http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090725/ap_on_re_us/us_camping_for_freedom

By ADAM GELLER, AP National Writer Adam Geller, Ap National Writer – 1 hr 12 mins ago

LANCASTER, N.H. – He fled the “People’s Republic of Massachusetts” to escape tyranny. Now he strides the campground in a plaid kilt and mirror shades, an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle across his torso, an immense Scottish sword sheathed between his shoulders.

Out here, though, the only signs of danger are the ones warning drivers to watch out for moose. Could it be he senses a threat we’re not seeing?

“Not expecting,” says the swordsman, who calls himself Doobie, grinning broadly. “Just ready.”

There’s no escaping the long arm of big government — even here at the far edge of a state whose license plate decrees that without freedom from oppressive authority you might as well choose death. But for Doobie and 500 others, this tent colony on this particular weekend is about as close to Libertarian Nirvana as they’re likely to get.

They’ve come for the Porcupine Freedom Festival, four days of beer, burgers and bonfires. But more importantly, they are here to carve out an enclave of less government and more liberty to do as they wish.

They are here to show a lost nation the way back to its political roots.

It hasn’t been an easy message to sell these past few years. Their group, the Free State Project, has struggled to attract followers. But now, with Americans thinking anew about the reach and role of government, Free Staters see at least the hint of an opening.

So this weekend, they drink to the future. Between swigs of a custom brew called Overregulated Ale, they ridicule the Federal Reserve, applaud the defeat of a bill that would have required the wearing of seat belts, bemoan higher taxes and restrictions on gun rights.

“We said bad things are going to happen and they happen,” Jason Sorens, a political science professor, preaching to the crowd clustered around picnic tables. “We say, we told you so.”
Read More…

Grabbed from Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis blog:

Things are looking pretty bleak. There is bad news in housing, the stock market, commercial real estate, jobs, and wages . Unfortunately, no matter how bad things are, someone always comes along to propose a “solution” that is guaranteed to make the situation much worse. Please consider the following ideas.

Punish savers and make them spend money: Near-zero interest rates and even a tax on bank deposits are necessary to force those with cash to use it productively

Assuming interest rates are reduced to about 1 per cent today, it will make little difference to savers if they fall all the way to zero. To all intents and purposes, income from bank accounts will be reduced to nil.

The next logical step, although it may be politically controversial, would be to do the opposite of what the Tories suggest. Instead of reducing taxes on interest payments, the Government could tax all bank deposits and other risk-free savings. This would create a negative risk-free interest rate, encouraging savers either to invest in property, shares and other productive assets – or simply to save less and consume more. In either case, the result would be more consumption and physical investment, less unemployment and faster recovery from the slump.

The Case for Bigger Government

Thirty years ago, Americans were told that government was part of the problem, not the solution. We bet on the magic of the marketplace, but the magic proved illusory. Every major part of the economy – health care, energy, transportation, food and finance – is deeply troubled. Now we are ready to invite government back in to help solve our problems, if the price is right and the strategies are convincing. By spending more through government and treating government as a partner rather than an enemy of the private sector, we can potentially save vast sums in the long run through a more efficient health-care system, safer climate, more competitive economy and more secure country.

A big difference between the U.S. and the rest of the rich world is that for the past 30 years or so, Americans consistently rejected “government solutions” to the problems of health, poverty, education and the environment.

What Hath Big Government Wrought?

• It was big government that brought us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• It was big government that sponsored the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq.
• It was big government that gave us nightmare problems we face with Medicaid and Medicare.
• It was big government that gave us overlapping hundred billion dollar systems in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
• It is big government that sponsored 10’s of thousands of pork barrel projects and bridges to nowhere.
• It is big government that gave us the Davis Bacon Act and the insanity pf prevailing wages.
• It was big government sponsorship of the rating agencies that created the “AAA” rated securities that went to zero.
• It was big government that took us off the gold standard and illegally confiscated citizen’s money.
• It was big government that allowed fractional reserve lending and theft by inflation this is the root cause of a shrinking middle class today.
• It was big government that created the Fed, and it was the Greenspan Fed that blew serial bubble after bubble culminating in the housing crash we are in today.

Big government either created or made worse every problem we have today. Yet Time Magazine and free lunch proponents like Krugman propose an even bigger government is necessary to fix the enormous problems of an already too big government.

I’d like to add that the idea that “Americans consistently rejected “government solutions” to the problems of health, poverty, education and the environment” is completely fallacious and ridiculous. Medicare, medicaid, the war on poverty, from little or no federal involvement to No Child Left Behind, huge federal college subsidies, the increase of scope and power of the EPA, etc. Just because Americans didn’t jump on board as quickly as other socialist / fascist States doesn’t mean such ideas were rejected.

Be the Change Inc YouTube channel

• McCain says he doesn’t support mandatory service.
• McCain says that if Target would have ran things during Katrina it would have gone better, there wouldn’t have been trucks of ice in Maine. If he really believes private organizations would do a better job than why would he advocate the federal government deal with natural disaster?
• McCain claims the reason the military is having a hard time keeping member and gaining more is because it’s not big enough. What?
• The guy from TIME is saying the US government should have mandatory service. McCain dodged the question asking if the US should have mandatory service for all and allow people to go into none military service.
• McCain says he would sign the Kennedy / Hatch Serve America Bill. Said he “love”s Ted Kennedy.
• We should send people to countries which don’t like us… but not money.
• McCain’s hero Teddy Roosevelt.
• Bring ‘all people are created equal’ to the world. Not necessarily military but in other ways. America is exception because of it.

• Obama gets a standing ovation several times longer than McCain’s.
• We believe in individual responsibility and ability… but also mutual responsibility.
• How to get more people into service? Start early with kids in school.
• He won’t have to pander to the union to get his national service plans through like Clinton did.
• The government should encourage voluntarism.
• Every student will get a $4k college credit by “giving back.”
• Big government suppresses private charity/voluntarism is an “old argument.”
• We have to have government. We have to have a FEMA that works. We need to encourage young people to serve so when they get older they are trained to work for those government programs.
• Government should expand the avenues of service.
• To keep more people in the military: restore peoples belief in service, inspiring people
• Universities which keep off ROTC should let them on campus
• Should provide full scholarships for math and science teachers and then make them go work in depressed communities.
• One of the primary aspects of his presidency would be to increase avenues for service in the nation.
• I want every young person to know that they won’t reach their potential unless they work with others.
• American voluntarism is what makes America great.
• Obama likes Teddy Roosevelt too.

All done. Check out the YouTube channel for the interviews.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn’t matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to “grow the pie” is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is “protectionism.”

The old script is in rewrite. “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He noted that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a set of looser banking rules, “we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation.” This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for “a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers.”

Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside “the structure and workings of financial markets” because “recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets.” Sure sounds like Big Government to me.

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early ’80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What’s becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

In the campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government. But the economic assumptions are changing faster than the rhetoric of the campaign. “Reality has broken in,” says Frank. And none too soon.

Is this a joke?

A Massachusetts liberal writing an article about the failures of capitalism using another Harvard grad, NJ born, Massachusetts representing liberal as a source?

Using the fact that the head of the Federal Reserve, which is about as anti-free market as you can get, wants to increase the organization’s power as evidence that free market conservatives are giving up on the free market? Who said Bernanke is conservative? Who said a central bank was free market?

Using the Great Depression as more evidence of free market failures?

Claiming John McCain is a free market conservative?

I’m just astounded by the amount of steaming feces coming off of this article.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

From http://www.reason.tv/about/

About The Drew Carey Project

Ever wonder what gives the government the power to just take away your family’s home?

Ever worry that the medicine that keeps you alive might be declared illegal by the Feds?

Ever think that the government doesn’t always know best?

Join host Drew Carey and Reason for a series of video documentaries that take a hard look at the variety of threats to our liberties — and celebrate what it really means to be free.

Beginning October 15, tune in to Reason.tv for Drew’s latest take on everything from medical marijuana to school choice, eminent domain, Big Government, and more.

It’s a bit simplistic and doesn’t cover some of the issues with 91E like that the contract with the local government had a noncompete clause in it. Otherwise it’s not a bad intro for the layman.