Between the mess at the local levels, the mess in Madison and the mess in Washington, it's amazing that people are still as complacent as they are these days.

Perhaps that's because we believe that everything will be OK so long as we just let things run their course. Or maybe its because we are continually inundated with people telling us that we have the best and brightest in charge and that if we just let them run things without question, everything will turn out just fine and dandy.

Greed. Power. Corruption. It’s all in a day’s work for our elected officials. And yet, we keep punching the ballot for these people, so apparently we either don’t mind or don’t care that we’re being ruled by megalomaniacs and crooks in fancy suits.

Perhaps things have finally come to a head here. Have politicians always been scum? Probably, but I think that there used to be people who cared – or at least cared enough to try and keep things in check. We have a much firmer grasp on what’s going on with our favorite reality shows than we do reality; and as such we have spawned such a culture of apathy that there ought to be a new term created in order to accurately convey it.

I would like to remind fellow patriots to not let the statists get away with marginalizing the most important holiday of the year by renaming it the "4th of July." This is making our awesome "Independence Day" less worthy of the fantastic celebration and reflection it deserves.

Please remind everyone you come across that uses the lesser name the value in our nation's independence and winning the fight for the truths we hold so dear.

Happy Independence Day!

By Tim Nerenz, the Libertarian Party Candidate for U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin's 2nd District

http://timnerenz.com/content/independence-day

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The important divide in American civic life is not between Right and Left on the horizontal axis; it is between Up and Down on the vertical – do we want more or less government?

Where we each place ourselves on this vertical scale depends largely upon our understanding of the relationship between the individual and society. Does society exist for the benefit of its individual members (the individualist’s orientation)? Or do individuals exist for the benefit of their society (the socialist’s)? It is not an irrelevant abstraction; the answer shapes our view of the world and the role of government in our lives.

Government is the organized use of force to constrain action. To the individualist, it is the state itself which needs to be constrained. To the socialist, it is the individual. These are incompatible philosophies. One can only be advanced if the other retreats. This is the dimension of civic life measured on the vertical axis.

Today’s Republicans and Democrats are both socialists, in that they seek to restrain the individual to benefit of society. They differ only on the purposes to which they would turn the power of the state against its citizens. They push and pull to the right and left against each other along the horizontal axis, but when given control of the levers of government, they have both pushed the vertical up with equal gusto.

In broad terms, Democrats constrain economic liberty to achieve their notion of social justice, while Republicans constrain personal liberty to achieve their notion of moral order. Whenever state power constrains its individual citizens, Liberty is lost; whether it is the Left or Right hand doing the taking is of secondary concern.

Part 1

http://timnerenz.com/content/libertarian-health-care-medical-choice...

There are many reasons to oppose government-run health care, but we only really need the first one; the government will run it.

What is the problem with our health care system? It’s not quality – we have the best people, equipment, and facilities in the world. It’s not capacity – we have enough providers, equipment, laboratories, and treatment facilities to care for everyone. It’s not distribution – there are clinics and physicians spread across every nook and cranny of the country.