It’s been August of 2009 since I made a blog entry and even longer since I wrote something substantial on the topic of Liberty. Life is busy and putting current events and debates in a light of Liberty often feels like talking to a wall. I am just one person on the internet. Those with the megaphones are going to frame the issues in the light they want.

However, this just means I’ve been making my case in shorter messages on social networks that I frequent. I’m convinced some people have blocked my updates on their Facebook feeds. I have been unfriended and blocked on Twitter for bashing the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration.

But, I will not give into terrorists! The message of Liberty is too important. Besides, those who block and unfriend me are obviously not real friends. So there is the unintended benefit of weeding out the fakes.

Of the five latest blog posts that show up here, one of them is about the right to be naked. It is entirely coincidental that I am again writing about that six months later. This time, I am prompted by a tweet from one of my favorite–and real–friends. The NY Times ran a story about a nude window display in Greenwich Village, NYC.

Reading Right to be Naked will explain why laws disallowing nudity violate Liberty so I won’t go into that.

The question that we need to answer is not which opinion we have is the right one. They are both right. Whether you believe people should be allowed to walk around naked or not is not the issue. We cannot make laws for an entire population based on the whims of a majority or minority in any given time period. The question to answer is whether or not we are a free people.

I will quote a paragraph from the article and then smash it to pieces:

“If you’re walking down a street in New York City and someone is naked in the window — and so children and whoever can see it — you’re depriving people of their choice,” said Daniel S. Connolly, a managing partner at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, and a former lawyer for the city who handled public nudity cases. “That’s where you butt up against other people’s rights.”

This sounds good and reasonable. We obviously shouldn’t deprive people of their right to free choice. Afterall, if we do that, we are violating another’s rights and that is a problem. I have no qualms with that idea: it is the fundamental principle of Liberty. The problem is the way this is framed.

It is completely rubbish.

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The most popular topic in the political world lately has been health care. I have tried to refrain from writing about it because of its charged nature.  However, I haven’t been completely quiet about the issue. I have my opinions and Facebook has seen quite a bit of it!

First off, I am competely against the bill and the idea of universal health care. There is no such thing as a good bill that is thousand pages long and there is no such thing as a well run government system. Those are both fairytales.

It is entirely ineffective that those on the side of the bill resort to name calling in the form of the Bush Administration’s tactic of calling critics unpatriotic and the Obama Administration’s tactic of calling critics racists. Both are unproductive and not what a debate is about.

As expected, those who want the bill passed don’t want a debate; they just pay lip service to the idea. The real debate is not whether we should have reform or not. No one disagrees that the current system is imperfect and needs to be reformed. However, reform is a vague term.

There is no guarantee that any old reform will make things better. Things aren’t so bad that there is no way the government can make it worse. We aren’t at rock bottom.

The real debate should be what kind of reform we should have. The only way we can have an intelligent debate on is if we understand what the problems are and not how to solve the symtoms.

The problem is not that we have an estimated 45 million uninsured people in the United States. Having health insurance and having health care is not the same thing. For whatever reasons, we have become conditioned to believing that the two terms are interchangeable. It is how the media talks about it and it is how the politicians talk about it.

The underlying problem with health insurance is that we are insuring every medical procedure under the sun. It doesn’t matter if its a check up, a cold, cancer, or broken bones. The system insures it all. This is not the case in any other insurance industry. No one buys car insurance to cover oil changes and tune-ups. We don’t buy house insurance for carpet stains.

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Almost everything the government has done to rescue our faltering economy has been kicking it while it is down. From the bailouts to the stimulus packages to cap and trade and universal health care bills, it is a miracle the economy is functioning at all. It is crazy to criticize saving the economy, the environment, and improving the standard of living for Americans so that is not what I’m doing. I want the economy to come back, the environment to be clean, and the standard of living to be high.

The disconnect is that while the government says they want to do all those good things, they will end up accomplishing the opposite.

I’ve talked plenty about how the government’s attempts at rescuing the economy is the equivalent of giving a drug addict more drugs, how man-made climate change is a load of crap, and how the problem with healthcare is the excessive amount of government involvement. So, I won’t beat a dead horse. I will instead tackle another unpopular topic: the minimum wage.

If it was up to me, the minimum wage would be $0. The minimum wage is promoted as a means to create wealth equality and provide all Americans with a livable income but, the reality is nothing that is promoted. A minimum wage keeps more workers out of work.

The government is essentially saying that if you do not have the skills to warrant whatever the minimum wage is, you should not work. Sound backwards? It’s not. There is no reason for a company to hire you for $7.25 to do a job that is worth much less. So where there was a chance for people without skills to take a lower wage to learn the skills so that they can get ahead in life, the government takes it away.

If you made some wrong decisions or life just threw you a bad hand, you no longer have the means to work your way up. The government eliminated the steps at the bottom of the ladder and if you can’t jump high enough to reach the new bottom, you are screwed. To fix this unemployment problem, the government puts a band-aid over it by offering welfare for the people the government put out of work! How grand.

To compound the problem, the government via the Federal Reserve inflates the money supply to fund all their welfare/warfare projects and our cost of living goes up. To solve this problem, the government raises the minimum wage because it is now more expensive to live. The increased minimum wage puts more workers out of work and the government needs to offer more welfare by printing, borrowing, or taxing and the cost of living goes up more! This is the vicious cycle created by government and further made worse by more government intervention.

No one in Congress is going to vote no to the increase in the minimum wage because it is politically unpopular–except Ron Paul and a few others who understand economics and unintended consequences.

No one wants to see the actual picture of what the minimum wage does. When people criticize the minimum wage and call for its abolition–like myself–we are labeled as monsters who do not care about the poor. I am not multi-millionaire and I don’t make that much money. I just understand economics. I don’t care about the poor as much as I care about myself–I won’t lie about it.

I find little wrong with putting yourself, family, and friends first before random strangers. It is terrible that people are living in poverty but I am not so far away that the policies I support will benefit me at the expense of the poor. It will benefit everyone.

It is an economic lie that the minimum wage is good for the economy. If the minimum wage can solve our poverty problems, why not just make it $100/hr and everyone would be rich! Obviously, we can see that it would be disastrous and practically everyone will be out of a job or prices will be sky high for everything.

So as usual, the government is kicking the economy while it is down with this minimum wage increase.

In the many efforts to close the budget gap in New York, Governor Patterson is proposing to free the sale of wine to supermarkets. It is unfortunate that this only being discussed now that the government needs money. There are no good reasons why supermarkets aren’t allowed to sell wine now. Ideally, any store that wants to sell wine should be allowed to.

Why do wine and liquor stores get a monopoly? We know that monopolies are bad. The more competition there is in the market, the better it will be for the end consumer–us.

I’ve seen little flyers at my local supermarket in support of this and I’ve heard the arguments against it. Those against the freeing of wine sales have a weak case at best.

“In addition to charging grocery stores franchise fees of varying amounts for the right to sell wine, it would nearly triple the excise tax on wine sales and eliminate financing for the New York Wine and Grape Foundation, a trade group.”

An increase in excise taxes is a bad thing but the elimination or reduction of government financing for the New York Wine and Grape Foundation is perfectly fine. Why do they need subsidies in the first place? If the foundation cannot exist without government aid then it shouldn’t exist at all. The active participants in the wine industry can maintain their own foundation.

As a consumer, I would love it if I could buy wine at my local supermarket. However, I wouldn’t expect any specialty wines at a supermarket. There will always be a market for specialty wine and liquor stores. It will likely be a smaller market and their business models may have to change but, that is how business is. There is never a guarantee that your market will stay the same forever nor a guarantee that you will stay in business forever.

The mere fact that the government grants wine stores a monopoly on the sale of wine makes consumers worse off. The availability of wine will increase and the price will decrease. This is better for the wine industry as a whole as the market will expand.

“A coalition known as the Last Store on Main Street, representing 2,742 New York wine sellers and liquor store owners, says the move would force more than 1,000 such stores out of business and lead to a loss of more than 4,000 jobs.”

Those who lose their jobs due to this can find jobs elsewhere. There is no reason why millions should suffer just because thousands will lose their jobs. The benefit to society is greater than the loss.

“I’m a parent,” he said. “For the 25 years I’ve been in business, I’ve been extremely conscious of people who try to buy liquor when they’re not legally entitled to it. So I’m concerned kids might be able to get alcohol more easily. I don’t want those kids on the road.”

The argument of an increased sale of alcohol to minors is asinine. Supermarkets already sell beer and card their patrons. The process of the sale of beer can just as easily be applied to the sale wine. This is clearly a moot point. Ideally, there would be no age restriction on the purchase of alcohol but, this is the society we live in.

“And are more people going to drink more wine just because it’s in a grocery store? I don’t think so,” Mr. Massoud said. “I think the demand is finite.”

That is just a gross misunderstanding of economics. Demand is always infinite. It is supply and price that keeps demand in check. We always want more things. If prices are lowered, demand will go up. It is an absolute certainty that more people will drink wine if it was more widely available and cheaper.

It is about time NY got rid of the wine monopoly. It will be better for all of us.

The war on drugs has never and will never reach its objective to fixing the drug problem. It only creates new problems while making the existing drug problem worse. In a CNN editorial, Jeffrey A. Miron, a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University, says that we should legalize drugs to stop the violence.

“Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.

Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after.”

It is almost second nature for people to want government to enact laws forbidding behaviors, substances, or activities that they won’t agree with. This has mostly to do with the “government is the solution” mentality. In reality, government is not the solution. This is why prohibition of alcohol failed so miserably in the 1920′s.

“The right policy, therefore, is to legalize drugs while using regulation and taxation to dampen irresponsible behavior related to drug use, such as driving under the influence. This makes more sense than prohibition because it avoids creation of a black market. This approach also allows those who believe they benefit from drug use to do so, as long as they do not harm others.”

This is the sensible policy because the war on drugs is never going to eliminate the use of drugs. Those who want to use drugs are still going to use drugs. The only outcome of the war on drugs is death as black markets are created.

“The U.S. repealed Prohibition of alcohol at the height of the Great Depression, in part because of increasing violence and in part because of diminishing tax revenues.”

Although I would rather see sensible policies enacted and a respect for Liberty displayed when we aren’t in an economic sinkhole, I’ll accept it anyway. Perhaps the government will be forced to legalize drugs in an attempt to generate more revenue in a quickly shrinking economy.