Open borders, no excuses.

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The first major lesson taught to a child in any American history class is the timeless story of the explorers, craftsmen, and pilgrims who left the European mainland to settle the New World centuries ago. Their motivations are known universally: They sought freedom from persecution, a new environment and culture to call their home, and, of course, an opportunity for very large profit. We remember their story as one of great heroism and moral triumph. Even though some chose the path of violence when interacting with the natives, still, overall, they worked hard, planned wisely, and eventually rose to achieve a higher standard of living and a more beautiful society through the productive actions of individuals. It is their struggle that formed the basis for the concept now known as the American Dream – the idea that America is a place where any motivated, industrious individual who will stay focused on his own life can ultimately fulfill his highest ambitions. Through the successes of the first immigrants, America became the land where nobody says, “That’s enough success.”

In modern America, though, this hallowed ideal has been flipped straight upon its head by many members of an intellectually lazy society and the careful obfuscaters of moral truth who guide them. Indeed, it shows great cunning and foresight on the part of the useless, parasitic busy-bodies who run the upper machinations of America’s legal system that they managed to turn the largest association of proud Americans and government skeptics – the religious right – against itself with regard to immigrants in the modern age. The Christian conservatives, who value a lifestyle of independence from government operatives and generally don’t feel that they need the government’s so-called “services”, cling to the border patrol and any macho-man politician who will break with politically-correct tradition by insulting Mexican immigrants as if their very lives depended on it. In some cases, they may even literally believe that this is the case. The problem with this perspective is quite simple to identify: There is simply and unequivocally no reason whatsoever that the government should control immigration in any way.

Every argument – or, “argument” – that has ever been raised in favor of immigration control is easily identifiable as deeply fallacious. At the outset, government action, which occurs by definition through the initiation of force against individuals, is unjustifiable when used preventatively against crimes that are imagined to occur. For the exact same reason that the government has no authority to confiscate a portion of every working man’s paycheck in the name of “social security”, so also border controls are just as evil. Immigration law is not law used to block, punish, or deter actual criminal activity, where there exists an assailant and a victim. It is an arbitrary prohibition, the punishment of a victimless crime. It is as unsubstantiated and subjective as asserting that a man has a right to drink alcohol in the privacy of his own home, but cannot also smoke marijuana, because that would be too dangerous.

After all, if walking across an imaginary line in the ground is something that requires the government’s permission, the government may just as well not allow any of it. Legal immigration could be capped at a quota of half a million people per year, or even zero people per year. Either way would be equally appropriate and morally valid, if the government had the authority to prohibit people from relocating. One cannot avoid the conclusion that the underlying assumption behind immigration law – the idea that borders represent a moral imperative in their own right, independent of any other justification – is deeply flawed and can straightaway be reduced to total absurdity.

With that assumption summarily destroyed, what remains in the void is a burning question: “Under what circumstances can there be a legitimate reason to enforce border control?” Indeed, a closer look reveals that there are no such circumstances. There is no violence, no infringement upon the rights of individuals, inherent in the action of traveling across a border. No assault is conducted; no person or property is harmed. Nor is immigration regulation necessary for the implementation of the more defensive functions of government. The FairTax and other taxes on final consumption do not require a list of citizens and permanent residents. The police are already available to protect everyone when necessary. The American courts can and should have a precedent of hearing any cases directly related to an action that transpired within the country. So the only government institutions left unaccounted for are, of course, the obviously illegitimate ones. An enumeration of the citizenry is reserved for functions such as welfare, income tax, espionage, and other corrupt and inexcusable violations of liberty. Lists of legal citizens and documentation of residences serve only to allow the imposition of property taxes, give the IRS too much authority to audit, and tempt demagogues to create terrorist lists in the name of national security. The government would have a much harder time invading the privacy of civilians if a certificate was not legally required for the simple fact of existing. If, for example, allowing uncontrolled immigration made enforcing the income tax so cumbersome and flawed that it had to be abandoned, that would truly be a wonderful day in American history.

Even with the victimless nature of the “crime” of illegal immigration identified, though, some authors and citizens continue to rebel against the obvious logical conclusion that the borders must be opened. This is where the brilliance and power of the social architects who oppose freedom and prosperity really shines. They argue distractions and obfuscations long after the core principles are elucidated. For example, one oft-repeated mantra is that opening the borders would violate the Rule of Law and thus expose society to any number of horrific effects. Amnesty for illegal immigrants is predicated on motives which could just as easily be used to justify amnesty for murderers, it is said. Columnists emphasize that illegal immigration is wrong because it is illegal, and therefore must be stopped. This argument, though, is self-defeating and evil. One cannot overstate the destructive capacity of deriving morality from legality. If breaking the law is morally wrong simply because it is breaking the law, then no form of dissent can ever be justified. If the government imposes a 99% income tax, or outlaws the possession of all weapons down to thumbtacks, surely the citizenry must obey, for that is the law. Clearly, laws which violently punish innocent individuals must be disregarded. In fact, the Rule of Law is a doctrine originally conceived for limiting governments, not civilians.

The aggravators frequently distract from the principles at stake by accusing illegal immigrants of harming the economy. Surely the enormous welfare benefits which are paid to illegals, in spite of the liberals’ frantic cries that this does not occur, must represent a significant portion of the national debt. Add to this the fact that it is all too easy for an undocumented immigrant to avoid the income tax while simultaneously outcompeting unskilled American citizens for the precious few remaining jobs in this depressed economy, and the sum of it all is one heck of a powerful argument … against government interventionism. This is the ultimate crux of the distractors’ and racketeers’ fallacious logic. They are unwilling to acknowledge that, in the most literal sense, all of the problems they attribute to illegal immigrants are actually caused by the government itself. The massive national debt occurs, not because illegal immigrants happen to be receiving welfare payouts, but because the government is willing and quite eager to tax and spend money from the working class in the first place. The unenforceability of the income tax is not a consequence of the population of undocumented immigrants, but rather of the illegitimate and frankly quite ridiculous nature of the tax itself. Finally, the jobs argument really attacks the government-imposed price floor on labor, which all economists agree will create shortages and reduce economic productivity. The logical position for any freedom-lover to take is that of opposition to the government interference that has rendered immigrants a resented class. The immigrants themselves are at worst guilty of being caught in the crossfire between middle class and bureaucracy.

Immigrants do not and cannot cause the federal debt to rise. Only government controls government spending. Uncovering this self-evident truth gives great insight into why illegal immigration is such a hot-button issue among the news media and liberal and conservative politicians alike. Establishment officials naturally fear authors and philosophers from the right wing, because the right’s opposition to government spending and waste puts the various government-corporate complexes and bureaucracies at risk. If the conservatives got their way, politicians and lawyers might have to find useful jobs instead of pushing papers at other people’s expense. Similarly, the establishment fears the left’s thinkers, as well. If any of a number of different liberal activists achieved real political pull, the government would not be able to arbitrarily outlaw simple personal behaviors. People could not be arrested and fined for harmless decisions. This, too, threatens to leave bullies of law enforcement out on the streets looking for work.

A simple solution to the government’s major problem is for the law enforcement and the bureaucracies to adopt a mutually beneficial stance of misdirection. Allegedly conservative officials dodge anger over government from real conservative voters by decrying those awful illegal immigrants for making the debt so high. Then, of course, it is not the fault of the Republican Congressmen that the debt keeps rising all the time. It must be blamed on the crazy liberals with their destructive love of illegals that somehow magically makes it impossible for Republicans in Congress to just vote “No” on spending bills. The liberals join in lock-step, demonizing the conservatives for ostracizing illegals, but not actually promoting a message even remotely related to true freedom. The two parties ultimately work together to increase border patrols, shoot innocent people, and not actually put any significant dent in the flow of illegal immigrants. A naive observer might wonder why so much effort is spent stopping illegal immigration when so little results are achieved. A libertarian observer, however, would note that the effort and expense was the goal all along. The government is simply generating more government activity. Stopping illegal immigration is one of hundreds of imagined causes the bureaucrats from the right and the left created to rationalize that. A few thousand people die, a few hundred thousand have their lives uprooted, but millions still make it through, because succeeding was never the object. Conservatives are mad at illegals instead of at the government that is wasting money, liberals have jobs and a way to buy votes by pretending to sympathize with illegals yet not taking any real action to open the borders, and the cycle continues.

If it should now be supposed that advocating for amnesty is the correct path toward freedom, let that idea be put to rest immediately. To use the word “amnesty” would imply that traversing an unseen line in the desert was ever a real crime at all. What would be appropriate at present is for lawmakers to agree that preemptive regulation against victimless crimes has not ever been a morally legitimate or practically feasible government scheme, that all who have been imprisoned by border patrol were thus mistreated, and, most astonishingly of all, that projects, codes, fences, arms, and soldiers dedicated to controlling the natural migration of human populations are and always have been a big-government racketeering project, that they are a waste of money designed to create work for talentless bureaucrats who otherwise would be incapable of competing in the job market, and that every working American would enjoy a much better quality of life without them.

The economic damage caused by the desire to prosecute against the victimless crime of traversing borders is difficult to estimate. Right off, it can be guaranteed that the entire cost of all border patrol officials as well as all the bureaucrats that handle paperwork for legal immigrants is entirely wasted money. Furthermore, had those workers not been employed in a destructive task, they could have sought jobs elsewhere, so their entire productive capacity over the span of their careers is potential profit and innovation which has not been brought to fruition. Finally, the tangible expenses of border patrol includes all the armaments and buildings used in the racketeering project. These expenses in total number in the trillions when considered over the past few decades. Then there are intangible and almost inestimable costs such as the productive power of more and cheaper labor as well as the interest accumulated on all the past expenses. Immigration control has been a continuous and severe blight on the United States economy for as long as anyone can remember. The accumulated cost with interest now exceeds that of the war in Iraq, the TARP bailouts, and the amount of money necessary to feed the entire continent of Africa for several years.

The unavoidable conclusion finally surfaces. Immigration laws are a racket and an excuse. They provide liberals with a moral crusade and demonizing talking points to draw attention away from confronting the economic sensibilities of the conservatives. Conservatives use them as a cover-up to hide their own unwillingness to actually cut government spending and repeal unnecessary laws. Ultimately, the dichotomy reveals itself to be just like all others – not one of left versus right, but of ordinary, freedom-loving individuals versus busy-bodies, elitists, and bigots. To employ a phrase that has recently become very popular in Washington, we need real solutions. Those real solutions are straightforward and obvious. The government can solve spending problems by just not spending. The abundance and frequency of illegal immigration can be solved by not outlawing non-violent behavior. As for what will be done with the new-found problem of massive unemployment among legislative paper-shufflers, department big-wigs, and bullying border gun-toters with badges, true American patriots neither know nor care.

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Shared: The “social contract” is an empty concept.

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Mike P of The Emptiness recently published this brilliant refutation of the statists’ falsehood known as the “social contract”. He gives a clear and concise example of how the social contract, if invoked by someone other than the government, would undoubtedly result in the person in question being labeled criminal, evil, and mentally unsound. Yet in this there is great hypocrisy, for the government itself consists of people who have no distinction from all the rest of us except simply the fact of being in the government. Thus, when a person speaks of a social contract, what he really means is, “We’re the government, and you’re not.”

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The first thing we need to do is identify exactly what the social contract is. What are its terms? How is it defined? This is tough because no one that promotes this idea will ever define it for you, so even if I run the risk of being accused of making a strawman argument, I will have to infer its definition from the arguments that people that promote it make. Not only will statists refuse to define it for you, but they will interpret you asking them to define it as an act of aggression or anti-social in some way.

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If something is morally good, then anyone, whether they are part of the state or not, should be able to do it. How could you argue against this? If it is morally good to give to charity, then I can do it, you can do it and the state can do it, and all of us would be engaging in righteous behavior. So then if the state is morally good, the basis of it’s power must be morally good, the social contract must be morally good and therefore anyone must be able to make social contracts with anyone else. I must be able to make a social contract with you, you can make one with me, my neighbor can make one with my other neighbor and all of us can make one with the state.

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See the full post in its original context here.

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Wake County Public School System takes a stand for freedom, ignores fraudulent claims of racism.

“Segregation.”

It’s a powerful word because it evokes powerful feelings. Hearing the word “segregation” instills in our minds images of violence, exclusion, and a bitter hatred of innocent men for no reason beyond the color of their skin. We remember a time when little boys and girls couldn’t ride the bus together or sit at the same lunch table for fear of being shouted down, bullied, or even arrested. We know it represents a dark, evil, and unforgivable period in American history.

Or do we? Perhaps not, if we listen to local NAACP leader and spokesman Rev. William Barber, who was arrested today on charges of trespassing while screaming and pleading with fellow activists to rebel against the Wake County public schools’ recent decision to resegregate. This would be a compelling tale of a brave man resisting police state oppression, if he were correct that the schools are resegregating at all. Unfortunately for the good reverend’s cause, they are not.

Actually, the Wake County School Board is relaxing government controls that previously forced students to attend schools far away from their homes based only on their parents’ socioeconomic status. The bizarre and somewhat authoritarian policy of redistributing thousands of students to new schools every year, which encumbered students’ social development and caused abnormally long bus rides, was created with the intention of improving school performance through increased racial diversity. It is unclear whether there was any reason at the time to believe that racial diversity would cause students or teachers to become smarter. However, it is abundantly clear now that the plan has not worked. In 2007-2008, an abysmal 18% of Wake County public schools met the already lax standards of adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind. That is not the mark of a successful government program.

Now the School Board has voted to eliminate much of the harsh policies that forced redistributing students across great distances, instead focusing its efforts on neighborhood schools to avoid long bus rides. The obvious benefits of this are multi-faceted and substantial. Consumption of gasoline will decline, providing schools with a small but precious way to save money in a time of across-the-board budget cuts. Carbon emissions will be slashed, as well. Most importantly, parents will have greater choice in where to send their children to school, and children will enjoy shorter bus rides and a more stable base of friends as they can attend the same school year after year, if, of course, that is what they want.

The School Board’s decision is an invaluable step forward in the movement to put parents back in charge of how their children are raised. The emotional issue of racial segregation is a fraud, a scapegoat set up to distract debate away from the real issue of school choice and throw advocates of freedom into an un-winnable game while busy-body school assignment officials try to retain some semblance of usefulness. Concerned parents cannot defend themselves against the accusation of being racist because the accusation is made without evidence, and therefore cannot be refuted with evidence. What they can do – and what we all must do – is stand our ground and never waiver in asserting our right to choice and freedom, not long bus rides and bureaucratic control.

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Congressional Candidate BJ Lawson is a master of economics, fears censorship of the internet.

I got a chance to interview BJ Lawson again at the Carrboro Famers’ Market on Tomato Day. He was there to talk to consumers about the value of consuming organic produce instead of industrial and processed foods whose only assurance of “safety” is the FDA. Thanks to the Triangle Conservatives for informing me of this opportunity. I encourage all of you to check out their group for information regarding local politics, even if you don’t agree with their opinions.

Click to watch the video, or scroll down to read the transcript of the interview.

JC: Do you think you can beat David Price in a policy debate? Can you, you know, show that you’re better than any opposing candidate on serious economic issues? Can you out-talk him? Do you know more economics than he does?

BJ: Well, I do think David Price is limited by what he’s allowed to say, frankly, and I think one of the frustrations most Americans have is that our government is lying to us and continues to lie to us. So … my offer to the voters: an honest conversation on the issues that are affecting us. So for example in economics, it’s clear that we’re in a crisis that was caused by and is caused by too much debt, yet the only solution that Washington wants to give us involves more debt. You can’t cure an alcoholic with another drink, so just to even be honest about recognizing the cause of our economic problems and then talking about how we transition to a freer economy where we create wealth in our communities is a discussion we desperately need to be having. Mr. Price, unfortunately, is limited by what he’s allowed to say and what his Congressional leadership will let him say, so he’s gonna be in a tough position in a policy debate because he’s not allowed to be honest.

JC: All right, so you talk about debt, and I’ve heard you talk about before reducing government spending, so what I want to know is, you’re in a debate, and David Price says this: “All economists agree that it takes money to make money. Capital gets reinvested into new industries and ventures to generate more wealth and turn the world’s motor. However, during a recession, individuals and banks reduce spending, keeping their capital saved rather than invested and lent. While saving has personal prudence, it is macroeconomically unwise. The decreased consumer spending and bank investment causes factories to slow or shut down resulting in unemployment and rising prices. The government can utilize the multiplier effect by taxing income and savings to fund construction and production projects. These projects aren’t always managed perfectly, but they reinvest capital which would otherwise be stored and not producing output. There’s no advantage to having wealth that isn’t being employed, but funding projects generates new jobs and ensures a cyclic flow of wealth. Shouldn’t we build up our projects when capital lies dormant in a recession?”

BJ: Ah yes, the paradox of thrift. So, were David Price to quote the paradox of thrift by Keynes, we’d also have to remind him that Keynes’s other philosophy was, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” And what we’ve reached in our debt – in our economy – is a point of debt saturation where, effectively, if we try to have the government continue to take on more and more debt beyond our ability to service it, we’re compounding the problem. So, at a very real level, what we need is not more capital in government hands to be mal-invested and given out through crony-capitalism, but we need to get more capital that can be put to work in our local communities. That means freeing up the market to create our own jobs, our own businesses, and not relying on the government as a source of debt finance stimulus, which is simply tying more weights to our ankles and ultimately slowing us down.

JC: But what you’ve just given me is a whole bunch of fiscal policy that assumes completely constant monetary policy. You talk about the federal debt, and you ignore the fact that the Federal Reserve has the ability to reduce the real value of the federal debt by modifying the currency. Can’t we fund projects and modify the value of the currency? Yes, it will reduce the value of savings, and I recognize that that’s disadvantageous to the individual, but we are in a recession. There are disadvantages to the individual. Reducing the value of the currency would increase economic flow if combined with a good fiscal policy.

BJ: So here’s the problem with our monetary policy is that we’re reaching the mathematically constrained end-game for our faith-based currency. What we’ve got is a system of debt-based fiat money that, as you know, can be expanded at will by the Federal Reserve and given out through crony-capitalism, as we’ve all experienced. That system, however, is mathematically limited because, when you’ve got a system of money where your money itself is based upon debt, and new money coming into circulation comes with a burden of interest to pay it back, you need, over time, an exponentially-increasing amount of new money to service the existing debt.

JC: What you’re talking about is when the federal debt becomes so large that the real interest, disregarding what the Federal Reserve claims the interest is, the real interest on the federal debt exceeds the maximum power of taxation at the peak of the Laffer Curve. It becomes impossible even if government spending goes to zero to ever pay off the debt because the interest on the debt exceeds the power of taxation.

BJ: Exactly. And I don’t know if David Price understands that.

JC: Do you think we are at that point?

BJ: Well, we’re clearly at the point where we have tipped over into the diminishing marginal utility of debt, where more debt added into the economy is actually reducing our GDP instead of increasing it. That’s the beginning of the end-game. So until we’re willing to have an honest conversation about the reality of dealing with the crisis of too much debt, and the need to purge mal-investments, to get that back into the economy down to a sustainable level, all we’re gonna be doing is stimulating ourselves off a cliff.

JC: All right, you’ve convinced me on your fiscal policy. Then David Price comes back with a statement about monetary policy again. He says: “During a recession, many companies, especially small businesses, experience a reduction in profits. Because they are businesses, they must scale back their operations to compensate. Yet long-standing social custom coupled with union negotiation makes it almost impossible to reduce wages and hours. Thus the only way a company can scale back operations is through layoffs. In layoffs, not only are some individuals punished for lack of productivity out of proportion to their actual decrease in productivity, but there’s a decrease in specialization of labor, which results in higher prices for consumers. This reduces total economic output, creates an unemployment panic, and compounds the recession. But there is another way. The Federal Reserve can inflate the currency, lowering real wages without lowering nominal wages. The recession is still there, but there are fewer layoffs, the burden of lost productivity is shared instead of focused in certain individuals that didn’t necessarily actually have their productivity go to zero even though they became unemployed and their income went to zero, and there’s no unemployment panic. So shouldn’t the Federal Reserve combat sticky wages by loosening the money supply?”

BJ: Theoretically one might be able to make that argument, but again we’ve reached the point where that process no longer works. How can we lower-

JC: But did it work before? I mean- … it works in some cases?

BJ:  Well, I mean it depends on your definition of “work”. If by “work” you mean, “Can we steal from savers and investors and encourage crony-capitalism that benefits the politically well-connected at the expense of everybody?” Yeah, you could argue that it works.

JC: But why does it benefit the politically well-connected at the expense of everybody if I take a real paycut, but everybody in my company stays employed, and a few individuals whose productivity only went down by ten percent don’t lose all their income?

BJ: Right, but people are on the treadmill of trying to compete to maintain a standard of living against a currency that’s declining in purchasing power. The crony-capitalism and the politically-connected gets into who has access to the first dollars off the printing press if you will, the electronic printing press. The people who have access to the money first when it’s created in an easy-money regime – they’re the ones that benefit, because they’re getting the first fruits of the harvest before prices go up. Unfortunately, though, as we’ve talked about, we’re at the point of debt saturation where we’re already seeing interest rates at zero percent. What is left? The Fed is out of bullets, and to say that we can continue to reduce interest rates or be any easier with easy money ignores the fact that there’s too much debt in the system. For every lender, there’s got to be a borrower, and there aren’t a whole lot of credit-worthy borrowers who are interested in levering up in the current environment. So we’re at the point where the tried-and-true forms of Keynesianism, so-called “Keynesianism”, are no longer effective when you reach the point of debt saturation.

JC: Okay, now the federal government is trying to control the internet. Are people like me the target of the federal government’s attempts to control the internet? Are they mad that I don’t have to buy big books to understand what’s happening in the world? And would you fight tooth-and-nail, not just – I don’t want to say, you know, “Vote ‘No’!” on the bill; you can vote ‘No’ on the bill; the bill’s gonna pass anyway. Would you talk to Ron Paul, and talk to Barney Frank if you have to, and stop the federal government from having any – any- regulatory control over the internet.

BJ: It’s a – that is a critical issue. Yes, I will, and you can get a pretty good picture as to how dangerous the current situation is when you consider that the Department of Homeland Security just this past month over the July 4th weekend put out a very short, like fifteen-day request for comment on a proposal for a policy to provide universal internet user identification. So you can see how the screws are going to be clamped down, and it isn’t even going to require additional acts of Congress to happen. The bureaucratic processes are already in motion to start clamping things down, and we need to fight it.

JC: Is it unconstitutional that the Department of Homeland Security even has the authority to make any kind of regulation? Shouldn’t Congress be in charge of all that?

BJ: Indeed, and you get to another important topic which I call the “Write the Laws!” act, where we look at Congress essentially delegating its Constitutional authority to write legislation to unelected bureaucrats and lobbyists. So you end up with regulatory capture and rules that are written by the politically connected with no legislative recourse for we the people, for us the people.

JC: Cool. Thank you.

BJ: Thanks for coming out.

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Tea Party Plans for Success at 912 Protests in 2010

This year’s 912 protests promise to be truly extraordinary, as an unexpected and powerful coalition of conservatives, libertarians, new patriots, and principled Americans has formed to plan and oversee the events. The Tea Party Patriots recently released this announcement in preparation for the protests. In it, they explained that the operation now boasts the support of “partners at FreedomWorks, Institute for Liberty, the Ayn Rand Center, the National Taxpayers Union, and the Patrick Henry Center.” The intellectual diversity represented by these various groups, in particular with the inclusion of the notoriously atheistic and anti-Republican Ayn Rand Center, underscores the Tea Party’s commitment to fiscal responsibility, individual liberty, and government openness, rather than to any party lines or hidden agenda.

Perhaps even more impressively, the 912 protests of 2010 will have focal points in three separate cities: Washington, D.C., Sacramento, CA, and St. Louis, MO. The protests were big back in 2009 with just one central event, with about 75 thousand limited government advocates demonstrating on the streets of D.C., and tens of thousands more spread in various smaller cities across the nation. The Tea Party’s decision to expand into three cities this year shows confidence that their plans will be even more successful, possibly even reaching D.C.-sized demonstrations in each region of the States. This ambitious attitude likely stems not only from the large coalition of supporters which the Tea Party has built since 2009, but also from the mounting urgency of making a lasting impression on Congress and America before the mid-term elections 52 days later.

The 912 Project was created by Glenn Beck in March of 2009 to remind Americans of the core values like love of freedom, responsibility and accountability, and respect for God and fellow men that we all felt on the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the next several months, the project evolved as the aspects of accountability and freedom were amplified, until they spawned a nationwide taxpayer rally to get the government back to serving the interests of the people, rather than destroying wealth in the false name of American values. The taxpayers’ march on Washington on 9/12/2009 was unprecedented in its size, scope, and influence.

Now the Tea Party Patriots plan to do it all again by coordinating cross-country travel and organizing what could be one of the largest taxpayer demonstrations in the history of the world. Most major cities across the nation will have local events on the big day, but everyone is strongly encouraged to make travel plans to attend the marches in D.C., St. Louis, or Sacramento if at all possible. I will be heading to D.C. from the Raleigh-Durham area. Anyone who wants to join (and you really all should!) can subscribe to my blog by clicking the grey button in the upper-right corner of the screen. You will then receive email updates as I negotiate travel plans from Raleigh to D.C. When enough people are on board, the costs really will not be high, and of course the demonstration itself is free!

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NC District 13 Republican Congressional Candidate Bill Randall speaks at a townhall meeting at Crossroads Entertainment.

I attended a townhall meeting with Bill Randall to cover the event and talk to Mr. Randall. Out of courtesy, (and for lack of digital memory) I did not film my one-on-one conversation with him. Let it be said simply that he and I discussed the philosophy of the Constitution, case law, and legal precedent, and that while I do not wholeheartedly agree with his stances, I have respect for the way he carried the discussion and thank him for his time.

I did ask Mr. Randall a question while he was speaking, which is captured very shakily on camera. The four-part video of his speech and several of the questions he answered is shown below. Topics discussed include the wars, the Federal Reserve, the state of our economy, the limitations the Constitution places on the federal government, the life of an unborn child, and the importance of granting equal rights to all citizens regardless of their personal views or practices.

Worst-Case Scenario interviewed on immigration by NC Politicin at the 2010 Tax Day Rally in Raleigh

It may not be quite correct to say that they ‘found’ me. I had never met them before. I was having a (somewhat heated) conversation with one Tea Partier about his claim that illegal immigrants were stealing from American citizens (not so – it is the government that is doing the stealing), when this big guy with a news media-sized camera walks up to me, sticks a microphone in my hand, and says, “Talk!” So I did, and once the camera was there, about five other guys decided it was their debate, too. Needless to say I was the only one representing the open borders argument.