How Can We Start A Conversation?

Here's our discussion point for the week: how can we start a real conversation about liberty?

We have two sides yelling at each other rather than talking to and with each other, it would seem. Partisan politics seem angrier and more polarized than ever.

Worse, both "sides" seem to live in entirely different realities altogether. If you're on one "side," two million people descended on Washington just one week ago, and if you're on the other you barely noticed when "the 60,000" people showed up in D.C. -an insignificant blip on the radar.

We live in such different realities because we don't trust each other. We don't trust each other because we suspect the motives on the other side. If the liberty faction in this country wants to make a difference it is going to have to address and refute the notion that we are angry birthers, racist rednecks, and paranoid survivalists.

Let's have a brainstorming session right here, right now on this comment thread. What can we do to foster trust, open the lines of communication, and get people on both sides of the aisle to really consider what we have to say?

Tax Bill Is Beginning of Formal Debt Criminalization

The noose is tightening on liberty. The United States Congress is steadily headed to a place where those who owe money to the US government shall be treated criminally. This phenomenon is advancing domestically and now, increasingly, internationally. The first shot in this latest campaign took place in 2010 when US President Barack Obama signed into law The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. It demanded, basically, that foreign banks withhold up to 30 percent of the income that an American abroad might earn. This bill isn't working so well because overseas banks are not cooperating (a state of affairs that was certainly expected). Thus, there is a need for something else: Senate Bill 1813, recently introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). This bill, in part, states that taxpayers with unpaid taxes over US$50,000 may find their passports confiscated. This isn't criminal per se, but the IRS has recently made noises about "sharing" information with police a...

Thomas Sowell Returns

By: Thomas Winslow Hazlett Reason

How To Cripple The Real Estate Market In Five Easy Steps

If the government and the banks had just allowed real estate prices drop to market equilibrium, we'd be out of this mess and housing would truly be affordable. But the government is determined to artificially prop up housing prices, whatever the cost to the economy. If you were head of Central Planning (howdy, Ben!) and were tasked with crippling the real estate market, here's what you would recommend. Choke the market and banking sector with zombie banks... Have the central bank (the Federal Reserve) buy up $1 trillion in toxic, impaired mortgages... Lower the rate that banks can borrow from the Fed to zero, and then pay the banks interest on all funds deposited at the Fed... Try to prop up the housing market by giving poor credit risk buyers loans with only 3% down... Load young people up with the equivalent of a mortgage in student loans... OK,let's see how our Organs of Central Planning are doing: check, check, check, check, check: a perfect score! they're...

The Humble Libertarian original

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