Old Truth Blog

No, I'm not making this up. This is frightening, to say the least. Good thing they just authorized more funds for the program!

Each of us should be grateful to the free-market for our livelihoods. Even those living on the public dole, be them government employees or welfare recipients, could not receive such without the state first extracting it from the market (inflationary finance excepting). It is because of the voluntary choices of others that each of us are able to fulfill our desires. This I understand to be the true American dream. Take my job, for example. I work for a software company that has developed a system that helps entrepreneurs manage their motorcycle or RV dealerships. These dealerships exist because motorcycle and RV manufacturers need someone to sell their products. These products were developed because consumers wanted something recreational to ride, or something to make their vacations more comfortable. People engage in recreation and go on vacations because they have earned the means to do so by satisfying the wants of their fellow man. Let's look at the inverse. People voluntarily

A very good piece appearing in the Financial Times by the European political Pirate party's Christian Engström highlights what could become of our freedoms if the intellectual property police had their way. The introduction: If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all. On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down. This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to re

The more I learn about libertarianism, the more I see what a big tent it really is . There's all different flavors like Limited-government or Anarcho-capitalist . I'm not quite sure where I fit in specifically, but what I do know is that I wasn't always a libertarian. Growing up, my father always talked about and voted for Democrats, as did my mother. I started to hear his views on things the older I got. I soon adopted them for myself. They were your typical liberal positions . After I was re-converted to my faith, got married, and moved out, I began reading a couple of columnists in my local paper, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. They wrote about economics and caught my interest. I bought Sowell's Basic Economics and began studying the subject. I fell in love with it. As I learned more about good economics and bad, I began taking a conservative position on government fiscal and regulatory policy. I could actually see and understand the cause and effects of bad p

I may incur some wrath from my fellow liberty-lovers, but that would only mean they didn't read the whole article. As a libertarian, I celebrate the right the Mormon church has to control who is and who isn't allowed on their property. All libertarians should. Full disclosure: I am a member of the Mormon church. A recent apparently newsworthy event went out over the Internet stirring up, once again, the anger that so many have towards the Mormon church for their position on homosexuality. Leave it to the MSM to report on a controversial story without having all of the facts. Had they, it probably wouldn't have been a story. What I wanted to focus this article on was the celebration we should all be having on what's left of our freedom of association. I will state it unequivocally ( again ), that our commitment to freedom is proven when we allow others to discriminate by whatever variable they choose. Be it who they'll hire or for whom they'll work, who'll t

One of the primary tools in class warfare are "soak-the-rich" tax policies. In a very clear and factual way, Dan Michell of the Cato Institute and the Center for Freedom & Prosperity explains just how misguided these types of policies are ( YouTube, 8m, 46s ). Not only do they make the economy worse, as he explains, but politicians actually understand this. In a telling admission, after being explained by ABC's Charlie Gibson that lowering the capital gains tax increased revenue, Barack Obama continued to support capital gains tax increases on the basis of "fairness". The video:

I've blogged before on the sad state of America's organ donation system. It equals death for many because of shortages. I believe repealing those laws that make compensation illegal would go leaps and bounds toward saving lives. In a great article by Jeff Jacoby via the Boston Globe , he concludes: No one would dream of suggesting that medical care is too vital or sacred to be treated as a commodity, or to be bought and sold like any other service. If the law prohibited any “valuable consideration’’ for healing the sick, the result would be far fewer doctors and far more sickness and death. The result of our misguided altruism-only organ donation system is much the same: too few organs and too much death. More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the national organ waiting list. Last year, 28,000 transplants were performed, but 49,000 new patients were added to the queue. As the list grows longer, the wait grows deadlier, and the shortage of available organs grows more acu