Chesterfield Township Bureaucrats' Outrageous Business Permit "Tax" Fee

Government central planners are even more insane and ludicrous than we thought, especially in my township here in my home state of Michigan. The Chesterfield Township bureaucrats recently voted to hike the town's "business permit fee", which is really a business permit tax on small, local businesses that have registered to pay in order to keep their annual permits up to date. The tax, which is disguised as a "fee" assessed and levied on small, local businesses that are required to pay it on an annual basis to the town officials, has been hiked from an annual rate of $5 to $25.

Here's a snip from the The Voice News (a local, community newspaper that serves cities in Southeastern Michigan like Fair Haven, Algonac, New Baltimore, Chesterfield Township, Richmond, and Marysville), which goes into detail here:

Businesses in Chesterfield Township have paid the same amount for their annual permit for 30 years. However, that's all recently changed in an effort to bridge the 30 year gap and generate extra revenue for the township. More increases are on the horizon to update other decades old fees.

"It's been $5 since the '80s," Township Clerk Jan Uglis said of the business permit fees. "We've got to be financially responsible."

The board of trustees voted at the Jan. 5 meeting to increase the fee from $5 to $25.

In the midst of the economic downturn, Uglis said the township has been looking for ways to cut costs and make increases where needed. While the $25 fee might be a shock to some, Uglis said it's still low compared to other communities.

"It's a way to bring more money into the township without raising taxes," she said.

Also new is a late fee the township is imposing. For every month a business doesn't pay the permit fee, they will be charged $15. Uglis said the code enforcer will be out to make sure all businesses are in compliance and take legal action, if needed.

"It's part of the ordinance," she said.

Uglis said it was easier to change the fee to $25 outright instead of gradual yearly increases. The gradual change would have required yearly resolutions; each of which would be required to go before the board of trustees.

"I know this is a bad time, but you have to understand, your business has increased in 30 years," Uglis said.

"Even at $5 people were years behind."

When the fee was still $5 Uglis said some of the businesses had failed to pay. She said for those who hadn't paid in two years, they had to pay $10 for both years and then the $25 on top of that. It added up, she said, especially if they had to pay a late fee.

Jan Uglis, a highly-overpaid township clerk (who is, by the way, a long-time progressive/socialist Democrat and was a proud member of my old church Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, which I used to attend many years ago), is justifying the hikes, claiming that they had not gone up in recent years, but she's not telling the truth. The true reason why the township is in bad shape is because of government overspending, high taxes, (surprise, surprise!) and a police tax, which have plagued the area for a few years now.

Even one resident has complained about this action and has expressed his ardent opposition to it. The rest of the Voice article gets worse. The next couple of paragraphs showcase, in tonality, the diabolical and vile nature of the beast we call government:

The permit was put into place as a way to safeguard the business and the community. Uglis said the business has to fill out the permit and state what they sell, whether there's any kind of chemicals on the premises and emergency contact information, among others.

"If the fire department has to go in after a fire, they have to know what kind of products are inside," she said.

Considering the fact that the local government's fire department is hardly efficient and swift in the deliverance of its services, I can easily tell you that it takes more than 10 minutes for the Chesterfield Twp. Fire Department to respond to a fire on someone's property, let alone a business. This claptrap about "safeguarding the business and the community" is a ruse, because government bureaucrats, even at the local level, respond by brute force. This tax and other machinations are souped up by big business and township interests to undermine and destroy commercial activity that has been, for the longest time, the backbone of the small business community in the area. By raising this tax, they are doing exactly that.

Here's another hair-raising fact: the town even wants to skyrocket its Class C liquor license. As Uglis admits, the township is preparing to raise it from $500 (which had remained that way for 30 years) to a mind-bending $2,000. If a start-up party store (or convenience store) wants to sell booze, that's too costly for any company to pay that amount. Sure, businesses like my local CVS Pharmacy and Kroger can pay that amount, because, as long-time established businesses, they have the volumes of cash, plus the legal and accounting departments to off-set those costs. A new business with a compliment of 200 employees or less simply can't afford to do that.

At a time when the township's economy, the county's economy, and even the state's economy are in god-awful shape and unemployment is boosting at the local, county, and state levels, this will even deepen the already-known one-state depression we already have, even though it's being officially touted as a "recession."

[Cross-posted at Let Liberty Ring.]

Obama’s Iraq Withdrawal Plan Calls for Drawdown on August 31, 2010

Obama's "Iraq withdrawal plan" calls for a pull out of the 142,000 U.S. forces (comprising of Marines and Army personnel) on August 31, 2010.

Here's the Fox News story which, in part, describes the unveiled plan to congressional lawmakers yesterday:

The Iraq war will come to an end on Aug. 31, 2010, senior officials said, following President Obama's decision to end all counter-insurgency missions by that time.

Obama told top leaders in Congress on Thursday that he will transition the mission in Iraq to training, advising and engaging in limited counter-terrorist operations, according to congressional sources.

The president is expected to deliver a speech Friday at the Marine base in Camp Lejeune, N.C, in which he will order the immediate drawdown of the 142,000 Marines and Army personnel in Iraq.

Obama's decision reflects his belief that "there have been real advances" in the country and, as result, the U.S. military should now be ordered to carry out "a fundamental change in mission," senior administration officials said.

With 142,000 U.S. forces in Iraq now and counter-insurgency operations conducted on a near-daily basis, "it is a war, no question," a senior adviser said.

And this war, senior officials said, will officially come to an end on Aug. 31, 2010, when the president orders all U.S. troops to focus their efforts on advising, equipping and training Iraqi security forces as well as assisting in reconstruction and political reconciliation.

"This is a plan that responsibly ends the war in Iraq," said a senior official who participated in the deliberations. "He is living up to a commitment he made as a candidate but is doing so in a way that has the support of the inter-agency task force on Iraq."

The president will order U.S. military commanders to leave a residual force of between 35,000 and 50,000 troops in Iraq. Under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, the U.S. must remove all military personnel by Dec. 31, 2011.

This is going beyond the 16-momth plan that Our Great Leader set forth throughout his campaign and even after he was elected to and inaugurated into office, even though some thought it would be "difficult" to implement it. 19 months? It's no secret that he had soft pedaled and somewhat backed off from his plan in the beginning of his term last month, despite what the Obamameter on PolitiFact.com shows.

I'm not confident that the war in Iraq will end or that Obama will pull the troops out. Perhaps he'll prove me wrong in the final analysis, but I'm not counting on that.

[Cross-posted to The Freeman Chronicles.]

Tucker Carlson Joins CATO

It's official: conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, former host of CNN's now-defunct "Crossfire" and his failed MSNBC show "Tucker," has joined the CATO Institute. Carlson, who briefly flirted with a presidential run by running for the presidency under the Libertarian Party's banner and then decided against it, will be serving as a senior fellow at the think tank.

According to a press release on CATO's website, Carlson will do the following:

Carlson will use his initial time with Cato to focus on writing a book on the state of the American polity. Through other writings as well as media and public speaking appearances, he will also seek to educate the broader public about how the libertarian philosophy differs from the standard liberal and conservative orthodoxies embodied in the two main U.S. political parties.

The next paragraph of its press release caught my eye, enabling me to shake my head in disbelief:

"Tucker Carlson is one of the most effective communicators of libertarian ideas in the nation," said Cato founder and president Ed Crane. "We are delighted to have him associated with Cato as a senior fellow."

First of all, Carlson is not "one of the most effective communicators of librtarian ideas." He's not a libertarian; he's a conservative. He may have a libertarian bent in his conservative thinking, but he's a conservative. It is true that he has come out against the war in Iraq and the War on Drugs, but he's not a consistent defender of liberty. He's not even a radical. Sure, he has expressed his admiration and respect for Ron Paul many times (he had Ron on his show during the course of his presidential campaign) and had been involved with his campaign. (Interestingly enough, one MSNBC toadie who had filled in for Carlson on his old show bashed Paul on December 27, 2007 for openly and truthfully declaring that the United States didn't need to have its own civil war to end slavery.) But he is a conservative of the Barry Goldwater-style variety. His view on independent migrants a.k.a. "illegal aliens" epitomizes my point.

Second, why CATO? Why not the Ludwig von Mises Institute? CATO serves the interests of the beltway "cosmopolitan" libertarian crowd that embraces Milton Friedman's Chicago school of thought. CATO is not truely liberarian; it's libertarian only when a Democratic government and a Democratic president are in power. They were neither libertarian nor attempting to be libertarian when Bush was in power for eight years. In fact, many of its key personnel were (and still are) big supporters of the Republican Party, including Bush. Not a single peep came from them (with the exception of a very few) when Bush dragged us into Iraq, called for and launched the U.S. Department of Homeland Stupidity (I mean, Security), and signed into law the Military Commission Act, the Patriot Act, and the REAL ID Act (among many draconian and pro-state bills).

Carlson may be feeling at home in the think tank's D.C. offices, but CATO's Ed Crane calling him an "effective communicator of libertarian ideas" hardly passes the ideologically pure smell test.

[Cross-posted at The Freeman Chronicles.}

Boston Tea Party Founder and At-Large Member Tom Knapp Introduces Pro-Second Amendment Resolution to the BTPNC

Boston Tea Party founder and At-Large Member Thomas L. Knapp has introduced an excellent pro-Second Amendment resolution to the party's own National Committee discussion list on Yahoo Groups. Seconds later, he issued an amendment to his resolution removing the word "both" in the phrase "it is both the constitutional obligation." I seconded this revised version of the moved resolution just seconds after he sent it to the list.

Here are the original and amended versions of the resolution. Either way, it's an outstanding one, given Attorney Generalissimo Eric Holder's promise to restore the old, god-awful 1994 assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. (Here's former BTP Chairman Jim Davidson's assessment of Holder's plan to revive the expired gun law.)

Here's the original version of the resolution:

Whereas, every man, woman, and responsible child is possessed of a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and constitutional right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- handgun, shotgun, rifle, machine gun, anything -- any time, anywhere, without asking anyone's permission; and

Whereas it is both the constitutional obligation of government to respect and defend, rather than suppress, that right; and

Whereas all attempts by government to institute measures of victim disarmament, a/k/a "gun control," are illegal, unconstitutional, subversive of public safety and morally repugnant;

Be it resolved that the Boston Tea Party opposes all new victim disarmament legislation and all attempts to re-impose past victim disarmament schemes, including but not limited to the Obama administration's contemplated re-introduction of an "assault weapons" ban.

Here's the revised version that's currently pending and is to be discussed later today:

Whereas, every man, woman, and responsible child is possessed of a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and constitutional right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- handgun, shotgun, rifle, machine gun, anything -- any time, anywhere, without asking anyone's permission; and

Whereas it is the constitutional obligation of government to respect and defend, rather than suppress, that right; and

Whereas all attempts by government to institute measures of victim disarmament, a/k/a "gun control," are illegal, unconstitutional, subversive of public safety and morally repugnant;

Be it resolved that the Boston Tea Party opposes all new victim disarmament legislation and all attempts to re-impose past victim disarmament schemes, including but not limited to the Obama administration's contemplated re-introduction of an "assault weapons" ban.

Any BTP member and liberty lover is encouraged to spread this far and wide as much as possible.

[Cross-posted to The Freeman Chronicles.]

It's Official: I'm the Boston Tea Party's Newly-Elected Secretary

It's official: I'm the Boston Tea Party's newly-elected secretary on the National Committee. The special election for the seat ended on Tuesday, February 23, and all the votes were finalized by the party's own chair on the same day.

I will be -- and have already started being -- faithfully aggressive in fighting for transparency on the board, as I have promised my voters in the Party. And I've already started my duties after having immediately taken the Secretary seat.

Any loyal BTP member who wants any pro-freedom resolutions or would like to offer pro-freedom motions to be put on the table, please feel to let me know at my email addy here.

[Cross-posted to The Freeman Chronicles.]

Ron Paul Calls for the Abolition of the Federal Reserve on Glenn Beck

Ron Paul on Fox News' Glenn Beck, making an outstanding and purely moral, philosophical, and financial case for the abolition of the Federal Reserve system. More than that, he calls for a new monetary system.



It's nice to see conservatives like Glenn Beck coming around to the good side, even though Beck, during Ron's presidential campaign, called Ron Paul supporters "terrorists" and accused them of advocating "blowing other people up." Here's an old clip of Beck on his old CNN show back in December 2007 after Paul's money bomb resulted in $4 million raised on December 5, commemorating Guy Fawkes Day:



After 8 years of conservatives supporting a diabolical "compassionate conservative" presidency plagued with igniting a war in Iraq, huge spending deficits, abuses of civil liberties and powers of the Oval Office, and other vile acts associated with the Bush administration, it's amusing that many of them are now turning on the Barack presidency after briefly being chummy with him. Watching them squirm and seeing the errors of their evil ways have been quite interesting, to say the least, although not necessarily enjoyable in any way.

Chrystia Freeland: Economic Activity "Will Ground to a Halt"

Bill Maher, whose show Real Time debuted its seventh season on HBO last night, had three panelists - Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times, Tina Brown of The Daily Beast, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters -- who took issue with Dr. Ron Paul's argument against the Federal Reserve and the socialist view that the laissez-faire capitalism is the root of the U.S.'s economic and financial woes.

Here's the clip of the first part of the panel discussion. However, watch it from 1:14 to 2:41, where Freeland and Waters criticize Ron Paul's "extremist economic view" that we must reject the "too-big-to-fail" doctrine and that there should be no regulations on the banks:



Maher asserts to the women on the panel that they are "well-versed in economics." Freeland, talking about the Austrian/freedom lovers, says that she "wouldn't want to live in a country that tried that experiment." She goes on to make this ludicrous yet misguided statement that is the central thesis of this blog post:

I mean, there is this sort of very extremist view called the Austrian school that says what Congressman Ron Paul was saying...that, you know, absolutely these companies got themselves in trouble. We should be absolutist free marketeer; let them all go broke. But would you like to live in a country where economic activity grinds to a halt? I think it's too risky an operation to try."

And, as Brown asks whether economic activity will grind to a halt, Freeland then naively states:

No, no, it would be, it would be a lot worse. If, if you let the banks go broke, imagine what would happen."

Then Waters chimed in with her nonsensical tripe, saying that she likes Ron Paul and has "shaked up, ya know, the Congress," but he is a "true believer" (after Maher says it). But then she really "parts" with him on his view that there should be no regulation. Yet ths is the same Congresswoman Waters who supported the government-propped up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac institutions -- yup, that's right; the New Deal programs that Democrats love and want to preserve -- that encouraged the reckless "no-money-down," overextension of the housing market/bubble that burst within the last couple of years. These are the same institutions that purchased malinvested "bad" loans and resold them to banks that would lend them out to credit-risky home buyers. These same home buyers would put "no money down," accruing interest while their loans were deferred and would end up paying high mortgage payments that they knew they couldn't afford.

Waters, Brown, and Freeland are wrong about Ron Paul, the Ausrian school of economic thought, and the "absolutist free marketeer" position on the "too-big-to-fail" doctrine and the regulatory state. Big banks like Citigroup and Bank of America can get past these regulations (they are supporters of the corporatist state as well, as they have lobbied for banking and other financial service regulations), and the smaller banks that are even nationalized as well as the big ones have a difficult time getting past the regulations. No one person can simply start up a new bank without reviewing and agreeing to abide by a myriad and a web of regulations that make it cost prohibitive to do business in the U.S. And the big banks get corporate welfare because they have become insolvent and are unprofitable ventures (although the executives are profitting from the taxpayers at their expense). Those business' losses are heavily socialized, thus cementing a future where today's generation will face their future being heavily mortgage that they will be stuck paying all the way to their own graves.

Isn't socialism grand?

[Cross-posted at The Freeman Chronicles.]

Ron Paul to Bill Maher: "You're Listening to the Wrong Economists!"

Ron Paul was featured on Real Time with Bill Maher tonight, which premiered its new season on HBO tonight. Paul, who appeared on the show to Maher in his one-on-one interview, said that the real problem with the state of affairs in the U.S. is we don't "do a lot less" and that we "should hardly be doing anything in Washington." He notes that it's "politically unacceptable" and yet "that's the right thing to do." He nailed it on the head with the fact that, when you have too much investment and there is too much debt and malinvestment and too much malvestment, you "have to liquidate it." After Paul provides his well-thought out example of what happened in 1921 when we were in a depression (which lasted a year because the government wasn't involved) and then we got into another depression in the 1930s (which was pro-longed by the U.S. federal government's intervention), Bill Maher asks:

But if that's true, why do so many economists say we should do the opposite?

Paul responded with the following:

Well, you're listening to the wrong economists if you think they're serious. All Keynesian, socialist welfarists will say you have to do something. If you believe in the free market and you understand the business cycle, the business cycle was caused by the Federal Reserve system, you know that you have to get rid of the mistakes that were building the system. The real cause is created by the Federal Reserve, and yet very few people are talking about the Federal Reserve.

Here's a clip of Paul's appearance on Real Time:



After Paul's appearance on the show, Maher and his Keynesian, socialistic guests kept shilling for the banks. Panelist Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times took potshots at Paul's Austrian views, saying that she wouldn't want to live in a country where there's "no economic activity" if we didn't bail out the financial services (banking) industry. Congresswoman Maxine Waters (an airhead socialist if there ever was one) made some glowing praise about Paul, but "parted with him" on the need to get rid of regulations (which Paul didn't even bring up on the show and wasn't the point on the show to begin with).


[Cross-posted at The Freeman Chronicles.]

Change Is Here

I wrote a parody of the old, classic children's song "If You're Happy and You Know It," which is about our new killer-in-chief.

Please let me know what you think. It's got a libertarian streak in it, although it is meant to generate a couple of chuckles or two.

Change Is Here
(Sung to the tune of “If You're Happy and You Know It”)
By Todd Andrew Barnett



If you voted for Obama, change is here
If you did it for your mama, change is here
If you went to pull that lever
To vote for the man you ever,
Never think again forever change is here

He ordered no lobbyists, change is here
And he’s just an opportunist, change is here
If taxes just keep on risin’
Sinking us in the horizon
Though his people keep advising, change is here

Times are gettin’ harder, change is here
Recovery is farther, change is here
Economy is in the shitter
Though the boy is not a quitter
Even though many are bitter, change is here

Did you hear about his murder? Change is here
Pakistan’s attack is furthered, change is here
The damage is quite collateral
Hey, these things are unilateral
They’re never multilateral, change is here

One promise of his broken, change is here
There’s no good will as a token, change is here
If these times don’t get quite better
It’s not ‘cause you’re no go-getter
You follow it to the letter, change is here

[Cross-posted at The Freeman Chronicles.]

Your Site May Harm Everyone's Computers

Google's infamous site warning "This site may harm your computer" had popped up all over Google's servers about over 40 minutes ago. This was even happening while I was trying to do some research on the search engine for a post I'm writing for this blog.

One blogger complained about this on his site, writing the following:

I’ve logged onto 6 computers in 4 different states, and two in other countries. I’m getting warnings for every link in the SERPS with Google attempting to block traffic to them.

Here's a couple of pics to show what I mean here:






(The last screenshot was taken by the blogger who issued the alert.)

Maybe it's me, but is Google engaging in systematic censorship or what? Considering it's embracing the omnipotent state, it wouldn't be a surprise. After all, the once-hailed, once-innovative company has become a mouthpiece for the Ol' Great Messiah himself.

This is what happens when government and Big Business (like Google, for instance) collude, creating what happens to be the Fascistic State that we've come to loathe today.

[Cross-posted at the Freeman Chronicles.]

Celebrity Collage by MyHeritage

MyHeritage: Celebrity Collage - Family roots - Family tree charts

Announcing Libertarian Papers: A New Journal

From the LRC blog, posted by Stephan Kinsella:

The Mises Institute is proud to announce the launch of a new, online journal today: Libertarian Papers. Edited by yours truly and boasting a impressive and geographically- and academically diverse Editorial Board, Libertarian Papers is publishing its first seven articles today, one per hour starting at 8:00 a.m. CST. These include articles by two eminent libertarian thinkers, Jan Narveson (writing on Nozick, justice, and restitution) and Robert Higgs (on depressions and war). These are followed by two, count 'em, two, previously unpublished memos from ... Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Mises's is a memo dated New Year's Eve, 1946, to F.A. Hayek, relaying his concerns and advice about the then-nascent Mont Pèlerin Society. Rothbard's is a 1961 "confidential" memo the Volker Fund, about libertarian tactics and strategy. Provocative, fascinating stuff.

The last three articles to be published today are a fascinating three-part exchange between Nicolás Maloberti and Joshua Katz about libertarianism, positive rights, and "Possibility of the Legitimate State."

---

More about the journal here.

Arrested For Touching A Plant

Via Rob Wicks:

In the words of legendary singer/songwriter Bob Marley, "Get up, stand up, stand up for your right." The heroic Andrew Carroll decided to stand up for his in the city of Keene, New Hampshire. As expected, the police arrived shortly thereafter. Note the onlookers' apt description of the situation in which this peaceful young man is "getting arrested for touching a plant."

Some video here and here. There is also an interview with Andrew.

Be of Good Cheer: Christmas Greetings from Sean Gabb

Sean Gabb, director of the UK's Libertarian Alliance, has penned a quite interesting and eloquent Christmas Greeting, unlike others "from religious and political leaders from around the world," which "range from the vacuous (Her Majesty the Queen), to the impressively malevolent, so long as the volume is turned down (the Bishop of Rome), to the plain stupid (the Archbishop of Canterbury)."

Gabb's column is quite remarkable and full of subtle insights and sound, sober reasoning. He seems to be have the appropriate mixture of pessimism and optimism, and many of his suggestions mirrored or crystallized some thoughts I've had--on China and the relative prosperity of the West, and other matters.

I liked Gabb's observations about the possibility and hope that technological progress can help to continue to drive the underlying engine of economic prosperity despite the state's regulations and parasitism:

Here, though, is an end of my gloom. Much is bad now, and will get worse in the next few years. So long, however, as we can avoid a collapse into totalitarianism, the future is nowhere near so bleak as we are presently assured. Scientific and technical progress continue at the most wonderful speed. Sooner or later, there will be a renewed scramble to bring the results to market, and our lives will be still further enriched--and this time, I hope, considerably extended.

As for China's much-ballyhooed coming economic dominance, from my business dealings with that country and region over the last decade, I've become more and more skeptical of this. They've improved so much, in part, because they were so far down due to communism; loosening the chains a bit can easily double or quadruple GDP in a short time. But the corruption, the entrenched regulatory-state mindset, the lack of a liberalized property rights institutional history and framework, along with certain widespread character traits, I think are severe barriers to China catching or surpassing the US or Europe in economic terms. I've begun to think India has a better shot, given its better English skills and British-imposed legal and property institutions, but even they seem to be a basket case. While there are smaller economies that may be superior to the West, such as Singapore, there seems to me to be no serious large challenger to the US's economic dominance. Despite our flaws, America and Western Europe are still head and shoulders above all other large economies, and this can continue to be manipulated to our advantage. Gabb has some similar thoughts:

And there need be no relative decline of the West. We have been told for years--usually by self-righteous lefties, gloating over a fall that they assume they and their families can personally avoid sharing--that the coming economic giants of this century are China and perhaps India. This is as fatuous as earlier claims about Japan. If you type the phrase "population pyramids" into Google, the first result will be an American Government website showing how the population of every country in the world is, and will be, distributed by age. Until we know how to extend not merely life but also youth, the most dynamic people in any country will be aged between twenty five and forty five. In England and in America, this age group will predominate throughout the present century. In the Orient, every developing country is following the Japanese pattern of rapid ageing, followed by actual decline of population. The Japanese at least reached Western standards of living before they stopped having children. The Chinese may simply grow old before they get rich. After a fashion, China has been getting richer for about thirty years. We shall see how long that can continue once the majority of the population is over the age of fifty, and have neither savings nor children to support them in old age.

I've noted elsewhere (Dyslexic Vandarchists of the World--Untie!, Left Anarchists and Progressive Taxation, The Over-reliance on State Classifications) that some of the "left-libertarians" seem to overshoot when they attack the state-support of industry and industry's manipulation of the state to the detriment of competition, consumers, and workers--in vulgar anti-capitalist fashion, they go so far as to accuse even nominally peaceful and productive companies, like Macy's and Wal-Mart, of not being genuine owners of their own property and thus subject to vandalism, squatting, etc. In Gabb's column, he turns the tables and criticizes the more totalitarianism Chinese intermixing of state and commerce:

And China has been getting richer only after a fashion. About thirty years ago, its Communist rulers decided to turn the country into one big sweatshop, supplying the West on razor thin profit margins. They managed this by unlimited force. Ordinary working people in China have been ruthlessly exploited. With the banning of real trade unions, and with generally oppressive contracts of employment, labour there is free only in the nominal sense. Otherwise, costs have been socialised for favoured companies; and competitiveness has been maintained by an undervalued exchange rate. Look beyond those glittering towers built for the ruling class and its foreign partners, and you find endless and increasing misery.

Free Talk Live's Ian Freeman In Jail for Questioning the Legitimacy of the System

Free Talk Live host Ian Freeman, formerly Ian Bernard, founder and host of the hit nationally syndicated talk radio show based in Keene, New Hampshire, creator and writer of FreeKeene.com, and frequent critic of the vile and diabolical state, was arrested yesterday for questioning the legitimacy of the state and its courts, which resulted in a secret trial conducted and not captured on camera. Free Mind TV’s Nick Michelewicz drafted a preliminary report, which has been up since yesterday. It says the following:

**preliminary report**
Active FreeKeene blogger Ian Freeman today helped the Keene District Court prove that it is ready to crack down on non-violent peaceful people today. At least 6 officers of various rank were present in court to try and outnumber the liberty activists. Judge Burke was obviously ready to order Ian’s arrest, and did so less than 45 seconds after entering the courtroom. Ian was then taken to a second room where his supporters could not go with him. He was viewed on closed circuit TV as he continued to question the system and not consent, and drew two further contempt of court charges, all three for 30 days in jail.

Watch FreeKeene.com for further updates, articles, videos, and more.

Freeman was ordered to show up in court over a couch that was on his property, even though it was on his tenant’s side of the yard. Even though his court appearance was caught on tape, his secret trial wasn’t, and that was deliberate on the part of the statists who were looking for an excuse to separate him from his pro-liberty supporters (many of them being members of the Free State Project) and to make an example of him in the process.

Here’s the video of the initial proceedings against Ian. Notice that, at one point in the video (shown below), the bailiff immediately moves to cuff Ian before the judge even ordered to remand him into custody:



As LewRockwell.com blogger Manuel Lora pointed out yesterday, this has been all executed to warn the liberty activists that the state is watching you.