The Pope and Libertarianism

Pope Benedict has released a new Encyclical Letter entitled "Charity in Truth." This along with his recent meeting with President Obama has garnered him much attention in the media over the past week. Unfortunately many are misinterpreting the Pope to further their own political agendas. For instance, many in the media (mostly Democrats) are misconstruing the Pope's statements in order to claim that the Church is "against capitalism" or that the Pope wants a one world government with more socialism and more welfare. This is all non-sense.

As Deacon Keith Fournier writes of the recent Encyclical,

"The Social Teaching is neither “left” nor “right”, neither “liberal” nor “conservative” - within the contemporary politicized use of those words. The Church ‘walks the way of the person’ and is an “expert in humanity” because she continues the work of the Lord Himself in whom we find revealed the fullness of the human person."

It may not be liberal or conservative but I would say that much of the Catholic teachings are very much libertarian! Just think about it - the Vatican is the only State in the world that does not fund itself through coercion. The revenues are collected voluntarily, by donation from the Church's followers. This by itself makes it the most libertarian State in the world.

Also, the Church heavily stresses Natural Law, which is the same basis upon which much of libertarian theory is constructed. Take for example this recent quote from Pope Benedict XVI:

"The Church has always affirmed that fundamental rights, above and beyond the different ways in which they are formulated and the different degrees of importance they may have in various cultural contexts, are to be upheld and accorded universal recognition because they are inherent in the very nature of man, who is created in the image and likeness of God."

Without the Catholic Church reference, this almost sounds like Thomas Jefferson. Claims that the Pope supports government rulers, socialism, or any other form of organized coercion are simply false. The Church teaches that truth and human rights pre-date governments. They come to us in a natural way from our creator and can never be falsified anywhere at any time, especially not by the positive rights decreed by governments.

Peter Schiff for Senate

It is looking more and more like he will run. He set up an exploratory committee recently. View the website here.

Terrible Government Schools

Only 3.5% of Arizona high school kids can pass the US citizenship test according to a new study by the Goldwater Institute. This is compared to the 92.4% first-try pass rate by new immigrants. Those who support stealing our money in order to run public schools need to see what actually goes on there (hint: it's not learning). Then they need to watch John Stossel's "Still Stupid in America."

My solution? In order of the most urgent actions: 1) abolish teacher's union legislation at the State and Federal levels 2) abolish the Department of Education 3) abolish educational department bureaucracies at the State level 4) abolish public schools altogether or at least return the choice back to the local communities. These four steps would guarantee lower cost and higher quality schooling.

Scary Forecast from Gerald Celente

Are States Too Small To Secede?

A recent post by John Payne from the "The American Conservative" explains why the objection to secession based on States being too small is completely erroneous. In his July 3rd post, entitled "Celebrate Secession", Payne provides four reasons why secession right now is a good idea. On the size of our States, he writes,

Many of our states are as large as most other countries. There are more people in California than Canada; more in New York than Taiwan, Australia, or North Korea; more in Florida than the Netherlands; almost as many in Missouri as Ireland; and more in Texas than Austria, Switzerland, and Isreal combined. Furthermore, our state economies are even larger than our populations relative to the rest of the world. Check out this map to see what country the GDP of each state matches up with; it’s pretty mind boggling. New Jersey is on par with Russia; Nebraska with the Czech Republic; North Carolina with that supposed paragon of social democracy Sweden. The most common objection I hear to secession is that the states are too small to survive on their own, but that position has no basis in reality.

The map is rather interesting. Virginia is on par in economic size relative to Sweden. No doubt with 1/3 of our incomes back, our economy would be much larger than the socialist Swedes.