Not everyone abstains from voting, but those who do...

The white part of this image came from a tweet someone posted after the presidential election, most likely a Hillary supporter.  The black part was added as a response to the tweet(maybe a Trump supporter).  Here is my response:

Not all of us abstained from voting. But those of us who did refused to participate in an immoral system of aggression against our neighbors designed to create the illusion of legitimacy for a government that uses force, coercion, and violence to steal the wealth and freedoms of our friends, family, and neighbors.

Government is a weapon

Hillary Clinton supporters react to Hillary's loss to Donald Trump on election night.

The Hillary supporters in this photo are likely not really thinking about how government is going to be used against them. They are probably just upset because their "team" lost. But one of the reasons they are upset is because of how Donald Trump being president is going to negatively affect them. I think it's a shame that the office of the president is so powerful that people have to be fearful of who has that office. The founding fathers created a presidency that was so weak that it shouldn't matter who it is to regular Americans.

But every president pushes a little further outside of the boundaries that the Constitution sets for him. This has happened with every president, but really took of with Abraham Lincoln, and hasn't slowed down since then. There is now a cycle that repeats every time a new president is elected.

The cycle goes like this: People spend 4 or 8 years supporting the president with the R or D behind his name (just because it’s the same letter they carry behind their name) as he grabs more power for the office of president than his predecessor did, cheering him on as he further erodes liberties, enslaves the residents of the nation through taxation and inflation, and makes government more authoritarian. Then they spend the next 4 or 8 years in a panic as they fear how all these powers will be used against them as they prepare and plan to win next time so that they can start the cycle again.

A better system would be one where people respected the non-aggression principle, which says that you don't use force against anyone unless you are defending yourself, you family, your property, or your rights. It says that you can use force, just not to be the aggressor, only to be the defender. Libertarians believe that this principle applies to all areas of our live, including government. It's wrong for a person to use force to take their neighbor's property, and it doesn't become okay when it is the government taking your neighbor's property. If we vote for a politician, we are choosing someone who will use government to take our neighbors wealth or freedoms, and this violates the non-aggression property.

The democrats in this picture likely cheered on President Obama as he used government to spy on Americans, to punish their enemies, to steal wealth from Americans to fund programs they wanted, and to murder innocent people, and now they are afraid that President Trump is going to do the same, but he is going to use government against democrats.

Of course, now republicans will spend the next 4-8 years cheering on Trump as he grabs even more power for the office of the president and uses the power against their enemies, only to be weeping and gnashing their teeth when the next democrat is elected as president as they fear how government will then be used against them.

The Driver's License Nightmare

Getting a driver's license is a great moment in the life of a teen. It's a sign of maturity and of nearing adulthood, and it's a license for freedom.

While a system of insuring that drivers know the rules of the road and have competent driving skills is important to the safety of all drivers and the efficient flow of traffic, having a State-run monopoly issuing driver's licenses is a horrible way to manage this system. Driver's licenses offices have a well deserved reputation for being inefficient, having rude employees, and being difficult to work with. In the Houston area where we are,it takes a minimum of a month to get an appointment, and you can only get one that quickly if you are willing to drive 60 miles from home. The closest office to us required a 2 month wait. 

3 of the 6 kiosks used for check in are out of service.

After waiting that month, if you are missing one of the 10 forms they require you to have, you are sent away and required to go to the back of the line, meaning you have another month wait and another 60 mile drive. 

Once in the office it is likely that you will experience at least one employee who will be short with you when answering questions, or downright rude. 

This is all happens because the government has a monopoly on licensing drivers. Monopolies have no incentive to offer good service or a good product. If you don't like the service the State provides, you can't go anywhere else to obtain a license. This doesn't happen in the free market. In the marketplace, if you don't enjoy the service or product a company provides, you go to a different company. If enough people do this, the company has a financial incentive to improve its service/product, or they risk going out of business. 

So I was thinking about how drivers could be licensed without a government monopoly. I'm not claiming to have come up with a perfect solution, but the system we have now is horrible and people just live with it, so why not consider something different. 

Maybe we could have auto insurance companies issue licenses. Insurers have a financial reason to verify that their customers know he rules of the road and are skilled and able to drive safely. The safer their drivers are, the more profitable they can be. They might offer different grades of licenses. Go through the bare minimum of training, maybe 100 hours of classroom and behind the wheel instruction and you could get a rate, say $100 a month, for your insurance. Go to more advanced training like defensive driving or accident avoidance and they might give you a rate of $75/month. This system would encourage drivers to complete more training to get more advance licenses for cheaper rates. 

The abundance of poor service offered at State-run licensing offices would become a thing of the past. If we didn't like the service we received at the Farmer's Insurance licensing office, we could swap to Geiko, Allstate, or many other insurers. This is not to say we could find someone who who license you if you were not qualified to drive, because these insurers would still want to be sure you were a safe and qualified driver before making themselves financially responsible for you. 

I don't know if this is the system that would be best to replace the state run system we have now, but I know that the state run monopoly that now exists is terrible and should be replaced. 

A hero should keep their oaths.

Literally the very first thing a soldier swears is to defend the Constitution. Then they proceed to fight illegal undeclared wars of aggression on orders given by politicians who regularly write laws that disregard the Constitutional rights of Americans.

The Two Party System

This image is trying to illustrate the idea that the two party system of politics in America(on one side is democrats and the other side is republicans) are supposed to be polar opposites from each other, and that libertarians have a completely different idea about who should govern your life.  In fact though, the two parties are not polar opposites.  They do try to portray themselves as this image suggests

 Democrats would like you to believe that their party stands for individual liberty - allowing people to make their own decisions while at the same time confiscating a large part of your property to redistribute to poorer and so-called "disadvantaged" people.  In fact though, they work to control people's decisions, such as what wages they are allowed to work for and what tools or weapons they may possess to defend themselves,

Republicans would like you to believe that their party stands for allowing people to decide for themselves how their money is spent, while at the same time making laws to force people to live by their own moral code.  In fact though, they also confiscate a large part of your property, but they want to spend it on waging wars and funding the police state needed to enforce their moral code.

Libertarians understand that the best way for men to progress, be healthy, happy, and wealthy, is to allow them to run their own lives and control their own property.  Mutually working together making voluntary decisions and trades is a better(though not perfect) system than allowing a central organization to use threats and violence to enforce the will of an elite group of government officials.

Who is the biggest bully in your school?

Link to the story in the Washington Post

Who is the most dangerous person in your school?  If you have a police officer who is assigned to your school, he or she is likely the most dangerous person you will encounter while getting an education.  The best thing that you can do if you or a friend (or even an enemy) has personal encounter with a cop, is to record the interaction.  Generally, people will behave better when they know they are being recorded, but there are many videos of adult police officers physically abusing young students to prove that is not always the case.

When dealing with police, keep these things in mind:
1. Police are trained to lie, and it is acceptable for them to lie.
2. Police are trained to make requests sound like demands.  Example: "I'm going to have to ask you to open your bag for me."  Although this may sound like an order, notice the language is "have to ask."  While you are film the encounter, get them to commit to an order by asking, "Is that an order or are you asking me to?"  If they don't have legal standing to order you to, they won't commit to it on film.
3.  Police often respond to perceived insults with violence, so it is best to be respectful.
4.  Police often respond to any short delay in obey them with violence, so proceed with caution and continue to film.

Remember that the camera is your friend.  The officer in this video may end up getting in trouble, but that would not have happened if someone had not caught this on their phone.  Any time you stand before a judge or a school official without video evidence, they are most likely to side with the cop over you.

The True Political Spectrum

In America, we're taught that there is a political that has the democrats on one side and the republicans on the other.  Democrats are said to be on the left, and republicans on the right.  Democrats may be referred to as left-wingers, and republicans as right-wingers.  People who try to mix both beliefs are called centrists (meaning in the center).

In reality, there is not much different between these two "sides."  When you boil down all their beliefs to the bone, they both revolve around the idea that some person or group of people have the right and authority to rule over you and to claim ownership of your life and property.  We call this belief authoritarianism.

The opposite of this belief in authoritarianism is voluntaryism.  It is the belief that all people own themselves and that no other person can have a higher or better claim on the ownership of their body or property than the individual can.  It is the belief that all the ways people interact should be voluntary.  Neither force, nor coercion, nor threats should be used to make someone do what they don't want to, or to stop them from doing what they want to do, as long as they are not harming anyone else or violating another person's rights.

All governments are authoritarian.  But some are more authoritarian than others.  North Korea is one of the most authoritarian governments.  They control much of their citizens lives, such as the books that can be read, the movies they can watch, the news they are told, where they can work.

The American Constitutional government is a less authoritarian government.  The Constitution was written to clearly define what government was allowed to do and to put limits on how much the government could interfere in the lives of it's citizens.  Unfortunately, the government has claimed more and more power for itself over the years and is becoming more authoritarian every year.  America does not have the limited government that the writers of the Constitution intended, and the actual government is much closer to the oppressively authoritarian government of North Korea than most Americans would like to admit.

America claims to be the "land of the free," but it is more accurate to say that it is the "land of the people who are more free than some people in the world and less free than others."  The only truly free society is one follows the principles of voluntaryism.