

Fresno County sheriff’s Lt. Ian Burrimond says 22-year-old Antonio Vasquez was found hiding in a field wearing only a T-shirt, boxers and socks after the Saturday morning attack.

He says deputies arrested Vasquez after finding a wallet containing his ID in the ransacked house.

The farmworkers told deputies the suspect woke them Saturday morning by rubbing spices on one of them and smacking the other with an 8-inch sausage.

The story does, however, have a serious side. The men who were rubbed down with spices and slapped with a sausage probably feel violated. I know that I would. Law enforcement wasn’t there to stop the violation from occurring–as always, they showed up later to document it. Lucky for these men they were only assaulted with a spice rack and some sausage, but thousands of Americans are not so lucky every year, and with increasingly strict gun laws, I’d expect to see more violent crimes happening inside of innocent people’s homes.

Each generation has a defining moment–a moment that goes down in history and will be remembered forever as that generation’s predominant achievement. This generation’s moment is coming in November with the possible election of Barack Obama to the White House. This moment will mark a turning point in American history which can’t easily be likened to any moment before it in America.

No, to find similar moments in history, one must look to foreign leaders; great men like Lenin and Mao, those most distinguished of men who operated on hope to bring about change in the nations they loved. Obama promises immense change and lots of hope. Hope and change are things we need in America today. Without hope and without change, all we have is America. All we have is the shell of a nation without hope for the change it really needs. But Obama puts those most nebulous ideals of hope and change at our fingertips so we can hope to change America.

I don’t know what it is that we’re hoping to change. I just hope that we’re hoping to change, period, because the stagnation of America, both economically and socially, gives us reason to hope for change so that we can once again have hope. Without hope, we can’t have change. Without change, we’ll never have hope. We need both, and Obama is the only candidate who can offer up those amorphous ideas with any real luster.

Let’s hope to change our nation to be more like those others, to be more like the Chinese and the Soviets, those great nations which also hoped to change and have never been the same since. Let’s finally elect a man with enough hope for us all so that change will finally happen.

Obama is a man with a dream. Theorizing that he could change America within his own lifetime, Barack Obama ran for the office of President. He awoke to find himself trapped in the present, facing mirror images that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Michelle, an observer from his own personal life, who appears in the form of his wife. And so Barack Obama finds himself leaping from speech to speech, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next speech will be the speech to the White House. Let us help him get there!

With the DNC starting today in Denver, I almost wish I were still there. I have no desire to see the likes of Obama (or any other Democrats, for that matter), but I would like to be around to feel the atmosphere, to lock myself into a “free speech” cage and to gaze longingly at the Pepsi Center as I realize that with hockey season about to start, I won’t be there to see the Avs play.

I don’t know if I’m just more in tune with the news from Denver or if the city of Denver is far more fascist than Minneapolis, but I haven’t heard about many civil rights violations coming out of Minneapolis with the Republican and Ron Paul conventions in town. What I do know is that the city of Denver has cracked down on civil rights, abolished freedom and basically given its already questionable police-state force unlimited authority to stomp dissenters.

In fact, according to the Westword, which is the Denver Metro area’s biggest independent newspaper, the cops were overheard at an anarchist protest proclaiming, “I just want to shoot these motherf*ckers so bad!” It was a nice show of restraint on the part of the police to allow the pesky anarchists to continue living through the end of the rally. Unfortunately for the anarchists, the Denver police-state doesn’t take kindly to people who don’t believe in the police state.

The march ended roughly four and a half hours after it began, when police were able to box in the anarchists on Stout Street between 15th and 16th, forcing nearly half of the group to escape into a parking garage. The people that ran into the garage were pursued by officers on motorcycle and, later, several white police vans were seen driving into the building.

If you’d like to keep up to date on the latest civil liberties abuses occurring in Denver during the DNC, keep an eye on the Westword.

We all know that I’m not a fan of the “War on Drugs”, nor am I likely to endorse anything related to it. But this website, Try Drugs, is seriously the coolest anti-drug propaganda site ever. If anybody out there is good with code, the pro-freedom people should really put together an anti-War on Drugs website cool enough to rival this one. Please leave a comment if you know of such a site that’s already up and running.

Fresh from the WTF file, I bring news of a tow company in Chicago which erected no parking signs during a parade and then towed over 50 vehicles that were parked prior to the signs being erected. At $170 a pop, the dirty thieves at Rendered Towing (note: don’t EVER call rendered towing in Chicago) made out like bandits…until a rash of calls to the police regarding entire lots full of missing vehicles prompted investigation into the company’s actions.

Police on the scene said they’d heard many radio calls about towing from vacant lots in the area, and most involved Rendered. Police said at one point they had to stop trucks from yanking the cars because the signage was erected after the 10 a.m. start of the parade.

About 50 cars were towed from a lot at 51st and Indiana. Owners argued they would not have risked towing fees had there been signs.

Talk about dirty business practices. Unfortunately for the crooked owners of Rendered Towing in Chicago, they’re getting a lot of bad press out of their actions and hopefully they’ll be unwoefully put out of business ASAP.

The Freedom of Information Act was put in place on July 4, 1966. Since then, millions of pages of government documents have been declassified and released to the public–almost entirely blacked out. A good example is a document obtained by the ACLU which was written in regards to CIA torture techniques. The document actually leaves enough visible to guess that they’re talking about torture and that the general assertion of the document is that the Justice Department doesn’t believe that torture is illegal, bad or ya know, torture. However, with so much blacked out, I can’t help but wonder what we’re not being told if they’re willing to admit that they approve of torture.

I’m reminded of my high school days when I was a Beatles obsessed teen who would do anything to get my hands on as much information about John Lennon as possible. And so, in one online search, I came across his utterly ridiculous FBI files. I sometimes wonder if the US government withholds documents not for the fear of reprisal for misdeeds but rather for fear of being exposed as a bunch of nitwits who think a parrot holds the key to national security. Right on!

What a waste of taxpayer money to fight the declassification of a file about a talking bird all the way to the Supreme Court. What a waste of taxpayer money to have written the report in the first place. The simple truth of the matter is that the US government bureaucracy has so many millions of pages of documents that it’s probably easier to simply release them blacked out than to actually take the time to read its own documents to determine if they contain any information that would tarnish its <sarcasm> stellar </sarcasm> reputation.

And so I sit here wondering what my own FBI file might say about me. Perhaps it says that I talk baby talk to my cats, that I don’t like to get dressed unless I have to, I like to eat pickles with ranch dressing and that I spend too much time on the internet. Wow. That sounds like classified information to me! Get out the black marker. We’ve got work to do.

Few things irk me more than uneducated fools throwing out the term “fascist” as an insult when the insult isn’t deserved.  People know that there’s something bad about being a fascist, but they have no idea what the term really means, nor do they comprehend what’s so bad about it. A simple enough definition of fascism from dictionary.com is:

A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

I’m on a fascist rant right now because I just witnessed a horrific display of ignorance in which Ron Paul was accused of being a fascist because he supports a more decentralized government.  I mean…what?  Ron Paul supports limited government, Constitutional rights, states’ rights, individual rights (except for women’s rights in the area of abortion issues, which is a sore subject for me).  Basically, he’s anything but a fascist!

The other thing that drives me crazy about the term fascist is that liberals tend to bandy it back and forth in reference to anyone who supports individual rights–those crazy fascists–but absolutely refuse to recognize their own big government fascist tendencies.  Yes, forcing me to pay for your welfare constitutes a form of fascism.  Yes, forcing me to use CFL bulbs constitutes fascism as well.

The biggest liberal fascist threat in coming years, aside from government healthcare, is the increasing tendency for liberals to lean towards environmental fascism.  There are plenty of respected scientific sources who dispute the doomsday global warning threats.  In fact, CBC produced a highly informative documentary on the subject.  But, liberals lambast scientists who disagree with the Gorian view of the environment.  They suppress studies which dispute or criticize their own “work”.  And they pass laws which force entire states and nations to “go green” despite the fact that “going green” may have more negative effects than what we’re currently doing, and despite the fact that by using force on us, they’re being FASCISTS!

At this juncture, I’d like to point out that ethanol fuel is responsible for much of our recent food price increases.  It’s not sane to take millions of pounds of corn from our food supply and expect that we’ll continue to enjoy the same low food prices.  In addition, corn farming requires massive quantities of water and therefore the overall “positive” effects of increased ethanol use are debatable. There is also a new law in the US which will force all US citizens to use CFL bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs. What most people don’t realize is that CFL bulbs are filled with mercury, which is highly toxic and deadly. The quantities in a single bulb are small and the EPA assures us that the bulbs don’t pose a health risk. However, do you really want to risk breaking one in your home with small children present? Do you really want to wait and see what happens when uninformed or lazy people dispose of them improperly and our entire water supply becomes contaminated with mercury? And besides the risk of mercury poisoning, many Americans don’t live anywhere near a CFL bulb disposal facility, meaning that they’ll have to drive for hours to properly dispose of the bulbs, releasing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere and entirely negating the entire point of the CFL bulbs.

Ok, so this blog entry is a little long, a little rambling, and all over the place topic-wise. The point that I’m really trying to lay out there is that if you’re going to call someone a fascist, you’d better be damn sure that you’re not one yourself first.