by Star Parker

The latest installment of “change we can believe in” is sweeping reform of the financial services industry.

Central to proposed Democrat reforms is the establishment of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. This agency would have broad authority to oversee and regulate financial service products like mortgages and credit cards and will be responsible to protect consumers from “unfair” and “abusive” products.

Unfortunately, when bureaucrats get authority to determine what is fair, the very people who they supposedly are charged to protect – us – are the ones who get hurt.

The most important product in our country is freedom and, unfortunately, it’s this product that President Barack Obama and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank find most defective. They really think that politicians and bureaucrats can take best care of the people.

Consider one of the most besieged financial services businesses in the country: payday advance loans.

The industry got started in the 1990s and now delivers about $40 billion in short-term, low-denomination loans. You can’t help but conclude this is a service many consumers want.

Yet the industry is under constant attack by groups who appoint themselves to be the champions for consumer protection.

Regarding payday advance loans, their claim is that fees are too high. The business is regulated at the state level. State-by-state initiatives have been advanced to put ceilings on rates loan providers can charge.

Voters in Ohio last year approved capping annual rates on payday loans at 28 percent.

The result? According to one industry spokesman, “700 of the 1,600 payday loan offices in the state have closed.”

No one has been protected. They’ve only limited options available to free men and women.

There are many firms providing payday advance loans – I count 55 on the membership list of their trade association – so clearly competition is fierce to price these loans competitively.

It’s not an accident that the same organizations that attack the payday advance business are lobbying for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Nor is it an accident that one of these organizations has been scandal-drenched ACORN.

Economist Milton Friedman once observed, “Many people want government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”

by Brian W. Walsh

Needed: A ‘clean line’ to determine lawfulness

“You don’t need to know. You can’t know.” That’s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris’ longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with – get this - the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That’s right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary – based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.

Mrs. Norris testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime this summer. The hearing’s topic: the rapid and dangerous expansion of federal criminal law, an expansion that is often unprincipled and highly partisan.

Chairman Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, and ranking member Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, conducted a truly bipartisan hearing (a D.C. rarity this year).

These two leaders have begun giving voice to the increasing number of experts who worry about “overcriminalization.” Astronomical numbers of federal criminal laws lack specifics, can apply to almost anyone and fail to protect innocents by requiring substantial proof that an accused person acted with actual criminal intent.

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal – but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: “Life sometimes presents us with lemons.” Their job was, yes, to “turn lemons into lemonade.”

The judge apparently failed to appreciate how difficult it is to run a successful lemonade stand when you’re an elderly diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinson’s disease serving time in a federal penitentiary. If only Mr. Norris had been a Libyan terrorist, maybe some European official at least would have weighed in on his behalf to secure a health-based mercy release.

Krister Evertson, another victim of overcriminalization, told Congress, “What I have experienced in these past years is something that should scare you and all Americans.” He’s right. Evertson, a small-time entrepreneur and inventor, faced two separate federal prosecutions stemming from his work trying to develop clean-energy fuel cells.

The feds prosecuted Mr. Evertson the first time for failing to put a federally mandated sticker on an otherwise lawful UPS package in which he shipped some of his supplies. A jury acquitted him, so the feds brought new charges. This time they claimed he technically had “abandoned” his fuel-cell materials – something he had no intention of doing – while defending himself against the first charges. Mr. Evertson, too, spent almost two years in federal prison.

As George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg testified at the House hearing, cases like these “illustrate about as well as you can illustrate the overreach of federal criminal law.” The Cato Institute’s Timothy Lynch, an expert on overcriminalization, called for “a clean line between lawful conduct and unlawful conduct.” A person should not be deemed a criminal unless that person “crossed over that line knowing what he or she was doing.” Seems like common sense, but apparently it isn’t to some federal officials.

Former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh’s testimony captured the essence of the problems that worry so many criminal-law experts. “Those of us concerned about this subject,” he testified, “share a common goal – to have criminal statutes that punish actual criminal acts and [that] do not seek to criminalize conduct that is better dealt with by the seeking of regulatory and civil remedies.” Only when the conduct is sufficiently wrongful and severe, Mr. Thornburgh said, does it warrant the “stigma, public condemnation and potential deprivation of liberty that go along with [the criminal] sanction.”

The Norrises’ nightmare began with the search in October 2003. It didn’t end until Mr. Norris was released from federal supervision in December 2008. His wife testified, however, that even after he came home, the man she had married was still gone. He was by then 71 years old. Unsurprisingly, serving two years as a federal convict – in addition to the years it took to defend unsuccessfully against the charges – had taken a severe toll on him mentally, emotionally and physically.

These are repressive consequences for an elderly man who made mistakes in a small business. The feds should be ashamed, and Mr. Evertson is right that everyone else should be scared. Far too many federal laws are far too broad.

Mr. Scott and Mr. Gohmert have set the stage for more hearings on why this places far too many Americans at risk of unjust punishment. Members of both parties in Congress should follow their lead.

by Michael Gaddy

“Government is an agency of force which can and must be employed against every deviationist. And this is only to say again that the government must oppose the individual. Therefore the “good” man in government is like a priest with a machine gun. The mechanism does the harm. The man who operates it merely pulls the trigger.” ~Robert LeFevre, The Nature of Man

Every two years in this country there exists a mania we call elections where those involved in the electoral process work endless hours and spends billions of dollars in an effort to put “good” men/women into elected offices. This, each person believes, will improve/change the government apparatus and everyone will be better served. This is analogous to believing that if one could place the right person on my Harley it would perform the tasks of a dump truck. The machine (government) can only accomplish that which it was designed to do: all governments, in their evolutionary process, eventually turn on their progenitors; the machine eventually rules the individual, no matter what “safeguards” have been put in place.

Nowhere is that more evident than where we are today in this country. No matter who is elected to operate the machine, the machine continues in its quest to destroy all it considers adversarial to the goal of total control and domination.

The writings of LeFevre tell us that man has long been fascinated by the phenomenon of the government apparatus and seeks to rationalize the continued corruption with one of two explanations. Either the people elected to run the machine were/are evil, or if the proper “safeguards” had been installed, “they would have escaped the evil their government was busily engaged in inflicting upon them.” I believe this perfectly describes our present dilemma, for those who voted for Obama wonder at how the campaign promises he made have been forgotten or the changes made were not what they expected. The opposition believes Obama to be an evil person. No matter how evil a person might be, as an individual they are unable to visit such tremendous evil on the world, without the power government provides. In turn, electing “good” people to run a gangster device will never deliver the hoped for product. LeFevre asks the question: “…then how does it happen that so many administrations of good men have been able to do so many evil and harmful things to their subjects?” As a country, we widely differ on exactly what administration has been good or bad. There are millions who believed George W. Bush to have been a “good” president, while millions believe Obama to be accomplishing “good” things, yet both have visited tremendous evil on the world, including their own supporters.

Individuals in this world have less freedom, are more and more controlled and coerced by government and continue to be robbed of the fruits of their labor, yet all this has occurred under the administrations of the “best” our country has to offer each election cycle, from both sides of the political spectrum. Isabel Patterson in her book, The God of the Machine, provides what she believes to be the answer. “…What good does it do to have a saint of every conceivable virtue operating a guillotine? Personally, the man may be above reproach. He may have the highest of morals and ethics. He may be imbued with a passion for doing good. But the mechanism he is hired to operate cuts off heads. He may dislike to cut off heads. He may weep with true sorrow whenever a head falls into the basket. But he was hired to pull the rope that lets the knife drop. And when it comes down, off comes the head. That is the way the tool works.”

This methodology is, in part, accomplished with government’s admonishment there is a higher purpose in life than being an individual. Ironically, this rebuke always comes around to serving the machine. John F. Kennedy said to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” It was not the country we were being asked to put foremost in our lives, but the machine. The government and its willing shills in the media and academia have been able to cloud the difference between the country and the government so that in the minds of many, they are inseparable. That is why, in today’s world, all who oppose the machine have been deemed “domestic terrorists.” The spirit of individuality, or just wanting to be left alone, cannot be allowed to flourish, but must always be seen as the enemy and therefore destroyed.

People create government to control that which they fear. The machine enjoys its continued growth and strength to the spirit of fear among the people. Different people fear different things; in a great number of instances that fear is of people who think or act differently or ideas with which they disagree. The machine therefore evolves into a mechanism that seeks control over everyone and everything. Limited government is an illusion. Safeguards put in place to limit the scope and range of government are gradually eliminated as more fearful entities appear, or are created, requiring continued growth of the machine. Franklin was correct; trading freedom for security leaves the people with neither. The constant meddling in the affairs of other countries produces enemies of the machine and are converted into objects of fear for the people. Here we have the vicious cycle; more enemies require a larger and more powerful machine, which produces more and more enemies to fear.

Individualism and the wish to just be left alone by those who do not wish to control others is the mortal enemy of the machine. If the individual can exist without this desire to control others or seek power over them, the need for the machine no longer exists. The government machine’s survival depends on convincing the people that the anointed among them, selected during the electoral process, can indeed take the government back to a less intrusive and more friendly status. Throughout our history, this has never happened.

People decide to become involved in government for basically two reasons. They either want the power and control over others and the wealth that brings, or they believe by becoming involved in government they can limit the power of the machine. These folks, no matter how well intentioned, become the “priest with a machine gun.” The machine continues to control and destroy the lives of others, while the “good” person in government pulls the trigger.

The machine will continue to create items of fear for the people. The fear of an economy going bad brings on illegal bailouts and controls of the economy that have the opposite effect intended and provide untold riches to supporters of the machine. This creates more fear among the people and enlarges the machine. The fear of being unable to pay for needed medical care creates fear that could give the government vast control over the people and their remaining money. The fear of the dreaded Communist, Muslim or person of different skin pigmentation, creates fear in the people and grows the machine’s arm of oppression: the military, law enforcement and the new scourge of private contractors. The fear of a pandemic in the form of some new exotic disease (created in a laboratory) brings the ability to control the masses with unneeded and potentially harmful forced vaccinations. When the machine seeks unparalleled growth, it creates false flag events to terrorize the population, bringing on new and more terrible laws and regulations, again to eliminate its greatest threat, the individual.

The machine has legions of faithful followers who willingly steal, intimidate and even kill for their paychecks, monies stolen by the machine from the production of their victims through intimidation and threat. These people are nothing but whores who care not for any oath they might have taken, but instead enjoy their unlimited, unrestrained power over their fellow citizens. These people will come after your guns, violate your rights, force you to be inoculated with harmful vaccines, steal your money and private property and place you in a detention facility if you dare resist, and be proud of the accomplishment. These people are not elected, but will always remain the real force of the government machine. Those elected to public office become the easily replaceable figurehead. It is accomplished every election cycle.

History teaches the machine always collapses under its own weight and corruption. Its loyal supporters are rewarded for their service with executions. The question is: how many freedom loving, liberty-seeking individuals must give up their freedom and/or their lives before this happens?

by David Mason

We are living in a plutocratic oligarchic society.  There are a small group of wealthy eugenicists who own our political parties, our media, our industry, our military, our economy and our education system.

	The political parties do not represent us, but instead represent an ideology put forward by their funders and their funder’s eugenicist researchers, such as Obama’s Science Czar John P. Holdren.

They put fluoride in our drinking water and tell us brush with fluoride toothpaste twice a day to lower our I.Q.’s and our fertility.  They vaccinate us with syringes full of mercury, squalene and polysorbate to cause brain inflammation and auto-immune diseases which destroy our natural immune system, thereby making us more susceptible to chronic disease.  They spray bromide ions and aluminium dioxide into the atmosphere to lower our I.Q.’s, sterilise us, and give us cancer.  They feed us genetically modified food, interfering with our D.N.A. and reducing the gene pool of the plants and animals we humans need to survive.  They sweeten our drinks with aspartame, an industrial waste product, which lowers I.Q. and interferes with brain function.  They flood our streets with harmful drugs which reduce brain function and induce dependency, amongst a myriad of other health issues.  At the same time, they have banned the cure for cancer; vitamin B-17 which can be found in the pips of apples.  An apple a day keeps cancer away.

They indoctrinate our children between 6 and 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year, for up to 15 years.  They own and run all major television, radio and internet communication networks.  They tell us what to think about and how to think about it.  They tell us the world is over populated, that earth cannot sustain 6.5 billion people.  In fact, there is enough room on the land of this planet for every man, woman and child to have 175m by 175m of land each.  We accept the lie of overpopulation because of the rat-maze, prison-like cities which they have created and we find ourselves in.  They tell us global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, when in reality carbon dioxide levels increase after a period of warming has begun, due to the abundance of life which flourishes in warm environments.  Carbon dioxide is what humans breathe out and plants breathe in.  Most life forms on this planet are carbon based and produce or require carbon dioxide in their respiration.  They use the excuse of global warming to increase our taxes and demonise our fellow human beings.  In fact, the entire solar system is going through a period of warming.  Your carbon footprint is not responsible for the melting of the ice-caps of Mars and the frozen seas of Europa.  Global warming is an excuse to reduce population and raise taxes.  They own, fund and operate abortion clinics.

They are the largest contributors to all major political parties, set their policies and thereby control our government.  They pass thousands of laws each year without congressional or parliamentary debate.  They frame political discussion in a false left-right paradigm, thereby dividing the people so as to never allow the people to resist them.  The political parties do not represent us, but instead represent an ideology put forward by their funders and their funder’s eugenicist researchers, such as Obama’s Science Czar John P. Holdren.  They have set up supra-national governmental institutions, such as the United Nations and European Union, to erode our national sovereignty and distance the individual from the political decision making process.

They conduct foreign wars of aggression.  These wars are murder in the name of corporate greed.  They control the oil fields of Iraq and the poppy fields of Afghanistan.  They conduct staged terror attacks and invent phantom enemies to frighten the public into accepting appalling losses of liberty in the name of national security.  Al-Qaeda, in Arabic ‘The Database’, was a list of C.I.A.-Mujahedeen agents who thwarted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980’s.  Osama bin Laden was on the C.I.A. payroll until, at least, 1999.  They use the phantoms to force us to accept that our every action is tracked, traced and scanned, that privacy no longer exists, that you have to present your papers on a daily basis, even to purchase cigarettes and alcohol.  All in the name of national security, and the health of our children.

Perhaps most pervasive of all, and the reason for their continued wealth, is their control of the money supply by use of public-private banking partnerships such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve.  These institutions are run purely for the benefit of their investors.  They print at least 10 times more money than they have in their reserves.  They lend this money, which is printed out of thin air, to governments and other banks, at interest, on the security of that government’s people and the people’s taxes.  This is why national debt exists; to fund the wealthy elite.  They have created a debt black-hole from which we cannot escape.  This system has led to, and will further lead to the debasement, robbery and rape of our domestic populations.  On a supra-national level, private off-shore banks, such as the I.M.F. and World Bank, impose their will upon poor countries which are in need of financial investment.  These off-shore banks openly control the governments of the countries which are indebted to them.

It is this controlled system of wealth which is in control of our lives.  For this is the truth of our existence; we are slaves.  We are money-slaves, debt-slaves and mind-slaves.  We cannot escape this system until we recognise it for what it is; a plutocratic oligarchic slave system.  And we cannot escape this system until we do something about it.

This is my hope; that each recognise his bonds and rends them asunder, so that each may live their lives with the freedom of the earth, and with love, hope and charity in their hearts.

Freedom is Strength, Ignorance is Slavery, War is Unneccessary.

by Larken Rose

Whenever I speak of forcible resistance against “government,” some people respond with things like, “How can you be for violence?” And almost everyone who says that is both delusional and hypocritical.

I admit, compared to almost everyone else, my political views are very extreme. For example, I don’t advocate that anyone ever be forced to fund something that they don’t want to fund. I don’t support robbery, even when the stolen loot is to be used for something supposedly noble or beneficial. No Democrat or Republican can honestly say that. Though they differ on how the politicians should spend the loot, every single one of them advocates that I be robbed, under threat of violence, to pay for things that I don’t want. And, of course, they also advocate that you be robbed to pay for things that you don’t want.

I don’t. Ain’t I extreme?

The trouble is, even though every Republican and Democrat advocates theinitiation of violence against millions of people who haven’t harmed anyone, the way people see reality is so warped by the “authority” myth that they can’t see that what they advocate is coercion. They think that calling it “law” or “taxation” somehow makes it legitimate and disqualifies it as violence. And yet they know that anyone who doesn’t pay the federal Mafia’s extortion fees will be punished, with either extra robbery or imprisonment (or death if they continue to resist). It’s not that they are unaware of the violence behind all “laws”; it’s that they think it’s automatically righteous when “government” does it, and so they don’t call it violence.

The most bizarre example is the people who say, “I abhor violence, so I’m for gun control.” Oh, really? And how, exactly, will this “gun control” be imposed? By friendly suggestion? By rational argument? By a group hug? Or by men with guns forcibly disarming the general public? “Gun control” is violence. Even worse, it is the initiation of violence against people whose only sin is having theability to defend themselves. And using violence against someone merely because that person possessed the means to protect himself is violent, evil, hypocritical and insane.

And such lunacy is the direct result of the belief in “authority.” If, for example, a burglar broke into someone’s house, and the homeowner pulled out a knife and threatened to attack the crook if he didn’t leave, how would most people judge that? Most would obviously see the invader as the bad guy, and the guy trying to chase him away as the good guy. But if the burglar happens to be called a “tax collector,” and tries to forcibly rob someone, and his intended victim resists, nearly everyone would loudly condemn the victim of the extortion as being a nasty, “violent” criminal.

That is why, when I say that using force to defend against those who initiate violence–even when that violence is called “law” or “taxes,” and even when the attackers call themselves “government” or “law-enforcement”–most people view me as the violent one. This is because almost everyone truly believes that when you make an actual crime (trespassing, robbery, extortion, assault, kidnapping, murder, etc.) “legal,” it ceases to be a crime. They further believe that resisting a crime, when the crime has been “legalized,” is a horrible thing to do.

Almost everyone in this country advocates constant, widespread violence, but they are too deluded to know it. Often the violence is fairly hidden, because the mere threat of authoritarian retaliation (for not paying “taxes,” for building something without a “permit,” for possessing an “illegal” weapon or an “illegal” substance, and so on) is often enough to coerce compliance. In those cases, statists can pretend that people obey “voluntarily,” though that makes about as much sense as saying that someone “voluntarily” gave his car to a carjacker, in order to avoid being shot. But even when the government violence is overt and bloody, as with the “war on drugs,” or foreign wars, or even some traffic stops these days, statists are still unable to see that what they are advocating is BRUTAL, BLOODY VIOLENCE. Worse yet, when I suggest that it would be justified to use whatever force it takes to stop such aggressive force, the statists see me as the “violent” one.

To illustrate this hypocrisy, I like to make the following offer, to anyone and everyone who considers himself peaceful and civilized: “I will never initiate violence against you myself, nor advocate that anyone else do so.” When I ask if someone will do the same for me, he always says “yes.” And almost no one who says that means it, as a simple follow-up question easily illustrates: “So you don’t advocate that I be forced, via ‘taxes,’ to fund anything that I don’t want to fund?” That’s when they start to backpedal, make excuses, start to use vague euphemisms about one’s “fair share,” and so on. “Okay, so you won’tpromise to refrain from advocating the initiation of violence against me. That’s good to know.”

Here is a very simple principle that almost everyone understands: “Don’t ever start a fight, but if someone attacks you, you have the right to defend yourself.” And yet, because of the cult belief in “government,” that simple rule sometimes turns completely upside-down: “It’s okay to start a fight with everyone in the country (via ‘taxes’ and other ‘laws’), and okay to violently crush anyone who tries to defend himself against your attack.” Well, if such lunacy is considered to be an acceptable, civilized, mainstream attitude–which it is in this country, and throughout most of the world–then I’m happy to be “extreme.”