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Due to massive family obligations in the short term, time will be at a premium for the next week or so. Thus, rather than rush through new posts, I am taking the opportunity to do a "best of" series of past posts. These "retro posts" have been the most popular posts in this blog from the past year or so. All of them have been viewed hundreds of times and seem to have made a connection to our readers vs. other posts and topics. Please enjoy them again or for the first time.
This blog has often talked about the American political class inability to get anything accomplished relative to the major issues facing Americans today. These major issues include the failed war on drugs, failing public schools, the lack of a national energy policy, a non-existent immigration plan and strategy, and the failure to solve the problem of escalating health care costs in this country.
However, this inability apparently is not restricted to the domestic side of political class responsibilities. If you look at our country's foreign policy recently you see very few successes (recent trade agreement with South Korea) and a whole lot of failures:
- There was a recent conference in Geneva that involved Iran and the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany [Associated Press - December 7, 2010]. The conference was supposed to find a way to allow Iran to develop a peaceful nuclear energy program while preventing them from developing nuclear weapons. The talks ended with a promise of all countries to get together again in 2011. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley went so far to say that: "We are encouraged that there will be a follow-on meeting [in 2011].
Sound familiar? It seems this dance has been going on for a long time, with Iran skillfully sitting down for talks with the over eager other six nations and hinting at enough progress to not kill future talks but never agreeing to anything either. This has been going on for years, with no concessions from Iran but serving as their delaying tactic for their continued developed of a nuclear weapon capability. Lots of talk, no action.
- The never ending search for peace between the Palestinians and Israel also has recently been in the news. The United States, for years, has tried to mediate talks between the two factions, with a recent agreement stipulating that Israel would not do any more settlement construction in Jerusalem for 90 days. This agreement was necessary to prevent the Palestinians from walking out of the peace talks. The Obama administration was so desperate for the 90 day window that they agreed to get billions of dollars of weaponry to Israel and made other diplomatic commitments for their moratorium on construction, all for a mere 90 day freeze on construction.
However, shortly afterward, Israel declared that the U.S. was too consumed by the Wikileaks fiasco to talk peace (Associated press - December 7, 2010) and that the U.S. had stopped the peace talk process. The State Department denied that this was the case and the talks were still on. However, it appears that the Israelis are using the weak excuse of Wikileaks to get the military hardware and diplomatic air cover that the U.S. committed to but never wanted to continue the peace talks anyway. Thus, all of the United States' plans to keep both sides happy and talking are likely to fail. Lots of talk, no action.
- Every time that North Korea acts up, the United States goes begging to China to please, please intervene and keep the North Koreans in check. However, China apparently has very little motivation to keep the North Koreans in check according to recent news reports and documents:
- China likes having a buffer between itself and U.S. ally South Korea. If the North government should collapse, then South Korean, and possibly U.S. troops, could be sitting on the Chinese border, something they probably do not want.
- If the North Korean government should collapse, there is a very high probability that millions of starving North Korean citizens would flee to the more prosperous China in search of food and shelter, an event that the Chinese definitely do not want to cope with.
- The North Koreans intermittently act aggressively towards Japan, a military and economic competitor of nearby China. With North Korea as a wild card, it distracts Japan in its affairs and confrontations with China.
As with the Mideast peace talks and hopes and the delaying Iranians nuclear meetings, lots of talk, no action when it comes to North Korea.
What do all of these situations have in common? Namely, the United States no longer has the leverage to make/convince others to do what it wants. Without leverage, other parties will do what the want and is best for them, not what is best for U.S. interests. Especially today, with a fragile economy, the United States has lost the leverage of economic power. China's economy has grown so much and made us so dependent on it that we can do nothing but go to the Chinese and beg for them to do something about North Korea.
The Israelis are living in a prosperous economic environment that is relatively secure. The Palestinian leaders exist and continue in power because of the hatred it sows among its citizens towards Israel. None of the parties involved, Israeli and Palestinians citizens and leaders really want peace as defined by the United States. We have no leverage to make them change their minds from the status quo but we are gullible enough to sign short term and costly agreements that the Israelis abide by or ignore at their will. Again, no leverage to make them do what we want, they have more to lose than to gain.
What leverage do we have with the Iranians? Obviously, the five or six rounds of sanctions that have been imposed on them have had insufficient leverage to make them stand down from their nuclear weapon ambitions. Plus, we are dealing with some very irrational and possibly insane rulers, both in Iran and North Korea. Without leverage to apply to their irrational interests, the United States is relegated to diplomatic beggar again and sits at these meetings with no power or leverage to enact anything effective. As a result, the Iranians play us for fools as they delay and delay as they develop and develop nuclear weaponry.
A wise old business saying goes as follows: "Never be so in love with a business deal that you cannot walk away from the negotiating table." Our political class and politicians have become so in love with these "deals," a nuclear free Iran, a well behaved North Korea, and a lasting a stable Middle East peace accord that they cannot walk away from the table. We continue to sit at the table and talk and talk because we have diplomatically, militarily, and economically no leverage to do anything else, looking diplomatically impotent in every case. Without leverage or the creativity to create leverage, you get played for a fool, which is exactly the position that our politicians have put is in today.
Which should not surprise us. The meager efforts of the political class to domestically improve life for Americans have almost always been a failure (e.g. Cash For Clunkers, TARP, etc.). And usually the root cause of these failures is that the meager and ill-thought out programs from our politicians usually have no leverage. Without leverage, plans usually fail miserably.
But that discussion is worthy of another post in the near future but before then, think about some of these recent failures and try to identify what leverage was inherent in the thought process of the programs. I will bet that you will find that there were none. As a result they failed as miserably as the foreign affairs fiascos above.
Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
Due to massive family obligations in the short term, time will be at a premium for the next week or so. Thus, rather than rush through new posts, I am taking the opportunity to do a "best of" series of past posts. These "retro posts" have been the most popular posts in this blog from the past year or so. All of them have been viewed hundreds of times and seem to have made a connection to our readers vs. other posts and topics. Please enjoy them again or for the first time.
An important part of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," is the understanding of what I call the Freedom Pyramid. The Freedom Pyramid tries to imagine what our founders had in mind when the put the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and a government based on individual freedom together. The ideal American Freedom Pyramid fits together as follows:
- The base and foundation of the pyramid is the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights.
- Sitting on top of this base level is the government structure that the founders defined to implement the liberty principles and concepts of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in a limited government manner.
- This government structure serves all of the country's citizens equally in guaranteeing each person's rights and freedoms as defined by the base level documents.
- And finally, the pinnacle of the Freedom Pyramid is our own individual rights, freedom, and liberties. These concepts are graphically illustrated below:
There are a few important characteristics of this pyramid. The power in the pyramid flows up from the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution to our individual freedoms which is the pinnacle of our country. Government exists to serve the citizens and the country and is just the mechanics for implementing the tenets in the Bill of Rights and Constitution. Finally, the political class appears nowhere in the Freedom Pyramid structure.
This structure has served the country and its citizens quite well over the past two centuries. Americans were usually the freest people in world, which allowed the country to grow into the most prosperous ever. The Freedom Pyramid concept placed individual freedom above all else, including the government and the political class, whose sole purpose should be implementing the concepts and principles of the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights.
However, over time, we have allowed the American political class to pervert this original Freedom Pyramid concept:
- Today, individual citizens and their freedom and liberties are no longer at the pinnacle of the pyramid, having been replaced by a self serving political class.
- This political class uses government functions and institutions to enlarge, entrench, and enrich itself. Examples at this level abound and include earmark abuse, favorable campaign finance laws, Congressional voting district gerrymandering, excessive Congressional benefits and perks, confiscating large amounts of citizens wealth and income via taxes, and a general low priority for the needs and desires of the country's citizens.
- The political class uses their increased power to divide the country into various and competing tribes and voting blocks of citizens, "energizing their bases" as needed and demonizing those not in their bases or tribes.
- This increased power of the political class and their abuses of power results in diminished individual rights and freedoms.
These concepts are illustrated in the current day, perverted Freedom Pyramid below, where the only Americans with the freedom and power tend to be our politicians:
As you can see in this pyramid, the Bill of Rights and Constitution are no longer vital to this pyramid's structure since the often act as an obstruction to the needs and desires of the political class rather than their original intent, the foundation of the country. Also, the power is driven down from the political class and is imposed on American citizens and their freedom.
We need to recognize how far we have deviated from the concept of the first Freedom Pyramid. The reality of America today is that we no longer live in a free country. We do not get true freedom in our election processes since the political class has rigged the voting process to favor existing officeholders and existing political parties.
We do not get true freedom while under our excessive tax burden. When an individual is forced to pay more than 30% of their annual income to all levels of government, that individual's freedom to send his or her kids to a better school or to start a business or to save for retirement or to go on a vacation is severely limited: you cannot have political freedom without financial freedom.
We do not get true freedom when politicians call individual citizens racists, Neanderthals, un-American, smelly, and other derogatory names just because they dare to disagree with a politician's programs.
If we ever want to get back to the right Freedom Pyramid, where individual citizens are in charge and the political class and the government the run are subservient, we need to implement most, if not all, of the steps laid out in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Some of the most important steps include:
Step 1 - reduce the size and budget of the Federal government by 10% a year for five years.
Step 6 - allow only individual American citizens to contribute to election campaigns, forbidding unions, corporations, PACs and other organizations from flooding the election process with money. The Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech to individual Americans, not organizations.
Step 7 - allow only citizens that are affected by an election to contribute to election campaigns within that election. For example, political parties would not be allowed to accept campaign contributions from someone in Kansas and send/funnel that money to be used in an election campaign in New Jersey.
Step 14 - stop gerrymandering Congressional voting districts to almost guarantee the re-election of incumbents.
Step 17 - eliminate the Democratic Party's "Super Delegate" process which has the potential of voiding the votes of all voters who voted in Democratic Party Presidential primaries.
Step 34 - hold politicians sitting on Congressional committees accountable for their respective government areas of oversight and remove them from their committee positions if that committee falls short of serving the country, e.g. all members of Congressional Intelligence committees should have been removed from those committee posts on September 12, 2001 for their inability to foresee the 9-11 terror attacks.
Step 39 - institute term limits for all Federal political seats.
Many of the other 50 steps are also important but implementing these listed above would go a long way to getting us back to the true and rightful Freedom Pyramid concept for this country.
Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
Due to massive family obligations in the short term, time will be at a premium for the next week or so. Thus, rather than rush through new posts, I am taking the opportunity to do a "best of" series of past posts. These "retro posts" have been the most popular posts in this blog from the past year or so. All of them have been viewed hundreds of times and seem to have made a connection to our readers vs. other posts and topics. Please enjoy them again or for the first time.
Two contrasting examples of government spending, control, and taxes have presented themselves in the past week or so. They both address the question: when government spending, control. and the resulting taxes go up or down, what happens?
First, consider the example that was presented in the most recent edition of Business Week magazine. This article described what happened when France dropped its value added tax on restaurant dining in the wake of soaring restaurants bankruptcies. Details of the tax reduction include the following:
- Last July, the French government dropped the value added tax to 5.5% from 19.6%.
- Since then, the industry has added 5.300 jobs even as the national unemployment rate rose.
- Salaries by those employed in the industry went up 5% on average despite a very weak economy.
- The industry also invested in job training for its workers, as promised to the French government in exchange for the tax relief.
While average prices went down only 1.2%, less than the 3% hoped hoped for, the question that needs to be asked is what would have been the prices without the tax decrease since more restaurants would have gone out of business, reducing competition and probably increasing prices. The good news is that prices did go down and if more restaurants stay in business, the free market and competition will help keep prices down.
Wow, drop taxes and government control and the market seems to take care of itself, at least with restaurant dining in France. Prices go down, jobs are created, salaries go up, and competition should intensify with fewer restaurants going out of business.
Now consider the opposite phenomenon, this one where government funding (i.e. taxes go up) and the government takes over and increases its control and management of part of a market. This story comes from the July, 2010 issue of Reason magazine and was described in an article written by Michael C. Moynihan. In December, 1998, Britain Mavis Skeet was scheduled for cancer surgery but the National Health Service postponed the surgery this time and four subsequent times. The last postponement was actually a cancellation in January, 2000 when the National Health Service declared her cancer was now inoperable.
As a result of this major screw up, the British government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, decided that spending for national health care was too low and "requested a new infusion of cash to shore up the faltering system by adding doctors, nurses, and beds."
According to the reporting of the Daily Mail newspaper in March, ten years later, after increased government spending, and theoretically the increased taxes to pay for the spending, it turns out that the volume and quality of health care in Britain did not change for the better. However, the infusion of more government control and taxpayer money did result in the number of bureaucrats in the organization growing six times faster than the number of nurses and the number of management employees doubling.
So lets review. Less taxes, less government control results in positive outcomes. More taxes, more government control results in negative outcomes. Seems pretty simple, except to someone in the political class who continually needs to prove their self worth by taking more of the Tony Blair approach and less of the French tax reduction approach. When will we learn that like the British example above, government and the politicians who run it rarely improve our lives, our pocketbooks, or our safety:
- while BP and others in he industry have to shoulder the majority of the blame for the current Gulf oil slick debacle, it was government regulatory employees who were lax, lazy, or completely derelict in their duty to make sure those drilling platforms were safe.
- while the economic crisis and financial collapse were occurring, at least dozens of SEC employees were busy patrolling the Internet for pornography and downloading the smut they located to their government computers or to discs.
- while Americans were dying due to faulty Toyota products, the government safety watchdogs started and prematurely stopped a series of safety investigations, not able or not wanting to find anything amiss with Toyota products even though we now are told 89 Americans died as a result of their lax investigations.
- several years ago, the government watchdogs for children's toys were lax in their vigilance in allowing imported toys into the country that had been manufactured with lead based components, endangering the health of American children who may have ingested the lead when the put the products in their mouths.
Eventually, the government watchdogs finally woke up and got the lead based products off of the market. However, their lax of vigilance continued when the foreign manufacturers just replaced lead with cadmium, an equally dangerous heavy metal in the latest wave of imported products.
We are so screwed if we continue down this path. We pay higher and higher taxes for less and less service when the reality of the French tax cut shows that reducing taxes and government control can be a very good thing. We have to get over this myth that just because the government says it is doing something we cannot assume that they are doing it right or, in fact, doing it at all. We need a complete government overall as outlined in Step 1 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" in order to find ways to make government leaner and cheaper while increasing its effectiveness and accountability. No one in Washington seems to think this is worth doing or they would have done it already.
Second, and we keep coming back to this step, Step 34 needs to be implemented which would remove existing members from Congressional committees who screw up in their oversight. Thus, in the above examples, those committee politicians overseeing the inspectors who did not do their job on the oil platform inspections, overseeing the pornography searchers in the SEC, and overseeing the auto safety and toy safety failures wold be booted off of their committees for dereliction of duty. Less government, less taxes, more effectiveness, more accountability.
Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
This is a third in a continuing series of posts where we discuss why it is often a stupid idea to unfairly overtax the rich. Standard disclaimers: first, my family is no where close to being considered "rich." We pay our Federal income taxes at the 15% tax bracket level. We live in a typical middle class, 2,000 square foot suburban home. I drive a seven year old vehicle and my wife drives a five year old vehicle. Thus, we do not have a direct stake in how much the rich are taxed.
Second disclaimer: the words "overtaxing" and "rich" are very subjective terms and concepts. Thus, the purpose of these posts is not to convince anyone what rich or unfair or overtaxing should be but to illustrate what can happen when taxes are increased on those high earners in our society. Wanting to tax the rich more is everyone's right but the reality of what happens when taxes are raised is what everyone should be aware of.
Today's post is centered around my old home state of New Jersey. Visiting the state this week caused me to see a number of billboards that were sponsored by a group sarcastically calling itself "Millionaires For Christie." Chris Christie is the current governor of New Jersey. The billboards and associated website were trying to raise the issue that as a result of Christie refusing to increase the state income tax on New Jersey millionaires, others in the state were suffering.
The associated website goes through some of the budget cuts that were made under Christie's watch, all of which seemed to be associated with education programs. This turned out not to be surprise once you paged down to the bottom of the website's page and saw that the primary New Jersey teachers' union was operating the site. The Governor and the union leadership have had a number of public confrontations since the governor was elected. Thus, I started to understand where the sarcasm and Millionaires for Christie effort was coming from, his main political opponent.
Before going through some of the items on the website, let's look at some independent sources of analysis and data to understand where New Jersey is currently sitting from an economic perspective:
- When Christie came into office, New Jersey faced a $10.5 billion budget shortfall, according to http://www.nj.com/ in a July 7, 2010 article.
- According to the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities, an organization that appears to be an expert on state government budgets and economics, the state will again face a budget deficit in excess of $10 billion in fiscal year 2012.
- This 2012 fiscal shortfall places New Jersey's deficit as the third worst state budget from a total dollar deficit ($10.5 billion) and the second worst state from a percentage basis (37.4%).
- A November, 2010 article from Kiplinger ranked New Jersey as the third worst state to retire in from a taxation perspective.
- A recent Forbes article placed New Jersey as the fifth most taxed state in the union.
- A detailed state-by-state analysis by the Tax Foundation in 2008 found that New Jersey had the worst state and local tax burden in the country, 11.8%. Knowing what I know about New Jersey, it is doubtful that this position has changed radically over the past few years.
- A recent article from Reason magazine quoted an expert source which calculated that the New Jersey public employee pension fund would run out of money in about seven years, requiring all of the pension outlays to then be paid out of current year state tax dollars.
Thus, it really cannot be argued that New Jersey is in bad fiscal shape even though it is one of the highest taxing state governments by anyone's measure or criteria.
Now, back to the Millionaires For Christie effort. According to their website, if Christie had approved an additional tax for millionaires in the state, the state government would have annually received an additional $637 million. However, there are a few problems with this assertion:
- Even if the state received the additional $637 million, according to independent budget estimates from neutral parties, this would leave the state short about $9.9 billion or 94% of its needed revenue. Isn't the bigger problem still on the table even if the additional money is received? Shouldn't that be the focus, how to wipe out the inherent, structural fiscal problem that results in billions and billions of budget shortfall every year rather than only 6% of the shortfall?
- Even if the state received the additional $637 million in the first year, if no action was taken to correct the underlying cost structure problem, what happens when the "Maryland effect" kicks in a few years later.
You recall in a previous post in this series we documented what happened when the state of Maryland instituted a millionaire's tax. The number of millionaires filing state income taxes dropped by 30% very quickly and the state expectation of receiving an additional $106 million turned into a $267 million deficit relative to tax receipts from millionaire's. If that was to happen in New Jersey, which is more than likely, then the rest of New Jersey taxpayers, the non-millionaires, would end up paying the freight since the state government and political class never fixed the underlying cost structure.
- The website lists how much money was cut from various programs. However, it does not say what percentage of the total program costs that represents. For example, if a program costs $2m to operate and $1 million is cut, that is significant. However, if the program costs $100 million to run and $1 million is cut, that is not significant.
Thus, by not showing both the absolute and the relative size of the cuts, the website leaves the impression that everything is a crisis where that may not be the case to suspicious people like myself. If all of these cuts are relatively small on a percentage basis, their cause will lose my sympathies, given the overall disaster that the total state budget is in.
- Christie's cuts in trying to get spending in line with revenue fell heavily on everyone and every program in the state including education. But since education is one of the biggest budget lines, there was no way that education funding could not be affected.
That is a fact that seems to be lost on the Millionaires for Christie effort and backers. All of the examples they cite are relative to education and the interests of the teachers' union. They provide no constructive input on how else to get state budget costs under control, it is nothing more than a rant about their interests getting cut.
Given the overwhelming evidence that New Jersey is on the edge of a fiscal collapse, it would have been more constructive and credible to come to the table with a plan that could solve the education problem and the budget problem as opposed to ranting about "Christie's Cuts."
- The group and website act as if Christie is personally holding back funds and is just a bastard. The fact of the numbers is that the state does not have the revenue, Christie cut in order to fulfill the state constitution requirement of a balanced budget. To infer these are
Christie's personal cuts is a juvenile way to approach a problem and reality.
Should millionaires be taxed more in New Jersey? I do not know, that is a subjective opinion. That is up to the residents of New Jersey to determine. But understand that if they do raise the taxes on millionaires without fixing the underlying cost structure, in a few years they are likely to have much less revenue from millionaires, ever higher state government costs, and the need to raise taxes on everyone, not just millionaires. That is the likely long term reality. The root cause of the problem is out of control state spending, not Christie personally making budget cuts.
And higher taxes on everyone to meet today's out of control state government expenses will eventually bump into the reality of raising taxes still more in about seven years to pay for state pension shortfalls. All of these events will eventually cement New Jersey's reputation as the most taxed state in the union.
And that is why I am no longer a New Jersey resident. I grew up in New Jersey and after graduating from an out-of-state college, returned to New Jersey. My wife also grew up in New Jersey and together we worked almost a combined fifty years in New Jersey jobs. I started a successful small business in New Jersey. We have a ton of friends and family in New Jersey. We enjoyed the Jersey shore, the Jersey mountains, and just about every other aspect of life in New Jersey.
However, we left in 2005 and moved to Florida for the simple reason of a New Jersey political class that did not have any fiscal sanity or clue, both Democrats and Republicans. What have we gained by moving to Florida:
- In 2005, the year we left New Jersey, we paid over $12,000 a year in property taxes. We did not have any municipal services and were served by the state police and a volunteer fire company. I cannot imagine how much our property taxes would be today, six years later, in that typical suburban New Jersey house.
- In 2011, we will pay under $4,000 a year in Florida property taxes. Thus, at a bare minimum, we are saving $8,000 a year vs. New Jersey or about $670 a month, in property taxes.
- Our Florida property taxes have gone down every year since we moved here and they are capped at no more than a 3% increase a year.
- We pay absolutely no state income taxes in Florida.
- Florida was not listed in the Reason magazine as having a looming state pension problem like New Jersey has.
- We still see a lot of New Jersey friends and family as the escape New Jersey winters for the warmth of Florida.
- Some New Jersey teachers might claim that Florida schools are not as good as New Jersey schools and that is why taxes are so much higher in New Jersey, the taxes pay for a higher quality education. Why that may have historically been the case, Florida has been working hard over the past decade to improve their schools' quality. In fact, according to the latest Newsweek annual analysis of the nation's high schools, eighteen of the top 100 schools are currently in Florida, only one is in New Jersey, deflating the whole argument that New Jersey pays more taxes for a better level of education.
Thus, there were plenty of reasons for us to stay in New Jersey but the state government, the state political class, and the state tax burden made that impossible. I believe we were net contributors to the state of New Jersey. We never collected unemployment, we never went on welfare, we paid our taxes on time, we volunteered in our community, we used our disposable income to frequent New Jersey restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses.
However, I would bet that we are not alone in the decision we made to leave, that individuals, families and businesses have reached the same conclusion or will soon reach that same conclusion. Raising taxes on millionaires in New Jersey is certainly a budget option. So is the nasty downstream implications if the state's political class does not fix the underlying root causes of excessive spending since those root causes will not go away but the millionaires might.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.loathemygovernment.com/
http://www.cato.org/http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment.com/
