The Humble Libertarian original

Unionized Hot Dog Stand vs. Right to Work Hot Dog Stand = Very funny student activism video from Young Americans for Liberty :

This is what's wrong with public education: Hell no, he won’t go. In a defiant raspberry to the city Department of Education — and taxpayers — disgraced teacher Alan Rosenfeld, 66, won’t retire. Deemed a danger to kids, the typing teacher with a $10 million real estate portfolio hasn’t been allowed in a classroom for more than a decade, but still collects $100,049 a year in city salary — plus health benefits, a growing pension nest egg, vacation and sick pay. Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo can call for better teacher evaluations until they’re blue-faced, but Rosenfeld and six peers with similar gigs costing about $650,000 a year in total salaries are untouchable. Under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, they can’t be fired, the DOE says. “It’s an F-U,” a friend of Rosenfeld said of his refusal to quit. “He’s happy about it, and very proud that he beat the system. This is a great show-up-but-don’t-do-anything job.” Accused in 2001 of making lewd co...

“Crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” -MIT economist Rudiger Dornbusch At President Obama’s State of the Union Address this year, which was heavy on recycled platitudes and light on substance , the president did more to prepare for the upcoming general election than actually give a genuine assessment of the state of the union, but that’s pretty par for the course. A sincere state of the union by the President of the United States may be more than most Americans are ready for yet– the horror of listening to the president describe the true economic realities we face might be more than many people could handle. I hope I’m wrong and most Americans would welcome an honest word from a major politician as a breath of fresh air. What would a sincere state of the union address look like? The president could just show us graphs of economic data and leave it at that. It would be the most radical truth-t...

ABC News reports : Romney Gives Unemployed Woman Cash on Ropeline Amid shaking hands and signing campaign posters, Mitt Romney did something he has never done before on the ropeline: He took out his wallet and handed a wad of cash to a woman waiting to shake his hand. The woman, 55-year-old Ruth Williams, says she has been following the Romney campaign since he arrived in the state on Jan. 11, when she said she received a message from God to track him down... “He was kind to me and he made Gov. Haley come see about me,” Williams said. “He stopped doing everything.” Williams, who would not specify how much money Romney gave her, said also that South Carolina Treasurer Curtis Loftis paid her light bill on Thursday. A spokesman for Loftis, one of Romney’s major endorses in the state, confirmed to ABC News that he paid Williams’ bill. While Loftis didn’t know the amount of the bill, he confirmed that he gave her $150. “God didn’t tell me to go to nobody else, he told me to pra...

My goodness, this might be the most libertarian thing I have ever written in my two years working for the California-based Independent Voter Project. Read it in all its Misesian goodness here . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Bad analysis: The Bureau of Labor Statistics ‘ most recent unemployment figures are out along with all sorts of analysis from the deluded “See? The economy’s healing. Not very fast, but it’s healing! Chin up there, America,” to the more sober “No, the economy is not healing; people are just giving up on looking for jobs. The numbers say so.” And they do. But let’s zoom out– like way out, and ask just why so many commentators, even the most sober among them, are treating employment numbers like some kind of useful metric for measuring the health of the economy and deciding whether it’s “healing” or not? I mean, right– even if the employment rate were a good measure, the latest figures are still hardly encouraging, but sound economic analysis has to go so much deeper than that. As far as measuring the overall health of the economy goes, the unemployment numbers mean nothing . Good analysis: It’s a lot like what one commentator recently said about Black Friday sal...

"If unions and governments exist to protect workers from businessmen... why do government workers need unions?" That's a great question, Philosoraptor. I guess government isn't so benevolent after all. Or maybe unions don't just exist to protect workers from greedy businessmen. Or maybe even both ! Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Saw this on Facebook: Remember when teachers' unions, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and PBS invented the lightbulb, the radio, the microprocessor, the internal combustion engine, air travel, penicillin, the assembly line, cellular communication, the World Wide Web, and paid many trillions in taxes? Yeah, me neither... Pass it on. Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Reason recently interviewed Matt Damon at the "Save Our Teachers" rally in Washington, and a video of Damon laying the smack down on libertarians has been making its rounds in the public-sector-loving quarters of the blogosphere: I just wish the reporter was quick enough with her wits and a few facts to rebut Matt Damon's hollow argument as well as Michael Graham did yesterday at the Boston Herald : According to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the average Boston teacher earned around $80,000 last year. That was the average. And that doesn’t include the generous health care or pension benefits, which would equal $100,000 in the private sector. All for just 180 days of work. Nationally, the average teacher salary is significantly lower — $53,000. But a teacher still earns more by herself (and about 75 percent of K-12 teachers are women) than the household income of the average American family. Once again, with summers and holida...

Jul 22, 2011 -8:21- Thomas E. Woods Jr., author of " 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask ," and Reason Magazine Writer Damon Root on the myths in American history: Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Daniel Indiviglio reports at The Atlantic : "One of the many startling results in Friday's unemployment report for June was how few American adults are currently employed. Even though the unemployment rate is technically 9.2%, the employment-population ratio fell to 58.2%, matching its recession low." Good luck in 2012, Obama. Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Payroll figures reveal huge payday for a significant number of [CA] state employees in 2010: State payroll figures revealed by California State Controller John Chiang show that over 1,400 state employees received more than $200,000 in compensation last year. Over half of these were doctors, dentists, and nurses in California's overcrowded prison system, and they got a major boost to their compensation-- in some cases, doubling it-- by cashing out unused vacation time, sick days, and furlough days. Nine out of the ten highest-paid state workers made over $500,000 in 2010, and six of the top ten earners were doctors, dentists, or psychiatrists in the California prison system, with one prison doctor collecting $777,423 and a dentist earning $599,403. These employees made even more money than the state's governor, Jerry Brown, whose salary is $173,987. Read the rest of my article at CAIVN . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Partisan journalists in this country have been doing everything they can to push this absurd narrative that Tea Party goers are just a bunch of ignorant racists, so let's see if union protesters will get the same treatment after some of their members put on this charming display of racist ignorance: Hat tips to Larry O'Connor at Breitbart.tv and to Memeorandum Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

"If you hate this country so much, why don't you just move to Canada?!?!" "Because I want to make this country better!!!" Ever catch yourself saying one of these two lines? If so, you probably should have ended the conversation a few minutes ago. But this classic dead-end argument brings up one of the greatest benefits of state rights. States should be test tubes . If some state has a terrible idea, they can try it and fail, without the rest of the Union having to suffer the consequences. If a state has a great idea, and it proves itself to be effective, the rest of us will willingly adopt it. We won't need a federal mandate. We'll want the benefits. In the latest issue of Reason , Tim Cavanaugh references a post-census study by Americans for Tax Reform , and looks for correlations between states slated to gain seats in the next reapportionment. In short, what states are growing and attracting movers? "They have lower taxes, less government spendin...

Elizabeth Anderson recently coined the term “ contract feudalism” to describe the increasing power of employers over employees’ lives outside the workplace. According to Anderson, one of the benefits that the worker traditionally received in return for his submission to the bosses’ authority on the job was sovereignty over the rest of his life in the “real world” outside of work. Under the terms of this Taylorist bargain, the worker surrendered his sense of craftsmanship and control over his own work in return for the right to express his “real” personality through consumption in the part of his life that still belonged to him. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Libertarian Alliance . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

I have no anger in my heart toward the average worker at Enron. There were likely 10's of thousands of people working for Enron with the best of intentions. Excited to be a part of a company so big and important. With absolutely no idea of the depth of fraud that was happening above them. Enron sucked. But that doesn't mean that every Enron employee did. And so we head to Wisconsin and every other state struggling to make their budget deficits look even slightly less grotesque. Now, I don't personally know a bad teacher. In fact, I'm friends with a lot of amazing ones. And they're always confused and saddened by my stance. "You want to cut school funding? Do you understand how important the work we're doing is? Do you understand how hard I work?" Yes. And no, I probably don't understand. But you're missing the point. We're not mad at you. We're mad at a system. A system that costs more and more each year. A system that isn't s...

Anarchists want to abolish the state, with all functions now performed by the state being performed by voluntary associations. So naturally, we object to “public employment” — the funding of services through compulsory taxation — in principle. The question is, how do we get there from here? Some things currently done by tax-funded government employees are legitimate functions that would still exist in some form in a stateless society. Mail delivery is one example. Education would no doubt be different in many ways in a free society — no compulsory attendance laws, and no processing of human resources for the corporate state. But teaching children is an important function in any society, and much that public school teachers do now would probably carry over without much change. Even some of what police do, like stopping violent crime and apprehending aggressors, would still be necessary — but without laws against victimless crimes, or any of the thuggish behavior regularly chronicled ...

Have you ever convinced yourself you've developed an airtight libertarian case against a particular social or economic issue? You talk it over and over with your extremely homogeneous group of friends until you're convinced you've discovered the exact line of reasoning that will convince everyone in the world you're right? After much preparation, I felt ready to calmly and tactfully discuss the Wisconsin Union fight with my friend - who happens to be a high school teacher in Wisconsin. As I slowly and gently brought up the topic, he quickly countered with, "If you're not in the union, your opinion is irrelevant." Now this is troubling logic. Taken at face value, this means that economists can't have thoughtful opinions on politics without being congressman. That teachers can't have thoughtful opinions on war without being soldiers. You get the point. And so did he. In all honesty, he just didn't want to hear the talking points. He knows them. B...

As union members swarmed the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin mid-February, the undiscerning cable news viewer might have been tempted to draw a facile comparison to the uprisings happening in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Beyond the video footage of rowdy demonstrators in the street, however, the similarities end. It is truly a spectacle of bad taste, willful ignorance, and wishful thinking to see respected commentators like Paul Krugman and his groupies seriously suggest that the budget battle in Wisconsin is reminiscent of the revolutions happening in the Arab world. Comedian Jon Stewart had it right when he said : "Ah, they're not the same in any way, shape, or form. This [situation in Wisconsin] is the same as people in the Middle East overthrowing years of dictatorship? Or is that just the last story you saw on the news?" It's just the last story you saw on the news. To begin with, the revolutionaries in the Middle East are fighting for ...

At first glance, the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) might strike you as an odd subject for a consideration by libertarians. Most self-described free market libertarians and market anarchists are more likely to condemn unions than to praise them. But in a stateless society, or at least in a society where labor relations are unregulated by the state, the Wobblies’ model of labor struggle is likely to be the most viable alternative to the kinds of state-certified and state-regulated unions we’re familiar with. And for those of us in the libertarian movement who don’t think “God” is spelled B-O-S-S, or instinctively identify with employers and gripe about how hard it is to get good help these days, the question of how labor might negotiate for better terms is probably of direct personal interest. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at On ALLiance at Rational Review . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website