Mainstream political parties must be spooked by the rise of UKIP, because they’ve paid it the compliment of slander. By describing its members as racist, sexist clowns, they have inadvertently played into its hands. What they have failed to grasp is that their consensus on what respectable opinion looks like doesn’t hold much sway beyond the Westminster bubble and members of the chattering classes. Having spent years browbeating the public into holding the ‘right’ beliefs, they thought they had instilled a refined liberal conscience in everyone. They thought they could turn the searchlight on those who had left the ideological reservation and the nation would recoil in horror.

The notion that “the people are the government” is one of the biggest slanders that the average citizen will endure in his lifetime. This is the political version of the doctrine of Original Sin: It assumes that a person is born politically damned with the weight of all of the past and future sins of his government upon his head. The notion that “you are the government” is simply a way to shift the guilt for every crime by the government onto every victim of government.

With political leaders of supposedly diametrically opposing ideologies all of a sudden displaying strikingly similar incompetency and cynicism, collective anger began to subtly shift toward the state per se rather than a particular political party. One could almost hear a faint echo of the “out with them all!” shout that rocked the country during the 2001 financial crisis.

But more than people directing their anger at the right target, what was truly remarkable was the spontaneous eruption of solidarity they showed toward each other, in sharp contrast with the clumsy and slow governmental response. Across the country, organizations from civil society collected funds, clothes, food and drinking water for Platenses. The media haven’t stopped portraying stories of La Plata neighbors who risked their lives rescuing children and the elderly.

• Police superintendents who happily prosecute thought crimes in line with political policy, but let career criminals go free.
• Archbishops who give sermons that could have been written by the government, and fail to maintain their own organisation.
• Health officials who not only abide by government policy, but sue anyone who isagrees.
• Chief scientists who spout government policy, rather than science, to the grave detriment of science as a whole.
• Local councilors who spout government policy, even though they know their area will suffer as a result.

For the last day and a half I have been following the news from Cyprus. In case you hadn't heard, the country's banks are nearly insolvent, the country itself can't afford to bail them out, and as part of a bailout package, the EU has insisted that the country levy a special "tax" on the deposits of the bank. Even those below the Euro 100,000 deposit guarantee.

U.S. officials blame the failure of their “rebuilding” projects on poor planning and supervision. They just don’t get it. The projects are nothing more than socialist public-works projects, no different from those in socialist countries. As such, they are inherently defective. Therefore, it’s not a question of incompetency or inefficiency. Instead, the problem is that the Pentagon embraces socialism as the way to rebuild the countries it destroys. It fails to realize that socialism has never worked and will never work.

The populist reaction against Europe’s crisis continues to move south, as exemplified by the astounding success of the Five Star Movement led by comedian Giuseppe Grillo, which became Italy’s largest single party in the recent general elections. An organization that has been in existence for three years, the Five Star Movement has capitalized on the country’s growing disgust with politics, austerity and Europe.

Another by-product of the overall reform movement is the expansion of older forms of direct democracy. Once the draft of the new Constitution had been published and submitted to Parliament, six of its proposals were presented to the people in a national referendum. One of the questions even pertained to the future use of national referendums. Before the crisis, Iceland had not held a national referendum since its independence in 1944. Since 2010, three have been held, including two relating to major economic policies. All six proposals in the constitutional referendum were approved by a majority of respondents. Although many found the response unequivocal, members of the Independence Party asserted the results were not truly representative of the majority of citizens. Nevertheless, the draft will now be debated in the legislature.

America is smothered by government, but the news media are too busy to notice. They’re far more interested in picking political winners and losers. That’s to be expected. The Washington media are little more than the propaganda arm of the ruling elite, and most reporters and pundits see things through the eyes of the governing class. Cable TV programs are merely parades of stale establishment types who repeat the same old clichés, while blithely tossing off plans to spend other people’s money. Fed a steady diet of this gruel, most people are lulled into a state of semiconsciousness (at most) or helplessness about government policy.

Turnout across England and Wales varied from 11.6% in Staffordshire to a high of 20% in Northamptonshire, where the high profile by-election in Corby was being held on the same day. The number of spoiled ballot papers was also unusually high.

Here, roughly, is how the spoils will be divided among the troughers at Ovenden Moor. The landowner will be paid £401,000?pa, index-linked, for the next 25 years. The developer will get an income of around £2,679,300?pa, index-linked, over the same period. The vast bulk of this will come straight from the taxpayer in the form of compulsory subsidies, payable even if the turbines produce no power.

And the energy that will emerge from this orgy of greed and destruction? It will be neither green, clean, abundant or useful. Wind power requires full back-up from fossil-fuel-powered stations. It doesn’t save CO2, nor provide energy security, nor contribute anything to the base load power Britain so badly needs to keep the lights on.

To sum up, if you ever possessed a scrap of honor, decency, or integrity, you have long since abandoned them. We want nothing more to do with you. Please remove us from your logos, banners, bumper stickers, and advertising.

For our part, we will strive to forget—not an easy thing for us to do, you'll understand—that we were ever associated with you and yours in any way.

Sincerely,
The Elephants

Is that what you would say if shrapnel from a missile blew into your comfortable house and killed your own beloved little boy? You would not only accept, understand, forgive, shrug it off, move on — you would actively support the person who did it, you would cheer his personal triumphs and sneer at all those who questioned his moral worthiness and good intentions? Is that really what you would do?

Do not misunderstand me. I am as patriotic as the next guy, and consequently happy to kill remote strangers for no reason, and their wives, children, dogs, and flocks. Unfortunately, we can no longer afford it. Do you know what bombs cost these days? Thus we must either find a cheaper means of terminating Afghan children, perhaps by poisoning, or else, on purely economic grounds, we must restrain the Pentagon’s appetites.

Therefore, under my administration all military officers will be required to wear pink tutus, toe shoes, and brassieres with expandable boob compartments. This will discourage history majors in arrested development from becoming lieutenants and strutting around like Genghis Kahn simulacra. An army of ballerinas will be much less troublesome.

Doug: I think it's like they said during the war with Viet Nam: Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? I also like to say: Suppose they levied a tax, and nobody paid? And at this time of year: Suppose they gave an election, and nobody voted?

The only way to truly de-legitimize a corrupt system is by not voting. When tin-plated dictators around the world have their rigged elections, and people stay home in droves, even today's "we love governments of all sorts" international community won't recognize the results of the election.

Doug: The whole constellation of concepts is ridiculous. This leads us to the subject of democracy. People say that if you live in a democracy, you should vote. But that begs the question of whether democracy itself is any good. And I would say that, no, it’s not. Especially a democracy unconstrained by a constitution. That, sadly, is the case in the U.S., where the Constitution is 100% a dead letter. Democracy is nothing more than mob rule dressed up in a suit and tie. It's no way for a civilized society to be run. At this point, it's a democracy consisting of two wolves and a sheep, voting about what to eat for dinner.

Doug: Right. The modern state not only routinely coerces people into doing all sorts of things they don't want to do – often very clearly against their own interests – but it necessarily does so, by its nature. People who want to know more about that should read our conversation on anarchy. This distinction is very important in a society with a government that is no longer limited by a constitution that restrains it from violating individual rights. And when you vote, you participate in, and endorse, this unethical system.

If you are choosing the lesser evil, it is still evil, and you are registering your consent to that evil. If you refuse to vote, you are at least depriving them of that: your consent. Flannery O’Connor once wrote: "Does one’s integrity ever lie in what one is not able to do? I think that usually it does." So stay home. Bake a cake. Say a prayer. Mow your lawn. Smoke a joint. Do anything except vote. After all, the whole point of a Christian life is to try your best to "come out with clean hands," right?

It’s all cracking apart. The long run is upon us. The welfare-warfare state is finished. Oh, sure, they can still resort to their standard monetary crackpot policy of inflation for a short-term fix, but they’re just delaying the inevitable.

When a paradigm no longer works, there is only one choice — abandon it in favor of one that works. The one that works is libertarianism — i.e., free markets, private property, sound money, and a limited government, constitutional republic.

I've long found electoral politics seedy and dispiriting, but that sensibility has lately become a debilitating affliction: like being a sportswriter struck by the unhelpful epiphany that it's silly for a grown man to write about other grown men playing a game for kids.

The current “emergency spending bill” nonsense is just that — nonsense. No “government shutdown” is at stake. In Washington, a “government shutdown” means that certain “non-essential government services” are temporarily stopped. The government employees who get laid off for a day or a week in order to heighten audience suspension of disbelief get paid for that time off when they return (as they inevitably shall). And if a “government service” is not, in fact, “essential,” then why is government providing that “service” in the first place, and how does the prospect that it might cease to do so become an “emergency?”

A vigorous war on words is being waged. Whether you call the process political correctness, cultural Marxism or thought control, certain words have become crimes; they have become hate speech. Thought-crime legislation prohibits the expression of specific ideas, including religious ones and ones that ‘bully’, while encouraging the expression of sanctioned ideas. It is also illegal to indicate an intent to commit violence – for example, posting that Obama needs to be shot or the government should be overthrown through violence; it is illegal even if you take no action and have no means to do so.

In other words, some of the pamphlets that sparked the American Revolution would now be illegal. Or they would be rewritten, as school textbooks currently are, to eliminate politically wrong words and ideas.

It is pretty annoying hearing the two major political parties, NDC and NPP struggle over who has paid public sector workers more money. Isn’t it a little contradictory to hear our President suggest that we must demand value for money from the largely non-performing public service, seeing that we are forking out $3bn in taxes (Ghc 6bn, a fifth of our GDP) to pay for their ‘’services’’? Yet, the NPP intends on continuing the party if and when they get elected. The grim picture about the low confidence in the ability of many governments to create and sustain employment is mainly due to a not so forward looking understanding of the dynamics of creating employment. That forward looking attitude is in the place of the private sector. Incidentally with Government’s attempt to quadruple salaries of public sector workers through the single spine salary scheme, there has been a drawback to strengthening the private sector as crucially needed talent to think and innovate is lost to the largely unproductive public sector. The private sector must be seen as the real engine of growth.

Personally, I would love to see this. I would love to see every person in the country stay home. I would love to see a situation in which they couldn't name a president because zero people turned out on Election Day. This would be exactly the kind of chaos that I could sit back and enjoy with a beer. But since it would only take one person in a country of 300 million to blow it for everyone, this kind of thing would be hard to coordinate. Therefore, I cannot get behind it.

From the point of view of the Productive Class, democracy has been an abysmal failure, elevating the very worst among us, the dumbest, the least sane, and the most evil. In my lifetime—indeed, in all of the 21st century so far, in all of the 20th, and in most of the 19th, the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives have been filled with almost nothing but the moral equivalent of paralyzed autistic lepers.

Only when the 75% of humanity with a healthy conscience come to understand that we have a natural predator, a group of people who live amongst us, viewing us as powerless victims to be freely fed upon for achieving their inhuman ends, only then will we take the fierce and immediate actions needed to defend what is preciously human. Psychological deviants have to be removed from any position of power over people of conscience, period. People must be made aware that such individuals exist and must learn how to spot them and their manipulations. The hard part is that one must also struggle against those tendencies to mercy and kindness in oneself in order not to become prey.

Psychopaths are, to some extent, self-aware as a group even in childhood! Recognizing their fundamental difference from the rest of humanity, their allegiance would be to others of their kind, that is, to other psychopaths.

Their own twisted sense of honor compels them to cheat and revile non-psychopaths and their values. In contradiction to the ideals of normal people, psychopaths feel breaking promises and agreements is normal behavior.

When you understand the true nature of psychopathic influence, that it is conscienceless, emotionless, selfish, cold and calculating, and devoid of any moral or ethical standards, you are horrified, but at the same time everything suddenly begins to makes sense. Our society is ever more soulless because the people who lead it and who set the example are soulless – they literally have no conscience.

What follows from the fact that Americans didn’t build their successes without cooperation from others? Not the President’s conclusion--pay more and expand government that does little well except inhibit social cooperation. It means we should expand the system that enabled those successes by expanding areas of voluntary individual choices—i.e., expanding freedom.

12. I voted Republican because my head is so firmly planted up my a**, it's unlikely that I'll ever have another point of view.

12a. I voted Democrat because my head is so firmly planted up my a**, it's unlikely that I'll ever have another point of view.

The Angling Trust, which has three million affiliated members, say some fisheries have been virtually destroyed and tackle shops have been forced to close due to the menace.

It launched the Action on Cormorants campaign yesterday calling for them to be generally licenced for culling, like magpies and crows, which can be killed if they threaten agriculture or public health.

We are living in an age of perpetual crisis, chaos, death, destruction, impoverishment, and loss of liberty. That’s because we’re living under a welfare state and a warfare state.

Why in the world would any rational American want to continue this aberrant system? It just makes no sense at all.

If there was ever a clear cut case of good versus evil, then surely it is the contest between Julian Assange and most of the world’s governments. They hate him because he exposed their lies, their manipulations, and their routine violations of the most elementary rules of human decency. By publishing virtually the entire corpus of messages sent to and fro between Mordor (Washington) and their Nazgûl (diplomats) in the field, WikiLeaks has given us the true history of the world in modern times, or, at least, a good glimpse into its secret underside historians rarely uncover.

The idea is that people should have to answer only to well-defined laws that have been enacted in advance of criminal punishment. In that way, people can adjust their conduct and decide whether to risk violating the law. But the point is that they answer to the law, not to the ruler’s arbitrary, ad hoc edicts.

Thus, the rule of law is necessarily a prerequisite to a free society. Under a regime governed by “the rule of men,” the government can punish people for whatever it happens to define as a crime at that particular time. When people are subject to that type of arbitrary power, there is no way that people in that society can genuinely be considered free.

A political term that had me baffled for a long time was "the hungry." Since we all get hungry, it was not obvious to me how you single out some particular segment of the population to refer to as "the hungry."

Eventually, over the years, it finally dawned on me what the distinction was. People who make no provision to feed themselves, but expect others to provide food for them, are those whom politicians and the media refer to as "the hungry."

This analysis sheds light on the bargaining that takes place between governments and government-employee unions. Both sides of the negotiation have a basic goal: extraction of wealth from the taxpayers. And those taxpayers have no seat at the table! It is hardly an exaggeration to say that collective bargaining in the government realm is a conspiracy against the taxpayers, who of course include workers in private employment. If there is a harmony of interest, it is between government workers and their employers, not between government workers and private-sector workers.

A few days ago, The Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke QC MP said on Radio 4: “A referendum on our membership of the EU is an irrelevance. It is the demand of a few Right-wing journalists and a few extreme nationalist politicians. I cannot think of anything sillier to do than to hold a referendum.”

If you are in the group that doesn't care about liberty, then stay alert. You may seem to be on the winning side right now, but dusk has fallen on the era of authority. Its repetitious failures have awakened a new generation to the promise of liberty, just as a previous generation got a glimmer a couple of centuries ago, before their descendants dropped the ball. Let's make it a permanent change this time.

The Queen has not sustained our national identity. It is actually worse than this. By expressing that identity, she has allowed many people to overlook the structures of absolute and unaccountable power that have grown up during her reign. She has fronted a revolution to dispossess us of our country and of our rights within it. How many of the people who turn out on Jubilee Day, with their union flags and street parties, will fully realise that the forms they are celebrating now contain an alien and utterly malign substance?

In a word, if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is constitutional, citizens should press their state governors and legislatures to nullify the law. You say, "Williams, the last time states got into this nullification business, it led to a war that cost 600,000 lives." Two things are different this time. First, most Americans are against Obamacare, and secondly, I don't believe that you could find a U.S. soldier who would follow a presidential order to descend on a state to round up or shoot down fellow Americans because they refuse to follow a congressional order to buy health insurance.

“Austerity,” it seems, is for the little people. You know, the ones busting their asses on factory floors and behind shop counters and in the farm fields, paying those taxes so that politicians can continue buying expensive toys from their friends at an ever-increasing (“but hey, we’ll slow the increases down a little!”) rate.

We see the importance of this element of politics clearly in the contemporary conflict between Democrats and Republicans. Given that these two parties are but two wings of the same predatory one-party state that rules the United States, we might well wonder why their intramural feuding often reaches such vitriolic extremes. The short answer is that despite the two parties’ general similarity of fundamental positions, they comprise somewhat different sorts of people—different in regard to religious conviction (or the lack thereof), typical social position, culture, background, occupational distribution, urban-rural composition, and ethnic makeup, among other things—and the two groups tend to dislike each other; indeed, in many individual instances, they despise one another. And their political representatives, though more inclined to conspire and cut deals with the other side, also represent their supporters along the hatred dimension. Occasionally, when a politician does not realize that the microphone is live, we hear some honest expression of his true feelings about his political opponents—“enemies” is the more accurate word.

Occupy Wall Street protesters are reminiscent of writer R. Emmett Tyrrell's criticism of radical feminists: They don't know what they want, but they want it very badly. On May Day, the protesters tied up the streets of Oakland, San Francisco and elsewhere. They are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore, although it remains unclear what, specifically, they are angry about.

We always DO revolt in the end, but things have to get REALLY bad first, because basically we are hard-working, civilised people who believe in "democracy". THAT TOO, the powers depend on. The problem is that too few people see how the democratic system has been abused.

However, there is also the old English saying: "The worm has turned." As a well-qualified worm, I feel myself very close to the turning point ......

Sixty-eight per cent of eligible voters did not vote in the elections, a bloc of people so big it could be described as "the vast majority", or certainly "most people". Most people chose not to take part in these elections, and in doing so they implicitly rejected the political class in its entirety; its ideas, its policy proposals, its representatives – all were very publicly and humiliatingly cold-shouldered. What we witnessed yesterday was a silent, withering rebellion against the political elites of this country. A good night for Labour? Are you kidding me? Labour got roughly 39 per cent of the vote on an estimated turnout of 32 per cent. This means around 12 per cent of the eligible electorate voted Labour. To put it another way, 88 per cent of us – the heaving mass of society – did not vote Labour. If that's a good night for Labour, I'd hate to see a bad one.

If I wanted America to fail …

I would prey on the goodness and decency of ordinary Americans.

I would only need to convince them … that all of this is for the greater good.

If I wanted America to fail, I suppose I wouldn’t change a thing.

The notion that President Obama is trying to fire up his “base,” as he prepares for a re-election campaign, raises the question of what constitutes his base. It is becoming increasingly clear that the “workers” he is supposedly concerned about are going to be dismissed or ignored so that wealthy environmental groups can be accommodated.

The polls close at 5pm this Thursday 5 April. No one knows how it will go, but having over 9,000 Pledges signed up locally is a good indication that the people of Thurrock want a referendum on the EU despite their local politicians, like national ones, trying to ignore the issue. We will email the result as soon as we know it.

The Bradford spring. No matter how seemingly powerful, no corrupted, out-of-touch elite can last forever. The people of Bradford West have spoken, and politics in the city and in this country will never be the same again. Anyone who took part in this historic campaign, or who observed it dispassionately, knew by last weekend that something spectacular was going to take place.

A 5,000 Labour majority was transformed into a 10,000 majority for Respect – the same total vote for me as the outgoing MP had in a general election – winning across every ward in the constituency. It was the most spectacular by-election result in British political history.

Voters have emphatically ended Labor's rule in Queensland, effectively reducing the trounced government to the status of minor party.

So comprehensive was the LNP election victory under Campbell Newman that Labor has been virtually erased from the Queensland electoral map.

The ALP looks likely to be reduced to just seven of parliament's 89 seats. This would be four fewer seats than that won by One Nation in 1998.

So our inquiry is directed to whether 1 percenters make their money through the political means or the economic means. The right answer is “both.” Let’s start by acknowledging that we do not live in a free-market economy, by which I mean an economy based solely on “equality of authority” and voluntary exchange, void of all privilege founded in coercion. Quite the contrary. Corporatist privilege abounds, and so we may reasonably suspect that any large fortune is the result of a combination of the economic and political means. In any individual case one or the other may predominate. Some people are genuine market entrepreneurs. But others are largely political entrepreneurs. Since the State touches all aspects of life, we are talking about matters of degree.

So keep cool. Don’t panic. “Humanity is Rising.” The so-called powerful, as cruel and dangerous as they are, FEAR US. And in their terror they retreat into a fantasy that modern history has shown to be just that — fantasy. They imagine that they can control the whole world from some centralized Tower of Power.

Day after day after day, our minds slip out of their control. Our parents, our grandparents, respected government. They believed the propaganda about it being Our Wise Protector. They Obeyed. We increasingly see government for exactly what it is.

I think that everyone who reads this newsletter will understand already why I finally decided to make my move to UKIP. For years I have disagreed fundamentally with the Tory leadership on the EU. They roll out the eurosceptic rhetoric at election time, and then forget all about it.

We had seen too many false dawns and dashed hopes. William Hague; IDS; Michael Howard, and now David Cameron, who has done nothing about the Party's repatriation commitment, and who has told me face-to-face that he doesn't want an EU referendum because we're "better off in the EU"

The irony is that most East Midlands Conservatives broadly agree with me on these issues. That's why they selected me as their #1 euro-candidate three times running. The Tory Party doesn't agree with them. UKIP does.

The mass of disillusioned fall into two general camps: those who still trust the political method and those who realize politics can bring no value to their lives. The politicos join the Tea Party or its like and campaign to elect the One Man Fit to Rule Us All. The non-politicos realize that no one man is fit to rule and, so, they take control of their own lives. They often do so silently because many of the peaceful, productive activities are illegal or could otherwise rouse the resentment of the bureaucracies they eschew.

American powerpigs have bullied, coerced, maimed, murdered, and destroyed their way to wealth and power all over the world since the middle of the 19th century, beginning, of course, with their very own people in the South and the unfortunate former Siberians they found in the West. What they don't understand yet (and quite possibly never will) is that this era of bullying, coercion, maiming, murder, and destruction is about to end abruptly. The rise of the Internet (turning communications ninety degrees from vertical to lateral) and the development by Iran of their own atom bombs only hint at what lies ahead.

The Age of Authority has reached its inevitable and inexorable end. There can be no going back. But between the easy way and the hard way that history appears to be presenting us with, those who still perceive themselves to be in authority seem to be opting for the hard way.

The shortest path from where we are today, to an actually free society, starts with Mitt Romney as President. Now there’s an awesome sentence to take out of context, huh? But it’s true. If you want state worship and blind faith in “government” to crumble, you should try to put the biggest elitist buffoon, the most obviously corrupt liar possible, on the throne. And Mitt Romney sure fits that bill! Go Mitt!

Does Britain need a Libertarian Party? I remember discussing this issue on several occasions with the late Chris Tame, and he was firmly against the idea. Having given it some considerable thought over the past few years I can say that I have come to agree with his view that under no circumstances should Libertarians consider forming a political party in Britain. I will add further that all Libertarian parties in other countries should disband forthwith and spend their money in ways that will effectively further the cause of liberty.

Today, the People’s Pledge starts the largest ground campaign for an EU referendum ever held in this country.

There will be a first local referendum in one carefully chosen constituency beginning now, followed by a further 10 later this year, and then another 100 in 2013.

It is indeed a singular achievement for one man to rise so high in the reasonably clubbable, popularity-dependent world of politics while yet remaining so heroically charmless in almost every possible way.

But Huhne has managed it. That is why today on this happiest of days, let us all raise our glasses and let joy be unconfined.

How many jobs do you know where you can’t be fired for five years, even if you don’t do what you promised you would and steal from the till? This is our chance to make sure MPs don’t think they can get away with ignoring us, or just toeing their party’s line.

I have always argued that when a Conservative MEP is out of sympathy with Party policy, and unable to defend it, he should resign to make way for another Conservative. I believe that that is the decent and honourable thing to do, and I have sought to do it, but my intention has been frustrated by the Party’s reprehensible prevarication.

So this time they’re not playing by the old rules. What, exactly, are they trying to accomplish? I believe their significance has to more to do with their form of organization itself — a distributed, self-organized network — as a model of the society they hope to build, than with any concrete demands. In Rowan Wolf’s elegant phrase, “the organizational model … is the carrier wave of the movement.”

It is crucial we take action on capping party donations before the next big scandal erupts. If the result is that political parties will have to live within their means - like everyone else at the moment - so be it. They shouldn’t be able to use the excuse of the economy being in a parlous state as an excuse for more delay. Indeed, at a time of cuts, ensuring the political process isn’t being dominated by vested interests is even more pressing.

You balk: Isn’t the problem the regressive pro-market post-Reagan politics? Please, people. Let’s be serious a moment. Reagan used a bunch of pro-market, pro-liberty, anti-big government rhetoric, but the man was no libertarian, and he did little to make the country more libertarian. Reagan spent and spent, and thus ran up the debt. He doubled the number of imports with trade restrictions. He pursued militaristic foreign policy. He increased rather than decreased the size, scope, and power of government. Reagan ramped up the war on Americans’ civil liberties drugs. He wasn’t even a big deregulator—that was Carter. Look past rhetoric to reality. Reagan was in practice just a more militaristic version of one of you. (More militaristic? Maybe I’m giving you too much credit. While we spent Black Friday shopping, Obama spent it having his military murder innocent Afghan children.)

Point your fingers at yourself. You did this.

Our devastating new report reveals the value of direct grants and paid time off that trade unions receive from taxpayers. In the run up to the disruptive strikes on November 30th we expose the staggering £113 million of your money that the unions raked in over the last financial year. There are now at least the equivalent of 2,840 full time staff working on trade union activities or duties at taxpayers’ expense. Taxpayers shouldn’t be funding staff to work for trade unions, providing them with a huge activist base to support strikes and freeing up resources for political campaigns. It is yet another burden on hard pressed families, diverting money they expect to be spent on frontline services. The trade unions should pay for this staff time themselves.

But no matter how Orwellian the tactics, no matter how many carbon cops are sent into hairdressing salons to interrogate barbers on the precise nature of their price rises, the truth remains: Australia has gone out on a limb, imposing a carbon tax that will send businesses to the wall, cause undue hard-ship to families, and tether Australians more tightly to government handouts.

And soon, we will send billions of dollars overseas to buy useless pieces of paper called carbon credits. Investment bankers, lawyers and carbon traders will get rich, as will all the usual spivs and scam artists ready to stick a bucket under the government spigot raining taxpayer cash.

The facades are crumbling.

And the "cognitive dissonance" that was created by all the lies that have been told by business and government are being revealed.

The people are seeing the reality of the world around them.

Obama cannot provide a very convincing argument that it is democracy that he is delivering around the world, when not only do people see all the videos of police attacking those protesting in the great U S of A, but upon seeing the truth of what is not a democracy, this is in turn, bringing even more people out.

In the war of ideas, it's not enough just to be against something; you have to be for something that is sound as well. Before you set out to alter the status quo, you ought to know how to replace it - and you need to be convinced, intellectually and in your heart, that the new system will actually be better.

The fundamental, structural problem with the state, the thing that makes it unworkable in principle, is that it is simply coercive exaction, blackmail and nepotism — i.e., corruption — on a large, organized and legitimized scale. Italy and Greece are mere illustrations of the same general problems that characterize all politicized, hierarchical societies.

How indeed could a nation rationally allocate resources in the forms of time, labor and things of value if individuals and communities are forcibly restricted from doing so themselves? Genuine free markets have no relation whatever to the political capitalism of the global, state-dependent economy.

When dignity and autonomy return to the life of the individual, allowing her to trade with her fellow equals on a mutually-respectful basis, the crises that Europe now hosts with wane and pass away. The state, of course, will have passed away with them, leaving real order and peace behind.

The government has set up a Commission on a Bill of Rights to investigate incorporating one into UK law and we’re encouraging people to submit their views to it before the deadline, which is this Friday. Can you spare a few minutes today to tell them your views?

There is no doubt that OWS folks can list numerous general failings that have occurred on Wall Street, plenty of misdeeds that have been perpetrated thereabouts, usually with the support of Washington’s politicians and bureaucrats. Yet there doesn’t appear to be much recognition of this within the ranks of the OWS folks. When they are interviewed they tend to lash out imprecisely, even blindly, and mostly at those in American society who are doing reasonably well, economically. The strategy seems to be to garner the sadly widespread prejudice around the country directed at those in the business community. In other words, OWS appears to be but a current version of the age old mentality and practice of business bashing. This is what fueled much of what the Third Reich was all about, including the deadly anti-Semitism evidenced during that era. While OWS doesn’t show direct hostility to Jews, it does appear to pick on those within the business community, giving the clearly guilty politicians a pass at the same time.

As long as there are favors to dispense, privileges grounded in authority and force, a small, inner circle of the rich will purchase access to them at our loss and their advantage. This is not the nature of the current manifestation of the state, but of the state itself.

Politics and government twist the overwhelming advantages of our unique desires and skills into conflict. Instead of each of us going his own way to satisfy his needs and earning a living satisfying other people's needs in a manner each of us finds most accommodating, we are forced to choose between suboptimal options imposed by institutions. Politics distills options to the most ascetic elements when a cornucopia should prevail.

Ironically, the powers now wielded by the federal government, post 9/11, are the same types of powers wielded by such Middle East dictators as Gaddafi, Egypt’s Mubarak, and Syria’s Assad. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that the U.S government specifically selected these brutal dictatorships to serve as torture partners with the U.S. government. All three of those dictatorships tortured suspected terrorists on request of the U.S. government, without even the semblance of a trial to determine guilt or innocence.

Perhaps the brutal execution of Muammar Gaddafi will be a wake-up call for Americans, causing them to ask themselves a fundamentally important question: What are U.S. imperialism and the resulting “war on terrorism” doing to us, both as Americans and as human beings?

The State is everybody’s enemy. Why don’t the protesters get this? Because they are victims of propaganda by the State, doled out in public school, that attempts to blame all human suffering on private parties and free enterprise. They do not comprehend that the real enemy is the institution that brainwashes them to think the way they do.

They are right that society is rife with conflicts, and that the contest is wildly lopsided. It is indeed the 99% vs. the 1%. They’re just wrong about the identity of the enemy.

Mark Seddon Director of the People’s Pledge said: ‘It’s no coincidence that the government has brought forward the vote after we announced that our tens of thousands of supporters would be mobilised to lobby their MPs. This is an outrageous attempt to stifle debate and peaceful protest. Not only does the government want to not have our referendum on the EU, but they want to shut down the debate altogether.'

The next 7 days are vital and we need as many of you to get involved as possible. To generate maximum pressure on MPs don’t just complete one of these steps; please do all three, and forward this email as widely as possible.

Were the Occupiers and Partiers to find common ground in demanding repeal of all the special-interest policies that now entangle politics and business, competition would force the fat cats to diet and weed out those businessmen who rely on political clout to enrich themselves. After all, capitalism exists to allocate capital. Crony-capitalism misallocates it. Freeing the economy from that burden would make Wall Street investments more productive, allowing the American economy the opportunity to rebound.

There’s nothing mystical about it. These eruptions are brought into being by a coalescence of unimaginably vast and varied elements, on every level of human life in the natural world. And they aren’t clearly defined, like cut glass, but amorphous, shifting, mixed, volatile, like a chemical reaction — a process, an elan vital, not a fixed property or party platform.

Forty years ago, the hippies and the New Left swam upstream against the dominant technological and institutional trends of their day. Today, we have that technological tide on our side, and we’ll eat the giant bureaucratic institutions alive like a school of piranha. We’ll display their bleeding heads on our battlements.

It’s a new world in the making — I just hope I live long enough to see how it comes out.

With rioting in their streets and Greece teetering on the brink of a massive debt default; with the EU seriously wondering about its and the euro’s future (if any), are gold buying restrictions part of an international governmental plot leading to confiscation of precious metals?

The E.P.A.’s power grab is only the most extreme example of a larger malady: regulation without representation. Today, agencies not only develop regulatory proposals, but also enact the rules, based on analyses they themselves conduct.

Something beautiful is unfolding. From all over Australia, people whose businesses and jobs are being driven into the ground by spectacular government mismanagement are gathering to drive from the corners of the continent to converge on Canberra to demand an election.

The productive class may not have easy rent-a-crowds for rallies and chirpy letter campaigns, but they have something that the keen teens do not — they have capital assets — in this case, assets that move.

I will be careful, I promise. But if there's any decency left in this land, I'm in no danger. As my readers all know, I do not advocate the initiation of violence against anybody for any reason. In fact, I took a formal oath to that effect many years before most of them were born. The Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the defense of what they stood for; to be willing to do less would make me feel like some kind of insect crawling in the baseboards.

The country that I serve is freedom, and I can only do what I must.

In any event, a terribly British version of an Arab "Spring" seems to be taking place in the UK.

The revolution really will be televised (mainly on Sky News?) and being terribly British, no-one will even need to get off their backsides, while several scalps are offered up to the people. Then the powers that be, will announce that once again all is well, etc etc etc, as they all carry on with "business as usual".

So, while this poll gives the GOP some cause for hope, they should remember that generic Republicans are not offensive, but real Republicans are. Come on, think about it: someone like Santorum or Bachmann is almost entirely offensive. Palin would send half the voters in fits of hysterical laughter. The independents are not likely to go for a theocrat. Befuddled old conservatives are not really that hot, and Ron Paul really doesn't intend to run for president anyway—just fund raise so he has a hefty fund to "donate" to his own 501(c)3. Sadly Paul would actively be undercutting the libertarian Gary Johnson.

At no point have I authorized the Congress of the United States to borrow money in my name or on my behalf. Nor have I at any time co-signed said loans, guaranteed said loans, or agreed to repay any portion of said loans.

If the (occasionally rotating/shifting) group of 537 persons composing the US House of Representatives, the US Senate, the Vice President of the United States and the President of the United States want to repay the debts they've incurred (or intend to incur if they can get their act together), hey, that's just peachy (as long as they do so from their personal wealth, rather than through some kind of program of organized theft).

If they want to default on it instead, that's between them and their creditors.

But libertarianism, however weak its influence today, is a much greater long-term threat to the left than is any form of conservatism, and the leftist intellectuals sense this even if they can’t articulate why. Leftism, whether they know it or not, is a distorted permutation of the classical liberal tradition. The statist left did their deal with the devil – the nation-state, centralized authority of the most rapacious kind – supposedly with the goal of expediting the liberation of the common man and leveling the playing field. More than a century since the progressives and socialists twisted liberalism into an anti-liberty, pro-state ideology, they see that they have made a huge mess of the world, that, as they themselves complain, social inequality persists, corporatism flourishes, and wars rage on. As the chief political architects of the 20th century in the West, they have no one to blame but themselves, and so they target us – the true liberals, the ones who never let go of authentic liberal idealism, love of the individual dignity and rights of every man, woman and child, regardless of nationality or class, and hatred of state violence and coercive authoritarianism in all its forms.

In a free country we would care little who the president is, provided that he conducts himself in a dignified manner, is a competent administrator, and can manage the national defense. The president would not have the power to “radically transform” the country, nor would he have the power to transfer wealth from one group arbitrarily to another. Donations to his election campaign would be commensurately small.

In a free country we would not suffer from the illusion that our economy is “fragile.” Our experience would show us that our economy is not a thing in itself but a very real reflection of our virtues and social relations. It is our freedom that is fragile.

Now Mr Pickles has been overruled by the bossy-sounding Mrs Spelman and is reported to be furious — though not so furious that he is thinking about resigning. And, to be fair, why should he? If a minister in the Coalition stood down every time a pledge was broken, there wouldn't be anyone left.

But I do worry that this habit of making promises to win votes, and then almost casually breaking them, is likely to be injurious to democracy.

We The decent People of our country must unify, win, and govern. After we unify, here's how we win:

1. Our Core Group of honest, open citizens (you and me) will be voted into office to replace all national elected leaders.

2. We win by Write-In voting, enforced by We The People.

July 1st 2011 will see the curtailment of mobile phone services for subscribers who have unregistered SIM cards. A time space of 18 months prior to the June 30th deadline had been given for registration. The given and main rationale for Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) registration cards is to ensure that criminals, agent provocateurs and other such elements will not have the technology at their disposal for their activities.

Most people who complain about what is happening have no idea of how to stop it. They usually whine about “political correctness gone mad,” or call on the authorities to learn some common sense. Neither approach touches the root of the problem. What is being done is not some accidental madness, but is part of an overall agenda of social control. The abuses we read about in the newspapers are the intended outcomes. As for common sense, this is not a debate, in which positions can be advanced and rejected in the abstract. I have said there are jobs involved in this agenda of social control. There are tens of thousands of people whose only justification for employment or funding at our expense is the part they play in controlling us. The only answer to the endless advance of moral authoritarianism is to sack every one of these people. In short, we need to demand the following:

But if what it says is even half way true, then David Cameron has made the most unforgivably damaging decision of his entire political career. It will delay our economic recovery, lay waste the British countryside and cement Cameron’s reputation as a man driven not by principle (as, say, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill were) but by a grubby, son-of-Blair urge to keep clinging on to power at no matter what cost to the country at large.

How about this: You stop making it necessary for me to defend my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness/property from your goverthugs and "laws" and I'll shut up. I don't want to think about The State or any other idiotic superstition, but I have no choice when you make it a constant threat. Keep your filthy government to yourself!

Sure the statism embraced by contemporary liberals, socialists, fascists and the like is somewhat different from the older kind, from mercantilism, from monarchism, from the rule of Caesars and tsars. Not all statists are the same. But what is crucial about all of them is that they are statists. They do not favor certain particular version of statism such as monarchism that had been demoted, overturned by way of the American revolution. The Founders were nearly libertarians except for some matters they probably didn’t know how to handle without some coercive laws, such as the funding of law enforcement and maintenance via taxation. But taxation is the feudal kin of serfdom–the treatment of those in a society as if they and their resources belonged to the government. That idea is not new at all, nothing progressive about it whatever. It is however the idea that is close to socialism in which system all the major means of production are publicly owned, belonging to government (which goes by the euphemism of “the public”). And what does socialism see as the major means of production in a society? Human labor. So human labor–which is to say every human being–is owned by the state. The hallmark of serfdom and slavery.

What we have is a really disgusting situation, far more disgusting than any time in recent decades. Before, the Republican Party at least didn't automatically make you want to grab for the vomit bag. Now they are catering to the dumbest, most ignorant, vile segment of the American public: Christian fundamentalists. These are the kind of people that bottom-feeding pond scum look down upon.

The Democrats are paid toadies for the unions, especially for the unions that represent government works such the teacher's unions. The Democrats scream so much about greed regarding the Republicans because they are the organized party of greed, not the Republicans. God's Own Party, GOP, is the organized party of hate, that is different.

Politics today relies upon manufactured panics. Take a problem, no matter how small, blow it out of proportion. Try to drag "children" into it anyway you can and then scream about protecting the children. Bolster your case with a bogus study, using dubious methods, and the media will beat a path to your door breathlessly telling paranoid parents of the newest threat to their children. Politicians will promise to solve the crisis provided they get more power and taxes are increased. The PIGs line up with their hands out, millions are doled out. In the end the PIGs are at the through happy and full, for the time being. The politicians are more powerful than ever. The parents feel parent, even though their children are no safer than before. Taxpayers have less money in their pockets and everyone is just a little less free than before the panic was created.

We have a charismatic Democrat getting away with wars and lies, and the media talking about him as though he is a restrained, thoughtful executive, unlike the last president - while the right calls him a wimp and reckless tyrant at the same time. Meanwhile, the entire war-on-terror and Ownership Society focus of domestic planning - the worst elements of the Bush years - continue exactly as though no crises in Iraq and the financial market demonstrated their inherent unsustainability.

It is indeed the 1990s and the Bush years happening all at once.

What's the solution for presidential dictatorship in foreign affairs? The solution is obvious: a dismantling of America's military empire and a restoration of a limited-government constitutional republic, along with strict constitutional and legislative constraints on the power of the president, together with an independent judiciary with the courage and fortitude willing to enforce them. Most important, as our ancestors taught us, the solution necessitates an aroused citizenry whose hearts and minds are aflame with the principles and spirit of liberty.

If development is considered to be so bad, why is redevelopment considered to be good, by many of the same people?

Redevelopment imposes the supposedly superior wisdom and virtue of an elite on the rest of us. That is its ideological appeal to self-congratulatory elites.

Getting rid of the power seemingly involves a Catch-22: How can you dismantle the state policies underlying the political means to wealth, when you're outspent and outgunned in the policy-making process by those who profit from it? How do you change the system to prevent their making money off it, in a system rigged in favor of the big money?

The answer: Get rid of the money.

I favor the union thugs, not the government thugs. For me, it's like Stalin versus Hitler: a pox on both of them. But, I like to root for the underdog, the weaker of the two bad guys, and that's the union in this case. I do so because I want the fight to long continue, so that both are weakened as much as possible.

For some sixty years, there has been a deep fissure in what is called the American right. There are those who believe in liberty. And there are those who believe in the American imperial State. They are not the same. Indeed, they are in opposition. These events underscore the serious difference, to the point that many spokesmen among the conservative movement can't even recognize the legitimate aspirations of a people not to be ruled by a dictator in power for decades. The reality highlights the lie that these people believe in liberty as versus government power.

To a very large degree bigotry in the marketplace is pretty much like that other bugaboo—monopoly. When it exists naturally, that is without state support or law enforcing it, it tends to be fleeting and rare. The presence of either opens up too many profit opportunities to non-bigoted entrepreneurs. This is precisely the reason that, even during the deepest years of anti-gay oppression there were always private businesses and clubs that would cater to the social outcasts. This is the reason that today, when the vast number of government bodies refuse to recognize gay relationships, that most of the largest corporations in America do recognize them, and there is widespread acceptance in the private sector. Bigotry doesn't flourish well in the private sector or in depoliticized markets. It takes the raw, rabid hand of government force to make sure bigotry gets it way.

It is one thing to wish to ‘decontaminate’ and reach out to the ‘middle ground’. But it is quite another to do it at the expense of one’s core vote. The Conservative Party leadership might just consider that these vile turnips, dinosaurs and backwoodsmen are not all out-of-touch, anachronistic eccentrics, but often intelligent and discerning individuals possessing of more conservative philosophy in their little fingers than some of the Party’s key strategists appear to manifest in their entire beings.

None of this will ever end until there is true accountability in public life. The problem is that the ‘ruling’ class can make decisions without bearing the consequence of the decisions that they make. This leads to corruption and self interest. It also leads to acting upon ideological lines with a complete damn as to the consequences. This is pervasive and has pervaded public life for far too long.

In 1757, Edmund Burke wrote: “No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Fear as a decisive factor in political and national life is nothing new in history.

The supporters of the PATRIOT Act have made fear their trademark. They constantly use the fear factor, describing threats that are amorphous, shadowy, unclear, yet perceived as very real, the threat of terrorism. Yes, the threats are real and they must be guarded against — but not by surrendering our freedoms.

But as you can see, the evidence which the politicians use to create policy is itself being compromised by their already having decided what they would like the policy to be before the evidence is collated. We are thus, despite the pretentions of the EU to being just that, a technocracy, being ruled not by such but by the presumptions and pretentions of a pair of French polticians. Worse, French politicians ignorant of the basics of economics which they presume to rule upon.

The dangers that admittedly loom in Egypt stem from the moderate nature of the Egyptian people’s aims. They seek merely to change the structure and personnel of the government. The essence of the State – the apparatus of organized violence – would remain intact. As long as the State exists, there is a danger it will be seized by a military strongman, by theocrats, or by some other brand of oppressor.

In other words, the only true revolution is one aimed at abolishing the State – an anarchist revolution. (Peaceful, of course.) That’s the best hope for avoiding a revolution gone wrong.

Jaroslav is walking a tightrope, keeping the lines of communication with western countries open through interviews and negotiations, while bearing the awful responsibility for the lives of his friends and countrymen.

I conducted three interviews on wide-ranging topics with Jaroslav, over the course of three days. I am currently transcribing and editing the audio and video.

On my last night in the country I attended a small party in his apartment where I met a couple I knew from our Liberty English Camps, and a few new friends. I also met Jaroslav’s fiancée, a beautiful young lady and fellow-economist, who stuck with him through the stress of the presidential campaign and the aftermath.

Now democracy is in real danger in Albania, at a time when we were inspiring to join EU, after we got the liberalization of visas for a free movement.

The people's protests will go on in the coming days, but for the moment there is no sign of resignation on the part of the government and its leader Berisha, the same who caused the tragic war of 1997, where 3000 people were dead and the country was destroyed.

The entire sad episode of the "Ground Zero Mosque" gave warning that democracy is no bulwark for liberty; it never has been and cannot be. I look at America today and see the wisdom in Bertrand de Jouvenel’s assertion that democracy is "the time of tyranny’s incubation." (de Jouvenel, 1978, 15) Americans have forgotten to remember that Hitler – who was elected – is not only a symbol of the vile Holocaust but of sweet democracy, too.

We can no longer pretend that there is any meaningful distinction between the way our government operates and the way those in China, Myanmar or Saudi Arabia do. When threatened, they throw off any pretense of respect for democracy, due process or any part of the legal system that does not serve their immediate ends. If this is indeed what the Wikileaks team intended to reveal, then it should be considered the site's most important leak to date.

This whole episode might just force Americans to confront the distinction between what is legal and what is right.

It may also force us to confront the hypocrisy at the root of our culture that imposes an entirely different moral code on those in authority than is imposed upon the rest of us. We can no longer ignore the gaping chasm that exists between what governments are allowed to do and what ordinary people are allowed to do. For if we are to condemn Wikileaks for potentially, theoretically, endangering the lives of innocent (or even not-so-innocent) people at some unspecified time in the future, then how can we ignore the fact that the government making this claim has itself murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the pursuit of its ends?

Indeed, government officials have revealed themselves to be as averse to the rule of law as they are to freedom of speech. They believe themselves to be free to persecute those who challenge them, unrestrained by the law and without any need for legal justification. And more often than not, they are right.

This resurrection of the ancient attitudes of envy and resentment of people who do well in life is so unbecoming to anyone involved in American culture and politics that I am not at all ashamed to say that I do in fact hate these people–or at least this aspect of them–with a purple passion. When they offer their nasty soundbites on TV news and talk shows, I am just about ready to rush in and blast them with some well chosen sound bites of my own, like, “You commies, go to North Korea where your philosophy will be right at home.” Yes, I have in mind Pelosi and Reed and Sanders and the lot–plus all the Americans who vote for them.

Or it might be that I am still in shock that so many people voted for the Labour Party at the General Election in May. More than seven months have passed since then and all the while a thought has been gnawing at what is left of my brain. Could there be a third or so of the population of this country that was both pleased with what the Labour government had done and wanted more of the same? That a fifth of school leavers were either functionally illiterate or functionally innumerate, or both, was not of sufficient concern to them that they would vote against a governing party that had interfered in schools like no government before. That there was still structural unemployment in some areas of the country was not of sufficient concern for them to vote against a governing party that claimed to be concerned for the poor above all others. That the economy was on its knees, as at the end of every period of Labour government, was not of sufficient concern for them to vote against a governing party that directed and regulated all aspects of economic activity in more detail than even Stalin managed in the USSR. Could they really think the state of the country on the 6th of May was despite Labour having been in government for thirteen years and not because of it? Could they really believe the problem was too little State interference rather than too much? Just that thought is enough to drive anyone to distraction and to the conclusion that there is no point being sensible when so many are so utterly devoid of critical faculties.

For those who have recently inquired: I reject all the political parties. Not a one is about liberty. They’re just about political games, internal and external.

From my own experience over several years, I have come to now reject the electoral process and political parties from my life, as I do not view them as an effective means to advance liberty. They are not worth wasting my time or money being directly involved with; there are far more effective activities (as well as organizations) to advance liberty.

Can governments become too large? Just ask one of the hundred million victims of states where state-power crushed individual rights to speak. Except you won’t get many answers because those victims not only lost their right to speak, they lost their right to breathe. (Think Soviet Russia, Communist China, Communist Cambodia, Nazi Germany,…)

Nothing made by man has killed more people than overbearing government. Yet now, anyone who even questions the creeping growth of government power is dismissed as an “extremist”. There is no balance allowed in this debate.

What is particularly bizarre is that the woman can still only take on a Christian roommate, she just can't advertise for one. As was reported: "Haynes (one of the bureaucrats) says Rowe can live with whomever she wants, but law '804-C' is about what you publish. The law says you can't print publish, or advertise based on race. limitation, sex, or religion." So, an atheist such as myself can't say, "No religious need apply." But I can still only share a house with atheists if I prefer, I just can't tell the truth in my ad.

STUTTGART, Germany, Oct. 24, 2010 – Every evening at eight o’clock for the last three months thousands of indignant citizen in this industrial hub, home of Mercedes, Bosch and Porsche, shout, whistle, blow their car horns or beat pans and pots in protest against the cartel of politicians and financiers who have made a mockery of democracy.

And on every Monday evening at six o’clock for months tens of thousands of these protesters have gathered in the central city park, the Schlossgarten, to demonstrate against the demolition of the city’s landmark Central railway station (Hauptbahnhof) and the felling of 283 park trees to make space for a lucrative new development project known as Stuttgart21 or S21 - the proposed date of completion in 2021).

This inability to appeal to the middle classes and wide demographic swathes of the electorate is reflected by the fact that only 22 per cent of gainfully employed voters pulled the lever for the Social Democrats in this year’s elections. The party is instead increasingly perceived to be close to – and are indeed mainly attracting – the jobless: the unemployed, people on long-term sick leave or others who depend on the state. This is not a position from which we can help them.

The bottom line is that the red-green alliance served to do little more than drive wedges deep into the heart of the Social Democratic voter base. The results were unsurprisingly disastrous.

People hated Bush and voted Obama because they were sick of Republicans. Obama and the Democrats stupidly assumed that was support for them and a mandate to screw up health care with government mandates and controls. I have been arguing that voters would flock to the Republicans because they aren't Democrats, not because they support the theocratic conservatism of the Religious Right.

This is the Laughing Man speaking. I did not choose this moniker, but given the direction of human events, I find it wholly appropriate. Our society is an absurd monument to the irrational, and those of us sane enough to see it are laughing like madmen. I do not laugh because nothing remains great; I laugh because something greater is on the horizon. I laugh at the destruction of the unjust, and we are on the brink of a powerful Reawakening.

The modern pantheon of enemies has now been identified, along with their demiurges, by even the most common of men. The enemies are the banking consortium; the global Elite born and bred from mega-wealth; the academics and economists who disconnect ideas from reality; and the scientific and military minds who are so compartmentalized by design that they rarely know what sort of dictatorship to which they are making their contributions. These are the groups that every man, woman, and child recognizes instinctively, because they are the same personalities encountered in our childhood. Until this point, these dictators have had the smugness to assume that the ones they view as the weak would cower forever.

The larger problem occurs once they take office. Here is where the serious problems begin. They are leaned on by their new colleagues, the party elites, related financial interests, the press, and the entire system of which they are now part. Are they going to make themselves enemies of that system, or are they going to work within the system in order to achieve reform, and not just for one term but more terms down the line? Doing a good job means being part of the structure; doing a bad job means being an enemy of the very system that they now serve.

• The latest call for proposals (2009/C 125/09) offers funding this year in support of “political foundations at European level”.
• There is a total of €7,140,000 (£6.4 million) allocated to support “political foundations at European level” in the next financial year (2010).
• Over two years, the policy and research teams of openly pro-EU political groups have received £7,544,000, while openly EU-critical political groups have received £665,000.

Matthew Sinclair, Director of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said:

"Trade unions are lining up to fight vital cuts in public spending and threatening strikes that could cause massive disruption for ordinary families. By financing their other work, like representing and recruiting members, taxpayers' money frees up union funds for political contributions and expensive campaigns. If big, rich, public sector unions are going to take an active political role, there is no way they should be getting taxpayers' money."

The two extremes in modern politics are busy-body Democrats and busy-body Republicans. The Democrats are dominated by the Nanny Statists and the Republicans dominated by nasty Theocrats. Given those choices I too would like the Democrats more. The Democrats think I'm stupid and need them to care for me. That is pretty disgusting. But what really scares me is that Republicans think I'm sinful and need to be punished. While trying to stamp out stupidity is, well, stupid, trying to force people to be virtuous is downright dangerous.

Matthew Elliott, the co-founder and Chief Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), has accepted an invitation to lead the ‘No’ campaign in next year’s referendum on the introduction of the ‘Alternative Vote’ system for UK general elections. Matthew will continue to provide strategic advice to the TPA, but he will step down as an official spokesperson in the run up to the referendum.

Like everyone else, the political class has to eat.

Unlike everyone else, the political class proposes to eat us.

Now that the pesky mosquitoes have mutated into gnawing rats and threaten to grow into rabid wolves, more and more Americans are finally starting to take notice.

It’s class war, to the death, like it or not — a war for survival, the political class or us. Personally, I’m for us.

The business tycoon has lots of spare time to socialize in powerful circles, because this is the business of the tycoon–who already has money and is struggling not to make himself rich, but to stay rich. Such a person will naturally support big government, because big government is a wellspring of resources–a teat, in other words, from which the tycoon potentially derives nourishment.

Government is also a potential means to eliminate competition. If a corporation invents a better mousetrap that is revolutionary and spends millions developing it, what better way to prosper than to hire a politician to ban the old-fashioned kind with the snappy spring that people baited with cheese?

We want to link our recent campaign (in which Parliament Square was successfully occupied for three months by our Democracy Village) with other libertarian campaigns for human rights, constitution and democracy. We want to consider together how best these campaigns can work together, and how if at all they can relate to the forthcoming government cuts to public services.

We should therefore like to invite you and members of any relevant groups you belong to come and speak with us about your work, and to find out more about the rally we are planning. in the hope that you and/or your group would like to help promote it and participate on the day.

The whole "Ground Zero Mosque" meme is fraudulent in the classic sense: It's an attempt at theft by deception. By convincing people that a cultural center is a mosque, and that "Ground Zero" is located two blocks north of where it's actually located, they hope to build popular support for their call on government to steal some things -- a piece of land, a building, and the religious freedom of the land/building's owners -- for them.

And fraud, a/k/a theft by deception, isn't libertarian either.

The political classes and especially the leftist political classes hate freedom and capitalism because it empowers and it frees the masses, a confident and independent happy population has no need of a big authoritarian bullying interfering government which thrives on poor frightened jealous subjects.

The problems with this passage from Lilla's article are legion. Let's begin with the fact that nothing he describes here can properly be understood as "the libertarian spirit … spread[ing] to other areas of our lives." Rather it is a case of the spread from the culture generally of a generalized distrust of elites and other authorities — a spread of what I call decadent individualism into the political sphere, where it expresses itself as libertarianism. This is what happened in the '60s, when hippie individualism was born and the libertarian movement, born 20 years before, received a massive injection of growth hormone.

It seems to me that Lilla is right when he claims that those promoting libertarian ideas today are bent on neutralizing, not using, political power and on empowering those who say they want to be left alone. It seems to me that Lilla is absolutely and incontrovertibly right when he claims that millions of Americans are fed up with being told

what counts as news or what they should think about global warming … what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink … the list is long.

A few weeks later, we got a second long form with a notice saying we were sent that one because we never returned the first one. So being a good American, I filled it out. "2" people living here. But since I am such an extremist, I decided not to put the date on that one. I can only be pushed so far you know.

For years, both conservatives and liberals have ignored libertarians, hoping that Americans would never discover libertarianism. That plan obviously did not succeed. People are gravitating toward libertarianism in droves. Now, conservatives have going on the attack, hoping that they can pressure libertarians into becoming like them — people who abandoned their principles to become statists with free-market rhetoric. Liberals, meanwhile, are going on the attack with their bankrupt statist economic philosophy, hoping to pressure libertarians into abandoning their sound understanding of free-market economic principles and embracing statism in the name of “reforming” and “saving” free enterprise.

So, three steps to new politics. First, sweeping legislation to restore the hardwon liberties that have been taken one by one from the British people. This government will end the culture of spying on its citizens. It is outrageous that decent, lawabiding people are regularly treated as if they have got something to hide. It has to stop. So, there will be no ID card scheme, no national identity register, a halt to secondgeneration biometric passports. We will not hold your internet and email records when there is no reason to do so. CCTV will be properly regulated, as will the DNA storage database with restrictions on the storage of innocent people’s DNA, and Britain must not be a country where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question.

Speed Limits. In a number of states in America, it is actually illegal to set speed limits below the 85th percentile. This is the internationally recognised and scientifically backed method of setting the optimum safe speed limits. In the UK, too many speed limits have been set well below the 85th percentile for political and ideological reasons as part of Labour’s policy to force modal shift. Speed limits should be set to keep traffic moving, minimise journey times and keep the roads safe. They should not be used as a tool to discourage driving. A law mandating that speed limits on main roads must respect the 85th percentile principle would be a step towards ending the criminalising of safe drivers, save significant costs in enforcement and administration, and return some credibility to road safety.

Now, economics was always the Conservative strong point, and it may be thought that the Liberal Democrats have nothing of their own to offer. However, we in the Libertarian Alliance have never liked the Conservative approach to economic reform. Their tax cuts favoured the rich. Their deregulations turned those at the bottom into casualised serfs. Their privatisations turned state monopolies into income streams for their friends in big business. They were better in all these respects than Labour. But we are interested to see what the Liberal Democrats will now be able to contribute with their belief in raising tax thresholds for the poor at the expense of the rich, and their belief in mutual institutions to provide public services in place both of the State and of big business.

I rather like it because it allows us to see our politicians as they really are. All their pompous guff about "the national interest" evaporates as we see them selling their souls for power. Policies that were an essential part of their electoral programme suddenly become unimportant and are ditched as they put their self-interest above their supposed principles. They have no choice if they want power, but they could be honest and admit that's what they are doing.

The best news is that Gordon Brown has steeped down at the Labour Party leader. Like Dubya, he and Blair were blots on the human race and I'm pleased to see them all gone. They aren't in prison, where they belong, but its an improvement.

This moment of uncertainty in our democracy has delivered us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change a broken system. Fair votes must sit at the heart of our political process.

And this is precisely the problem with democracy. On the surface, it seems like a marketplace of consumers buying products, albeit political ones. The reality is that nothing checks out. We don't get what we buy. What don't know what we are buying. We don't know what the thing we are buying is supposed to do. What are we really buying? We are expending no real resources on the purchase other than our time.

Oscar Wilde said that socialism annoyed him because it took too many evenings. Similarly, democracy takes too many lunch hours.

You see, while I’m as blunt as can be about what I believe, and what I advocate, statists almost never openly admit what they want. For example, everything the “government” spends, it first takes from people (via “taxes”). But those who support government welfare–which is a lot of people– hardly ever come out and say “I think money should be forcibly taken from you to give to the poor.” Even when I question them at length, they go to great lengths to not admit, even to themselves, that what they advocate is the initiation of violence (against you, me, and everyone else).

Above all, a majority Labour Government would have fixed the system to keep itself in power forever. It would have used its own creatures in the Police and the bureaucracy to harass and perhaps even to murder its opponents. A Con-Lib pact will do none of these things. It will allow a free and fair election at the end of its term, in which some distinctively libertarian or traditionalist force may have a better chance of making its voice heard.

If anyone is still with me it’s time to conclude – the time has come for a major debate on constitutional reform, not about whether we need it, but what we move to. However, I wouldn’t be surprised that at the end of the debate the British people decide to stick with what we have on the devil you know principle.

However it ends, the next six months or so are going to be fascinating for political nerds.

XYZ – The central fact of this nation is that its political and media classes are rotten to the core. These classes are made up of ageing radicals who’ve spent the past 30 years marching through the institutions, and of younger apparatchiks who don’t fully believe, but who accept the framework within which they operate. And it’s worse than this. A fish rots from the head down, and the rot in this nation has spread deep into the body. Key parts of the electorate may not consciously have embraced the statist and green and politically correct ideologies of the Establishment. But they have been desensitised to them. They regard any alternative as eccentric or even alarming.

6) Despite denying plans for a central database of communications data, the Home Office set up a new directorate just this January to push forward the £2 billion Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). The intent is store details of everyone you call, text or e-mail and which websites you visit – providing a record of clues to your religious and political beliefs, your sexual interests and personal relationships, your financial and medical worries – ‘just in case’ they become of interest to the authorities. Phone tapping and opening mail is so sensitive that it is a power exercised only on the approval of the Home Secretary, and cannot even be mentioned in court. But collecting communications data, and building techniques for them to be arbitrarily investigated, makes much more available to be known about every one of us without any form of warrant or independent oversight.