&

After reading Albert Stichka’s opposing view of government in our joint article in the July issue of The Fayetteville FEED, I decided that a response was in order to some of his key points and assumptions that I believe attempt to distort and marginalize the views of small-government advocates and the libertarian position.

I have a lot of respect for Albert, both as a professional and intellectual, and think that his positions on government stem from an honest belief that the role of government in modern society to is to help people, particularly the less fortunate. However, it was Supreme Court Justice William Brandeis who said that “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent…The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” I believe that truer words have probably never been spoken. Large government advocates like Albert, who are well-intentioned but naïve to the nature of economic law and to the secondary and tertiary consequences of their actions, are most likely to harm the economic and civil liberties of everyone in the name of helping a select few. They don’t understand that their policies often harm those they wish to help.

My article giving an overview of libertarianism appeared in the July issues of the Fayetteville FEED. I give two thumbs up to the FEED's editor, James Johnson, who wanted to give space for political and philosophical discussion in his magazine to celebrate the spirit of the 4th of July. You can read my portion of the article below, but I highly recommend that you also read the full version HERE at the Fayetteville FEED website to see the introduction by James, and the opposing viewpoint in favor of Big Goverment, written by photographer Albert Stichka. This piece was limited for space, so for the next few months I plan to post a series of articles that will cover the many aspects of libertarianism that couldn't be expounded upon in the FEED. Look for them, and send me feedback. -Ash

Give us Liberty or Give Us …

By Ash Smith

Medicare and social security are going bankrupt, we are involved in two wars with no end in sight, we are facing the worst economy since the 1930s and we can’t control a major oil leak in the gulf because our politicians and major corporations would rather worry about how they look on the evening news than actually work to solve the crisis.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to write a brief introduction to Libertarianism for the local magazine, the Fayetteville FEED. The FEED will print the article in their July issue, alongside a rebuttal of Libertarianism by another contributor. I'm going to post a brief snippet of the article below, and encourage you to pick up a copy of the magazine when it publishes next week.

Also, visit The Fayetteville FEED's website HERE. They are a great source of local information about music, artists, and all of the quirky things that make Fayetteville a pretty decent place to live.


Introduction to my article on Libertarianism to appear in the July issue of the Fayetteville FEED Magazine.

Medicare is going bankrupt, Social Security is going bankrupt, we are involved in two wars with no end in sight, we are facing the worst economy since the 1930s, and we can’t control a major oil leak in the gulf because our politicians and major corporations would rather worry about how they look on the evening news than actually work to solve the crisis.

Have I left anything out? Oh yeah, and as a nation we currently owe $54,000,000,000,000 in debt. That’s $175,000 per person.

We’re in bad shape. Yet, Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, the answers given to us by government are always the same: “Give us more power and we can stop that problem,” or “give us more money and we’ll be able to fix or avert that crisis”. You’d think that we would have wised up by now, instead of electing the same bureaucrats who continually dig us into deeper holes.

There is an alternative to this mess and the endless cycle of economic recessions, wars and the loss of your inalienable rights and civil liberties. That alternative is libertarianism...

Read more when The FEED publishes in July!

The war in Iraq has been raging now for 7 years, and can anyone honestly tell me what we're still doing there? First, it was about Terrorism links. Then it was about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Then it was because we had to stop Islamic Extremists. Then it was about stabalizing the country (which interstingly we destablized in the first place).
Then they stopped giving excuses and instead justified the preemptive war because we got rid of a brutal dicator who hated the U.S. and committed atrocities against civilians (which we've done as well with our drone strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan). But now, for the life of me, I can't figure out why we're there. And it seems that the present administration just isn't offering any excuse or answer at all. President Obama has continued the same war policies as the Bush Administration, and all we have to show for it are larger deficits and more bodies of young soldiers to be buried in Arlington. Way to go Prez.

Check out the Faces of the Fallen at the Washington Post to remind yourself that we're still in a war in Iraq, and that we've lost over 4,300 soldiers there for a cause that our government can define.

Thomas DiLorenzo's book, The Real Lincoln, brilliantly unravels over a hundred years of lost history over the course of its 300 pages. Most of us have always accepted the version of the Lincoln story that we were taught in school: That Lincoln was the "Great Emancipator", that he saved the Union by committing troops to stop the racist Confederates.

What DiLorenzo is able to show is how inaccurate that myth really is.

Was Lincoln an abolitionist? Nope, says DiLorenzo. He carefully shows in the second chapter what Lincoln really thought of slaves and free blacks during his day. He wanted them all sent to live in colonies in South America, thought that it was their natural place to be inferior to white men, and would have continued slavery in the South for his entire presidency had the Confederacy not seceded.

Was the Civil War really about slavery? Nope. DiLorenzo shows how the economic policy of Lincoln and the Whigs, mercantilism and centralization, was the real source of tensions between North and South. Slavery was a factor only in the sense that it became a point of contention within that flawed economic policy.

For those who are searching for honest depictions of history, this is a must-have book.

This article is the text of a speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990.

I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean.

A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse – and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

READ MORE