Happy New Year!
The First Philadelphia Libertarian Meeting of 2012 is tomorrow,
MONDAY JAN 16 7:00 PM
We’d love to see you there.
Higher Ground Coffee Shop
631 North 3rd (1 block north of Spring Garden).
El Stop: Spring Garden.
December Meeting
Higher Grounds is a nice little coffee shop located near the Spring Garden Station on the Blue Line. See you there!
Monday, December 19, 2011
7:00 PM
Higher Grounds
631 N 3rd St
Philadelphia, PA 19123
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Washington Post confuses Ron Paul for Fred Karger
The following images may have simply been an oversight on the part of the Washington Post. See if you can spot anything fishy.
How anyone could confuse the radical libertarian Ron Paul for a moderate liberal like Fred Krugar is anyone’s guess. Maybe they really thought Ron Paul was the first openly gay presidential candidate. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
September Meeting
Monday, September 19th, 7PM @ Joseph’s Pizza 7947 Oxford Ave
Safe Driving
While riding a bus from Philadelphia to New York (I won’t mention which company), I noticed that the driver was a little distracted. In fact, he was talking on his cell phone almost the entire trip.
Was he just chatting away with his friends? No, he was rather serious. In fact he was having a serious discussion with his supervisor. What could be so serious that he would endanger his riders by talking and driving at the same time?
Well, he was warning his supervisor that he was going to soon be over his federally mandated maximum driving hours for the week. To convince his supervisor, he even took the time to calculate out loud how many hours of driving time he had remaining. This got a little complicated, so he took his eyes off the road to find his notebook, in which he recorded his driving hours.
So while the bus driver was reading, calculating, chatting on the phone and driving, I was sitting there thinking about how much safer I am thanks to arbitrary federal limits on bus drivers.
Thanks government.
Meeting 8/15
LPPhilly will be having a meeting next Monday, 6:30pm at:
Higher Grounds
631 N 3rd St
Philadelphia, PA 19123
Check out the meetup page for more details.
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Extremism
Extreme Ironing
Media bobble-heads and the political zombie hordes take it for granted that being extreme is bad and being moderate is good. Politicians would agree, since that is the easiest way to maintain power. Yet, there is nothing inherently wrong with extremism.
We want our food to be extremely tasty, the weather to be extremely pleasant and our benefactors extremely generous. It is only in the realm of politics, where people are artificially pitted against each other, that moderation seems to be a virtue.
Few would argue that we should take a moderate view of robbery. One extreme is no robbery, the other extreme is lots of robbery. A moderate view is that there should not be too much or too little robbery, which is absurd.
Similarly, libertarians take the extreme position that all human interaction should be voluntary, not just the part that the government hasn’t gotten around to regulating. Continue reading
Lessons from the Egyptian Rebellion
If your government shuts down the internet, shut down your government.
Egypt is in rebellion, and this is a good thing for those of us who recognize the State for what it is. As Lew Rockwell states:
Those of the young generation, people too young to remember the collapse of Soviet bloc and other socialist states in 1989 and 1990, are fortunate to be living through another thrilling example of a seemingly impenetrable state edifice reduced to impotence when faced with crowds demanding freedom, peace, and justice.
There is surely no greater event than this. To see it instills in us a sense of hope that the longing for freedom that beats in the heart of every human being can be realized in our time.
This is why all young people should pay close attention to what is happening in Egypt — to the protests against the regime of Hosni Mubarak as well as the pathetic response coming from his imperial partner, the United States, which has given him many billions in military and secret-police aid to keep him in power.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian government is doing everything it can to maintain its illegitimate power. Attacking civilians, shutting down cellular networks, even cutting off the internet. This is not surprising, since the spread of information makes it harder to control those who want to be free and killing hundreds of people helps keep the remainder in line.
Here in Philadelphia, we can rest easy since the benevolent US government would never dream of doing the same thing. Yet, as governments continue to lose power during the Great Recession , they will become desperate and take drastic measures against their captive populations. It’s getting dangerous.
Posted in activism, government
Tagged activism, anarchism, Anonymous, Egypt, government, Guy Fawkes, internet, protest, rebellion
Leave a comment
A Tale of Two Bloggers
Starring Stacy Litz and Aaron Proctor
Our story begins with Aaron Proctor, author of the Philadelphia Libertarian Examiner blog. Proctor is a self described “conservatarian”, which is a contradictory combination of conservatism and libertarianism. He seems dedicated to confusing people who are interested in libertarian ideas.
The story then quickly moves to an actual libertarian, Stacy Litz. Litz is the author of the Philadelphia County Libertarian Examiner blog and a leader in local libertarian circles.
The names of these blogs are similar, but the similarity ends there. While Proctor is content to merely relate his own opinion, Litz is tapped into the local (and global) libertarian community. Her contact with both activists and intellectuals makes her posting both informative and relevant. More importantly, however, she has a definite set of principles that she is advocating.
Proctor, on the other hand, is only relevant in the sense that he is commenting on current events. Trapped in the false left-right paradigm like an ant in a jar, he occasionally recommends a libertarian conclusion, but refers to it as “real” conservatism and fails to explain the underlying rational for free markets, etc. Continue reading
Posted in activism, libertarianism
Tagged activism, libertarianism, principles, Stacy Litz
4 Comments
Critique of the LPPA Platform
Let's not add to the confusion.
How is it that libertarians can have a political party, ostensibly dedicated to principles, when libertarianism is fundamentally opposed to the use of political power? This seeming contradiction arises both on convention floors, where delegates debate whether or not to compromise the message to “broaden appeal”, and in various libertarian writings.
Take, for example, the confused and contradictory platform of the LPPA, the Pennsylvania State Libertarian Party. It is full of great ideas, most of which stay true to libertarian philosophy:
We, the members of the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania, support and defend the rights of individuals.
We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to do the same…
We stand firmly for the Principle of Non-aggression: that no one—neither a government agent nor any individual nor any group—may initiate force or fraud against an individual or his property.
A number of excellent quotes could be taken from the LPPA platform. Most of it is dead on. Yet, somehow things like this slip in:
Because each individual has the right to offer goods and services to others on the free market, and because government interference can only harm such free activity, we oppose all action by government in the market except to protect property rights, adjudicate disputes, and provide a legal framework to protect voluntary trade. Efforts to forcibly redistribute wealth or forcibly manage trade are intolerable.
I think the technical term for this is “turd sandwich”. Continue reading