1Declaration: Free Markets, Free People, Free Minds

UPDATE: I have finished everything except the addition of my favorite books section. I am considering a new format and will complete this later.

Join the almost 100,000 signers of the petition to US Congressmen, to lift regulation and open up drilling. Congressional action will have immediate action putting a stake in the coffin of the speculators driving up the price of oil and in the long term by increasing supplies to meet demand. Drilling in the US is the first step towards an energy independent America.

Sign the petition: Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less

Recent polling by Rasmussen Reports shows that a majority of Americans believe that the best thing the government can do for the economy is to get out of the way. Politicians however have a different idea, pointing the need for more laws, more regulations, more taxes, and more spending.

Why you ask?

Power!

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Rasmussen Reports: Most Say Stimulus Had No Impact & Best Economic Policy is Getting Government Out of the Way

Tuesday, 28 May 2008

Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters nationwide say that the economic stimulus package passed earlier this year has had no impact on the economy. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 57% believe that if Congress and the President do nothing more, the economy will be in even worse shape a year from now.

However, if another stimulus package is passed, just 17% believe the economy will get better and 21% say it will get worse. Most voters—54%--say that if another stimulus package is passed, the economy will be about the same a year from today. These general views of the stimulus package were largely shared across partisan and demographic lines.

While voters seem to want action from political leaders, 54% believe that the best thing the government can do is “get out of the way by reducing regulation and taxes.” Republicans overwhelmingly hold that view while Democrats are evenly divided—42% of Barack Obama’s party agree that the best economic policy is for the government to get out of the way while another 42% disagree. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 50% think the government should get out of the way and 32% disagree.

A majority of both men and women think the best economic policy is to reduce regulation and taxes. So do a majority of voters in all age brackets. There is, however, a huge ideological divide. The notion of reduced regulation and taxes as good economic policy is embraced by 73% of conservative voters, 48% of politically moderate voters, and just 30% of liberal voters. Most liberals (53%) disagree.

Earlier surveys have consistently shown that a solid majority of voters believe that tax increases harm the economy. Sixty-five percent (65%) are opposed to an increase in capital gains taxes.

The economy has emerged as the top issue of Election 2008. Voters generically trust Democrats more than Republicans on the issue but trust John McCain more than Barak Obama.

Check out this video of California Democrat Maxine Waters during the House hearing on oil prices on 5/23. She could not even think of the term of what her plan for lowering gas prices was (hint: nationalize). This is a vivid example of liberal ideals of the government should take over every aspect of our lives and their plan to create a totalitarian government. Maxine Waters is clearly out of her element. Just look at the two other Representatives sitting next two her who can barely contain their laughter.

Link: sevenload.com

Special interim elections have yielded results that individuals who cherish individual liberties detest. Democrats have taken another seat in the House with Democratic challenger Childers overtaking incumbent Republican G. Davis. This is the 3rd this year, the other most notable in Louisiana where the Democratic challenger replaced a Republican seat held for nearly 6 decades.
Republicans have really brought this on themselves. Republicans are no longer the party of individual freedom, low taxes, small government, and non-intervention overseas.

It is a shame to see the direction America is heading. Our Constitution is being taken apart government program by government program and activist judges dedicated to the creation of a socialist society. Our education system is declining rapidly because of government control. Social Security is heading for bankruptcy, a program Chile copied from us and then scrapped for personal retirement accounts. Taxes are set to increase for more government programs designed to take care of us because our government views us as to inept to take care of ourselves and in turn removing our individual liberties, violating the Constitution, and eliminating personal choice. The founding principles of our country are being lost. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928, stated "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."

Thomas Jefferson (1801) hit the nail on the head when he said, "A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."

Power is being stripped from individuals and states and moved to an all-knowing and all powerful federal government. Thomas Jefferson noted that "When all government, in little as in Great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another & will become as venal & oppressive as the government we separated from."

If all of that does not affect your thinking consider this quote from Alexander Tytler's [i]The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic[/i], "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until voters discover...they can vote themselves [generous benefits] from the public treasury. From that moment, the majority always votes for candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship." Every new government program is one step closer to the oppressive government America declared independence from on July 4th, 1776.

A change back to the founding principles of our country is desperately needed to remain the beacon of freedom in a world of dictatorships and imprisonment. Else we shall face the fate that Alexander Tytler noted and Ben Franklin correctly sumarized "When the people realize they can vote themselves money, it will herald the end of the Republic" and bring forth a dictatorship.

Is nationalized health care really the way to go? Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton say it is. Thinking about it what could be better. It sounds great as we would all get health care that would be paid for by the government. We wouldn't have to worry about paying anymore, shopping for a plan, or worrying about losing our health insurance when we switch jobs. But at what cost?

What would happen to the quality of the product we would get since competition would be eliminated? What would happen to research and development? These questions are all part of a bigger point that we would be paying for it anyway. The government would just be taking away our freedom to choose, not to mention the tax increases that would be necessary to create such a program and the increased governmental control in our lives. Is nationalized health care worth it?

This article appeared in the February 28,2008 edition of the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom. This story tells the truth about the future of our health care system if it becomes nationalized like Hillary and Obama hope to do.

Do you not fear a government that makes the decision whether you should live or die?

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NHS chief tells grandmother, 61, she's too old for £5000 life-saving heart surgery
by Chris Brooke

A woman of 61 was refused a routine heart operation by a hard-up NHS trust for being too old.

Dorothy Simpson suffers from an irregular heartbeat and is at increased risk of a stroke. But health chiefs refused to allow the procedure which was recommended by her specialist.

The school secretary was stunned by the ruling.

"I can't believe that at 61 I'm too old for this operation," she said.

"A friend has had exactly the same thing done and it has changed his life.

"I feel as though I've been put out to grass and surely deserve better than this."

Mrs Simpson, of Leake, near Thirsk, North Yorkshire, was diagnosed three years ago with atrial fibrillation, a condition suffered by a million people in the UK.

It can cause palpitations, heart failure, strokes, shortness of breath, chest pains and blackouts.

Drugs have had limited success and her hospital consultant decided the most effective treatment would be a procedure known as a catheter ablation.

An electrode on the tip of a long wire is manoeuvred through a vein or artery and destroys abnormal heart tissue causing the rhythm problems.

National guidelines set no age limit for the procedure, which is usually carried out under local anaesthetic and has a better than 75 per cent chance of curing the condition.

Her consultant's application for Mrs Simpson to have the operation was rejected in December.

The North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust is said to have cited her age as one of the reasons for refusal.

Mrs Simpson said: "'If I lived in another part of the country there wouldn't be a problem.

"The condition is very distressing and is now starting to affect my work.

"I'm generally an upbeat person but this sort of condition affects you more and more as time goes on, and attacks happen more often. What concerns me most is the risk of a stroke."

A spokesman for the Atrial Fibrillation Association said: "In this day and age when people are living longer, it is wrong that they should have the door to their future shut in their face."

However late yesterday, following media interest in Mrs Simpson's plight, the PCT backed down and agreed to fund her treatment.

Medical director Dr David Geddes apologised to Mrs Simpson for the "distress" caused by the delay.

He said: "We have reviewed the case in the light of the additional clinical information and national guidance and, as Mrs Simpson fits the clinical criteria, we have agreed funding for her treatment."

"All decisions are taken on individual clinical needs; we do not discriminate on the grounds of age.

"Our procedures exist to ensure fair decision-making, based on clinical evidence, for all our patients."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=521772&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true

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Check out this great article.

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Why Conservatives are Happier than Liberals

By Jenna Bryner

May 7, 2008

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found.

Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance.

In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted both a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as "very happy," while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer.

The same rationalizing phenomena could apply to personal situations as well.

"There is no reason to think that the effects we have identified here are unique to economic forms of inequality," the researchers write. "Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor."

The current study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354424,00.html

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Check out this article about the over-burdensome income tax system for both individuals and corporations. This article acutely points out the unnecessary costs associated with the income tax system. Clearly a change is needed. To find out how check out my series about the FairTax or visit FairTax.org.

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Add this to tax bill: $207 and a day of work
Monday, April 14, 2008
By: Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Tax season became a little more taxing this year, with the average person spending more than a day and more than $200 collecting, calculating and compiling those numbers for the tax man, according to a report based on Internal Revenue Service figures.

If it's any consolation to the individual still trying to get receipts in order a day before Tuesday's filing deadline, businesses have it far worse. The National Taxpayers Union, in its annual look at the burdens of taxpaying, said the corporate cost of compliance is about $170 billion. General Electric in 2006 filed returns equivalent to 24,000 printed pages.

Congress, and not the Internal Revenue Service, is the leading culprit in this time and money increase, said the group, a nonpartisan organization that works for lower taxes and smaller government. "Congress is adding to the tax laws' complexity faster than the IRS can simplify its forms," it said.

IRS figures showed that all taxpayers, from those using the simplest 1040-EZ form to those using longer forms, spent 26.5 hours in record keeping, studying the law, and preparing and sending their forms for the 2006 tax year. That was up from 25.4 hours three years earlier.

The average out-of-pocket cost, including for those taxpayers doing their own taxes, was $207, up from $185 three years earlier. The self-employed taxpayer paid an average $444 to put his taxes together.

That takes a chunk out of the refunds most taxpayers receive. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress last week that as of March 29 it had issued about 70 million refunds, with the average refund worth $2,467. The tax agency expects to process nearly 140 million individual returns this year.

The NTU report estimated that, using an hourly compensation rate of $26, the value of time lost compiling tax returns was $92.6 billion. More directly, individual taxpayers spend almost $28 billion on software, tax preparers, postage and other out-of-pocket costs.

The $170 billion compliance cost for corporations represented 43 percent of corporate income taxes collected in fiscal year 2007.

One reason for this annual agony is that tax law keeps getting more complex. The instruction book for Form 1040 has grown from four pages in 1945 to 117 pages in 2000 and 155 pages last year. The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation's general explanation of tax legislation enacted in the 2006-2007 session of Congress ran to 841 pages, up from 593 pages for the previous Congress.

Congress is marking Tax Day with several initiatives to make paying taxes simpler or fairer. On Monday the House is considering a bill to bar federal agencies from awarding contracts to people or companies that have failed to pay their federal taxes.

Later in the week, the chamber will vote on a bill that, among other provisions, eliminates a requirement for individuals to keep records of calls made on employer-provided cell phones and stops foreign contractors from using foreign subsidiaries to evade Social Security and other employment taxes. That legislation would also terminate a program under which the IRS contracts with private debt collection companies to pursue smaller scale tax evaders.

In the Senate, Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, are promoting a bill that would require the IRS to allow all Americans to file their returns electronically free of charge. They say this would save taxpayers some $1.2 billion a year.

But Congress also made life for the IRS more difficult this year by waiting until last December to fix the alternative minimum tax, a levy intended to affect only a small number of very wealthy people that could have hit more than 20 million this year. That slowed down the processing of some refunds while the IRS adjusted its computers.

The IRS also was forced to be as efficient as possible this year because it was tasked with paying checks owed Americans as part of the economic stimulus package passed in January. People should start receiving those payments, of up to $600 and $1,200 respectively for individuals and couples with another $300 per child, early next month.

The independent IRS Oversight Board in a recent report commended the IRS for across-the-board improvements in such areas as customer service and enforcement of tax law.

But it also noted that the estimated tax gap of $290 billion — the difference between what is legally owed and what is actually paid every year — averages out to about $2,200 per individual tax return. That, it said, is "an enormous burden for the average taxpayer and one that should not be tolerated by honest taxpayers."

Originally published at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24112908

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I recently received an email pointing me to this article appearing in the American Thinker writer by Bruce Walker. This article acutely points out the differences between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. Although I am not a conservative I do agree on a majority of their positions because they believe in the ability of people to succeed on their own. I am not a Republican but they are a far cry better than any Democrat.

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The Lawyers' Party
by Bruce Willis
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/the_lawyers_party.html

The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer and so is his wife Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate.) Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Benson, went to law school. Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.

This years presidential election may be on of the most followed elections in US history. In what should be a clear cut Democratic presidency because of poor economic indicators, an unpopular war, and the most unpopular president in history the Democratic candidates can't take an upper hand and keep fighting each other instead of Republican nominee, John McCain.

The 2008 Presidential Election will have its two major parties, the "Big Two" once again vying for power, but it will not be an election between conservatives and liberal. This will be an election between moderates and liberal fascists (yes...I borrowed that term from Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism) and will feature a variety of other third party candidates from Libertarians to statists.

Today's "Big Two" (Republicans and Democrats) politicians are out of touch with the founding principles of our country. (Go ahead and read the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and information about the signers of the Declaration. Then try reading about the over reaching British government and compare where our government is heading.) Instead of limited government, maximation of individual liberty, and self-responsibility our nominees and elected representatives preach about and enact laws that seek to minimize individual liberty by limiting choice (no more incandescent light bulbs) and increasing government intervention in our daily lives. They have clearly forgotten, or what I believe have intentionally misplaced, the idea of the most famous Chinese provers, " Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will feel himself for a lifetime."

The "Big Two" (not all politicians but a large portion of them) no longer believe in the people of this nation. Democrats are in favor of the "nanny state," welfare state, or as Neal Boortz calls it the, "I want my mommy state." Democratic candidates offer up a constant barage of rhetoric on nationalized health care, lies about global warming (without scientific evidence), and the golden oldie to blame the rich or big corporations for your problems. Republicans offer few better solutions. John McCain recently spoke to 9th war Hurricane Katrina victims promising more federal government intervention and preaching of the failures of the national level response while neglecting the lack of state, local, and personal responsibilities. There is no doubt things could have been handled much better with regards to the federal response but the primary responders state, local, and private citizens all failed to take responsibility. McCains sponsoring of the McCain-Feingold bill limiting people's freedom of speech, McCain-Kennedy bill offering amnesty for illegals, and McCain-Liberman global warming bill offer more credibility to this argument.

This leads me to one conclusion. The politicians, praised by some of you, but nothing more than mere mortals and imperfect beings like yourself believe that you are totally incapable of taking care of yourself. Look at the policies they are creating and then look at yourself and American society at large objectively. Instead of offering permanent solutions that feature individual improvement, problems need solving by more government dependency and inefficient government programs.

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach and man to fish and he will feed himself for a lifetime." This quote no longer applies. Self-responsibility have been eliminated and freedom of choice has been erroded. Clearly this quote no longer applies so lets update it for the time.

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Give a man a fish a day (aka welfare and entitlements) and he will become dependent on us (government and politicians) and vote for us (politicians) forever." This has become the ideology of the "Big Two" and it will continue until the people of the United States call for change sternly in elections or mass communications with their representatives.

Don't forget that their are more than just two political parties! I firmly believe that Liberty in America can only be saved by Libertarian ideals.