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The Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell explains why your government does not want you to be able to hold cash:
[T]here are two reasons why statists don’t like cash and instead would prefer all of us to use digital money (under their rules, of course, not something outside their control like bitcoin).
First, tax collectors can’t easily monitor all cash transactions, so they want a system that would allow them to track and tax every possible penny of our income and purchases.
Second, Keynesian central planners would like to force us to spend more money by imposing negative interest rates (i.e., taxes) on our savings, but that can’t be done if people can hold cash.
See parts I, and II.
Related video:
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 If you would like to get more freedom in your life then the Free State Project (FSP) might be for you. FSP is an effort to recruit 20,000 liberty-loving people to move to New Hampshire. On February 3, 2016 FSP announced that more than 20,000 signatures had been obtained—a Statement of Intent to move to the “live free or die” state within five years. Here’s a handful of the 101 reasons to move to New Hampshire.
Secession
New Hampshire’s constitution does not specifically prohibit secession.
Automobile Insurance
New Hampshire is the only state that does not mandate automobile liability insurance or charge a related fee for being uninsured. Compared to national averages, New Hampshire has more insured drivers, and, as of 2014, the 3rd lowest insurance rates in the country.
New Hampshire legislators are only paid a salary of $100 per year, helping ensure the existence of a citizen legislature committed to public service.
Accessibility of Officials
New Hampshire officials, from town clerks to the state governor, are accessible to the public and generally have a “walk-right-in” office policy.
Right to Revolution
New Hampshire’s constitution expressly protects citizens’ right to revolution (Section 1, Article 10).
Sales Tax
New Hampshire has no general sales tax.
Best Representation per Capita
New Hampshire offers the best representation of any state in the nation with a 400-member House of Representatives for a population of 1.3 million people.
Income Tax
New Hampshire has no general personal income tax. Dividends and interest are taxed at only 5%.
Eminent Domain
New Hampshire state law prohibits the use of eminent domain for private use or private development.
Inventory Tax
New Hampshire has no inventory tax.
Gun Laws
New Hampshire offers some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation: no license is required to open carry and a concealed carry license is available on a shall-issue basis.
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 Of the recent debates, Peggy Noonan writes in her column in the WSJ that she realized she was witnessing
something grave, something historic. “Something important is ending. … What is happening now is bigger and less remediable in part because the battles in the past were over conservatism, an actual political philosophy. … It is hard to believe what replaces it will be better.”
This column has been pretty devoted the past nine months to everything that gave rise to this moment, to Mr. Trump. His supporters disrespect the system—fair enough, it’s earned disrespect. They see Washington dysfunction and want to break through it—fair enough. In a world of thugs, they say, he will be our thug. Politics is a freak show? He’s our freak. They know they’re
lowering standards by giving the top political job in America to a man who never held office. But they feel Washington lowered all standards first. They hate political correctness—there is no one in the country the past quarter-century who has not been embarrassed or humiliated for using the wrong word or concept or having the wrong thought—and see his rudeness as proof he hates PC too.
He is a divider of the Republican Party and yet an enlarger of the tent. His candidacy is contributing to record turnouts in primary after primary, and surely bringing in Democrats and independents. But it should concern his supporters that his brain appears to be a grab bag of impulses, and although he has many views and opinions he doesn’t seem to know anything about public policy or the way the
White House or the government actually works.
Someone compared Donald Trump to the Kim Kardashian of politics. There’s a lot of glitz, glamour and outrageous stunts—all emotion with little thought. One of Trump’s supporters admitted to Ms. Noonan that he knows that Trump is a “junkyard dog.” And Trump’s supporters, unfortunately, think his character is equal to the moment.
Related: Trump responds to Romney’s attack
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 Here is America’s travesty: Last night in Detroit, the 2016 presidential candidate, the one with far
and away the best formula for America—Rand Paul—is long gone. The honorable Dr. Ben Carson also has fallen by the wayside. When looking at remaining Republican and Democratic candidates, it looks as if Americans are going to send to the White House (1) a policy-bereft, self-aggrandizer, with zero government experience or (2) a habitual liar, morally deficient, national security risk.
For their part, the four Republicans on stage in Detroit showed, if they showed anything, Americans that they were either (A) totally ignorant on foreign policy or (B) lock step (or worse) with the failed McCain, Graham, Wolfowitz, Libby, Kristol, Kagan (Bush was a pawn here) neocon foreign policy theme that gave America the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Sorting through the minutia of last night’s well-run Fox debate accomplishes nothing, as apparently little was said that is going to change many viewers’ minds. The candidates performed pretty much as expected. And Americans are now left in a quandary, unlikely to be resolved to the benefit of the country or most of its citizens.
Watch the debate below:
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 Over the weekend my daughter and I attended Sig Sauer Academy’s eight-hour
course on Kidnapping Prevention for Young Women. This was the logical next step in constructing her self-defense mindset. For years now she has been shooting at our local gun club at our Friday night kid’s shoot and is comfortable around guns. A self-defense course was our next step and by traveling to Sig it gave us some precious time together to discuss her self-defense. One key takeaway from the course is to use your common sense—avoid vulnerable situations. Easy enough to say but
sometimes difficult to do.
KIDNAPPING IS AN ALL TOO COMMON OCCURRENCE THAT RECEIVES LITTLE ATTENTION UNTIL IT HITS TOO CLOSE TO HOME.
Kidnapping Prevention for Young Women is a hands on course for girls between 13 to 17 years of age and their parent/guardian. This course will cover situational awareness, critical decision making and strategic planning for the entire family. Kidnapping and sexual assault are every parent’s worst nightmare. The young women in this course will learn proven techniques to survive any
abduction or assault.
Prerequisite
There are no prerequisites for this course. Parents please register and pay for yourself, but not your child as you will be participating in the class together.
Course Outline
- Use Facebook and social media to your advantage
- New age of communication
- You have a voice
- Use of eye contact
- Threat recognition and situational awareness
- Kidnapping defense
- Wrist grab defense
- Choke defense
- Defense from being grabbed from behind
- Defense from rape
- Getting back to your feet
- Strength in numbers
Here the course instructor, John Fain, shows martial arts advocate and consultant, Tom Callos some of his methods:
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Why has Donald Trump been setting attendance records at his huge political rallies? Perhaps because Mr. Trump is the only candidate in the 2016 presidential race who is willing to come out and address the threatening issue of Muslim/radical Islam front and center. Europe and America face no bigger threat than radical Islam, and Americans are rallying around Donald Trump as the candidate who is addressing
their fears.
Americans who have not traveled to Europe in recent years perhaps can be excused for not fully understanding the urgency of today’s terrifying immigration issue. The phrase “Taharrush Gamea” may mean little to Americans, but all over Europe, it is a different matter. Here the Spectator (UK based) explains that “Taharrush Gamea” is a phenomenon of the Arab world where gangs
of young men encircle, grope, and in some cases sexually assault women at large public gatherings. The Spectator discusses attacks in Cologne, Germany, by North African and Arab men and goes into length regarding similar problems in Sweden as well as in Finland.
Police officers in Stockholm are instructed not to reveal the ethnicity or nationality of any suspects lest they be accused of racism. The Sweden Democrats are the anti-immigration populist force in Sweden-no longer a fringe element but the third-largest party after the election of 2014. Opinion polls suggest they are growing ever stronger. They are reviled by all other parties who try to fight hem by
rejecting their every claim as baseless. As a result, immigration cannot be discussed frankly in Sweden. If you mention anything negative about refugees or immigration, you’re accused of playing into the hands of the reviled far-right. A result, even legitimate concerns are silenced or labeled xenophobic. The recent migration crisis has changed this only slightly.
Who among today’s American presidential hopefuls seems to fully understand the urgency of the North African, Arab immigration crisis and is willing to confront the crisis first hand? The clear answer is Donald Trump.
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 “Government exists to
protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.” (Ronald Reagan)
The quote from President Reagan is worth remembering the next time a politician promises to get a law passed because it is for our own good, writes Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to do anything without first receiving some form of permission from one government authority or another. According to both the Brookings Institution and the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, roughly 30 percent of the workforce is covered by some form of occupational licensing, from florists to funeral attendants, from tree trimmers to make-up
artists.
Food seems to be a particular obsession for lawmakers. The constant tinkering with school lunches can perhaps be justified, since public schools are government run. But what are we to make of the fact that 19 states ban the sale of raw milk? California actually deploys official “food confiscation teams” to raid the homes of people found to have purchased illicit milk. Even the federal
government gets in on that one, making it illegal to sell raw milk across state lines. Want more? Arkansas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee have joined Berkeley, Calif., in levying special taxes on sodas. North Carolina bans the sale of rare hamburgers.
With increasing regularity, government, whether federal, state, or local, is inserting itself into every aspect of our lives. In fact, can you think of any area of your life not regulated by lawmakers “according to their morals, judgment, preferences or whims?”
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 During the 1990s, neoconservatives were suffering a terrible case of
ennui. Sure, the Clinton administration had expanded NATO and gotten the nation into several brushfire wars in remote locales, but nothing really exciting had happened. After nearly a decade of nothing to write about but peace and prosperity, David Brooks urged the nation to emulate Teddy Roosevelt, who “saw foreign policy activism and patriotism as remedies for cultural threats he perceived at home.”
And of course, hawkish think tanks convened conferences and commissioned books. The lodestar of neoconservative foreign policy thought in the 1990s was the edited volume Present Dangers, which warned of grave and imminent threats from Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, although for
Kristol and Kagan, the real “‘present danger’ lies in America’s hesitancy.”
One guy who made only a few fleeting appearances in service of inflating the other threats? Osama bin Laden. As if to prove the old aphorism that if everything is important, nothing is important, the neoconservatives devoted time and energy to drawing up a laundry list of arguments for foreign policy activism and mentioned bin Laden only in passing.
They weren’t alone, of course: hardly anyone was sounding the klaxon about al Qaeda in the 1990s, and if they had, no one would have listened. Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates, whose inflated reputation is a mark of how bad our defense policy establishment is, famously remarked that
when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.
Of course, much of the story here, which wasn’t Gates’ point but should have been, is false positives. The U.S. defense establishment spends hundreds of billions defending against remote threats—and starting wars—using a logic that would literally bankrupt the country if it were
applied across non-“national security” threats.
But just as the Republican foreign policy establishment warned of monsters under every bed while missing the burglar coming in the window, the GOP political establishment has created an array of bogeymen that work well for raising money from the GOP donor class, but don’t represent actual dangers, to the party or to the country. You can say almost anything in a fundraising letter from a
conservative think tank or magazine and raise money on it, with little scrutiny of the claims therein. Glenn Beck is still a thing.
At the level of electoral politics, it’s just as bad. As Marco Rubio’s campaign implodes, for example, he is attempting to vacuum money from high-level donors, pulling for all he is worth on the argument that he’s the one man who can stop Donald Trump. This despite his having won
only one state and still polling badly compared to Trump in his home state of Florida.
In foreign policy, and in electoral politics, there is no cost for threat inflation, and no cost for focusing on phantoms that distract from real dangers. The people giving money to campaigns, to think tanks, and to magazines, just have better things to do than catalog the falsifiable claims made by their suitors, let alone to follow up on them.
The problem with all this is that with incompetents at the operational level, and their benefactors occupied with business or other pursuits, occasionally you get a 9/11 and occasionally you get a Donald Trump. Unless the permanent campaign apparatus on the Right, the GOP foreign policy apparatus, or the donors that fund them see the light, the clown car will roll on, from election to election, foreign
policy crisis to foreign policy crisis.
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 For Donald Trump, the 2016 presidential election hangs in the balance at midnight 15 March in Florida. Trump must win Florida or he will almost certainly not have enough delegates to win a first ballot nomination at the convention. This would guarantee the end of his candidacy. Donald Trump’s supporters, across the state, are going to
have to wage a monumental battle to prevent defeat by, as Pat Buchanan warns, “The Oligarchs’ Super-Pac Anti-Trump Savagery.”
Fully 116 members of the GOP’s national security community, many of them veterans of Bush administrations, have signed an open letter threatening that, if Trump is nominated, they will all desert, and some will defect – to Hillary Clinton!…
Robert Kagan, wailed in the Washington Post, “The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Are they serious?
Victory for Clinton would mean her remaking the Supreme Court, killing all chances that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, or that we could get another justice like Antonin Scalia before 2021.
What are these renegades and turncoats so anguished about?
…
Trump calls the Iraq War many of them championed an historic blunder.
…
Can millionaires and billionaires who back open borders, mass immigration, globalization and the disappearance of nation states into transnational collectives overwhelm with their millions spent in ads the patriotic movements that arose this year to the wonderment of America and the world?
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