How Anarchism Can Solve Social Problems: Gary Chartier at Freedom Fest 2013

"Once states get a footing, they tend to crowd out alternatives," says philosopher and La Sierra University professor Gary Chartier, author most recently of Anarchy and Legal Order. "Also, I think they tend to colonize people, ideologically."

Reason Magazine's Matt Welch caught up with Chartier at this year's Freedom Fest to discuss his extensive writings on anarchy and left-libertarianism.

Held each July in Las Vegas, Freedom Fest is attended by around 2,000 limited-government enthusiasts and libertarians. ReasonTV spoke with over two dozen speakers and attendees and will be releasing interviews over the coming weeks.

About 4 minutes.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick and Oppenheimer.

(function(d, s, id) {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) return;js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Latest Commentary
- How Medical Innovation Redefines Our World
- "Punishment Has Been Achieved"
- The United States Government Does Not Want Americans To Travel Abroad
- Social Pressure as a Means of Keeping Order
- Are Police in America Now a Military, Occupying Force?
- Lynne Stewart: Convicted of Supporting the Declaration of Independence
- Abolish Your Local Police
- Truth as Treason

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy

View the original article here

How the State Destroys Social Cooperation

by Gary Galles

Many of our present economic difficulties, while blamed by politicians on freedom and markets, are in fact the long-run effects of government policies emphasizing short-run, visible benefits that mask hidden or delayed costs. In particular, our economic woes reflect government's reliance on coercion, whose harmful effects expand over time, in contrast to voluntary cooperation, whose beneficial effects expand over time.

Voluntary market cooperation expands because the more time sellers have to respond to increases in demand, the more their incentives lead to better ways of accommodating buyers with improved output. Similarly, the more time buyers have to respond to increases in supply, the more profitable uses are discovered. That is, when you give individuals better incentives to voluntarily cooperate in the marketplace, over time, they discover and implement more effective ways to do so, expanding cooperation and the mutual benefits that result.

We see this everywhere in personal computing and technology in which convenience, computing power, and portability of devices increase constantly, at rates much faster than most ever anticipated in earlier times. In contrast, when the state employs coercion, it encourages buyers and sellers to act against what would be in their self interest in a free economy. Over time, those who would otherwise spend time thinking about their trading partners, instead respond to coercive measures by expanding the ways they can evade the burdens imposed. In such a situation, social cooperation contracts.

Taxes (including deficits, which are delayed taxes), subsidies, and mandates all illustrate coercion's progressive undermining of social cooperation. For example, when government raises taxes on income earned by benefiting trading partners, those who provide the benefits earn less over time. In response, those burdened with the new taxes have incentive to do less to benefit others while substituting more effort to avoid taxation.

Moreover, when government mandates employer-provided "free" benefits, employers then reduce other parts of compensation that many workers may actually value more than the mandated benefits, to "pay" for them. Or employers may simply hire fewer workers. We see this already in Obamacare's mandated increases to employers' labor costs. Employers have cut jobs and hours (the mandates don't apply to under-30-hour-per-week workers), or employers squeeze other parts of employee compensation, including on-the-job training, which is a crucial mechanism through which workers learn their way to success.

Price ceilings such as rent control, and price floors such as the minimum wage, also illustrate coercion's increasing erosion of social cooperation. In response to such mandates, people increasingly find ways to do less of what violates their self-interest, which entails cooperating less well with others. As Friedrich Hayek noted, "Any attempt to control prices or quantities of particular commodities deprives competition of its power of bringing about effective coordination of individual efforts."

When government holds apartment rents artificially low, they reduce landlords' incentives to continue supplying dwellings. Over time, fewer units are constructed (seen under every rent control regime) and owners find other ways to leave the rental housing market. This takes place through a variety of mechanisms, including condo conversions, which removes units from the available rental stock in order to evade restrictions imposed on rent, but not on mortgage payments. Owners might also respond by reducing maintenance and upkeep of units which rent controls make unprofitable. The end result is less social cooperation and long-term deterioration of the existing housing stock.

When government holds the price of low-skill workers artificially high, as with the minimum wage, government reduces employers' incentives to use low-skill workers in production. Over time, employers find more ways to conserve on that artificially scarce input, reducing employment via changing production processes and products, substituting capital for labor, reducing output, moving jobs elsewhere, and to generally cooperate less with low-skill workers. For instance, restaurant industry responses to minimum wage hikes have included moving to buffets, which require fewer workers, expanding slow-cooked menu choices (essentially substituting crock pots for workers), and self-serve soda dispensing. Similarly, the higher the price of a worker relative to a computer, the more employers will substitute computers for labor.

Furthermore, the constant prospect of endless and arbitrary changes in taxes and regulations and other forms of coercion increases the risks involved in trying new and innovative ways of cooperating with others in search of profits. And because coercion expands evasion efforts over time, more and more resources go to enforcement, taking resources away from productive uses and violating principles of equity (since enforcement is inherently selective and unequal) that can be upheld only when arrangements are voluntary.

Since there are very few areas where coercion is necessary to achieve social cooperation, there are very few areas where government advances it. Instead, the massive expansion of government beyond such bounds has undermined cooperation and violated justice. Yet still more intrusion is constantly offered as a solution. That is why Ludwig von Mises's recognition that "Those who ask for more and more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom" is important and ominous today. Each expansion of government's reach shrinks freedom and restricts otherwise expanding social cooperation, with effects that worsen progressively over time.
_
Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. Send him mail. See Gary Galles's article archives.

(function(d, s, id) {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) return;js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Latest Commentary
- How "Your" Government Works
- Pelosi: Willing to "Protect" Syrian Children To Death
- Who's Really Getting Punished?
- Perpetual Chaos and Crises
- The Twisted Premises Implicit in the Drive for War
- The US Uses Gas To Kill Civilians
- We're All Edward Snowden Now
- Elysium: The Technological Side of the American Police State

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy

View the original article here

Social Pressure as a Means of Keeping Order

by Logan Albright

We tend to think of the law as one, big monolithic thing, a unified system under which we all must live. The rules governing what we can and cannot do may change over time, but the system itself is a constant, maintained by a centralized body of enforcers. Force is the operative term here, because the threat of force is really the only weapon the law has at its disposal to curb behaviors it deems undesirable. Break the law and you will either be fined, imprisoned or, in extreme cases, killed.

We have become conditioned to think that this threat of force is the only possible way of keeping order in a society, and that since force is such a dangerous thing, we must restrict who can legitimately use it. Thus, the state monopoly on law is built on the assumption that law and force are necessarily and inextricably intertwined. In fact, there is no reason to make such an assumption.

How, then, are we to enforce the laws of the land without the threat of violence? The answer, which can be found quite readily throughout history, and is still in use in a diluted form today, is simple social pressure from the members of the community. While this may sound laughable to some, it is a powerful force not to be underestimated, and has succeeded at keeping order with surprising success in the past.

A colorful example comes from England, where the term Rough Music was once used to describe a practice of community members banding together to drive out those who violated their social norms by banging pots and pans together in a symbolic ritual of humiliation and eventual expulsion. Shunning among the Amish is a comparable example.

Similar practices, albeit less dramatic, persist to this day in any area where there is a strong sense of community. Neighborhood associations use social pressure to enforce certain norms, with offenders suffering the vocal disapproval of their neighbors. It is important to remember that this is not vigilantism, where an individuals initiates force to seek personal justice, but rather a form of collective behavior towards the offender that in no way violates his rights. Instead of force, ostracization inflicts feelings of shame, guilt and isolation on those who refuse to obey the mores of the group. If the offense is great enough, others may refuse to do business with the offender entirely, eventually forcing him to leave the community altogether.

Apart from its non-violence, the method of keeping order via peer pressure has the advantage of being highly decentralized. Every community will have its own code of conduct, allowing people to sort themselves into areas which share their own set of values and principles. An atheist libertine need not be held to the standard of a conservative Christian community. An immigrant from China can choose to live in a community that upholds the customs of his heritage. There is no one-size-fits-all standard of behavior which inevitably fails to take into account cultural and philosophical differences within the population.

The obvious objection to this line of thinking is that social pressure is all well and good for small towns and isolated populations, but that in big cities there is simply no way for people to know each other well enough to enforce a standard of behavior as a group. This is a fair point, but the existence of tight-knit communities within large cities ? Chinatowns or other immigrant groups are the most common example ? show that a large population alone is not sufficient to render social pressure ineffective. I have written elsewhere about the fact that government welfare programs discourage the formation of communities, since the threat of misfortune can be met with a welfare check in place of the support of friends, neighbors, relatives and churches. In the absence of such programs, it would behoove ever prudent individual to develop some form of community as a type of insurance against hardship, in which case social pressure becomes a very effective means of behavioral control.

Of course, there are some crimes and some criminals for whom social pressure would be wholly inadequate. Those individuals mad enough to commit murders or rapes doubtless have little fear of what the neighbors might think. In such cases, force is indeed required, and punishment remains a legitimate province of the law (which still need not be monopolistic in nature, but that's a topic for another time.) However, for all the sorts of minor offenses that fill law books and clog up court systems, it seems entirely preferable to adopt a decentralized, non-coercive method of punishment that relies upon the human need for social interaction and the approval of one's peers instead of the cold impersonality of a prison cell.
_
Logan Albright is a writer and economist in Washington, DC.

(function(d, s, id) {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) return;js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Latest Commentary
- How Medical Innovation Redefines Our World
- "Punishment Has Been Achieved"
- The United States Government Does Not Want Americans To Travel Abroad
- How Anarchism Can Solve Social Problems: Gary Chartier at Freedom Fest 2013
- Are Police in America Now a Military, Occupying Force?
- Lynne Stewart: Convicted of Supporting the Declaration of Independence
- Abolish Your Local Police
- Truth as Treason

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy

View the original article here

Government Undermines Social Cooperation

Follow @infolibnews!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src='//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,'script','twitter-wjs'); by Sheldon Richman

I should know better than to take seriously the insipid words of presidential speechwriters, especially those who composed an inaugural address. Still, I can't let some of the words President Obama read at Monday's inauguration pass without comment.

For example, Obama said this:

Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today's world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.

Here is the standard false alternative beloved by politicians seeking to justify their own violence-based power. The fallacy is clear when stated this way: Since individuals acting in isolation aren't capable of doing many things they want done, government should take charge and see that they are done.

What's left out? The "collective action" of voluntary civil society, which includes the market as well as all peaceful noncommercial activities (such as mutual-aid associations). To listen to Obama, you'd never know there was community life apart from the state, which, let us never forget, is founded on the power to inflict force on nonaggressors. (The power to tax -- the appropriation of private property under threat of violence -- is the fundamental power without which no government power can exist.)

Politicians say such things hoping the average person is too dulled by the government's schools and the slavish news media to notice the missing piece. The liberal (libertarian) vision of the free society never posited the isolated individual as the source of progress. Not wanting government to manage human affairs does not imply the absence of social cooperation. Quite the contrary! Social cooperation lies at the very heart of the classical-liberal vision. It's found in every liberal thinker from Adam Smith -- who underscored the division of labor and the "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange" -- to today's libertarian thinkers. Ludwig von Mises came close to titling his magnum opus on economics Social Cooperation. He opted instead for Human Action, but "social cooperation" is the second-most used phrase in his thousand-page book. "Division of labor" places first, but that's just another way of saying "social cooperation."

Indeed, Mises's chapter eight, "Human Cooperation," begins,

Society is concerted action, cooperation... The total complex of mutual relations created by such concerted actions is called society. It substitutes collaboration for the -- at least conceivable -- isolated life of individuals. Society is division of labor and combination of labor. In his capacity as an acting animal man becomes a social animal.

Mises of course was a hard-core advocate of laissez-faire. Government would have barely been noticeable in his ideal society. The thought of raising living standards through individual isolation would have struck him as absurd. Human beings progress through cooperation and only through cooperation. He explicitly broadened David Ricardo's law of comparative advantage and dubbed it the "law of association." The principle explains not only why free trade benefits all participating countries, but also why individuals do better by working together than by acting alone:

The law of association makes us comprehend the tendencies which resulted in the progressive intensification of human cooperation. We conceive what incentive induced people not to consider themselves simply as rivals in a struggle for the appropriation of the limited supply of means of subsistence made available by nature. We realize what has impelled them and permanently impels them to consort with one another for the sake of cooperation. Every step forward on the way to a more developed mode of the division of labor serves the interests of all participants. In order to comprehend why man did not remain solitary, searching like the animals for food and shelter for himself only and at most also for his consort and his helpless infants, we do not need to have recourse to a miraculous interference of the Deity or to the empty hypostasis of an innate urge toward association. Neither are we forced to assume that the isolated individuals or primitive hordes one day pledged themselves by a contract to establish social bonds. The factor that brought about primitive society and daily works toward its progressive intensification is human action that is animated by the insight into the higher productivity of labor achieved under the division of labor.

For the record, Mises acknowledged that "Ricardo was fully aware of the fact that his law of comparative cost [or advantage] "? is a particular instance of the more universal law of association."

One of the stalwarts of the liberal tradition, Fr?d?ric Bastiat, made quite a big deal of this point in the opening chapter of his economics treatise, Economic Harmonies (1850). Noting the average person's access to a vast array of goods in mid-19th-century France, Bastiat observed,

It is impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that exists between the satisfactions this man derives from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were reduced to his own resources. I make bold to say that in one day he consumes more things than he could produce himself in ten centuries. [Emphasis added.]

What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that the same thing holds true for all other men. Every one of the members of society has consumed a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone else.

Like all advocates of individual liberty, Bastiat understood that the choice is not between isolated action and government social engineering.

So when Obama says "the American people [cannot] meet the demands of today's world by acting alone," he attacks a straw man. Who proposes such a thing? Note the ambiguity in the sentence. By "acting alone," does he mean individuals acting in isolation with no division of labor in the market? Or does he mean people acting cooperatively, by consent, and without government involvement? If the second, then he is simply wrong. People acting cooperatively through the market can indeed "meet the demands of today's world." The clumsy bureaucracy and the "private sector" cronies it serves need only leave us alone.

But Obama apparently means individuals literally acting alone, because he immediately says, "No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores."

Who writes this nonsense? Who thinks that a "single person" could do any of those things? Does Obama (or his speechwriters) even know what opponents of government social engineering stand for? They must think they can distract people from the libertarian alternative with a false picture of the choice we face. Get people to think the choice is between government social engineering and literal individual self-sufficiency, and the libertarian ideal of voluntary social cooperation through the freed market will present no threat to the privilege-laden status quo.

Here is the irony: Government intervention undermines social cooperation in myriad ways. To name just one, privileges for favored producers drive a wedge between entrepreneurs and consumers by distorting relative prices and eroding the market's ability to coordinate supply and demand over time. In general, government ?welfare? activity crowds out private solutions that are far more amenable to freedom and cooperation.

Politicians pose as the great advocates of "collective action," but in fact their schemes increasingly replace mutually beneficial social cooperation with top-down special-interest-driven decrees.
_
Sheldon Richman is vice president of The Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of FFF's monthly journal, Future of Freedom. For 15 years he was editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York. He is the author of FFF's award-winning book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families; Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax; and Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State. Calling for the abolition, not the reform, of public schooling. Separating School & State has become a landmark book in both libertarian and educational circles. In his column in the Financial Times, Michael Prowse wrote: "I recommend a subversive tract, Separating School & State by Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank... . I also think that Mr. Richman is right to fear that state education undermines personal responsibility..." Sheldon's articles on economic policy, education, civil liberties, American history, foreign policy, and the Middle East have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Washington Times, The American Conservative, Insight, Cato Policy Report, Journal of Economic Development, The Freeman, The World & I, Reason, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Liberty magazine, and other publications. He is a contributor to the The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. A former newspaper reporter and senior editor at the Cato Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies, Sheldon is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia. He blogs at Free Association. Send him e-mail.

(function(d, s, id) {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) return;js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Latest Commentary
- I Put My Life On The Line Writing This Article!
- It's Not Evil to Copy
- Troubling Public Opinion Trends for Gun Rights and Civil Liberties
- "Conspiracy Theory": Foundations of a Weaponized Term
- Government Will Lose the War on Piracy
- John Mackey's Political Correctness
- John Taylor Gatto on the Inanity of Gun Control
- "Gun Control for the Children?" Sorry, No Sale.

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy

View the original article here

Social Security Ponzi Scheme Coming To An End

Chris | InformationLiberation

Socialist security, possibly the world's largest wealth redistribution scheme in history is finally now coming to an end. Like a scam chain letter, the first people who "sent in a dollar" got a hundred back in return, but the last pay in and get nothing. Such is the case now with socialist security reports the AP, "People retiring today are part of the first generation of workers who have paid more in Social Security taxes during their careers than they will receive in benefits after they retire. It?s a historic shift that will only get worse for future retirees."

Unfortunately, unlike a scam pyramid scheme chain letter, citizens are not allowed to opt out, so everyone from now on will be paying in with the guarantee they will be losing money, and getting absolutely no "security." Rather than a "social safety net," it's a ring of jail bars locking everyone into perpetual debt slavery. Such a situation cannot continue for very long, and as the AP notes, it will only get worse as more and more of the baby boomers retire.

?For the early generations, it was an incredibly good deal,? said Andrew Biggs, a former deputy Social Security commissioner who is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. ?The government gave you free money and getting free money is popular.?

If you retired in 1960, you could expect to get back seven times more in benefits than you paid in Social Security taxes, and more if you were a low-income worker, as long you made it to age 78 for men and 81 for women.

As recently as 1985, workers at every income level could retire and expect to get more in benefits than they paid in Social Security taxes, though they didn?t do quite as well as their parents and grandparents.

Not anymore.

A married couple retiring last year after both spouses earned average lifetime wages paid about $598,000 in Social Security taxes during their careers. They can expect to collect about $556,000 in benefits, if the man lives to 82 and the woman lives to 85, according to a 2011 study by the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

As a young person myself, I'm ecstatic to see this socialist ponzi scheme fail. While I feel for people who "paid into it" their whole lives and will now get nothing, the fact of the matter is the money was stolen from them, and stealing from future generations won't make things any better. Taxes are theft, all of them, the sooner people accept it, the sooner the healing process can begin.
_
Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com, you can read more of his writings here. Follow infolib on twitter here.

(function(d, s, id) {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) return;js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Latest Economy
- Boy Whose Hot Dog Cart Was Shut Down by the City of Holland Now Homeless
- Obama's Master Plan: Bailout Everyone
- Monsanto Awarded ONE BILLION Dollars Due To Patent Infringement For A Product That Was Never On The Market
- New Hemp Bill Introduced in US Senate
- Gibson Guitar Forced to Pay $350,000 Ransom to Feds
- Submissiveness and Conformity in America's Business Leaders
- The Not So Super Hero
- Drawing back the Financial Iron Curtain to a Beautiful Anarchy w/ Jeffrey Tucker!

Congratulations Chris !
You are now officially a neo-con stooge .

You are quoting a fellow of The American Enterprise Institute, the home-dungeon of intellectual heavyweights like Richard Perle and Dick Cheneys wife ..

Thanks.

By those standards, I'm a stooge of some 40000 people/organizations I've quoted over the last 7 years running this site, maybe you could add them all up and tell me how I'm a stooge of them all (and every single person associated with them).

If you think the socialist security system is wonderful, just say it, I'd love to hear you defend this bankrupt socialist scam.

Sad post Chris, why don't you focus on the main problem facing our economy which is corporate welfare not social welfare. Your AP quote also doesn't account for inflation as well as the extreme increase in the cost of medical care in your "give a dollar, expect 100 dollars back" examples. This just reeks of right wing bias and I expect more from this site.

Lets use Ron Paul as a great example of what to do with SS instead of the neo con stooges who just want to end social welfare to have more money for corporate welfare. Dr. Paul's solution involves a public option to pay into SS, which is a great start towards fixing the social safety net instead of just cutting it lose.

After that the only way to "fix" SS is to fix our medical industry, which is one of the primary reasons the cost of living for retirees has increased so drastically over the last 50 years causing them to need so much more back from SS. Without a end to the "for profit" medical industry, we will continue to price out the middle class from affording the costs to stay healthy as they retire. I know socialized medicine is a boogeyman term here, but other developed countries do it just fine and are in much better shape than we are with our system.

The Folks complaining about this article are more than likely Boomers who have no problem at all with their kids and grand kids furniture being burnt to keep those checks coming as long as they still have a finger to point. They got theirs stolen and now they enable the thieves to steal from their kids knowing there is nothing in it for them. America lost EVERYTHING under the leadership of the Boomers...the "entitlement" generation. Their policies are all based on a time horizon that has the end of the world and obligations to future generations? coinciding with their death. ..the WORST generation EVER!.............. I just wanted to add to the discussion that when the social security program first started,the actual number issued was not supposed to be used as identification by law.
Today it is.
We literally have a national ID number,and its being issued to our children practically automatically at birth.

My concerns for social security, besides the obvious fiscal issues,are that it promotes government dependency at the cost of individual liberty.

It does this on many levels.

And to top it all off,there is no where in the Constitution authorizing the federal government to institute such a program.Nowhere.

America will be great again when Americans fully accept that to have liberty,they might have to have less government "safety nets" and actually be more responsible for themselves,and instead of relying on a nanny state to save up for their retirement for them- do it themselves.

But I know,I know,thats scary.

And its sad how cowardly and dependent we've become.

As a Boomer who is going to be 56 next month, let me back up what is being stated in this posting with a real life example. After my husband passed away in '04 my family said I should go to the happy little folks at the Social Security office and apply for his SS. I knew this was BS, since as a nurse turned writer who does a lot of research, there are bills in various forms of development which will change what my age group would be eligible to receive. Since my goal in life is to be financially independent, I treated this as a candid interview project. After talking with a few dedicated government wage slaves, I did manage to find at least one person there who had possibly awakened to what SS really is, a scam to slip Americans into dependent socialism.
If you doubt me, prove me wrong. Your best bet is look at history.
But back to our visit with the SS office wage slave. This person told me to apply 6 months before my 62nd birthday if, the age limit had not been moved up to 70 by then and, if SS still existed.
As a researcher and writer who is well aware of the plans the Illuminati has in store for this country, I agree with what Chris has written.
D.M. Simonds
ScribeCaveDotCom
The choice is yours. To Anon 98150, the "main problem facing our economy" is not simply corporate welfare nor social welfare, it's all welfare, from corporate welfare to the military industrial complex to welfare to make dependent government slaves who will defend the state enslaving them just so long as they get a check of loot for themselves, it's all done under the same principle and it's all entirely criminal.

The example of give a dollar get a hundred back no longer applies, but it did apply to the first people who were part of this ponzi scheme, read the story of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_May_Fuller who "paid in" (had confiscated) $24.75, then got a wealth transfer of $22,888.92 given to her. That's almost a thousand to one return.

Ron Paul's "solution" will never be implemented as the people running the system are crooked criminals who do not want the welfare system to change, it's true if they cut the wars they could keep the scam going a bit longer, but that wouldn't change much, the fact of the matter is the ponzi scheme is coming to an end now and as with all ponzi schemes when the money stops coming in it must collapse.

As SS functions now it's a scheme to rob poor young people to pay for rich old people, why is that something which should be "saved"? If the state cut all spending even then it shouldn't go to social security, just stop actively stealing from people through taxation and let people keep the money which is rightly theirs, that's a much better "solution" to this problem than let's keep current confiscation levels the same and hope the criminals in congress who did not earn it spend the money more wisely.

"Like a scam chain letter, the first people who "sent in a dollar" got a hundred back in return, but the last pay in and get nothing. "

Sort of like the Youngevity products Tangy Tangerine multi level marketing ponzi scheme, huh?

I do not agree with this whole article. The banksters created this ponzi scheme, and until an economic order based on Logos is put it place, I thank God that there has been and will be for a while this safety net that has allowed millions of people to survive.

Jeannon, this sort of misplaced sympathy is giving some 70 years olds a couple extra dollars to live on and enriching a few score of bureaucrats at the expense of robbing tens of millions of their freedoms and economic potentials in the prime of their lives.

The first generation in the system knew retirement would now be easier so could go spend much of what was already saved on vacations or whatever, the next generation didn't bother to save enough b/c of course they factored the gov't money into retirement. Additionally they started taking other forms of gov't social welfare in home loans, loans for their kids schooling, etc... The 3rd generation took gov't by the tens of thousands starting at 18 and kept borrowing in one form or another until they were 30.

The result of such "social welfare" is a generation that is underwater on homes that won't sell, can't afford to pay student loan payments that they can't escape, and have to fear losing their jobs in the terrible economy the previous decades of spend now pay later has caused....all the while any money they do make has portions taken out to give some 60 and 70 year olds a nicer tv in the retirement home.

Kill social security (in phases if need be), cut gov't house/school loans, and free the markets that haven't seen freedom in my lifetime; it will do more to help the poor than all the "social welfare" I've ever seen.

The SS trust is unindentured. Tighten up your Contract with SS. SIN in Canada. Remember, yourSS/SIN# Is the same # as your Individual Master File at the IMF (International Monetary Fund). Quit bitchin, assert your rights.

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy

View the original article here

Social Security disability on verge of insolvency

Social Security disability on verge of insolvency - informationliberationinformationliberation
The news you're not supposed to know...Breaking NewsBrowse by CategoryAnalysisHighlightsMultimediaLatest CommentsArchivesRSS FeedSyndicationAboutContact
Multimedia
An Introduction to Austrian Economics: Understand Economics, Understand EverythingThe Century of the Self: The Untold History of Controlling the Masses Through the Manipulation of Unconscious Desires
The Disappearing Male: From Virility to Sterility
The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes OffOperation Gladio: The Hidden History of U.S. Sponsored False Flag Terrorism in Europe
How America Can Be Saved: A Lecture by Hans-Hermann Hoppe(more)Article posted Aug 21 2011, 9:01 PMCategory: EconomySource: Associated PressPrint
Social Security disability on verge of insolvencyBy STEPHEN OHLEMACHER

Verge? It's been running on printed money for years.WASHINGTON (AP) ? Laid-off workers and aging baby boomers are flooding Social Security's disability program with benefit claims, pushing the financially strapped system toward the brink of insolvency.

Applications are up nearly 50 percent over a decade ago as people with disabilities lose their jobs and can't find new ones in an economy that has shed nearly 7 million jobs.

The stampede for benefits is adding to a growing backlog of applicants ? many wait two years or more before their cases are resolved ? and worsening the financial problems of a program that's been running in the red for years.

Read More

SHARE: Share Tweet Email This


Latest Economy
- Status Change: Gold Moves From Investment To Money
- Ron Paul: Investing Genius
- Shades of FDR! Socialist Chavez Nationalizes Gold
- "A Wolf In Sheep"
- On the Brink of Inflationary Disaster
- Marc Faber Explains How Even The "Greatest Bear On Earth" Gets It Wrong
- Peter Schiff Debunks Barron's Hit-Piece On Ron Paul's Portfolio
- CBO: Federal deficit will hit $1.3 trillion









No Comments PostedAdd Comment

Add CommentNameComment

* No HTML


Verification *Please Enter the Verification Code Seen Below 

PLEASE NOTEPlease see our About Page, our Disclaimer, and our Comments Policy.

FAIR USE NOTICEThis site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston ChurchillSearch

Advanced SearchLogin Username:

Password:

Remember Me
Forgot Password?
Register
Most Popular But America IS A Police State - 08/18News 'Journalists' Shill for the State - 08/18U.S. Anti-Piracy Police Kept Secret From The Public - 08/12Cop allegedly threatens to execute family after they reported his wife for reckless driving - 08/1614 Conspiracy Theories That The Media Now Admits Are Conspiracy Facts - 08/24Hiroshima & Nagasaki: 66 Years Later - 08/12Big Brother 2.0: 10 New Ways That The Government Will Be Spying On You And Controlling Your Behavior - 08/18Our Troops do NOT Protect Our Freedom and We Should Stop Thanking Them for Doing So - 08/09
HighlightsThe Missing Lesson From Norway: Never Trust a Man in Uniform"They're Only Out To Make Cold Hard American Cash"; Park Police Crack Down on Bicycle Cabs in DC18 Signs That Life In U.S. Public Schools Is Now Essentially Equivalent To Life In U.S. PrisonsEighth Grader Executed for Scaring a CopFeds Drop All Charges Against 27 Head-Shop Owners They Falsely Accused of Being Terrorist Drug DealersStraight-A College Student Faces 125 Years In Jail For Producing Fake IDsTexas Cops Ticket Thousands of Schoolchildren to Raise Revenue, Some as Young as 6-Yrs-OldHouston Police Chief: Videotaping or Criticizing Police May be Sign You're a Cop-Killer(more)
 Top

View the original article here