I feel like I keep repeating myself. Last month, I wrote that Government Thinks You are Fat and Stupid and so they need to set hard rules to keep all of us lemmings from walking off cliffs. In that article, I discussed proposals by the state of California to further regulate and tax sugary beverages (something we already have to deal with here in San Francisco) in the name of public health.
This time, it’s The City here to tell you how stupid you are.
Governments continue the perpetual war in Oceania, Eastasia, or Eurasia—for us, tobacco, plastics, and soda—in order to keep the people distracted and to justify their own jobs. It seems that every election cycle, another major city floats a soda tax as a do-good measure to improve public health. I saw it almost happen in New York and then actually become law in Philadelphia, and it followed me out to San Francisco in 2016 (Prop V).
Here is a quick highlight reel of what that the LPSF has accomplished in the second half of 2018. Looking at all this together, it's clear that we are growing fast and accomplishing quite a lot with little resources. I'm very proud of the work that we've done and the progress we are making. THANK YOU again to all of our members, donors, activists, speakers, volunteers and friends. Without your support, this wouldn't be possible-- and with your continued support, 2019 will be even better!
This will be my final regular article for the LPSF Newsletter, and for a change, I’m going to go with a normal title and not one of my eclectic ones that often had folks scratching their heads. I have voted with my feet and moved to New Hampshire to be part of the Free State Project, an effort to convince 20,000 Libertarians to move to the “Live Free or Die” state to help push it in a more liberty-oriented direction. I’ve already jumped into activism here and joined the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, which reviews the bills written by state legislators and fights against the statist ones and supports pro-freedom ones, and also my local “Porcupines” group.
The full title of this book is Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. It’s an inflammatory title, not helped by the lurid red book jacket highlighting a bright yellow smiley face with a Hitler mustache drawn on it.
If an Internet troll who decided to take his habit of posting annoying memes on social media sites were to take his efforts to the next level by writing and publishing a book, it might well look something like this!
It’s Giving Week, where people come together to celebrate the spirit of giving. It is truly inspiring and humbling to see our fellow man donate their time and money to support causes that they believe in. We come together as a community and show how much we care about each other, and our compassion is celebrated.
We have been through two intense election cycles in 2018, neither of which produced good results for liberty in San Francisco or California. Facing the ballot results can be discouraging, to say the least. Measures that we have devoted many days of work to oppose passed with ease and candidates that we spent our free nights and weekends supporting came last in their elections. It would be easy to throw in the towel and give up on defending liberty, conceding that our efforts don’t make any difference after all.
Although... don’t they?
Why do government bureaucrats often throw common sense out the window with inflexible, illogical rules? A perfect example comes from Southern California where the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which is the second largest in the nation, has started enforcing a policy it’s had for years but has largely been ignoring. Now that enforcement began earlier this school year, parents are rightly up in arms.
In September, Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 1793, Cannabis convictions: resentencing. The bill amends Prop 64 (2016), the Adult Use of Marijuana Act and requires the state to erase or reduce prior sentences for marijuana possession. Assemblymember Rob Bonta, who sponsored the bill, stated “Long after paying their debt to society, people shouldn’t continue to face the collateral consequences, like being denied a job or housing, because they have an outdated conviction on their record.” AB 1793 lets people who committed victimless crimes move on with their lives.
It's kind of amazing that something so central to many of the issues we see and read and hear about in the news every day, something on which billions of dollars and countless hours of scheming by political "professionals" are expended every year, continues to be so widely misunderstood. Yes, that description can be applied to government itself, but here I'm simply talking about voting.
