http://lastfreevoice.wordpress.com/…

While I’m out at Pridefest 2008 raising awareness of libertarianism and the Libertarian Party, Bob Barr was on Fox News Sunday spewing anti-libertarian ideas of states rights. I recommend scanning through the comments of the article linked above as a few former LP presidental candidates comment on this. Steve Kubby says it well:

There is no such thing as “States’ Rights.” Only people can have rights and those rights are inseparable, indivisible, inalienable and non-transferrable.

States have powers, as enumerated in the 9th and 10th amendments, NOT rights. Furthermore, it is the duty of any government to recognize and uphold rights, not to grant or remove rights.

Libertarianism is about the rights of the individual, not the rights of states, nor any attempt to transfer rights away from the individual. States’ Rights may be a conservative idea, but it is also a totalitarian concept, that should be rejected by all true Libertarians.

and:

“States’ Rights” is a fraudulent and profoundly un-Libertarian concept that has no other purpose but to deceive and rob us of our natural, inalienable, inseparable, non-transferable rights as human beings.

The Ninth Amendment says: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain RIGHTS, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

In other words, just because the Constitution doesn’t mention a particular right, that doesn’t mean we don’t have that right. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights were conceived and written to limit government, not allow it to usurp our rights.

The Tenth Amendment says: “The POWERS not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

What part of “POWERS” does anyone NOT understand?

How can anyone logically argue that “powers” somehow includes a state government hijacking our “rights”?

and just as important a statement is Thomas Knapp’s:

You should probably start by learning the difference between “federalism” and “states rights.” They aren’t the same thing. One is a strategy. The other is one of many possibly justifications for the strategy … and a particularly BAD one.

Furthermore, Barr has now gone PAST making a “states rights” argument for libertarianism and is defining libertarianism as that particular argument for it. He’s not “introducing the LP and libertarian ideas,” he’s introducing the LP and linking it to ANTI-libertarian ideas.

http://www.latimes.com/…

President Bush signed a $555-billion spending bill Wednesday that will pay for a large share of government operations in 2008, but he complained that Congress did not do enough to restrict pork-barrel expenditures and was not providing enough money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush said in a statement: ‘I am disappointed in the way the Congress compiled this legislation. … Congress dropped into the bill nearly 9,800 earmarks that total more than $10 billion. These projects are not funded through a merit-based process and provide a vehicle for wasteful government spending.’

There is a problem with his complaint. Earmarks aren’t allocating new pork. It’s just marking general funds already considered allocated for future use on particular things instead of allowing the executive branch to spend the money as it sees fit. So unless I’m missing something here Bush is complaining that they are redirecting funds he could have had. I like what Thomas Knapp noted while posting this story:

Around $1,850 for every man, woman and child in the United States — and of course there WILL be more — and he’s bitching about $33.33 of it? The statement, as it happens, was made from an airplane that costs taxpayers $55,000 per hour to operate while it flies him … to his vacation destination!