Do people sometimes forget that we are all individuals with common goals, diverse circumstances, and unique perspectives? In many situations this is the case. The more governments, both local and national, expand in size and scope, the more politics become a game of winning and losing rather than representation of the people, providing individual freedom and choice, and encouraging local solutions and creativity. The world faces no shortages of problems, but the solution does not, as often believed, lie in continued centralized power of government, but increased freedom on a local level.

As centralized representatives are empowered with more responsibilities, their ability to directly and effectively represent their constituency decreases. Certainly it is more difficult to directly represent 200 million people than it is to represent 100 people. Such power maintained by a select few opens the door to lobbyists, special interests, and privileged groups who seek to grab a portion of that extraordinary power in order to gain an unnatural advantage over fellow individuals. In 2008 alone, 14,808 lobbyists contributed $3.3 billion to government. In such a scenario, who receives more direct treatment, the 14,808 lobbyists or 14,808 individual citizens? A large government is easily influenced not by individual citizens, but by large and privileged groups with the means to essentially bribe those in control, thus decreasing the power of individuals over our government. Central policies simply can’t represent the unique needs of local communities, towns, and counties.

As governments centralize and expand in power, the power and freedom of individuals decreases. It is not necessary to increase our individual abilities through a complex system managed by far-off politicians. In fact, all that is necessary is a simple concept that is commonly blurred or forgotten: freedom. Freedom is the only “system” that sees all individuals as naturally equal; freedom is based on individual, not central, power, and recognizes that we, the people, can solve our dilemmas free of constraint, force, and coercion. Freedom provides individuals the opportunity to keep the full fruits of their labor and appropriate their money to where they see fit, whether it be to the elderly, those in need of food, or any other service. The element of choice lies with the individual, not with the power of others. Simply put, when focusing on local solutions, individuals maintain far greater freedom and influence of participation, activism, and travel (voting with their feet), than they have in a strongly centralized system.

Individuals carry the greatest initiative, responsibility, and obligation over government in their counties, towns, communities, and neighborhoods. Things would appear much differently today if individual people, rather than federal officials and bureaucrats, were the driving force behind environmental, medical, and other policies. Chances are that many communities would oppose the opening of a nearby coalmine and would work together, as individuals, to find a cleaner, sustainable energy source. People will certainly feel a greater sense of charity and responsibility if they see or know people in their town who need but can’t afford health care. People are simply connected to something that they personally understand, see, and love, and will work together to protect and improve such a place. This is a basic world where solutions are based not on conflict and political gain, but community involvement and cooperation.

A locally managed government created to represent and serve the people fully can only function with an informed and active public. To do my own part in bringing this about, I developed Freedom Chatter in March 2009 with the slogan, “Involve, Interact, Inform.” Freedom Chatter is an ongoing project of mine with the objective to bring together a community of contributors and excited individuals eager to analyze all areas of business, economics, and public policy. Freedom Chatter recognizes the inherent qualities of human nature to be creative, diverse, and develop original ideas; it is unreasonable to expect everyone to subscribe to one viewpoint or ideology, whether it is on a local or national scale. By acknowledging the power and creativity each one of us carries locally as individuals and utilizing our ability to interact and inform, a rebirth in freedom, prosperity, and happiness is well within reach.

Originally written as a college application essay in November 2009.

Words are not sufficient for the immense and unimaginable loss of perhaps 100,000 lives during the recent earthquake in Haiti.  The immediate question is what can be done to help.  I wrote recently in “Guns or Health Care?” that it was Clara Barton and a group of fellow Americans who founded the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and not the federal government.  The Red Cross has already begun operations by contributing $1 million from their International Response Fund and sending stocks of tarps, mosquito nets, and cooking sets to Haiti.  I myself made a donation today to the International Response Fund, which can be done here or from the home page, redcross.org.  There are other charities working there as well, and I encourage anyone to investigate if you choose to donate.

The federal government has also pledged assistance with our military.  While I certainly hope this assistance helps save lives, Americans should not forget the Hurricane Katrina fiasco so quickly.  Our own country was wracked by a serious disaster, though smaller than Haiti’s, and the federal response of FEMA was famously ineffective.  Now, I will not question the government’s benevolent intentions to help, but we must recognize that they are incapable of even balancing their own budget, and was within 72 hours of a technical default last month.  They have failed for 8+ years, spending billions and billions, to locate the leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist group.

As George Washington once said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force.“  The function of the government is to provide the rule of law and protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth, grant special privileges, or interfere with the lives of individuals and their actions.  Government has nothing – it must first tax or plunder resources by force from citizens before redistributing to Haitians or even fellow Americans.
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Ponzi scheme – a fraudulent investment operation that returns assets to the defrauded from assets they previously loaned to the scheme’s operators or assets paid by subsequent newer “investors” rather than from any actual profit earned

While it is (comparatively) well-known that the US dollar, while a currency, is a solely an instrument of credit issued by the Federal Reserve. All holders of dollars – including myself and most readers of this article – are in debt to the Federal Reserve. Now, this debt is really phantom debt, but the key really is printed on each dollar, more properly known as a Federal Reserve Note: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” (1)

The total federal debt issued was $11.933 trillion dollars at the end of fiscal year 2009 in September per the Treasury Department, an increase of $1.9 trillion from 2008. (page 37/123) This debt will continue to increase every year until the monetary system collapses due (just in part) to the compounding “miracle” of interest rates. Federal debt is bought at auction by primary dealers (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, etc.) and “resold” to the FED, which then inflates the money supply by creating new dollars, or “injecting liquidity.” The FED can also “inject liquidity” by purchasing assets, such as toxic mortgage debt or even company stock like AIG or GM. Individual community banks, whether Citibank, Bank of America, or small local banks and credit unions, can also create new dollars with the fractional reserve system, which is can be viewed graphically here. However, a proof I wrote demonstrates that fractional reserve banking broke down years ago, and can be more aptly named as the “no-reserve lending” system.
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Government controls nearly every inch of education in the U.S. with lackluster results at best. Education must be brought back to a local, personal scale based on individual choice and involvement. Parents should get active in the education of their kids, work with teachers, and schools should be bound by individual, not federal, regulation.

FONDA — A Montgomery County couple has been arrested on child endangerment charges for failing to register their children with the school district as they were home-schooled, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said Monday.

Richard Cressy, 47, and Margie Cressy, 41, both of the town of Glen, never registered their four children or their home-schooling curriculum with the local school district, said the Sheriff’s Office.

The Superintendent of the Fonda-Fultonville Central School District, Richard Hoffman, confirmed the four children, ranging in age from 8 to 14, had not been registered with the school district for the last seven years.

“From what I can gather, it sounds like there was education going on, so I don’t know if they really slipped through the cracks,” Hoffman said, “[but] they didn’t fulfill their legal responsibility to file with the school district to be home-schooled.”

Under state law, parents who choose to home school their children must register their curriculum with the local school district superintendent. The Cressys never submitted one in the seven years they lived in the Fonda-Fultonville Central School District, according to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, which began investigating the parents after receiving an anonymous tip.

http://www.cbs6albany.com/news…..ounty.html

“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – C.S. Lewis

“In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” – Thomas Jefferson, from the Virginia Resolution of 1798

Last month both the House and Senate passed two very dissimilar bills with the same purpose – to tax the American people around $900 billion more, and intervene government bureaucrats into the private lives of each man, woman, and child. Congress is currently working out the differences, my prediction is that the bill will be quite the Frankenstein after the pork is added.

As I painstakingly laid out in my health care plank last summer, its unintended consequences will worsen the quality of care and affordability of health care.  I believe the TRUE issue at stake is affordability and cost - if an MRI cost $200 instead of $3,000, it would be a lot less imperative to suggest  drastic changes like socialized medicine.  The TRUE root cause is government-sponsored insurance cartels and quality-depleting, cost-increasing legislation such as the HMO Act of 1973.  After all, President Nixon was told “all the incentives [of HMOs] are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make and all the incentives run the right way.”
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